HTFU: Or, it's just a game get over it...

I'm apparently a bitter old vet, after only 2.5 years of playing EVE.

Funny thing is, I don't think of myself as a bitter old vet. I try to be helpful when people ask questions, when driving my alts in NPC corps (especially noob corps) I try to help them learn to play better (at least when I can) and I try to answer questions that I feel I can contribute to effectively. Interestingly enough, this doesn't apply to people who whine about some game mechanics. I think there are a lot of odd mechanics in EVE, and there are some broken ones, but broken to me may be playstyle to you - so I don't whine about it... until now.

Here are my top "broken or odd" mechanics in EVE, and whether I think they need to be fixed:

1. Sovereignty Mechanics: I hate current sovereignty mechanics. The days on end of shooting structures with tens of millions of hitpoints hold little appeal to me. I am, however, a combat pilot in a 0.0 alliance, so it's part of the game I play. I will, when the time comes, ship up to my sniper Battleship (or close range Battleship) and shoot at the structures with my alliance mates. I don't like it, but it is the current iteration of this piece of the game, and although painful it's not really broken


2. Lag/Disconnect: This is broken. I have personally been lucky enough to always load grid and at least have a chance to shoot. But the stories of blackscreened doom and the rage they bring are an obvious sign of a broken mechanic. Whatever the cause, the black screen disconnect is the top of the "broken - fix please" list for me.


3. Faction War: So this is a touchy subject. I played FW for a while. I wasn't ready for non-consensual PvP (or consensual PvP for that matter), but that has nothing to do with what is actually broken. This seems new to me, but apparently in minor FW plexes, pirate faction frigates can enter where T2 frigates cannot, and CCP posted that these frigates were designed to be "more" than T2, so that seems broken to me, even if they aren't officially T2 or better. That's broken, IMHO and should be fixed. But the rest of FW? It's not broken as much as it needs help, much like sovereign warfare.


4. Learning Skills: This one always gets my goat. Learning skills are not required. There is no rule that a new player needs to spend a month training Learning skills before they can undock and fly. Learning skills are an option to accelerate your training if you are in the game for the long haul. Don't want to spend a month training learning skills? Then don't. Nothing in this game requires you to train learning skills. Sure, they make it quicker to train other skills. But you don't need to. Just like you don't need to train Propulsion Jamming, or Hydromagnetic Physics. Learning skills: not broken.


5. Ship balancing: This is a touchy subject for everyone. Here's my take. Each race has a ship for every role, right? In theory then, each ship should be able to perform that role completely. I'm going to pick on the Gallente Covert Ops Frigate (aka Helios). The covert ops frigate has 3 primary roles: Scout, Covert Cyno, Prober. Of the 4 racial Covert Ops frigates, only the Helios cannot perform all 3 roles simultaneously. Why? Because CCP gave it a 5m3 drone bay instead of 3 high slots. Unfortunately, they did not provide an accompanying drone to fulfill one of the missing roles - so there is no "Covert Cyno Drone" or "Scan Probe Drone". Now I'm all for keeping things within the "reality of the EVE universe" and Gallente are known for their drones, but not their stupidity. There are other Gallente ships without drone bays (Nemesis, anyone?) that match the other races capabilities in basic configuration - but the Helios drone-bay-for-high-slot makes no sense.


6. Insurance: This is another great hot-button topic. Let me reference the real world though, for this argument. In the real world, you pay for insurance, and if you crash your car (or someone crashes into it) your insurance will pay to fix/replace it. As far as I've been able to tell, even when you commit an illegal act with said vehicle. You are paying for a service (insurance) and they don't care why your car is wrecked, only that you need it fixed/replaced. Insurance isn't broken. If you take your insured battleship to hisec and gank a miner (and get CONCORDed) your insurance should still pay out. Sorry, not broken

Those are the items that come to mind immediately - I'm sure there are a couple more and I reserve the right to add them as I think of them.