CrazyKinux, in a recent posting, takes a shot a guessing how Avatar versus Avatar (AvA) combat will look and feel in EVE Online. I’ve given this some thought and would like to add my two bits. Well, more like 12 but who’s counting?
First Some Background.
With Ambulation on the horizon, the addition of walking, talking human shaped avatars to EVE Online is one which promises to change the game dramatically for those that decide to use it (it will be optional.) My wife for one doesn’t want to use it, which is a bit odd as the main reason that CCP have decided to do this is because they’ve found that women relate better to a humanoid avatar than they do to a ship.
Initially, Ambulation will a combat free part of EVE, allowing players to walk around stations and deepen the social interactions with each other by meeting up in bars (run by players), buying clothes and other accessories (made by players) and actually having a Corp Office they can sit in and plot galactic domination from.
The developers have decide to leave combat out of Ambulation to begin with because of something they call ‘the teaspoon effect’. This is basically a hypothetical scenario where the leader of one of the player alliances is killed in a station by an assassin stabbing him in the eye with a teaspoon. The way things currently work in EVE, the cloning system (by which players are resurrected with their skills and such intact) only works when a character is in their Pod. Killing a character outside of their pod would result in permanent death, something which CCP will have to find a workaround for if AvA combat is to become a reality.
In the future I fully expect AvA combat to become and integral part of the EVE experience and here’s some ideas for what it might be like.
Some of what follows is born of an incomplete understanding of how outposts are managed and minimal experience of actually taking on an outpost or POS, so forgive any glaring errors and feel free to correct them in the comments. Read on to see some of my ideas.
