Final Thought(s) on the Watchlist change

I've been pondering the Watchlist changes at some length, I've spoke to various friends and one of the most interesting conversations I had with Bex gave me reason to consider the changes not from a gameplay point of view but a software design one.

With Great Power

People argue that the Watchlist is a powerful intelligence tool, it can be but it has to be used the right way. The introduction of tags or labels really increased the power but knowing someone is online is not the most useful of intelligence.

With the coming change the Mercenary, The Pirate and the Intelligence Assets of major alliances lose a way of tracking pilots of their targets. 

If you see them online in your watchlist then you instantly know they know they are watching you, because you're in their watchlist. Paranoia +50!

Brings back all kinds of "watching me, watching you, watching me" jokes. *shudder*

What Could They Have Done

As-is the watch list is a very useful tool in both gameplay positive and negative ways (probably more negative depending on whom you speak to) but it was poster StainGuy in a Reddit thread who (shockingly) provided, surprisingly excellent, constructive feedback on how it could be changed.

The new method can't be stopped and I doubt any major changes will take place before it appears in-game however I firmly believe that the watchlist should work based on a delay. The closer you are to a target, the sooner you see they are online and consequently the further you are from them the longer your notification takes to appear.

So you're in the same system, well that will be a waste of time as you could see them in local but with 5 jumps you'd find out within a minute or two. Get ten jumps or more then it starts increasing so if you're 50+ jumps away it could take up to 60 minutes before you see them online.

In a wormhole, well it should only work if you're in the same system but still delayed by a few minutes. After all no beacons to show local in a wormhole so no need to tell everyone someone is in the same system as you by having a pseudo-local instant notification system.

The Future?

The Watchlist is a feature people like and dislike, i think it will remain but its form will forever be altered. However I think the form is being altered not because it has to be from a gameplay perspective but from a software engineering one.

The time has come to change a feature and which would you rather spend time on, new features or old, buggy ones? With the exception of one developer I worked with every developer wants to do new things not fix old things they didn't design.

So comes the Watchlist, someone has been tasked to update it and they've taking the quick and easy route. I can't blame them but long term I feel it's shortchanging us, the players, we're getting a reduction in functionality in order for something to be updated but nowhere near the functionality we had before.

Why do this?

Two reasons come to mind, this is a short term solution (that in true EVE style will likely remain long term until someone notices it in ten years :)) or there is a lot of code for this functionality that is hard to maintain, no longer is efficent and needs to be updated. 

That's where I'd lay my bet, the code is old and needs to be changed in the modules (for whatever reason: CREST, BIAB etc..).

It's a shame, we're being shortchanged with this.

Undocumented Feature

More Waaaagh!

I received another invite to join the POS Bash Crew from last time, they'd found a new C1 with a Dark Blood Tower that was full of modules and very little defensive modules.

There was a little change to the plan, a mid-week assault would hopefully result in the tower coming out of reinforcement on Saturday rather than Sunday. So we assembled again and Oracles, Ishtars and Navy Vexors started to dismantle the defences and then, in just under three hours, reinforce the tower.

Which had just over 14 hours of Stront in it. Oh we weren't expecting that and its during the day Australian time so I won't be able to be there but there were other, more committed, people who would.

Bugged

This morning I login to EVE and Bex sends me a message, turns out that overnight the POS owners have been able to deploy and online around 40 new guns. As Trinkets Friend puts it on his blog:

Suddenly a cakewalk turned into a fucking joke

I was in another POS bash some time ago where something similar happened but I can't remember what happened but I think we did have enough pilots to ignore the small number of new guns and obliterated the tower regardless.

But seriously, is this a bug or a feature because this royally pissed off not just me but every member that had wasted an evening reinforcing the tower. It's in a C1 so we cannot get battleships or cpaitals in there to assist,m any sub-capitals will be seriously under fire and we'll need far more logi than we have pilots to ensure we survive.

Read Trinkets blog post on it and I can't agree more with what he says. It's a fucking joke, CCP can add new features but will not fix obvious bugs within their own the code that are causing game-breaking issues. Hell I'd go so far as to say the POS owners are cheating by using a broken mechanic to defend a POS they should have properly setup in the first place (with more than 8 guns, 1 web and 1 warp disruptor).

Unfortunately due to this the POS bash is off and the defenders have been rewarded for their defensive stupidity thanks to bugs in code.