Reducible Complexity: Standings and Haulers

EVE Online is a complex game, and this is what I love about it. And CCP keeps adding new things to the game, which increase the complexity. However, not all the complexity is meaningful. As a scientist I'm a big fan of parsimony. We can break EVE's complexity down into two categories: meaningful and meaningless. Reducing meaningless complexity is beneficial. It creates parsimony, removes clutter and frees up cognitive resources so players can attend to what is meaningful: gameplay. In this post I will argue that the NPC standings system and the current iteration of Industrials contain meaningless, and hence reducible, complexity. These systems can be made more parsimonious.

NPC Standings

What were NPC standings used for in the past?

1. Accessing higher level missions: Still relevant. 
2. POS Anchoring: Now obsolete.
3. Jump Clones: Now obsolete. RIP Estel Arador Corp Serves.
4. Refining Yields: Mostly obsolete with Athanors and compression.
5. Locator Agents: Potentially useful.

Looking at this list it seems NPC standings don't do much these days. They allow access to mission levels, modify NPC station refining, and allow for locator agents. Open up your character sheet and go to your standings. What a mess. The UI is ugly and it's filled with hundreds of entities. What is this adding to the gameplay? I would argue that, in modern EVE, absolutely nothing. It's a big cluttered mess that doesn't do that much beyond missioning, FW, and the odd locator agent. It can be simplified.

Imagine if your NPC standings looked something like this instead, with neat little dropdown menus:

• Amarr
• Amarr Navy
• Imperial Shipment
• Joint Harvesting
• 24th Imperial Crusade
• Minmatar
• Republic Fleet
• Freedom Extension
• Minmatar Mining Corp
• Tribal Liberation Force

How much simpler is that? There aren't a dozen corporations for each faction and dozens of agents for each corporation. You just have the faction standing, plus corps for security missions, courier missions, mining missions, as well as Factional Warfare. Much simpler. Parsimonious. This will also be beneficial for retaining newbies because there will be less clutter and information in the UI, making EVE a bit less daunting for them. LP stores and locator agent stuff can be adjusted accordingly.

Haulers

Industrials are another mess in EVE. Each race has it's own haulers, which makes sense. But what doesn't make sense is the absolute mess between Amarr/Caldari haulers (size vs align time) and Gallente/Minmatar haulers (size vs align time vs specialized bays).

Specialized bays make sense. The specialized ore bays on the Rorqual, Orca, and Porpoise ensures that these ships aren't used as suitcases and reserves that role for freighters and industrials. Specialized bays also allow for a choice; you can haul a lot of this 1 thing, or you can haul a moderate amount of anything. But splitting them up by faction makes no sense.

I propose that every faction just gets two haulers: one big and slow, one small and fast, with their respective T2 variants. For specialized cargo bays the Ore Industrial skill could be put to use by introducing specialized Ore Industrials for hauling the bulkiest things in the game - PI, ore, and minerals. In addition to this, there could be specialized cargo bay expanders, either split by type or general, that would allow players to expand the specialized cargo bays.

Players will have the option to use their racial haulers and to specialize into the Tech2 variants or to use Ore Industrials at either level I or or level V. And there's an opportunity for some very beautiful new, modern looking ships to be added.

Simple and parsimonious.