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Ship spinning returns to EVE Online

by Jef Reahard on Oct 14th 2011 2:00PM

Sci-Fi, EVE Online, Game Mechanics, MMO Industry, Patches, News Items, Sandbox

Everyone knows that internet spaceships are serious business. Relatively few, however, recognize the grave importance of EVE Online's late great ship spinning mechanic.

Happily for the hardcore, those few include CCP developers, and as we mentioned a few weeks ago, one of New Eden's favorite pastimes is coming back from the dead. A new CCP dev blog spills the beans on the release date, and EVE vets will probably be thrilled to hear that ship-spinning is coming to the Singularity test shard today. The feature is tentatively scheduled to return to the Tranquility live server on October 18th during an extended downtime beginning at 11:00 UTC.

CCP has also added the old hangar interface functionality back into the EVE client, and users with sub-optimal Incarna computer specs (or those who simply hate walking in stations) can opt to turn off the game's captain's quarters and party like it's 2010.

A weekend discount on PLEX has also been announced.

Source: EVE dev blog
More coverage: EVE Online website

Tags: ccp, eve, eve-online, game-mechanics, incarna, patches, sandbox, sci-fi, scifi, serious-business, ship-spinning, spinning, srs-bsns, walking-stations

Reader Comments (44)

Probably the most pointless and childish complaint a developer ever caved to.

@Abriael

There really isn't any reason not to have the faster interface in the game. More so there really was no reason to scrap it outright, what this represents one more boolean variable to keep track of?

I'm not trying to downplay being able to walk around the station they both have their place one plays out to immersion and the other to efficiency.

@Abriael

Or it would have been if they hadn't arbitrarily removed the feature in the first place after swearing that Captain's Quarters wouldn't affect performance, only for CQs to be total resource hogs.

@Abriael

If this post had a Like button, I'd never stop clicking it.

@Abriael Not really. Do you play EVE? Not only was the CQ environment a resource hog, CCP also took out a lot of functionality when removing ship spinning. Those two together make up what the complaints were mostly about. They caved because the people complaining had a point.

@Abriael

I agree with you.

@Abriael : Probably the most pointless and childish complaint a developer ever caved to.

Funny thing, the CEO of the company himself had to come out and publicly apologize for removing it.

You couldn't be bothered to explain what ship spinning is?

@gildhur

Dude, if you don't know what it is by now, you must have been reading knitting or dog-walking websites all this time... ;)

@pcgneurotic I don't follow EVE as I don't play it. I came to this article because the headline intrigued me, and I wanted to find out what ship spinning was. Yes, I could google it, but I would think that Massively and its corporate overlords would prefer I stay on their site and find out the information here.

Journalism 101: Don't assume your reader is already familiar with your topic.

@gildhur

Well it's kind of a trade-off between efficient workload and catering to a more general audience (which takes longer and doesn't necessarily lead to better coverage and more page hits).

Since everyone else in this thread (so far) knew what it was, I'd say I made the right Journalism 101 decision.

@Jef Reahard The article was posted on the FRONT PAGE of Massively. Last I heard Massively is not an exclusive EVE website, there are many readers who don't play EVE but we still read Massively articles because most of the time they're not written in game-specific terminology.

This is a failure of Journalism 101. Or should I just not t read any article about a game I don't play? That's what's implied in this kind of writing and these kind of elitist responses.

@Vandal

LOL

For real...you guys are pissed about him not explaining what ship spinning is...hilarious....

@Vandal

I'll be honest here, you and Gildhur both strike me as a little over-dramatic. If my lack of defining ship-spinning was such a deal-breaker to your enjoyment of the article, why not post a comment like "hey Jef, what's ship spinning?" I would have been more than willing to answer it, probably in greater detail than you wanted, lol.

I'm less willing to do much other than laugh when people come in with their FAILURE OF JOURNALISM 101 guns blazing, to say nothing of when terms like elitist start getting thrown around by folks who lack a clear understanding of what they mean.

Try the sweet before the sour, next time. It might work out better.

@Jef Reahard

Shouldn't a journalist have thicker skin than this? The original question was mildly cutting, at best... and not explaining the concept WAS a critical failure.

Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but the omission is certainly noticeable.

@scrubmonkey

Like I said, I laughed. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone with thicker skin than me, lol. If by "thick skin" you mean "ignores commenters," then yeah, I suppose I could start doing that.

@Jef Reahard

Bah, wtb comment system. I also meant to add that I've never referred to myself as a journalist, and in fact posted a pretty lengthy game-bloggers-are-not-journalists diatribe on this very site some time ago.

Some commenters continue to refer to us as "journalists," but imo that's a misnomer.

@gildhur Ship spinning in the most literal sense of it is the actual physical ability to, when docked, click on your ship and drag it around in a circle causing it to spin. Hence ship spinning.

On the more loose end it was a very simple and basic docked interface that, when compared to Captains Quarters, did not use nearly as many resources and was much more quicker/responsive.

Ship Spinning has many roots in EvE (At least it was a big deal to me) as a time honored way to actively kill time when you're stuck in a station waiting for an aggression timer or for an op to start.

As a 5 year "bitter vet" CCP putting ship spinning back into the game actually warms my heart and I am seriously considering waiting till the end of the re-sub promo (in November) to try again for another 30 days. (The only reason I re-subbed was because of college... :( )

@Jef Reahard

It's more than a little amusing that you still left it to another poster to actually answer the question. I don't think you could be bothered to go find out what ship spinning was.

That's a good trick.

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Ship spinning returns to EVE Online

Reader Comments (44)

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 1:02PM Abriael said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 2:26PM Scuffles said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 2:32PM Eamil said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 2:32PM pcgneurotic said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 2:47PM Petter M said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 4:10PM ScottishViking said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 8:00PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 1:10PM gildhur said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 2:31PM pcgneurotic said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 2:39PM gildhur said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 3:17PM Jef Reahard said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 3:50PM Vandal said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 4:09PM ScottishViking said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 4:19PM Jef Reahard said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 7:31PM scrubmonkey said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 9:14PM Jef Reahard said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 9:15PM Jef Reahard said

Posted: Oct 15th 2011 1:30AM OmegaTwig said

Posted: Oct 15th 2011 11:35AM Allegos said

Posted: Oct 14th 2011 2:02PM Spacegrass said

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