Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I want to be able to hire players and pay them isk for them to come aboard my ship and focus their skills on certain areas of my ship. And I want to be able to have other players hire me.

Here's how it works: Infomorph Psychology level 5 as a prerequisite. Then a new skill: REM Clone.
(A pity the word sleeper is already used in this game. I would have preferred to use it instead)

I would train up REM Clone skill to at least level 1, and then have the medical bay vat up this clone. I can even give it implants. Then I place it on the market. This will not be a purchase, but instead players will be hiring my clone as one of their ship crew. They will pay me isk to use my clone for a certain amount of time. And make it so REM clones may also be sold in the contract market or even sold to corp members at no cost.

Once purchased, my new boss will assign me a role. Maybe I'm in charge of defense. Maybe I'm in charge of offense. Maybe I'm in charge of specialty weapons. Whatever I'm in charge of, I boost the effectiveness of those things based on a percentage of what certificates I choose to show publically. This means that I could sell myself as a moderately skilled jammer when I actually am an elite jammer. This is so that paranoid players can be a part of this new idea without displaying their actual skill level to enemies. And when I claim a new certificate, my REM clone will automatically pass the extra boost along to his boss. (Provided I chose to show it)

Having this clone will not affect my own ability to play the game under normal circumstances. I won't have a clue as to what my REM clone is doing most of the time. When the contracted time is up, my boss can choose to extend my contract or let my clone drop back into the pool of skilled laborers for hire.

My boss can lose my clone. If my boss decides to pick a fight or is trapped in an ambush, my clone will die with the ship, not the pod. These clones don't get a pod. To keep people really on their toes, we could add a death clause to the hiring contract that would cost the boss extra IF we chose.

This idea hopefully will be extremely interesting to both new players and to hardcore veterans. The boosts available will make PvE easier, and make PvP more challenging, especially when we add in the next part of my idea.

I would like my REM clones to have the ability to wake up! If my boss is getting ready for a major takedown op, and need every edge, the boss can activate a command to try to wake my clone up. If I'm not online at the time, then the wake up command will depend on the skills of my boss and if that was agreed to in my hiring contract. If I am online when this happens, I get to chose if it works or not. If I chose yes, then I immediately am an observer in the battle. I can talk to the boss (but nobody else) and watch everything. Normally this would be a massive hit to the CCP server, but I'm wondering if it would be possible for my boss's client to be in charge of repeating the datastream to my PC. That should hopefully stop any extra server drain. And it won't matter much if my feed is a couple seconds desynchronized from everyone else.

The boosts my REM clone gives are skill based, but only 25%. So for instance if my total missle skills allowed for 50% faster reloading of missles, my boss would actually only get a 12.5% bonus added to whatever bonuses s/he already gets. But if my REM clone wakes up, then my boss will get a double bonus from me, or 25% faster reloading time.

Comments, suggestions?

Do you have a link to the original CCP statement? I'd be curious to read it to see if they are addressing the issue of many players making realtime changes to the ship, or if they are also addressing the issue of mirrored streaming video/audio.

If that is the case, you wouldn't be able to center camera on any ship other than your own, and fleet booster wouldn't be possible. It probably has to do with the secondary player actually trying activate modules, or otherwise try to control of parts of the ship, rather than sitting there passively giving skill based boost.

Alts. More subscriptions for CCP. It's the only person you can trust here in Eve.

Leviathian, perhaps I didn't explain my vision clearly. If I were to hire your REM clones and you were my mortal enemy, you wouldn't be able to access any of my systems/guns/etc. What I envision is something like a youtube video. You would be able to see me turn stuff on and off. You would be able to see what system I'm in. If I'm dumb enough to park my super-important ship in a spot that can be figured out (for instance I park it beside the only blue planet in the system) then that info could be passed along by you to enemy forces. I envision it acting as if you're standing behind me as I'm playing, but can't touch anything. In fact, it would be exactly like that except all chat windows won't be visible except a special one where you and I could talk. The camera angles would only be what I set, you would be forced to look at whatever I'm looking at. And remember: this will only happen if I activate the wakeup command AND you are online. .....although, it would be extremely evil fun to add the ability later for you to be able to remotely wake your clone up and I don't notice!

Mxzf, I do understand that Eve is server-client. I'm wondering how much coding it would take to reflect the datastream coming from the server to another client. The server would only send out one stream of data per ship, but because the ship owner's PC would reflect it, one or more extra PCs would be able to watch the action.

To explore the evil side of this, I see possibilities. I do believe that the maximum amount of evil a REM clone could cause would be set by the initial hiring contract. "Wake up" abilities turned on would increase how much you have to pay to hire the clone. Setting the clone to allow remote wake ups would possibly drop the hiring price at the increased risk of remote spying. And to take a step away from the dark side, corps could use this mirrored video so experienced players could give detailed help to newer players that are stuck or confused.

Perhaps this 'youtube video stream' I'm talking about is a bad idea or simply cannot be easily implimented. That's ok. I just include it because it would be super-awesome to get some of the carebears and newbies in Eve to watch major combat in a way that makes them feel like they're part of the action.

To repeat, everyone please treat this thread as several seperate ideas
1. A new type of clone that allows players to hire eachother for extra skill boosts.
2. A way to stream one client's video to multiple other PCs without increasing server load.
3. PvP skullduggery action with spy clones is up for debate. None? A little? Lots?