Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Overall Eve is fun to play and offers a wide array of ship classes to the player. Many of the niches are full to over full with choices. But there are some niches that could be fun to fill.

In real life I spent most of my formative years at sea, aboard various ships. I have logged more than 3,000 days aboard ship in my life, most of that in the Pacific Ocean, some in the most crowded ports in the world, and some on lonely stretches of water.
Eve is an interesting place, but not as interesting as it could be, given the diversity of non-military shipping on the world’s oceans.

Eve lacks many of the specialist ships that ply the ocean blue today moving commerce from one place to another.
Diversity and specialization make the combat ships a lot of fun and offer an ability to specialize. The same goes with the current set of mining vessels. Haulers fill a niche, but fall short of the diversity that one would expect to see plying the ocean. Freighters and haulers fill the two ends of the spectrum, but the middle is missing, as are some fun special ships.

Tugs

Tugs offer the largest set of ocean going (not just port bound) coastal vessels and some of the most interesting blue water ships on the seas today. Tug captains may start out helping to dock ships, but as their skills increase, they are asked to take on larger and larger tugs with more and more capability. If one thinks of space ship command as skill in ship handling that using both the basic and advanced skills would provide a reasonable progression for tugs. Need to move a can from a belt to a station – no need to bring out the freighter, instead the can (analog would be a barge in the real world) would tow the can into station. Great tug skippers (captains) can round up and tow a dozen or more barges at a time, newbies typically have trouble with one or two. Tugs are slow but powerful. Some of the biggest tugs in the world can move Super Tankers from port to port at half to a third of the speed the super tanker could make on its own. To my mind both in system (coastal) and jump tugs (blue water) would be interesting additions to Eve.

Of course tow rope break in the real world, and cargo is set adrift.

Container Ships

Container ships come in a wide variety of sizes from a few containers (20-30) to container ships that will carry more than 4,000 of the steel boxes you often see on the backs of trucks. These ships typically carry a wide array of materials for a wide array of customers from one port to the next. The smallest are considered tramps because they have no set route, and take on cargoes of opportunity. While containerships have greatly reduced the cost of moving cargo from one port to another they have a dirty little secret, in storms and sudden maneuvers containers can fall off the ship, and the container ship has no way to retrieve the container it just lost. Great skippers can typically significantly reduce the number of lost containers, but even they in an average year lose 1 to 2 percent of the cargo containers entrusted to them. With the increase in player build container choices, creating a range of container ships to use with the containers might be very interesting.

Typically you will find three major classes of container ships – tramps in the 20 to 150 container range, they have the ability to load and unload to a truck, a barge or a dock without the aid of specialized port equipment. They have limited lift capability though and typically stick to the smaller sized containers. Medium container ships tend to be highly dependent on port equipment capable of moving 100 – 1000 containers at a time, they also tend to be the fastest moving of the container ships, but not as maneuverable as the small ones. Large container ships travel set routes in the real world, and move 1,000 to 4,000 containers. These massive ships have to have special docks built to support them. Given the difference is size between an Eve container and a real life container cutting the number of containers by a factor of 50 to 100 depending on the container size being discussed. Obviously an Enormous Freight Container could fit all of the cargo from a typical medium sized container vessel with room left over in the real world.

Since sudden changes in direction can cause the loss of containers at sea, would not bumping container ships subject them to similar losses in space? Small container ships might have the advantage of being able to pick up a lost container but medium and large container ships would have to let someone else have the container.

Skills that could apply would modify the level of bump shock required to lose a container, to allow the ship to haul a larger mix of containers (e.g. for a low skilled character one size of container might be all they can carry because of their inability to load the ship with multiple sizes).

I have in general conversation with others in Eve started calling the small size ship the “two-can” because it might only fit two containers on it. These small tramps might go well with the new Player Owned Station construction and offer some interesting game play when building new stations.

There's no need for any of these

i like the idea, i mean ships capable of moving containers and ships not usaly allowed in high sec would be an amusing thing, think of it like this, a frieghtor you can't fit these you could fit and maybe make it so you have to target the things your moving, so a gank ecm ship could jam it out while another one swoops in and steals all the goodies it had. making piracy a way to steal your enemies goods rather than just blow them up. that way you could steal a war targets load and use it to blow up the rest of their ships, or steal capitals from afk haulers. it would give both indy pilots and pirates something new to do. heck make it so you can haul around online pos bits so as to make putting one up faster and easier. you could have a whole lot of new bits to fit to one of these making them specelized ships capable of one moving one kind of thing at a time. it could be a fun thing to fly or rob or gank, it just depends on how ccp makes it work if they do

Currently EVE Online lacks the depth needed to support these classes of ships in any real and non-decorative sense.

Having said that, I think that a Tug would be invaluable if it could utilise a tractor beam on a ship; this would allow superhuge, mega-mass haulers to be dragged into alignment to gates in no time at all, compared to their currently infuriating (yet realistic!) glacial pace. In this, i could sadly only see Alts being used to specialise in tug usage, eliminating the possibility for any kind of profession involving this. Certainly not something you could easily make money from, unless you sat outside the likes of Jita or Rens et al and offered your aligning services.

Luxury craft will only truly work if their is a demand for it. As pilots can currently not get up and wander around their ships, these too are going to be little more than decorative and at worst, a waste of isk.

Again, having said that - with the addition of Dust mercenaries onto the main EVE Online server, and perhaps a wider audience wishing to go sightseeing on their PS3/PS4 in the future, luxury liners offering tours of New Eden's more beautiful or war-torn areas for isk is always going to be a possibility. This would perhaps tie in with the Walking in Stations feature that may appear. From a purely gaming aspect it'd of course offer nothing, but being able to "sit and experience" New Eden, rather than viewing it through a HUD designed around combat and information gathering, would be quite a nice change of pace. I can imagine famous alliance leaders meeting in trillion-isk luxury ships, blinged to the max and dwarfed by supercarriers and fleets of fighters escorting it through space on some diplomatic mission. But we can all dream.

In short, it was great to see someone like myself - so passionate about the world of EVE. I do hope that one day EVE will eventually become a fully realised world instead of a space combat simulator with 10 years' worth of additions and changes, but right now, the game has no real place for the suggested ships.

Other than the tug. My idea of using it with tractor beams for faster aligning is inspired and I'm taking full credit for it :P