Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Second, the boarding action. Adding this sort of content would seem to require adding a large number of maps to DUST 514 for all of the ship types that it would be possible to deploy them against. This is not practical from a development standpoint, especially with so much work still needed on the core game. Luckily, ships in Eve are stupid large as a general rule, allowing it to be abstracted down to as few as four "ship" maps as a starting point - one map for each racial type. Yes, this may mean that the DUST mercs end up fighting in a map that is larger than they are on or drastically smaller, but this is just the initial state. If this proves successful, it can be expanded. These maps would need to feature objectives, ideally each tied to various modules on the ship they are fighting over. Blow up the control station for a Megathron's railgun and it's down a gun until a DUST logistics suit patches the terminal. Manage to crack the reactor and its capacitor recharge rate drops. Offline the shield recharge or the engines. The nasty things a guy on the inside could do to a ship are endless. Which options are available would need balance testing. Only one boarding action per ship could be carried out at a time.

Third, defending against the boarding breacher. The most basic defense would actually be a ship's cargo hold. Mercenaries are already a livestock type in game. With the boarding breacher in play, these would become like charges or ammo, expended as defending mercs are killed and used to reload the boarding breacher (or maybe just to manufacture boarding breacher shells). Run out of mercs? A friendly can shoot your ship with a boarding breacher to inject some fresh respawns for your defending team. Some modules and items would also assist in the defense of the ship, such as a Clone Vat Bay providing a slow stream of free defensive respawns as long as it was online, nanite repair paste fixing damage to modules, and even new modules such as interior defense turrets (mostly seen on caps and supercaps). Some in the thread below have suggested giving every ship some automated defenses as a default, which sounds like a good way to adjust the difficulty to take down various ships.

Fourth, communication between worlds. This is the real challenge of it all, but should be manageable. Eve would need to pass only a few parameters to DUST - relevant ship modules at the start of a match, number of available clone mercenaries in the hold, the times when boarding breacher shots land, and when nanite repair paste is used to repair a damage module. Dust would need to pass back times when modules are damaged. Time Dilation is the real challenge here, as it is something that Eve has to deal with that DUST does not. In a large battle like 6VDT, whole DUST matches could take place between one firing of guns and another. One way to handle this is to have significant events in the DUST match recorded, then have them applied to the affected ship as the equivalent time passes in Eve. This can lead to some temporal paradoxes ("He blew up before the DUST mercs took out his warp drives, but they still fought that battle!") and would make things somewhat harder for the attacking side (the real time between boarding breacher shots and thus attacker respawns getting added is extended by TiDi), but is generally better than having a Titan go from having all modules available to having no modules available in the elapsed time of a few minutes.

Fifth, who's responsible for attacking/defending? The basic backing behind this would be an automated matchmaking queue, pitting evenly matched squads against each other, so that the defense of a ship would always be in the hands of human players. However, both attackers and defenders can contract DUST mercs to be on standby for boarding actions. You could hand pick your defenders, browse a market of those available, or whatever. Major blocks would probably end up cultivating their own DUST-side divisions just to have quality defenders on hand to defend their supercapital resources.

TL;DR version: Dust mercenaries crippling capitals from the inside.

Thoughts?

As long as dust is not on the same platform it shouldn't dictate anything for eve online that actually makes a big impact.

Even then there should be systems eve players can use to defend themselves.

Here's an idea:

Warping out ends the match. DUST Clones get disconnected as the warp activates inside the ship. A timer is added that can be adjusted to the match when the ship starts to align. As end of alignment and warp drive active, dust server kills the match.

Explain to me exactly why it should be possible for me to lose my ship with absolutely no way, at all, for me to defend myself.

But if you use a scout, or perches, or dotlan, or any number of other precautions, the camp doesn't get you. With your idea, no matter what the super pilot does, they die. Titans and supercarriers can't hit cruisers.

I AM a cap pilot. My dread cannot hit cruisers reliably. My carrier can, IF I have the right drones out. In a large fight, there is no way for me to protect myself against these things. There is absolutely no precaution that I can take to preserve my ships, nothing I can do to defend myself. That is NOT the way EVE is, it never has been.

Right, you use the right tools, you survive.



Which is exactly the point. Supercaps should have to fear going out alone. They shouldn't be impossible to kill in fleet actions.

Also, it's not a one shot kill. It's "Your survival depends on which guys are defending you in DUST, who have a (probably large) advantage over their attackers".



In a fleet action, who is responsible for dealing with the cruisers? You just said it wasn't you, so I must assume that other people were there to keep the hictors and dictors off you. How is trusting your fleet to keep you from being tackled and focused into oblivion different from trusting a bunch of DUST mercs to keep your guns from being sabotaged?

problem is the usual suspects of the super super fleets tend to be multigame gaming crews as well. Goons and PL are more than eve crews, they are big in other games and genre's as well..

You go against them, they post up on their generic forums for assistance (somethingawful for example) and if your crew does not have a strong console user base to counter you are relying on NPC AI to save you. Watch various clips of zero punctuation to see the humorous and scathing reviews by Yahtzee on NPC AI in games he reviews.

You might counter as other have said hire human mercs. Adds cost to the ownership and no crew with a brain would hire them anyway. they are already wondering who in their crew is looking to be the next bandwidth for setting up a trap. They don't pay for this service, its free of charge. I know if I had a super I am not going to pay 100 mil isk to hire human mercs who can turn around and not defend my super at all or even aid the boarders in fact.



Dust 514 most players don't know exist because its a bland, meh fps. It was released too rough to low critical review. And they did not release to PC. Its been smoothed out over patching I hear but summer is over and its almost tme to start the x-mas planning. Other fps devs have fought EA for a spot in Santa's sleigh and failed.

To also help fix this they hired an internet eve "celebrity". The person they hired only really known to eve players and maybe DOTA ones. Read above about no pc release....I barely have the time to play eve on my computer, couple hundred dollars for a console just not a wise buy to play eve from a fps perspective. The decision to cut off pc is biting them in the ass on this basically.

Actually, you'd be relying on a matchmaking queue. You'd get real people, reasonably matched against their opposition if the algorithm is any good. Those real people would have an initial defenders advantage.



FPS players are bit different than EVE players, especially since there is nothing in it for them to AWOX.

Also, if you have a super, I doubt you paid for it yourself, so you have alliance support. If you did buy it yourself, you are space rich and you should stop whining.



Right now, I agree with most of your points on the marketing strategy. DUST 514 doesn't have much to set it apart from other FPS, mostly because it hasn't been properly linked into EVE's universe yet. This is a step to change it.

So my only defense against DUST boarding parties (who probably planned this and are coordinated) are a bunch of random FPS players who have no stake (beyond ISK) in the survival of a ship I spent billions of hard earned ISK on?

Defense having an advantage or not... I might as well jettison all my equipment and self-destruct my ship. Hedging the survival of major assets like that on what is tantamount to a coin-toss is bad gameplay.

I think that instead of thinking that a group of mercenaries can destroy a ship, more interesting would be damaging certain attributes (how about messing with sensors? slowing that armor rep cycle?) or even offlining (and that's it, no magic *LETS BLOW THIS CAP*). The limitations to the attack team to 10 clones per breacher seem pretty fair to me, considering a super cap pilot should be able to have 150 clones at minimum to defend against any attack.

Of course, then you would have a bunch of disposable cruisers just fire to the super caps trying to land as many as possible in order to even out the odds. OTOH other ships need to also be able to destroy some of the breachers to help out a friendly carrier (mercs already alive wouldn't die, but they'd lose respawn clones).

So you get DUST mercs belonging to alliance A face in an uphill battle against DUST mercs from alliance B while a battle is raging outside in EVE. If you don't happen to be in an alliace, maybe hire DUST mercenaries from important Merc outfits with players that you KNOW will play well (unless paid not to -- and there probably needs to be a mechanism to counter this).

Now, the stake on ensuring your ship survives would be: that they belong to your alliance so they have an interest in you surviving, or the iskies you would pay IF and only IF they win (barring, of course, they got paid to not win).


I admit, however, that this kind of gameplay probably needs more thought to ensure that it eve players have a real chance of defending themselves and/or not feeling that they are unable to do anything.