Player Features and Ideas Discussion

To make this scenario interesting for the EVE pilot, they need to have a task to perform while the DUST mercs are traipsing around in the ship or ruined station. I am thinking about in the movie Alien II where the mercs are exploring the abandoned base and someone back in the vehicle is manning the sensors saying “I am reading life forms approaching you, 100 m...... 50 m....”

Maybe as the mercs explore the wreck the EVE pilot is looking at an interface where what the merc suit sensors are seeing is getting mapped out for the EVE pilot to view, creating a wire frame 3D map. While other sensors on the ship are lighting up areas of heat or electromagnetic activity. Have the ability to launch scout drones to fly through and map out the area. The EVE pilot can be using them to try to find specific things He/She is looking for, and can direct the merc team via coms to head for a destination, or avoid a potential danger.

Of course there may be Drones in space to deal with some of the time, and in low/Null sec, other pilots.

The two games can be kept separate this way (what happens in the wrecked ship and what happens outside of it) but data can be passed between the games, allowing both DUST mercs and their EVE pilot to share the experience in a truly integrated gaming experience.

EVE side this would require a new interface, which would simply be a new popup window, and some new models. Of course the programming for that interface would be substantial, but it would not require changing EVE in any other way.

The following is my response to a thread on the DUST forums about the idea of EVE pilots dropping teams of DUST mercs off on ancient ship wrecks and abandoned stations as part of EVE Exploration. The idea being that the DUST mercs would recover artifacts and salvage for their EVE employer, in exchange for a reasonable pay check. I thought I would repost my response here to see if other EVE pilots would find this idea interesting?


Original thread on the DUST Forum.

Does being the guy back on the ship running the scans, doing the mapping, watching for dangers, and fighting off external threats appeal the EVE players that do exploration?

There's two very good reasons.

Firstly, we don't even know how PVE content will work in Dust, how the players will react to it, how to work out the bugs and make it playable and enjoyable (including AI workability). Kicking the complexity factor up 5 orders of magnitude by including Eve interaction from the very start would be utter foolishness.

Secondly, the economies aren't linked. That basically means the game system will separately determine the rewards for each party, without any means for the two sides to decide this on their own. And if the motivation is lackluster for either party, then the two sides don't have the means to arrange something.

Furthermore, if I don't have the option to take the loot for myself and jettison the mercs into space. Well, it probably shouldn't be in Eve.

In light of the many DUST PvE threads, I thought I’d post my “vision” for how DUST could implement PvE in an interesting way that is closely tied to EVE, and also has the elements of PvP pirating, and potential for brutal backstabbing. I think this system would be reasonable in scope, and certainly less ambitious than many of the other proposals. It also has the potential for being expanded through iteration over time by adding things like 0-G combat, or fighting in a vacuum, different structures, different NPCs, different scenarios, etc. It's a very "New Eden" way of doing PvE IMO.

It begins with an EVE player fitting their ship with 2 new modules, a clone torpedo launcher and a CRU, as well as buying clones from the market (i.e. buy them from PC corps selling spare clones). The EVE pilot will scan down a site via probes and fly to it. They will target the site’s wreck and launch several clone torpedoes whose nose penetrates the hull of the wreck, creating a seal and then opens up allowing the merc access to the interior of the wreck. The clones need to recover some highly valuable new resource (such as a special datacore or something). Each torp will contain a single clone (perhaps a full squad).

Once the squad has boarded they will progress through the drone-infested wreck interior. They share coms with each other and also the EVE pilot. As the Mercs progress to their objective, fighting drones, they may trip security traps, these may release waves of NPC rats that will attack the EVE pilot. There may be opportunities for the EVE pilot to assist mercs via targeted bombardments of the exploration wreck as well. Perhaps Mercs could gain access to the wreck’s weapons systems and help take out rats by activating/repairing/recalibrating the wreck’s turrets.

Now it may be possible for competing EVE pilots to also scan down this particular site and launch their own team of mercs to hijack the objective and/or take out the first merc squad. If in hisec, the EVE pilots cannot directly attack each other without concord reciprocity (unless flagged per usual EVE PvP mechanics), but they can assist their own clones and use targeted strikes to take out the competing merc teams without getting Concorded. Once the objective has been recovered, the merc squad will need to make it back to their torpedo for extraction. If one of your mercs gets KOd, they can be needled back as usual, but if they’re completely killed, they’ll need to respawn in the EVE ship’s CRU and get re-deployed via another torp, expending one of the clones in the EVE pilot’s cargo, and torp ammo. This incentivizes good fits. Mercs are paid ISK for their trouble by the EVE pilot via contract, and the EVE pilot recovers the resource to sell on the market. If your EVE pilot is destroyed or abandons you, the Mercs will be forced to suicide to return to their quarters, getting nothing for their trouble. Alternatively they could contact another EVE pilot via chat with their current system info to sell their services and get a ride home + payout from the new pilot. e.g. Corp Chat > Hey, we lost our ride home, Any EVE pilots want a {valuable thing}? Come scan us down, we’re in {system}. 10mill ISK.

The key to this concept is making the resource valuable enough that EVE pilots can pay DUST mercs well and still make better ISK/hour than most other activities.

What do you think?

This thread has been moved to Features & Ideas Discussion.

like batelle is saying. Dust needs some established PvE content to:

First be created
Secondly called rubbish and bugged
Thirdly reworked and bugs ironed out
Fourthly be reintroduced
Fifthly be good and worth while
and finally once we know its working and theres a reason to do it, start connecting it to the rest of the universe.

also what batelle said about the joint market is true. Dust does not have a market. it has a galaxy wide vending machine that instantly teleports their stuff around the universe, there is no logistics. Currently their isk behaves differently to ours, it does not appreciate or depreciate. EVE players rewarding dust players will probably leave eve players getting great items for a pittance, or dust players will get mountains of dosh for 5 minutes of effort. Or both.

The idea in principal is great. except for boarding ships in the middle of a fight. that has endless amounts of issues, which u can find by doing a search for it on these forums.