Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I know its been talked about since the beginning, but I think Dust 514 might bring the first change. First thing we could start with is adding the ship bridge (which is different for every ship) and allow you to go there from your quarters. There you could see NPCs for the first time who you can interact with. Later more areas can open up in the ship and even the ability to walk in stations. At some point shuttles should be allowed to dock at any ship, giving them their first practical use as personal couriers allowing you to see other players face to face. By this point, some things might come up that you can do outside of the space side that will show what differences your race makes. You never know, one day we may walk on the planets.

Alright everyone, I'm filling in a request for pros and cons to the ideas and will address some of the issues presented in the thread, and later perhaps address more as they come up.

Pros:
- Crews add 'life' to EVE. IMO, this seems to be what 'EVE is real' is all about, adding more of a realness to EVE. The very presense of crew would thus add more depth to a CAPs immortal life. We greatly lower the crew counts on our ships, but we never completely lose them as has been stated in books and on evelopedia.
- More possibilities for modifications. You can hire groups of your crew to get different or better bonuses. After all, not all Gallente are armor tankers and thus why not use Minmatar engineers who are best at giving you better shields?
- Battlestations! Watching battles from an outside view of your ship getting old? How about directing your crew first hand during battles from your bridge. What could be more fun and thrilling than that?
- So, we all are pretty well aware that crews are actually in the game, so why is it without player interaction your ship can be destroyed? Are your crew honestly just to die while you go get a soda? Perhaps a 'self-defense' option where if you get attacked in this mode your crew instantly jump into action and will engage targets, even deploy and retrieve drones.
- Interaction. Finding little to do between days of skill training and nothing much else you feel like doing ingame? Perhaps your crew can provide you with some entertainment in the meantime or even provide like 'mini-missions' on ship. Who wouldn't feel rewarded for helping some crew out and even getting some rewards for it?
-In relation to the previous pro, perhaps there could even be regards to crew and on board ways of further modifying your ship that isn't possible any other way. Not only does this make crew interaction more appealing, but also give your ship more of a personal feeling that might make you want to hang on to it. This could still go both ways though, your crew might have been working really hard this month and now, as a result, you get informed that your powergrid and capicitor output has been boosted by 3%, good right? Well, on the same hand your crew could accidently drop something into the engine core and now the ship permanetly moves 7% slower. Regardless of good or bad outcomes, your sure to eventually get a 'surprise' that's very welcome.

Cons:
- Server Lag. Tranquility has been known to get laggy during times of the day and in particular areas, and adding this sort of interaction does run the potential of making this lag worse...possibly considerably.
- Design work. In order to make this feature fully functional, especially to a really good extent, will take a lot of time and even more money.
- Basically, the way the system currently works where we don't see the crew at all isn't broken at all so you can't really say there's a need to fix it. The crew idea isn't here to fix any problems with running the ship single-handedly, just to add a new possible and probably exciting aspect to gameplay.
- Some may find it tedious and dis-satisfying, especially if you have a lot of other in and out of game things going on. Everyones online experience will be different.

Okay, now I want to address some issues that have already been brought up.
(How could we possibly have crews? After all, if we had them, ships could never be used in WH space!)
A: Does every ship in your hanger(s) have to be fully or even partially crew at all times? No. If there's a capsuleer in each ship, do they have to be crewed? Yes. It's actually quite simple really if you think about it. No capsuleer is 'born' in WH space so they have to get there by some other means. This being said, crew can come along with them when they make the journey. Your ship is destroyed while there and you take over a new one that's been built there in WH space? Well no one has said a thing about crews not having clones, as a matter of fact when in a place where supplies and outside contact are so limited, cloning becomes a bare necessity. The ways may seem few and far between, but I'm sure the personal are getting there one way or another.

(Any crew on the ship would be killed instantly when manuvering as the ship can fly at several thousand G's and can basically turn completely around in only a moment.)
A: Acceleration/Inertial Compensators. It's already been stated that capsuleers have not been around that long yet the empires have been exploring space for quite a while. How could regular humans survive on board these ships if they didn't already have such measures in place? We are the minority here people, accommodations have been made for regular humans long before us.

(Crews are irrelavent, there is nothing we really need to add them for.)
A: You are entitled to your opinions, I'm entitled to mine. In the end we'll see who CCP finds more appealing, the ya's or the nay's.

As far as i know pod ships are essentially one-man robotic ships.
If crew are to be implemented they would probably cause a somekind of bonus, but i dont think it would make much sense.
How exactly could a crew improve a ship that is already 100% automated?

You love my PI.

I love your ship crews.

Marry me.

+1

Ok, for one everyone is right. capsuleers are what i like to think of as the hybrids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylon_Basestar#The_Hybrid) in Battlestar Galactica.

As, in they are in a goo of sorts and are plugged directly into the ship and with a single thought they can turn the warp engines on or fire a volley of missiles.

they, never get to walk around their ship. i would like to do something like your idea. but, it doesn't fit into eve.

And despite having hybrids, Cylon baseships have crews who can also do stuff.

There is no reason why a capsuleer needs to be in place to command the ship and have a supplementary crew to maintain the ship or provide the atmosphere from a social interaction perspective.

That goes without saying, if you can get out of a pod outside of the ship, then maybe you can get out of your pod inside of your ship. This implies the ship goes offline, and allows the player to move around inside. If the ship in question isn't docked up or safe, then a gang could kill it before the capsuleer even knew he was under attack.

I also notice that when I tell a 300 meter ship to turn on its axis, it does so at a speed which would squish anything organic that was not close to the exact center of rotation.

The lore and the game are inconsistent. Deal with it. From there, give me a persuasive gameplay related argument for ship crews.

I have only seen inertia stabilizers, something that appears to be a term uniqe to EVE since i havent seen it anywhere elses.
inertia dampeners i a much abused term in sci-fi. It means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertia_damper
You are probably thinking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertia_negation

I wonder if CCP guys who implemented inertia stabilizers even know what inertia means, or if what you call inertia dampeners would allow for crew to survive the harsh manuvers of a starship.

This essentially raises a lot of questions only the guys at CCP could answer.

If you make posts at least do some research.

All ships have crews. Recently this canon has been discussed and incorperated by CCP thusly:

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines

This is how the crews live (on some ships), remember Capsuleers are all individuals so they might not do it all like this:

http://www.eveonline.com/background/potw/default.asp?cid=05-10-09

This is how dust 514 sees it for the mercs (perhaps shipcrews also)

http://www.dust514.com/en/chronicles/?article=2367

I never thought about it like that. You are right though. We just wouldn't be able to move your ship or repel an attack until you get back in your pod. we just really need some kind of visualization to help with this. Like how is your pod attached to the ship? is it suspended on cables? or is it just like an egg in the middle of a room? all of these things are necessary to know if your idea will work.

I had suggested crews during my CSM candidacy. CCP was not convinced of their game play reason back then.

during fan fest 2011, the crew topic was again mentioned ( min 28 ). This has already been discussed on the old forum. And not only in the lore session, I think the crew topic was also mentioned somewhere in game design presentations of CCP or a more recent dev blog. But I can't seem to find it.