Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Perhaps they're purchased with the cost of the installation? In other words: when you purchase a Command Center (or any other PI building) or a Control Tower (or other POS building), you're paying not only for the physical building, but at least a minimum amount of crew to run the thing. I see it as a package deal: the (virtual) crews automatically come with the cost of the installation, and are already there when set things up.

I would sorta think of it like this:

Coming out of your pod onboard your ship is and option, not a requirement as it seems now on stations. If you leave your pod while on the ship, the ship is still functional and will run like it does any other time, but the crew will work like a computer, automatically targetting ships it considers threats and usings the guns, boosters, drones, etc... that it feels necessary at that time.

Of course, I would imagine from the bridge you could make decisions just like in the pod specific to battle, but it would probably be irrelevant other than for visual purposes or if for some reason you couldn't get back to your pod quick enough. The purpose of the whole crew thing simply is to see who is there working for you and possibly letting you pick out who it is. This could be a way of replacing or giving an option besides the regular ship bonuses. For example if you own a Gallente ship, but prefer Minmatar weapons, you could hire a Minmatar Weapons officer who will replace a 5% bonus to hybrid damage with a 5% bonus to projectile tracking speed. When you start thinking about it, crews could bring a whole new life to EVE.

Man, I see no reason why they shouldn't be, save maybe for lagging in some circumstances. Then again, that could be compromised by limiting the amount of activity going on to a smaller area or what not. You got a great idea going here, CPP should look at this.

Guys, this thread will mostly be useless if you keep discussing the lore or trying to deduct lore from game design. Fact is : "crew" is not cleanly solved at the moment. Neither in lore nor game design.

You build ships in WH space ? Well, if crews were introduced, I imagine one of the additional building components for ship production would then be : crew. Or at least, these shiny hulls will be stuck in the hangar arrays until you provide crew enough to fly them, or can only be moved in repackaged state.

Whether or not component volumes will have to be adjusted remains to be seen.


In the end : "crew" must have a game design reason for being in game. PvE is not enough for CCP ! And it surely would be rather disruptive to the goal of 0.0 development and not cater to the 0.0 crowd either. I don't want to use this as an argument against crew, I want to add this to the discussion as an indication for required improvement of the suggestion until any reasonable amount of people will be behind this.

The best game design reasons for CCP have thusfar been :

• the thing must motivate players for more interaction
• more intense interaction
• or make nicer explosions ( or more of them ).

If you can come up with a 20 second story "why" crew do that, then it's an easy sale.

I see this as more akin to Rigs, an additional "module" we can add to our ships. You can control the whole ship by yourself or you could hire (I use hire deliberately) certain crewmembers that can be responsible for different departments.

Maybe on a Frigate you only have one "Crew Slot" and could pop in there a Gunnery Chief for extra DPS or to change the DPS bonus of the ship. This would go up much the same as Rigs - in that a BS might have 4 Crew Slots. Initially having vanilla crew slots and perhaps having specific crew slots for specific departments with a more effective bonus if you put the right crewmember in the right department slot.

As far as training - I agree with all the above thoughts on your crew getting more experienced the more they are in combat. However if you get blown up - your crew are done. Harsh - but then that's EVE :-)

Also I have been thinking that you would pay your crew on a weekly/monthly basis and this would scale up as the skill of the crewmember increases (either from the "Crew Recruitment" section of the Market or as they increase in skill through experience).

Gameplay wise this would add the following:

- A new section of the market to recruit your crewmembers, also a place to put your unwanted crew
- Crew XP would be lost if your ship is exploded. Much the same as Rigs - this would create demand for crew on the market
- PI on terran worlds could have a new item for "Academy" or "Flight School" that would create new green crew
- Surprise factor in PVP - you are flying a Drake but have +% to EM because you have a specific Gunnery Chief that can change the flavor of your DPS
- No-one must have Crew - but if you do it can adjust your ships potential bonuses or add a bonus to one aspect while reducing another (as per Rigs)
- Pilots must balance having an experienced crewmember in a Crew Slot vs the cost of paying the guy. If you cannot pay then he/she leaves the crew and your bonus is lost

I see the development of this being not unsimilar to when Rigs were introduced. A new section on the market - change to the fitting UI - updates to the back end ship data - new PI Nodes for academies/schools - a way to charge the pilot for crewmembers on a cyclical basis.

Anyway that's my 2c

Yes I agree with EXP being session timed - perhaps at the next docking event?
As for paying the crew - I see your point - but I was trying to put in an opportunity cost of having experienced crew on board. Perhaps there is another mechanic we can leverage?
Recoverability is also interesting - perhaps escape pods for the crew that could be recovered like a wreck
That brings up the idea of specific ships designed to rescue crew - like the Noctis for salvage....how much utility you would get from such a ship is debatable. But maybe a module designed to recover escape pods that fits on the noctis or other ship

Either way - this is definitely a FiS type mechanic I think CCP should look into.

I like the idea of specific crews for specific ships and your skills seem reasonable - tho the Crew Efficiency I think should be related to the Level of the crew rather than the Captains Skills.
Also having specific Crew Stations for Crew Types:

Scorpion has 4 Crew Stations:
1 X Gunnery
1 X Engineering
2 X Tactical

You could fit the following (example) level 10 crews:

Scorpion EM Gunnery Chief - adds 10% EM Damage but reduces resists to EM by 10%
Scorpion Ballistic Shield Specialist - adds 10% Kinetic Shield Resist at the expense of 5% in each of the other Resists
Scorpion Gravimetric Tactical Expert - adds 10% to Gravi Jam Chance - reduces other types chance by 5%
Scorpion Magnemetric Tactical Expert - adds 10% to Mag Jam Chance - reduces other types chance by 5%

In this example you would have a compounded 5% bonus to Gravi and Mag Jam Chances but all others would be 10% reduced effectiveness
EM Damage would be +10% but your resists would be +10% Kin -15% EM -10% Therm -10% Exp

This would allow a savvy pilot to tailor his ship even more to a specific role in fleet

The rig analogy and earlier attempts

The "rig analogy" came to my mind already when we made crew an official feature request during CSM3. But that was not convincing to CCP -- at least not the way we presented it, see chapter 6.57 -- who were still missing more game play. They also told us that added complexity for fitting ships was considered derogative, and would have to be compensated by added game play to justify. Finally, crew was considered by CCP as a sort of NPC and that they wanted crew to never outweigh the importance of the Capsuleer's own skills; which is obviously something that's depending on the actual numbers influenced by crew.

Balancing headaches

You should also keep in mind the balancing headache introduced by crew, whose effect go ontop of all the already existing modifiers. Balancing is already neglected by CCP. They would have to ensure that with crew you would not be able to overpower certain combinations.

Do you remember that wormhole anomaly exploit via integer overflow ? A wormhole company was able to push some of their ships' attributes into the negatives, using an anomaly effect and dampeners together. The variable in the game though did not support negatives and thus from zero they jumped right into super-high values in their sharpshooting abilities.

Going forward

I think the rig analogy is very clever and can be iterated upon with profit, as demonstrated by Nova and Jonas. As a side note, I can imagine completely replacing the static rigs by the much more flexible crew concept. But generally, for the moment, we can consider that rig aspect a "done deal" for this feature. What I am still lacking is more game play.

• Salvaging crew from a battle field sounds like a sweet semi-profession.
• Ejecting early to save your crew, together with your clone, would add a similar mechanism to all ships as it exists for T3 taking a skill toll upon destruction.
• If it was for me, I would add crew simply for their RP potential. Maybe that can be expanded on.
• Incarna, which did not exist back then, allows for a bodily representation of your crew's first officer. The "pet" idea I can see catering to the Incarna users.
• Since crew can be improved by the owner and resold, they have a trade potential far beyond rigs
• Maybe PI has potential. It can lead to scarcity in crew acquisition. And think politics : originating from a specific planet might even influence your crew long after their recruitment - planetary events might lead your crew to mutiny / resign because they want to go home.

More of that ?

Jack would have brought up an interesting point. We could make it so that crew are 'fueled rigs' if this game actually allow for grevious amount of hull damage, but alas it doesnt so I dont expect a large number of folks dying in noticible replacement chunks as the ship starts to go down requiring fresher bodies to take hold of whats getting vented out into space.

Maybe we can make a resource that is similar to what rigs use. Ships would be limited by the 'quaters' resource on the fitting and how much percentage of the quaters the crew takes up is how much they contribute of thier bonus. For example a crew that provides 10% capacitor would only provide 5% if they are over slotted beyond max recommended in a frigate's case 1 crew is recommended, fitting two cuts thier bonus in half fitting 4 would cut each one a qauter possibly stacking as the chain of responsibility breaks down as fewer people are working on the same issues. However in a destoyers' case you can fit two crews so unless they fit three or more they wont see penalties on bonuses given.

This also brings up the point you need to make S M and L and XL size crews for the various ship sizes. Also the resources required to make each would of course escalate from small to xl.

As for balance theyll at least be easier than a ship as you can tweak one you can tweak all. But tweaking takes the longest and then making sure the bonuses you are going to select are proper bonuses not something you're going to regret and have to remove entirely later on.

I do say please make PI an important part in making crew, but unlike regular PI resources their rate of gain should be much slower than other pi resources or making them much more difficult to create using current resources.

I do like the idea of ejecting to save your crew but i dont think many larger than frigate or cruiser would purposly utilize it. I mean there is no way you're going to get a crew expensive enough to consider the ejection unless you magically make tech 2 crew which seems... silly?

BTW when sold on market they lose all of the current levels exp this is so markets wont throw a hissy fit. "repackaging' to make them itemized ie. you have a stack of '15' crews and you break down a crew to stand in with those to make 16 as well.

Contracts however can preserve exp however Im not sure how'll theyll handel in plastic boxes who knows.

Search and Rescue ships and modules would be interesting, combine enough survivors and you can reconstruct a crew but a ship with that sole purpose alone doesnt sound useful. Maybe the medium tractor beam idea i had a while ago to quickly tractor in disabled drones and inject ammo/cap batteries into other ships from a distance. Or who knows make the salvager a scripted (lense, anotehr script could be just for scrap metals) module or make a Thukker Tribe ship thats specializes in salvaging using a specialized salvager just like ORE allowing crew recovery, reconstituting lost items and ships once one got enough peices picked back up.

Having a captains quaters pet is a bit iffy. Capsullers have historically have had no interaction between tickers and non tickers. Maybe an AI medium that serves as the crew representative and yours to the crew.

One more thing Id like to mention as an option. Racial crew.

Oh, that's easy. Crews would be much more than PvE from the start simply because it would be a serious way of bringing EVE closer to Dust 514. Also, it will be more motivating for players because half the people still playing have been waiting to see each other in game face to face for a long time, plus the cool factor will go up with being able to interact with people and NPCs in a whole new way. Of course, there's still the idea about crews having upgrade slots, but there's more to it than all that. It's both practical and fun.