Player Features and Ideas Discussion

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.

I will try and contact low-sec and WH PvP Capsuleers to gather their ( presumably contra ) opinion.

I would say no to that assumption. Capsuleers have clones. DUST Mercs will enjoy some cloning ( as a game design necessity against perma-death of "your" character ). But ship crew of Capsuleers cloning ? -- no way.

A further con, you missed :
- crew is an additional "consumable" or ( more or less ) necessary "item" that adds complexity without a clearly described factor as to how it enhances the fight experience and fight mechanics - particularly in PvP. Short : crew is a chore as it lacks the benefit to the game experience.

Jarome, would you care to edit your OP to add the pro/con list to the front page ?

I'm glad you nit-picked at it a bit, I could have thought out about it much more, but I thought maybe it would be better to post what I had at the moment and then let others come up with the rest instead of doing it all myself :) That being said, if nothing else, these ideas can be improved in that way anyway.

Your idea about the whole massive crews and de-moralizing thing is a very good start. If you wanna get really deep into the effects of every action, every planet bomber or city destroyed in conflicts could generate either depression amongst the crew thus causing negative effects or, more common, increased aggression, which causes more damage output, increased accuracy, and maybe faster firing. Of course, this could still be negative if your crew doesn't see you as actively pursuing those who challenge them and may try and fire on any ship even remotely similar to those who attacked.

In addition, relations with crew really need to be examined. If you want a good example, look at the Sims 3 for example. A seemless world all running at the same time, but remaining focused on the 'character'. Who you associate with, what path/career you lead, and what personality traits you portray all determine how people view you and who your true friends and allies are. Should the crew enviroment be as in depth as a life simulator when it's introduced? No, not even close, it could possible damage the universe so far and take away development of more pressing concerns. This doesn't mean though we shouldn't look to implement what we can to make it as good as possible at deployment and then develop it further over time so that there is some real meaning to crews after all.

Thanks for working with these thoughts.

To make it clear again -- particularly aimed at what Jarome wrote -- I am not seeing crew as a good feature for EVE ( and CCP will likely not do it anyway ) if it was about making the crew some more or less realistic NPC. As a side effect perhaps, yes.

But the focus point for crew as an effective and appropriate game mechanic I see only in the following : giving two REAL players or groups another channel to fight or cooperate, short : play together. Channel one is the guns on each ship, channel two is the player-driven economy where direct interaction takes place. Channel three is : the forums. Yes, the whole meta game which makes EVE so special is part of the interaction possibilities.

Now, if crew were to open another channel, being a battle ground where you can influence another player -- ally or foe -- that is what I can see as a beneficial factor; and an answer to the initial rejection of crew by CCP. If additionally, crew were to be bound into establishments game play or PI / DUST then this were a winner. That's my 2 isk.

That's a pretty good system to work on. I think if moral were to reach a point you could start to see mutiny or even deserters.

Propaganda ships... going to pi planets and blasting the locals on how bad the war is going. May force allaicnes to import thier crews from elsewhere.

This also lowers the value of thier own crews they assemble...

Wow planetary warfare just got more serious if crew was seen as a viable income.

Let me clarify something mentioned earlier,

Capsuleer clones are expensive as they retain skills and apperance and genetics.

Dust 514 clones are minds burned into a generic tube man-baby. (think starwars storm/clone troopers). Mind provided from original body.