Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'm aware this has been suggested before, but I couldn't find any good brainstorming threads. Usually it comes up in response to something else, and in my experience, people tend to completely ignore comprehensive, detailed mechanics suggestions if they aren't in the OP...

So, here is my version, designed to add flavor and strategy and awesomeness while minimizing tedium and situations where Eve players have to sit around doing nothing.



Pre-Battle Preparation

Before you leave the station, you in Eve do two things, if you suspect boarding parties or wish to board somebody else's ship.

1) Based on your ship type, you have a certain number of "marine bodies" on board. These are not yet linked to actual human players. They are just empty comotose shells, similar to jump clones. They are the bodies that DUST players to be able to inhabit those bodies later to fight for you later on. There could be a variety of different basic types, like "light infantry" "heavy infantry" "sniper" "demolitions" or whatever makes the most sense for the details of the gameplay. While at a station, you can specify which proportions of which types you would like to have available on your ship.

Larger ships also get a certain number of NPC defenders in addition to any marines they carry. So you could never just take over a titan with like 4 guys. But frigates have no NPCs (they have no crew), and cruisers might only have a handful, by contrast. Also, the NPCs don't fight as well as humans, and they are spread out around the ship and won't pack together to defend chokepoints, etc. like humans would. But they will still slow attackers or kill unskilled DUST players.

2) You set the maximum amount of isk that you are willing to pay mercenaries to fight for you. This may or may not be specific to the troop type.

How it actually goes down in the skies

1) Somebody gets within 2500 meters of your ship
2) They click some button for boarding parties
3) They enter their desired number of different kinds of troops they want to land on your ship. You could have presets for this to save time.
4) There could possibly be some modules or skill that might help alter the odds of a boarding party successfully reaching the ship or not.
5) If the landing capsule reaches the ship, then a 5-10 second dialogue box pops up for the defender. The box tells them how many marines they have available (and how many could actually be filled based on the number of DUST players ready to play and willing to accept their amount of pay), as well as the number of boarders have arrived. You are given two options: either immediately self-destruct, or take the risk of repelling the boarders. If you choose to repel, then you are no longer allowed to self-destruct until the battle is decided. otherwise you could just talk to a DUST player on voice chat and blow yourself up the instant you're about to lose, and stupid things like that. If you don't respond, it chooses "repel" for you.
6) If you choose to repel, then you get to input the number of marines you wish to activate, again with presets available, etc.
7) The game matches you up with DUST players on both sides, and the fight begins.
8) In the meantime, you can continue to fly around and do anything you could normally do in your spaceship.
9) If the defenders win, nothing happens. If the attackers win, though, you are instantly pod-killed, and your ship is left floating in space pilot-less, available for anybody to claim.

Random other rules:
* Maximum battle time is something like 10 minutes. If boarders fail to pod kill you by then, they lose.
* If you dock at a station, then the timer instantly drops to 1:00 remaining, if it was >1:00 before. You are locked in the station until the end of the battle (max 1:00). "Station security is being mobilized" is broadcasted to DUST folks, and they get swarmed by station cops after 1:00 and they auto-lose. If they manage to pop your pod in that 1:00, though, then you are still pod-killed, and the ship is transferred to the ship hangar of the guy who boarded you, and is now his property.
* If the ship that unloaded the boarders gets blown up, then the boarders lose! Important! (They are in danger of losing their data link to get home, so they leave their bodies to avoid getting trapped and abandon the fight)

[edit: removed a section about how to match up players in eve and DUST, since it wasn't really important to the gist of the idea]

I see a pretty glaring problem here.

A Dust match takes how long? Are you going to hold a ship down for that long to determine the outcome?

EDIT: After reading the rest of the first page, I've changed my mind from "How would that work anyway?" to "DO NOT WANT!"

Honestly, you could have posted a general idea. So many details are only a waste of time.

Fair enough. I just edited out the "matching players" section because it was pretty unnecessary. Most of the other details I think are important, due to preventing various pitfalls that might make for boring gameplay.


There are many MANY ways to defend your ship, which you have conveniently ignored:

1) Pay more than the other guy (which will end up getting you more highly skilled mercs fighting for your side) and bring more marine bodies along in your hold. This is similar to paying more for nicer modules or faction ships, or carrying cap boosters in your hold, and is thus not very different than existing Eve strategies in terms of things "being in your hands"

2) Blow up the ship that deposited marines in yours. If you blow up the landing ship, the boarders all abandon their bodies instantly and you win the deck battle. This is very much in your hands.

3) Don't let indy ships that might be full of marines get within 2500 meters of you during battles...

4) Get to a station before the deck battle is too far along.

5) Last ditch, but still a defense: have friends nearby that can rush in and take control of your ship if you lose the deck battle

6) Surely there are many other creative defenses I'm not even thinking of

The only way you lose your ship is if you were a cheapskate AND let boarders approach you AND failed to point or kill the ship that landed them AND failed to get away to a station. That is in no way "out of your hands."


In order:
1) They cut in with torches/drills/whatever, of course. Unlike a battle with another spaceship, they don't have to rip apart your entire ship to meet their goal. They only need to make a 1 meter diameter hole... Much easier. Also, they are at point blank range.
2) They're wearing space suits... space doesn't hurt them.
3) Why would your ship have giant tanks of random irradiated plasma sitting around, with convenient pipelines connecting it to every single compartment? That sounds like an absolutely horrible idea and a huge safety threat for your crew. Any light damage in normal combat would case that crap to flood over your crewmembers and kill everyone and cripple your ship...
4) Your crew members DONT have space suits. When the boarders attack, they simply leave a path to the hole in the side of your ship that they entered from, and a vacuum follows them as they move, causing your crew to suffocate, except for the minority of your crew members who are outfitted to repel boarding attacks and have appropriate gear available. I.e. a limited number of NPCs + however many DUST marines you hired to defend. Even if your scientists and engineers did survive, a guy with a clipboard provides absolutely no obstacle to a heavily armored space marine with a laser machine gun...
5) Drones are actually a pretty good idea. I wouldn't be opposed to the option of having items you can buy and put in your hold that act as sentry bots to aid in the battle, etc.

The balance issue is a good point. This part of the idea could be removed, and replaced with just a stock number of marines that are available with any given ship hull, and are auto-refilled at stations (not taking up any cargo space). E.g. frigates get up to 2, cruisers 5, blah blah.


It's not supposed to ALWAYS be super easy to do. If it were trivial to always win by doing X, then it would neither be an interesting nor well balanced game mechanic.

This is just one option of something you can do to defend yourself. It's up to you to set yourself up so that you don't get caught with your pants down and nobody nearby to help you pop the boarding ship. Ever heard of support fleets?


Again, this is one of several methods you can use to defend yourself. If you choose to operate in wormhole space where stations are harder to come by, then it's your responsibility to compensate for that by making sure the other ways of defending yourself are more reliable to make up for it.

You seem to be confusing "Within my control" with "So easy that a braindead monkey could do it."

I never promised it would be trivially easy to repel boarders. I just promised that it would be within your hands. It's still up to you to be smart, think ahead, and compensate for any weaknesses you anticipate. Just like anything else in Eve.




These are EXISTING problems with realism in the Eve universe. Ask the Eve devs if you're upset about the illogical fact that armor on the back side of my ship still protects me from bullets hitting the front side. That's already illogical.

If that illogicalness bothers you so much, then why are you playing the game as it exists right now? Obviously you don't ACTUALLY think it's that big of a deal, and are just pretending it's important to you so you can use it as argument fodder. I'm not falling for it.

If you've never complained about how armor makes no scientific sense already, then I don't see why you have a right to complain about it still not making sense in the future.

No, **** off.

But yeah, at fanfest CCP said that they would not be implementing it unless a lot of people wanted it.

Yes, it could be used for POSes.

However, adapting such an idea to POSes would require a whole bunch of different mechanics, to make up for the fact that POSes don't move and thus cannot easily avoid boarders. They would need other ways to defend themselves to make up for that to make it balanced and not cause systems and/or stations to flip ownership constantly.

Let's worry about that later, if and when people decide they like this idea, and after knowing more about POS changes...

so to do a roam/op in goon space you have to load up on mercs because they have the ample resources of something awful to pull from since a mutli game environment.


Or any of the reddit happy crews. PL iirc is also multi-game/platform as well.

Or the above just hot drop you with their army of console gamers.



And this is good because? Well actually I see one good thing..it would make falcon faeggotry obsolete. You would have no reason to complain about falcon permajam when the falcon alt blinds you to let the main get a t3 solo kill in an af after 10 minutes of "fighting"....the boarders would kill you faster lol.

Yeah, I already edited the OP earlier to remove the part about having "mercenary" items in your hold. It is definitely a less annoying and less-imbalancing solution to just have your ship class determine how many mercenary bodies you can deploy at a time.

I think the idea would be fun for DUST people. But only after capsuleer have finished with it. So say a titan gets fully blown up in the EVEOnline, then DUST teams would be queued up into order to battle within in. If one side wins, fewer or no modules drop, if the other team wins, mode modules/salvage would drop.

So while this DUST battle is going on the Titan would remain in the process of exploding and would become invulnerable like say Incapacitated POS modules do.

Max battle time 15min. 5min to set up the team in DUST. And 10min to play whatever DUST game fits in there. As soon as it's over the Titan fully blows up and the goodies are available for looting.




Could also do it with POS/Station Capture, Faction warefare timer reductions etc. It could all benefit both games.
For ships, anything below a Ttian would have questionable usefulness.