Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I had recently suggested this basic idea to someone on Youtube and thought.. why not present it to CCP and see what they can do with it?

Ships will come with Crew Slots, with more slots depending on the size of the ship, ranging from 1 to, say, 6-8 maybe.

Crew Slots are color coded to Engineering, Sciences, Tactical, and Universal

Universal can equip any of the crew types.

Ships more intended for direct combat will have more tactical slots, like the Talos and Rokh. Ships intended to rely on other tricks like remote armor repping or improving their own tank, like the Dominix. Survey ships, ECM ships, ect, like the Probe, would have more Sciences slots.

Now, the interesting thing about crew is that not only do they have a nice passive impact on the ship (Maintenance Crew could provide passive hull or armor regeneration for instance), but they can't be manufactured, like, say Rigs.

Who is willing to sign up to be part of your crew is based on..

A. Where you are. You want a Large Blaster Reload Streamliner? You better go in to Gallente space, buddy.

B. Your standing with a faction. Have you been saving miners from dirty pirates? You're unlikely to find Angel Cartel crew willing to hop aboard while in their part of town.

C. How often you lose your ship. This seems to me like it would be a serious game changer in EVE Online. No one wants to sail if they expect to die. How often you lose ships will have a drastic decrease in quality of available crew, and number of available crew. You may find if you lose too many ships that you can't find the crew type you want anywhere.

I don't really know how you'd like to do it. Maybe ship losses with in a given period of time. Maybe ship types lost. Maybe over all length of time ships have been had to how long it took them to be destroyed. I'm sure one of you devs could figure it out.

D. Loyalty Points. Partially related to standing, I suppose, but you can purchase professionals for a tour of duty from faction navies.

Now, the better you do in all of these, the better the quality of crew. Better quality crew will stay longer and have higher quality effects.

Now, I noted crew staying for a particular time. The idea here is that once their contract is up and their tour over, they leave off to new exploits, home, or where ever. Once the contract is up, when you dock they vanish from their crew slot. For ships which can't, they'll simply vanish as if they left via shuttle. Fluff-wise, word from them can get around. The more action they've seen, via combat, data hacking, mining, or whatever else, the more stories they'll have to tell of their time on your ship. So surviving crew will have an impact as well as how often you lose ships. I'd suggest making a module which gives your ship Escape Pods to increase likelihood of crew survival, with a report of crew lost in the kill mail. Both with a fluff number of how many dead, and with a showing of which crew "modules" were destroyed. Greater exploits in an area of the game (such as repeatedly hacking difficult sites, or mining rare ore for a few hours a day) will improve your chances of seeing better quality crew, but specifically, only those who specialize in that area. So in other words, if you don't use lasers for three months, and only have mediocre standing with Sansha.. don't expect to see many pirates who specialize in quick crystal switching routines of high quality offering to work on your ship.

Rescued crew modules from ship wreckage who are shown mercy can improve your reputation as well once dropped off in a station item hanger (where they proceed to vanish as they return to their lives). Or spaced to alter faction standings and security status. It might be fun to even be able to bring pirate crews in to authorities for bounties of faction standings / security increases... at the loss of pirate faction standing / crew availability in those piratey low/null regions.

Crew should have unusual effects compared to normal modules, such as reducing reload time and offering passive hull regen, or even something like a Flight Deck Crew which provide a passive regen to hull/armor on drones in bay. More mundane abilities such as improved tracking on turrets should also be available.

I think this unique, PvE oriented method of obtaining Crew will heavily alter some aspects of EVE game play, making, for instance, freighters less easy to gank, and suicide ganking a tactic which seriously hurts you in more serious pvp when you can't get a hold of good crew. The idea of a throw away ship becomes a thing of the past. The fact that a ship full of very high quality crew, if well selected, will likely be considered the ship to win in a fight, and a fleet of such would be even more so, I think would make wars much more realistic affairs. Ones where even if it's ok if you die, you worry about your crew.. even if it's for selfish reasons. It'd make this game play more realistically, I feel.

Well, that covers it pretty in depth I think. It should definitely offer extra rewards for faction warfare, and make people really think about the political and social effects that their capsuleer has on the mortal men and women they share the galaxy with.

Might make them make PvE less boring, for one. Although it's a thousand times better than when I started, where it felt like I was basically grinding the same 7 or 10 missions over and over again.

It'd make the game more strategic.

It'd make small, fast pirate ships more of a thing, which in general is how pirates are in real life. You should see a handful of crew-less or low quality crew interceptors taking on bigger ships. Not full fledged fleets. At least for less professional, small scale pirates.

It'd immerse players in to the lore of the game, and the faction fluff. Requiring players to have to realistically work with the galaxy they live in.

Basically it makes the game as a whole more realistic and immersive. Something competing sci-fi MMO's will have a hard time countering that level of. Sci-fi fans tend to be more hard core in their fandom and love of immersion, I feel, and this would definitely improve the positive feelings of new players and permit higher player retention.

This would result in more money for CCP.

It also reinforces the "Don't do stupid stuff, stupid." ethos that is the core of EVE. I think punishing people for being reckless and rewarding them for playing smart and working hard is a good thing.

Punishing people for frequent PvP other than the drain upon their wallet is bad.

As such, rapid decreases in the quality of effectively required crew and resulting loss of ship abilities as a result of repeated death is also bad, understand?

It's really not a tough situation.

P.S: You can take your required PvE on my main combat characters, and (insert anatomical improbable action here).

Yes some of the bigger ships have crew but they have no control over ship functions

as a pod pilot when you enter a ship it is hooked up to your brain and the ship becomes your body and control it as such this is what makes capsule ships so much stronger than regular crewed ships

having some numb skull operate your warp drive would be like some one pupating your legs

Er, a warp core mechanic wouldn't tell your ship when to warp. The Captain, even on a non-capsuleer ship, would do that. The mechanics and engineers just keep it running smoothly. Everything is still controlled from the bridge/pod no matter what ship is being flown. This is true even in real life.

The consequences of losing are losing your ship and the isk you sunk into it, your time, the effort spent to move and fit the ship, giving the enemy access to your wreck to loot, and potential SP loss if you were flying a t3. There was never any magical time where everyone had to work on each of their own ships like you seem to imagine. Time/Effort/ISK/Maybe SP. You lose these when you die.

This is a game. As such, game enjoyment and game design take far higher priority than realism.

If you discourage people from dying by heavily punishing their ship stats on death, people become risk adverse, unwilling to risk situation where they are likely to lose their ship.

This means that

A: People avoid fights when they can, unless of course B is true.
B: Bring ton more people than the enemy so you can squash them flat without significant losses, and bring a ton of ECM and logistics so they have as little chance of killing your people as possible.

Do I really need to explain to you WHY giving people even more reason not to take a fight they have a chance of losing is a bad idea? Massive blobs, defensive postures, and enforced blueballing are terrible realities in nullsec, and anything up and above current that would contribute to people not fighting even if they were only a jump away and matched in numbers should be treated like cancer.

Oh well my current crew already does this or are you planing to bash them in the head to make yours more useful

"Risk aversion" is already a huge issue when it comes to PvP. People will often choose to avoid a fight if they are not certain they can win. This is bad because...

- it makes for boring gameplay
- it means ships haven't died... which means that people are buying new ships and equipment... which means that supply increases on the market while demand goes down... which reduces prices for things... which reduces profits for people that depend on building/selling/moving stuff for PvPers... which means less money is being transferred between players.
tldr: the economy of EVE relies on the destruction of ships and equipment.
- less people will be willing to actually try PvP... and learn from it.


Also... Faction Warfare was SUPPOSED to be about getting involved in cheap, easy to access PvP without many restrictions while also being able to earn an income in the process.
Due to the mechanics changes from the revamp some years ago it has basically become "Faction Farming" where people switch alts back and forth between the various sides to get the most profit. Warfare and ship-on-ship combat are currently beside the point as they have no effect on how much territory any side can claim or hold.


As far as the "you should have to work for your rewards" comment goes...

Making ISK for PvP purposes requires effort. LOTS of effort. As does making, moving, and fitting up large numbers of ships, mods, and ammo.
Unless you are smart.
In which case, you can streamline the process and do things very efficiently... cutting down on your workload and giving you the ability to perform PvP more often and for longer periods.

Your mechanic basically says...
- "it doesn't matter how much smarter you are... you MUST do PvE to gain that edge over others."
- "so what if you have had bad luck recently? So what if there is a foe in the area who can only be brought down through 'zerging' tactics? You can't have an edge over others because you lost ships. Meanwhile, they can keep holding on to their edge."
- "you can't use any ship anywhere. Certain ships will operate better in certain areas of the game."

In short...
- "grinding" to be better than others becomes a thing.
- limits are placed on tactics and how often you are willing to engage.
- restrictions are placed on what equipment you can use based on where you are.


And if you say, "don't worry, this will be optional" then I only have this to say...

Any mechanic that gives tangible enough rewards stops being optional.

And remember that you are playing a game where people will spend billions of ISK for an extra 1% bonus on implants... will grind SOV for hours because their leader dislikes a single person... PvE in billion ISK ships just to earn an extra 15% more income over a ship a tenth of the price is capable of... and hotdrop a 40 million ISK cruiser with hundreds of millions of ISK worth of ships "just because."

Hmm lets see here.........

Star Trek Online:
1.) has Tactical, Engineering, and Science Officers for Players, Bridge officers, Duty Officers.
2.) All modules in ship fitting are seperated like this as well.
3.) You can not do things without the correct Bridge Officer in the correct slot.....and also trained for actions as well.
4.) Duty Officers......they come in several flavors and abilties but using them is limited to .....slots.
5.) STO is buggy as hell.
6.) Would I recommend STO to a friend? Erm, nope.

7 to infinity) Do i want to play EvE online or Star Trek Online?

I Bloody well want to play EvE online, stop with the crew crap, its part of lore.....please use your imagination a little or what not here. If i wanted to playa different game that is borked straight to crap I would go play that game.

Point is we dont really need it, it would add useless complexity to an alreadycomplex game.
ALSO since it seems you came from STO.....why dont you go back there instead, its a F2P game where you dont lose anything but time and is not challenging at all unlike EvE. Here at least its the players that make the game not the Game mechancis/Lore per se.