Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So I've been having an idea tickle my brain for the past several weeks, but first, a little back story:

I'm a fan of the EVE novels. I've read Templar One and The Empyrean Age so far. I love how the novels deal with normal people and not just capsuleers. Well, this got me to thinking "There's not much in the way of interaction with normal people in the game." Now, as I understand it, the ships that I fly all have crews, and that I, as the capuleer am basically just the pilot and captain issuing orders to my crew.

And herein lies the idea "What if we could hire our own crews?" Or, if not the entire crew, then why not specialists or crew chiefs, who could provide small efficiency bonuses to your ship. Of course this only spawned new and crazier ideas in my twisted neural cortex for ship to ship boarding operations, having the ability to target specific parts of the enemy's ships such as weapons or engines (which I understand is sort of accomplished with webifier and other e-war modules).

These ideas may be small, but it seems to me like they would give even more life and flavor to the EVE universe. Or am I just a crazy new-ish player who's not content with the way the world is?

You can pretend your rigs are your crew, or your implants, or boosters etc etc.

Because that's what it boils down to. Just more ways to modify the same attributes. If they were to work/behave in a unique and interesting way then have at it. But if they go down with the ship they are essentially a rig. If they escape with your pod they are essentially an implant.

I like the general idea of crews being an actual mechanic in EvE.

However, I'm wary of how this could ever be implemented without becoming just another module - or worse.

I've heard talk of experienced crews that get better the longer they live, but in the harsh "reality" of EvE's dystopian worldview, these crews usually end up as your favorite flavor of Quafe.

YOU are in a life sustaining pod, they are not.

Also, add in the fact that EvE did try something similar with Industry workers, and that got scrapped mostly because no one took advantage of the system (partly because the workers just weren't worth the hassle of bidding for them - and then nursing that bid).

No, the focus of EvE is on the pilot (i.e you and me) and not the internal gubbins of the ship - organic or otherwise.
Maybe if CCP (or a player) comes up with something totally novel that will also not completely imbalance what exists now, and be worthwhile, then we might have some sort of interesting system. Until then, gonna have a -1 from me.

--Gadget loves her crew (poor bastards)

I think this sort of thing would work better as structure residents.

Take a look at STO's Duty Officer system. It's basically a completely separate system that is used as a content creation/alternate industry method.

Essentially, workers that live in "card" form that have various knowledge/stats. You get opportunities for jobs to send these crews on, either dropping them off at a location and coming back later to pick them up, or having them take X hours to attempt Y task for you, with success chances based on how well you match their skills to the job at hand and how well their personalities synergize with each other. When they complete missions, they become better skilled at whatever skills they were using for that mission. They can be injured and killed due to hostile intervention of enemy operatives, captured and pumped for information, and will take time to recover from wounds suffered, or potentially sustain permanent injuries.

This could give additional interesting play to player structures and serve as an alternate driver for people to establish new corp offices. Use corp offices as the "recruiting pool" as the source of these little guys, make them tradable/exchangable, and make them less efficient/more random ways to acquire certain things. They could be responsible for finding certain kinds of escalation sites without doing the first part of the chain (exploration) transitioning PI material types at a loss (trade) as replacements for locator agents (intel) as replacements for research agents (science) and as an alternative source of LP goods (diplomacy) to disrupt/provide intel on the "hireling activities" or PI of other players in a given region, constellation, system, planet, or station (espionage)be directly responsible for finding more/better opportunities for future missions (management) and to be stationed in a target office, structure, system, constellation, or region to defend against hostile teams (security)

Because these mission opportunities are randomized, they're more opportunistic, less directed assets, and create a low level "off grid" pvp metagame of passive hostility between capsuleers directing these teams of agents, capturing them, torturing them for information, holding really good ones ransom, etc.

Like PI, their use is limited to a small number per character, and require significant SP inventment in their management, first for "Hireling management" as the core skill that determines how many you can have "hired" at a time, and then a range of secondary skills, one for each discipline that control the quality, number of the types of jobs you can potentially roll to send them on.

Because they are sourced from corp offices, corps can make public the ones their members don't choose to pick up from the office, or release them to offices, giving players a reason to browse corp offices in various stations, and corps a small source of additional income even if they don't own any structures through passively selling them to other players.

Best thing is, because they're poor ass dirtsiders, they work for peanuts.

I'd really rather see less EVE spinoff games and more breadth of play in the game that actually matters. Especially when talking about something with relatively low art asset overhead rather than pie in the sky stupidly costly **** like WIS, integrating valkyrie fighters in EVE fleet battles, and other stuff that constitutes huge technical and financial hurdles. Something like this loses a lot of its charm when it doesn't have ancillary effects on a more grounded system, and further, something like this is actually realistic in the scope of EVE's budget, server architecture, and game design.

Though I think you're correct that it would be excellent to integrate the functionality of something like this in to the official companion app they're releasing on the 15th with ascension, alongside PI management, industry management, contract management, trade (if the character is in a station), and other passive non-spaceship-flying functionality.

Actually, it is. Go watch the Scope news videos around the time the Drifters appeared. There was a thanny that died to them where Scope reported that all 9k+ crew had been killed.