Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Invulnerability? No. Highsec Pve is already plenty safe for the average player especially if you can find a remote area that is dominated by a friendly corp.

That said there are some things that I would consider to be able to enhance a player's safety when they are prepared. The main one being the ability to 'always bring a gang along with you'. This, sadly is no real option for the vast majority of players that spend most of their online time doing solo activities. But I say if you can't bring real friends then hire them. So I would suggest the possibility of implementing an NPC escort summoning option.

To implement this I would suggest that players with sufficient standings with an NPC faction within the NPC faction's owned space be able to summon an escort. This will cause several escort ships of that faction to warp in/spawn, to accompany and protect the player for a limited time. This would likely be tied to an LP purchased item, perhaps with several grades to depend on length of time and/or strength of ships involved, and will likely only be able to be activated when certain timers are not active against a player. These ships will attempt to follow and accompany you for a designated time, or jump distance from when they are summoned but are incapable of following to another factions space. While escorting they will engage any ship or Rat that attacks anyone within your group. Attacking an escort ship will cause a player to go suspect with some standings hit, but destroying one will cause a larger faction standings hit to the player who summoned them, and so can be worthwhile as a target in themselves. They will also be capable of being warp disrupted to prevent them from following their 'client' on a warp out.

These escort ships would immediately attack anyone who aggresses, and rep you for damage with a response that is faster and more useful than concord and perhaps even warn away or engage harassing players or bump lockers (meaning bump locking teams would likely need to keep log-off timers active on their target to prevent summoning of them after the fact), but the system may be more useful in lowsec or Faction Null to spawn a temporary gang for complexes or baiting tactics.

I don't expect most summoned escorts to be exceptionally powerful, except for super expensive ones, but they will consist of either an armor or shield repper, warp disruption + webs from frigate to cruiser sized ships and likely one type of faction ewar along with the damage from these 4-6 ships.

All of the above is merely a prototype idea though so don't expect all the mechanics and balancing to be perfectly worked out. At it's core it is merely "The ability to Summon/Rent NPC Support Ships"

... seriously?

NPC mercenaries ...

you realise this is literally what i do for a living right?

Are you able to do more damage and logistics than CONCORD? Well okay, you could out do CONCORD on logistics given they don't do logistics, but how about that DPS huh?

Or you could, you know, pay some real players to do the same thing. I'm just spitballing here but I bet you could find some players that would take your ISK to escort your ship around.

Are you crazy!?!??!?! That might entail...you know...work.