Player Features and Ideas Discussion

One thing that has been a pet peeve of mine is that every ship is either specialized, expensive, prohibitively difficult to acquire, impossible to build, or only meets half the typical needs for newer players starting out.

To quote Jeff Cooper on the idea of a scout rifle:


What is this rifle? It is light enough to take hiking, powerful enough to kill a great many large animals, has enough animal to be reasonably useful for extended hunting, can load fast enough to be reasonably good in the battlefield or self defense, and is built strong enough to last several generations with minimal maintenance.

The idea is, this rifle was never intended to be perfect at any of the above, it was intended to be just "good enough." Such as that if one were to only have one rifle, it would make no better sense than to have one that is sufficient to perform most tasks asked of the tool, without necessarily excelling at any of them.

Proposal: Part of the training, instead of providing a myriad of specialized ships to end users that are useless outside of their intended purpose, make the end of the new player experience to acquire resources and build this "jack of all trades" ship. And one that will not require additional specialized ships to complete parts of the rest of the training. This could allow the user to explore all the careers, go through all the agent missions, and accomplish most tier 1 missions, with just this ship, given proper fitting.

Bonus, this can be a ship based off of an "old design" from yonder days or something, only requires level 1 training in any frigate class to utilize, one ship, open to all 4 races. Specs need to be good enough, without over powering. All resources should be able to be acquired by any race without having to go below sec .7 space.

Build resources:
14,000 Tritanium
12,000 Pyrite
2,500 Mexalon

Or something like that. This allows most races to get the items without having to hopefully travel very far or into dangerous areas.

Specs:
Cargo: 350 m3
Hull: 300
Armor: 350
Shields: 350
Speed: 375 m/s
Drones: 10m3
Bandwidth: 10 mbps

Fitting:
High 4
Medium 4
Low 4
3 turrets/missiles
Balance of resources for the above should keep this from being too powerful, but it should be easily tanked to the races/persons preference. Should be buildable within 75 minutes, should be able to handle a salvager and at least fill up on the first tier of close range bottom rung weapons, and easily fit the longer range ones with some creative fitting or sufficient training.

In fact, instead of a blueprint for this item, it should be made available as a default buildable item in all stations that can build frigate class ships. Users can lose the ship, mine with their crappy corvette until they have the resources, build the better one, run some missions or mine some more, outfit as desired, and get back into the game from there, no matter where they may be.

Can you mine with it? Better than a corvette and most non-ore frigates, sure.
Can you fight with it? Probably tackle all Tier 1 sec missions as well as the full slew of non-destructive career agent missions.
Can you rat with it? Keep to .5 and above, and make sure you have the experience, but yeah.
Can you run cargo with it? Most industry jobs should be doable in it.
Can you explore with it? It's somewhat tough and has the drones and fittings to make it sufficiently capable of doing so.
Can you poke around nullsec with it? Make sure you don't put expensive fittings, but yeah, almost no harm done if you lose the ship, just build another one, have another on standby, etc, you'll lose a few thousand in fittings, but better than losing several hundred thousand in ships and fittings
Does it blend? Ask Concord impolitely and find out.

Thoughts, ideas, feedback?

Probe, magnate, heron, imicus.

400m3 cargo capacity, split turrets/missiles, drone bays, exploration bonuses.

Just an fyi, you're suggested ship has more slots and hp than current frigs.

Either it'd be too good and render all other t1 frigates worthless, or it'd be terrible and never flown by anyone with half a brain.

So...why?

And CCP controls the supply for good reason. As Danika pointed out, if it is that good nobody would fly the other frigs.

Nope, -1.