Player Features and Ideas Discussion

HUGZ stands for Multi-player Incarna.


Alright, so we see some Devs actually responding to some Incarna related threads.

Essentially, the long term future of Incarna is being totally revisited from Pre-Production onwards. So, what are we looking at here for what will make Incarna successful for those that want it, and not interrupt those who want to stick to FIS.

With that in mind, let's discuss a bit what would make it work.

My first point of contention is ...

Without people who can't "Fly In Space" then Stations will always be a secondary transport mode such as "driving a car" is to a person walking. So, you need a class of players who consider "walking" their primary mode and flying their secondary mode of transportation.

Creating a class of EVE player that can't fly, would be the first hurdle. But, if you can't do most of the content for EVE, why pay for it? Easy - Free 2 Play for WIS. PLEX is also conveniently called "Pilots License Extension" - so without a PLEX you aren't a Pilot. No flying unless you're paying (subs or PLEX). What can F2Players do? Well, a lot, and not so much at the same time, and would really help define what Incarna would cater to - a F2P EVE set of players that are interested in Social Play (with and through the EVE sandbox) and then we've got a point of interaction for Capsuleers to want to step off station to deal with F2Players. A committed F2Player who's out walking around more often will naturally succeed at certain careers that benefit that style of play (more social interaction - more micro community management) than someone who runs around all over EVE doing what they do in space.

Other things a F2Player can not do :

1. Gain Skillpoints
2. Vote for CSM
3. Others?

Other game content would be exploration style 3rd/1st Person environments - from Station areas to Blood Raider outposts (how do they get there? Pilots?)

Other opportunities are to easily introduce friends and family to EVE either as a social avenue to explore with their significant others without needing to pay at first, or even as a permanent social environment to get time in for fun. Gameplay would vary widely, but here's some thoughts to get us rolling ::

• Free Walking IN Stations - No Flying, No Skillpoint Training, No CSM votes, No more "Emergency PLEX Time", etc.
• PLEX/Subs for Flying and Skill training
• Each station has 2 Districts (limited for a reason)
• Station Districts that can be influence and exert influence - through and by the player owned establishments on the station
• Districts would specialize in certain bonuses/establishments/perks that bring different professions to that district. i.e. "Trade District", "Black Market District", "Industrial District", "Miners District", "Gambling District", "Red Light District", "Training District (NPE Content here!!)
• These specialized districts would be developed by players influence through investments/establishments - Jita would probably be a Trade and Industry district from player influence, so a Blackmarket wouldn't fit (to trade boosters) - other stations in the vicinity would have to have those districts established, leading to specific stations for Booster trading and also then segregate into social levels - "Richer people districts" vs "poorer people districts", etc. This is a natural part of human society.
• Districts naturally help "Segregate" types of players - bringing together like minded players for social opportunities, at the same time excludes non-like minded players making it easier for players to identify who they want to associate with - can lead to interesting social opportunities.
• Free2Play players would require transportation occassionally - provided by PLEXers- contracting a passenger service (that's reliable) and doesn't get you killed would make a difference. Would require a "passenger" hold attachment to a ship perhaps, would come with various accommodations for the journey. Would be a marketable way to create Space Passenger travels and in the case of ship death an "emergency shuttle" is launched - and could be picked up, by lets say, pirates.
• Competitive passenger transport could then go from "rag tag cheap" to "Cruise Liner" with full entertainment suites and on time departures, with limits of 50-100 passengers or more. (The Jita to Amarr Passenger Liner Corporation).
• Dust integration into stations is a must have for station populations. Most capsuleers won't get into stations too often, and less so with less people there. Perhaps waiving the "NPC Broker fee" for Dust contracts if you meet in person can be an incentive as well.

CCP Revenue from F2Players

• Occassional PLEX consumed to train skills, fly around, etc.
• Aurum consumption for buying what should become clothing "BPCs" and similar as profession options to sell to F2Players
• So, if I wanted to be a "Clothing designer" - I would buy the BPC from the Aurum store and make it for sale for F2Players or by F2Players
• Promoting more players to play in general, generating more interest in EVE and resulting in more subscriptions for space content. Combine with other improvements to gameplay and Dust to generate longer term player commitments and loyalty.

Justifies Aurum for Incarna by having an actual Free2Play side to EVE, would require serious lowering of many Aurum goods, and generally creating a sensation that paying subsribers generate tremendous amounts more ISK than the average F2Players, also justifying some ridiculous prices for "social clothes" to stand out from the "F2Pers". This makes F2Pers more interested in getting in on the good money and subscribing when they feel up to it.


You'd need clothing on the order of 1-2 M ISK, $0.25 in Aurum (5 AUR equivalent or so) - that would be purchased easily by multiple F2Players (T-shirts, basic pants, super basic accessories). To 10M ISK/$1 in AUR (50 AUR or so) for slightly more intersting things, all the way to 100M ISK Pantalones for Super Rich subscribers that pull in 100M ISK an hour and don't care about some uber stupid expensive pants (to the general F2Per.)


I'm sure CCP can use other forms of Revenue to justify the F2P access without flying around.



The big challenges as I see them are as follows :

• Giving F2Players the right kind of content
• Not confusing F2Ps to what they can or expect from a Walking in Station EVE game (it's not a WoW MMO)
• Fast development cycles on certain "Exploration" environments
• Developing a micro economy for Stations separate from Space economy using ISK (or not ISK?)
• Making station environments Unique enough that not each station feels like the exact same replica of another station.
• Bridging the perception of "Station" to "Universe" for the average F2Player that they comprehend the scale of EVE as more than just 1 station.
• Creating enough social opportunities with F2Players that pilot capsuleers want to come off their ship enough to interact often enough.
• Creating tangible professions even if you can't fly in space.
• Making "Drinking a Beer" actually mean something - or being bought a drink have more value than some gimmick MMO thing.
• Making this awesome enough to be awesome enough to do.

I would actually change a few things; though I like most of the ideas you've come up with.

No specific order:

New ship - Player transport. Can be used to transport F2P or other pilots from one location to another... scratch that; got a better idea.

F2P players are essentially non-capsuleers; meaning they don't have clones. These people are essentially just your usual New Eden citizens; but this doesn't mean they can't fly a transport or a small fighter, or even operate a mining platform of some kind.

Reasoning: There has to be more than just operating an establishment, or wandering around a station to draw people into this kind of game.

New ships which are Civilian class vessels will become available. Personnel and luxury transports capable of holding multiple passengers, small fighters much like Drones, except operated by F2P players, and mining and transport ships for industry.

This gives them the ability to transport goods, transport other F2P players, mine in asteroid belts, and defend those operations.

The downside: They can die. For all that they achieve, leaving a station will be a risk for them; whether transporting goods, riding on a personnel transport, or piloting an escort fighter. If they get destroyed out there by other F2P players, or by FiS subscribers, they could very well have seen the last of their days. Their only means of survival, should be escape pods, and the time required to use them.

In a Fighter pilots case, it might be as simple as throwing a switch to eject the pilot with his flight control capsule; for a passenger liner, they may have little chance should it be small and easily alpha'd, and only slightly more if it happens to be a larger luxury liner with more EHP.

Fighter Bombers and Fighters: Could F2P pilots work for Corporations and Alliances and manually pilot these or something like them? C

ertainly, they could pilot their small fighters while working for a Corporation or alliance, and even transport goods for them or manage small mining operations.

Death is final, but there is a solution: Black Market cloning and cloning offered by Alliance and Corporate services. Don't want to die; this is the answer. Every clone will cost you!

Skillpoints: I think they should actually have skills and a skillpoint system similar to what subscribers get; it should however be a much more incremental advancement in skills, with access to skills with much lower requirements, and some skills which overlap. Trade skills for example, as well as research and manufacturing skills could overlap. They would be very time intensive for an F2P player to train, but rewarding when they were completed, from an F2P perspective.

Given the F2P players would not be capsuleers, they would be required to actually have some means of learning the skill without injecting it, and much slower learning times without a data chip to rely on at all times. Nevertheless, it would still be a passive training plan.

Training could, at best, be 1/4 the speed of a Capsuleer or even slower. For skills available to both F2P and Capsuleers, this would provide a measure; but for F2P specific skills, the training requirements would generally be much less.

Other things:

Transports and Mining ships could require multiple F2P players to operate effectively, resulting in combined effort to actually do anything with them. A minimum req. for these vessels could be something like 1-2 pilots, and 2-3 Techs. This would depend on the ship of course.

Mining would be lower than what is possible with Exhumers of course; yet still profitable from an F2P perspective.

Transports would be limited in cargo capacity, to something like the smaller Industrials, or even less. Potentially, with larger transports requiring more crew, this could change. Skill requirements would be high of course, and loss would be catastrophic in most cases.

Tradeable market items for the F2P players. Things that are specific to their available professions and activities; yet can be traded by the greater EVE playerbase.

New skills: Starship Operation, Transport Operation, Shield Technician, Gallente Fighter Operation, Maintenance Technician, etc...

I want to emphasize that I'm not taking credit for the Free 2 Play Idea, someone told me they saw someone else post it on the forum and it really struck a nerve with me and the other ideas I had already posted.

Regarding the music: I'm sure CCP could have some techno-universe music composed in house quite easily; preferably with more than a 1-3 minute length, and with some variety. In-game music could be their own copyright. No problems there, although it needs some variety. 15 minute tracks would be good for some, and 4-10 minute tracks for others.

I don't think techno-universe is actually any kind of genre, but I am kind of referring to synthesized instrumentals, with a space-like mood. No idea what that actually is. They could also do some actual artist tracks of different kinds too, so it's not all just synthesized music, but that would be a little more costly.

As for baseline Humans, all capsuleers were at some point; so it would just be a matter of them taking that extra step. This could be done through RP elements, in combination with actual subscription services. At any time after they decide to actually Sub to EVE online, they may go through the process at the appropriate station.

Basically, they'll get a message saying they've been selected for the Capsuleer program, and it is requested they sow up at some location for training and integration.

Like you mentioned in your next paragraph, I see. Basically the same thing I was thinking.

I really like this, CCP should take not. My personal opinion on the F2P > P2P transition would be that you do start as a human and then have surgery to become capsuleer. If you go back to F2P you just don't have to pay for surgery again.

On the music front I would personally look at working with someone like Spotify to incorporate it in game. Maybe even do a similar thing with Facebook?

+1 for general idea, but needs further touching up. An excess of station-wellers could simply blow up the EVE cluster, due to the endless stream of connections. Thats what happen if it was free to play. At least for a while.

I'd enjoy it if the non-capsuleer did not have access to the general chat service, and instead could either/only use the mail service and/or only a local-station channel, where he could talk to other individuals. But any and all acess to Capsuleer communications outside the mail should and would be barred, in addiction to not having acess to the guest list for individuals docked at the station.

Other than that, it'd be EVE as usual, but withotu spaceships and possibly shooting each other at some point, but for a start, they should only be a inner/closed set of room wth individuals you could talk.

Maybe... The possibility of operating market-related transactions would be nice aswell.

If moving around from station to station is made near impossible or exceedingly complicated (IE: Requires capsuleer intervention by contract accepting and relocating), server load would be at a minimum assuming hat either everyone shared one or two stations in the beggining (4 probably, one per race), or that there were so few individuals per individual station.

An example:

Lets say each system has an average of 2/3 stations. That not true, but lets assume so. there's apparently 5100 systems, and that makes for about 10000 stations. Some stations like the starting stations would have a lot of people, but others would either be empty or near desolate. Even if all stations were populated, some would be very residual, while others would be overpopulated, to the point of requiring aditional hardware.

Even if we say that about 10 people are in each station, that's already about 50.000 people, as many as in everyday eve, so you'd probably picture they'd have the same lag as eve in general does.

All in all, it might require a whole new server that communicates with the main cluster just in terms of station-location, and at the same time, it might not even require that many people, especially if its treated like an FPS game with up to 32 people in a station at any given time. And if there were more, it'd just create a new room.

I'm not going anywhere with this reasoning I think. :D

I think it might just require some hardware implementation that's akin to launching a whole new MMO. Lets see hos dust 514 fares first. :D

BTW, i read this now.

I don't think Free to Play human-playing should be able to train skills. I enjoy the idea of them being offduty or unlicensed Capsuleers, which would indeed make the transition to implanted/non implanted simpler.

In essence, what people in EVE pay for is essentially the skill progress. Any Free to Play gaming scheme would necessarily have these skills not-trainable during unpaid-for periods. However, the idea that your character is cmpletly static isn't so much realistic. Perhaps a set of skills could be trained, but had nothing to do with the way EVE currently is. Stuff like "heavy machinery operation" that'd allow your guy to be a mechanic, or "heavy duty lifting". Regardless, I'm far morenclined that no free-to-play scheme should have skill training capacity, period.

One you paid, however, you could once more board a pod and become a capsuleer, possibly by having an option that instead of "go to ship hangar/captain's quarters" you could have the option "return to pod". Or you could just be uploaded directly into your current pod-clone.

Maybe thats how it should work:

Capsuleer or human generates a clone for space-working/living. This clone is in everything identical to a Capsuleer's clone, but has no implant. It is basically a un-implanted clone. Since you don't train skill while in it (its free to play) its unimportant. If you upgrade to a PLEX, or a Pilot's License (paying), your clone gets transferred to your Capsuleering clone. Once your pilot license is up, you get transferred back to your non-capsuleering clone. You can even use the prime fiction to then explain why capsuleers have acess to the Capsuleer chat network (its the zeroth-implant everyone and their mother has), and when you aren't in the Pilot Licence clone, you do not have that implant, limiting you o everyday, normal human-conversation.

I agree that they should retain a mostly seperate skill set. I do believe some trade and social skills from the standard skill set should be available however, as they still have to interact with the markets to one degree or another. Other skills to I'm sure, but the list should be very limited.