Player Features and Ideas Discussion

boarding parties could be the next big thing for the CCP marketing department after orbital bombardment becomes boring.

so how could it work in a balanced fashion?

IMO those two high level conditions must be maintained to make it balanced for both sides:
1) the ship should be only boardable when it would die anyway (explosion imminent requirement)
2) there should be at least one way to prevent successful boarding (challenging team effort for the aggressor)


1) preconditions for boarding
ship immobilized (pointed, not in range for docking or jumps)
shields, armor and hull are below a certain threshold (ship is basically dead)
speed is below a certain threshold

2) preventing successful boarding
via self destruct (or regular destruction of the ship)
defending the ship till one or more of the conditions listed in 1) do no longer apply (e.g. your reinforcement fleet arrived)

how would a dust match on a ship work?
The boarding party would have the job to reach the pod. Additional objectives could be to temporary disable the self destruct mechanism, disable ship drives, offline modules, weapons, eject cargo.. you name it. The defending party would have the objectives to delay the boarding till the ship explodes (protect self destruct mechanism) or delay the takeover till your reinforcement fleet arrives (protect pod).

If the player does not have a dedicated merc defense team standing by, the mercs will be put together via match making (player driven ship protection contracts - could work like ship insurance).



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FAQ:

the merc point of view: what is victory?
its simple: if the ship explodes with you or the pod is killed you did the job right. This will minimize griefing since destruction of the ship is basically a victory condition for the merc. Rewards are player driven, no NPC contracts(!). So if you think you can invite mercs short before you press F1 to kill the ship you do them a favor since you gave them free rewards. Full rewards are only payed out if all objectives (as specified in the contract) are met.

how are mercs transported?
"generic merc clone" commodity. Empty hulls till the match starts. Maybe another container with "generic space merc equipment pack" for the resources they need for the weapons and stuff. Special module or ships does the actual boarding by attaching itself on the other ship (or something similar). Ships have also a certain amount of merc clones in the refridgerator for defensive purposes only - this means your crew is not fighting, mercs are.

its my ship i don't want that a console player takes it away from me!
read 1) again. You are already dead, its your fault.

Explosions replaced with boarding crews?
not at all. Boarding is intentionally difficult and risky to make it impossible to take over entire enemy fleets. You should be able to pick and take a trophy at the end of the fight but thats it. Ships which are being boarded are very vulnerable (see 1)).

so i have to wait 20mins till i can lose the ship? How long is a boarding match?
well. if the mercs run to your pod without resistance and kill you its not very long. If they do not manage to disable the self destruct its max 2mins after you enable it. And if you have a very good defense team it can be quite long.. since your goal is the delay boarding till your reinforcement fleet arrives, or your ship explodes.. remember?

POS/Outposts?
right now? I don't think that CCP wants to touch them before they know what they want to do with them. But yes they would be the obvious first choice for in-space boarding under different conditions.

POCOs?
sure, could generate a lot of matches. Even in highsec if CCP decides to make them player driven.

Why spaceships?
Eve is about spaceships. Everyone has one, the noob and the vet. Spaceships are Eve's main content.

if the boarding party manages to kill the pod the ship is boardable from any eve player in a capsule. Thats the basic idea. The destruction is actually a defense mechanism of the ship owner in the "you get nothing" or "i go down with my ship" sense. You do not board a ship to destroy it, you would just fire on it. You board it to take take the ship or steal (eject) the cargo.

sure, you can do that. Next thing to board are your friendlies.


there is no nerf in this feature request

Hull Tanking.

Doing so would now result in you being boarded instead of just killed.

All those 'oh god I warped out at 5% structure, **** was awesome' stories would be replaced with 'yeah, then I got boarded. **** sucks.'



Also, death 2 all supercaps. With this in, no supercaps would ever die, therefore it is bad.

Could i carry militants that would fight for me? That would give them use.

to board another ship they should introduce a specialized ship to do that with a bit of offensive/defensive capabilities and a cloning bay so you can just summon the mercs when you need them and not make them wait in you cargo for hours, also it reduce the proliferation of boarding since to do so you have always to bring with you the boarding ship.

on the defender side its a bit hard because the standard ship dont have a clone bay to summon mercs for defence so or they carry them all the time (not gonna happen) or the ship is defended by the crew (NPC) and where is the fun there?


but the idea its good

mercs itself are new to the eve universe. Lore could just introduce ship security clone bays which only work for dust mercs, not for capsule pilots, and make them a standard item for all ships. So you have the lifeless defense mercs always on board. The players jump into them on demand using fancy brain transfer sleeper technology driven by space internet. (player contracts which work like ship insurance would be the major motivation... or maybe you have your own mercs in corp and you don't need it)


special ships for boarding.. why not. Or make it an item and add a bonused ship... all nice details for the game designers ;)

Don't like this idea at all. Additionally, the whole self destructing thing, is not a viable defense mechanism. It's a garaunteed loss of your ship, whereas many eve players would prefer the chance to escape in hull, which many of us HAVE done over the years.

Second, this would be a massive nerf, yes, nerf, to freighters. Imagine the increased risk to freighter pilots, now that all you would need to take them out, is 1-2 ships to take out their miniscule shields and armor, then guess what? It's all hull baby.

No, this is not a balanced mechanism. This could be interesting if it were a dust game feature, that does not take place on real eve ships, but if you want to increase the interaction between the two games, this is absolutely the wrong way, and WILL **** off a lot of eve players. Remember, it's eve players keeping BOTH games afloat.

I really don't see this working for the following reason:

A Dust match will take a certain length of time to complete. Let's say it's a really fast match, and takes 5 minutes. That is 5 minutes that the ship being boarded can fire on whoever is pointing it. The dude being boarded could also call for help as well, if there are friendlies within a couple jumps it will just take a falcon to break the point, then what? The Dust match suddenly ends? What will be the incentive for the Eve pilot that is keeping point on this ship and being fired on? What will be the incentive for the other pilots that are holding the field?

The only 3 scenarios where I see this working would be if you catch a capital ship alone ratting, or bumped out of a POS or something. Although catching a carrier ratting in null isnt' that rare, he will most certainly call for help as said above.

The other scenario would be after a fleet fight, keeping the last ship pointed to board it. In this second scenario I think you would be hard pressed to find a fleet that is willing to stay on field to keep 1 ship pointed instead of blowing it up for 20 minutes (or w/e time the dust match takes), since if it's actually the eve pilots who woudl get the boarded ship, it would have to be split in some manner between the entire fleet.

The final scenario I see it working in, would be in hi-sec war dec scenarios, by far the most likely scenario where something like this would be practical. This will encourage eve players to war dec industrial corps that can't defend themselves or field a falcon to break a lock. I don't think CCP is looking to make war deccing hi-sec carebears amymore popular than it currently is however.

That being said, I don't think the development time required to implement this would be worth the infrequent occurences where boarding would take place and is actually sensibly worht doing.

If the idea here is that once the boarding commences, your enemies no longer have to point you and you somehow lose control of your ship where you can't warp or use modules, I will have to say that IMo that is a terrible idea. If the boarding party would have to disable these systems, or eliminate the operator of these systems that would make more sense, but that would also take time and would lead to the same problems I stated above.

Another thing to mention here is that once the ship is boarded, it should still be in space in teh eve world, adhering to game mechanics. So if the dusties to board and capture a ship, the pilot of the ship could have his friends blow his ship up should they be in a position to do so.

Just my 0.02 isk.

Starting to wonder if anyone posting in here has done any actual PVP? (semi-serious) most of the fights I've been in have been over in a very short space of time, absolutely no window of opportunity for boarding mechanics to work between running low armor and ship exploding. Any way to do this would massively change PVP from what it is now and pretty much kill the game as it would give plenty of extra time for people to get reinforcements in aka blob to win... or am I missing something?