Player Features and Ideas Discussion

o/

When I started exploration and was still taking in the sights, I saw docked ships and one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was to eject and steal the ship, dock it and come back in pod to retake my own ship.

Sometimes these ships are docked in a shipyard and have something added to the name, to indiciate they were still being constructed, such as "final stage". And I've seen ships that were not docked and nothing added to the name, such as a Navy Caracal.

So I was thinking, how about at sites where there are ships, there is a (small) chance it is a completed ship, which you can then take ( if you have the skills to fly it ofcourse ) or get someone who can fly it to come (and wait in the site so it doesn't despawn).


Fly safe.

This, plus it'd rip the guts out of the markets for the ships in question.

Well you wouldn't be going home with an extra ship every time ofcourse.

Even if it's one time in a hundred, there are enough sites being run every day to absolutely flatten the market value of these things. Plus you have the docked ships as mission scenery, which would only make the oversupply worse.

Maybe it's a matter of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Really have to agree with Danika here. There used to be little 'easter-eggs' hidden in missions like things you could blow up in low level ones for good loot, or a low chance for random Null Sec ore spawns, and the end result was people farming for those things.

If you told a newbie they could go around stealing a bunch of industrials or Cruisers, they'd go out, accept a ton of missions, and do nothing but run around stealing those ships every day, which would kill the market for producing those ships since unless your "module install" costs as much as the normal hull then you're going to be able to under-cut any T1 ship price.

Also this would turn scenery ships into a balance parameter for missions, which is kinda ridiculous.

Unfortunately, the market is not "rational."

There are more than a few goods / products that are still being sold below manufacturing value because of some supply gluts that happened years ago.

Some examples:

- some Planetary Interaction materials: there were a few things that happened early on in the game's life that resulted in large influxes of materials into the market.. So large, that even after consumption for these materials has been increased they are still worth less than it takes to make them... years after the fact.

- Mining ships: specifically the Procurer. Before the first mining rebalance, industrialists created a MASSIVE amount of them purely on speculation ("it is a good ship... people will want it!"). However, it turns out the ship doesn't die often and so it sees relatively little market movement. I believe the price has only recently recovered (2 years after the fact).



Now, let's do some napkin math:


Let us estimate how many missions are run per month.

http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/70766/1/9a_sinksfaucets.png

If you look through that chart, you will find a bar for the amount of ISK earned from "Mission Agent Reward"
It is about 1.24 trillion ISK for November.

Now I have run level 4 missions and the agent reward for them generally runs about 1 million per.

1.24 trillion / 1 million = 1.24 million missions being run per month.

Now this number can go up or down based on
- whether more people are running lower level missions (means lower rewards, adds less to the monthly total, which means more missions being run overall)
- more people are running higher level missions (means higher agent rewards, adds more to the monthly total, which means less missions being run overall).

But let us assume that 1.24 million is the conservative median.


Assuming that there is a 5% chance of getting a mission that allows you to "steal" a ship...

5% of 1.24 million gives us 62,000

That is potentially 62,000 new ships being thrown onto the market... or potentially preventing the purchase of a ship on the market.
Even if you are getting only Tech 1 frigates (~500,000 ISK each), that is adding an additional 31 billion ISK worth of materials to the market.


This is a bit of a problem considering that there has been a huge uptick in production over the last few months... and the fact that production has traditionally been higher than destruction (which pushes down prices for builders and limits profits).
http://content.eveonline.com/www/newssystem/media/70766/1/0_produced.vs.destroyed.png


tldr:
Would it be cool to steal a ship from a mission? Yes.
Would it be good for the game overall? No. It would cause more issues than anything else.




The long and short of it is this:

- capsule tech essentially integrates our bodies and minds with that of the ship. Every sensor, every pump, every weapon... all of it becomes an extension of us.

- capsule tech essentially means that we do not need a command crew. Just maintenance workers (or sometimes not even that).

- ships that are "capsuleer compliant" are actually quite rare in the world of EVE. To get a ship up to "our level" is quite costly as it involves gutting and retrofitting parts of a ship.


tldr: imagine trying to plug a modern computer into a Cold War-era warship. That is what it would be like to try to take over a non-capsuleer ship.

Maybe I should have been a bit more specific with 'when I started exploration'. The sites i'm talking about are the scanned combat sites. Not mission sites. I can imagine there's a lot of mission running going on and that would result in an overflow of those ships on the market.

Anyway, judging from the posts, I think this idea is destined for the trash bin ;)

To add to that list;

4. Repeat of an idea that has literally been beaten to death and has no obvious answers or consensus.
5. Dryson Bennington / Infinity Ziona / Harry Forever / (insert alt of one of the aforementioned people here) troll thread.