That seems too… negative.
Snargasm feels more right to me. It’s like your brain getting a nut off on the metaphorical face of someone’s post.
Personally I’d take the occasional 3 month thread necro over the old forums where as soon as something hit Page 2 there’d be another thread on the same topic, often with an almost identical idea proposal.
CCP “CAN” do this these days as they already fixed the legacy (read: outdated as fuck) code for citadels. While it would require a little more work no doubt, CCP will never do this as it wouldn’t make them more money off of players at this point, and it wouldn’t serve much purpose these days with capitals and even supercapitals being basically one-shot in battles. You’ll just have to wait for another space mmo to do it. Good news is, a BUNCH of them are being made right now.
They didn’t fix the code. They made new code for citadels. That’s a big difference. The ships are still using the old code, which means no multiple characters in a single ship.
Even if a new code had to be written for the citadels, we have something that works so it shouldn’t be too hard to convert it to a ship.
Also, we still have an open spot for the supercapital logistics, this seems like a good candidate to take that post.
What works for a citadel (which doesn’t move) may not work for ships (I don’t even want to think how difficult this would be to do during a system-jump)
We know they fixed the in-space issue, but that’s at best half the problem with multiple players in one ship.
The other half (and realistically more like 70%) is the session change and how that’s handled in back-end code. Citadels don’t leave a system so there’s no reason for those systems to have been changed with the Citadel release.
Money has very little to do with any of this, it’s all about how well a feature would work in gameplay, how wide the user base is for it, and how much time it would take to implement. In this case the gameplay is vague and might not work well, the user base is pretty small, and the time required is significant.
I like the Idea of a carrier, regardless if it is easily implemented or not. As to what it adds? Right now, if you see a Bowhead, it is a big juicy slow moving target. But if a Bowhead could carry ships with or without pilots… that would definitely add some potential danger to ganking ships. And yes, you could use a carrier to move you and your friends somewhere ‘anonymously’. But could that ‘lost big fat target’ also be spawning the beginning of an invasion fleet? I think use the Ship maintenance bay of x size, and put ships totaling that size in it. So maybe many frigates, or several destroyers, or a few cruisers, or maybe 1 battleship. But, I kind of think our job here is to propose ideas, and let CCP Decide whether to act upon them or not.
First off, there’s no way CCP would allow something like this to be used in High Sec, like any other Capital, so nothing would change with the Bowhead.
Second, “anonymously” isn’t the issue, it’s already easy to get from A to B without being seen. From a gameplay perspective the biggest issue with something like this is that Fred can get Dave and George from A to B without them actually doing anything and at very little risk.
Overall the gameplay involved here is several people AFK or at least not doing much while one person does stuff. That’s not interesting, it’s not engaging, and it doesn’t present a particularly compelling reason for why CCP should spend the time to let one ship transport multiple players.
So I think this idea is actually a really cool jumping off point. I love the idea of ships being able to carry other ships.
I do see a problem with the idea of messing with local because well dont ■■■■ with Local it is important just the way it is.
But as another thought a ship that could grab another ship and increase its warp speed is extremely interesting to me. Something along the lines of I can take the new ship and attach it to two Battleships and then take us all into an accelerated warp. Would be a nice force multiplier for small gang and an interesting way to mess with the current rock paper shotgun mentality of small gang.
Balance is for horrible people and losers anyway.
you mean just like now with a jump bridge?
Remember when motherships were renamed super carriers, and CCP announced they were going to add a mothership that was basically this? Then they worked on it for like a week and were all “oh, crap, whoops. Nevermind.”
So yeah, even ignoring the whole legacy code this-can-never-happen thing, for this to be viable it would basically have to be designed as a poor man’s titan bridge, and then be priced more than a titan so that it can’t be a poor man’s titan bridge. Assuming the minimal dev cost possible, it would still be a huge investment for only a handful of people. So, cost:benefit would be a no.
but the problem was the code not balance
hell i would be fine with this if having someone in you SMB disabled your jump drive
Requires infrastructure, requires the player to actually do the piloting and clicking themselves (and seriously ask some people around here how many players they’ve killed sitting AFK on one side or the other of a jump bridge), and is static between two points with a few limitations on placement.
So no, not really like that at all.
talking about titans and blops not sticks
well had they not ran everyone that knew legacy away and trained some new guys on legacy they’d know what they were looking at. Even the military gets its replacements in for a few weeks before the previous soldier leaves. they keep blaming old code instead of blaming themselves and saying what they will do to fix it. currently their fix is slowly put in new code so they end up with a mix of new and old code. most games have gone through a 2nd iteration because of that and if they made it able to port over characters even without belongings, I believe a lot of people would do it because id do it in a heart beat even if I had to start over wealth wise, as long as I had my past 12 years of training.
Also they need to make a huge event aimed at sinking isk.
Still requires more player action than this concept, in addition to being severely range limited and requiring a ship that costs ~60b+ to execute the jump.
If this concept “Real Carrier” costs like 120b and has to travel gate to gate to get anywhere then yeah I won’t care if it lets people AFK because it takes a gigantic loot pinata flying around for them to do it.
This shows a pretty fundamental ignorance of how programming works as a job.
You have to deal with legacy code in pieces because it takes a huge amount of time to completely refactor large chunks of a code base, like years, which means for the entire time the refactor is going on you can’t touch anything that the legacy code touches because the new code will likely change in some way (after all, that’s why you’re getting rid of the old code).
The bigger the piece you refactor the wider the area you have to freeze and the less other stuff you can add or change. This impacts bug fixing, new features, you name it.
The problem with just saying “screw it” and making a new game is that while this lets you rewrite everything at once it’s still hugely time consuming and while the end product will likely have none of the old bugs or bottlenecks it also won’t have the years of accrued features.
So if they did start making “Eve 2” and transferred over all your skills they’d have to either refund or lock a huge chunk of them because they’re tied to ships or features that don’t exist yet. Alternatively they focus on getting in everything that’s tied to a skill but a huge chunk of the world content doesn’t exist, like for example no Wormholes or no Scanning or no Structures or something.
Literally everyone in software refactoring large apps in pieces if they’re not doing a complete rewrite and generally complete rewrites only happen when the app (or game) in question is either stable and not being changed, deader than a doornail, or independent of the new version so you can have one team maintaining and another creating 2.0. The latter is only really feasible in games for huge studios because you basically either need to stop updating your old game or have almost 2 entire production teams to keep the old game going while building the new one.
Lastly, if you think the Military or any other organization is perfect at retaining knowledge you’re out of your mind. The Military’s solution to retaining knowledge is basically to write everything down and just to have enough people to train the newbies even if one person leaves and they still lose knowledge over time as systems go out of use because the last person who actually had to maintain them outside of keeping the mothballs fresh retired 20+ years ago and while he may have trained the next guy in the basics that guy never used them and didn’t pass them on.
I’m gonna leave this one to @Teckos_Pech for an in-depth explanation of why this wouldn’t do what you want it to and is generally a poor idea.
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I have been getting my blops at a bargin…
besides I see nothing wrong with being able to move around with a very limited number of friends when RL makes it hard for you to log in
as far as i can see it, thise ship carrier is possible and may be useful. to say more it allready exists. parts of it.
why it is possible?
1: players allready can dock into hand-made structures, while docked they can repair their ship, refit change ships, spin camera outside structure etc.
2: multiple players allready can be moved around in space by one player. it is fleetwarp in current solar system and titan briging to other system.
3: multiple players allready can be made immortal for limited time by one player. its mining barges and panic module on rorqual.
4: capitals, soe industrials and nestor(lol) are allready able to transport ships in their ship maintenance bay
combine those 4 features in 1 ship and you will get what was discribed in first post.
how it may be useful? here are few situations
1 transporting pilots (not only their ships) to other solar systems with jump drive
2 securing (saving) ships that can not survive in combat under current circumstances - industrials, scouts
3 changing ships/fittings without hanging on battlefield (doing it while docked in carrier)
4 hiding ships that do not have cloak fittet (or ones that can not fit it)
5 hell yes, afk player transportation - space taxi services. out in other games players can be passagers, transporting somebody while chatting on the way is really fun.
6: carrier could have clone bay similar to clone bays on the npc stations: if one of pilots looses his pod in combat, he will wake up in new pod, docked in the carrier (yes, many of us expeted citadel clone bays to work that way). sort of “Valkyrie inside EVE”.
7 carrier could be anble to anchor itseff like a citadel and become a temporary station
8: players will definitely find much more ways to use it, like they did with pos forcefields and mobile depots)
expected trobles
carrier’s pilot can suddenly log off because of “socket closed”, disconnect, bad power supply etc. for this reason carrier could have few pilots allowed to fly it by carrier’s owner. thet will just “take control” of it.
Thanks for the pointer @Cade_Windstalker.
Why? There is some inflation in the game, but it does not seem to be runaway hyper inflation. And if you sink out too much ISK you run the risk of deflation which could be very bad for the game too.
And as Cade hinted, people may not participate in that event. People won’t just blithely sink ISK out of the game. You’ll need to incentivize them to do it and that will likely mean something like in game items. And the problem there is of course game balance. I am probably not going to sink a bunch of my ISK for an item that is on par with existing items. I might do it for say a super item, but then you’ll just be creating a class of haves and have-nots which won’t be good either.
Please, lets lay off this ISK sink thingy-ma-jiggy.
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