Boarding Parties

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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Hi All, I’ve been thinking about how to make raiding ships, planets and stations applicable by using assets already in game without the need to intergrate FPS mercenaries (however if this were to happen, a warclone player would obviously need to be able to perform better than the NPCs)

to do this you would need to introduce a few things, unless someone can figure out a way of simplifying it further.

first thing you need is boarding ships / transport ships (whatever name best applies)
the best way to put this into the game is to have them work similar to drones, using the same bandwidth mechanics and scale sizes for light medium and heavy.

this way no extra fighter bays on ships or anything like that, it uses what is already there.

how i personally can see this working is a high slot module being created which used marines as ammo
this way to launch the ships, you have to have marines in your cargo hold.
the idea being you use the high slot to launch the boarding ships instead of clicking in the drone menu. as it cycles it uses a Marine and launches a ship.

you would also need something which i call a boarding tether.

its one thing to be webbed and scrammed, but a boarding tether will cycle a few times till both ships cannot be locked by others in a tempoary state of invulnerability of just extreme locking time.

by creating this state you enable the attacking ship to launch their boarding parties onto the enemy ship.

“so if i’m being attacked how do i defend against this?” you might be asking.

i have two thoughts on this

  1. an automatic immunity response timer. as a capsuleer you are one with the ship, if you suddenly got parasites you’re body would fight them off, so my thinking would be a timer appearing in the top left corner, similar to aggression timers where if it runs out you successfully kill all the marines on your ship.

  2. a minigame, given you’ll be sitting there for probably about 3 - 5 minutes (depending on balance) having a mini game to play would be a viable idea, you complete the game, you kill the marines.

“so what do marines do”
simply put they take stuff from a ships cargo hold, during a raid, a ship cannot move but also cannot be targeted by others, meaning you create the event/state between the two objects in question.

“what if there is nothing to take?”
in my mind, if there is nothing to take, the ship which was invaded will remain invulnerable for say… 3 - 5 more minutes, this is because the marines would leave behind a small tactical nuke.
the capsuleer will then have to play a minigame to defuse the bomb in question.

“so i’m invulnerable, why don’t i just shoot the guy who just tried to rip me off?”
the tactical nuke would in my mind have a fail safe, you try to take advantage of this state, you just get blown up.

being subject to a raiding party and out right instant death if you don’t have anything in your cargo seems quite unfair, i feel giving the player the option to choose their fate is more applicable. you could attempt to disarm the bomb on your ship, if you succeed then you go back to normal flying about.
if you fail you get blown up
you agress your aggressor you also get blown up
but this is actually more to help allow the aggressor a means of escape.

this would mean almost any exisiting ship could be subject to having a boarding party on board.

further more larger troop transports or perhaps even capsuleer run warbarges could become a factor in the game, with a new area of combat.

in my humble opinion the marines you send onto planets, ships & stations would then likely take things such as BPC’s, Minerals, PI, reaction materials and such things.
things which are small in space but are also equally high in value.

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But why?

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IIRC, CCP mentioned that they were thinking about giving players the ability to seize ships when they were working on project nova. However, something like that would also fundamentally change how Eve is played. I’m not saying that the resulting game wouldn’t/couldn’t be good, but it would certainly be taking Eve in a new direction -which is an extremely risky move that could alienate their existing player base. Moreover, I like Eve for what it is right now.
No P2W

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yeah I remember that too.

allowing people to sieze ships would be very complicated would a virus take over tempoarily like an AI or would it force pilots out of their ships? honestly I don’t know but i think it would best be avoided.

in my humble opinion, for us as capsuleers it would only effect PVP, i feel it would broaden its variety, instead of going for the kills, it could be just as devistating sending marines into a station to get some loot.

it’ll just be a shift in the player base demographic, which is already in the process of happening anyway. CCP did a survey a few months ago which was intended to discover the toxic players and what they like to do in game and then tweek game play. so there is already a demographic shift going on, besides the player base demographic for two interconnected games is going to be different to the demographic now, change is not something to worry about if having FPS Warclones return is, whats important is compatibility through playstyles if you’re able to directly effect each other.

when project nova’s key note was discussed and they said at the end about “capsuleers fighting outside a station, while mercenaries fight inside” the whole room applauded, capsuleers want something which will benefit them and honestly i think this is a great way to bridge the gap, if you’re not interested in using it, you also don’t have to, you can just keep playing the game as is, IMHO its a win all round.

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…

I’m going to ignore the bog standard stupidity found every time this idea is suggested. But how on earth do you think 5 minutes of invulnerability isn’t going to be abused?

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Interesting. Would you be so kind as to point me at that, please? I would like to read about it / see the survey in question.

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OP claims that CCP ran a survey to find “toxic players”. Lol. So did CCP come out and ask you personally what the criteria for “toxic” is? Just someone you dislike?

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It was a pretty crap survey and you can’t take it anymore. There was a lot of outrage on r/eve about the usual garbage like free rewards and the survey being bad (1 question was whats your favourite activity, couldn’t select ship spinning or uninstalling smh). It was rather unremarkable

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regardless of the survey or weather or not my assumption about how the data from it is even used. this is not part of the intent behind this post

to be clear, when I mention invulnerability i don’t mean creating a state similar to the rorqual PANIC button, its more like when you undock from a station or jump through the gate.
“sorry you can’t lock onto this guy” we’ve all seen it and it exisits only briefly allowing for people to load on grid.
what i mean is both ships will remain visible, on grid, what they’d experience would be akin to the cloaking mechanics.

  • can’t move
  • can’t shoot
  • can’t interact with pilots outside of this state / event

allowing for some kind of series of events to happen between the two players within a short space of time. (as before either a mini game or simply some kind of timer sequence as a way to defend against it)

after a boarding event both ships cannot be boarded or launch boarding parties for another 15 - 30 minutes
similar to the capsuleer log off count down timer. this timer would exclusively prevent excess raiding of a singular ship or a single person excessively holding players in place and harassing them. hell you could slap a reason onto it like “the marines need to rest after their fight”

to prevent larger ships such as titants, carriers, supers, rorqs etc from getting extra “protection” timers because their Marines are off raiding, you simply disallow the boarding party module to be fit onto these catagories of ships. you could also make it so these large ships simply don’t get any kind of protection from the boarding tether.

so even if you had a raiding ship on grid with a larger asset, the larger asset wouldn’t get any form of protection.

my thinking here is that a select group of ships can do ship to ship raiding

In my mind, I would probably limit the boarding party module to something like…
frigs, dessies, and cruisers (including all T2s & varients, AFs, T3Ds, T3Cs & HACs)
but that’ll be down to the dev’s to figure out should they like this idea enough.

during raids things cannot be jettisoned, compressed, launched from planet surface, or the use of asset safety, as well as a capsuleer’s ability to eject.

I can see this creating a demand for a specific raiding ship, so I do not see capsuleer piloted warbarges exisiting in the universe as too much of a problem.
any exisiting ship within [insert criteria here] can do ship boarding, but a warbarge and ONLY a warbarge can raid planets and ships.

this means alpha players can do ship to ship boarding parties

omegas can raid planets and stations.
regarding raiding planets: i would just re-use the orbital bombardment mechanic, just change the animation to drop pods or some kind deployment ship.

the invulnerability state doesn’t need to exisit between a pilot and a planet.

if you look at my post on the small strucutres thread, i mentioned about how orbital defence batteries could be optional for players to protect their PI against raiding groups. i don’t see why bigger corps or alliances won’t just put these up when they drop the POCO’s anyway.

and no state required between pilot and station, to protect a station, someone would have to launch fighters and attempt to destroy an invading warbarge. which means stations don’t gain the invulnerability protection because honestly they take a long time to take down anyway.

so warbarges would need heavy resists, some kind of heavy bonuses to repairing or perhaps even some form of siege module.

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Ah. Thank you.

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Boarding party. Is it like a blanket party in the Army, except we use 2x4’s instead of bars of soap in a sock?

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Alpha players can’t even figure out how to mine Tritanium, much less take part in a boarding party…

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Your ideas about boarding actions have generally been hashed about before. There was a megathread on WiS (Walking in Stations of course) where such things were talked over a lot…along with a staggering number of other threads here, on reddit, on DUST514 places, and on seemingly a million other platforms. It is very long, but you might find it interesting if you can find it.
As the survey mentioned is no longer viewable, I sadly am of course unable to try and see where it might identify “toxic” players. Oh well…
I personally doubt that EvE Online will be a candidate for integration with FPS elements / gameplay…but, Pearl Abyss certainly isn’t consulting me on their plans for their IP…so who knows…

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well its no secret dust had its share of problems, it was a seperate game which the player groups would be able to help / war with each other, honestly i do like this concept and i think there has been enough enthusasm in the community to encourage the creation of project nova, unfortunately i’m not famailar with anything on walking in stations and even though I am on the eve reddit I honestly have used it once and that was about 3 years ago. other than that I sometimes do post in the dust514 veterns discord.

I don’t think the issue of it becoming a stable game has anything to do with the game play, the cross over factor or one of the most critical factors was that the capsuleers complained “how does this benefit us” or “warclones have no use” well there are plenty of changes happening in the game which create viable strike targets.

if you could establish key game play factors which the warclones would utilise as game play features and mechanics for capsuleers prior to the intergration of warclones, then make it so warclones have superior capabilities to the NPC’s you’re using not only would this support an active play style but it would also encourage the supporting factor of having warclones in the universe.

launching warclones onto carriers, frighters, titans, stations, planet raids. if this were supported combined with some aspects from my post over on the small structures thread.

ultimately this would mean the more slower moving markets end up having a bit more ready fluxuation to them and then you could account for this when scaling and considering warclones intergration.

I personally believe it is coming, maybe in 5 years or something.
its not something you just jump straight too, you have to go through a journey which would be supporting of its intergration. small changes here, new assets there, new game play features here and there creeping in with very little influence into the main game from time to time.

a series of smaller things which might seem useless and accumlative now would then be “utilised” to support game play of warclones which immediately benefit capsuleers.

----additionaly----
this is just my personal thoughts and not relevent to the main post, but its not often i get to talk about this stuff

one of the things we heard regarding project Nova was that they were planning on using the unreal 4 engine considering what happened with the PS3’s end of life cycle and the unreal 3 engine becoming out dated pretty much at that point. I personally believe they’ll intergrate the concept of cross reality game play a concept they did with EVE Valkyrie and implement it across the board, allowing Mercenaries to also pilot fighters and switch between VR and NON VR supported game play, not only do they have to make sure the game works as an FPS shooter, but there are several other key elements behind what makes EVE the unique game which it is.

I personally disagree with the idea of making it like a modern shooter where you have to deplete the enemy war clone vats, tactical clone vats are a thing but they shouldn’t be applicable on both sides, this would create too much of a wide contrast in player skill base (assuming they use the same skill system as before, which i hope they don’t) which is what happened last time also.

the game needs to have more of an open world RPG kind of feel, very akin to something like skyrim.

i actually just posted on the station chat thread about how warclones in the game lore are inside a virtual reality haven to keep their minds sane.

instead of warclones utilising jump clones, what makes more sense is allowing them to enter a VR world and exit at a different station, this way it is not a direct transfer of contiousness in real time like capsuleers have. or ultimately have warclones version of jumnp clones just have massively shorter cool downs. but i digress this is way off the topic of what i started with, boarding parties!

----back to the point----
I think by utilising the right set up boarding parties as it all currently stands in game could actually be a very fun mechanic for those who would be interested in that sort of game play, it would also mean some groups would need to adjust some tactics and such. I just think it would be fun to see it become a reality.

by focusing on the capsuleers being able to do this and then the warcloens getting to piggy back but be of benefit, suddenly the perspective of how good the whole thing will change, capsuleers would be more fourth coming with wanting to help warclones and equally given warclones can’t pilot ships (maybe fighters) it would mean they’d not really be in much of a position to turn down work when its available.

somethings would require the ability of finesse, imagine being able to steal the T2 BPO’s and titan BPO’s which some of the larger groups have out there.
meaning warclones and thier finesse in such situations for a lack of a better description would honestly be able to topple power regimes because they’ve stolen some critical tech asset from one group.

think of the months of spy work capsuleers would have to do, even if some things are known now, this knowledge becomes very useful to boarding parties and warclone players, creating more of a true sense of “players create the game history”

we all know CCP is nudging us towards certain things, like how when the trig invasion content happened some things were “more than likely” going to happen anyway.

I just feel this will help towards the “one universe one war” aspect of things. especially as they are also working towards making the game easier for new players to understand and get involved with.
e.g the up coming skill changes in september. allowing for higher player retention.

----additional----

on the QOL thread here: Little things / Small QoL suggestions - #2577 by Drogon_Mace

I commented on how bringing smuggling back into the game could be a cool feature.

if smuggling were bought back, ships detected with having illegal cargo or perhaps cargo containers on their ships, could perhaps be stopped and boarded by customs officers at gates in high sec.

not only does this make the boarding parties aspect of the game slightly more unique and relevent to the individual game experience but also gives an approach and style towards items being confiscated by customs officers.

15

Seems like a great tool for two friends to use to become invulnerable to a gank…

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well I like to think there could be a small ammendment to a game, if you look at things like burst modules, they work specifically on fleets, why not make some kind of opposing system where you CAN’T do something if you’re in the same fleet, so no fleet to fleet boarding parties.
assuming corp friendly fire is illegal you wouldn’t be able to do it then either, it would have to come down to the CEO to establish that.

or even then specifically you could add some extra code that it doesn’t work on corp or alliance members.

combined with the ship size restrictions and the “Disarm the nuke” idea its not really worth risking your ship for a few minutes of invulnerability. besides why would two people do this when they could do it to the enemy, steal some loot and do some damage if not just destroy the enemy ship?

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I like that

… along with no other types of boarding parties.

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shame, it must suck to be affraid of change or worried you’ll loose to a minigame

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What sucks is to be incapable to defend your idea without recurring to personal attacks against people unconvinced by your proposal.

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if you don’t like the concept, its simply not my problem.