Then it shouldn’t be the devs’ problem either.
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actually it should, implementing ship boarding has been on the table for years, I don’t know what the previous attempts to hash it out were like or what they involved but it would be my interpretation that the way the game is going something like this is going to be needed for more strategic victories and allow smaller corps and alliances to have more of an impact against the resources of higher alliances. as a result this stands as a play style which has a level of demand but has not been implemented or resolved, the ideas here COULD help resolve some of those issues for future implementation, I would argue its a dev’s job to look at it for practical applications, implications or possible solutions to exisiting problems with things in game. regardless of their personal feelings on the matter.
“How will players abuse it in the current game of EVE?”
It may be useful to answer that question each time before you post another fantastical (yet unrealistic) idea. You often come up with long posts full of details about a really nice idea you had (which is good!) while completely missing how it doesn’t fit in how EVE works (which is less good).
Example answer: people will abuse these boarding parties to stall fights (with a ship immune to interaction) in order to have enough time for their friends to come rescue them, which completely changes the way fights will work everywhere in EVE in a bad way.
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every mechanic comes with abuse, like EVE hasn’t had or still have people flying min max fits for pvp and such things
this is why i suggested boarding parties should plant nukes or viruses on ships at the end of each hit and run, causing the mini game I mentioned before, there is always a chance for human error to occour and a player can loose their ship.
people stalling for time will still run a risk of being killed by one of their own which is an awox, you could easily make it so the longer the raids the more chance the nuke goes off, meaning the longer you’re abusing this mechanic to stall for time the more likely you’ll just kill your corp mate yourself.
in your example answer having someone available with that specific ship is a matter of availability, you could ping out for help and it might not come, so if you’re talking about a rorq, its best just to stick to the panic module, you could also impose a timer disallowing ship boarding for say 5 - 15 minutes after a rorq has used its PANIC module you then can’t extend your invulnerability by immediately being boarded.
most likely people will use this to save rorqs and defend capitals and titans for additonal time, but simply write it into the game code that ship boarding cannot occour for friendly ships
ship boarding disallowed between fleet members
ship boarding disallowed between corp members, regardless of friendly fire settings
ship boarding disallowed for people with blue standings
“but won’t people just change standings and then abuse it”
make it so that the standings change comes into effect after down time in regards to these ship modules preventing people from simply just changing settings back and fourth. alliance settings over personal settings all the time.
that being said it seems the major flaw which is easily exploitable is the concept of some form of ship immunity, so lets create an alternative to that
an alternative to the ship immunity, you could just allow a specific boarding ship to exisit and it would require a singular specific ship to do it, such as a warbarge, who would just launch hyperspeed boarding ships without any form of tethering or invulnerability from the launching ship or on the recieving ship
(it is my opinion however that warbarges will need to be tanky as hell or perhaps have some kind of module like ADC or something akin to a bastion module)
in this example I can envision the boarding parties scattering to the first available target similar to auto targeting missiles, no mini game introduced, if you still wanted to have a virus or nuke planeted there would have to be some kind of extra ruling for that, like “only becomes active after next tether / undock” this way you don’t have this mini game abruptly pop up in the middle of a fleet fight, preventing people from participating and denying content to capsuleers because you’re using NPC’s
in this itteration I don’t see how this woud be much different from launching fighters, drones or even just using missiles, that fits much more in the flavor of the game at the moment, no invulnerability for players to abuse.
doesn’t that solve both problems of it being abused and also making it fit more in line with how EVE works?
A minigame that others can force on you that instakills your ship if you fail is dumb. Invulnerability will also be abused by my “red” alt. And if there’s no such effect and this is just to steal stuff, why bother over just cracking the ship open with standard weapons? I assume boarding a ship is a criminal offense in highsec as well?
That you think this would more commonly somehow be used to punch up is laughable and shows you really don’t understaffed this game.
@Dark_Lord_Trump please read my previous post
@Lugh_Crow-Slave whats laughable is the fact you don’t seem to grasp the fundamentals of warfare let alone guerilla warfare. raiding enemy supplies & supply lines has been a staple in warfare since before ancient rome and in fact such a thing has been used to delay enemy efforts and halting progression of the war. a big example of this in recent history would be WW2 where countries occupied by the nazi’s engaged in constant small skirmishing against them. an example would be Josip Broz Tito’s communist Partisans frequently engaged with the german army in Yugoslavia. or you could look at how Admiral Yi a Korean naval commander used hit and run tactics against the japanese navy during the invasion of Korea back in 1592. the japanese forces has superior land tactics due to their civil war.
while the japanese had almost all but conquered Korea, admiral Yi’s gureilla tactics helped fend off the japanese and cut off supply lines and critical resources, which in turn led the japanese soldiers to perform excessiving piliging and plundering of korea rather than advancing further to their main objective which I believe actually was china at the time.
sneaking into locations, destroying ship yards, ammo depots, fuel lines and such things are all critical factors in war.
thinking that having guerilla warfare NOT be some how used to up punch is laughable when the entire history of human warfare stands on the contrary of your point.
Not to knock your wall off text but eve doesn’t exactly work like the real world. Any mechanic a small group can make use of the large ones can use the power of n+1 to either completely break requiring it to be nerfed into a near useless state for the small groups. Or failing that can negate its effect.
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thats a simple balance issue.
if you can make it more cost effective for larger groups to haul things in but smaller groups to raid you resolve this problem 100%
basically coming down to cost vs resources gained, why would larger groups raid when they can have jump frieghters turn up enmass with full and plentiful cargo holds, but smaller groups who might not be able to afford jump frieghter or JF services or simply don’t use them would be beneficial to raid.
the most important factor here would be risk & reward vs time JF chains and service and exist and are already profitable for players, raiding takes time but would have to stand to being a riskier aspect of game play. it doesn’t make any sense for larger groups to expose themselves to that level of risk for less reward. where as small groups would be more likely to take on a set level of risk for a good profitable reward, meaning this specifically could be benefical to individual players but not large organisations.
again the risk would be higher, the rewards would be lower and you can scale the running cost of such a ship vs the cost of a JF service, larger groups would have no need to raid in this way other than to specifically break the game, even then you should only allow one raiding party per ship/ capital/ planet/ structure at a time, the opposing side would then be defending, to prevent this being abused you implement a cool down timer of the recipent can have to prevent being excessively spammed by raiding parties, this prevents constant farming, the longer you’re on grid the longer your assets are on risk.
so an exmaple a raiding group will take lets say 10 minutes (ships launched, land, raiding ensues and back to the origonal ship) + a 30 minute cool down window, this means each raid will have a 40 minute effect
which means if you had 10 warbarges on grid it would take over 6 hours for them all to raid the same structure continously, the longer you’re on grid the more risk you re of getting hit by a response fleet. this level of risk doesn’t make sense for larger groups even if you sent them out to hit 10 different locations, when (as a larger group) you could more conveniently buy resources from a trade hub and have them JF’d to you
It seems to me is the chance of destruction of the loot that the OP don’t like and want the chance to get the loot before it blows up . And he either don’t realize there is already mechanics in game that allow what he ask for or he realize why no one bother trying.
Read it. Raised points were not addressed.
clearly you didn’t
Then enlighten me instead of just going “hurr durr read it again.”
I’d LOVE it if CCP made some well designed additions to the game going even tentatively in these directions, but it would signify MAJOR changes to the over all game. These changes would take many many years to implement. Having said that, PLEASE CCP go in this direction.
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thanks for the support!
my thinking is that if there was a way to implement boarding parties before any kind of FPS mercenaries are put back into the game, you’d simply create an game play process which capsuleers can use to put real players onto enemy ships at least you create the ground work for one. boarding parties would naturally make for an interesting dynamic in the game as things progress.
(side tangent) a big realisation i’ve had is that not every ship boarding will always constitute as a match in the FPS sense, should boarding parties be implemented, an open world sandbox RPG style is much more the way to go, which makes me realise now that what we witnessed when Dust514 was launched was only a preliminary alpha test, i think Dust was ineveitably going to be cancelled so they can make changes to the way the universe works.
(back to the point) i don’t think it would take years to implement something like this.
a lot of the graphics, states and models already exisit in the game for these things to happen.
but it would take a team to sit down and mix things up to create the correct combination of effects from within the game’s code. but truthfully i know basically nothing about code, but i have done some very minor game dev myself in the past, when trying to launch a MMO private server.
I talked about a boarding tether, having a module with utilised a web & scam effect and using the tether animation would be something which could be created in a short time. alternate names could be “tackle tether” because honeslty this would be cool if a web and scram was combined into a singular module just for convenience.
when dealing with planet raids the animation for the orbital strike’s could be utilised, however instead of bullets you could tweek it slightly to make it visually look more like “drop pods” honestly i wouldn’t really think there was too much there to change. you just give the players a different justification.
having a ship carry marines to structure, stations and ships, would mean a new type of ship model,
you could make it so you launch these automated ships from your drone bay by using a high slot module to load marines into them OR simply just create and release a player controlled war barge or troop transport.
raids which net no loot can be balanced and scaled
NPC marines use virus’s to mess with the ship
actual Merc Players could MAYBE drop a tactical nuke which players get to disarm, if people don’t like this idea then have it simply disable the minigame and nerf the conceptual damage down from “mwahahaha i kill you now” to “ouch”
so a lot of the stuff is there, its just putting it in place and in the right order.
on the subject of having marines board a ship or structure.
I actually think a virus would be the way to go, especially if the concept of breeding a digital virus would be cool, I kind of see this similar to invention, you have the basic “virus” but if you “invent” it with different materials (called cultures) it will effectively do a singular job better.
perhaps instead of t1, t2, faction etc. you just utilise a simple colour system which works in a teir system
plain, yello, green, red
the further up the chain the more devistating it is.
slow capacitor recharge.
slow shield regen.
reduce repair rates.
activate over heat.
offline a module.
cause a capacitor drain.
delay module cycling.
not to mention messing with some of these new modules such as auxiliary life support, core temprature control and such things which could not only have awesome explosive effects but also effect a ships function is essential ways.
Ship boarding v2
so, following the comments here and taking on board peoples views on how things can be abused, obviously the boarding tether is not an applicable option, however I like tothink for a v1 it wasn’t too much of a bad idea, which has got me thinking there will effectively be two instances for ship boarding.
1v1 or fleet.
And how the boarding system works shouldn’t matter if you’re out manned or in an equal sized fleet.
Without a doubt in my mind the capsuleer piloted warbarge needs to be:
must be tanky AF
Have a siege mechanic
create an circumstance on grid to allow mercenaries to pass between ships or stations
I’m personally a fan of the idea of the warbarge having a siege module, the siege module will give the ship some kind of repair bonus as well as bonus to one of its stats, similar to how the siege module I believe gives a bonus to hull HP and repair amount.
I think the ships which send mercenaries over to other ships should be controlled by the capsuleer
this way the capsuleer on comms for fleet operations can still control the direction of the fight.
So, as a warbarge, needing to attack planets, stations, ships and whatever else may come. I believe engaging a siege mode is the way forward, taking about 30 seconds to deploy, the reason for this would be to translate in real time to the mercenaries on board through non verbal means by the changing of a light colour for example (think the loading screen from XCOM2 on the back of firebird between missions)
so the siege mechanic for a warbarge would be applicable to both transmit the state between characters as well as meet the requirements for 1v1 and fleet ops
1v1 is very straight forward, however in my mind the mercenaries themselves should be able to decide when actually to launch themselves into space towards the enemy ships
on a 1v1, the warbarge will need to scram and web and depending on ship fit could probably simply handle a singular ship
in a fleet though, due to large amounts of DPS, I think a burst module should be utilised
warbarges have a burst weapon which effectively acts as a debuff, but it debuffs everything, what this does is effectively slow down the rate of the fight entirely.
Utilising a minimum of 100KM burst radius with an additional 25% per level even people warping in at range will be subject to being slowed down, effectively the point of slowing everyone down is to allow the mercenaries the time they need to launch themselves into space and board enemy ships to do whatever they’re going to do be it loot, upload a virus or plants explosives.
The only catch which I can think of is that this burst effect will have to effect both friendly and enemy ships to prevent one side having a huge advantage. Its not tidi but its a debuff, like a temporary nerf of all ships systems, the idea is that this doesn’t have an instantaneous effect, the idea is that the warbarge will burst on 10 – 15 second intervals (allowing new ships which land on grid to be effected also) and the debuff effect becomes accumlative. The debuff would mainly focus on weapon and module cycle times, damage amounts, armour, shield & hull recharge and repair rates, this way how much damage a ship can do and how it repairs itself are all effected to the same accumlative percentage which is then capped at X amount X amount would be down to the game developers
To keep the ships on grid though to prevent them warping off, the bust effects also have an immediate static web & scram effect which also effects afterburners & micro jump drives causing ships to physically slow down keeping them trapped in this “net” style effect because in this case the burst module acts like a net being thrown over everyone on grid, it doesn’t matter if you hate each other, you’re all stuck in a net.
TLDR: warbarges should be able to use a burst effect which is an accumulative debuff effect which has a hard cap, this is to slow down large fleet battles to allow mercenaries to board ships and do their thing, under this premise this means the warbarge effects combat but is not creating any form of denial of content, it just means things will take longer to achieve.
I consider this effect more of a “suppressing fire” aspect, similar to how you see in the movies, someone yells “cover me” and then does so the protagonist can go do his thing, this would also create an aspect of where even if the warbarge is destroyed, the mercenaries on ships are now going to be in key positions towards high value strike targets, making them 100% relevant to the battle at hand
Burst Effect:
100km burst radius
10 – 15 second timer
25% radius increase per skill
burst causes web & scram effects along with effects MJD and after burners
this should basically allow for boarding parties to be involved in large fleet combat, highly applicable for titans, supers, caps & structures.
Soooo you think that a 100km AOE scram+web is going to be used for whatever the hell boarding parties will do? Fat chance. More than likely you send a few of these things into the enemy fleet while your eagle fleet hammers them with spike. Either that or you use it for gatecamping since you get to tackle stuff immune to interdiction.
all ships effectively work at a reduced rate
even if an eagle fleet was involved it would take longer to hammer them, you’d also want to have skilled warbarge pilots for larger AOE which would effect eagle pilots warping in at range.
the base AOE size can simply be increased to 200km
regarding your post around jump gates.
this burst module wouldn’t be allowed to be fired within 1000km of structures, including stargates.
however the siege aspect of the warbarge will allow warbages to warp to a structure and deploy a boarding party, this way you can still raid stations, planets, jumps gates
(I remember hearing there was talk a while ago of having control over jump gates, so this would be good for content for boarding parties)
with the limit around structures and stargates, it should easily allow people to warp around and do their daily business.
further more because its not an interdiction sphere or warp bubble you could put an extra clause in that pilots warping through this effect won’t be effected. this way it doesn’t act as a giant drag bubble, you would be effected however should you land on grid (even at range) due to the size of the burst effect.
So… it can’t be used in 90% of fights.
the bursts, no.
however you can still use the boarding parties, to deploy mercs you need to be in siege mode.
the ship itself will still have weapons and combat capabilities, it would be down to the individual pilot to tackle their target and board them which is how you’d board structures or other pilots ships.
the exception being for structures you don’t need to tackle them, you can target and deploy.