Add a “Click button, get bacon” button in stations that dispenses corvettes rather than automatically placing them in a player’s hanger when they dock in a pod. Then add a 5 minute cooldown (or whatever amount of time works) to prevent spamming the button.
Also, give the racial corvette that is based on the corporation owning the station the player is docked at, rather than the player’s character background. For neutral stations/citadels, base the ship on the region of space the player is in. Otherwise (wormholes and maybe some parts of null?) base it on the character’s background.
Reasons for these changes:
This helps to reduce station clutter by only giving out corvettes when players want them.
This also means that players get a ship that is slightly more suited to the area of space they’re in, and could possibly create some market opportunities by spreading out corvette distribution to different areas of space. (I doubt it, but then I’m not a station trader)
Players would also no longer be locked into a single corvette availability based on their character background.
Using up dev time to make this change isnt justifiable really (not that it would be particularly hard i dont think) but all dev time is valuable and this idea isnt.
Btw, the fact that you only get the corvette of your race is 1) one of the only remaining things to differentiate the races beyond looks and 2) getting racial corvettes actually is what creates market opportunities.
For a moment I thought I like the idea, but then decided against it.
New players should always get their rookie ship without a need for a button press. Just let them have it like it’s a free meal. We don’t really need to make the newest of players press a button for this. Let’s keep it nice and simple for them. They’ve got plenty to learn as it is.
However, why not disable it altogether for players with 10m SP and more? Which experienced player still relies on a rookie ship? … You have a pod as your last resort, and when that’s not good enough then you’ll have to buy a ship. And when you then cannot afford a new ship and are at risk of getting podded then a rookie ship isn’t going to make that much of a difference anyway. Worst case is that high-sec players with a billion ISKs worth of implants use a rookie ship to save their ass. Do we need to support this? … Only in the extreme case where an experienced player ends up with no assets at all and no ISKs could one make an exception, but that’s really the only scenario where I think it would need a free ship.
I can agree with the second part of this suggestion. I mean, what is the lore reason for every single corporation to mass-produce all 4 factions’ corvettes?
This shouldn’t bee too difficult to implement either, the script that checks the faction of the character should be modified to check the faction of the station instead.
The only negative effect this may have is people who are selling corvettes on the market would run out of busyness.