I’d love to get some input from the community before I consider posting this idea in new ides section of this forums.
How about having a 4th character slot on your account dedicated to hardcore gameplay with permanent death?
This special slot would offer:
Its own training queue, and it’s free when your account is in Omega state
Skills training 5x the regular speed
Can’t plug implants
Can’t jump clone
Can’t skill inject or skill extract
Can’t change attributes and the attributes have the same value
Limited to combat skills only (no industry, no pi, no social, etc)
If your characters get podded, they are instantly marked for biomassing and you can’t undock anymore. Instead of a pod in your hangar, you will see a coffin (maybe the character wouldn’t have the full biomass otherwise we would run out of names pretty fast, but at least the skills and assets would be wipped)
What are your thoughts on this concept? Squeeze that brain juice and show it to me.
I like the idea. One does have to bear in mind, though, that there’d soon be entire fleets composed of relatively skilled permadeath chars that have been held in abeyance for 6 months or whatever. Someone with 5 Omega accounts could just cycle through them…with a ‘2 year skilled’ char popping up every month.
This idea is in conflict with the “EvE forever”, “persistent sandbox”, and “choices matter” paradigms. For every idea you need to ask why would anyone want to use it, except for the obvious exploits (train throwaway gank chars fast)?
The 4th character would not be a full capsuleer, it would be like a failed capsuleer, like a normal person who aspired to be a capsuleer
And you only thought of ganking? There’s also station gunner alts for free? Titan pilots for free?
It would reduce CCP revenue if you get those alts for free
Ah…well one could get round the issue of people using permadeath to avoid clone tag fees or ratting for the tags by charging up front and having a 100m ISK fee for creating a permadeath character.
Cloning should be a privilege. Make all characters hardcore until they fullfill the requirements for cloning. Whatever that may be. The requirements are pending.
As I mentioned in my thread, the idea of the hardcore mode only truly works if everyone is playing by the same rules. If everyone isn’t playing by the same rules, it’s not exactly a hardcore mode, but something else.
Hypothetically, the idea of baseliners can work in EVE, but they’d need to have their own set of exceptionally-powerful benefits in order for players to choose them over capsuleers. And it’s this disparity that would break the game’s balance. On a hardcore server, this isn’t a consideration, since everyone is equal, just with the presence of perma-death.
The main benefit of hardcore permadeath characters would be the absence of any lasting ongoing record of their kills/losses…which I think would make them far less risk averse. People are way more likely to engage in high risk activity with a ‘throwaway’ character that is never seen or heard of again…than with some character where every loss can be looked up years later.
I’m playing WoW, and I have to say that it’s like 95% excitement when I’m actually out in the world doing stuff. In EVE, it’s like 5% excitement, during those rare few minutes every day when I hone in on a target and engage it. Everything else is just boring wait time.
Can easily implement a leader board and/or dynasty functionality to the game to address this very thing.
In fact, beyond corporate hangars I feel there should be hangars based on access lists, so alts from different corps can share hangars without having to resort in contract juggling (the chore of a chore for the other chore)