It isn’t everyone. And, in fact, that news article was basically saying that crew losses are going up, because all-hands-lost losses are very common in the indie capsuleer era.
It’s also the case that backups for independent capsuleer crews are only provided the option of backup clones at a discount, not free. The full bit of that quote is:
Provisions for crew safety on capsuleer vessels include numerous safety features, such as small boats, escape pods and long-term survival suits. The SCC also makes available life insurance and financing of static backup clones for space crews on highly favorable terms. Despite these measures the SOE believes not enough is being done to prevent crews losses aboard capsuleer ships.
So escape pods/boats and emergency survival gear is still a thing. Whether or not an individual crewmember might have backup clones depends on just how much they’re willing to put down for it.
Different for national military ships, of course. In those cases, yeah, pretty much everyone has a backup.
Yes, but if you do not want to deal with crew losses as a plot line, you can simply say “well my crew had backups” and be done with it, pretty much? And then everyone else will be forced to follow suit or look like monsters.
(If it is not self-evident from the discussion, I am not a fan of making soft-clones a thing in the canon in the first place, because it leaves so many more questions than it answers, and makes it so that every single plot or story about death of anyone notable or somehow related to any capsuleer requires either ignoring their existence, or some convoluted explanation for why this person happened to not have a soft-clone. At least should have made the process explicitly uncertain so you could simply go “sadly the backup revival failed”.)
I don’t like it either, but more in the other direction. I feel what we need is for lore people to realize what we have. EVE is a cyberpunky setting, it should be about exploring the human issues that arise from such inhuman developments. We should not be relying on typical stories of death, but instead on stories of how the prevalence of cloning changes the kinds of lives that people lead. Rather than impose consequence and loss where it doesn’t make sense for the setting/genre, we should be embracing what the absence of that consequence and loss does to humanity.
Note this is more a critique of the kind of stories that CCP puts out, not on your stance.
I totally agree that if you want to have soft-clones, you should make stories that fully take their existence into account.
I don’t personally think EVE has ever exceled as a cyperpunk-y setting, however, and I don’t read it as such (this is based a lot on early lore, of course). I think the stories like Karishal Muritor’s rebellion and execution or an Emperor’s death or indeed the death of Karin Midular & events in Colelie, and also player stories where say baseliner duels to death actually result in death and one can actually worry about one’s kin dying in an accident (without subjecting oneself to some religious belief with a deathwish built in) work very well. In my experience, EVE stories that are more dark space epic or military space opera than cyberpunk tend to work over-all better than the infomorph / augmented human plotlines and philosophical stories.
But that’s a personal taste more than objective truth, obviously. Again, if you are going to have soft-clones, you should take their implications into account in the stories. Problem is you cannot really do both kinds of stories in the same universe without some pretty heavy LALALA I AM NOT HEARING YOU from players about parts of backstory, or some explanation in place for how the process is not anywhere close to fool-proof, or available to anyone who has enough money and wants it.
This is the bit that bugs me the most. In the earlier cloning article it described the chances of error being something like 0.1%. That was already ridiculously low, but then recent lore has reduced that even further to something like 0.0001%. It’s like… what the ■■■■. Why take away one of the biggest dramatic features of cloning: the possibility of coming back wrong, or changed, the issues inherent in being a copy of a copy of a copy. If it’s perfect every single time, you lose the moments that break the fantasy and force people to really think about what and who they really are.
And here’s @CCP_Falcon (yea sorry mate I am still at this, 2009 called and said they want their disputes back) on reddit, emphasis mine:
"[T]here is soft cloning, of course. Backups taken via a non-destructive method that’s way slower, meaning a capsuleer has to spend 2-4 hours in a clinic being “backed up”. Upon death outside the capsule, this backup can be used, however there’s memory loss from the time the backup occurs up until the point of death.
The cost is incredibly prohibitive, even for most average capsuleers. You need to be very wealthy in order to be able to afford it. Outside of Capsuleers, it’s utilized by Heads of State, very important political figures and the insanely rich to safeguard themselves.""
"However, there have been cloning failures in the past. There’s a condition called a “mindlock” where your consciousness downloads into your new clone, but you’re effectively trapped inside your own head. Think sleep paralysis, only permanent, for the rest of your life where you can hear, see, think and have all your motor functions intact, but are unable to move, speak or communicate in any way, shape or form.
Then there’s the small potential for corrupt downloads. Imagine trying to read from a jumped / corrupted hard disk, only imagine that hard disk is your brain. Typically this happens when the data doesn’t parse correctly from the received data packet to the new clone’s brain, and results in what’s known as a NJIF (Neural Jack-In Failure).""
If soft-cloning is indeed “prohibitively expensive” even to most capsuleers, does that mean that most capsuleers do not have soft-clones at all, or that they are mostly limited to copies taken at the time of their last podding (where presumably you could just make a backup copy)? Or something else?
If the cost is prohibitive to most capsuleers, where does the money come for the backups for national navy crews mentioned in Frigates of EVE? (If the process is not actually expensive, but expensive because corporations keep it that way artificially, I’d think capsuleers would have worked around that already.)
Is there something that stops someone mindlocked or in a corrupt download just terminate that clone and revive/retry from the same data again? If you can make copies of the same data (as the sporadic existence of doppelgangers implies), it would not make sense to destroy the data before you confirm the new clone is viable. (You’d do it after, to comply with legal requirements, of course.)
Why did Karin Midular not have a backup?
Despite putting the questions this way, personally I think it would make sense to approach this from “how do we want clones to work, so as to make interesting and consistent stories”, then invent details to fit, rather than work from theory and try and figure out the consequences.
Greetings, new to the game but not to MMOs and lore and fan fiction… the moment I joined EVE I realized that I would want to make fanfic set within the world of EVE… so I am hungry for source materials!!!
I have found the fiction section on the main site, and clearly there is a lot to read there, and this forum (just realized that there is a great link compilation in the FAQ thread) but my question is this- is there anywhere else that can I find a breakdown or cliff notes style review of official Eve source material, that covers the most important fundamentals of the game, its origin stories, and the core standard details of the world? I already have several ideas… but I want to make sure I do the background research that a new aspiring fanfic author needs to know so as not to sound totally ignorant of what the EVE community expects in RP/fan fiction.
I promise I’m not being mean. I’m a newbie too (I make 6 months old this month!) and one of the biggest difficulties I had was in finding lore, and ensuring which lore was still current, and what had been retconned, etc. As you can see from even this thread, there are a lot of discrepancies and really only players who were around for this stuff can tell what is what (and even then, sometimes…)
I highly recommend joining an RP corp so that you can pick their brains for what lore is current, and ask them quick questions about the basic details of the world, and anything else you may need. So far my corp mates, and other RP friends I’ve made, have proven the most helpful lore-wise by far.
Also join the OOC chats and get to know folks. That way, you’ll always have someone to kindly point out your error if you make a mistake (which you will!).
Everyone is fairly easygoing though, and everyone knows everyone, so you’re unlikely to get shouted down for making innocent errors.
Feel free to message me in-game if you’d like any more guidance. If you’ve read all the stickied topics in the Fiction Portal, though, and checked out the different links, you’re probably good to go.
There’s now (since yesterday) a bit of why Karin Midular did not have a backup clone in the end of the lore article about her.
TL;DR: no one knows for sure because these are private matters we Minmatar do not discuss publicly, but probably she subscribed to a “one body, one mind” philosophy that precludes copies of minds or bodies (but her version would have allowed an emergency cloning, which sadly was not succesful).
See this thread for more discussion on the new info on Minmatar attitudes to cloning that bit reveals.
