Passengerification and Offline Travel

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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I think it would be really fun to have demand for travel, both from NPCs and players. A player would list an airline (spaceline?) service, a capacity, and a price. There would also need to be money set aside for collateral. All “Economy” passengers would need to be put into “economy passenger cabins”, which are containers. Each economy passenger would take, for example, 4m³, because they have luggage and whatever. They would pay not very well. All “Business Class” passengers would be rare and more voluminous (~12 m³?), with higher collateral, and would pay for speed. They would reside in the “Business Class” cabin. “First Class” passengers would be even more rare and voluminous (~24m³?). They too would have a cabin. The cabins would be a significant investment, with the cost of business class and first class cabins impossible to pay off in only a few trips. They would have a set cost from NPC sell orders at certain assembly plants (preferrable away from trade hubs).

You can also buy/find/develop blueprints to construct “Capsuleer Transport Bays” which could hold players and their capsules. Each capsule would be 500 m³, and bays can be size-adjusted like regular secure containers. Each player would offer a fare and require collateral, just like a regular contract. As long as the player is docked in the required station for the flight, even if offline, they can be loaded up as a package onto a passenger ship and flown to the destination, implants and all. If the contract is successful, the operator recieves the fare as profit. If not, the passenger keeps the collateral. If a player is online or logs on to a character onboard a passenger ship, they will be able to see “undocked - in transit” on their character card and will be able to see around their host vessel not unlike the “view ouside” upwell structure option. They can set a time limit for their order, and if it isn’t completed by then the order will fail. This is to prevent players from picking other players up, flying to random locations, and logging off/not going anywhere. In addition, players can eject from a transport whenever they want, forfeiting the collateral and awarding the operator their fare.

Another option I can see for this is the carrying of actual ships, like frigates, onboard carriers and supers, allowing a fleet to travel into battle inside a capital.

If a ship with other players onboard is destroyed, all of the implants are lost and the drop rate is 0% for passengers and player bays. The operator pays all of the collateral, and gets a lossmail with the value of the transport bays. The passenger gets a lossmail of only their implants, shown as the ship that died (worth no money), its fit (worth no money), its cargo (worth no money), and the implants lost (shown in cargo at full price). The aggressor gets a killmail for the ship plus each of the capsules destroyed. Since any capsules are not counted as ship kills, the agressor will still only get one kill, and one possible solo mark.

There can be two different systems, one where a buyer is offering a fare and another where a seller is offering a ride for a set price.

Maybe the bays can use consumables as they are jumped, simulating fuel usage and discouraging one-customer trips.

Any other issues/suggestions?

1 Like
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Addendum:

I just thought of a nery nice way this could work out. If the process is introduced by a special agent, it could give very new players (who would otherside be making 1m isk per day) a decent income AND a motivation to explore the galaxy.

An upwell structure may only be listed as a destination if it is in the ‘online’ state and is completely impossible to destroy before the offer expires.

Give shuttles an onboard passenger bay, with decent volume, that can only fit passenger cabins.

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Like Air America?

Only shuttles could transport passengers. The other ships are warships, no civilians allowed in those ships as they tend to blow up more than anything.
Plus, as passengers, there’s no way they’d put on the red shirt.

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Despite this not being Elite Dangerous,

In the past the Dev’s have stated that code makes it impossible for Player Characters to inhabit the same ship even in the manner you are asking for…until then…

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Bro the luxury cruisers in limited ships

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Modifying the code for an upwell structure could probably allow for what the OP is asking for. IMO, this would be more useful for carting around jump clones though, which could be carried in any ship since it would merely be a game object / asset.

As for moving npc passengers around, it would be fine to treat them like the commodity market in the current setting. Or add specific distribution missions (assuming they don’t already exist) that have the player ferrying passengers.

However if you want a more in depth passenger system like I mention in the 3rd section of this post ,which details a system for crew and officers for our ships, then I suggest taking a look at the linked topic.

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It would take players exactly 2 seconds to exploit that and have their upwell structures permanently invulnerable…

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Rorqual, jump clone vat

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Sure that can work too. But I was just talking about converting it to a normal asset that could be hauled around in any cargo bay… and then would have to be installed into a capital clone vat or cloning facility in a station in order to be used as a jump clone.

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I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about here. Maybe you misunderstood my statement?

Very nice! I like it, though it seems exceptionally hard to balance and implement. One part of EVE that I love is the feeling if insignificance you get as a mere member of a group within a big group within a huge group. In other games, the player is always the commander or central character, but not in EVE.

Never played it, so don’t know that you’re getting at here.

Sadge.

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This is what would be exploited. Players would keep a constant queue of passengers being sent to their citadel, rendering it permanently invulnerable…

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Long story short, pretty much any idea that you can come up with, players already have thought of a way of exploiting it…

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Ah. I can see how my description was vague. Sorry 'bout that.

Correction: if a structure is awaiting a hull timer, for example, one would not be allowed to create a passengerification offer with an expiry time after the structure could possibly be destroyed, at the earliest. If a structure is reinforced with its shield down, the contract cannot have a duration more than the remainder of the shield reinforcement plus the armor reinforcement timers.

wow ok
thanks for the kindness and confidence

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Yeah, when you have a game that has tens of thousands of players online every single day for 20 years, we’ve thought up of pretty much any and every scenario…

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Except you didn’t address that Upwell Structures wouldn’t be affected at all.

Come to think of it, you could code it so that player login locations are items, and just use regular courier contracts alongside the NPC demand.

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you know, i do like this concept, but i feel it need substancial work.

I like the idea of offline characters remaining in world, this would actually solve a lot of problems, i also like the idea of active warclones being able to hitch a ride somewhere, however due to the coding this is difficult, I have actually said something about this regarding warclones in the past

I think what you could do is write into the lore that the mind of a warclone or capsuleer is stored and then transported, this way when its delivered it automatically installs a warclone at its destination, if the storage device is destroyed it transmits your clone data as per normal.

back on the main subject, CCP i believe announced recently that they’re trying to work on jump clones, this way when you jump clone or respawn at a ship you automatically respawn in a ship, which in my mind is a vast improvement. on the subject of a warbarge (just for the fun of it) you could have a “combat deployment module” which runs in 15 minute cycles and uses clone blanks as a kind of ammo.

I feel the OP’s idea has some merit too it, but i also feel it needs some work. I like to throw ideas out to help but honestly with this one i’m coming up short. however, again, i feel theres merit to it and it needs work.

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That is a good point. Maybe these bays would require a module to be onboard that would remove all fitting room and drone bandwidth so you couldn’t actually fit for combat with passengers onboard, or remove highslots, I don’t know. I really think that having the player logout position be an item in stations. This would allow a bunch of interesting mechanics.

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Not doable because of various issues. For example, if player sets up a contract to transport himself anywhere, the contractor can grief him by just having him inside ship until contract ends.

However, if we could courier Jump Clones, then that would be very useful and interesting.

Ah so you already mentioned jump clones.

And I already suggested the same thing few months ago with passengers somewhere. All that is needed to do is to randomly once per few days perhaps generate NPC buy orders for some passenger type that is tradeable like Marines etc. These do not exists, although one in a blue moon some players sets this up.

Too bad that CCP is not incorporating “passenger items” more into their lore and aren’t setting up such buy orders when they are about to launch some roleplaying event somewhere like we saw recently with the Amarr.

In fact, this part of the forum is completely ignored by CCP. I don’t think they read it at all, the changes that they made and are supposedly from player input are mostly coming from CSM lobbying…

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I would like to be taken inside a cargo hold one day.

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For this, the victim would collect the collateral and be dumped in space in a pod. Hopefully either the implants are worth less than the collateral or you manage to jump back to the safety of some station somewhere. If they’re lucky, they can do both, and lose out on their transportation but get an enormous amount of money.

For roleplay? I had not heard of such goings-on.

I don’t think this is quite right, considering that the Small QoL Suggestions thread is a really common source of small changes at the very bottom of the patch notes.

I fully do not expect this to be implemented, even if this was a somewhat popular idea. It needs to be repeatedly talked about for a quite long time in order to go into the development phase.

It would be cool to sit in someone else’s ship, with “View Outside” upwell structure functionality built in. This sounds really hard to do, though…

One interesting idea I had is to take other players on voluntary short trips for solo pvp, with them sitting as cargo inside your ship. That way they maybe can have a fully interactable view of a solo fight, which could teach them a lot. Maybe if the passenger’s overview brackets could still apply, unlike the upwell function, it could give a truly unique learning experience for the new solo pvper.