I live in null, the market is patchy, people pay more for things that they don’t have to fetch. The market at places like serpentis prime where when I went there, nobody was living there, it was non existent, so arriving in a t1 frigate with a hold full of ammo, wasn’t enough. nothing was seeded at all, so it was fundamentally unplayable with a new character as a new start unless one knew in advance that they needed a suite of bpos or long run bpcs to come with them.
I’m pointing out that they need some basic items seeded up in order for people to be able to play from the start, otherwise they will be reliant on empire, but imo it shouldn’t be original source quality. I don’t know where you got pirate hulls out of that, perhaps you are crossing my thoughts with the OPs.
but the fact remains that actual pirate ships are actual capsuleer ships, and that lore is fundamentally unable to justify not having pirate capsuleers.
if they aren’t a genuine marker of a player taking a hard road, they aren’t interesting. Before multiplayer games got graphical I played a PVP mud called mume, where difficult restrictions were put on evil races, and they were played just as much as less restricted characters. Even the trolls that could real die if they got caught in the sun (and lord were they hard to play during summer with 4 hour nights). It also engendered a better sense of camaraderie amongst those players, which lead to the practical observation that pvp outcomes were usually favourable to dark character groups, and that to new players they were both legendary and scary.
Also I don’t like the idea of just being able to transfer SP to such a character, thus making them a wallet achievement. In practice if they are limited to normal SP gains then at least amongst the sub community that played them, first achievements would probably be noticed and celebrated.
No established marked, no safeguards, you have to create or loot what you use, even stuff that would be crap in empire would be valuable out here… I don’t know, but all those things sound very interesting to me and I would absolutely create a new char out there and try to survive and build up.
This is a sandbox and EVE works best if they just let the players sort those things out. There does not have to be much here. Add a possibility to start out there as pirate faction capsuleer, warn the player that this is “advanced mode” and that there are no safeguards and CONCORD to protect them.
As for the lore and ships. First, there are alphas now the capsuleer technology became a lot more accessible it seams, so why not for the pirate factions as well? Most pirate factions use ships that are also available for capsuleers, it would be enough if the pirate capsuleer just had a faction related default skin.
Because then you’d need the option to start in lowsec, and many people with opinions and no understanding will tell you that that’s a bad idea. Your request makes perfect sense, is perfectl reasonable, but against CCP’s idea of protecting new players from the game.
you should try such a request on reddit instead. with enoubh manpower behind it, it might actuall happen.
Maybe starting in null should be an option for 2nd and 3rd characters on accounts.
But what would you do and where would it drop you. What would happen if it dropped a thousand noobies in null sec, I think the “lol elites” would have a field day.
Would be interesting to see what happens. Since this is null someone can step up and actually protect the new players. And I bet quite some amount of ISK this is what would happen.
Most people value new players as actual people, while some treat them as victims. in lowsec especially, people care about the space and the game. it’s survivable, yet not too restricted like highsec. it provides actual adventure and anyone who needs to be cuddled can go to highsec anyway. it would work out quite well, actually. i’m happy that the first response to my post wasn’t an irrational hatepost about how they’d all get slaughtered.
It’s an idea that has alot of good points, but it also has alot of details that needs to be ironed out.
Like how and who would be around to protect the new guys when they are dropped off in a bad part of town with no guidance.
How does a new characters decide where they will be dropped off with the kinda random sometimes drastic shifts sov control.
How dose a new character go about making money in a newb ship with civi gear when the rats and npcs can sneeze and kill them without some sort of level match system.
How would the starter Corps work based in null. Or would just almost basically be dropped into a big null block.
Things like that, that would scare or frustrate a newb out of the game if he jumps into the wrong system before they understand what’s going on.
No need. lowsec players will take care of it. protection makes no sense at all, because getting killed doesn’t cause a new player any losses. they’d join corps literally on the first day, leave for highsec or go on to be solo adventurers. solo adventurers exist, btw. they learn the game by themselves using the internet and manage to figure it out all on their own. history proves this to be a correct statement, because when there were no tutorials, people still managed to play and actually keep playing.
Victimizing New Players is nonsense. They aren’t victims, therefore they don’t need protection. if people don’t have faith in the intellectual capabilities of modern new players, what does that tell us about the modern new player compared to ten years ago?
i’d write it, but it’s insulting.
PS: No one said that all new players should start in lowsec by default. More options would be great, though.
If CCP adds such an option, expect some PC game reviews coming up mentioning sheer brutality of Eve online for new players. Those reviewers will do anything to make bad reviews for games they weren’t paid for.
That’s great! Just like it was great for the game when the social hand guiding club stole billions of players who gave them their money! It was CCP Hellmar himself, during the 10th anniversary interview, who said that 500 people quit and FIVE THOUSAND joined, because of that event and how it spread through the media!
“Good” PR only leads to more of the masses joining, which automatically leads to more whining, complaining and demands. You prefer THAT? Doubtful.
You login to the starter corp for serpentis in serpentis prime and some creepy player sees you in local and tells you that you should join his corp or alliance or get farmed on the undock. You choose not to join, and you undock into their press gang. After you give up and join and run a few missions, with 50% bounty tax and then try run, one of their smart bomb bs kills you on a gate and you are back in serpentis prime.
Aye, discussed these issues, but there are level 1 missions available in for example: serpentis prime, and its npc sov, but yes the contents of the pirate home constellations would need to be considered, but its nothing that isn’t fundamentally cut and pasting things from other parts of eve.
Thats why i don’t think you should be allowed to make your first character in a pirate corp. Thats the way other games with a hard mode have often worked.
Right now, when I wanted to put a character into fountain, I just flew it there in an incursus - there was no camp the whole way.
I’d also have no problem if mr levelling his raven guy, got bullied, couldn’t figure out how to fit in, and wound up back on his raven character in highsec, ie I’d be completely happy if the people choosing to play these characters were real serious about it, and I’d be perfectly fine if already setup organisations with non pirate characters set up there.
Ah, yeah there was a bit of context missing from your original post that seemed to be referring to the idea of pirate-specific T1 hulls. Seeding BPOs though isn’t the problem, it’s that none of the infrastructure to support production exists out in NPC null. There’s not enough mining and other industry to actually produce hulls out there even if you have the BPOs and besides that it’s easier to import stuff than it is to try and produce it on-site, and that won’t change as long as the space you’re talking about is Null Sec space.
No… that’s not the case. There literally are Pirate capsuleers in the lore. That’s what Officer Spawns are, among other things. Dread Pirate Scarlet is an NPC Pirate Capsuleer as are figures like Zor and others.
The pirates, and everyone else, have easy access to the tech to retrofit ships to accept capsules. What they don’t have easy access to is the capsule tech itself. That’s still Jove tech and not well understood or readily available, even in the Empires. The Pirate factions do have some access to it, but not the same level of access that the Empires have, and they wouldn’t waste it on someone who might betray them.
MUDs are a fundamentally different sort of user-base from games like Eve. They tend to start out more niche and RP oriented with the actual gameplay being secondary. Also the amount of development time required for them is tiny in comparison, so it’s easy to justify adding niche content or other stuff that wouldn’t fit into a normal game.
In a game like Eve though something that will only appeal to a tiny group of players is only worthwhile if it’s easy to implement, and this absolutely does not fall into that category.
Except that I kill serpentis big boss every week, and I used to kill the sarpati enforcer all the time, and they often have the blueprints to build a capsuleer ship. As a goon renter years ago, I think 30 rattlesnake blueprints passed through my hands, and I’ve long lost count of vigilants. Most of the post ishtars online era has felt like pirate ships online to me. If I ignore my own ship, then seeing a brutix is rare, seeing a stratios is routine. On the way back to rf today I crossed path with an ex cas ccg player, told him there was a daredevil ahead, he was in a succubus.
it was pretty much all of the useful content of mume, would have died in months without pvp (it predates eve and I believe is still alive).
its not hard to implement, a first pass of content could be largely cut and paste, just advertising heads up that there is no griefing limitations there should put the right extant characters into the area to shoot the easy targets and make it hard to start, and in my opinion the largest body of targetable users for eve, are ex users. Start again the hard way as an elite pirate bastard is waaaaaay more appealing marketing message than the whole dreams thing.
No, they have the blueprints for a ship, you retrofit it for Capsuleer use. If you go back into the very early short stories and chronicles in the lore you can find the story of the first test of the Capsule tech. It was done on a completely normal ship that had the equipment in a cargo hold.
The way a ship gets retrofitted for a capsule is basically by just ripping out crew space and replacing it with the hookups for the pod and maybe some mechanical stuff, but that’s done as part of the production process.
Yes? And?
I spent some time in MUDs myself way back, but that doesn’t change that they’re more niche games. They also require less to keep running and are generally designed, intentionally or not, around the smaller playerbase sizes they attract. Very very few MUDs every get more than a few thousand players total, let alone a few thousand online at one time.
They’re niche games, they just require very few resources to develop because they forgo most of the expensive stuff that goes into a modern game.
It couldn’t, not and have it be usable or of any quality.
Also you seem to be confusing stuff that’s appealing to you with stuff that’s appealing to everyone.
As I stated previously things like hard-core mode tend to be less popular than the larger game they’re attached to, and Eve is a huge PvP sandbox with few protective restrictions. That generally makes something less appealing, not more so.
Really you’re both under estimating the amount of work this would require to create an actually playable gameplay experience, and overestimating the appeal.
“Such pilots were a rare breed, though; because of the technology’s inherent dangers, capsule-fitted ships were not yet in mass production and existing models therefore had to be retro-fitted at great effort and expense.”
Which is not true now.
It was most of the work to create the game, it was never a niche part of it. Almost every actual player played a character with restrictions.
Which is also relative to the workforce available to work on them. In fact usually they outsource things like scenery to the playerbase, and work on the core things like characters, ie core to game things was exactly features like this.
That is the nature of virtually every feature in a sandbox. You have to surely recognize that as the sandbox goes on there are less significant features that can ever be put into the game that appeals to everyone anyway.
You are not an eve developer either - you’ve got no more evidence to say its hard, than I have to say its easy.
The level 1-4 missions are already done, and have been there forever. Renaming some rats and changing their standing consequences is exactly how we got all the anomolies in the first place. A couple of constraints on character creation is not hard.
The pilots are still rare as is the actual Capsuleer tech. The ship retrofitting is certainly easier and cheaper now though which explains why you can build a Pirate Cruiser for capsuleer use.
Yes, that isn’t what I meant. What I meant is that from a player perspective those features have niche appeal. Since MUDs are relatively much easier to create than a game like Eve, with many of them being small team or single person affairs, they can get away with adding features that don’t appeal to a large group of players or having a niche appeal overall.
You just can’t make expensive games with niche appeal, it’s financial suicide.
None of which is applicable to Eve or makes this a better idea. This isn’t even a core feature. If you’re just copying stuff over and not changing any of the actual gameplay, just rewriting lore, then it’s a small side-feature at best. Though realistically it wouldn’t be very playable if you did that. That’s why this would be a significant amount of work.
A feature doesn’t have to appeal to everyone to be put into the game. Most MMOs are made up of minority groups with no one group’s interests ever really making up a majority of players. You still need more significant appeal than this though. Take Diablo 3 as an example, where Hardcore is both easier to get into and less punishing than Eve has the potential to be. Hardcore is still played by something like 10% of players there. In Eve with something like this with no significant advantage and a ton of disadvantages you’d be lucky if even close to 1% of people messed with this, which isn’t worthwhile for the effort required to make it playable in the first place.
Actually I do, my degree is in Game Design and Dev and I work in software. I also pay pretty close attention to the things the devs say, especially about the systems that make up Eve and about the dev process.
For a start the Null spaces pirates occupy aren’t new player friendly. That would either need to be changed in some way or the system restricted so that you don’t have actual newbies starting one of these characters and getting nuked. That’s a fair amount of work right there, in both design and programming.
Plus if you actually look at Pirate agents you’ll find that there are relatively few of them, which has a lot of potential to cause problems if those agents are suddenly being done by a group of players in poorly fitted T1 ships as opposed to the t2 and pirate hulls that are generally used now.
Also most of the value from those missions comes from the drops and LP, both of which require High Sec access to reasonably turn into ISK, which doing pirate missions makes difficult because running missions for pirates will tank your empire standings.
This isn’t just a quick copy-paste job. CCP would need to go through the entire expected character progression and look for major issues, see how it would potentially play, and then add in all the code and voice work for starting the game in a position like that.
Really, go play through the game as a new player and look at everything that goes into that. Even if you did some trimmed down version of it that skipped all the voice work and the tutorial you’d need to figure out how these things are expected to play.
Throwing something together and saying “good enough” is something a free MUD might be able to get away with but it causes problems with a professional company does it. While I’m sure you’ll come back with something like “you mean they’re not doing that already?” the answer is no, they’re not, and if they were it would be glaringly obvious because the level of errors and mistakes you get when things get slapped together is about ten times worse than what Eve and every other MMO experience now.
Too many replies. Besides the obvious answer of ‘because its just designed that way’ technically all the pirate factions are members of the 4 races. So you cna;t choose to be a blood raider, because they are already Amar. What would be interesting is if you could join the faction after ‘birth’ and run pirate missions. There would be draw backs but that would be interesting game play. also, there was this idea a few years back of an ‘eve on hard mode’ with perma death (this idea still fascinates me cough@CCP_Fozzie@CCP_Risecough Which could play into that. But the simplest answer is the pirates are just a broken off gorup of the empires, and as you are technically a ‘graduate’ of the capsule program, you would not be a pirate when you start, because i am sure they screen that ■■■■.
