As far as i know pod ships are essentially one-man robotic ships.
If crew are to be implemented they would probably cause a somekind of bonus, but i dont think it would make much sense.
How exactly could a crew improve a ship that is already 100% automated?

you are wrong at that point. our capsuleer ships are indeed controlled from 1 central place, but the ship itself is sustained by the crew. When you read some of the EVE Chronicles, you notice that we indeed have crews onboard our ships, but they just do the maintenance work and keep the ship running, while we, capsuleers, issue the orders.

Ok, for one everyone is right. capsuleers are what i like to think of as the hybrids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylon_Basestar#The_Hybrid) in Battlestar Galactica.

As, in they are in a goo of sorts and are plugged directly into the ship and with a single thought they can turn the warp engines on or fire a volley of missiles.

they, never get to walk around their ship. i would like to do something like your idea. but, it doesn't fit into eve.

you are wrong at that point. our capsuleer ships are indeed controlled from 1 central place, but the ship itself is sustained by the crew. When you read some of the EVE Chronicles, you notice that we indeed have crews onboard our ships, but they just do the maintenance work and keep the ship running, while we, capsuleers, issue the orders.

I also notice that when I tell a 300 meter ship to turn on its axis, it does so at a speed which would squish anything organic that was not close to the exact center of rotation.

The lore and the game are inconsistent. Deal with it. From there, give me a persuasive gameplay related argument for ship crews.

Inertia Dampeners, derp. Which is a technology existing in eve as it is, additional I damps increases the rate a ship can accelerate and turn, if one should fail entirely on your boat youll have pudding. Long as its operational though everything is fine and dandy. I think the gravity pull drives eve uses possibly functions as the I dampener as well but im not certain more research must be done in order to ascertain such.

Give me a persuasive gameplay related argument for ship crews.

And despite having hybrids, Cylon baseships have crews who can also do stuff.

There is no reason why a capsuleer needs to be in place to command the ship and have a supplementary crew to maintain the ship or provide the atmosphere from a social interaction perspective.

That goes without saying, if you can get out of a pod outside of the ship, then maybe you can get out of your pod inside of your ship. This implies the ship goes offline, and allows the player to move around inside. If the ship in question isn't docked up or safe, then a gang could kill it before the capsuleer even knew he was under attack.

I never thought about it like that. You are right though. We just wouldn't be able to move your ship or repel an attack until you get back in your pod. we just really need some kind of visualization to help with this. Like how is your pod attached to the ship? is it suspended on cables? or is it just like an egg in the middle of a room? all of these things are necessary to know if your idea will work.

I hate to rehash this as i know its been decided that our ships have crew - but it seems impossible to me that they do.
At least to the extent that the canonical figures indicate.

mainly because of wh space.

If you establish a Pos in wh space and mine minerals locally to build ships there are no limits to the number of ships you can produce.

Where are the crews coming from?
The pos ? I doubt it as the space required for shipping a pos is very small.
Local planets ? Unlikely as these were uninhabited on our arrival apart from sleepers.
Immigration into Wh space ? get real!

The same goes for PI installations.

I also notice that when I tell a 300 meter ship to turn on its axis, it does so at a speed which would squish anything organic that was not close to the exact center of rotation.

The lore and the game are inconsistent. Deal with it. From there, give me a persuasive gameplay related argument for ship crews.

I never thought about it like that. You are right though. We just wouldn't be able to move your ship or repel an attack until you get back in your pod. we just really need some kind of visualization to help with this. Like how is your pod attached to the ship? is it suspended on cables? or is it just like an egg in the middle of a room? all of these things are necessary to know if your idea will work.

For example if you own a Gallente ship, but prefer Minmatar weapons, you could hire a Minmatar Weapons officer who will replace a 5% bonus to hybrid damage with a 5% bonus to projectile tracking speed. When you start thinking about it, crews could bring a whole new life to EVE.

Perhaps they're purchased with the cost of the installation? In other words: when you purchase a Command Center (or any other PI building) or a Control Tower (or other POS building), you're paying not only for the physical building, but at least a minimum amount of crew to run the thing. I see it as a package deal: the (virtual) crews automatically come with the cost of the installation, and are already there when set things up.

I see this as more akin to Rigs, an additional "module" we can add to our ships. You can control the whole ship by yourself or you could hire (I use hire deliberately) certain crewmembers that can be responsible for different departments.

Maybe on a Frigate you only have one "Crew Slot" and could pop in there a Gunnery Chief for extra DPS or to change the DPS bonus of the ship. This would go up much the same as Rigs - in that a BS might have 4 Crew Slots. Initially having vanilla crew slots and perhaps having specific crew slots for specific departments with a more effective bonus if you put the right crewmember in the right department slot.

As far as training - I agree with all the above thoughts on your crew getting more experienced the more they are in combat. However if you get blown up - your crew are done. Harsh - but then that's EVE :-)

Also I have been thinking that you would pay your crew on a weekly/monthly basis and this would scale up as the skill of the crewmember increases (either from the "Crew Recruitment" section of the Market or as they increase in skill through experience).

Gameplay wise this would add the following:

- A new section of the market to recruit your crewmembers, also a place to put your unwanted crew
- Crew XP would be lost if your ship is exploded. Much the same as Rigs - this would create demand for crew on the market
- PI on terran worlds could have a new item for "Academy" or "Flight School" that would create new green crew
- Surprise factor in PVP - you are flying a Drake but have +% to EM because you have a specific Gunnery Chief that can change the flavor of your DPS
- No-one must have Crew - but if you do it can adjust your ships potential bonuses or add a bonus to one aspect while reducing another (as per Rigs)
- Pilots must balance having an experienced crewmember in a Crew Slot vs the cost of paying the guy. If you cannot pay then he/she leaves the crew and your bonus is lost

I see the development of this being not unsimilar to when Rigs were introduced. A new section on the market - change to the fitting UI - updates to the back end ship data - new PI Nodes for academies/schools - a way to charge the pilot for crewmembers on a cyclical basis.

Anyway that's my 2c

Isk to a non-capsuleer is alot of money, for 12k you can retire comfortably an entire family. I think we need to do away with crew requiring monthy pay as we already assume your agents already pay for thier needs in the missions/comissioning of the ship and just make them expensive, that way it would pay for the entire crew for thier entire possibly short lives. At least they would have bought the farm for thier folks back home. However ccp recently put out survival rates of crews which improves with the size of the ships. So I think they need to have a recoverability factor.

EXP earned i think needs to only be calcuated once a day or session timers to avoid massive server headaches of updating items in real time for something that isnt going to be a real effect until the crew 'levels'.

Yes I agree with EXP being session timed - perhaps at the next docking event?
As for paying the crew - I see your point - but I was trying to put in an opportunity cost of having experienced crew on board. Perhaps there is another mechanic we can leverage?
Recoverability is also interesting - perhaps escape pods for the crew that could be recovered like a wreck
That brings up the idea of specific ships designed to rescue crew - like the Noctis for salvage....how much utility you would get from such a ship is debatable. But maybe a module designed to recover escape pods that fits on the noctis or other ship

Either way - this is definitely a FiS type mechanic I think CCP should look into.

Either way I think crews need to be able to de-level when the ship dies underneath them which is very possible to do becuase you are 'spawning a container' to have the items in so its going to have to process that on the server. Like a lvl 6 crew that was on a ship that blew up would devel down to 5 if they survive becuase not everyone got off that ship and some of them did die along the way but not all the experince of the survivors are gone just big chunks of it that has to get replaced and repaired.

Speaking about 'repairing' crew we can add that as a factor to recovered crew items in order

Another way to keep them more expensive is that they 'get' attuned to ships, so ie Gunnery Crew - Scorpion LVL 3 would be effective in Scorpions only. But if you assign them to another ship they lose all of those levels and go clean slate.

And Im quite adamant about specific hulls, not base hulls for a series of ships im sure covert ops frigates operate much more differently from its technology 1 cousins.

Also skills I think would be required. They should fall under leadership catagory.

Crew Managment - Allows one additional crew to be assigned onboard maxing out at 5. 1(frigate) 2(destroyer) 3(cruiser/battlecruiser) 4 (battleships) 5 (captiols).

Crew Leadership - Increases the amount of exp earned by the crew. 5%.

Crew Efficency - Increase the effects crew provides by 1%.

I think level cap would be 10. level providing a percent in bonus to whatever specalty the crew provides but it will only be 1 stat per slot.

NPC kills are a flat rate awarded by mission turn in.
PVP kills are based on ship kill-mail value and contribution. IE more exp for solo kills more exp for expensive kills.

I like the idea of specific crews for specific ships and your skills seem reasonable - tho the Crew Efficiency I think should be related to the Level of the crew rather than the Captains Skills.
Also having specific Crew Stations for Crew Types:

Scorpion has 4 Crew Stations:
1 X Gunnery
1 X Engineering
2 X Tactical

You could fit the following (example) level 10 crews:

Scorpion EM Gunnery Chief - adds 10% EM Damage but reduces resists to EM by 10%
Scorpion Ballistic Shield Specialist - adds 10% Kinetic Shield Resist at the expense of 5% in each of the other Resists
Scorpion Gravimetric Tactical Expert - adds 10% to Gravi Jam Chance - reduces other types chance by 5%
Scorpion Magnemetric Tactical Expert - adds 10% to Mag Jam Chance - reduces other types chance by 5%

In this example you would have a compounded 5% bonus to Gravi and Mag Jam Chances but all others would be 10% reduced effectiveness
EM Damage would be +10% but your resists would be +10% Kin -15% EM -10% Therm -10% Exp

This would allow a savvy pilot to tailor his ship even more to a specific role in fleet

Guys, this thread will mostly be useless if you keep discussing the lore or trying to deduct lore from game design. Fact is : "crew" is not cleanly solved at the moment. Neither in lore nor game design.

You build ships in WH space ? Well, if crews were introduced, I imagine one of the additional building components for ship production would then be : crew. Or at least, these shiny hulls will be stuck in the hangar arrays until you provide crew enough to fly them, or can only be moved in repackaged state.

Whether or not component volumes will have to be adjusted remains to be seen.


In the end : "crew" must have a game design reason for being in game. PvE is not enough for CCP ! And it surely would be rather disruptive to the goal of 0.0 development and not cater to the 0.0 crowd either. I don't want to use this as an argument against crew, I want to add this to the discussion as an indication for required improvement of the suggestion until any reasonable amount of people will be behind this.

The best game design reasons for CCP have thusfar been :

• the thing must motivate players for more interaction
• more intense interaction
• or make nicer explosions ( or more of them ).

If you can come up with a 20 second story "why" crew do that, then it's an easy sale.

(Lets try this again and this time save what you type.) It is said that we are demi gods, to the crew, and to anybody we are viewed and worshiped as gods in eve. Your crew will do your every bidding and obay every command even if its death. Your crew will die for you.

I would like to see what my crew is like, be able to walk around them, see them worship my feet. I think it would be interesting to see what the crew thinks and how they react over your gaze. Tho I think my crew would be made up of sansha and blood raiders in my legion who are all bad pirates. heh I would really like to see how my crew reacts to victories and whatever actions I fallow.

I think it would be kind of fun to be able to walk around the crew and talk with them around a choice menu of things you can ask them kind of like off mass effect.

Us? Worshipped gods?
I think somone needs to do more background reading. There are no cases of any capsuller being worsphied. I mean seriously there are quite few of us. And if given the chance our own crew would probably kill us if they knew we cannot miracously come back to life to hunt them for all enternity never dying never ceasing.

Simply put we are one of the most hated entities in the divine universe.

Even Sanha himself is supposivly not a capsuller (I mean we did managed to kill him) hates our guts to no end to delcaring war on us entirely and hes empowering regular people with the means to destroy us.

The four empires fear us at the same time they need us, they made Concord to control our behavior, and the jove knows how to cut our immortality and where not afraid to divulge this to Concord officers. What how do you think biomassing occurs?

If the crew ever found out that there was a way to kill you without a chance in hell your clone would wake up somewhere to eventually exact revent, Im sure they will take the oppertunity to do so.

Also you as a captain dont try to interact with the crew at all. Its also proven that any intimate relationship with the crew beyond the normal professional "I am your captain and you are my crew" as always resulted in poorer combat performance of the pod captian, the ship is nothing more than the extension of your body, your emotions while captianing has adverse effects on ship performance. Also they have a tendacy to die when your ship finally does go.

Its automatically assumed ships are provided with crews at the station they're comissioned at. You cannot reall unpackage a ship in space so when the ship is assembled you are also getting the crew together as well from the station. Agents and station services pay for crew as you're capsuller business alone in taxes and trade pays more than enough for crews and thier life insurance policies. We also belive crews can be cycled out as often as every time you dock somewhere. Stations stargate even starbases have thousands to millions of people living aboard so nearby people isnt that hard to see consdiner new edens populations are probably in the quadrillions.

demigod by being outside the cycle, nothing more.

You do not worsphip angles or lessen deamons do you yet they're demigods, what about the children of gods herculese wasnt exactly worshipped either.

most tribes didnt extent beyont 250 people, which is odd becuase thats how many people you're capable of remembering.

Your gun to a bunch of natives are a bad example in this case.

The non capsuleers do understand why such ships are much more efficent already, they just where the 'lucky' ones to be born with the genetics stable enough for pod technologies. Or other cases is that they didnt like the idea of having to be euthanized to become a pod pilot.

Remember dust marines are very similar to us and they out of all the people in the galaxy hate us the most.

You do realize they do have cannons larger than dreadnaught guns pointed back up at us right?

Wouldn't matter, your point is invalid... Orbital bombardment with pod pilot DPS would blow up the entire planet you realize that right? Also resistance tanked dreads and carriers can tank 1 to 2 DD's from a titan before going down. Titans can tank atleast a dozen DD's.

Anybody other then a pod pilot is just a regular man. No point in trying to say dust people can survive demigod level power. So your trying to say that dust soldiers can survive antimatter and nuclear weapon bombardment from orbit just to name a few? Get real.

Planet surfaces are far more fragile then a titans dense hull that is designed to tank DD's wile planets have no resistances. Plus nukes and antimatter are enhanced in atmosphere due to the oxygen purity and particle density that space lacks. DD's are consitterably more powerful in atmosphere then they are in space. It only takes 24 ICBM nukes to kill the earths environment. Ever seen a caldari or mimn DD before, yeah...

http://www.ltparis.com/images/meme_fry_small.jpg

Don't get all excited over a trailer. We don't know if that was a pod pilots dread or not, but rest asurned that if a fleet orbital bombards that planet it would be turned to dust. Also size of guns mean nothing in eve. Some gallente crusiers can do more dps then most races battleships meaning over 1000 DPS. Enhanced by pob pilot abilities guns are far more powerful then just size being a factor. Bigger is not always better in eve. But titans are a exception when a pod pilot is piloting it. Guns are hundreds of % more powerful then standard guns.

The guns on a planet in dust are only bigger to confinsate for the lack of pod pilot abilities to enhance its firepower. Wile they are prob no more powerful then a dreads gun in the real game. Trailers don't mean anything but to show off graphics.

With all due respect, should you not take this discussion to the Intergalactic Summit ? Else, as interesting as the debate is, please boil this exploration of lore down to something that is a helpful modification or addition to the actual crew feature in discussion.

Not yet we need to further refine the idea before the derailment happened. remember this idea was shot down by ccp before we need to come up with better refirnement before representing it again.

Remember guys... the big reasons why the "crews" idea was shot down before were...

- people were proposing that crews "level up" with experience... which was countered that it encouraged "grinding" and leaves "casual PvPers" in the lurch as they lose their ships on an almost daily basis.
- people proposed that your crews would gain more experience the more you paid/trained them and/or the length of time you had/used them... which was countered that it encouraged people to stockpile ships/crews until they gained every percentage advantage over others who just "threw" their crew into the ship.
- people proposed that it would be an "enhancement" item similar to a rig or a mod... which was countered with the point that it would just add another dimension of balancing that CCP would have to keep an eye on (meanwhile CCP has yet to get a handle on balancing ships and mods we currently have)
- people proposed that it would be an item NEEDED to fly a ship, similar to the way fuel is needed to get around with capital ships... which was again countered by PvPers saying that it would just add more logistical hassle to "casually engaging" in PvP.
- people proposed that it would be a resource gained through Planetary Interaction... which by itself isn't a bad idea, but still doesn't quell the other issues behind implementing crews into the game.

Remember guys... the big reasons why the "crews" idea was shot down before were...

I hate to rehash this ... but it seems impossible to me that they do...mainly because of wh space.

Not yet we need to further refine the idea before the derailment happened. remember this idea was shot down by ccp before we need to come up with better refirnement before representing it again.

Dear followers, I think what we are missing in this discussion completely as of yet is the "CC" in CCP : crowd control.

I agree that EVE has an under developed PvE. But, even while am enjoying PvE, this game is designed around PvP and massively multiplayer situations in a single-sharded universe.

Now, what can crew introduce in terms of influencing a fleet on alliance level ? Think of politics, intrigue, religion.

- Crew can be the game design lever to allow opponents another way of impacting an alliance : not by invading their space with Capsuleer fleets or forum posts, but by "demoralizing" the crew the opponents have on their ships. This might be meta-gaming forged into a game mechanic.
- Think on a large scale ! Not what a single pilot does with crew ( mini-games and first-person-view that Jarome mentioned ). That is too small. Think big : what if "global" events were created to influence the bonusses which crew might give to an alliance's ships ?
- You can now not only attack the opponent's space by a fleet. But you can use PI tools to demoralize the crew in an area of space. Maybe you need to get to the planets where the crew for ships had been recruited ? Think of their families ! :)
- What if a set of parameters existed which could be influenced by the opponent, and that set of parameters influenced the opponent's crew behavior ( aka bonusses ) ?
- The ways of influencing the opponent's crew ( on a constellation level ! ) could be non-fighting : like new PI / DUST interaction ?
- Maybe infiltrate stations' establishments and do shady business ( aka mini-games ! ) in the opponent's stations' bars. Imagine a small task force of spys being sent into the other alliance's ( other faction's ) space, lurking around in their bars and using mini games or other mechanics to exercise a demoralizing effect on that alliance's crew. Not yet clear as to how the alliance would counter that task force.

You get the idea ? What do you think ?

Well... there are a few ways to do this, and I have to say that the status update needs to be on the same time level is determined.

1 If DUST 514 is involved the loss rate of planetary infrastructure home to the crew as crew would be most like required to be made on a planet, and if possible repaired down there as well via re-education centers/prisons or emancipation camps. This would have significant effect.

2 track the loss rate (loss of ships over time) the more a person loses a ship over time the lower the moral of the newer crews per pilot

3 track the combined loss rate of the corproation. This has lesser impact than personal losses.

4 track the combined loss rate of the allaince. This has the most insiginificant factor in moral.

5 track the loss/gain of allaince territory has significant effect.