Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2075
   |
Posted - 2014.04.15 17:54:00 -
[1] - Quote
I came up with a very similar set of ideas about a year ago, but one thing I added was an instanced public station environment you could choose to load into. You might only ever see 60 mercs walking around in one instance atm, but it would put a lot of mmo into this "mmo"fps. The area would serve as the travel hub for the station (you walk into the shuttle bay to leave the station) and would be the access point for PVE missions, which would give you some kind of standings / LP or some other bonus with the corporation owning that station.
One thing though is that I think instant battles should always be available no matter where your clone is in New Eden. These are just lobby matches that don't affect anything, and shouldn't be restricted by your location. One of the design goals is for the game to be a free to play shooter where you can log in, press a button and instantly have some action. Going deeper is highly recommended, but optional. There just isn't a great reason to limit access to pubs. But, for FW and PC I think limiting your access to matches based on location will be really important to making the game more mmo-like and our battles more strategic.
For example, imagine that in FW you can only fight on planets that are within your current constellation (the idea being that an npc ship drops you off). Then you can start to have more of an impact in New Eden by allying with a group that has a heavy Eve presence in FW and focusing your efforts on areas where changes in Dust control might actually mean something, rather than just in some backwater system nobody cares about atm. This likely means that there will be districts taken without opposition, but if that is how it has to be then so be it. PC should be even more restrictive about geography than FW, I think. |
Kristoff Atruin
Subdreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
2113
|
Posted - 2014.04.22 14:38:00 -
[2] - Quote
I think in the first iteration that if a ship is destroyed, all the Dust gear should be returned to the station it came from or the merc gets reimbursed for the full value of what was lost by the game (rather than the pilot). Using collateral would require full integration with the Eve economy, and I don't see that happening quickly. I'd rather see us getting geography in the game sooner rather than later. Until the economies are merged it would basically be an Eve enabled version of teleportation for yourself and your gear.
With mercenary clones part of the drawback to the technology is that we have to be close to a transmitter when we die in order for us to be "reborn", whereas capsuleers hook into the FTL network built into the stargates to remain connected to their clones. So the way I see Eve passenger transport working is that the contract is to move some of your leisure clones to another station with some kind of transmitter. Once the contract is complete you get an option to jump to that clone. Maybe someday we get the ability to actually be on the ship, but that won't happen for a long time if ever.
We could elaborate on this by allowing Dust corps to rent offices in stations with transmitter / receivers built in and accessible to all corp members. Then for a monthly fee everyone in the corp has easy access to those stations. Of course, to rent that office a director would have to travel there first. |