#1 Boarding a ship in EVE would require one or both of two different defense mechanisms.

A) Contract another set of mercs to defend your ship. Issues:
A1) As the universe of New Eden is immense, it could take a very, very long time for anyone to come to your aid, and you have absolutely -no- way of defending yourself against an attack from inside your own ship.

B) Set up defense tech (ie. lasors, rockets, auto-turrets) inside your ship. Issues:
B1) "Oh look an auto turret! Hey Bob, you're a heavy, go tank it while I hack it so it will shoot that rocket launcher!"
B2) Having rockets or lasers being fired inside your own ship, would be... rather detrimental to your ship's structure.
B3) AI vs Humans, who do you think wins? Unless you make the AI practically god mode/aim bot (anyone played training in Black Ops on the hardest difficulty? LMAO at the kill cams).

#2 Boarding ships in EVE, would require creating a map for the entire interior of each ship. Personally, as amazing as CCP is, I don't think they will ever design a map for each Titan, each Dreadnaught, and so on and so forth. Some of the ships in EVE are MASSIVE, they would be much larger than the current maps that we have on the X/Y axis, and they are also much taller on the Z axis, requiring multiple stories. Such an endeavor would require MASSIVE amounts of data storage.

#3 Making Dust mercs able to board ships in EVE, would make them FAR to valuable an asset, it would be simply impossible to do anything without having tons of mercs at your disposal. It would create an imbalance between the games, so that Dust would have a dominating effect on EVE, while EVE would have a much less harmful effect on Dust. The games are meant to have equal influence on each other. What I mean is, I don't think a Titan, or even a small frigate, will be able to board your dropsuit.

#4 In order to defend against an attack, you may decide to preemptively hire some mercenaries to defend you. Those mercenaries could easily take your contract and receive your payment, only to board your ship and hold it for ransom.

Another issue would be if you were boarded, prompting you to create a defense contract so some mercs can come save you, only to find out that either A) the defending mercs are actually working with the attacking mercs, and they hold you for ransom anyway; or B) the defending mercs come, kill the attacking mercs, salvage their remains, and hold you for ransom.

#5 Hiring mercenaries to attack a ship, would cost significantly more than simply blowing the ship up in most scenarios. Perhaps it would be effective for small frigates or mining ships, but in PvP situations such as pirating or gate blocking, it wouldn't make sense.

#6 This would not be viable in fleet fights, if the goal was to capture something on the ship in question. As soon as you boarded your target, their team would target them and melt them immediately, to prevent you from taking whatever valuables you happen to be after. So the match would really never even happen.

If we get to board NPC ships for story line missions, cool, I'll take down Sansha from the inside. Fighting AI in PvE makes sense, but having AI as a defense mechanism for PvP encounters would be simply... stupid. It would be more like PvEVE-ship, as the EVE player would really have no effect on the AI defending him, other than which weapons he chose to give it.

How many of my fellow Dust players supporting the boarding idea have played EVE? And how many of those have actually been in 0.0 wars involving fleet engagements and station/POS takedowns?

Having done all of the above I want no part in ship boarding. For one, many fleets engagements involve one fleet rolling over another. Like the day Goonswarm jumped more carriers then I had time to count on top of the fleet I was apart of. There was no chance for boarding, we were wiped the **** out before we could count the amount of carriers dumped in our lap!

The rest of the engagements took forever. Lots of jumping in and out, managing range, blah blah blah. Fleet commander calls a Target we melt em in a few seconds all the while hoping we aren't the target the opposition fleet commander calls for his guys.

If you are a Duster who has signed a contract to be a boarding party you're gonna just sit and wait, and wait and wait ad naseum, then find out the ship carrying you just got called as a target because the opposition is pulling in their big ships and they want possible boarding attempts prevented. So good job wasting your time.

It's a great idea that sounds fun, but it won't work in application without seriously reworking fleet warfare mechanics. As it is now you'd wind up with a bunch of mercs sitting around waiting to do something just to be prevented from seeing action by an intelligent fleet commander.

Now a place where boarding will work and should be implemented is stations and POS. Last time I was in a fleet attacking either of those two it was incredibly dull after the defending fleet was dealt with. The process of taking out individual parts of the station and blah blah could be circumvented and stream lined. Instead of forcing EVE pilots to pound away on immensely high HP station pieces just have them take anti ship defenses then send in the Dusters to capture a station from the inside. It gives the Dusters something fun to do and eliminates a tedious part of EVE warfare, a win win in my book.

Giving mercs the ability to "sneak" onto a ship would only strengthen their value, another argument against this. Sure you could have an AI defense system, but unless it is a computer controlled god mode, the players will always outsmart it. It would be necessary to have mercenaries defending you, as such their value would skyrocket and they would become a necessity outside all "safe zones" ie. HighSec.

A karma system will already be in place, known as standing. If you wrong someone, they will lower your standing with them, which will in turn lower your overall effective standing.