Interesting thread with many cool ideas this! Just posting to show my support for these ideas

One thing that hasn't been discussed much is W-space. If we want to investigate some real Sleeper ruins and other advanced, dangerous, exotic locations, we need a way to get through wormholes. I can imagine purchasing a clone bank and having an EVE pilot carry the clone bank at high risk through a wormhole and drop it on a planet. (Granted a lot of these places are already owned, so the corp that owns the system can also contract Dust mercs to land and investigate planets. But in any system that can be corp-owned, there's always the risky possibility of sneaking in.) And then, once you get what you came for, you'd need an extraction plan. Could be a lucrative, high-risk job for an EVE pilot to support pirate mercs this way.

Goric, do you ever have any bad ideas? +1

I have maximum astrometrics powers. I'm putting up a billboard at Jita 4 "have cloak-able ships, will travel."

The notion of WHs only having a limited time frame and, therefore, any exploration of celestial bodies in said WHs by a Dust merc crew makes me have tinglies. I'm just picturing a cloaked Eve pilot in chat telling the merc squad leader to hurry up and get their ass outta there all panicky and such as he sees a small armada of corp owned ships in D-scan.

Bam, you get in, make the bread and you're out like a thief in the night!

Aww, thanks!


I know, this actually excites me a lot. The time-sensitive nature of the contracts, the high-risk, high-stakes, high-rewards nature of the work, the fact that every second counts for the DUST players on the ground to get back to their extraction point, making decisions about whether to try to harvest something valuable if it might slow you down and endanger your mission. It could be so awesome!

Much like the rest of the game, it could be awesome but probably won't be for a while. I love this game when it works but it definitely has a lot of flaws. My point here is mainly to just not get overexcited for the possibilities as they are endless :)

Ahh who am I kidding, go nuts! How about the roles that we play in WH space? Would we have entierely different suits and fits just for that?

You would definitely use different fits in PVE from what you'd use in PVP, but I think you'd also have different fits depending on what you were planning to encounter. Getting swarmed by rogue drones in hisec might involve trying to maximize your firepower, whereas Sleeper tech might include both drones and traps (and maybe organic or other terrifying threats) that would require a completely different setup to counter.

Imagine that you have certain specialized roles for the ground team as well. For example, you might encounter points at which you have to avoid detection and shut down a security system so your team can get through. Your heavy sporting an HMG filled with EM ammo isn't going to be able to manage that, but that's why you hire a scout with minimized dropsuit profile and the skills to hack the Sleeper security systems. He manages to hack the system but trips the alarm while doing it and gets killed. The rest of the team has to fight off increasing numbers of drones before they can get through the security door to safety. The heavy sacrifices himself to keep the team safe, and then the logi drops an uplink on the other side of the door to let the heavy and the scout spawn back in. There are four possible passages and your surveyor is 70% sure you want to go down the one on the left. And the adventure continues...all the while, your escape plan is sweating up in space, maybe avoiding the local system owners, or maybe fighting off Sleeper ships coming to respond to the invasion.

Yes, we're talking probably 3-4 years in the future at least. But part of what's fun about this game, and the community in general right now, is the possibility. Playing with the possibility and being a part of shaping fundamental aspects of future gameplay. To me personally, this part of the game is more fun than actually being in-game--and that's not meant to disparage what's already there, because I still have fun jumping into a squad and playing matches and customizing my fits.