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Severus Smith
ZionTCD
Legacy Rising
187
   |
Posted - 2013.03.26 16:07:00 -
[1] - Quote
We DUST mercenaries are quite powerful, but we are not Capsuleers. We are demigods. They are gods.
If you took all the ISK from every DUST mercenary and corporation and combined it together you would still be poorer than the majority of Capsuleers. A single one of their corporations spends more in a day than all of ours could, combined, in a year. The Orbital Strikes that decimate our tanks and kill us are fired from their Destroyers. A ship equivalent to a Heavy Suit in armament, cost and use. A single Battlecruiser or Battleship, which they have hundreds of thousands, could turn our battlefields to glass on a whim.
Someday we will be able to hold territory, strike at their planetary infrastructure, and maybe even board their capital ships. And when that happens we will become a nuisance to them; akin to termites or ants. Termites can cause irreparable damage and ants can kill unlucky individuals. But despite all this, at the end of the day termites and ants are still insects and the Capsuleers are still gods.
We will never be equal to them. |
Severus Smith
ZionTCD
Legacy Rising
188
|
Posted - 2013.03.27 00:00:00 -
[2] - Quote
DeadlyAztec11 wrote:Rowdy Railgunner wrote:And also, skills? How hard is it to say, Quote:here is money go kill them ? No, mercs will design their own hierarchy, with us as pod pilots, their gods and benefactors. One day they will call us to kill other Capsulers. As one day I imagine we will be leading boarding parties, storming into the captains quarters and executing him then destroying his precious space can. Or better yet selling it!  Eventually we will stop doing this simply on behalf of competing capsulers. Instead, we will do these on behalf of our CEO's. Get ready, in a year or two for a war between Capsulers and Mercs  If it comes to war between us and the Capsuleers then I am selling out and siding with the Capsuleers...
You do realize that everything that's been conceptualized for the future relies heavily on Capsuleers right? They will build our gear, move our assets, bombard our battles, control our systems, and pilot our Warbarges. We're animals to them. Useful and well trained enough to fight and do their bidding but without their support we're nothing but a disorganized pack of dogs. So if you suddenly turn coat in this future of yours I expect you'll find yourself marooned on some distant planet with no transportation, gear, or orbital support to speak of.
Good luck. |
Severus Smith
ZionTCD
Legacy Rising
194
|
Posted - 2013.03.27 16:40:00 -
[3] - Quote
Robert JD Niewiadomski wrote:All this demigod/god, master/servant, "we are animals to them" and other "silly" divisions and self belittlement disappears if The Merc character and The Capsuleer character become One... Simple... Ok, I'll put away the half IC banter and just answer squarely. I'm sorry but it won't happen.
1. Business
CCP has already said they want DUST and EVE to be separate games that can exist on their own two feet without the other. That way if EVE dies (god forbid) DUST doesn't die with it, and vice versa. With that said, they can't linkup the two - doing so ties the games together too much. If EVE dies then what will happen to all your EVE skills on your spiffy EVE/DUST linked character. All your ship assets go away, all your skills, everything your character did in EVE is gone. Players will get pissed and leave and DUST will die too.
2. Game Mechanics
Skill Points are very different in EVE than they are in DUST. In EVE you pay a monthly fee ($15 USD) and you have passive SP gain of roughly 1 million SP a month. In DUST you pay nothing (FREE) and get 24,000 passive SP a day and a weekly cap on active. You can't combine those. If your spiffy EVE/DUST character can suddenly grind Skirmishes in DUST to get enough SP to buy Amarr Battleship IV so many EVE players will rage. And if you make DUST full passive you're now stuck with a gimped character as your 1 million SP a month either has to be spent on EVE skills or DUST skills and if you divide it between the two your progressing half as fast on both sides of your character. Finally, if they make a schizophrenic SP system where you have EVE SP and DUST SP then it's just confusing and not a clean idea to begin with.
3. Community
The EVE community does not like Micro-transactions. DUST is financed by Micro-Transactions so Skill Boosters, AURUM gear, etc that are purchased by your linked EVE/DUST character will cause so many Jita riots the poor freighter pilots will cry. The only reason EVE players haven't committed full on mutiny regarding DUST and Micro-Transactions is because the two economies are split. Which leads too...
4. Economics
The economies are completely different. In DUST having 10 million ISK is a good amount. In EVE 10 million ISK is the price of some single, low end modules. You're dirt poor at 10 million. Grinding ISK in DUST amounts you maybe 2 or 3 million ISK in an hour, while in EVE I can make 50 million ISK doing level 4 missions and even that's not much. Running Anoms or Incursions can net 2-3x more. A linked EVE/DUST character would have to have their finances linked as well. And when that happens, and you have billions of ISK on the EVE side paying for Proto fits will feel like pennies. That amount of rapid inflation into the DUST market will require that you have an EVE side on your character to compete. Which again, goes against point # 1 about CCP wanted the games to not require the other.
5. Lore
The lore doesn't make sense. CCP's original inspiration for DUST was the iconic quote "Infantry does the dying while the fleet does the flying." If they merge the "infantry" and "fleet" together into one entity they violate that inspiration. Secondly, they have already set it up in the lore that DUST mercenaries are separate from EVE pilots. Capsuleers use Jovian tech to clone, Mercs use Sleeper tech to clone. They are incompatible. It would violate so much existing lore that CCP would either have to redact a bunch of stuff or cram it in half assedly.
6. In Character Objectives
It just doesn't make sense. Let's say your character was linked. They could fight as a DUST Merc or fly as an EVE Pilot. Why would your character ever want to fight on the surface and die repeatedly when they could be flying through the cosmos in a ship the size of a small moon? Your chances of dying (which still hurts like f****, despite immortality) are much higher as a Merc than they are behind the controls of a Battleship. Your income, which drives New Eden, is 100 if not 1000x more in space as a Capsuleer than it is as a DUST Merc. Why would you fight on the ground, and die repeatedly, for pennies when you could instead safely mine some Tritanium or destroy drones and make 25x more in half the time?
7. Immersion
Capsuleers are gods. All of my "divisions and self belittlement" are true. CCP has said it hundreds of times that in New Eden the Capsuleers are gods. Countless chronicles, mission arcs and story events all reinforce this stigma. The Capsuleers are gods. Maybe, just maybe, in a few years DUST Mercs will gain in power, notoriety, and "perceived divinity" to be par with them but I don't see it happening. Everything CCP is talking about now, or for the future, either makes us Mercs rely heavily on Capsuleers (transportation, manufacturing, system control) or makes us completely inferior to them (no ship piloting, inferior clone models). We are stuck fighting on planets while they roam the skies. Which sounds more powerful to you?
For all those reasons, and many more, a linked EVE/DUST character just will not work. It defies game mechanics, lore, business strategy, immersion, economics, community and in character objectives. There is just too much against it and not enough for it. So I am very sorry but it won't work. |
Severus Smith
ZionTCD
Legacy Rising
199
|
Posted - 2013.03.27 21:05:00 -
[4] - Quote
Look, you seem passionate about this so I'm sorry. But I gave you 7 pretty well explained reasons why your plan, while intriguing, wont work.
To your credit you do have a point; my DUST character "Severus Smith" is named after my EVE character "Sev Smith". But, while they're both played by me, they are alternate identities. I, as a person am a single entity, but Sev Smith is a Capsuleer and Severus Smith is a DUST Merc. That is due to the limitations in these games. To combine them causes a bunch of design problems that CCP really doesn't want to deal with.
- Are my EVE side character skills, assets, money locked when I don't pay my $15 subscription?
- How do you manage SP without two separate systems that are counter-intuitive?
- What do they charge me for clones? In EVE a Capsuleer's clone can cost upwards of 200 million ISK. In DUST it's free.
- How do Skill Boosters and other AURUM items affect my EVE character half?
- If I have a -10 Security Status in EVE how can I get to Highsec battles in DUST?
- If I accept battles in DUST does my character move there in EVE? That negates jump clones and opens a bunch of exploits.
Then you have the infrastructure problems.
- They need to rebuild all of EVE and DUST's DB architecture to allow for a linked character table structure.
- How do they handle downtime for one game. Updating one DB (restarting it) will cause partial character data to be unavailable.
- New screens / menus will need to be developed for both games to show both EVE / DUST data.
- Both games now have merged project lifecycles and require collusion from both project teams. Updating stats in DUST now requires mirrored updates in EVE.
And the legal problems.
- EULA's must be in sync for both games.
- If I am banned in one game am I banned in both? DUST is free, but EVE is not.
- If DUST / EVE is canceled do I get reimbursed for the link payments? Or skills? Or what happens to my character?
Plus, again, many many many more problems...
All for what? Me to have the same name on both of my character. Sev Smith. The Capsuleer Mercenary.
It just isn't worth it. CCP would incur so many problems, expenses, and lost development time to "fix" a problem that already has a decent solution. Do what me, Zion Shad, Chribba, and many others have done. Name your Dust Mercenary something close like: Severus Smith, ZIonShad and ChribbaX.
Problem solved. No costs for CCP. No lore oversights. No angry players.
Linked characters are a cool idea, and maybe at the original scope meeting where CCP fleshed out the game that is now DUST 514 it could have happened. But not now. DUST and EVE are separate. |
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