Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => CCP Public Library => Topic started by: Louella Dougans on 29 May 2011, 04:09
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Aura tutorials on Duality atm. select number 01 - How Tutorials Work. Listen to Aura
Mentions how brain is modified, and Aura is installed in a doodad and will always be there. ALWAYS.
Anyway:
There is a section about:
"Now that your original body has been euthanised without complications, you are ready to begin your new life as a capsuleer"
So...
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This document is issued to all graduate capsuleers, regardless of their ethnicity or background.
In the document, various fundamental human rights are outlined and defended, including the freedom to travel, freedom to work for a corporation of one's choosing, and freedom of speech within Gallente Federation borders.
The document is somewhat redundant for capsuleers, who enjoy these freedoms and others even greater. Despite this obvious fact, the Federation authorities have chosen to issue the license all the same, viewing it as a symbolic gesture, and a reminder of the Federation's core values.
Freedom of Operation License
These documents clear the holder from numerous by-laws and responsibilities within the Caldari State and abroad.
They are issued to capsuleers, who typically operate above the law and are accountable to few people. All this document does is formalize that reality, and as such, is entirely redundant and pointless.
The hypercapitalist corporate state of the Caldari is awash with these sorts of documents, however, and the tendency towards needless bureaucracy is simply a part of corporate life.
Clearance Documents
Tribal sponsorhip is a longstanding tradition within the Minmatar Republic. Typically sponsorship is sought by an individual before embarking on a journey away from their tribe, or as part of a corporation's employment process. After a sometimes lengthy approval process, a Minmatar is then able to proceed with the full support of their tribal peers.
Typically, a citizen of the Republic will seek sponsorship from only their family tribe, and this is usually sufficient to last their lifetime, barring any dramatic changes. In some rare circumstances, sponsorship is granted from all of the seven tribes to particularly promising individuals.
In the unique case of the capsuleers, the seven tribes of the Republic have agreed to blanket-issue sponsorships as an attempt to encourage loyalty and cooperation.
is an item called "Tribal Sponsorship"
A document representing submission to the authority of the Amarrian Empress, Jamyl Sarum.
Notably, the language surrounding capsuleer fealty has been significantly watered down, revealing that even the Amarr Empire is willing to acknowledge the reality of capsuleer freedom and autonomy.
is the showinfo description of an item called "Token Of Submission", from the introductory mission on Duplicity test server atm.
Capsuleers now have no physical, family or legal connections or obligations to their origins.
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Then why would an Amarrian become a capsuleer?
You commit suicide and become a clone as part of the program.
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I'm going to go with 'This is how they do it now, but when I became a capsuleer ...."
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All of those four documents are very interesting tbh, but I'd still point out...
"They are issued to capsuleers, who typically operate above the law and are accountable to few people"
The scope is still there, not some arbitrary "No, never" from CCP.
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Aura tutorials on Duality atm. select number 01 - How Tutorials Work. Listen to Aura
Mentions how brain is modified, and Aura is installed in a doodad and will always be there. ALWAYS.
Anyway:
There is a section about:
"Now that your original body has been euthanised without complications, you are ready to begin your new life as a capsuleer"
So...
Relevant topic is relevant (http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1514730)
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I'm going to go with 'This is how they do it now, but when I became a capsuleer ...."
This tbh. I'm not retconning a couple years' worth of RP just because of some tutorials I'll never take.
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Then why would an Amarrian become a capsuleer?
You commit suicide and become a clone as part of the program.
from the amarr epic arc, committing suicide is a way to avoid a name/reputation being tarnished.
e.g. "Your actions have brought great shame upon your family, however we will offer you a choice:
Plead innocent, and your name and family will be ruined, and you will end up a slave
Plead guilty, and you will be executed and turned into a capsuleer, and none of this will ever be mentioned"
Which would have odd implications, and would also explain why so many Amarr capsuleers go "lol" and do typical capsuleer activities of exploding things.
vOv
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Capsuleers now have no physical, family or legal connections or obligations to their origins.
Nothing in those item descriptions seems to suggest a character has no family or connections to their origins. Merely says they aren't bound by the laws of the land any longer.
But yea, with most here in saying, "Back in my day we had to use our prime body til the thing wore down to a nub... BOTH WAYS!" :anti-whipper-snapper:
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Very interesting louella, thanks for the info
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"Now that your original body has been euthanised without complications, you are ready to begin your new life as a capsuleer"
So...
That is bad and CCP should feel bad.
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it just feels like stuff that I think Ken? mentioned in another thread not all that long ago:
"Here is a sci-fi setting of space exploration, interstellar corporate intrigue, mercenary wars and stellar political manouvering. You aren't part of it, go and shoot each other for lols."
:s
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I'm going to go with 'This is how they do it now, but when I became a capsuleer ...."
This tbh. I'm not retconning a couple years' worth of RP just because of some tutorials I'll never take.
This.
A small thing, but fundamental to Mata's RP for nearly three years. Since this wasn't mentioned when I went through training, if it becomes "the way things are done now" I'll assume Mata went through it the old way. The cultural implications of all new pilots being ghosts, though, are... considerable. And alienating... and not in a good way.
I'm wishing we could sit down somewhere with whoever's guiding this stuff -- Abraxas? Dropbear? TonyG? -- talk through their ideas and come up with some responses which work for all of us.
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From one perspective this new development can be seen as something that gives more freedom to the players in relation with their characters not being bound by any NPC entity.
On the other hand, it can be seen as something that actually restricts people ability to choose where their loyalties lie.
Personally I feel that it's pretty dumb.
Why would the empires create these 'demigods' to roam the stars freely?
Why would they create something that can come and compete with them?
Why would they kill the people that they have trained?
First one, of course they wouldn't.
Second one, for no reason at all. They have most of the pirate factions as examples what happens to mavericks.
Third, for legal reasons. Plausible deniability and all that.
To me this paints a picture where a capsuleer can be terminated for no repercussions whatsoever, legally they are dead and they have no possessions outside of the economy that is strictly controlled by CONCORD.
Jeepers, this whole new development can get pretty restrictive and grimdark when you put your mind to it.
But basically it means, there is nothing that you can own, outside of what you have in your hangars.
(Capability to owning anything is debatable, dead people have no possessions.)
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I think I'm going to stick with the "this is how it's done now" line as well, for the reasons above, but also something else I considered:
One of the things it is nigh-impossible to train a capsuleer for is the experience of being podded. Mind-body transfer is a horrifically traumatizing experience, and if the schools could prep capsuleers for it, they probably would. Furthermore, the initial implantation - which has the potential to cause brain damage if performed even in the slightest way incorrectly - wouldn't be half as bad if you could grow a clone around the implants and then transfer the subject into that body.
Here's the thing - one of the constants in EVE PF surround mind-body transfer is that it can and will screw you up if the most fractional slip in data, the most minute error, the tinyest delay is made in the process. Hence, the two desired abilities above - exposing the capsuleer to mind-body tranfer in a non-violent environment, and tranferring the capsuleer to a new body to avoid implantation damage - wouldn't be entirely safe, and in all likelyhood excessive reclonings/clone jumps would be avoided at all costs. In the intermediary years, however, the massive industry surrounding capsuleers will undoubtedly have come out with better, more accurate, and less accident-prone scanners, making controlled recloning in the schools feasible.
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Clonejumping would be one thing.
HURR LET'S THROW AWAY THE ORIGINAL is entirely different.
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Clonejumping would be one thing.
HURR LET'S THROW AWAY THE ORIGINAL is entirely different.
Not if that's the only way you could become a capsuleer(nowadays). So perhaps going with our we are the lucky few who can not only handle the presures of being a capsuleer, but also we're the luckier ones who's bodies didn't reject the implants/die while having them put in.
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Considering that there are only two existing characters of mine that this would impact, and my ignoring this won't screw up anybody's RP ... yeah, I'm going to ignore it and keep their backstories as is.
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Clonejumping would be one thing.
HURR LET'S THROW AWAY THE ORIGINAL is entirely different.
Not if that's the only way you could become a capsuleer(nowadays). So perhaps going with our we are the lucky few who can not only handle the presures of being a capsuleer, but also we're the luckier ones who's bodies didn't reject the implants/die while having them put in.
The original line doesn't even claim that that's the case. It's just taking your original body and chucking it in the reprocessor. Why would you do that? What is that supposed to add to the PF?
Actually, you know what, I'm just going to chalk it up to Aura being an asshole. Remember when she used to laugh at you when you got podded?
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If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.
-Marcus Aurelius
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Actually...
This sparks something...
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Actually, you know what, I'm just going to chalk it up to Aura being an asshole. Remember when she used to laugh at you when you got podded?
The cake is a lie!
No, really why not have the AI be twisted and try to mess with the "subject's" mind?
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Works for me.
The problem with roleplay is that retcons can and do throw things out the window. Best to try to roll with them.
The difficulty with claiming that 'back in the day' things were different is the obvious discontinuity. Player A made character 2 months ago. Player B made a character with the much-anticipated Incarna expansion, eager to roleplay a minmatar Sebiestor tribesman. Player B's Character talks to Player A's Character, which describes the backstory of his character, etc. Apparently Player A's character is still the original body as he's never done any pilot-pilot combat.
Player B's Character is naturally confused as Aura explicitely told him in the tutorial phase of his capsuleer career that all pilots loose their originals.
Player B's character wonders why Player A's character did not experience this. Player A's character claims, "we did it differently back then". Player B's character feels outraged that his rights were infringed upon because of a difference of two months. Player's B's Character blames Minmatar Republic/CONCORD/Empires/insertfactionhere for the massive policy change and the lies he was told.
So, where does this leave us? Simply because we were fortunate enough to have found eve years ago, people that come after us have massive impositions placed upon them because of a retcon we refused to adopt? Or is there going to be some in-character, observable "policy shift" in Empire Space about capsuleers, where the Original Hosts must be destroyed for capsuleer participation to be complete? Would this then incite resentment against the factions and CONCORD regime?
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I think it sounds more symbolic. In most myths, in order for a hero to gain godhood, he or she had to die first. It's the ascension that set them apart, you couldn't just wave a magic wand or whatever. They had to make the ultimate sacrifice for it.
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Yeah, I like it. The journey into the Underworld and all that.
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They weren't giving out these certificates back in 2004, but I still pretty much understood that legally you had no ties to your nation of origin or were no longer considered a citizen by them even back then. You were considered your own tiny sovereign entity under the jurisdiction of CONCORD.
*Shrugs* It just seemed obvious to me after reading all the stuff about how CONCORD worked.
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So, everyone is quite clingy to their character's original bodies, and apprehensive about the cloning devices. Are we sure we wouldn't prefer a universe without capsuleers and space captains instead? ;)
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Why would the empires create these 'demigods' to roam the stars freely?
Why would they create something that can come and compete with them?
Why would they kill the people that they have trained?
Jeepers, this whole new development can get pretty restrictive and grimdark when you put your mind to it.
But basically it means, there is nothing that you can own, outside of what you have in your hangars.
Actually, quite a massive chunk of game mechanic starts to make sense from a certain point of view, including no crew / no visible NPC traffic, etc.
Basically:
Using an quasi-alien technology, you create a weapon that is overpowered, sentient, and (in most cases) has a mentality of your average criminal / teenager from a street gang / whatever. Quoting Hellgremlin, "a monkey with laser eyes". Of course, trained loyal officers would be much better, but only 1 monkey in a kazillion fits for the implantation, so we don't have a choice, and neither has the monkey.
How do you control these things, if there are thousands of them? How to prevent the monkeys from burning down the jungle?
Give it an illusion of freedom. Make it see only what it is allowed to see. i.e. "a banana on a tree from 50 m away only, marked by a red cross." Severely limit all contacts with baseline population or prohibit this contact altogether. No direct contact with its own crew. Separate egger-only areas in station. Separate market. A built-in device somewhere that, when activated, will generate that nice message "we're sorry, something happened (c) during a recloning process", etc. You'll never know if something really happened or this exact rabid monkey was terminated by the laser implant owner.
Make these things brew in their own juice, so to say. Unleash them in the wilderness to clear the pirates in droves, to colonize planets, to build their imaginary empires that last for an year, to fuel the =real= economy by providing countless manufacturing jobs. Make it so it's in fact totally impossible for them to do ANYTHING against the planetside populations of the empires except mopping up a few thousand unlucky red shirts here and there (marked by a Big Red Cross for easier identification). Control and direct it while letting the poor thing revel in its godhood.
Then, when you had enough, just press the Big Red Button and sent in the navy to occupy the area and to clean up / board all the dead capital ship husks.
It's Matrix meets Ender's game.
For extra sauce, make it so that the contact with the few =real= loyal trained officers who happened to be suitable for the pod and are legally employed by their respective governments, is also severely limited. Because they know what all this experiment is really about, they aren't former convicts or random civilians, and they don't play the Game.
:P
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An illusion is a good way to put it. The Sansha events have the capsuleers apparently as heroes, but its obvious the empires know hundreds of more facts than the pilots think they do. Ante was like that as well.
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Actually, you know what, I'm just going to chalk it up to Aura being an asshole. Remember when she used to laugh at you when you got podded?
Didn't she only do that when you first got podded? Basically laughing at you for losing your first clone and hoping you survived the first traumatizing experience of emergency cloning? (it's been a while, so my memory could be fuzzy)
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So, everyone is quite clingy to their character's original bodies, and apprehensive about the cloning devices. Are we sure we wouldn't prefer a universe without capsuleers and space captains instead? ;)
Actually, Cia lost her original body about two years ago. It was a Big Deal for her; she got over it.
If I say now that she lost her original body in capsuleer school, I have to go back and retcon and erase a number of months of her character development.
And that of the people around her at the time - who are characters not played by me.
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Newbie question: What outlooks have prohibitions or taboos against not being "original?" From my perspective, the idea that every capsuleer gets killed/cloned as a final step in the process seems to make sense. How else is one to know if that particular individual could survive it in future, less controlled circumstances if they can't even make it in a lab?
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Newbie question: What outlooks have prohibitions or taboos against not being "original?" From my perspective, the idea that every capsuleer gets killed/cloned as a final step in the process seems to make sense. How else is one to know if that particular individual could survive it in future, less controlled circumstances if they can't even make it in a lab?
My understanding is that both Amarr and Achuran culture view the cloned individual as having lost their 'soul' and therefore not being truly alive. For RPers of characters from those cultures, as well as others where player interpretation has created a similar attitude in a local area, being able to preserve one's 'original' body is therefore quite important, and they will adjust their IG behaviour to make sure they only ever risk a jump clone.
In addition, there are a number of interpretations of the cloning process that argue that female clones are infertile (clones are biomass lattice with your DNA injected into them; while male bodies continue to produce sperm throughout their life and DNA colonisation of the clone's testes will enable it to produce appropriate genetic sperm, female bodies are born with all the eggs they'll ever have and so a female clone-body's ovaries colonised with the new owner's DNA cannot produce new eggs.) which makes keeping one's original body a Big Deal for some female pilots.
Personally, it's not the actual decision about 'we're all clones' that I have a problem with. If it had been the case when I'd started playing, I would have rolled with it. But for people who have integrated the idea of 'original bodies' into the RP, accepting this as 'how it always was' required a substantial erasure of character history.
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Actually, quite a massive chunk of game mechanic starts to make sense from a certain point of view, including no crew / no visible NPC traffic, etc.
Good post.
I'm wondering, does it make sense that Roden is a capsuleer? How can someone who's not bound by the law be elected as the President?
This appears also to put some limitations on capsuleer politics - if the law doesn't apply to us, then all the talk about constitution, freedom of religion etc. would be kind of redundant.
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Well, to be honest, the process of becoming a capsuleer had always been left ambiguous. As we all know from roleplaying for the past decade or so, where CCP leaves ambiguities, it is likely they will later fill in the gaps, as they see fit.
They do this with factions all the time, often resetting storylines or reasons for certain alliances existing, or by guiding storylines to the way they want them to conclude.
This impacts often hundreds of characters in ways that are subtle and obvious, but we have to work with it.
When viewing ambiguities in the backstory, that's always been a cue for me to be hands-off about it. Convo example: "How are capsuleers made? Like all the other capsuleers, of course. Why're you asking me about it? "
*shrugs*
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Others, like Kirith Kodachi, have previously explored (http://www.ninveah.com/2010/05/fiction-friday-series-2-chapter-7.html) the idea of podding as part of training. In a military context, it makes a lot of sense, to be honest. I'd also think that, in PF, non-player capsuleers could choose to submit themselves to the law in exchange for some sort of additional resources, like those who remain within the formal navies (cf. The Empyrean Age).
When I read the documents, I don't read them as saying that our characters are legally dead and can have no possessions outside of the CONCORD economy, nor that they literally have no connections back to their original factions (cf. "Her Painted Selves (http://www.eveonline.com/background/potw/default.asp?cid=05-08-08)"). Rather, I take the documents for what they say:
The document is somewhat redundant for capsuleers, who enjoy these freedoms and others even greater.
All this document does is formalize that reality, and as such, is entirely redundant and pointless.
The seven tribes of the Republic have agreed to blanket-issue sponsorships as an attempt to encourage loyalty and cooperation.
Even the Amarr Empire is willing to acknowledge the reality of capsuleer freedom and autonomy.
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http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1518387&page=2#42
CCP input.
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(obligatory disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion and shouldn't be considered canon. Although I'll ask the storyline team to have a look at this thread and elaborate a bit more, should they see fit to do so.)
Until Abraxas or Dropbear (or someone else on the storyline team) posts to the thread with something official, I don't think CCP posts in the thread are worth paying attention to. I don't think the people who have issues with this change are interested in speculation from CCP, and want a hard answer.
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Disagree: non-definitive CCP posts may not provide a final answer, but they're certainly "worth paying attention to" as least as much as any of ours.
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stuff
Well...now that is interesting.
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stuff
Yep, that all makes sense. It also robs everything we do in game of having any meaning, imo. We're all blue-pill cogs in the Matrix of EVE. While I recognize the evidence that can be used to support that theory, I find the "capsuleers-as-tools/monkeys-with-laser-eyes" version of New Eden to be rather distasteful and disrespectful to the players (primarily the RPers) of the game. If it ever comes to light that this was CCP's true intent with the setting, I'll be quitting EVE.
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I think folks have a rather narrow view of the playing field, and are ignoring several agents attempting to control the situation in New Eden.
The Factions, and CONCORD, need Capsuleers to maintain a competitive advantage against the Sansha, Sleepers, and Rogue Drones. However, the factions and CONCORD are also distrustful of Capsuleer motivations, and rightfully so. Thus, they bar the general population from playing with the internal politics and operations of the factions themselves, except through registered and carefully regulated Mission Agents. This keeps their defenses strong on the internal side of things.
Now, of course, Capsuleers can still wage war with certain factions. They can raid faction shipping, stymie faction war operations, even make factions lose territory. These factions set these pilots to negative standings and bar them from accessing their high-security space, at least as much as they are able.
So, you have two walls against capsuleer influence into Factions themselves, both on the friendly and non-friendly side of things. CCP has given us the opportunity to play as the independent, CONCORD-regulated capsuleers, who are licensed via accredited capsuleer schools throughout New Eden. This isn't a matter of debate, it's simply the design of the game. As such, we have significant liberties, but also restrictions, in our abilities to act.
Ask yourself this question: each capsuleer is effectively an interest group with massive potential influence and power. Does it not make sense, then, to channel this power towards external threats, away from the internal workings of your Faction, where you've carefully built up an architecture of power over the past four centuries? Capsuleers are too chaotic and rogue to intergrate directly into that schema, at least the independent, non-indoctrinated and internally-regulated ones anyway.
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Not just a response to the cloning thing, and probably tending a teensy bit towards "you're breaking my EVE: I'll take my toys and go home", but:
It feels to me like some of the recent and proposed changes turn IC-EVE into... a game.
This might be a cunning way of matching the internal world of EVE with the external reality that it is a game, but from within the immersion it had previously been feasible to have a much deeper and richer relation with the cultures and events which made EVE's "world". We have previously bridged the gap between what the game can show us and what we plausibly thought there should be with imagination, speculation, and the infinitely-malleable description available to us in text-based roleplay. I will grieve its loss if that goes: if the introduction of Incarna and the shown-GUI world of station life means that what can be shown becomes all that there is.
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I'm still a bit flabbergasted that the increase of information available to roleplayers, including visual cues and architecture via Incarna, can be seen as detrimental to roleplay. Can anyone care to explain this perspective?
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While I'm unable to answer Soter's question, since I share his curiosity, I'd also note that I don't see the same dire situation that Mata does. When I joined EVE, a lot of the PF already seemed explicitly designed to support the game design. Cloning, semi insane capsuleers, etc., all to try to reduce the necessary hand waving and invocations of Bellisario's Maxim. Sure, they still exist (submarine physics), but other games have it worse and CCP at least makes an effort.
It's a big cluster. If your character came along with marginal differences, that's okay.
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I'm still a bit flabbergasted that the increase of information available to roleplayers, including visual cues and architecture via Incarna, can be seen as detrimental to roleplay. Can anyone care to explain this perspective?
I'd long assumed that Walking Incarnambulation would come along some day and be another facet of the game, most likely one that would initially alter bar-channel RP (which I don't do that often, but which might be fun to try more depending on what they deliver), and that those of us who like our world bigger would continue to use text to cover that aspect of our roleplay. I'd hoped -- even assumed -- that there would be room for continued co-existence of canonical EVE and the wider EVEs that roleplayers build.
Instead, the sense I'm getting is that the clarification of the EVE world to support the new assets will remove -- or at least diminish -- capsuleers' access to much of that bigger roleplay world: of taking a friend to the stream where you caught eels as a child (not a holo representation of it); of dealing with your new and awkwardly-undefined place in your clan's social, ritual and legal structures; of keeping the mushed remains of your original brain in a specimen jar, jumping into your original body with the real marks on it when you go home, and hoping irrationally that somehow you'll manage to die with all the right bits so the ancestors will recognise you.
I've enjoyed playing someone who didn't want to be an infomorph, and who worked to retain ties to her humanity (whether or not that was doomed is part of the long story). I'm approaching the realisation that the rich and plausible world which I'd built as an expansion of EVE may well become incompatible and even unintelligible.
CCP doesn't owe me anything in this: I created in the knowledge that I was building on sand that could one day shift and undermine my work. But some of what I built is good, and all of it is an expression of "me", and I will grieve its ending when that comes.
Just that. At the moment it's still at the stage of "concern", but my previous low-level concerns have become more focused recently as I've realised that there are whole other ways to join the dots of Prime Fiction, and that my choices over the years could be -- from the point of view of the owners of the shared story -- not just different but wrong. I feel... a little silly to have invested so much in this, and -- although I still have a corporation I love and people I enjoy playing with and no plan to stop playing EVE right now -- I find the goings-on of capsuleers alone less interesting than the interplays between those and baseline life, and I'm starting to look around for whatever might be the Next Thing for me.
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So you do not oppose the content of any such possible retcon as the New Player Experience suggests regarding the process of capsuleer creation. However, you feel possibly constrained in future roleplay possibilities with the advent of the Incarna system.
Well, certainly, roleplay is constrained in videogames. In any circumstance, a video game developer must create a believable and open gameplay environment for our characters to participate in. In a fantasy MMO, this may involve a fictional continent divided into several regions. In our case, it is our captains quarters, our spaceships, the vastness of space, and possible station environments CCP develops in the future.
The constraints are the same for both. For more than two decades of videogaming, people have worked around this with text communication environments, either in MUDs, or in IRC channels and the like, to do roleplay encounters of a more sophisticated or freeform nature, without the limitations of our gameplay environments.
So, what is so different here? CCP is in fact expanding our gameplay environment, but you claim it encroaches on territory that it does not, the text communication environment. Chat channels will still exist in and out of game, providing the same necessary function they always have. We will simply have the added advantage of knowing what our character's body might look like, not simply their face and shoulders. Not to mention, the increased environment space will allow for more genuine immersion in new players, who have never before seen their characters humanoid forms.
In the end, it expands the playability and capacity to immerse new players into the genre and story of the game universe. I see this only as a positive.
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Julianus, I suspect it is less the advent of walking in stations that bothers Matariki, than the "clarifications" of PF that are removing some of the uncertainty about the world, and doing so in ways that removes or makes implausible many of the bits that Matariki found interesting.
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What Ulf said.
If Incarna is "as well as" what we do already and is prime-fiction-neutral, that will be fine.
If, as an example, it were a gameplay fact that there were only player-characters in Incarna bars and boardrooms, and if that motivated CCP to say that podders can hang out only with other podders, that would be a world-changer for those of us whose roleplay and fiction extensively include and refer to interactions between podders and non-podders.
I'm increasingly getting the impression, though, that that decision was made a couple of years ago, alluded to obliquely in official fiction since then, and I pushed against it because it wasn't incontrovertible and it didn't fit with my RP/I didn't like it. That's why I'm currently having a bit of an "Aha!/Oh...." moment. Still need to wait for confirmation, of course.
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Well yes, if podders have lost any links with the rest of the world, my RP is pretty screwed. Like a lot of other RPs.
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Well I say "Fuck da police". I'm not going with this heavy-handed shoehorn of CCP wanting to explain 100% of the player's stories at the cost of <5% who are the roleplayers. The Burning Life states that "precious few" have contact with the outside world, and we as RPers would constitute that. In addition, I don't see what's stopping us from behaving as "citizen-capsuleers" that exist everywhere in PF but we're unexplainedly barred from apparently.
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... and there you go equating all the roleplayers with the canon characters.
Personally I am pretty comfortable with all this, because my view on EVE has pretty much been the one that they are advocating.
So I will just stroke my (imaginary) beard and smoke my pipe while I watch others have a hissy fit.
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Give me one reason why a Federation Navy Lieutenant capsuleer can somehow be.fully integrated with his society, but a humble Hulk pilot can't.
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So, everyone is quite clingy to their character's original bodies, and apprehensive about the cloning devices. Are we sure we wouldn't prefer a universe without capsuleers and space captains instead? ;)
Nope. Borza long ago lost track of where his original body is or if it even still exists among his jump and medical clones, and doesn't really care.
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This might actually help me ret-con Math'ra's past to a degree where a section I could never quite work out just snapped together nicely.
The idea of being provided the choice of:
"Commit suicide, become a Capsuleer and maintain your ability to help your Faction.. but you will loose your soul
or
Submit to punishment and have your family, house and relations submitted to slavery"
Considering I have in Math's story him being submitted to a situation where this would fit perfectly... I may need a retcon, bonus being it doesn't affect anyone else's RP that I know of.
Winsauce.
As for people like Cia/Mata/Morwen - the approach of "Well, thats not the way it happened to us" is perfectly legitimate.
Its how I view things like CCP Rebalancing ships, as mandatory refits that are performed by station crews with or without the Capsuleers consent as the changes are parsed by CONCORD or some such. (This doesn't apply to SC's/Titans - the recent changes however being massive buffs mean that you would be silly to not have them CONCORD reffited anyway)
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Hrmm....
I dunno...maybe I need more coffee but...
I don't see this as changing all that much. Those capsuleers that choose to remain tied to their government of origin can. Those who choose a more "independent" existance ( :yar:) are free to go where they want. Including stations. There might be "capsuleer only" sections of stations, but I can't see there being any restricted zones. No sane merchant would agree to banning a potential customer who has a multi-million ISK wallet.
The whole "La Femme Nikita" origin of "you are now legally dead, serve us or end up in a hole" might be good for some, but it dosen't make sense that it would apply to everyone.
One has to assume that there's a large amount of people that are concieved in vitro. So even if a capsuleer's clone is sterile upon manufacture, it shouldn't be at all difficult to reverse the sterility should the pilot want to reproduce.
Also, many people probably use cloned organs to extend their lifespans. Unless you're about to become the Emperor of Amarr, most people probably wouldn't have a problem with losing their "original bpo" for the chance of "unlimited bpcs." (And considering Jamyl...)
There's a REALLY good short story that (to me) shows how capsuleers might fit in with the rest of humanity. It's called "Aye, and Gomorrah" and it's by Samuel R. Delany. It's a really quick read and you'll like it, even if you don't see how it dovetails with capsuleers.
But like I said in the split thread, we really need more info from CCP.
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Soter: My own problem with Incarna is slightly different. It's simply a matter of immersion.
I've RP'd in I don't know how many different avatar based games. My immersion almost always comes to a screeching halt when suddenly this appears on your screen:
"Matariki Rain leans on Gottii's large frame, glancing up to give him a little smile before returning her focus onto you." and I'm staring at two straightfaced realdolls with nowhere near the physical disparity the two characters actually have, nor any of the actual actions are performed. Just avatars staring dully two inches up and to the left of the other guy's eyes.
This works when there's so simplified avatar graphics like... say Neverwinter Nights where you're barely moving stick figures around, but when we're right smack in the uncanny valley of Carbon models, we're suddenly sledgehammered in the face with the fact that no... no, the characters does in fact not perform the actions you just read in a little box to the lower left.
All immersion goes straight out the window for me.
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This might actually help me ret-con Math'ra's past to a degree where a section I could never quite work out just snapped together nicely.
The idea of being provided the choice of:
"Commit suicide, become a Capsuleer and maintain your ability to help your Faction.. but you will loose your soul
or
Submit to punishment and have your family, house and relations submitted to slavery"
Considering I have in Math's story him being submitted to a situation where this would fit perfectly... I may need a retcon, bonus being it doesn't affect anyone else's RP that I know of.
I like that explanation for some Amarrians. I wouldn't doubt that situations crop up like this a fair bit.
It would have been problematic for my only Amarrian alt1, but since she's dead, I don't have to worry about this. :P
1I biomassed Sussan after her ingame death, because she believed that the soul was completely lost upon the death of the original body, and very likely damaged during jumps from that body to jump clones (she didn't have any). She equated the general nuttiness of capsuleers to their souls' having been corrupted or wholly subsumed by 'outside influences' during the course of multiple infomorph transfers. She didn't view all of the 'outside influences' as being overtly malignant, but personally, she just didn't want to take the chance on being used as a meatpuppet by a demon.
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Dropbear addressed the issue: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1519536&page=1#8
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+1 for THAT.
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I'm still amazed that people never really picked up on the whole "Empyrean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyrean)" thing.
:twisted:
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They didn't? Hmm. I always took it to be a joke or ironic jab at a group of people who were very far from being "empyrean". The TEA trailer even highlights the less-than-genuine nature of the titular time period.
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Dropbear addressed the issue: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1519536&page=1#8
For those of us stuck at work for 24hrs, and can't access the eve-o website what did he say?
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For those of us stuck at work for 24hrs, and can't access the eve-o website what did he say?
This was the one reason why I was really excited for the new forums. Could get to them through EVE Gate, which they don't yet know to filter :yar:
For your duty pleasure:
Hey guys,
Apologies for joining the discussion late, things are pretty busy for us all right now, as you can imagine.
So...about that line. First of all, we're glad to see it was noticed, and that discussions have already started about the implications, and so on. I think it says something about our player base when subtly introduced (yet important) changes to the storyline are narrowed in on with speed and analysed at depth.
Now that I've buttered you up with flattery, the next thing to point out is that this is just the first little step in a much larger, more long-term movement, the aim of which is to elaborate more on the life of the capsuleer, including the hot topic of how they come to be in the first place. I can't speak about specifics yet, since I'm not directly involved in the next steps, nor is everything hammered out and confirmed yet.
Expanding a bit more on the newly introduced part of it though...and giving you an internal insight on the matter: you'll notice that this new piece of canon is introduced as a voiceover from AURA. Something that might not be appreciated is that when you're working with a voice actor in a studio on a script, you want to do it all at once (it's much more effective than getting the actor back in the studio repeatedly for small changes).
Also, if you have plans for the future, then the voiceover has to account for that. What you record today has to make sense tomorrow, when things change.
And that's kind of what is going on here. You're seeing the first part of a larger shift because the voiceover is going out now, with Incarna. In the future, that little tidbit which seems unceremoniously introduced will tie in with other things and make much greater sense in that context. For the moment, it will remain a little snippet of the new player's introduction to EVE that, hopefully, makes them do a little double-take in their head and ask "wait, what?!" like you guys did.
Speaking more broadly about the specifics of this new canon, and its implications...
Firstly, this is not a retcon. What that means is we've not suddenly defined what has happened in the last eight years. Instead, we're just defining how things work now (where "now" means, once Incarna's New Player Experience launches). I can't say where, how or when we'll bring that out in the canon, just that it's our intent to do so at some point, and make clear (beyond this forum post) that there was a change in the way capsuleers graduated.
We're doing this for one simple reason: We don't want to pull the rug out from underneath people with an unnecessary retcon. Simple as that. It's avoidable, so we're avoiding it.
The deeper reasons motivating the change are the ones people have already picked up on; it's about differentiating capsuleers from baseliners (but not necessarily alienating and separating the two wholesale, as some people are concerned is the intent) and other themes, which will be expanded upon further in other ways down the line. Some cool stuff is cooking on that front.
Finally...regarding the broader concern that we're "walling off" the world of non-capsuleers.
I have to start by saying that it kind of strikes me as a funny, out-of-nowhere concern. I don't mean to belittle it, nor come across as saying I don't take it seriously, I'm just a little "wtf?" at it is all.
Here's why.
30 second hypothetical: You're CCP, and you want to tear those walls down between capsuleers and "the rest of the world." All you have right now is capsuleers flying around inside spaceships.
So what's the first thing you do, to tear those walls down?
You get those pilots out of their ships, and walking around on "dry land."
I mean, that's the foundation, right? You can't ever hope to take a stroll down Crystal Boulevard unless you can, like, stroll. Right?
Personally, I feel like Incarna is the most storyline-oriented expansion EVE has ever seen. It's different to other storyline-heavy expansions like Empyrean Age in that it's a more slow-burning, long-term thing, but what it lacks in immediate, juicy storyline, it makes up for in terms of potential.
For one, the notion of walking down Crystal Boulevard moves from the realm of "how would that ever happen?" to "I can see how that could possibly happen in the years to come". Hopefully you agree that, although that isn't something that benefits us immediately, it's still a profound shift in EVE's storyline potential.
From one perspective, Incarna is a big step towards the very thing you guys are concerned we're walking away from, and more broadly, it's a big step towards some pretty exciting new storyline possibilities. Even more broadly, from a content perspective, it's a damn cool way to push things out to players in a way that is oh-so-compatible with storyline (and user friendly, to boot).
To give an example. Instead of finding out about pirate epic arcs by reading a years-old Dev Blog outside of the game client (putting aside the question: how would you know to read it in the first place?), you can now stand in front of your TV screen in your captain's quarters and see an ad from the Angel Cartel.
That's another little victory for EVE's storyline right there.
I drifted a bit from the point there. The tl;dr is that the "everyone is a clone" development is not a retcon, is something we've thought about quite a bit, and will be explored in more depth in the future.
If I missed something, or more likely, misunderstood something (particularly about the "putting walls up" concern) then please do point it out.
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Thanks Ken!
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They didn't? Hmm. I always took it to be a joke or ironic jab at a group of people who were very far from being "empyrean". The TEA trailer even highlights the less-than-genuine nature of the titular time period.
Empyrean = infomorph...
...well, I'll just go to my corner again. :oops:
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Ken, thanks for asking that. You gave a good summary of my concerns and got a response which seems to address them. I'm going to ponder for a bit.