Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE OOC Summit => Topic started by: Tekla on 15 Jul 2014, 13:13
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Greetings!
Trying to understand my character's background, I've stumbled upon the very basic thing - starships. Being just a rookie, capsuleer soon gets a bunch of ships full of guns and gear, and, as far as I understand, losing a ship isn't a big deal. Thus ships should be very cheap, so literally anyone in Eve universe might be able to get a garage full of frigates - work a bit harder and you'll get a battlecruiser. That sounds a bit weird and unreal.
How do you, fellow capsuleers, explain such an amount ships each one of us owns?
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We make ISK really fast?
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Life is a cheap commodity in New Eden and starships are basically a more technically advanced version of IKEA flat pack furniture that only require an equally advanced allen key.
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Ships are only really 'cheap' when measured on the scale at which capsuleers do things. But once you're there, well. The average capsuleer is very good at losing ships, but (generally) even better at making the blood money required to replace them.
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Ships are only really 'cheap' when measured on the scale at which capsuleers do things.
This is pretty much how I look at it.
If you think about the average capsuleer graduate, after this big investment to find an individual whose nervous system can interface with the capsule and all, they knock around in the starter corp while they are getting accustomed to their new career. Say there are 500 active capsuleers in these corps at any given time, generating 5-10 million ISK in bounties and mission compensation per hour, using all varieties of agents. If the starter corp skims 10% from that income in tax, then they are pulling in, as an arbitrary amount, 0.25-0.5 billion ISK per hour, day-in-day-out, forever*. It's the kind of money that baseliners don't see in a lifetime. All that cash could go to station overhead, personnel, investments, whatever, so long as the capsuleer is invested in the cluster. They do things which move money rapidly and often in large amounts.
As they progress and form their own corporations, they develop their own agendas and acquire assets necessary to the advancement of those agendas, often leveraging them against competitors who respond in kind. They are still invested in the cluster, still moving money from one party to another, but now they reap all the benefit and foot all the responsibility. Maintaining a healthy surplus of assets is a hedge against shortfalls that come with the high stakes of capsuleering in the unfriendly skies.
That's my slap-dash, convoluted way of looking at it.
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How is it possible NASCAR has so many cars, times star systems and ISK. ;)
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Something to keep in mind is that, according to the lore, 100 ISK is the equivalent to the amount of money the average non-capsuleer would earn in their lifetime. Even the most basic missions we run usually pay upwards of 1,000 ISK, so we're really earning piles and piles of money right out from the start of the game. It's only "a little money" in terms of other capsuleers.
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If you think about it, the upper crust of today's society make oodles of money as it is. If you can say write a doctoral paper on astrophysics, then figure out how to solve a major problem in a starving third world nation, pose for (magazine) and THEN rule the stock market with your new, custom designed algorithm, of course you're going to make a pile of money. Essentially Capsuleers can do all of this and more. Because of the unique combination of genetics, super-tuned implants and learning software and that fact that we are immortal and pretty much fearless, we can do what no others can do. As such we command hideous amounts of money for our time. The part that EVE does a crap job of showcasing is that the 20-50k active "capsuleers" at any one time is a percentage of a percentage point of the total number of humans in New Eden. Rare doesn't even begin to cover it. So yet again, super rare, super talented, immortal and fearless. PAY ME :)
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Greetings!
Trying to understand my character's background, I've stumbled upon the very basic thing - starships. Being just a rookie, capsuleer soon gets a bunch of ships full of guns and gear, and, as far as I understand, losing a ship isn't a big deal. Thus ships should be very cheap, so literally anyone in Eve universe might be able to get a garage full of frigates - work a bit harder and you'll get a battlecruiser. That sounds a bit weird and unreal.
How do you, fellow capsuleers, explain such an amount ships each one of us owns?
We make tons of money baseliners wouldn't see in several lifetimes an hour. We have an industry that is more than capable of churning out thousands of spaceships every few days, with supporting logistics and material acquisition to ensure this continues. There's billions of baseliners tripping over one another for the chance of crewing your spaceship so that they might hopefully make some trickle-down income to send to their families.
Having a hangar filled with enough spaceships to make up entire battalions shouldn't come out as a surprise.
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Because of the unique combination of genetics, super-tuned implants and learning software and that fact that we are immortal and pretty much fearless, we can do what no others can do.
Don't forget the EXTREMELY difficult and often lethal training process.
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Something to keep in mind is that, according to the lore, 100 ISK is the equivalent to the amount of money the average non-capsuleer would earn in their lifetime. Even the most basic missions we run usually pay upwards of 1,000 ISK, so we're really earning piles and piles of money right out from the start of the game. It's only "a little money" in terms of other capsuleers.
You missed a few zeroes. It's 10,000 ISK that was stated as the equivalent of an average family household's lifetime income. :P
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Something to keep in mind is that, according to the lore, 100 ISK is the equivalent to the amount of money the average non-capsuleer would earn in their lifetime. Even the most basic missions we run usually pay upwards of 1,000 ISK, so we're really earning piles and piles of money right out from the start of the game. It's only "a little money" in terms of other capsuleers.
You missed a few zeroes. It's 10,000 ISK that was stated as the equivalent of an average family household's lifetime income. :P
HURF BLURF. That was a mistype, I swear. >.<
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So, think about it this way: people migrating to a planet in the boondocks? Sell all their crap, scrounge, beg, and buy a shuttle to haul themselves and a few cubic meters of gear-- previously.
Nowadays, though, the family can buy cast-off rookie ships with a lot more room, and take a slower flight off into the dark with a lot more gear. It's more dangerous, of course, because the rookie ship is less nimble-- but it offers a lot safer start once you land, care of the extra gear you can haul.
CONCORD's subsidy of basic capsuleer equipment is probably accelerating the flight to the dark unknown places. ;)
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Uh-huh. Thanks. I can see it better now. The only question that's still present - it's an offtopic though - if capsuleers are such a valuable assets, why the hell send 'em to mine ore, that looks more like an AI/drone kind of job.
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Uh-huh. Thanks. I can see it better now. The only question that's still present - it's an offtopic though - if capsuleers are such a valuable assets, why the hell send 'em to mine ore, that looks more like an AI/drone kind of job.
It's less about the actual mining and more about the logistics of it. AIs and drone miners do not have the capacity. Concord is reluctant to allow fully automated barges due to the fears of the repeat of the rogue drone debacle. Baseliners can't steer the ship well enough. So it falls to capsuleers to get it done.
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Besides, Capsuleers are kind of strange birds, and obviouly, quite a few of them enjoy mining.
The ship to cityscape comparison, when you see the size of an exhumer vs, say, a highrise building, also explains why they wouldnt allow vehicles that large to be automated (again) - ie. the rogue drones issues.
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Uh-huh. Thanks. I can see it better now. The only question that's still present - it's an offtopic though - if capsuleers are such a valuable assets, why the hell send 'em to mine ore, that looks more like an AI/drone kind of job.
The mining corps have their own mining ships piloted by baseliners among things. They've complained about the sheer output of Capsuleer production before, as well. Capsuleers just do it better.
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Uh-huh. Thanks. I can see it better now. The only question that's still present - it's an offtopic though - if capsuleers are such a valuable assets, why the hell send 'em to mine ore, that looks more like an AI/drone kind of job.
A cynical view might be that it's more profitable not to allow capsuleers to purchase from the big mining conglomerates. There's a war economy at work with capsuleers, and having capsuleers go out and mine means that those mineral sales are taxed by the SCC when they're put up on market. It also keeps capsuleers in their own little bubble of destruction and supply.
Capsuleer ships explode for the control of resources, those resources are used to create more ships (with every step being taxed) which are then blown up to control resources. When you think about it, it's a neat zero sum game where CONCORD and its signatories profit, capsuleers are isolated from their own domestic markets, and all those poor, desperate, and undesirable types get tossed into the meatgrinders.
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Something to keep in mind is that, according to the lore, 100 ISK is the equivalent to the amount of money the average non-capsuleer would earn in their lifetime. Even the most basic missions we run usually pay upwards of 1,000 ISK, so we're really earning piles and piles of money right out from the start of the game. It's only "a little money" in terms of other capsuleers.
You missed a few zeroes. It's 10,000 ISK that was stated as the equivalent of an average family household's lifetime income. :P
NECRO ALERT - I AM NECRO'ING THIS THREAD.
Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, may I ask where this was stated? Source or a Chronicle? I'm not disputing it, just curious to read that and whatever other information might've been in the same article.
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Uh-huh. Thanks. I can see it better now. The only question that's still present - it's an offtopic though - if capsuleers are such a valuable assets, why the hell send 'em to mine ore, that looks more like an AI/drone kind of job.
The mining corps have their own mining ships piloted by baseliners among things. They've complained about the sheer output of Capsuleer production before, as well. Capsuleers just do it better.
We're meant to hand wave that space is full of baseliners doing stuff and things. I remember reading something early eve's beginning that belts with a warp-able beacon are the ones too crappy for the empires to bother claiming/hiding for their own. We capsuleers can mine them more efficiently and make it worth our while.
So presumably every empire system has a whole mess of mining activity hidden in something like artificial deadspace or akin to the scan inhibitors.
Really it's just too much work or too resource intensive for CCP to populate space anymore than they have with background NPC.
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Something to keep in mind is that, according to the lore, 100 ISK is the equivalent to the amount of money the average non-capsuleer would earn in their lifetime. Even the most basic missions we run usually pay upwards of 1,000 ISK, so we're really earning piles and piles of money right out from the start of the game. It's only "a little money" in terms of other capsuleers.
You missed a few zeroes. It's 10,000 ISK that was stated as the equivalent of an average family household's lifetime income. :P
NECRO ALERT - I AM NECRO'ING THIS THREAD.
Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, may I ask where this was stated? Source or a Chronicle? I'm not disputing it, just curious to read that and whatever other information might've been in the same article.
It's come up several times on this forum. It's from an old news article from CCP/ISD about a Nyx that was destroyed, and the number was given as a way to provide a baseline comparison (hurr) for roughly how much a supercarrier is worth.
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baseline comparison (hurr)
stahp
EDIT: But yeah, thanks! I'll go looking for that today
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What I find unreal is the number of crew I lose to my own dark impulses, compared to enemy fire. The life of a Capsuleer is truly one without consequences.
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Which is why we're considered monsters and not heroes by the average person-on-the-street. They're not nearly as cray cray as we are to think all this spaceside death is okay.
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Which is why we're considered monsters and not heroes by the average person-on-the-street. They're not nearly as cray cray as we are to think all this spaceside death is okay.
I'm not cray cray, I'm yay yay!
(http://i.perezhilton.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tumblr_mgbxk1ik2x1rvvqj8o1_500.gif)
I'll see myself out.
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Which is why we're considered monsters and not heroes by the average person-on-the-street. They're not nearly as cray cray as we are to think all this spaceside death is okay.
I'm not sure there is an upper limit for crazy, Capsuleer or no. It may simply be said that the non-Capsuleer is not *as* capable of monstrous acts (due to mortality, fragility, finances, etc.).
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I'll stick my head in here real fast to note that one of thre fiction devs - I think it was Abraxas - said they are not happy with the number of crew a capsuleer kills and gets killed on a regular basis, and would like to vastly reduce it somehow.
Then that got pushed to the side and forgotten as well. :roll:
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I'll stick my head in here real fast to note that one of thre fiction devs - I think it was Abraxas - said they are not happy with the number of crew a capsuleer kills and gets killed on a regular basis, and would like to vastly reduce it somehow.
I'm a well known supporter of less crew as well. To me the large amount of crew killed makes storytelling much more difficult.
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I like the range given on the crews page. It allows for running with the bare minimum for those pilots who are conscientious of the death toll.
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I'm honestly leaning more towards "the more crew the better". Reducing the consequences for a ship killed/lost removes more of the weight combat has in the game. If it all just comes down to isk in the end, what does any kill matter? If you got a little cleverly placed sp, you can just lock your lips around any of the game's isk faucets and suck on it until it your wallet pops. Back in action and nothing of consequence ever happened.
More crew please. More consequence. Let's lose SP no matter what ship we blow up in. Let us have to hire crew, with different skills depending on how much we pay. Another fitting slot, for crew.
Even less impact when blapping something is bad, mkay?
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I don't have a big preference about any sort of change, but I do think the larger the crew count the larger your suspension of disbelief has to be before your awareness of the sheer absurdity of the level of grimdark starts to bother you.
[insert cliche quote about large-scale death just being a statistic]
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That just increases the amazing scale of Eve to me, really. The population count of New Eden would have to be truly vast to support it and retain reasonable ratios between cluster population and horribly dying crew members. This brings further awe into the universe we play in. If there are other ways to lend more impact to each kill so they don't become utterly insignificant and pointless, I'd support that too but right now all I can think of are crew counts, sp loss, maybe standings loss for the guy getting killed, etc.
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For me it just makes it harder to be immersive in because I'm continually reminded as to how over the top the grimdark is in that instance. There is a lot of EVE that is dark, but not absurdly so. Crew deaths is the primary exception. You have dramatically dark and evil people, events, etc. But it can be balanced out by impressions of everyday people that are fairly 'normal.' But crews completely go against that. It is just wholesale death in a meaningless, spam sort of way.
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How is crew deaths in spaceship violence "dramatically and over the top grimdark"? I mean, that's par the course for any sci-fi universe.
If you don't want to be killing people, or having people under your watch killed, don't engage in spaceship violence. Obvious? It's not like EVE doesn't offer options for players who don't want to engage in combat....
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I like the range given on the crews page. It allows for running with the bare minimum for those pilots who are conscientious of the death toll.
According to that page, minimal ship crews are for unfitted ships because a crew of engineers is needed to effectively use modules. It also says that in cases where a ship is not instapopped, ~80%-90% of ship crew can get away via invisible escape pods.
I agree with Miz.
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How is crew deaths in spaceship violence "dramatically and over the top grimdark"? I mean, that's par the course for any sci-fi universe.
If you don't want to be killing people, or having people under your watch killed, don't engage in spaceship violence. Obvious? It's not like EVE doesn't offer options for players who don't want to engage in combat....
However, the motivation of 'wanting to reduce crew loss' can itself be good RP material. It can be used to develop a character's combat tactics (more prudence). It could be a motivation for R&D (better automation systems to reduce need for a crew). It can also be milked for drama (PTSD-like symptoms?). All of that can liven up RP.
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Almost all space opera sci-fi has massive amounts of crew dying in every engagement. They just never bring it up or act like it's at all a big deal. Isn't it better that Eve does?
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How is crew deaths in spaceship violence "dramatically and over the top grimdark"? I mean, that's par the course for any sci-fi universe.
If you don't want to be killing people, or having people under your watch killed, don't engage in spaceship violence. Obvious? It's not like EVE doesn't offer options for players who don't want to engage in combat....
Most sci fi (at least that I read and watch) doesn't have an entire subspecies of people that are willingly allowed to kill millions of crewmembers every month for no apparent reason other than 'I felt like it.' I mean really, it is just silly. In no universe would capsuleers as they currently are be allowed to continue to exist unless the entire universe gave absolutely no value to the average human.
In most science fiction, there are the 'great wars' that are the terrible, awful things. It isn't just an absurd 'way of life' that this many people are needlessly killed every single day on this scale for no reason whatsoever. There is a big difference between a space opera war that breaks out over the course of the books and a semi-stable universe that is just, well, fine with all this death. There is no actual war going on.
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I like the range given on the crews page. It allows for running with the bare minimum for those pilots who are conscientious of the death toll.
According to that page, minimal ship crews are for unfitted ships because a crew of engineers is needed to effectively use modules. It also says that in cases where a ship is not instapopped, ~80%-90% of ship crew can get away via invisible escape pods.
This jives with the way the novels by and large interpreted it, as well. On both points.
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To be clear on the level of absurdity this reaches:
Assuming average crew loss rates (i.e., not instapopped) and a busy day, I calculated at one point that I could be killing between 400,000 and 500,000 ship crew a day. One person, doing not-very-hardcore PvE. Having talked to some nullsec people, I suspect someone doing "hardcore" ratting could kill up to 800-900 thousand a day.
Now let's assume for a moment that there are 1,000 people doing PvE in EVE at any given time, a very conservative estimate. Now we're at 400-500 million people per day.
According to one source I found, Earth's population currently grows at a rate of around 230,000 people a day; thus, it would take around 1,740 Earth-like worlds to support the impact of capsuleers doing PvE. This might not seem like such a big deal - there are around 1,900 empire systems - but for the fact that it is a best-case estimation which uses a (in my opinion) exceedingly low number of crew killed by PvEers, completely ignores crew killed in capsuleer-vs-capsuleer actions, and also does not take into account those killed in structures we explode nor crew killed in other "semi-PvE" activities like FW and exploration.
A more accurate number, in my opinion, would be something close to 700-900 million on a given day, requiring between 3,040 and 3900 Earthlike worlds to support.
Just from what capsuleers do. Not including anything that happens around us.
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I'd rather refuse to recognize the sheer scale of ship violence going on in stupid repeatable PvE missions than consider ships to have very limited or no crews.
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I think realistic numbers would be more accurate taken from the Singularity server. Even with all the titan kills on Singularity, the death tolls are considerably less and realistically manageable.
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I'd rather refuse to recognize the sheer scale of ship violence going on in stupid repeatable PvE missions than consider ships to have very limited or no crews.
Yep. Missions clearly represent unsustainable levels of violence.
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Almost all space opera sci-fi has massive amounts of crew dying in every engagement. They just never bring it up or act like it's at all a big deal. Isn't it better that Eve does?
In almost all space opera sci-fi they didn't consider 'massive amounts of crew dying in every engagement' as Tuesday.
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I'd rather refuse to recognize the sheer scale of ship violence going on in stupid repeatable PvE missions than consider ships to have very limited or no crews.
Yep. Missions clearly represent unsustainable levels of violence.
"... really? I did this for you something like... thirty minutes ago. I scouted all three of these places already! What? NO, this is bullshit. I'm not accepting this mission again. Go use the coordinates I already got you. I want another mission. Angel Extrava... you are naming these now? I'm having an aneurysm, aren't I? I'm going utterly and totally mad. Is this hell? I did exactly this already, not two hours ago."
PvE exists as an isk faucet so you can go do other stuff in Eve. The first time someone did a mission, sure. It happened. The second time? The however many thousandth time someone pulled that fucking damsel out of that pleasure hub and killed the exact same named NPC? Yeah, no. Dagan got blapped once and the slaughter at Blockade was a singular event as far as I'm concerned.
Try calculating the PvP losses. They're the ones that actually matter from an IC point of view, because they quite certainly happened and aren't just bloody mission loops.
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PvE exists as an isk faucet so you can go do other stuff in Eve. The first time someone did a mission, sure. It happened. The second time? The however many thousandth time someone pulled that fucking damsel out of that pleasure hub and killed the exact same named NPC? Yeah, no. Dagan got blapped once and the slaughter at Blockade was a singular event as far as I'm concerned.
But Dagan is an egger. So is Bowser. Princess Peach is a bimbo and a dumb blonde stereotype with Stockholm's Syndrome.
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How is crew deaths in spaceship violence "dramatically and over the top grimdark"? I mean, that's par the course for any sci-fi universe.
If you don't want to be killing people, or having people under your watch killed, don't engage in spaceship violence. Obvious? It's not like EVE doesn't offer options for players who don't want to engage in combat....
My problem is with articles like this: http://community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/mining-accident-in-annaro-system-traps-200-miners/
With billions of crew dying every hour, 200 people that might day in a few days isn't newsworthy.
I simply claim to fly without crew. What do I need them for anyway. I sure hope they're not manually loading my crystals.
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What is newsworthy isn't a rational thing. To use real world parallels:
33 Miners were trapped in a Chilean mine in 2010. They got massive news coverage for months.
In Afganistan, 7000 civilians were killed by one side or another in 2010. In 2010, 31,000 Americans were killed in firearms homicides and 32,000 were killed in automobile accidents. None of these got comparable news coverage in the US to the Chilean miners, yet all involved massively more death. If they did get coverage, it was almost certainly a perfunctory "Today, an airstrike in Afganistan killed 20 people... now back to those Chilean Miners!"
To go back to EVE: The way I read that trapped miner story isn't that the story worth telling was that 200 people would die, it's that they had actually survived this far. Survival in a space accident is newsworthy, death in a space accident is routine.
And with EVE tech the crew is probably not manually loading, no. But they are fixing the loading device when it gets knocked out of place. Programming the nanite goo when a repair is needed. So on and so forth. The numbers on crew are actually quite low compared to the size of the ships.
As far as I am concerned crew death is a fact of life in EVE. So when I see someone IC talking about not using crew on larger ships, what Gaven ICly hears is "So-and-so is in denial about the human cost of their activity." A few people have believably gone the rogue drone route, but only a few.
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As far as I am concerned crew death is a fact of life in EVE. So when I see someone IC talking about not using crew on larger ships, what Gaven ICly hears is "So-and-so is in denial about the human cost of their activity." A few people have believably gone the rogue drone route, but only a few.
Yep, this is how I respond to it. It is the nicest way of handling it without YDIWing someone (which for something as concrete as crews, it is very difficult to not say something. But I'm getting there.)
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I'd rather refuse to recognize the sheer scale of ship violence going on in stupid repeatable PvE missions than consider ships to have very limited or no crews.
I just want to reiterate that I am not arguing for less crew numbers or something silly like no crews. I am merely saying that it is a part of the universe that I have difficulty with - but it ain't my universe, so I roll with it.
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As far as I am concerned crew death is a fact of life in EVE. So when I see someone IC talking about not using crew on larger ships, what Gaven ICly hears is "So-and-so is in denial about the human cost of their activity." A few people have believably gone the rogue drone route, but only a few.
Yep, this is how I respond to it. It is the nicest way of handling it without YDIWing someone (which for something as concrete as crews, it is very difficult to not say something. But I'm getting there.)
I prefer not to talk about it IC to avoid any of that stuff, because I know many people disagree OOC.
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We are the 0.0000000000000000001%