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[Rok-Yuni]

so, been bored and trawling the eve forums, the ship crew debate rages on... and there has been some speculation as to whether it might ever become a game mechanic, or even just be referenced in the killmails and the like... so here's my 2 bits.

while i believe it would help immersion, and in many ways spread the player base out a lot more, especially in high security space, i don't personally believe that, unless it is incredibly hand-wavy, implementing ship crews would work.

they would have to source the crews from a systems inhabited planets, that would produce a base figure to work from, then would come social and environmental modifiers... a wealthy temperate world with good farming, entertainments and tech is likely to have less of a percentage willing to risk becomming crew than a barely functioning backwater....

then there is refresh rate... at best they could feasibly do this once every few months, as new crews finish training... so losing a ship would start to become even more worrying. (and CCP would have to implement a crew loss calculation to ship deaths)

add to that the impact crews would have on nullsec. how many crew are needed for one titan? fleetfights as we know them would be over. losing a titan would probably take months to replenish, unless the crew was sourced from perhaps a whole constellation...

[Lyn Farel]

Yes I like the idea. But I just do not want to see it becoming another big ISK worry, and more something connected to some other factor (time ? something else ?).

It could also be cool for Sansha / Rogue drone supporters, to get more concrete and material means to abduct people when killing other capsuleers.

[Seriphyn]

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/New_Eden_crew_guidelines

[Ken]

The crewmen are there.  And they are totally irrelevant.

Tens of trillions of people in the cluster.  Say, average of 1000 in a capsuleer ship (some have zero, some have several times that).  300,000 capsuleers or so.  ~300,000,000 people working as crew on egger ships at any given moment.  Let's say half of them die horribly in any given year.  That's an attrition rate of 150,000,000 per year (a lot by our standards, but...)  If we estimate the cluster's population at around 20 trillion, that kill rate comes in around... 0.00075% of the whole.  If a civilization as vast as New Eden can't continuously replace those numbers through births and staggered education cycles, everyone is doomed.  Also worth noting that with those estimates, only about 1 in 66,000 people in the cluster serves as crew aboard a capsuleer ship, making such people more than 200 times as rare as say... a current member of the U.S. military is in American society.

tl;dr  We're not going to run out of crew.

But for the record I would be thrilled to see some sort of 'crew bonuses' system implemented.

[orange]

Someone did the numbers for the mission hub losses once... that is what we would have to worry about!

But escape pods are part of PF, so not even every ship loss is a total loss of crew.

[Ken]

Yea, I usually pretend missions don't really exist, even when I'm running them.  I mean, how the heck do the Serps and Angels get that many battleships into Dodixie   

[Hamish Grayson]

Yea, I usually pretend missions don't really exist, even when I'm running them.  I mean, how the heck do the Serps and Angels get that many battleships into Dodixie   

Lobbyists.

[Ken]

*u&!ng democracy...

[Ghost Hunter]

Yea, I usually pretend missions don't really exist, even when I'm running them.  I mean, how the heck do the Serps and Angels get that many battleships into Dodixie   

What's your thoughts on citing storylines IC?

[Lyn Farel]

The crewmen are there.  And they are totally irrelevant.

Tens of trillions of people in the cluster.  Say, average of 1000 in a capsuleer ship (some have zero, some have several times that).  300,000 capsuleers or so.  ~300,000,000 people working as crew on egger ships at any given moment.  Let's say half of them die horribly in any given year.  That's an attrition rate of 150,000,000 per year (a lot by our standards, but...)  If we estimate the cluster's population at around 20 trillion, that kill rate comes in around... 0.00075% of the whole.  If a civilization as vast as New Eden can't continuously replace those numbers through births and staggered education cycles, everyone is doomed.  Also worth noting that with those estimates, only about 1 in 66,000 people in the cluster serves as crew aboard a capsuleer ship, making such people more than 200 times as rare as say... a current member of the U.S. military is in American society.

tl;dr  We're not going to run out of crew.

But for the record I would be thrilled to see some sort of 'crew bonuses' system implemented.

Oh yes definitly, but you still need to re recruit your crew, the time to go get them in the closest populated area, etc.

Yea, I usually pretend missions don't really exist, even when I'm running them.  I mean, how the heck do the Serps and Angels get that many battleships into Dodixie   

Interesting view, though I always told myself that only capsuleers are under the watch of concord. We also only use designated stargates, but taking in account that there is a lot of forgotten things in space, that stargates are not so hard to build for any sized organization (like any POS or tower or something else of the same caliber), it is not so hard to hide yourself in the vastness of space.

Except when you are a capsuleer and being monitored closely by CONCORD as you need a licence to fly. They must be tracking every capsuleer of the cluster. Except probably the affiliated (NPC) ones like Roden, etc.

[Ken]

Yea, I usually pretend missions don't really exist, even when I'm running them.  I mean, how the heck do the Serps and Angels get that many battleships into Dodixie   

What's your thoughts on citing storylines IC?

Like everything with missions it has to be done sparingly.  Everyone effectively runs the same missions, storyline and otherwise, so you have to treat them more as inspiration for a particular character's traits/experiences/storylines rather than real, precise events that happened exactly as they are represented in the client.  I find it's best to simply say Character A has a long and glowing record of contracting for Corporation B and think of new and interesting interpretations of the 'contracting relationship' rather than to say Character A has killed Kruul and rescued the damsel, even though that is literally what he did... more than a dozen times.

ymmv

Yea, I usually pretend missions don't really exist, even when I'm running them.  I mean, how the heck do the Serps and Angels get that many battleships into Dodixie   

Interesting view, though I always told myself that only capsuleers are under the watch of concord. We also only use designated stargates, but taking in account that there is a lot of forgotten things in space, that stargates are not so hard to build for any sized organization (like any POS or tower or something else of the same caliber), it is not so hard to hide yourself in the vastness of space.

Yes, I suppose that works too.  Still, mission hubs are just laughably implausible even in a capsuleers-always-wear-blinders version of New Eden.  I mean, we're talking about hundreds of pirate battleships in the heart of the Federation, State, Empire, and Republic.  They're just hanging out, going totally unnoticed by the faction navies, police, and media until some capsuleer gets a tip off to their presence and swoops in to murder everyone.  If every single mission deadspace pocket in the cluster had to be taken as a "hard PF" fact, I think it would go far beyond the term "immersion-breaking".  So, I just handwave them into the realm of capsuleer bluster/propaganda/simulation/otherspace.  Helps me sleep at night.

[Myrhial Arkenath]

I would be amused if crew / humans became somehow involved in PI, maybe lowsec / nulsec only PI involving slavery and such. Not sure if that'd work with EVE's age rating though, and possibly sensitive audience. It would deliver massive grimdark though <3

[Graelyn]

Seriously, if you try to present yourself as someone who has killed 10,000 sansha battleships (even if you have in the game client), I'm never going to take you seriously. The same goes for saying that you killed Kruul and rescued the same damsel 5000 times. Same goes for anyone saying that any pirate faction loses >50,000 BS a month. NPC content has to be taken with liberal dose of handwaving.

It's better than the alternative, of scouring systems and belts for weeks in the hope of catching one lone NPC patrol, who would fight you properly and competently...because that's the sort of thing our chars are supposed to be encountering. But it wouldn't make for fun gameplay.

[Saede Riordan]

Yea, I usually pretend missions don't really exist, even when I'm running them.  I mean, how the heck do the Serps and Angels get that many battleships into Dodixie   

What's your thoughts on citing storylines IC?

Like everything with missions it has to be done sparingly.  Everyone effectively runs the same missions, storyline and otherwise, so you have to treat them more as inspiration for a particular character's traits/experiences/storylines rather than real, precise events that happened exactly as they are represented in the client.  I find it's best to simply say Character A has a long and glowing record of contracting for Corporation B and think of new and interesting interpretations of the 'contracting relationship' rather than to say Character A has killed Kruul and rescued the damsel, even though that is literally what he did... more than a dozen times.

ymmv

Yea, I usually pretend missions don't really exist, even when I'm running them.  I mean, how the heck do the Serps and Angels get that many battleships into Dodixie   

Interesting view, though I always told myself that only capsuleers are under the watch of concord. We also only use designated stargates, but taking in account that there is a lot of forgotten things in space, that stargates are not so hard to build for any sized organization (like any POS or tower or something else of the same caliber), it is not so hard to hide yourself in the vastness of space.

Yes, I suppose that works too.  Still, mission hubs are just laughably implausible even in a capsuleers-always-wear-blinders version of New Eden.  I mean, we're talking about hundreds of pirate battleships in the heart of the Federation, State, Empire, and Republic.  They're just hanging out, going totally unnoticed by the faction navies, police, and media until some capsuleer gets a tip off to their presence and swoops in to murder everyone.  If every single mission deadspace pocket in the cluster had to be taken as a "hard PF" fact, I think it would go far beyond the term "immersion-breaking".  So, I just handwave them into the realm of capsuleer bluster/propaganda/simulation/otherspace.  Helps me sleep at night.

I'm largely of the same opinion, of course we don't have the technology and secret routes to travel into the heart of the cluster at a whim, what a hilariously laughable idea. Pay no attention to to these hidden stargates. >_>      <_<

But seriously, the entire way that missions are run is just horribly laughable. It doesn't make the faintest whiff of sense in the PF, the sheer number of people repeatedly murdered is absurd, not to mention the bloody damsel makes about as much sense as...something that doesn't make sense.

[Xav Serise]

The topic of NPC crew irks me in that it introduces what I feel to be dissonance with the established technological level of the EVE setting.

I realize it's PF, and I'm fine with that and accept it in the context of my RP...

...but I have a module fitted to my ship that, when turned on, my entire ship glows with nanite activity as it repairs itself.

What, exactly, is some human crew member supposed to add to the equation when I have nanites?

There's other PF that establishes that the reason capsuleers are so efficient and awesome is that from their egg-shaped thrones they interface with their ships like they were extensions of their bodies. Why would they denigrate that interface by introducing human facilitation in other areas of the ship's operation?

"Oh, here, I'll turn on my guns with my brain but when I need to fire up the tractor beam I'd better give Scotty's extension a call on the onboard ship phone."

Bleh. So, yeah, I'm hoping that they don't foist more of this awkwardly-fitting PF into the game mechanics, thereby giving it more limelight than it already has.