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[Matariki Rain]

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.

[Julianus Soter]

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.

[Ulphus]

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.

[Matariki Rain]

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.

[Lyn Farel]

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.

[Seriphyn]

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.

[lallara zhuul]

... 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.

[Seriphyn]

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.

[Borza]

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.

[Mathra Hiede]

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)

[Sinjin Mokk]

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 ( ) 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.

[Mizhara]

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.

[Vieve]

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.

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.

[Ken]

Dropbear addressed the issue: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1519536&page=1#8

[Casiella]

+1 for THAT.