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[Vaun Erryk]

Such is the problem when the character has skills and knowledges far in advance of anything a player is capable of knowing. Then it simply becomes a case of how good is the players skill in coming up with Authentic and Convincing "Technobabble" versus how willing other players are for accepting the "Technobabble" as being plausible for the setting.

If the discussion's gone into technobabble, it's probably gone too far anyway. A skill I value is knowing where to draw the line, what to avoid looking at too closely, &c if EVE-science has to be discussed. I enjoy occasionally considering how some obscure facet of the game might work, but so much of it is unknowable or impossible that not everything can be convincingly discussed without resorting to technobabble. If you're just spewing words out for the sake of their sounding technical, I don't really see a difference between that and e.g. borkborkbork clang sping bop gibberish.

I'm fond of Steffanie's and Lyn's approach. (But I'll leave that there, lest the thread get derailed; always PMs if something needs discussing further.)

[Karmilla Strife]

- Scientific characters that can't deliver. Any background that the player can't explain or at least pretend to, in fact; the number of capsuleer "scientists" I've seen talk utter shite is beyond belief. It might happen for e.g. military experts, too, but I don't know my arse from my elbow there.

I get bothered by the military "experts" and a lot of the DUST player shenanigans. I try to let people have their fun and not get in the way. I have to laugh though when I meet a new character, and they tell me, loudly in a crowded bar, that they're an expert at covert operations.

I don't like the victim trope. As an Amarrian player, I feel there's more to the faction than making sure everyone is reminded of how bad Amarr can be. As a Minmatar player, I feel there's more to the faction than everyone overcoming a horrible background in order to rebuild society.

I actually kind of like the pseudoscience technobabble. IRL I don't understand a lot of things and my eyes gloss over. I like that my character can have a similar reaction when people start talking science fiction fictional science.

[kalaratiri]

As a person who plays a minmatar with living parents, living siblings (minus one who died in a freak accident - farming is dangerous shit, yo) and was born free, I agree with many of the comments here. I also play a young character, Kala is 22, but I don't think I've ever been particularly subject to people complaining about Kala being childish. No more than other, older characters anyway ^_^

Kala is also terrible at martial arts, and gave up in a huff. "I have a spaceship, why would I need a fist, etc, etc"

Grandstanding. The, "I am the ultimate face of herpaderp!" approach. Noone even tries to pretend they're average.

I do Kala is supposed to be just a normal girl (or as normal as any capsuleer is anyway)

As for things that annoy me:

Claiming to be related to PF characters. No, you are not Sarum's daughter, don't even try ._.

'Constant Drama' characters. Characters who don't even pretend to be sensible, everything is about grabbing attention and doing :dramatic: things.

Things I like:

Sensibleness

Well thought out back stories that support the PF

[Louella Dougans]

I think Vaun might be more meaning "scientist" characters that do not convey the impression that they know what the scientific method even is.

[Silas Vitalia]

Grandstanding. The, "I am the ultimate face of herpaderp!" approach. Noone even tries to pretend they're average.

This is an interesting point for debate!

'Average' is a difficult concept when all of us are playing capsuleers.  By definition the .01% of the .01% of humanity. Very, very special snowflakes.

Our collective backgrounds might be from all over - rich, poor, loved, hated, etc. That colors our characters. But we are none of us average as soon as the implants are connected.

Additionally, and especially for older capsuleers, I can't stress enough that becoming effectively immortal and flying millions of tons of hardware with thousands of crew and shooting volkswagon sized nuclear shells at enemies will do all sorts of wierd stuff to a human psychology.

[Arnulf Ogunkoya]

<snip>
Additionally, and especially for older capsuleers, I can't stress enough that becoming effectively immortal and flying millions of tons of hardware with thousands of crew and shooting volkswagon sized nuclear shells at enemies will do all sorts of wierd stuff to a human psychology.

How do you know this? Given that nobody has done this in reality.

Bear in mind at one point people felt that travelling at high speed was alarming.
From: http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/victorians/transport/communication.html

Some people feared that such speed might endanger the human frame. Queen Victoria asked the driver to go more slowly than his average speed of 40 miles an hour on her journey from Slough to London, finding the experience terrifying.

We got used to it eventually and people are still people. Why would plugging into ships change us so much?

[Silas Vitalia]

I think history has shown that when people are in charge of large masses of humanity and can order them to their deaths willy-nilly, have extreme wealth, and little consequences for their actions, it tends to have psychological implications on their character and how they relate to other people (especially those in the lower classes).

The main part is 'little consequences for behavior.'  Capsuleers enjoy much power over life and death with very, very limited consequences.

Human history shows us when social rules go out the window it takes very little prodding and about 3 seconds for many humans to reduce themselves to murdering psycopathic animal machines.  Even worse when such behavior is 'encouraged' by a new set of rules.  Take the famous 'prison guard' experiments that had to be shut down because average volunteers turned into psychopaths within a few short days.

To boot, even the most despotic rulers of Earths history didn't have nearly the destructive power, and power over life and death for so many people, as the more powerful capsuleers.

Combine this with -immortality- and I think there would be all kinds of unknown, bats-in-the-belfry sorts of crazy manifesting in wierd ways.

*Edit*  I think this part of capsuleerdom is SUPER important though.  It's the FIGHT for many of us to KEEP our humanity in the face of so much raw power and inhumanity that can be the excellent core of much great character work.  Something for your characters to struggle with.  Those of us that jump off the crazy deep end of the pool are taking the -easy- route in my opinion, it's you characters that try to fight those urges and stay sane that have more emotional interesting goings on in many cases*

[Steffanie Saissore]

In a sense, after reading Silas's last couple of posts and thinking about it, CCP seems to have taken a couple of pages from White Wolf's Vampire (Masquerade or Requiem, either works)...where Vampires are no longer human...they merely play at being human (hence the terms masquerade and requiem) in order to remain part of the world they once lived in.  In essence, capsuleers are no longer part of what the vast majority of humans consider humanity.  We are given essentially free reign to do as we wish, fly around in ships capable of punching holes through a planet's crust, we can buy almost anything we desire, can't die, and there are very few consequences to our actions.  Humanity shuns us or worships us, we lock ourselves away in little pods of green goo, interface into massive ships and with but a thought can end the lives of thousands of people.  Most of our interaction is through text or holographic projections and all sense of physical intimacy and contact are eroded from our memories.

We are, in essence, closer to the undead vampire than we are to human.

[Anabella Rella]

My main complaint is with people who blatantly disregard the PF. When Dust went live I spoke with several clone soldiers who also claimed to be pilots (and vice versa) even though CCP's unambiguous about the fact that the technologies are incompatible. Another case is the capsuleer who claims not to use a pod but instead flies via some magical tech that wires them to the ship and allows them to be cloned but, still able to walk about and interact with their crews. And speaking of crews, I want to shoot people who continue to claim their ships larger than frigates are totally automated so that they don't have to deal with the messy consequence of their character being responsible for thousands of deaths because they flew a crap-fit Drake into a gatecamp in Amagankme.

[Pieter Tuulinen]

Pretty much everything Anabella said.

[Gabriel Darkefyre]

+ Well thought out, plausible characters : Characters where both their virtues and flaws are subtle. Characters don't need to be "The Best" at everything to be interesting. Likewise, "Evil" Characters are better when there are plenty of shades of grey to make their motives ambiguous and their actions understandable rather than making people immediately thinking of a Moustache Twirling Villain tying a pretty helpless Maiden to the Railtracks.

+ Originality : Variety is interesting. 100's of Stereotype Cardboard Cutout Characters is not.

- All Grimdark, All the Time : What's the point in striving for anything if it's automatically doomed to failure because "Grimdark"?

[Anabella Rella]

Amen to that Gabriel. With no light with which to contrast, dark loses most of its meaning. It also gets boring as hell over time. CCP should really take this to heart and flip the light switch to 'ON' more often.

[Veyako Koyama]

Most of my likes have already been mentioned.  So my dislike, and this may be more or less a minor pet-peeve as opposed to a huge dislike:

-Homogenizing humanity.  Its general concepts, growth, ideas, etc.  I'm somewhat confused that there are people who think of the greater humanity concept.  And while I agree that yes, we are all technically humans that derive from the same point in history (Earth/Terra).  The whole EVE gate collapse followed by a reset/growth of four distinct cultures with four distinct ideas of what humanity is, is not something I think should be replaced with our RL/today concept of humanity.  I've seen some who think 10 years of a modern Capsuleer era is the be all end all judgment to the rest of humanities course (x4) that has had thousands and thousands of years to develop; and become dismayed that there are considerable head-butting contests between the Empires. 

[Katrina Oniseki]

+ "A Whole New World..." What does your house look like? What about the bridge of your Algos while floating through a gas cloud? What are your station neighbors like? Don't stick to PF! Make your own fiction to go along with it! Player lore is to PF as paint is to walls. Sometimes it can be tacky, but most of the time it looks great.

+ "Military Swag" Show me your uniforms. Introduce me to your XO. Tell me your rank and show me your ribbons. Have heralds trumpet your arrival on the deck of your ships, and whisper sweet nothings into my ear about your victorious campaigns.

+ "YOLO" You're immortal and you've got all the money in the world. Go have some fun. Go sand surfing across a desert world deep in nullsec. Spend a week in an Amarrian monastery. Sample the possibly lethal blowfish of Funtanainen. Hire six whores at once and snort enough Crash to make Charlie Sheen jealous. What's the worst that could happen?... 

+ "I Like Big Butts, And I Cannot Lie" ... All You Other Eggers Can't Deny.

[spoiler]- "Uneducated Capsuleers" As if becoming a capsuleer is a two weekend training seminar in a rented out strip mall or somebody's basement. We went to some of the most powerful educational institutions in the entire cluster, and these people act like high-school dropouts?! Urgh.

- "Rape/Cheating" One of those is universally bad form in any story. You don't need to include rape to be edgy. Cheating however is a personal disgust for me. I cannot stand it.

- "Depression or Weak Willed" Shyness can be cute, introversion can be intriguing. But a depressed or weak willed character is just uninteresting. My character tends to reject them out of hand and tell them to stay out of the capsule.

- "Crew Killers" Lack of morality or empathy can make a great villian, but the type of character who airlocks their crew to look badass just irritates the hell out of me. It's like driving a car around the city hitting as many pedestrians as you can to impress me. Seriously? I'm supposed to respect that and be afraid and talk about how edgy you are?[/spoiler]

There are some close friends of mine who have characters like this, so I want to point out that while this is a pet peeve of mine, I STILL LOVE YOU AND WOULD TOTES SNUGGLE YOU.

[Vieve]

+ Absurdity.  I can so :grimdark:, yeah, totes, y'all, have you met my characters?, but I likes me some rapid fire improvised absurdity.  Particularly if it grows organically, is based on the current environment of the involved characters, and does not require much in the way of OOC discussion.

+ Taking things literally.   By that, I mean working with what's out there in IC text, and known IC subtext.

+ Keeping things close to the chest.

+ Vherokoir and Ni-Kunni

+ Federation folks who reflect a little more regional flavor.  Yeah, we know that folks in Solitude can be xenophobic, but they've also possibly got more of Ni-Kunni and Intaki (and possibly Khanid) folks than they do Matari immigrants.  Everyshore is not 100% go-go-gadget Jin-Mei Lirsautton, as I'm sure any Mannar might tell you. I won't mention Federate Caldari, because I've personally beaten that particular horse into a nice pair of boots.

+ Caldari diaspora.  What were the quirks of early life for those Caldari who grow up outside of the State (but not as part of the Federation)?  E.g., there are tons of Caldari Business Tribunal stations just about everywhere, and lots of Caldari in the Republic and Kingdom, et cetera.

+ Did I mention Vherokoir and Ni-Kunni?  Yeah, I know, I can't spell Vherokoir.  This is why I like watching them, not playing them.

+ Childhoods in general.  Not that I want to see more children, good grief, no, just more people who've thought about how they grew up and what they did before they became a capsuleer.

+ Life in general.   Characters who have complications and responsibilities and aren't just Eggs of Death.

+ Atypical characters in general.  Machine Shamans. Self-loathing Reborn.  Stuff like that.