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[Jace]

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]

[Mizhara]

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.

[Jace]

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.

[Samira Kernher]

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....

[Anyanka Funk]

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.

[Elmund Egivand]

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.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

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?

[Jace]

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.

[Jace]

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.

[Esna Pitoojee]

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.

[Samira Kernher]

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.

[Anyanka Funk]

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.

[Gaven Lok ri]

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.

[Elmund Egivand]

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.

[Mizhara]

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.