[mod]Please do not respond to provocative comments with escalation.[/mod]
Miz, a short while ago you were in conflict with quite a lot of the people you encountered in antagonistic roleplay to a point where communicating with you was problematic. This tone reminds me of the tone you had before.
There are two really critical things I want to achieve:
Excellent that you list them. This helps us with criticism that is actually constructive.
1. The lack of crew, from what I've heard from a lot of people, this isn't that big of a deal, so I'm not going to worry about it too terribly.
A lot of people do this to go around dealing with guilt-by-proxy for when they lose ships. Are you going for this because it is unpleasant that people die in this little world we have in our heads when your characters fuck up? When you do? When you lose a ship?
If not, I'd sure like to know why, because it IS a big deal to not have crew. A huge deal. It bespeaks wanting less consequence, primarily. People won't truck with that because they feel it is central to have consequence, but the more acceptable ways of getting around 'it' (where 'it' herein is the risk moreso than anything else)
to some extent include:
-Piloting zero-crew ships, primarily,
-Having very expensive and somewhat more effective escape technology on your own vessels, which you sort of handwave into making you a less effective fighter somehow, and
-Offering crew members the capacity to back themselves up mentally as part of their employment contracts, so even if their lives end, something of them can rejoin their families or go on in the world or
whatever.You'll notice all these things have consequences; you'll notice all these things are not perfect for the purpose of fulfilling your wants. Why should they be? Why should your character get everything she wants? Why isn't a bit of sobering risk and responsibility a good thing?
2. The ability to quickly and easily get in and out of my pod, so that I can wander my ship, work on stuff, etc. I don't want to have an Android holo-body, I want to actually do it.
Where is it explicitly stated that the process of getting out of your pod is necessarily endlessly slow? Or all pods, for that matter? I'm a pretty experienced roleplayer, and I would have about zero problems with someone having a sixty second egress/ingress procedure for the capsule, even if it was maintained that this was true in one of the scientific articles, or if a dev said it, without quite a fucking lot of context for why it was necessarily thus. A ten second one. A five second one. We're playing characters in a pretty advanced world - you want to claim your character dumps a million isk or whatever into developing a mechanism to allow for such things on every new ship, a mechanism tailored to her? Fine by me. You want to claim her bodies are engineered for it? Wunderbar.
What most people will have a problem with is that your vessel will be capable of operating at more than a shadow of its full capacities without a pilot in the pod. Note that the pilot in the pod of your vessels does not have to be you; capsuleers can be passengers.
Note that it will make sense to plenty of individuals that your ship may navigate, perhaps on emergency systems, when there is no pilot in it. One does not engineer a hundred million isk vessel without a backup control system should the pilot go and experience mindlock; most any vessel's gonna have some kind of black box or backup bridge allowing the on-board crew to have a shot at getting it home. If most capsuleers choose to tear it out because they figure it's useless to them once they go into mindlock (which is short-sighted, as a cure might someday be found for their condition), well, you can be the exception.
If there is an alternative fluid that my pod could be filled, or even if you used the same fluid and manipulate it somehow to drop the time involved in getting in and out of it, I'll even take that.
Probably best.
I do still think that the softlink that I can use to control the ship while doing mundane things in safe areas is fine.
It's not. Crew's okay for some things. People have gotten away with 'I power down my vessels when I log out,' though. Think on that for a bit - I can already see useful implications.
And your the one who suggested the neural collar thing, to replace the scanner with.
Hoo boy. If you mean my idea here, not replace. Add to; partially circumvent, possibly, but I mentioned it precisely
because you did not explain why you were trying to circumvent it. It was a shot in the dark.
Why do I want my character like this? Why don't I? Why do you play your character like you do?
I like her like this, I made her like this, yes, I could just go the easy way out and cave in to what everyone is telling me, but I wouldn't have fun playing her like that. I removes her individuality, it removes her conflicts, it means there is no damn reason for me to play her at all.
See, the questions are kind of useful, Nikita.
I suppose I'll preface this next bit by saying that for the length of most of this community's existence in the game, EVE has been prone to housing roleplay communities that build characters that are intensely personal. Because we all mostly adhere to certain shared limitations, it takes less sweeping individual variations to create more marked individuality.
If you come from a roleplaying environment where it takes changing the core of your character template as drastically as you have, which include changes so drastic as to have significant implications for the whole of the setting, which I am prepared to say you have done, you might feel inclined to claim such things necessary.
I would offer you the idea that they're not.
I would offer you the idea that characters need only vary in what they do and think, how they act, and how they tend to choose to act to be seen as different, not in how outlandish their background might be.
Anyway.
I made my character the way I made it for specific reasons; my character was built to get into the most social groups within the capsuleer community it could. I picked the race deliberately, I wrote what I wrote of its social standing, its political outlook, and its history deliberately. I did it because there is obviously only one bloodline that is the top of the food chain in exclusivity.
I play my character the way I do because it meets certain needs for me to have a lot of fun playing it that way (barring these fun little mood swings lately).
It sounds to me like your wants can be summarized as:
1) Something that sticks out and does not seem to be a sheep, or part of the usual patterns, and
2) Something very technically involved, perhaps with the ideas and aesthetic tendencies of a lot of cyberpunk genre fiction.
Put in some more if you want, but that's what I see. That's fine.
But. Most of the things you list as wants are things I perceive to be the wants of someone who is looking to avoid, say, what everyone else is served when they roll up a character. They're not just 'I want to be noticeably unique!' No, they're also 'I want to not have to deal with these silly limitations. They're for squares, man.
Squares.'
NO, ASHAR, THAT'S NOT TRUE! AND YOU'RE FAT.I'm on a regimen, and if it's not the case, you would do well to outline it as such. Right now, it's very easy to see your no-crew thing as consequence dodging, and to see it as dodging a much bigger consequence than the one you're trying to balance it with, namely the mental difficulties or operational limitations or whatever else has been created by all your character's wacky little shifts away from the norm. Preventing subordinates from dying completely is WAY BIG to most folks. It's Not What Capsuleers Are. It's a zebra that thinks it can be a horsie because it makes similar sounds when it runs around the savanna.
It might be helpful to mention that the players who typically get away with - say - claiming not to be a capsuleer or deviate from the norms that define a capsuleer generally get community acceptance because they're doing it to entertain everyone they encounter while maintaining an equivalent or lower level of power available to their character through mechanical and interactive means.
That is to say, the stuff they could do or have done to others as a character does not exceed the stuff they could do or have done as a player. Ciarente's 'Camille Roth' character, for example, is entertaining and not a capsuleer because she brings something to the table, storytelling-wise, without claiming to have access to something other people don't - say, shit-tons of willpower that is to normal capsuleer capacities what they are to baseline capacities, or (not one, but several) extremely illegal and extremely potent artificial intelligences well inside the cluster that put her capacities far above those of the rest of her demographic.
Your wants in terms of individuality are served best by picking something that doesn't make you utterly fucking alien to the class of people you're supposed to be rubbing shoulders with at an equivalent level. But there are some allowable degrees of inequality. What are they? Well.
Verone is the CEO of a large and somewhat powerful group of people with interesting degrees of moral plasticity, let's call it.
Evanda Char is a character with lots of political and diplomatic leverage and a powerful group of people behind her CEO.
Kitara Darkmoon is a longtime associate of my character, one who has formed certain bonds and knows my operational procedures well.
Matariki Rain is someone who's able to invite my character to places wherein my character is vulnerable. So is Ciarente Roth, so is Shalee Lianne.
Nikilaiki Ruutaraha is a character heavily invested in psychological, cybernetic, information warfare, and other lively story arcs with me and has an emotional attachment to my character.
All these characters are played by people who actively navigate the community's opinion of what's a bit much, what's acceptable, and what doesn't fit well with the concepts and feelings highlighted by our common experience playing the game.
I'd accept an implied imbalance in power from all of these characters, some for mechanical reasons (the CEOs can send their people at me) and some for ones related wholly to the quality of the story they tell when they violate the consensus to some degree.
This is what differentiates them from what in other circles are referred to as 'Mary Sues.' When these characters give mine a reason to be sucpicious or outright try to harm me using capacities their players have carved out through establishing strong positions, I react appropriately. When someone I don't know comes by and says, I have me so much willpower that I could corner any given mind-clash league, I usually tell 'em to give me a reason to want that in my world.
That's it, in the end.
You've given us little reason to want these alterations to be a part of the setting, and furthermore, you've cited few reasons for why they meet YOUR wants in a fashion that a variety of alternative solutions do not.
Author
Topic: So...What should I do? (Read 15246 times)