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[Saede Riordan]

She actually only has one clone who does her piloting.

Its like this:
She has one clone that never leaves her pod, ever. That clone is probably mostly brain and some emaciated organs. Its doubtful that body could survive for long outside of the pod.

She has one body that is essentially a 'toy.' this is the body other capsuleers are most likely to run into. Its entirely cybernetic save for her brain, and is loaded with all sorts of tools and gadgets. This body tends to be the one she is the most careful of, since its expensive and not super robust.

She has one body that serves as the 'captain' of the ship she's currently pod piloting. This body is mostly biological with a few augments to allow her to better interface with the ship, but its essentially a public relations position, its good for moral to see Saede around in the flesh then to just have her be a disembodied voice or hologram. (That's her thinking behind it anyway)

She has one all out combat body, designed from the ground up to be a weapon. Almost no one ever actually sees this body, but its around. This body is more biological then her toy body, but its just as heavily modified, the modifications just aren't all non-biological.

And she has three other bodies, very basic, entirely biological save for a few implants, that are designed to be disposable.

At any given time, 2 or 3 Saede's are in Known Space. Most of the time, its the disposable bodies that are about, thus if they are found out and destroyed, not a ton of isk is lost.

[Lyn Farel]

What prevents her to use more than one capsule clone ? Or what prevents Concord to shut her down ? The same plot hole that prevents them to shut down all capsuleers claiming to be pirate loyalists ?

Just being curious about it 

[Saede Riordan]

What prevents her to use more than one capsule clone ? Or what prevents Concord to shut her down ? The same plot hole that prevents them to shut down all capsuleers claiming to be pirate loyalists ?

Just being curious about it 

Nothing really prevents her from using more then one capsule clone, but it would be a pita to have another Saede mechanically, I'm poor irl and I can't afford an identical alt account, lol. Hypothetically possible, but not exactly practical OOC, though maybe when I have more money, it would be kinda cool.

What stops concord from shutting her down is that CONCORD never actually shuts down anything a player does, even if you're shooting CONCORD ships in curse, even if you are espousing pirate loyalties, even if you're helping Sansha Kuvakei uplift people from highsec planets. CONCORD is not all powerful and their ability to punish is not unlimited.

[Esna Pitoojee]

The fact that CCP is unwilling to support the PF of what CONCORD can and would do to capsuleers who break their core rules is one of my great frustrations with the game at the moment.

That said, there is very real evidence that CONCORD can and will deal with people who piss them off badly enough (i.e., banned accounts).

[Lyn Farel]

Yeah that is also the implied explanation that I had in mind... Concord does nothing.

Although as much as you might not have the means to pay or support another account is purely ooc... How do you explain that ic ?

[Gwen Ikiryo]

I kinda struggle to see accounts being banned as something IC at all, considering some of the reasons CCP bans people have absolutely nothing to do with the game. And even for a lot of the ones that do, you'd need a considerable dose of moon logic to explain CONCORD pseudomagically terminating someones ability to use a capsule over, say, using a racial slur while they let people actively murdering them go free.

Better to just suspend your disbelief.

[Aelisha]

Yeah that is also the implied explanation that I had in mind... Concord does nothing.

Although as much as you might not have the means to pay or support another account is purely ooc... How do you explain that ic ?

Maybe becoming a capsuleer is an expensive and intensive process, so much so that even immense personal wealth is no guarantee of a candidate being able to afford the procedure.  Essentially the need to pay a subscription may represent a wider 'backing' to a given capsuleer's continued membership in our elite society.  Self funding is a possibility, though would be prohibitive and our disconnect from worldly affairs might cause problems unless you have a house-staff managing your estate.  National funding is clearly the province of naval/corporate capsuleers for the NPC factions, and so unlikely to be the root of our ascension.  So benefactors from within the remaining groups of interested parties may be the means by which capsuleers insufficiently wealthy to capitalise on winning the genetic lottery can buy in regardless. 

PLEX circumvents this by piping the money earned from being a capsuleer into paying off the cost of being one (clone staff, medical experts, guaranteed accommodation in all stations, new clones and all of the cleaning up after us that others have to do), but if you're not PLEXed then you're being backed somehow. 

Capsuleers are expensive creatures when you think about it.  Our bodies likely need a whole range of monitoring.  Our deaths require new bodies, as do our hobbies, fashion choices (resculpts and so forth) and injuries significant enough that one would rather re-clone than heal.  Legally we're a burden, with a swathe of trespass, murder and treaty violations following combative missioning, let alone military actions as a third party.  Our very existence keeps a lot of people in work, and that cost all comes to a head when the month passes and your license is up for review.

Pay CONCORD to tolerate the bull-poop your existence forces them to deal with, or have fun in mortal society.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

I don't mean any offense in saying this, but I've been continually baffled since day one by the insistance of Eve Roleplayers when it comes to reconciling everything in the game ICly.

CCP didn't think about this stuff, you know? I can bet you ninety-nine percent that their train of thought when making the PLEX system was, "Hmm, we need a name for these new in game time cards. What would vaguely make sense? Oh, I know, pilots licenses!" and that was the end of it. They didn't think about the implications of making the subscription system an in-universe system, or of the apparant contradictory omnipresent nature of CONCORD it would imply. They just thought it would be a cool idea (and/or a great way for them to make money) and did it.

It seems bizzare to me to draw radical and setting-altering implications about an organization based on what is very obviously done out of pure OOC pragmatism. I mean, sure, a couple of devs might have made offhanded comments vaguely validating it, but devs have made offhanded comments validating stuff that is, frankly, pure nonsense to anyone with a basic understanding of the setting on repeated occasions.

So when it comes to either believing CONCORD has crazy fairy powers which they for some reason only decide to use in weirdly specific and obtuse circumstances based on a couple of abstract sources very obviously rooted in out-of-game mechanical nessecities, or just shrugging and gliding over it based on the numerous more direct IC ones (missions) that suggest they don't, I don't really get why people insist on the former so sternly.

[Aelisha]

No offense taken, I just find it fun to speculate and build it into private RP.  It doesn't break my RP for people to think otherwise, and this very firmly plants itself into 'mutual consent' territory as a topic to raise in a scene. 

I just find fun in finding the most plausible fiction for the inconvenient reality, but there's plenty I place into suspension of disbelief, so I really can't speak out against that perfectly valid (indeed most common for a reason) approach to the elephant in the room.

[Gwen Ikiryo]

No offense taken, I just find it fun to speculate and build it into private RP.  It doesn't break my RP for people to think otherwise, and this very firmly plants itself into 'mutual consent' territory as a topic to raise in a scene. 

I just find fun in finding the most plausible fiction for the inconvenient reality, but there's plenty I place into suspension of disbelief, so I really can't speak out against that perfectly valid (indeed most common for a reason) approach to the elephant in the room.

Ahh, well, that's fair. I didn't mean to poop on anyone elses roleplay approaches.

I'm sorry, I kinda got a little worked up about that for no reason. I had a frustratingly long discussion about it recently with someone much more stubborn.

[Samira Kernher]

Because "mechanics are IC, period" is a better blanket rule than allowing RPers to debate "that one thing is IC, but that other thing is OOC". It keeps everyone on the same page. It may at times be a non-sensical or silly page, but at least it's the same page.

When RPers start thinking they can pick and choose what is and is not IC, based on their own individual preferences, you get drama very fast.

[Aelisha]

@Gwen

No problem.  The elephant in the room is a common sticking point, and as Samira points out, there are blanket approaches to deal with it.  I personally believe in an approach where I can RP my interpretation in a microcosm (of people who have consented to a shared vision), ever ready to redact/retcon or ignore that microcosm should it be provably shown to be a false premise in the future.

IMO my favoured approach is largely inspired by latter interpretations of Auteur theory, or the interplay between creator, camera and audience.    In classical Auteur theory, the director is argued to put his stamp on a piece of work, more so than the writer.  Modern interpretations have extended this into a feedback loop between the director, the writer (hereafter referred to in tandem as the 'creator') the medium and an audience.

An audience's perception of a creator's work is influence by the medium (camera) and by the possibly false premises upon which they base their judgements.  The greater the effort put in by a creator to explain every aspect of his creation, the less room for interpretation remains.  Should the creation be 'fuzzy' due to design, neglect or an inappropriate medium, the audience gains the power to define potentially contradictory interpretations of the final product.  If left unattended, these premises may themselves become canonical to sub-groups.

In a less extreme end-result, the creator observes the interpretations of the audience, interacting with them (if infrequently) and quashing the outright implausible (in the creator's vision) or fostering the possible.  In this way, the audience feeds back onto the creator, influencing any progressive creation or iteration that they might engage in. 

To turn a phrase: "so long as one is willing to accept that the majority of their active output will be put onto the scrapheap of ideas, one has the power to lay a brushstroke on a master piece without ever having played a true role in it's creation" - be prepared for your interpretation to be wrong, but if you wish to influence the creation of content your interpretation will have value (on or off of the scrapheap).

For the record, I consider suspension of disbelief itself to be input.  Having participated in the world, even if choosing not to address the gaps and fallacies, is input in and of itself.  Opting not to question the creator of a product is itself feedback, arguably of the most positive kind (it may be interpreted as 'nothing is wrong' with no room for interpretation of that message). 

[Gwen Ikiryo]

Because "mechanics are IC, period" is a better blanket rule than allowing RPers to debate "that one thing is IC, but that other thing is OOC".

When RPers start thinking they can debate what is and is not IC, you get drama very fast.

The idea of applying "blanket rules" to roleplayers is kinda crazy on any level, in my opinion. If anything, attempts at enforcement of a certain way to do things tend to lead to more drama, not less.

If my 11 years of MMO roleplay have taught me anything, it is that roleplayers will almost universally do as they like and bend both the game and the setting in various directions to suit their own perceptions and tastes, regardless of what anyone says or does about it. Eve very much included. Hell, this thread is a minor example in of itself!

Besides, we're already doing what you're saying. If I took that rule to it's logical conclusion, all our characters are just crazy people writing about themselves going to bars while staring at chat windows, and Capsuleers are literally not alllowed outside of their quarters ever based on that semi-IC blurb that pops up when you hit the CQ exit. Lines have already been more or less arbitrarily drawn by the community based on what's fun and what makes sense - I'm just wondering why they've been drawn here in paticular, since the idea of GodCONCORD is neither of those things.

[Samira Kernher]

That's going to extremes, Gwen.

There is still some interpretation available and necessary even with a largely blanket rule. Namely, in any area where the mechanic is contradicted by another official source such as another mechanic or clear dev/lore statement. In that case it is necessary for the community to determine how to resolve this discrepancy in official sources, until and unless CCP does it themselves.

PLEX, for example, has no contradictory mechanic, lore, or dev comment, and it has several statements that validate its existence. Ergo, there is no sense in ignoring or arguing against its existence.

The "door" issue, on the other hand, is a case where lore, dev comments, and even other mechanics (see the Thera station descriptions) all indicate that capsuleers can and do leave their quarters. Thus, interpretation does come into play there and players do have to decide how to resolve this conflict.

The key thing, is that it is the game world itself, and the game world's creators, that determines what is and is not canon. It is not personal opinion and preference by the RPers. As a counter example, in WoW you will get many, many players arguing that certain classes are not allowed to use certain abilities in RP, purely because it doesn't fit with their vision of the world and even when several other sources validate its existence within lore, because to these RPers mechanics is treated as a strictly OOC thing and can and should be ignored whenever it doesn't fit their idea of the world (for example, Heroic Leap for Warriors. Many RPers will call you a bad RPer for using it in RP, because they refuse to believe in a universe where warriors are anything other than normal people with normal skills. When told that it's right there in the mechanics, used by both PCs and NPCs, they will say, "well mechanics are OOC and so should be ignored!"). This will often devolve into the players arguing that lore or dev commentary that supports the mechanics is just in place to justify a silly OOC mechanic, and therefore should also be ignored. It's a slippery slope of players picking and choosing what they want to accept.

Players should never be allowed to be the ones to pick and choose what is and is not canon and what is and is not IC. If the content creators themselves create an atmosphere where there is room for interpretation, then it is fine to debate that specific topic because there is no straightforward answer. But when there IS a straightforward answer that is unopposed by any other official source, it is senseless and destabilizing to argue against it just because you the player don't like it or think it's wack.

[Lyn Farel]

Because "mechanics are IC, period" is a better blanket rule than allowing RPers to debate "that one thing is IC, but that other thing is OOC". It keeps everyone on the same page. It may at times be a non-sensical or silly page, but at least it's the same page.

When RPers start thinking they can pick and choose what is and is not IC, based on their own individual preferences, you get drama very fast.

They already do that, even for those almighty sacred ingame mechanisms that everyone tries to find his own explanation about them, completely far stretched half of the time precisely because those contentious game mechanisms make no sense...

So no, game mechanisms are not an unifying thing among roleplayers, far from it...