Talk:Ship crews
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Comments from a colleague
1) Why? After reading the document, I still do not understand what a ship crew would add to my ship, and why I would get one. If you want to play the 'its more realistic' card here then I think the issue would never get passed. There needs to be an advantage for the player.
Erik Finnegan 13:02, 23 July 2009 (UTC): I thought that I had mentioned that. Benefit is the added bonus to the ship's effectivity. And an additional effect on the game-play experience is quite simlar to T3 cruiser operation. On T3, being shot down (not ejecting in time) will make you lose some random skill points. With crew, this effect will be applied to all ship classes, yet "light": when you get shot (not shot down, this time), i.e. you go into armor, you will lose crew. And losing them, means they have died and are gone forever.
You will have to care for your crew, train them beforehand, and bringing them back home from a fight, means, you are bringing home a part of you. Because you put time and effort into their training.
Vaganza 23:41, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
The crew will give you improved capabilities. For example: having a reactor crew with a capability of 3% they will increase the capacitor recharging by 3% per minute.
One of the major benefits is, that these crews can be changed like other fitting parts, and now it comes, without making a head of capacity or cpu power or availiable slots, where you normaly would insert an item to get the same bonus.
2) Increasing crew skill by actions (module activation, warp, etc) is a bad idea in my opinion. For one, it reminds me of my World of Warcraft days, grinding my Wand skill to 200. Second, this mechanic is just going to lead to people feeling the need to grind the skill to the highest level before a crew is considered useful. Which in turn is going to cause people to find ways to gain crew skill level as easily as possible (shooting an asteroid over and over, or an NPC pirate who is getting remote repped at the same time so he never dies, etc etc). All of this is not fun gameplay. Additionally, this method of skill progression is very un-eve like. Nowhere in eve are skills increased by actions. Why would this one be different?
| Vaganza 14:15, 23 July 2009 (UTC) |
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| Because this idea belongs to Erik, I can only guess about the deep thoughts behind. But I think it's an approach of finding an alternative way of gaining skills/knowledge/capabilities to items and or perhaps NPCs and/or players. To me, at this point, it is not important we can take other ways or at least stay at what I described in "training in order to get the next leveled crews / leaders is handled like production." Blueprint invention and so on. Albeit this might be interesting to have an alternate way of gaining knowledge or functionality. |
Erik Finnegan 18:14, 23 July 2009 (UTC): The critique points out a valid flaw in the simple idea of module activation. Either we can tie crew skill to more complex "success criteria" (missions?! :-/) or we should really stick to the "production" idea as mentioned.
Vaganza 23:41, 23 July 2009 (UTC) Here two points which may take effect on the capabilities of the crews:
- The player can make training missions. But not like players make normal missions now, these missions come up like the story line missions. Depending on the "activity" of the crew and the time passed by since the last mission. So to go and fight your friends for hours becomes less relevant. For example a training mission can be granted when the player has made 20 activity-days, which means 20 days where at least one activity, longer than (f.e.)3-5 minutes, has taken place. This is still not a weak solution but perhaps an aproach.
- We take the functionality of activity days and combine them with a capability increase of a few percent of the base value up to a maximum. In RL you also have multiple steps of learning, first you learn something and later only the repetition of the learned makes you becoming firm in it. There can also be a flexible increase of needed activity days for the next capability increase, like we have it in the skilling, f.e 1 day, 5 days, 20 days, 50 days ...
When we stay at the production way it'll be easier for ccp to realize, cause they don't have to implement an invention. They can use the crews like items for calculation. For the first step this would match basic requirements.
3) Making this crew idea mandatory for capital ships is a good way to get vuk, the goons, larkonis, etc to vote No. I'm sure they're not looking to further increase the work/skill load on capital pilots.
| Vaganza 14:15, 23 July 2009 (UTC) |
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| I'd say that it is not mandatory for caps, the idea was just to be a bit more relaistic, depending on really big ships. But this point is absolutly not important! For me it's fully ok when we skip this. |
Erik Finnegan 18:14, 23 July 2009 (UTC): I did not think at realism in the first place. The ships would still be operated by more personnel than we would display in the "crew slots". What you see are probably the team leaders. But anyway, the crew should not be mandatory. As the RP-intro says, it is yet another way to improve the effectivity of the ship. As gyrostabilizers, or scanner boosters, ... Only now, this is "modules", which can be improved through training (see above) and you would feel more attached to, because you put effort into it. While an afterburner is either named or not, it stays like that, the crew grows better over time (if you put it to training). And you can even make money of it, like researched blueprints.
