NPCs and Blades - fundamentally flawed

Mishi

Commander
Aug 14, 2024
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Mishi
In the many years of fantasizing about my own little gameplay loops, I've always been drawn back to "Be your own captain". Everybody wants to pilot their own shiny ship and they want them to operate at their maximum potential. So obviously, to maximize your potential you want actual humans filling roles in your expensive ship and not NPCs or Blades. I see a lot of problems with this.

Example 1
You have a big org. You have an Idris. If you are going out on a specific mission with a specific goal, yea I see no problem filling it with actual people. Same could be said for other bigger capital military ships. IE you know you are going out for 2 hours to provide QRF for a pioneer building a base for an orgie err. ...um org person.
Example 2
You have an Orion or a Reclaimer. I don't think it's unreasonable to have 2-3 friends with you to help with the main goal. They can swap to turrets if need be. Still might be screwed if it's just the Reclaimer.
Example 3
Odyssey, Pioneer, Kraken variants and Merchantman. My own personal gameplay loops. So yes. I would love to have dedicated actual RL humans go out with me. They are expensive ships. But you mean to tell me that I'm going to be able to tie up someone to a boring turret position for who knows how long, and maybe nothing happens? And how do I pay the people I have to pay? How do I leverage what I may OR NOT make. You could argue a contract for a flat percentage of whatever you earn. But in a game in which everything takes a long time to get going, and your profits are probably going to be determined by how long you stay out, how are you ever going to have IRL people? Is it fair that for these gameplay loops you pretty much have to have NPCs or Blades? You could also argue that yes, you need to just have NPCs and Blades, but hire people in other ships to protect you. I don't see this making a lot of sense financially either. Unless it's like a batphone. The other aspect of this is the old argument of the casual vs the hardcore player. These are probably going to be very long gameplay loops...especially exploration. As a casual player, it would suck to not be able to experience a lot bc your experience is tied up behind a sweet spot of when action might happen. I dunno. Sorry if that was incoherent or a rant.

The ideas I had, tbh I don't ever see happening but here goes. You have NPCs, Blades and Robot blanks. You fill your ship like normal with NPCs and Blades, but if something happens, you can call on comms that you have room for 4 turret gunners and an engineer. You get these volunteers from your org, and theyre scattered doing their own gameplay loops. They go to a casting station...like a VR booth. Maybe its only in cities. Maybe you can put one in a ship. Maybe there is even a caster ship that specializes in it. But you jack in to the robots, and the NPCs take a break or whatever. Maybe they get On The Job training bonus lol. You have your gunners/engineers until the threat is over and then they jack off errr jack out. Everybody is happy bc it is quantifiable time to be paid. The casuals can do something they probably wouldn't normally be able to do. You could potentially tie it to non org slots, or even into my other idea (no ships for F2P). And to be completely honest, I don't think it breaks the "MAGIC" or "Suspension of Disbelief" rule for RSI.

The other idea I had was that if you were to play F2P you can't own a ship. You have to fill ship roles. Maybe they have stats or ranking for what they do. Pay someone more if they are a badass turret gunner or engi.

These are my own personal wishes. The only way I see the most fun happening is with a drop in drop out mechanic. What will honestly probably happen is they will put so much emphasis on making your NPCs and Blades the best they can be so your ship is only IRL crewed in very specific loops. And then you cry when your ship blows up with those assets.
 

Mudhawk

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Well, interesting idea as such.
It probably works well inside one system. So no sweat there. Do the remote worker thing.
As soon as a jumpgate is involved you're f**ked though.
After all the only way data goes through gates is n specialised couriers.
So no Long Range Remote Working (LRRW).
Doesn't stop you from bringing a couple of slave-freighters with a master-ship in the middle though. That might work with jumpgates too.
But that's a very dedicated job right there. Nothing like hopping on/off at your leasure.
If you're just by your semi-automated lonesome...
Hmmm... maybe you can get a service contract with a talent agency that works in multiple systems?
Emergency hotline style?
Who you gonna call..?
TEST BLASTERS!!
 

wmk

Space Marshal
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You forgot about one more scenario: using NPC crew to guard or operate ships when the owner and regular crew are offline.

Once the full persistence is in game, all ships will stay in the Public Universe even when you logout, especially capital ones and spacecraft like Bengals. They need to be protected; some of them have or will have automated AA guns or missile launchers, but most of them should be manned, either by humans or by the bots.

I personally hope to use NPCs to operate my larger ships. I guess we would have a simple UI which could be used to assign bots to tasks or stations, and order tasks, like in ArmA / VBS and similar games or simulations. Tell the AI pilot to fly straight at some n-speed, order the crew to enter combat mode and engage at will, etc. Then, before going offline, park in the middle of space and order the crew to protect the ship.

image-is-dark-mysterious-scene-robot-standing-spaceship-robot-is-wearing-white-spacesuit-has-h...jpg
 
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Mishi

Commander
Aug 14, 2024
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Mishi
As soon as a jumpgate is involved you're f**ked though.
Yea, I had a feeling this argument would be made. Like I said, what if there were a cast specific ship. A drop ship of sorts in which you can QRF for any ship within range. Maybe you got 10 dudes on board that are helping mining operation on a couple orions. The call goes out that there's combat. They all cast out of pve and cast into pvp.

You forgot about one more scenario: using NPC crew to guard or operate ships when the owner and regular crew are offline.
You are completely right, I did forget about that. And what would be the easiest mechanic for crew to go home if they wanted to. Especially if you're super far out.
 

Sky Captain

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Oct 13, 2018
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...Everybody wants to pilot their own shiny ship and they want them to operate at their maximum potential. So obviously, to maximize your potential you want actual humans filling roles in your expensive ship and not NPCs or Blades. I see a lot of problems with this.
I appreciate this perspective. The game needs to be programmed to work with or without player-run crew IMHO. But insofar as it is problem to solve: For decades now, gaming companies have been programming large capital-sized spaceships to fly on their own in various games. Players in games already fly against NPC controlled ships. So clearly the technology exists to render an NPC spaceship in 3D, fly it through space, have it manage its resources, and have it shoot at its enemies without a human player being in control. So from one perspective, all that CIG is doing is proposing to do is to expand upon that to allow more player-controllable roles on such a ship. Yes, there are problems to resolve to create truly engaging roles to keep players meaningfully busy on such ships. But that's probably more of a hurdle than CIG coding the ships to run themselves. So watching to see what CIG is saying next about player-run gameplay roles aboard ships (and why those are fun) will be key.
 

Mishi

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Aug 14, 2024
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Mishi
that's probably more of a hurdle than CIG coding the ships to run themselves.
All of my self-made problems with this system and my own wants really boils down to this response. I mean I did both the achievements for arena commander last weekend and when the Idris came out it's all pretty self explanatory. For me I have a lot of late night fever dreams in which I come across as Charlie writing on the whiteboard. Hey! Hey! You know what would be cool!? To be completely honest, for a game that has had very troubled development (disappointingly so recently), I should just be ecstatic that NPCs work and they come soon. I can dream though lol
 
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Shadow Reaper

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You forgot about one more scenario: using NPC crew to guard or operate ships when the owner and regular crew are offline.

Once the full persistence is in game, all ships will stay in the Public Universe even when you logout, especially capital ones and spacecraft like Bengals.
I don’t think this is the plan. I think the owner of a ship will be able to assign permissions to other players to keep a ship playable while he’s away, but someone with that permission will need to be online for the ship to be in the PU. Otherwise it vanishes and reappears where it was if and only if someone with permission who is logged into one of its beds, logs in. If it has no beds, or no players logged into the beds, then the ship will reappear at its home port.

Even very large ships with large numbers of bridge crew all sharing permissions, will likely not be crewed 24/7. That is expecting too much from players and inevitably would result in multi crew ships flying around with a single player onboard—just what CIG wants to avoid. Rather, large ships will probably keep specific play hours and captains will forbid bridge crew from realizing the ship during off hours so that it doesn’t get stollen or destroyed.
 

Mishi

Commander
Aug 14, 2024
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Mishi
multi crew ships flying around with a single player onboard—just what CIG wants to avoid.
I really hope this is the case.

I don't honestly see anything being solidified by CIG anytime soon about over reliance of NPCs so I uh had another fever dream last night when I couldn't sleep.

I'm actually proud of this idea but...I'm going to create another account. May be a cheap pledge, may be a f2p account. The sole purpose of this account is to fill a ship role. Boom problem solved. I bet you this becomes the norm for organizations.

I'll be flying around on my main, making money while my 2nd account is asleep in a turret.
 
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Shadow Reaper

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Shadow Reaper
The sole purpose of this account is to fill a ship role. Boom problem solved. I bet you this becomes the norm. . .
Absolutely. Some players will create several accounts to try to fill all the slots on their favorite ship and then find they can’t manage all those PCs, while others will create PCs to crew exploration ships with dozens of others who meet twice a week to explore the farthest reaches. The latter makes far more sense to me.
 
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