Welcome to the eighth installment of the EVE Blog Banter , the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here . Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s topic comes to us from Ga’len at The Wandering Druid of Tranquility. He asks: “What new game mechanic or mechanics would you like to see created and brought into the EVE Online universe and how would this be incorporated into the current game universe? Be specific and give details, this is not meant to be a ‘nerf this, boost my game play’ post like we see on the EVE forums.”

Ship Boarding!

Part of the unique ability in the X-Universe series of games from EgoSoft was the ability for the player to script almost every action in the game. Some truly ingenious scripts were released like Carrier Commands, MARS fire control and ship boarding using marines. Now if we could use the NPC passengers in EVE Online for this purpose, it would make ship capturing a possibility instead of destroying a ship every time and looting it (such a waste of good resources).

The conditions for this to work is that Marines or Mercenaries need to be in your cargo hold for this to work and the target ship can also stock similar personnel to defend his ship. Obviously new skills and support skills needs to be trained like “Boarding Crews” etc and passenger transportation would actually be useful (Personally I have exotic dancers and spiced wine on board my ships).

Sample logs as you activate a module that sends a raiding party onto target’s ship when their shields fail (it would be great if we had an Ion cannon weapon which only affected shields?):

Marine Leader : “Approaching airlock… activating cutting lasers … we have a good seal.. get ready men!”

Loud bangs and Fighting ensues and after some time, the experience of the crew and the defense crew determines if the target capsuleer should be expelled from the ship and sent home.

A quick search for “Salvage Tug” on the Features and Ideas Discussion shows a lot of people wish there was a new class of ship to enhance gameplay. With ship boarding, it’s conceivable that boarded ships are then towed away to a station for re-use or profit.

Of course, the exotic dancers on board should be claimed

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