The Pilots are capable of staying in the Pods indefinitely, but could just as easily do just as Wheri says and stay outside, running for the Pod whenever battle stations is sounded. Personally, and from some of the articles I've read, I get the impression that both are going to happen based on the Pilot's temperament.

Picture the sort of Pilot who would stay constantly hooked into the Pod and never emerge. Said Pilot feels more like a ship than a human being, interacts purely over the comms channels, and treats the crew as a disposable part of the ship's infrastructure, only existing to them as a disembodied voice giving orders. Then picture a Pilot who lives amongst his crew and is an inspirational leader, who mourns whenever they die and feels a shiver of unease every time he hooks into the pod.

Then picture all the possibilities between these two extremes.

An EVE character can function perfectly well never leaving the pod for the entire career as a pilot. The extent to which a character DOES leave the pod will probably be one of the defining characteristics of a Pod Pilot.

Finally, a thought I've had about the pods was that they create a full-sensory VR experience for the Pilot to fly by- feeling damage to the ship as pain, hearing missiles launch and explode, and so on. In theory, there is no reason why this couldn't simulate another environment. Perhaps the pilots will create a "Chat Room" where they can manifest as humanoid (or whatever) avatars to interact with each other during long periods spent in the pods (EG Asteroid Mining).

Also, perhaps an admin should start a thread about Pods and transfer the applicable stuff over. Whilst potentially useful, it IS getting off the stated topic a little.

Whilst no longer playing EVE myself I was a player for over a year and have several issues of E-ON magazine. One of the stories published in the magazine- and therefore presumably canon- detailed the pod and a pilot emerging into the rest of the ship. Others on the site give hints about other aspects of Pod Piloting. Here are the facts about the Pod which can be found in canon, and if there's a serious problem I'll try to dig up where I found a specific piece of info:-

- The Pilot IS floating naked in a tank of goo, body comatose, whilst plugged into the ship's computer.

- The tank provides full life support and maintenece of the body- a Pilot can remain in the tank for a theoretically unlimited length of time with no     physical side effects.

- The Pilot can unplug from the pod, emerge into the ship (after washing and dressing), and interact with the crew. The ship presumably loses all the advantages of being pod-piloted, and quite probably is LESS effective than a non-pod ship in this state.

- The pod is behind securely locked blast doors that can only be opened from INSIDE the pod when the Pilot is plugged in. This is a security measure to prevent a mutinous crew from killing a comatose Captain in the pod.

- The Pilot inside the pod "feels" the ship as if it was his/her own body, and so is able to control it more effectively.

- Frigates have no crew, and just require a pod pilot. Larger ships are more complicated, and fully automating them would require a computer so complex it would have a chance to go rogue as the Rogue Drones did- hence the need for a crew. Pod piloted ships do, however, have significantly smaller crews than standard ones.

- There are obviously no bangs, zooms, or other sounds in space- likewise, weapon fire is probably not visible to the human eye. The Pilot will, however, react faster to such stimuli than to a message reading "Incoming missile" or "Laser fire from Ship A", so the computer converts such date into a full-sensory display.

There may be a lot of "Stunningly Beautiful" women out there, but I see a lot of the guys aren't exactly homely. The only ones who aren't incredibly good looking are mutated/scarred/somehow hideous- one extreme or the other. RPing is a form of wish-fulfilment, and how many people, deep down inside, want to be "Average"?

Likewise, I think the "Slut" stereotype comes from the same place. Men playing a Slut are acting the way they wish real women would act, Women are acting the way they would never dream of acting in RL but still fantasise about anyway.

As for gender- I've never played a Female character either in an MMOG or tabletop RP. I need to identify with the characters I play on some level, and I just can't seem to manage that with female PCs. It probably doesn't help that there are a couple of RL friends who play female characters very badly in Tabletop RP, which probably put me off even trying it myself.

Twilight Imperium 3?

That seems like a rather difficult one to play by email without a program for doing it... But if there's a good way to pull it off, count me in. I love that game!

EVE does have the most interactive environment of any RPG at the moment. Elements like the completely player-driven economy are already in place, and they have plans to make it even more interactive.

The planned future is to have the environment react to player actions- if a lot of people mine in one system, the ore spawns stop and/or start become less valuable types, and killing lots of mobs will increase the security rating of a system. Eventually, the borders of the Empires will shift based on player actions- if more Caldari missions are completed by players in that region than Gallente ones, a system will change hands.

In my opinion, this is how player-interactivity will increase. The same mission grinding, but insteade of being a futile money-spinner, you'll also be contributing to the success of your faction. And instead of randomly hassling people, griefers will become Privateers who sabotage those efforts. The MMOG formula stays the same, but the setting now reacts to players.

((An interesting concept for RPers to gather around, though a bit of an obvious one. I suppose that with my delay in getting involved with EVE I'll have a chance to think about how my re-activated character would fit in with such an idea. Everyone needs a place to start though.))

The Devs have said on the EVE forums that it's actual footage of the early-model engine itself (we saw all the rooms and avatars they had set yup to date). Age of Conan might have some competition for my time after all once this expansion comes out...

They're apparently going all-out on the human character system for a hyper-realistic environment. Seems a bit odd for an add-on to an already popular game, but- CCP is now merged with White Wolf, and has confirmed that it will be realeasing a World of Darkness MMORPG at some point in the future.

Perhaps the Ambulation project for EVE is just a way of testing out their ideas for a traditional human-perspective online game before they begin full development of WoD online?

They had announced that they intended to expand the EVE setting beyond just spacecraft, and the first step towards that would be atmospheric flight and planetside action. Then, they suddenly put that on the back burner and announce that Ambulation is the way forward, right after they announce the merger with White Wolf and the deal to make WoD online. It's the only explanation for this which makes any sense to me, though perhaps someone who knows more about game development will tell me all the ways I'm wrong.

Yes, for all it's upgrades, it's still a Civ game. So all the quirks are still there. A good game nonetheless.

The ideal method from my point of view would be to introduce a detailed wound system such as Seed had, which has the potential for death. Remove any chance of INSTANT death, and have a fallen character need to be stabilised by someone else before they bleed to death. Introduce a ransom  or slavery system or the like to encourage people to capture fallen characters rather than kill finish them off. And have realistic healing times and infection chances, so that people will really feel the effects of combat even if they don't get killed.

Permadeath gives people a very good reason to think twice about combat. This means that it's a good thing in games where combat is possible but not the central focus, but bad for combat-oriented games.

I agree that running a greatly accellerated timescale (one week to one year?) and having the Pendragon family system to provide you with extra "lives" would be interesting to see in an online game, though not a very likely one for anything but a niche market. I'm just caught by the concept of applying the Pendragon mechanic, as I've just started running the "Great Pendragon" campaign at my local games club.

A more practical solution, for games that want to have combat but not have it too much as a focus, would be to have "Fate Points". When dead, your character actually is only badly injured or otherwise has a near-miss, and loses a Fate Point. If a character with no Fate Points dies, then it's Permadeath. A character would start off with a certain amount (One? Three?) and then slowly accumulate them with the passage of time (one per three months real time?).

This would mean that a character who avoids combat won't be in that much risk, unless they're the target of a determined campaign of assassination.  Characters who repeatedly engage in combat, however, will eventually have their number come up. It also means that if two characters take an intense dislike to each other they can try to kill each other off, and will eventually succeed. There could also be certain high-risk situations judged by the GMs where Fate Points don't apply and all deaths are Permadeath, though players should never be able to enter these without being aware of them.

Although laking the charm of the Pendragon suggestion, the Fate Point idea gets rid of the most glaring problems with Permadeath whilst still making it possible to permanently eliminate a character. It would also be much easier to implement than a complex family system, only needing a means to keep track of how many "lives" a character has each time they respawn.