MG4CSM #1: Capsule Improvements

On some glorious day in the future, I intend to run for CSM my very self.   I've had alot of ideas and I feel sharing a few isn't a bad idea. 

One such idea would be some improvements to the mechanics of the pod, or capsule, a pilot uses for escaping the firey explosion of his ship.

As things stand, when your ship explodes in eve online, your capsule is ejected just before it does so, and it will sit there, zero kilometers from the ship's wreck, until you initate a warp-off.   It can however, warp instantly, a nice bonus.

The problem I see, is that unless you have a great connection and a fairly expensive computer system, during the moments when you ship explodes, your system can often be in less-than-optimal conditions.  This will often lead to lost pods due to "lag", and nobody likes that.

Pods can get very expensive.   It will cost a 4 year player only a paltry few million to keep his or her clone up to date, but when you start plugging it with hardwiring and pirate implant sets, the pricetag can get up about 2 billion ISK!

It's my stance that pods deserve a bit more protection against the elements.  Due to their fragile and expensive nature, it's necessary to give pod-pilots more control over their investments than they already have.

Proposed Changes:

1) Escape vs Eject:  Currently, ejecting from a ship forces the pod out just as it normally would if the ship were to explode.  The eject feature is currently only useful for leaving the ship to board another in space.  If a pilot finds themselves trapped and their shipped doomed, I'd like to see them able to use an "escape" feature, where they would be able to shoot their pod off in a random direction to the tune of 30KM away from the hull.

2) CCP, FIX ship-deaths!: Lag is a serious issue when it comes to pods.  Going from seeing your ship explode to being in a station, without ever seeing your pod, should never happen.  Ship-death mechanics are the same as they've been since 2003.  I would force CCP to ask why lockups happen when a ship death occurs.   Perhaps it's because the camera starts at zero KM from the pod, rendering far too many graphics.   Perhaps just bad coding.  These kind of lockups happen even with recommended hardware, and they shouldn't.  What ever there is to optimize, I'd make sure they'd do it.

3) Pod Killmails:

Let's face it, we all want to know whether or not the typhoon pilot who we killed while going 2K a second really had snake imlants in  (this actually happened to my fleet on the Ossogur gate yesterday).   Pods are a little harder to catch, with my mechanics, lets even it out by making it a little more worthwhile.

4) Corpses & etc:

Salvageable Corpses?  I think so! This isn't really an original idea, just a pirate's wet dream that's been around for awhile.  Let players dig through the husk of dead enemy to pull out slightly used implants.   Maybe even take the twenty bucks and the 25% off quafe coupon in their wallet, while your at it.  And ofc, a slight improvement to the UI.  I've got a few thousand corpses in containers across the universe, let's make names click-able and corpses search-able.   Going to need that to get my mantelpiece in order if walking in stations ever comes around.

Conclusion:

By making pods just a little more viable to save, I think we'd see more people going the extra mile and using some implants.  The escape mechanic means we may see more people leaving their ship behind in favor of their implants, and free ships are always nice (If you can get your fleet to stop firing in time, of course)  And of course, we get some nice rewards for hunting down pods too, so we'll have more incentive to get those pod killmails.   

-MirrorGod

Up for CSM sometime after 2013