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| My Hangar in Ishomilken |
When I first started playing Eve I named my few ships according to ever changing ideas that would pop into my head. After science-fiction authors. Movie titles. Rock songs. Pink Floyd albums. Video game characters. Scientists. Moons in our solar system. Old girlfriends. You name it and I probably did it for at least a few weeks at one point or another. Along the way I started to develop a sense of superstition about certain names as my hangar started to grow and I started flying more and more ships. I might try a new name out only to have that ship explode shortly after undocking... well that name must be bad luck. Time to move on. The first time I flew a Daredevil I named it "Murdock" and every single one since then has been named the same. The one time I changed it, the one time, I lost it landing on a Gate to a smartbomber.
Yesterday I asked Tweetfleet about ship names. The responses I got were very similar to my own experiences. Everyone seems to have their own ideas about how they name their ships. Some have conventions they adhere to regularly, some are just random "on the spot" decisions, and others have complex and detailed ideas about how they name their ships. It is, as I expected, a wide spectrum. Which is good as far as I'm concerned. It proves to me at least, that Eve players continue to love their spaceships. A fact which shouldn't be news to anyone.
Years ago I proposed an idea that would attach information about a ship builder to the actual ship. An idea I called the "Maker's Mark" back then. And it got me wondering about ship names and if there is anything that could be changed about them. They are one of the few places in Eve where every player gets to be creative, a place to stamp your own personality, in a game often lacking. Is it ok for ship names to be so transitory in nature?
An obvious way to preserve the ship name would be for it to live on in the kill-mail. Right now it does not obviously. But it certainly could. Although I'm sure, like most things, the amount of time needed to make that change could be grossly inappropriate and wasteful of precious Dev time.
Another idea would be to preserve the ship name along with the saved fit. There is already a place in each fit to "name" the fit, why not have that name transfer to a new ship when you fit it? Imagine how much time this would save during mass-fitting for Corps and Alliances? It would certainly make organizing much easier. The ship name could be changed again at any point, but the idea has merit I think. I know, for me personally, it would help. I often fit up a new ship under time constraints, when time is of the essence. And even I have undocked in ships named "Rixx's Federation Navy Comet" before.
Or maybe I should stop meddling. I dunno. Maybe things are just fine the way they are now? What are your thoughts?
Comments
I hope they aren't waiting until they do a big overhaul of fitting, to allow multi-fitting, fitting from hangars etc, because this really does seem like a small feature that would be easy to implement and, as you said, save a step during a fitting session.
I usually name my ships after the hull they're in - boring I know :)
Thanks for raising the subject, Rixx! I hope CCP will at least respond and say "No, because...".
Right now I'm naming ships after whatever snippet of song is playing when I fit it. This results in them being largely nonsensical to anyone but me.
The majority of mine are either something that struck me about the hull or variations on the meaning of a given ships class name then translated into Latin... I also use a LOT of Sindarin (LOFR elvish) names.
As I live in Anoikis and any ship stored in a POS becomes the "property" of the Corp that owns the POS, I use, as many in WSpace do, various symbols in addition to the ships names to keep straight what's mine and what's not.
The thing I'd like to see is the ships name as a graphic on the hull like kill marks. Plus why in the hell can't we name our PODs and have the name stick?? =]