Way back around 1998 I was exposed to my first MMO at a friends house. The graphics weren't that great even for the time but the game play was intense and challenging. Most importantly, it was my first time playing a game with a persistent world (mostly). The game was a Dog Fighting Flight Sim called Air Warrior 3 and sadly it was shut down by EA in 2001.
Basically it was War Thunder with worse graphics, far better controls (joystick required), and hundreds or even thousands of pilots all over the world all fighting each other in one online world that players effected by taking bases and expanding their territory. There were three teams, the A, B, and C team and they would fight 24 hours a day to maintain and expand their control of the map.
Besides the awesome dog fighting, there were also bombers like the B-17 which had spots for Gunners. So as a B-17 Pilot you would first recruit 5 or more Gunners that were real players. Then you would take off and fly to your objective. Should enemy fighters approach the Gunners would unleash holy hell on them and a team of good gunners could drop countless fighters before the B-17 was forced to land or everyone ejected.
This created a very cool system of teamwork where pilot and gunners talked on comms to each other while working together to achieve their mission and bomb an enemy base.
Fast forward to yesterday when I first saw the trailer for Gunjack CCP's new game they announced and the two things merged in my head.
Watch the trailer to see what I mean (and notice how scared they were when I showed up on grid):
I can forgive the mispronunciation of my name but I'm glad CCP is including me in their trailers now.
On a serious note, wouldn't it be ridiculously cool if Super Carriers were like this? If a Super was an 11 man ship with 80 Battleship sized guns? and maybe 2 Dread Turrets?
This would increase the "Player Cost" to put them on the field because they would be useless without a full crew. That would possibly discourage them being overused and instead move them more towards alliance flagships as they were originally intended.
Unfortunately, this fantasy isn't likely to happen because Gunjack is planned to be a VR game and maybe even a Mobile Game. Not to mention that the EVE universe hasn't historically allowed direct player control. Every thing is orbit, approach, keep at range, or at best double click and manually fly, despite how awesome it would be to fly a interceptor with a Joystick.
If CCP were to do something like this I imagine it would break their servers because every shot would be aimed and therefor they would need hit bubbles, bullet tracking for millions of bullets, and probably a ton of other things to make it happen.
But it would be sufficiently cool that I think it would be a good investment for them and it would be a good way to bring some old players back.