Player Features and Ideas Discussion

you mean from high sec missions, dont forget the highsec at the end, everything in highsec is worthless but mining and incursions, because not everyone does does, the problem is every noob is introduced to missions or mining

if you want more isk i think youll need to ask for ccp to make tutorials for something else then missions, or put higher bountys...
or find something else to it, like create other different source of income, like from added types of module, like incursions or WHs, but some other type of high sec missions.. or change how missions work

Then why not mix pve and pvp?

First Problem/Fix Needed:

1a Make Pve so you can use pvp fittings, pvp fittings are short terms high power fittings (Power = DPS or Tank or/and Both)
1b Make Pvp fittings that are a bit more long term to they merge with Pve better (longer lasting cap, rechargable cap booster i saw a thread about it could be tweaked for longer figths with ups and downs)

2a Make an area where players can pve in and pvp in, an area that supports both at the same time, like lowsec incursions, but not for large scale fleets only
2b Make it so pve players need to figth, and cant just warp out so there fits are gonna support being hotdroped
2c Make it you got no disadvantage by being there first, rats will turn around and attack others not farily even, they will think these guys are stronger so taking them out im more importent, but it will even out if its starting to last long
2d make it so you land not exactly on spot on the grid, make it random spot in a 40km circle so unless you have allot of pple you cant just "camp" these things

3a make it worth something, and easily accessible, so players to it, and want to do it, the loss of ships will support for the money made
3b make it in highsec so any players can just go do it, but this area will be a pocket in space where concord does not care if something happens (im not sure if this is possible but im sure there is a way to make it possible, it would make it so all players could do it without passing in a gate camps)

How about this: make all station agents give missions remotely (and only in their own system). Get rid of the mission levels and make each site escalate in waves starting at a level 1 equivalent. If you kill the ships in a time limit, wave 2 (level 2) warps in. As long as you complete wave 1 of the mission you can hand it in, but more money comes from beating more waves. This avoids the grind of mission, dock, refit. Its also good for the economy, as lots of mission runners will push too hard for greater reward before their ready and get pop'd :p. A lot of Current missions come in the form of warp gates/waves which could be adapted to this format keeping the variance in missions alive.

For extra bonus points make it so that one ship per wave is worth 2x bounty, but will warp away if attacked, thus encouraging pvp fittings in pve.

Your half right. There are two problems.

PvE is dull. I will not dispute that. But it is pretty much the sole source of ISK. Without PvE there is no ISK to buy anything. It's all well and good having ships, modules, ammo and materials to sell, but if no one has any ISK to buy it with, then you won't be selling it any time soon. No ISK, no shiney PvP ships...

And your right, PvP is far from easy to make a living from. It would be good to have a way to make more from PvP, in one form or another.

Looking back on this thread, I feel my first post was probably too negative. I don't think it would be even feasible to bring rats onto a par with RL PvP pilots. Programming the AI would be difficult, given that evryone is different and the AI would ahve to react to so many variables in so many different ways. Not to mention that so many pilots are on such vaired levels when it comes to PvP. But making them more challenging would be good.

Bosses, I like. I have never understood why faction spawns, with such potentially tasty loot, are so easy compared to the elite spawns. IE: A Dread Guristas frigate dies in one or two volleys of missiles, while a Pithi frigate will jam, scram and web you while taking 3 or 4 times as much damage to drop them. That doesn't make sense to me. A boss spawn in the bonus room of Guristas Extravaganza (lvl 4) would be great. It would make it feel complete, rather than just noticing there isn't anything spawning any more.

I would like something to be done to change the needs of a PvE fitting. I know FW complexes got some attention during Retribution, so they are now designed to be done by PvP fit ships. Could this be done to missions? Make them more about the gank and less about the tank?

Some Incursion style missions would be cool too. Maybe, once in a blue moon, a level 4 agent could hand out a mission where you need to bring a small fleet? It would also encourage people to get out there and find supportive missioning corps, rather than just running a mission with an alt.

In reference to mission running specifically:
Ganking may be good tactics. It certainly increases the chances of a successful kill when your opponent is badly damaged when you start your attack.

The question I am wondering about is this: does that also make it good gameplay?

In reference to your newer belt style NPC sites:
So, these spots have a bunch of NPCs that spawn in response to your going to them? I think you suggested the spawn will scale with the number of ships involved. This sounds good to me.
Yes, they can try to gank someone, but they still need to respond to their own problems resulting from them being there too.

yes small amounts of npc from the start you can just pick off there guards and start taking anythign that comes out they have lots of pple in them, not to worry unless a fleet comes int, then they pump a fleet out not worrying about the one that was ratting, also because they WANT that kill, so they will aim for tackling/ganking when someone comes in then when they lose allot they will keep the tacks but maybe they could have some logis instead and make it hard on the fleet, again

you need to forget about ganking, since it would make ganking impassible you'd need a ship able to fight back, not just fall off and die

About anomaly:
DED found when doing anomaly take you too far, often in enemy territory and the traveling way is borring :s , just make it pop around the pocket.

Also, the anomaly work on round/wave, we should make it a bit funny, maybe with a "bounty chain", the faster you kill and chain, more you get. The time gained/needed depend on the size of the target. And the bounty become harder to maintain over time but also give more reward.

Exemple:
Starter 120s
Frig 10s
Cruiser 20s
BC 40s
BS 80s

So the first kill is the starter, if you kill something before the end of the 120s, you become in a Bounty-chain1, lets suppose i kill BS and add 80s to the stopwatch, each time you kill a rat, the bounty chain increase in reward AND the time given by the size of the rat is lowered the more you climb the chain. (like 10s given by a BS at a bounty chain 30)
If the stopwatch drop to 0 second, the chain reset.
The reward should be an increase in percentage for the bounty.


In another idea, the problem with nullsec ano are their size, i do haven alone... not bad but there is a lack of huge anomaly made for a gang. So we stay alone... make one for gang... and not only in -1.0

As no one responded to Xa's idea I would like to expand on that.

In a post a little back Xa gave an idea I blogged about recently, basically it is an idea that your missions gains and difficulty should scale with your ability and even group but how do you do that?

Fairly simple as it happens has already been achieved in other games, most notably a game called "RIFT", it is an idea thats very simple that actually fits the eve cannon even better, essentially you as a capsuleer enter a system, request a mission remotely (this is the future with instantaneous communication, seriously is docking necessary?) you are then given a coordinate to warp too, you warp in and commence blapping.

First wave, equivalent to lvl1, complete it in time? congrats here comes wave 2! roughly equivalent to lvl 2,complete that in time? next wave! and so on, until your getting to waves that require exceptional fits, piloting and or groups to complete to get to the next wave, each wave giving progressively better returns until you fail to complete in time at which time the NPC's attempt to run.

Got to a high level wave? got a faction spawn? point that sucker so he doesn't warp out! this will actually get people PVE'ing together and learning PVP style fits and gangs without such a harsh distinction between them just to get to higher waves.
There is also no reason you cant make the spawns procedural so that the diffiiculty just gets higher and higher without an actual upper limit so you will at some point fail and need to learn when to cut and run!

As I said i have posted a longer version of this idea on a blog myself and a few friends run, I really do invite critique and addition to the idea both on this thread and our blog at...

http://www.extra-vehicular.com/2012/11/pve-content-mission-shake-up-idea.html

I'm not sure scalable mission difficulty is a good thing, at least not in EVE. In other MMO's where the death of a character has a much smaller impact on the game, and on the player, it not only works but is a good idea. There you can change your tactics and strategy and still be able to pull of a win, after dying some times, and having levels that easily can set a staging point of where to set the scale of difficulty makes scaling easy.

In EVE where the loss of a ship can be very expensive it would result in too much ISK loss for a player if missions scaled up to the point where it became inevitable to lose your ship unless you bailed out. It would make PvE unprofitable instead of a way to gain ISK. There's also the problem of not quite knowing what to fit your ship with if missions are scaled depending on your ship and it's capabilities and your skills with said ship and it's modules. It could even be worth downgrading your ship to get an easier mission...

Even though the increasing level of spawns idea might seem like a good idea I still have serious reservations against it. Part of a mission running experience is to being able to tank as well as giving out enough DPS to overcome any enemies tanking abilities. Having a mission based on DPS'ing as fast as possible for more reward seems to me to just elevate the "as much ISK/h" sentiment that is a pretty big part of making PvE the basically boring past-time that it currently is. Making a mission require a "do as much DPS as you can" fit elevates the problem as not only will the ISK/h sentiment rear it's ugly head but it will not require any kind of need to fit a ship depending on the mission at hand. DPS and a scrambler to keep the best bounty rats in place.

Dersen Lowery's 7th point though is interesting. Have monthly competitions for designing new mission complexes, complete with story and all, could be fun as well. Getting the players to feel more involved and have more fun (I mean, who wouldn't find it fun to run a mission or two they themselves have helped design???) as well as getting the world more evolved. The final version would of course be balanced by CCP so as not to have low-risk missions give top-end rewards.
What the hired PvP Players are all about I have no idea though. New devs?

The first point is good too. To get the bounties on the rats you need to take them out. In any mission where Capsulers fight non-Capsulers the non-Capsulers should bail and try to run when they notice they have no chance and are about to die. This would of course set missions where the objective is to kill all enemies present hard to do unless changed to either kill OR drive off. This would not result in increased ISK to the game as not killing them means no bounty for them either BUT could allow for more rats present with the knowledge that of the total (random number bounty) 50% will not be given out as the rats will warp out to safety. To keep them all interested would require seeming to be taking too much damage and introduce a few new strategies for making ISK of those bounties.

Cheers

I personally feel that lvl 5 missions should be brought back into high sec.

However, they should be slightly altered so that it is impossible to solo them.

They should require a fleet of 5 at least, with at least one logistics.



This would help to break up the monotony that is high sec missioning.

They are currently outperformed by high sec incursions anyway.


Now, as far as the introduction of t2 related minerals, I feel this is a good idea as well.

anything to cut down on the costs of t2 ships, thus making them more viable for pvp would be nice.


As far as npc intelligence. I feel they should all be similar to sleepers, however, lvl 4 missions should still be solo-able with a properly fitted bs.

Perhaps what could be intruduced is dynamic missions so that the more people you bring, the more npcs you face, thus increasing payout divided amongst the players.

However, doing so may discredit lvl 5 missions and incursions, so perhaps that's not the best of ideas.

So, perhaps, like I said, they should move lvl 5's back into high sec, buff low and null incursion payouts, add t2 mineral drops to cut down t2 markets, make all npcs more like sleepers, and add rare npcs with chances at pirate/faction drops but are also quite powerful compared to other npcs.