Missions & Complexes

Define "normal players" please.

Your plan is only going to work, if you consider that there are people who are happy with the way it is right now.
I want to relax when I come home from work, and not get an adrenaline rush for a mission, cause the unpredictable circumstances could cost me my ship and would ruin my evening. I know, I know "dont fly... bla bla bla". Screw that, cause then all I have to say to you, if you like it harder take cruiser to fly lvl 4 or do lvl 5 missions / incursions or go to a WH.

Besides I dont want to need 3 hrs to do one mission cause it is so tricky. Maybe on a weekend, but then should I stop playing the game during the week, when I might have only 1,5 hrs?

Now I have vented some steam I try to bring an idea to solve both wishes and not play that piggy little game of nerfing one side to buff the other.

Introduce another agent type. Its missions would be "intelligence" missions.
It could feature all the things you stated. It should even take into consideration how many ships enter the pocket. So if you get into the mission with 2 friends, the npc danger could rise accordingly.
You could use sleeper AI etc. etc.

LP wise and income wise you should range between a lvl 4 and a lvl 5. Say 25,000 LP in a lvl 4 in a 0.5 sec system? Bounty if you play alone could be around 40 million. Of course this type of mission could overpower you and you could statistically loose your ship in 1 out of ever 16 runs?

Sounds like your Domi is overtanked or has too many caps mods (or both). If I fall asleep for 3hours in my Domi my Domi goes pop because of not cap stable.

On that note, last time I spent three hours (wasn't actually three hours though) in a mission was the Sansha version of Worlds Collide the incoming damage in the Sansha pocket was harsh and actually had me refit my Domi a few times for more tank until I felt comfy with the incoming damage. Of course having to go to the nearest market hub because I failed at bringing the right drones didn't help the completion time any :P

As for drone aggro, I swapped an Omnidirectional Tracking Link for a Target Painter and that seems to have pretty much solved the drone aggro problem. Though random non-aggressed groups going after drones stays horribly annoying (and was one of the main annoyances in that Worlds Collide), but that's something NPCs already did before the AI changes so...

Of course you have to think about it and clearly communicate - it will affect hisec masses after all. It's not like in case of removing static 2/10 DEDs from lowsec - that only affected a few very insignificant players. And it was not FW lowsec so who cares, right? But I'm sure all devs are aware that 25 pages long thread with 500 posts from lowsec pirate community and 5 posts from devs not even involved in said change - you know about that but you are just too shy to participate in discussion.

Yeah, you are always very eager to communicate and talk when hisec masses cry their eyes out about bumping and ganking, but god forbid you could think and communicate about how much you influence pvp communities in your "looking for new ways to make PvE more exciting".

Your thought too deep for my little mind is, Young Padawan. Elaborate in simple words care you?

Well, so maybe we should stop pretending Eve is PvP centric game, especially nonconsensual PvP-centric game. I didn't start playing Eve because of spacepixels - to be honest X3 had better - but because of cutthroat environment I was promised.

Everything that needs revamps and radical changes seems to be "too hard", "to much", "too big" or "not used by too many too become important enough". POS, sov, missions. But at least we have mining frig with stabs built-in, and duels are just around the corner. \0/ for us!

Touche :)

So if anybody has any doubts I meant ship-to-ship combat kind of PvP with any number of players on either side with very high chance one of sides was forced into it.

But whatever PvP means to people it is always about conflict between players, environment is only a terrain. Market, sov, exploration, killboards - those things are only means to players' ends. The moment we annihilate player vs player conflict opportunities to make interaction with environment more interesting Eve loses small part of its unique charm.

Are you just teasing now or there is really something substantial coming up in some more or less near future? Even teasing would be great if put into devblog and let the nerd forums warz begin! :)

Here’s a thought, payment choices when accepting a mission, you can chose an option that allows you to bet on your completion speed, picking this option causes the bonus reward increases by 300% and the time cut dramatically (possibly random could be as little as 6 minutes). In combination with a new rule, if mission is not completed in time given then a loss of standings and no payment would be the result.

Before you go crazy and ask about what medication I am on, I am thinking this would add a risk vs. reward aspect. Possibly pacifying the PVP faction, and rewarding only the missioners that were willing to take the risk.

this is going to be long, so bear with me. i would like to argue that unpredictability is not what most missioners want. of course i cannot speak for ALL missioners, but having spent a lot of time on the forums as well as the local chat in several mission systems i feel comfortable postulating the following typical traits of a hisec lvl4 runner:
- he runs solo. people who prefer group play will land in either small scale pvp, incursions, wormholes or mining ops.
- he has other commitments. small children, long work hours, obnoxious pets (or parents), all these things are more often than not preventing the typical mission runner from investing long chunks of time into EVE.
- he enjoys min/maxing. the difference between T2 and deadspace items will save you an insignificant amount of time in most popular mission setups and yet you regularly see multi-billion killmails of mission boats. many missioners know eve-survival by heart and have spreadsheets with their mission times, LP conversion ratios etc.
- a mission runner is even more risk avert than the average hisec dweller, which is understandable given the fact that some of his modules could buy him a fully equipped and insured pvp battlecruiser or two.
- he wants to and/or enjoys making ISK. whether he is just trying to finance his pvp habit or saving for the next a-type on his shiny mission boat, his wallet is one of his most important motivators.

if you have gotten this far, you are probably thinking about posting to state your disdain for our risk avert, low-performing, cowardly missioner friend and tell him to HTFU, GTFO etc. if you choose to, please also state what gives you the right to do so, other than your inflated ego. the fact of the matter is that all accounts are payed equally and therefore, CCP needs to respect the wishes of its player base equally.

given all the characteristics above, i postulate that making missions less predictable is a bad thing for our typical mission bear. he does not want to have to look for someone to team up with if the mission gets too difficult, especially if there is no way of telling the difficulty before accepting the mission. he may or may not have only 15-30 minutes before his kids come home from school and he does not want to have to log out mid mission because of unforeseen challenges or delays. he also does not want to have too much omnitank, buffer, eccm and other situational equipment on his ship; instead he wants a glass cannon tailored to have the exact amount of tank he needs and invest the rest of his slots and ISK into DPS. he does not enjoy risking his expensive toy in a mission where he may or may not lose it. and lastly, while he probably does enjoy the occasional faction spawn, he would much rather have a solid, predictable income (otherwise he may as well go and do some hisec exploration).

if you really want to improve mission running, you should concentrate on making life enjoyable for our persona. things that you may want to look at are the way missions are accepted and completed, the choice and relative performance of popular mission ships, the balance of rat ewar (TPs lol), the vast gaps in difficulty, time investment and payouts between missions of the same level, awkward and inconsistent trigger mechanics, agent distribution etc. again, i'm not saying make everything easier, just take some of the frustration and turn it into predictable challenge.

lastly, a few personal opinions. while i do partially fit the template of the typical missioner, i do not think that a lot needs to be changed. the things i mentioned above are all nice to have but all in all, my personal feeling is that mission running is fine (and yes, i do sometimes run against sansha). there is enough excitement to be had in other parts of EVE, let's keep mission running the casual rat-shootery it is now.