Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Here is a neglected concept:

Introduce mission like scenarios where it is a known detail that a no win situation is imminent.

Hostile NPC, whatever, but the players need to evacuate an area under mounting hostile presence.

The purpose? Higher and higher escalating rewards become available, the longer the players can endure.

A group of defensive ships tanking and holding back assaults so rare items / ores / salvage can be recovered.

Wait too long, and lose everything when your ship gets popped.
Leave too quickly, and hear about the great loot others claimed after you left.

Players should need to evacuate a system, leaving by a gate or similar entry point.

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New options to consider!

Would the preference be towards:

Waves of small groups
OR
replacement NPCs joining the current fight as openings appear.
(Both would increase the overall NPC forces over time)

Second detail:
It will obviously be possible to interfere with the efforts of others, but HOW difficult should this be?
Very difficult, you need to camp out under a cloak to avoid being driven off. You could make better rewards doing the mission than ninja looting others.
OR
Easy, you just go in. The encounter will scale up to be more difficult in response to you, but you can just take loot or blast other players and take their loot from their hulls. The mission will be wiped out, but you'll get ISKies... and maybe new players out for payback against you too!

Thoughts?

I like the idea. I would be careful though and not have the rats have much bounty though or it turns into a big farm with rather large groups of farmers.

I can easily imagine a situation where more and more players just enter and everyone blasting away at the rats

local chat: "X up for farmville!"

This sort of thing could easily be set up as a time limited anomaly rather than a 'mission'.
Suits it better too.
New class of Anomaly, 'Distress call'. You aren't there to destroy the rats, so they can have a 'visible' spider tank set up capable of handling lots of DPS making them very hard to kill for their value, but they don't have to put out that much DPS in return, and while player ships are on the board, they don't target the NPC 'distress call'.

This would likely be a case of isk value being in the loot instead of bounties(like sleepers) the wrecks though would need to have shorter then the current 2 hour timer for one and the site/mission would need to despawn in a manner like sleeper data/relic sites(very quickly after opening a can).

+1

list of options:

1-site pays Concord LP
2-LP starts at X and decreases over time till site is failed (players must be on grid for LP to tick down)
3-make the sites spawn over districts on planets
4-the rats are all related to DUST in some way.
IE: War barges over districts with Bombardment support craft and haulers moving Dust Related items to and from
the planets surface. have clone rats (ones added to low sec) as overseers in the site with elite rats as escorts
5-give the rats in the sites SANSHA AI.
6-have assault, defend, hold the line options

assault= assist the pirate faction in killing off the enemy war barge.
deffend= assist the Parent faction by killing the pirate war barge.
hold the line= against rouge drones auvive long enough to facilitate the escape/delivery of DUST BUNNIES to the planets surface

7-new spawn for every agressed ship on grid.
IE: you land on grid ans shoot faction War barge/support then you spawn a faction defense fleet. kill that a larger
one spawns and so on. if you provide remote assistance to an agressed pilot then you cause a spawn for your self
you could also just let them duke it out and scoop the loot from the dead war barge (some dust related ****. maby a
clone pack or 2. but doing this will yeild no LP

8-may be have the hacking game in there someplace

Uphill both ways?

+1 to OP, this is sort of what I expected incursions to be but Incursions wound up just being ISK faucets. That you can sleep to.

Oh I dont know, if these types of missions revolved around evolving AI with randomized spawns then I suppose you could say 'farming' but there would deffinatly be a high risk, also, they could be made with non hostile npc's which turn hostile once shot but gaining any shooters (and therefore reppers) suspect flags I think this would be an amazing way to create great areas of fun for all players involved, and potentionatly a lot of tears as well, its entirely down to implementation all you have to do is think outside of the box :)

As an example we could start with the hualer spawns outside stations, attacking these could gain you suspect and weapon timers and the station would immediatly spew out a small defence force (Vipers omg!!) as well as firing sentry weapons, kill all these and tougher ships would spew out of the station, evolving with information based on weapon systems players firing are using, players entering the fray to aid the npc's could gain LP if they win the fight and so forth, needless to say these particular types of haulers should be a diffferent type than normal and dont necessarily need to be on a station, its just an idea.

Please take a moment to browse my thread with some other basic ideas for more diverse npc content in eve :)

In order for it not to happen, it shouldn't be as rewarding. I may be torched for what I'm going to say, but this kind of mission should on average pay less than L4 missions, as long as hisec is concerned. I called it the gauntlet for a reason. The ultimate rewards here are bragging rights.

Case in point: I routinely complete AE bonus even though I'm not obliged to. Okay, bounties and loot+salvage are nice but honestly it's not the best income out there. The reasons I do it are:

1. Because I can.
2. Because I lost three ships in early attempts. It's not personal, not anymore, but still it has this slight tint of revenge.
3. Because I can test new ships. "Okay, this one works nicely, but let's see how it fares in AE bonus".

Oh, just got refinement idea: what about making this kind of mission a bonus? There's normal mission which you normally complete but if you have balls, or death wish, you throw yourself into the fray.

I would love to hear more feedback on this idea.

I could be mistaken, but I took it as each wave becoming significantly more difficult. So you might start with the first wave having four battleships, the second having eight, the third having sixteen, and so on with each wave have some amount of smaller ships as support. Until you reach the point that there are so many NPC's on grid that they're instapopping players.