Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Heyho,

You know that feeling when you scan down a combat site and the disappointment when you see it isn't a DED-rated one? In my opinion CCP should re-think the whole non-ded sites, comparing risk-award ratio as always but instead of bringing up the usual "reduce the escalation distance", "more variation" and "drop better stuff" lines I came up with a different idea.

These sites are designed to be run as a team, so why not give the team an award everybody can use afterwards, not just an item that sells and provides isks? I'd suggest that once you've completed a site like a faction fortress, everybody in the team on grid gets a timed bonus to damage vs. npcs. I've thought about dropping a booster-like pill or a deployable structure like the newly released bounty-ess-structure to boost the bounties in a system - but then that's only something that would be sold again. The effect or the actual time it's available should depend on the difficulty of the site and the effect should be bound to the faction the site belongs to and to 0.0 / low sec.

I don't know how hard it would be to implement such a timed bonus and to limit it to npc-damage only. But it wouldn't boost people in pvp and give them an unfair advantage, it wouldn't be just another item on the market and it's a thing that would help push non-ded sites a bit and the pilots running it. I know this isn't one of the big issues at the moment but could be a neat tweak.

Feel free to rip this idea apart, glad for the input.

Escalations can be very good reward, and are quite fun.

So you want to take content that people are skipping anyway and make them even less desirable.

I agree with your premise, I think the solution is to significantly increase the chance to escalate from the base site. The elements of difficulty in following the expedition, and the high difficulty of many of the final stages (really, the escalations from military complex and higher sites, as well as the mineral acquisition and logistical outpost escalations, fleet staging point, and provincial HQ, are all quite difficult already). Furthermore these sites (minus fleet staging 9/10 and logistical outpost/mineral acq outpost 6/10s), don't even drop OPE regularly. Increasing the escalation chances for unrated sites would not overbuff them.

And really, many of the unrated plexes themselves are more difficult than many DED's in the same parts of space.

This is silly and unnecessary. The only way to do this would be to drop a booster, which could then be transfered and sold. While valuable, there's not a way to make it PVE only, and i doubt its something CCP wants to put in the game.