Player Features and Ideas Discussion

** Continued **

Wait! How does that make players the content, you ask? Well, think of the current archeology and data hacking mechanic. You start your hack and you have a virus strength. While you attack that data/archeology site, if your virus strength drops to zero, you fail. Well, in my concept, that virus strength is obtained by farming players.

Let me explain by starting with an explanation of what the lore would be. Every ship that enters a station has to transmit a "something". The transmission of that "something" is done at short ranges and is secure because of ~reasons~. Ships never know if they will arrive at their intended destination without issue, or if EVE will happen and force them to dock up elsewhere. So it has become standard operating procedure for ships to contain those "somethings" for ALL allied stations. In order to hack into the security system of a station, those "somethings" are needed. So how do you get those "somethings"? You shoot enemy ships! Then you hack the wreckage. If successful, the loot fairy gifts you some "somethings".

At this point, CCP could choose to just convert those "somethings" directly into the virus strength needed to hack a station, but I would introduce further steps to the process. I would venture a guess and say that those "somethings" are encrypted and the victor that looted them doesn't yet know to which stations they belong, so yet more hacking to be done! And since EVE is hardcore, that hacking can't be done in safety, so not in stations, not behind POS shields, not cloaked because ~reasons~.

Now, lets say that those "somethings" have 4 variables. Region, Constallation, System and Station/POS. To begin a hack to identify those "somethings", a guess for one variable has to be entered, starting with Region and ending with Station. Once a guess in entered, you can attempt a hack and if your guess is correct there will be a node available to confirm your guess. If you don't fail the hack but the guess is incorrect, you reveal the entire grid to confirm your guess was incorrect. If you fail your hack, you have no idea if your guess was correct or not.

"But then it's just a matter of grinding until you make the correct guess", you say! Yeah, that would be lame. So introduce the possibility of destroying your "something". Two incorrect guesses or hacking failures and it goes "POOF".

"But with 4 variables, the probability..." Yeah, so let me introduce a new layer of complexity. Let me say that you can hack batches of "somethings". What I mean is, you throw your "somethings" into a big batch. You make your guess for the region that will apply to the entire batch. Then for each "something" that matches the guess, the difficulty of the hack decreases. Either the difficulty is hidden by dynamically varying the strength of the defense, or it is not hidden by having a larger virus strength that you can see immediately. Doesn't matter to me.

An example: you throw 1000 "somethings" into a batch and make a guess, then hack. 250 of those "somethings" match your guess, so your hacking difficulty decreases by some metric that is to be designed. You succeed with your hack and confirm those 250 "somethings". The other 750 now have one failed attempt. You make a new batch with those 750 and try a different guess, and proceed with a hack. Your guess is correct for 100 of those, the hacking difficulty is reduced by some metric and you succeed again. 100 of those "somethings" now have a confirmation BUT keep in mind they already have one failure tied to them. You now have 350 "somethings" with the Region revealed. 250 of those have no failure attempts and 100 have 1 failure attempt.

Now you need to repeat the process again to reveal the constellation. And then again to reveal the system. And one final time to reveal the Station.

SO! It should be obvious that A LOT of "somethings" are going to go "POOF". Which means, getting completely revealed "somethings" in decent quantities is going to require a lot of farming. Farming of other players! This is good, right? And since I'm so mean, all those revealed somethings have to go into that one ship which will approach the station and try to hack it with those "somethings" providing the final virus strength. How many of those revealed somethings would be required is a balancing issue.



HOW TO DEFEND?

1) Don't lose ships.

2) If you lose a ship and a friend is nearby, your friend should shoot your wreck. Loot it of modules if he can, but if not, deny the enemy of "somethings".

3) Find some ship out in space loitering. He may be hacking "somethings". Shoot it.

4) If alerted to your station being hacked, shoot the hacking ship, if you can tell which one it is. Otherwise shoot them all.

5) Spend a crap load of ISK to retool your security system. ** See additional ideas, below.

First you say you don't like timers and lots of HP on structures, then you introduce a structure with lots of HP we need to shoot?

what's the tl;dr version?

I deliberately did not elaborate because I was hoping people's imagination would fire up and by filling in the holes, they would get on board. That being said, here's an example:

I'm in a small gang. I'm the "salvager" in the gang. My gang shoots a couple enemies belonging to Alliance X. Once the enemies are podded, or their pods warp off, I get to work. I target a wreck and peform something similar to the current hacking mechanics, but I'd hope CCP would introduce something new at the same time. It takes me 60 seconds or so to finish the "hack", while my gang covers my arse. I succeed with the "hack" and I get a piece of loot. Say that loot is called a "damaged memory core fragment", to be referred as DMCF from here on.
My small gang successfully returns home from the roam (something that will become important if you want to expand) and I drop those DMCF's into my corp hanger. We do this for months, where "this" is essentially PVP.

After a month or so (longer if we suck, shorter if we rock), someone grabs a thousand of these DMCF's, puts them into a ship with a new dedicated module for processing and starts to decipher the "codes". This is the mechanic I outlined:

1) Put a bunch of DMCF's into a batch.
2) Make a guess on the first variable, "Region".
3) Go thru another type of mini-game, similar to hacking.
4a) If the guess and the hack are successful, you decipher the first variable.
4b) If the guess is correct but the hack fails, you have learn nothing and your DMCF gets a bit corrupted.
4c) if the guess is incorrect and the hack succeeds, you learn that the guess is incorrect, and the DMCF gets a bit corrupted.
5) With the DMCF's that have REGION decoded, you then do the new mini-game hack to decipher the Constellation.
6a) If the guess and the hack are successful, you decipher the second variable.
6b) If the guess is correct but the hack fails, you have learn nothing and your DMCF gets a bit corrupted if not corrupted already, or it gets completely corrupted if it had already been corrupted.
6c) If the guess is incorrect and the hack succeeds, you learn that the guess is incorrect. Your DMCF gets a bit corrupted if not corrupted already, or gets completely corrupted if it had already been corrupted.
7) With the modules that have had both variables deciphered, you proceed to guess and hack for the third variable.
8) and so on until all 4 variables are deciphered.

** there is a bit more complexity in the version I originally outlined.

Now, once you have X numbers of these deciphered DMCF, you can put it into a ship with yet another special module equipped and fly it to the station you've identified and perform yet another mini-hacking game. If you succeed, the station's security system is compromised and it spits out EVERYTHING inside it. And the station is open for anyone to claim by installing their own security system.

Quantities that would affect hacking successes at all stages are open to adjustments to achieve some reasonable quantity of effort to capture SOV. IE: balancing required!

Well, by "nature" I meant how do you determine what the "correct" combination of R/C/S/L (Region/Constellation/System/Location) is?

Is it based on total corporation assets (Starbases and Stations)? Alliance assets? Where the ship happens to have spent a lot of time? Places where the particular pilot is allowed to go?

Crick and Watson described the structure of dna in about a thousand words. You used two thousand to describe a mechanic that should fit in a few sentences.

Choose your words more carefully.

Sure. I could have jotted everything down in point form, keeping it all in a few hundred words. Then people would have complained about it being unclear. Doesn't matter what you do, someone will complain. At least your complaining is bumping my thread, so thanks for that.




I don't presume to have a fully fleshed out concept that will take into account every little detail. In essence, it is a concept where we shoot other people to grind SOV, instead of shooting things that don't move, don't shoot back, have massive HP to keep it from being effortless and timers to work around time zones.

Anyway, making this stuff up as I go, here is a potential answer to your question:

1) The only way for a station to change hands is to deactivate the security system.
2) When a station's security system is deactivated, it ejects ALL player owned content. IE: ships, modules, BP's, etc...
3) Once a new security system is installed, be it a new owner or the same owner, the codes are no longer valid.

Yes, your codes can become invalid. However, having the station puke out everyone's "stuff" each time this happens seems like quite a disincentive to me. Also, I would allow the "somethings" that drop to be renamed. So people who are serious can tag them with who, where and when.

Those now useless codes can still be useful. In an example I outlined above, a guess is made to decipher either the region, constellation or system for a whole batch of codes. For every code that matches your guess, the following hacking attempt to confirm that guess becomes easier. So the codes may be useless as an end product, but it can be used to improve your chances of deciphering codes that are still valid.

Don't get too flustered. Nothing I've written is set in stone. I am not advocating that minor detail ***MUST*** happen. Omit that, find some other dis-incentive to game the concept and I'm just as happy.

As for why I personally suggested this? I think the concept of stockpiling is game breaking. My personal opinion. I would prefer to see a system where ships and modules are built and distributed when needed, where needed.

As for losing everything if you don't play for years? You would have options. Move everything to high-sec, where the stations can't be contested. Or just liquidate everything into ISK. ISK is accessible anywhere in New Eden. Added bonus is you don't have to worry about your FOTM being junk when you come back.

True. But can't you think of a different way to make it all work, and keep NRDS alive? Having it tied to ship docking seemed like a potential idea, but if it will cause too many issues, then drop it. What other reasons for "something" that gets dropped from player wrecks (and NPC wrecks if players are absent) would work for everyone?

As for winning by not losing ships... if someone wants your space, and is targeting the players in your corporation or your alliance, do you really believe you'll never lose ships? I find that really far fetched.

If you mean docking up to not lose ships, I did predict that possibility and already proposed a solution.

Adding NPCs to EVE is one thing. Making them a way to bypass player interaction is quite another. If your system relies on farming NPCs to fix a problem that it creates (namely people becoming even more risk-averse) then something is very wrong.