EVE General Discussion

There are missions outside of highsec, and your experience, I take it.

Smaller groups, hopefully, and less of an ISK investment in ships. Which was the second point in your post...

I haven't flown a (non-epic arc) mission in years, but I do think that giving missions some love is a good idea. This game has the worst "questing" system of any MMO I am aware of. Epic arcs and burner missions are definite improvements and I'm glad they were added even if I don't really use them.

What I would love to see is missions that encouraged player interaction in a way that couldn't just be overridden by dualboxing.

Imagine this: Whenever you request a mission there is a small chance that you will be matched up with another player (or several other players) in the same region of space who requested missions of the same level at around the same time. You are all given the same mission and directed to the same deadspace pocket.

There are a million ways this could be expanded upon with new missions designed to take advantage of it, but even just doing this one thing would dramatically increase the interactivity of missioning.

Why are you directing this at me? I'm a pirate.

I mean, to answer your questions, I'm on the fence about AWOXing nerfs and I definitely don't think you should be immune to violencing while missioning in groups.

I do think that a change to the missioning system (especially in lower level missions) that forced a degree of interaction could be a very effective nudge in the new player experience towards social interaction. Like, if these multiplayer missions also spawned a chat channel between you and the other people given the same mission. No need to jump on comms, and maybe you don't even say anything in chat, just try to blitz the mission before anyone else can get there. But even then, you are interacting by racing them and it's a richer experience.

TL;DR - I'm not asking for fleet PVE for me, I'm promoting ANYTHING that gets new players interacting with each other more directly.

few years ago now they did target switching for rats with no real agro mechanic.
I watch rats change targets like ADHD 5 year olds hopped up on crack

(Emphasis added mine)
OK, you lost me at forced. In a voluntary situation like a sandbox videogame players who don't want to go along with your vision of how the game should be played will simply opt out or leave. You simply can't make players who wish to remain solo join groups no matter how "noble" the goal of interaction may be.

I'll try to dig up the source but basically CCP stated that iterating on mission content was really hard because they had horrible tools for it. There was no simple way to create NPC's and designing a mission area uses the same tools/interface as anchoring a POS (which, if you haven't done... would be a nightmare).

They've talked multiple times recently in various places (dev blogs, CSM minutes) about how they have been making significant improvements to these tools under the hood. As an example, burner missions were one of the first things they did with the new NPC authoring tools, from what I understand. So basically they are doing the unsung groundwork of bringing infrastructure to a state where they can actually start making progress on the content finally. So, hopefully Soon™.

Basically it's the same as the state of sov... they've said repeatedly they can't even begin addressing sov before tackling the huge and less sexy problems around ancient POS and corp code.