Wormholes

Pulled from Mittani article about standings and pve activities from Eve Vegas round table.

THE SOUND OF THE SPACE POLICE

The announcement of NPC patrols and convoys certainly came as a surprise to the room. These will be faction-specific groups of NPCs that wander around solar systems, jumping between stars, and engaging players. The patrols will be in every part of space, from highsec to wormholes, and will act far more like players on a roam. For example, players might run across a Minmatar patrol deep in Amarr faction warfare space, and be enticed to engage them with a boost to their standings with the Amarr Navy. If the engagement turns south for our hypothetical players, the Minmatar patrol will likely attempt to pursue and destroy them.

***Similar situations will unfold in wormhole space, with Sleepers or Drifters fighting players across the dynamic constellations of J-space.

!!These patrols will even scan down and use wormholes on their own. If players are engaging the Sleepers, we are promised that nearby Drifters will find the players and gang up against them.!!

Taken from:
https://www.themittani.com/features/huge-changes-coming-drifters-standings-and-more

This sounds like npcs will warp to wormholes and open them maybe? Later in the article it talks about standings hits for running sleeper sites and drifters and sleepers hunting players down and killing them in high sec. Pretty crazy stuff. This is all a pipe dream so far but if implemented, npc's aren't usually d-scanned because of the high number of rats in systems. We might no longer be able to close our home holes.

Thoughts?

Great. Now people will camp gates for NPCs

Dunno on numerous occasions we have tagged enemy fleets, a-f , and just followed tags.

Making the universe feel more alive is always a good thing.
The way it is done needs more info.
Will they open wormholes and spawn the other side?
What about loot,salvage and bounty's?
To soon to tell the possible impact of these things.

I really like the ideas Affinity have here but its at least 2 years out. Much of the ideas here was brought up by players on the pve soundboard corbexx arranged some months ago.

Also all in all pve is a big part of Eve that is long overdue an overhaul

NPCs should not be content drivers but facilitators for PvP, else they are there to be shot for bounty and loot.

Dynamic NPCs and improved PvE is going to be one of the few things that has a chance of "saving" EVE. Given the statistics released at EVE Vegas'15 showing that less than 20% of the games population ever engages in PvP it would seem foolish (or at the very least tone deaf and blind) to continue beating the drum of 'PvP is the end all be all, only thing that matters, will increase subs, etc" whatever the claims always are. The data from CCP clearly shows those claims spurious and misinformed.

Most MMO players do not want to do PvP. We (wormholers in general seem to be very PvP focused) are outliers in this regard, both among EVE's playerbase but also the wider MMO population. It's probably high past time that we recognized that very real fact.

That isn't too say "drop your PvP fleets and "breadline" all week long(ahem)" but it does mean that we ought to be more receptive, as a whole, to new, interesting and innovative experiences of a PvE variety as those are the only things that are going to bring in and retain the >80% of players who have never engaged in PvP and who quite possibly have no interest in doing so. Growing the overall population is the only way that we see more people in that 80% group explore into wspace and possibly put down roots.

So as much as this makes me grit my teeth and because I'm terrible at PvE (you have no idea the number of Domis I lost years ago trying to run COSMOS missions thinking they were worth something or the amount of Caldari Navy LP I have saved up from my first half year of playing - that I still haven't spent because I cba to figure out the best use for it), I think CCP better do something to improve and enhance what the overwhelming majority of players want to see in a MMO. In other words, increase the immersion factor, improve the story line, improve the NPC and PvE experience so it isn't the single most boring thing in EVE (next to mining) so that they can actually retain the willing and paying subscribers who aren't only interested in shooting people in the face and "violencing spaceships".

/CCpls

receptive? yes
excited? not a single bit
why?

Imagine an escalation and all of the sudden roaming sleepers...

Simply because "...CCP has generally made NPCs harder by tweaking ships stats" is not a good reason to not push CCP to improve the PvE experience in meaningful ways. (read: not simple stat changes but instead improved AI, more dynamic scenarios, procedurally generated dungeons, etc) And when they legitimately try, they should receive support and constructive criticism (a hard thing for the players of this game I know).

PvE, like it or not, is the largest activity in the game. More players do that than anything else. Good PvE will retain players (and possibly even bring in new players). Bad PvE not.

It's relatively simple in that regard.