Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Ok, probably been suggested but how about the ability for the owner of a L / XL citadel to hire an agent to live in their citadel?

The owner would have to pay monthly, on a sliding scale depending on level & standing, but receive a small percentage of any rewards & standing gain when people used it.

If people are willing to pay, maybe even go up to level 5 in hisec.

This could include the LP store or make it an add-on.

What do people think?

Level5s in highsec would pay way too much. They'd get farmed heavily and all the greedy ones would just abandon lvl4s.

But the bigger problem is what the above poster mentioned, I'd guess. Suddenly there would be new agents EVERYWHERE. CCP would have to create a shitton of new ones or have the old ones depart into new locations (which would probably be easier) which then would probably mess up a lot of things, including http://eve-agents.com, the client's agent finder would have to be reworked for that as well.

I kind of doubt this is a good idea. There's already a shitton of agents out there.


The real question here should be: Why do you even want that?

Eve is heading to remove as much npc as possible, handing over more to the players so I see this as a logical step.

I get what you are saying about level 5s but there would be 2 controls automatically in place:

1) the owner would have to pay monthly for the agent. This price would be high, extremely high.
2) the owner could choose to restrict access making it a perk for their corp.

As for new agents, these are offices. Who says they have to be there in person? Same goes for the missions, it is purely an access point.

When I asked the Devs about agents in Citadels att the last fanfest they did say that they would like for players to be in control of that.

But they dont curently know how to make that work in a good way.

We will just have to wait and see what the future brings.

*if* they limited it purely to sov space - say with a requirement of maxing the relevant sov statistic for the system and possibly limiting it to the keepstar citadel..... It *might* work....

But honestly I think you would find that the missions would be just as dull as the canned sites they would supplement/replace after an incredibly short period. EVE PvE has never been entertaining game content, it is all the same things over and over and over and over again...

That can't be an argument as it is the case for all PVE in all games. There are only so many missions, so many encounter scenarios, so many bosses to fight, so many NPCs to find/kill/work with. And honestly, I find 10 DED Blockades one after another still more entertaining and challenging than 10 Havens/Sanctums. You can also easier expand on missions than anomalies: Missions are generated after you take them, they are not there in your UI when you enter a system. You can have thousands of different missions and they would not clutter your UI. Anomalies, on the other hand, are there in shedloads already and more anomalies would just result in more clutter of the UI.

The variety adds to the experience. Havens are so boring after I have run hundreds of them, I went back to activate my mission char and run Stain missions instead. Even if the missions are "just" Havens with a different skin, they feel different and more exciting because of the different encounters. Besides, a DED Blockade, Fed Navy/Angel Cartel Worlds Collide, Amarr The Assault or Police Invasion are significantly harder than Havens/Sanctums and a lot more exciting.

dont you think thats a bad thing? i mean just throwing up a fortizar where ever you are staging and having instant lvl 5 mission hubs, no longer will people need to think about people making money when organising deployments, just have a fortizar hidden in a backend system and grind with no opposition.

Honestly?

Aside from a couple of changes that were actually needed (mostly because they were caused by CCP in the first place)....Most combat rebalances since I started playing 8 years ago just **** me off - and I'd rather CCP stopped ****ing meddling with things that weren't ****ing broken.


When I was young, CCP seemed to manage to nerf every ship I was aiming for literally hours before I finally got the skills to fly it. First bombers, and later even the insanely OP combat-rorqual...

Well, those things *were* OP - so sure, you can make a case those nerfs were required. Those aren't my main issue with CCP meddling.


More recently (See: The past 5-6ish years?) - I stopped aiming for the OP ships, and started to truly appreciate using the underpowered ships. The ones that *nobody* was using - because they were "worthless". I found the ways to fit these ships to unlock their (seemingly) hidden potential - and I absolutely loved (and still love) crushing people in the "OP" ships using the "useless trash" ships.

And then CCP started buffing all of my ships... Like literally all of them... They buffed my rookie ships, they buffed the mining barges, they transformed the "useless" mining frigates/cruisers into OP logistics ships, they buffed the speed on most of my gallente ships (that were unused because they were "too slow")....

They even took my already OP vexor, gila, and rattlesnake and made them *MORE* OP...

And that is just some of my personal favourite ships - as we all know they've rebalanced pretty well every single ship in the game by now....*NONE* of my old fittings still work, because none of the ships are even close to the same...


And, as if that wasn't enough, they started introducing *new* ships....Each one more ridiculous and overpowered than the last... The infamous T3 cruisers, the (arguably) even more ridiculous T3 destroyers...

Then they saw that Caldari pilots (yes, I'm an EVE racist, so sue me) tend to be ****ing cowards who don't want to close to within 50km of the enemy - and thus couldn't ever actually kill anything since they couldn't tackle at that range... So they gave them the Mordus ships...

And they saw that people found exploration too "hard" - so they threw the Gnosis at them - all the bonuses of all 4 races of battlecruiser to 5 with no training whatsoever.... And that still wasn't good enough so they threw in the SoE ships, with all the combat ability of front-line brawling ships *AND* covert ops cloaks *AND* room for scanning/exploration gear - all at the same time (previously people had been using T3 cruisers for this - but were presumably annoyed by the terrible burden of having to refit the ship for each role in turn)...



And I'm not complaining about any of this because I'm bad at it. I can adapt, and I *have* adapted. I have all new fits for all of the ships, I've maxed out all the new ones, I can fly any/all of them. My Kill:Death Ratio has *Quadrupled* from 5:1 to 20:1 since these changes - because I literally can't lose a ****ing fight that is even remotely reasonable anymore unless I *try* - and I'm too competitive to actually lose intentionally...

But **** it, I really wish CCP would stop ****ing around with combat to try to make it "Easy" for everybody or 100% "balanced" with no "weak" or "useless" ships at all...


/rant

That will have an effect. If you can have your citadel with agents in high sec, fewer people would even consider going out into more dangerous areas of space and even rent space. If you can make money with ways that you accustomed to, you are also more inclined to at least give it a non-comitting try. This is not so much about gameplay styles but rather about the willingness and encouragement of people to actually build something outside the protective and restraining borders of high sec.
My biggest concern these days is that CCP makes every area of space too similar, be it PVP or PVE. More and more distinguishing factors are being removed. I am not arguing in any case for changes to high sec; in fact, CCP should leave high sec alone and every new feature of the game that adds to citadels/industry structures should only be added to those structures build in low and null sec. High sec is an introductory area to the game, you should not have the majority of the game's functions available there. However, that is what CCP aims to do. CCP ought to differentiate the security areas more from one another so that there are actual and feasible driving factors to move people into other areas of space.

Personally, CCP should work on the PVE part more than on the PVP part. PVP works by itself and does not need constant maintenance. You do not need to change ships or structures every other month just for the sake of it (unless something is obviously broken). PVE, however, is what drives the victims out into space. There needs to be more and more varied PVE in space so that people undock and explore space and make themselves available for interaction. Making use of landmarks/natural phenomena, introducing rotating agents, working on making the COSMOS system better and more usable are all things that I have suggested before or agreed with that make people fly around in space instead of sitting in station. Yes, it takes away from useless projects like Gunjack or Valkyrie but as long as EVE does not work in VR, these projects should be sideline gimmicks and not where CCP invests the majority of their manpower.