Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Many people complain about the monotony of Player vs. Environment (PvE) encounters. There are two main issues that lead to this. 1) PvE content is more or less static, along with some of it being fairly easy. 2) It has virtually no effect on the universe, other than being a huge isk faucet.

Some have suggested making PvE encounters more dynamic by making them more random. But, while it might be more exciting for a little while, PvE’rs will figure out the difficulty level and prepare (through tactics, fittings, ship selection, etc…) for it enough so that it becomes boring again. Case in point: Incursions/Sleepers. The new AI for the incursion and sleeper rats is great, and at the start of incursions, so many player ships died horribly. Now, however, players have adapted and can quite comfortably handle the new AI. While increasing the randomness and difficulty will make PvE a bit more exciting, it can only increase the fun factor so much.

The other main reason for uninteresting PvE content is the lack of meaning. I think that to make PvE more interesting is to make it actually have an effect on the universe. Most of the PvE has no effect on anything other than small corp/faction gains and losses for the players involved. My idea here is to make the PvE encounters affect the system where they take place in some meaningful way. For example, make the number of anomalies in a system correlate to the number and size of belt rats. Taking it even further, tie the number of pirate npcs killed in a system with its security status (the more killed, the higher the sec status). I’d only do this in 0.4 to 0.5 space. To encourage people to go out to low-sec, make level 4 missions only available in 0.5 or lower. You want to grind level 4’s but the system is too crowded? Move to 0.4, run missions, and raise the sec status. This would also have to tie into allowing pirates access to run NPC pirate missions in 0.4 and 0.5 to bring the sec status down.

Thoughts?