EVE General Discussion

Sweetness....Moar....give me moar....
Clearly you see no value in a well educated PvP target. Don't you see that this is the best way for devs to improve PvP?

Ohh you are going to educate the bears and make them PvPers?

Fools errand.

So many ways static missions could be different every time you do them.

Each ship type gets several different loadouts it could randomly choose when the mission is created.

The trigger should change, but the trigger should be identifiable in some fashion for the basic mission levels. such as scanning or visually seeing a command module highslot item that looks like an auxiliary bridge "turret".

Ships that use drones (not like spider drones) I mean real drones. This would require a smart bomb change from griefer cloaked ships to be simply considered a suspect flag as cloaking near a neutral should be its own hostile act. And they can deal with each other without Concord intervention.

More missions that mimic player activities:

Waiting at a mission stargate and scanning npc cargo ships as they warp in at 15 and auto to the gate, need to cargo scan just the right one and take it out.
Make untargetable npc ships aggress you and targetable by taking their can for a corp hit contract.
Combat scanning missions to find specific npc ships.

The so called "artificial PvP vs PvE" exists world wide and has since before computers.

Some games are competative, football, boxing.

Some games are personal best, solitare.

Each person has their own preference based on thier personality. That is normal, that is the very nature of games.

But here, some of the PvP community, not all many remember what a mistake this was in UO, are obssesed with converting carebears to PvPers.

It would be dumb to commit so much effort to making PvE better in a hope that it will improve PvP when they could spend the same effort directly on PvP and bring in players from the millions of PvPers world wide.

Converting carebears is a fools errand.

Ok, Bootleg Jack... I'm listening... It is easy to criticize, it takes hardly any effort. How about giving us your Solution. How would you "Improve" PvP? Hmmm....

Simple, you improve PvP to draw from the millions of PvPers world wide.

1. Ignore the carebears, they make lousy PvPers, have to be either bribed and/or protected (increase reward or reduce risk) and in the end run back to Trammel, aka High Sec, with the rewards, so nothing is accomplished.

2. Spend development time on the PvP related issues from the existing list we voted on, null fixes, balance, etc.

Those ads with the fleet battles draw in lots of new PvPers, we are just not converting them to long term customers.

As far as missions go, from a PvP standpoint they are a means to an end, the end is PvP, not missions, missions are the grind.

PvE will always be different from PvP because NPCs don't have a brain. They cannot change to new and never before seen tactics (without Dev time and effort each time a change is wanted).

They are dumb. Even sleepers are predictable.


However, I'm all for reducing NPC counts in missions (and buffing both difficulty and reward per NPC). Its silly that I can handle 20-30 ships in an Assault Frigate.

I would also support some more missions that are closer to random like the Dread Pirate one. That is the only mission (for Amarr) that I regularly check EVE survival (as much good as that does...).

Chess

My only two real issue with missions and other forms of combat related PVE are that they a) are too predictable and b) use an A.I. with the intelligence of a toddler. Missions like Dead Pirate Scarlet are somewhat a step in the right direction as far as predictability are concerned, but still falls short considering the "random spawns" are merely selected from a list of spawns that are a bit more varied than other missions have. Normal rat A.I. still falls well short expecially when compared to sleepers or incursion rats (not just in damage and tank, but also in that normal rats DO NOT support each other cooperatively at all). One could argue that missions are supposed to be ment for income and income alone, but I still feel as though alowing rats to rep each other once and a while or jumbling up spawn lists a bit couldn't hurt, even if only a few missions for starters.

I think Carlos has it right. Also i think that the OP wants the game to seem a little more intelligent. After all, in a lvl 4 mission, when you are fighting lots of enemies, they never warp out, and don't ever deviate from approach+orbit+fire weapons. There are some minimal attempts in PVE where the enemy uses mods (in one i can think of they actually dampen you pretty heavily, and it can lead to nasty situations), but rarely do the mods really effectively do more than annoy, and most players are intelligent enough to use google to know its coming anyways.

There is always the smoke and mirror solutions that could make things more interesting. Take your average lvl 4, now add about 40 starships to the backdrop. When the mission is run, it acts just like always, only the 40 ships warp out. That would at least give the feeling that they could leave, but are hell bent on taking you out.

NPC ships could be added to the missions, and have escorts. There are already asteroids in the missions, add some miners. They would warp out also, but not so fast that they couldnt be stopped. Minerals loot. Doesnt have to be huge.

why not? because it would take work, and the Devs dont care. There are other things they would rather improve than missions which already function as intended, as isk generators which take time making subscription purposeful.

i guess you could also look at it from the RP standpoint of space is mostly empty, and clones make space travel and warfare alot like video games. The unpleasantness of clone download is far less than the punishment your CEO might meet out if you abandoned your post guarding this or that thing in a lvl 4.

Each time a new player enters EVE, its actually a fed up corporate stooge, who has decided to forsake the cookie cutter corporate build and set off into the frontier on his own.

etc etc.

It would be interesting to have tougher opponents, but more fun? prolly not, as has been said, just different fits and more mods to apply to your particular mission fit. Ultimately it could lead to a far greater variety of ships being used, as people would maybe fit for different bonuses and such.

A novel idea.

Of course there is the school of thought that the PVP tutorial is joining a pvp corp from hi sec and learning about the variety of PVP in EVE. That will always be far greater than running a mission with an NPC that you must web/scram to kill.

Furthermore, the tears of gallente would flow like rivers if NPCs in missions used smart bombs, or targetted drones to lower PCs dps.