Player Features and Ideas Discussion

OMG, yes, this is a great idea...
More faction spawns, but the spawns must be pointed or they warp off as soon as their hull takes damage (after armor and shield, or we could go with the "primary tank" idea)

Right now we only have 2 missions with faction spawn chances, Worlds Collide and Blockade.
One of the OP's suggestions was for higher value loot to drop, which implies more faction spawns which implies flooding the market with faction items if nothing else changes...

This idea also relates to the mission Dread Pirate Scarlet - if you fit a disruptor on that mission, you can stop her from going into the 4th room, and if you kill her in the 3rd room, she drops a +3 implant, basically you get a another 7.5 million ISK if you brought a warp disruptor along with you.

If one jacks up the random faction spawns (have them in more than those two missions) *BUT* has them attempt to warp off, then there is a big incentive to fit a Warp Disruptor on your ship in every mission/PvE affair.
By giving up 1 mid, you make the mission harder, but somewhat often you also get a larger payday.
-Imagine getting Blockade or Worlds collide, you get the faction spawn, and it just warps off because you didn't have a disruptor

As a bonus, it makes it more likely you can kill those damn ninja salvagers (just be aligned to warp out before blapping him in a couple volleys -assuming he brought a weak ship, not a PvP fit Merlin/Hurricane/etc-, and warp from SS to SS until you can dock up and wait out the remaining tim) instead of having them warp off (and usually warp back in with their kill ship, and you better not be there when they come back) when you shoot at them.

Also, regarding inflation, would it be possible to have rats give an LP reward for the corp offerng the mission, and then decrease the ISK payout? The guy who thinks the inflation is a good think has "drank the Koolaid" of the economists who caused our RL economic woes.

one thing i wish that they make more clear at the agent missions, is what faction's you will gain and/or lose standing at by doing the mission you are about to accept

like a small red and green square where the faction you lose standing with is in the red, and the green for the faction you gain standing with,

it will make it more easy for new players to see and old players like me that have stopped doing mission as i found it a bit to hard to find out who i gained and lost standing with.

edit:
the colors don't have to be red and green..
but it can help to split them up to make it more easy to see

Picking up a mission and doing it is easy enough. Please no farming fields in EVE, those are really sickening.

I think PVE rewards are quite well balanced accordingly to the risk involved. If you want it safe, take the lowish reward from missioning/belt ratting in highsec. If you want more, risk going to low/null or to uncharted space for sleepers.

This is true, but I'd phrase it differently. It's not that missions are too easy, but that they require no creative thinking or attention once you figure the general scheme. So at first they can be both quite challenging and interesting, but that effect wanishes quickly.

I completely agree with this. I think NPC bounties should be replaced with increased item drops.

This is a good idea, but I think the main approach should be in implemeting and improving the advanced AI that is used for sleepers and incursion sanshas. Use quality instead of quantity to make PVE challenging. Or better yet, mix both approaches.

And the T2 loot should remain where it is right now, imo. Easier access would devalue T2 and through that also hurt T1.

Hmm says I have too many quotes, gonna split in two messages...

Oh and on the side note. NPCs warping out is a good idea, but then they should become scannable, at least with combat probes, so that they aren't gone for good if they slip out just once.

Until this part I read it thinking it's a serious post.

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Ok, I'll ellaborate.
If you don't get ISK via NPC bounties, how *will* you get your isk?

Mission isk rewards would need a buff, but then you just give your left hand to recieve instead of the right. Makes no real sense. Also hurts nullsec, where there are no agents.

Incursions are a high-end thing, not something you'd really build on. Also, for the risk-averse, it's a dodgy topic.

Might be cool to balance around this, with mini-incursions going on as well. Maybe crippling (always having to run around, not being able to do anything often with the possibly increased incursion rate), but fun. Would not hurt null at least, and make EVE more of a group thing. But also, more of a "come raid" setting. Only not for shiny new loot, but to fund your PvP.

NPC buy orders... Really, do you want this game to be like WoW, where a lot of vendortrash drops, and you make gold out of it? Bounties are the same thing, only without the hassle of looting/transporting stuff (which may be difficult in null)

Insurance payout - c'mon, while it *is* an isk faucet, you are supposed to be still loosing isk there

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And I think that's the main list of where you get isk from.

The way I see it Pve difficulty is something very hard to tune. In certain other MMO's that we shall not name but beings with a W and and with a T, end game pvp is a complicated dance where monsters have unique abilities and where you have a massive variety of abilities to use at once and obstacles actively spawn that you must avoid.

The main grinding pve is really just as boring as missions in eve.

The most difficult pve in eve requires only that you have enough ehp or logi then you just do it. "Oh this guy is taking damage, apply reps to him we already 100% know he won't die because we did the math." In incursions the competitive aspect of it makes up for this somewhat but because you are doing the exact same thing over and over and over again really takes away from it. In certain OTHER mmo's each encounter has a unique challenge to face around each corner. If something is repeated you only have to do it 3 times in a row before you encounter a unique group of NPC's or a boss.

Sure even the certain OTHER mmo's content gets repetitive but it does so much more slowly than incursions or missions.

Eve needs more hand crafted encounters, things like smartbombing NPC's that travel very fast or stealth bomb launching pirates, logisitics, randomized ewar, drones that turn off when the mothership is disabled etc. However the other game has the advantage of a death being forgivable while in Eve trial and error is a much more frustrating process.

Simply randomizing spawns wont cut it since they all are just damage vomiters that may or may not jam you and make you wait 20 minutes.

Actually, that might be a good idea. When you PvE, you make enemies of various Factions and Organizations. It's perfectly feasible that they might warp in on you when you are sitting in space or undocking from a station, or even in a Deadspace cleaning up a mission.

Why wouldn't they get mad and come after you when you spoil their plans? Perfectly reasonable expectation that could be tied to standings loss with them. -2.0 could get you attacked occaisionally, while -5.0 could be a more regular occurrence and/or tougher ships.

Back to OP:

I actually mentioned in another thread, and idea for changing Mission ISK rewards to a more conventional economy friendly idea. Dropped items can cause problems with the economy too, as has been noted in previous discussions, if for no other reason than it makes modules more highly available and takes the player out of the manufacturing and distribution chain.

Having NPCs drop refining materials, (like Scrap Metal), is a possibility, but one step better is to make it another profession altogether. Simple drops will result in an influx of easily accessed materials into the market, which has been a problem with Drone regions, and was the reason some mission loot drops were removed from the game.

So, the alternative is to make it something you have to work for; just like mining, and requiring a similar effort and investment in ships, modules, and time. Not as much perhaps, because someone has to defeat the NPCs to make it available.

Now, a common argument against this might be that this makes missions take longer, and requires additional time investment just to see rewards from something you've already invested time in. Generally speaking, that would be correct. You could however allow for players to sell salvaging rights to their missions, giving someone else access to the pocket to clean up.

This gives you another profession, (like mining or exploration, and compatible with both of them), and it allows the Mission runner to kill things and build standings rather than wasting time with harvesting the value from the mission over an extended period.

This also increases Corp activity for missions, and increases the variation in professions within Corps, while giving them a symbiotic relationship between those professions. Mutually beneficial occupations; unlike Mining and Mission Running.

It also means the creation of new ships and modules required to take advantage of this, and skills to use them. Hulls will have to remain in Space longer, not be cleared by downtime, and perhaps could even use a buff to appearance.

I've always considered the ship wrecks to be somewhat inappropriate. Compared to the burned out hull that you might expect to see, you have instead a small, crushed metallic bit of something. This might be what is left after the ship has been harvested of all refining materials, but is still capable of yielding some salvage components.

Technically, it should be less capable of yielding decent salvaging components after being harvested than before.

So, a new salvaging ship or two, preferably made by ORE, and a new module to complement the current component salvager that functions more like a mining laser. Effectively, it would disassemble the ship and deposit the refining materials into cargo or the ore hold.

The ships could be a new Orca hull design that has harvester fitting capabilities, and a smaller Noctis hull design with the same. Modules could be available in mass-extraction designs like the strip miners, (used on the Orca Hull), and laser varieties which could be used on standard ships without bonuses, and the new Noctis hull with bonuses.

Bounties and direct ISK rewards from missions could be decreased drastically by reducing the number of ships in missions and/or by dropping the bounty on those ships, as well as dropping the agent reward significantly. Transfer the value to the Hulls, and increase it for the time investment required where necessary.

Standings mechanics could also be adjusted, and PvE ships could be increased in difficulty to better match PvP set ups, while increasing mission levels could also increase the capabilities of the ships faced in those missions.

Rather than level 1-5, you could have 0-9 missions, with zeros being entry level like the tutorials, and 9s being PvP matching with an assortment of Tech 2, Faction, and Tech 1 ships that are capable of decimating all but the most skilled Mission Runners working together. Rewards could scale accordingly.

Standings would become less hindering in some ways, with Faction loss and gain tied more to ship kills, and Corp gain tied primarily to the mission running itself. The loss wouldn't need be increased, but there should be some gain associated with that loss provided you are working for the appropriate corporation and running the right missions.

Ship kill missions should also extend to Corporation rivalries, and less to Faction specific kills. Rather than killing Amarr Navy, you could kill Corporate Police Forces or Rogue Pilots, or even non-affiliated Forces. Missions need less requirement to shoot your specific standings all to hell.

..anyway, this post is long enough already; I'm sure I could get into the rest of that stuff elsewhere later.

I could write a small book on all the things wrong with EVE pve, but let me try and sum it up
(this is about high sec PVE, low / wh PVE is another beast):
- 1) PVE is static: once you play a mission (or run explo site), all the future ones you get are
virtually identical; giving it any randomization (the more the better) would be great step forward
- 2) PVE lacks challenge: due to 1), you know exactly what you are going to face. Due to
nature of EVE once you know your foe, battle itself is a token effort. This breaks entire idea
of risk vs reward system of EVE because you essentially have 0 risk (of course this changes
once you leave high sec, but that is totally different topic)
- 3) missions are dull: basically it all comes to 'shoot X rats'. More variation would add a lot
to make it more interesting, few examples:
- special spaws that are really nasty (perhaps optional but give good rewards if killed)
- npcs that have to be pointed to keep them from fleeing
- packs of small ships / something similar instead of our generic group of bs + few bc + few frigs
- optional random hacking / salvaging / ... targets in missions
- missions that require (or have optional) must-scan down sites
- other types of missions: for example: defend (POS / ship...), intercept ship flying from A -> B,
mission on timer, kill a player mission (FW / bounty hunting...)...
- of course, random groups, random triggers... would spice it a lot as well
- 4) lack of small group content: sure, we have C3-4 WHs and lvl 5 missions, but both of these
are low-sec / 0.0; playing lvl 4 with more then 1-2 (perhaps + salvager) people is good way
to reduce your profits and high sec incursions are 10+ people - definitely not small group;
seeing something for 3-6 people would be really nice (while keeping profits/person <= lvl 4s)
- 5) mission rewards are quirky: not total amount as in ISK/hr (that too is another topic), but some
missions just tend to suck and others are (slightly) too good. Perhaps making mission profit independant
of number of battleships in mission might be good idea

Just had a thought. How about multi stage missions that are not actually a mission chain?





What do you guys think?

I think the main problems with PVE are:

1) That it has weird risk/reward payouts. For instance, most of the risk involved in sleeper PVE is not even in the mission itself, but in GETTING TO the mission in your gimpy PVE ship. You either have to bring two fittings with you and switch them out, or be woefully underprepared for pirates in your ship that is fitted for PVE.

2) It's pretty boring and repetitive.

3) It creates a strange "two separate worlds" situation with combat, where PVE and PVP don't translate well, which results in people playing two different games, and not nearly as much enriching multiplayer interaction and opportunities as there could be.


Like others here, I agree that the solution to both of these things is to make PVE more similar to PVP. If this is done well, then :
* PVE can have much more risk of losing your ships (or at least some forms of it that you can optionally choose have more risk), and can be justifiably associated with success
* It would be more skill based (real life player skills, not character skills), which is always a good thing.
* It would also be much more entertaining and engaging.
* It would train you better for PVP and vice versa, so that people all play together more on all fronts (it is an MMO after all)
* It would be less intimidating to fly to PVE engagements in null sec in your gimpy PVE ship, because if PVE and PVP were more similar, then the same ship would be more appropriate for traveling around null sec AND for running the missions once you get to your destination. Which makes the risk/reward less weird and broken.

There are a ton of ways to make PVE more like PVP, several have been mentioned here, but the ones I feel are most important:
1) PVE enemies should routinely tackle you. Not overwhelmingly/all of them, but almost every room of missions starting at level 2 or so should have one or two tacklers. Including bubbles in higher level missions.

2) On the flip side of the coin, PVE enemies should routinely use their warp drives. Everything from warping to different rooms to rep up when they are close to dying, to warping their buddies on top of you once one of their faster ships has gotten in range, to warping between bounce points on grid as a means of maintaining sniper range, etc.

2B) Also they should use a lot more EWAR.

3) AI needs to be improved. This would not be NEARLY as difficult as people are making it out to be. I think a lot of people overestimate just how amazingly clever and adaptable and awesome they are, while in reality, most PVP is performed according to a limited set of fairly well-rehearsed scripts. So you could be a fairly "dumb" AI, one which does not take into account very many variables at all, and still vastly increase the interest and difficulty of PVE. For instance, something as simple as having 5 or 6 pre-programmed basic strategies for each type of NPC ship. Then just have them switch between those strategies based on some simple input, like "how many of my NPC fleetmates have died recently using strategy A? Lots? Well then switch to some other strategy. None? Well then keep doing A." That would mimic the bulk of the learning and adaptability that goes on in PVP, honestly, and would probably be good enough to bring the two much much closer together, without a ton of coding effort.

4) There should be fewer but stronger NPCs on every grid. PVE is all too often currently about grinding down a huge swarm of gnats one by one, which encourages things like repping-oriented tanks, drones, and heavy reliance on kiting, none of which work very often for PVP. If NPCs had fewer ships, but much more furiously high-DPS blitz types of ships (combined with tacklers and interceptors, etc. as mentioned above), then it would be more like PVP, and people would be rewarded for buffer type tanks more, bringing the two fighting styles more closely together. It would also be more exciting and adrenaline-pumping, because the whole mission would be faster and the stakes would be higher.

These things also all reinforce one another. For instance, if NPCs aggressively warp out to rep themselves (#2) and there are fewer of them (#4), then it becomes much more difficult to blow up 5 ships, go to a station, and come back and blow up 5 more ships, etc. You have to deal with the entire battle at once more often. And THAT combined with more varied strategies (#3), even canned ones, means you need to fit yourself to deal with a wide variety of flexible situations all at once when you go to PVE, which is much much more similar to PVP.



Right. Difficulty is very easy to scale (and all difficulties can be available at once in the form of different level missions and sites and belts). Similar style is what it's about.