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Player Features and Ideas Discussion

 
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Pve in Eve seems unrewarding and not so interesting.

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Mund Richard
#101 - 2012-12-08 11:24:19 UTC  |  Edited by: Mund Richard
Alticus C Bear wrote:
PVE content.

Are Wormholes dull? I would say not but this is more due to the environment than the fact that sleepers have advanced A.I.
The problem with content like mission is that it feels quite isolated, you can be in system with a hundred players and only see people on the undock.


#1 Wormholes are not hisec, and local chat doesn't behave like anywhere else, so you never know when it gets really-really exciting (apart from when you see probes on DScan 0.5 AU away...).

#2 (and more weighted)
Wormhole rats were DESIGNED with the new AI in mind.
Not just some random hastily-implemented patch (see "we know it's broken, will deploy it anyway and fix at a later time), but proper design from bottom-up.
You can't just build a house, and then swap out the foundation, unless said house was designed with that in mind.
HiSec missions were designed to be boring once you have the skills and fit for them.
They could be awesome, if they were redesigned to have sleeper-like rats, but that also includes their numbers and abilities!

Right now, the only way to make them exciting is:
1) what we see now, AI behaving somewhat random
2) under-tanking them (but with ample dps)... best fun I had in L4s was when I was confident with being able to farm them, and tried to thin my tank as much as possible to put on more gank.
Bugged spawns and full-room agro made it quite exciting (specially now, with the new AI, instant room agro, and broken TD sansha Roll)
Afterwards I learned how to do them even better, and got boring again.
Now I live in null.
Stealth Bombers uncloaking at 15km make it fun, though with the AI protecting me, only for a short time. Ofc if I die in that short time...

"We want PvE activities to require active participation and mirror PvP more closely." Stacking penalty for NPC EWAR then? Lock range under 9km from over 100 in a BS is not fun. Nor is two NPC web drones making me crawl 10m/s. PvP SW-900 x5: 75m/s.
Azrael Dinn
Imperial Mechanics
#102 - 2012-12-08 15:16:49 UTC  |  Edited by: Azrael Dinn
Gilbaron wrote:
the problem is not that pve is boring,

the problem is that you can hardly make a living via pvp


And how accepting a mission after a missions or going to the same sites over and over again is not boring?

I've have tried it almost all. It only gets interesting when you are about to blow up and don't know whats happening. Most of the times you can plan everything ahead, you know what you are doing, where to go, what the evemy will do against you and so forth and most of the times the enemy will not stand a chance. When something special happens and you notice that "wot" the rats are winning. Then PvE is interesting for that brief moment of time. After that you warp away and come back with bigger guns and then start the whole process all over and then it gets boring again.

But this is what I think about PvE atm and the element of not totaly knowing what you getting your self into is not there and thats usualy interesting cause it new and suprising.

edit:
So much stuff to think about...

Anyhow I was also thinking about all this PvE and how you know everything. Why not mix the PvE rats up so that you don't know what your going up against. Doing PvE against Caldari / Guristas, rats might use sensor dambening and webbing, or going missions against amarr / bloodraiders and the rats would use speed and webbing. What I'm trying to say that give the rats new tools to attack players. They don't need to be limited to one type of warfare / race / faction. Why can't they do more and mix attacks like players do (can't be that hard to fit a neutralizer on a vindicator).

After centuries of debating and justifying... Break Cloaks tm
Verity Sovereign
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#103 - 2012-12-08 17:09:02 UTC
Crimeo Khamsi wrote:
Verity Sovereign wrote:
(and have a higher change of dropping high tier faction ammo)


Minor comment: I must confess, I don't understand why everybody is so gung-ho about drops. Sure, this is one way to give payouts, and yes, if PVE is made harder, payouts need to be larger.

However, making too much of your payment be in the form of drops has an obvious negative side effect: It gimps the industrial sector of the playerbase. They have no need to be building things anymore if those things are just getting spawned in huge numbers by missioners.

And at the same time, it doesn't even really matter to the missioners. Why do you care whether you get 100,000 isk in a module, versus your agent simply paying you 100,000 isk extra for completing the mission? if anything the modules are just more annoying, because you are forced to fly over to every wreck to loot them, and forced to go visit trade hubs to sell your junk all the time.

Thus, relying too much on module based payments seems lose-lose for everyone: industrialists are hurt, and missioners are more inconvenienced.

I say just stick to isk as the vast majority of your payment, and make valuable drops only be special things that you get occasionally on some missions for doing things like fighting a battle especially well, or meeting optional side-objectives. But even then, just as a little bit of icing on a primarily isk-based cake.


#1) ammo already drops from rats, I just propose making that be low tier faction ammo instead of standard ammo - it makes the value of the drops higher, without stepping on anyone's toes.
It doesn't devalue LP (well maybe a bit), as nobody wastes LP on low tier pirate ammo.
Right now the low tier pirate ammo is just pointless- the supply is too low to actually be usable, and its inferior to the well supplied navy ammo.
So this change would help *fix* low tier pirate ammo, and help *fix* unrewarding PvE at the same time (not complete fixes though

#2) There must be a balance between inflation, and "gimping the industrial sector"
Prices of industrial goods rise when the ISK supply expands proportionately more than the supply of goods. If the drops are so crap that they aren't even worth picking up, then we have PvE injecting an unbalanced supply of ISK vs goods.
Ever increasing ISK supply is why you can't buy a thorax for 4 million anymore.

A balance must be struck between reward vs effort. If you just make PvE a whole lot harder (in various ways, to make it less boring), you need to buff the rewards to keep it worthwhile.
If you buff the rewards - well rat bounties (in an out of missions) are why we have such ridiculous inflation... so this needs to be balanced with an increased value of goods from the missions.
The mission goods must be balanced relative to the industrial base, so as to not obsolete mining/manufacturing.

Low tier faction ammo drops seem to be an ideal way to do that
* the amount of ammo dropped doesn't change, just standard becomes low tier pirate
* This low tier pirate can't be converted through the LP store to Navy ammo, so people who want to use Navy ammo must buy the standard ammo produced by players.
* Mineral value of drops does not go up (they can even tweak the stats so it goes down)

My guess is with a greatly increased availability of low tier pirate ammo, we'd see the price move to about halfway between standard and Navy faction (for 2/3rds the DPS increase of Navy faction), which would mean more valuable drops.



by the way, someone linked this chart:
http://i256.photobucket.com/albums/hh194/wrath_23/IskConcern.png
Can someone tell me how wormholes are an ISK faucet?
Sleepers have no bounties, and they only drop components, which are used to make T3 ships....
And all the other stuff in WHs (ie ore, PI) does not produce ISK either, just "goods"
Hakan MacTrew
Konrakas Forged
Solyaris Chtonium
#104 - 2012-12-08 17:56:00 UTC
Sleeper loot is sold to NPC buy orders. It is therefore a faucet.

Friends
Colman Dietmar
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#105 - 2012-12-09 06:56:27 UTC
Solutio Letum wrote:
why not return on topic of why PvE is boring to death?

PVE is boring because it is repetitive and not challenging to anyone who knows the ropes.

This can be fixed by adding variety through making the spawns in missions random so that there's no predetermined solution to every single encounter, and improving NPC fleet composition and AI, so that the NPCs have a larger variety of tools (logi, ewar, real tanking, etc). Also, it would help if NPCs didn't have infinite targeting range and capacitor and thus were affected by dampeners and energy transfer.

Another big improvement would be to make pickup groups viable. This, however, would require creation of some new looting mechanics, as well as adding some PVE content that would actualy require players to gather in groups.
Kesthely
Mestana
#106 - 2012-12-15 03:14:55 UTC
One of the things i personally dislike about missioning is that with better skills they become TO easy.

I like my little ships, my frigates, destroyers and cruisers, but when i want to use them in a mission, i have to either take a low level mission wich then becomes way to easy (T2 frigates in a lvl 1 or 2 for example) or take painstakeingly long (T2 frigate soloing a lvl 4 mission)

What i propose is the following:
Allow certain agents to accept missions designed for specific ships. EG: Go to a lvl 4 agent and accept a lvl 4 mission, for a frigate sized ship. Acceleration gates would only allow frigate sized ship, and the mission would be as difficult as a lvl 4 mission but then for your Frigate.

A few examples of how those Lvl 4 missions would look like to me
Frigate sized: Designed for Faction or T2 frigates, a few ships per wave, designed to counter frigates (lots of webs, fast tracking guns or lots of light missiles etc.)

Destroyer Sized: Designed for Destroyers T2 Destroyer hulls Also allows T2 frigates and faction frigates. Designed to get the feeling of a true destroyer, lots of incomming frigates with a moderate amount of dps, decent amount of webs so you can't flee, and in rapid waves so you have to kill them FAST before they swarm you

Cruiser Sized: For T2 and faction cruisers and below, disallow T3 cruisers. Mix of frigates destroyers and cruisers, some missions heavily on support / disruption some heavy on dps / tank, and all vulnerable to ewar / capwar and normal tank dps mechanics. Designed so that each mission would favor a certain TII role, some missions easier to be done with a Hac, others with a recon, some even designed for a Hic, EG: an encounter of a few cruisers that keep warping out and in when damaged unless they have an infinate point on them

Battlecruiser Sized: For (T2) Battlecruisers and below, includeing T3 Cruisers: Designed to be done with a small 5-10 man fleet (Think the 5-10 man incursion sites)

Battleship Sized: As current

Each Level of agent (1 to 5) would then have a selectable option for ship size, and would give an appropiate mission. From easy to hard. This way pilots wanting to specialize in certain ships or roles will have the oppertunity to use there favorite ship in appropiate challanges.
Mars Theran
Foreign Interloper
#107 - 2012-12-15 11:29:30 UTC
Less targets; more versatility. Change it up. Make it so you have a variety of missions, (speaking with respect to security missions mostly), and variable targets and ship types. Make it feel like players are fighting to achieve a goal.

Change up the number of pockets required to advance to the final room. Provide variable targets with the potential of not being able to find the primary target, (Intel was wrong), but still complete the mission. Give Mission entities personalities; info like agents have.

It needs to be more interesting. Deeper. Provide follow up missions, possibly storyline, where you receive additional Intel and get the opportunity, (possibly time limited to accept and complete), to go after the entity. Give players a kill list, and prevent them from fighting the same named entities twice, unless the entities happen to be NPC capsuleers. If they are, add times killed to the kill list for them.

Allow NPC entities to spawn in various missions against a specific faction, or a variety of factions. Provide un-named guard entities, possibly with minor info pages that detail their rank and position. Provide ship info, and links to the entities or guard entities piloting them. Allow for variable bounties on them that can potentially increase the longer they evade the player.

Just ideas; throwing them out there. Smile

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madmax 27
Gardes Feydakin
#108 - 2012-12-15 11:55:00 UTC  |  Edited by: madmax 27
I myself would like to see the ai in someway get smarter when you have more people in fleet or running missions in groups, maybe bring back the whole room agro bug depending on fleet numbers etc. That whole room agro bug made us as a group work more as team having to bring logistics, useing fleet watch etc. Since you fixed it seems more boring not getting the rush when im about to lose an expensive ship or fellow friends ship. I think this would suit all people whether you running missions solo or in groups makes them more Challenging depending on fleet numbers. Dont even think you need to change the rewards either as worlds collide or blockade you can still make few pennys in a group. One part me says you should have higher level missions for groups but i just don't see this very balanced as it can easily be exploited. So i stick to change the ai depending on fleet numbers.

You might say if you have got a fleet, why go run incursions in empire, well the people i run missions with, we started 6 years + ago and now were older we have more responsibility so we cannot play hours on end flying about to incursions, but we still support the game we played for the last 6 years odd by still having are subs running and playing twice a week and meeting up for a chat.