Missions & Complexes

Its tired old content and a system mostly dating from 2005, and most of the content has been scaled out a year later by the introduction of rigs, and the general increase in average SP of the playerbase. Its silly that I can do the same content 5x faster than a new player, because of level 5s in drone interfacing, gallente battleship, sentry drones, large hybrids and the various gunnery, tank and core supports, and that lot is a far greater SP timesink than training propulsion jamming to 1.

The newer AI is a definate step forward, but there still needs to be better puzzles/strategies than rote-learn the trigger, and one of the strategies should always not be sensitive to T2 firepower type advantages (and better than blitz).

If I really, really, really had to deal with this, I'd leave 1 old agent per race offering the current security missions (for the OCD amongst us who would be uncomfortable with them gone), and I'd seriously reconsidering from the rest of the agents how to provide entertaining missions.

most of what has been said in this thread so far is stupid. anyone who tries to argue that missions should be 'more exciting' or 'more like PVP' is in reality advocating missions to be more annoying and more redundant. if you want excitement and PVP, how about you try to, you know, PVP? there already are missions that are more like PVP, namely FW missions. surprisingly enough, most people choose regular lvl4s instead.

my claim is that no matter how 'exciting' you try to make a mission, after doing it 100 times players will be bored and annoyed at best and uninstall eve at worst. if you want the mission system to retain its place in the eve universe, you should rather look at why people are running missions in the first place. the motivation can be summed up under three categories:
- making ISK
- relaxing
- min/maxing

the fact of the matter is that a typical mission runner does not want to have to deal with unforeseen circumstances like random spawns while watching local and dscan. he wants to have a beer and watch youtube videos while making large red crosses explode with his shiny pimpmobile and make some bank in the process. if you screw this play style up for him, he will not become a PVPer, he will just switch on his mackinaw pilot.
if you really want to improve missions, you need to give up the illusion that they need to be 'exciting' and instead concentrate on filing off the rough edges like redocking between missions, imbalanced NPC ewar (target painters? really?), wildly varying time/payout ratios etc.

Nobody has ever suggested every npc in a mission should warp out. Did you just finish training forum strawman to V ?

Dread pirate scarlet is the classic example of an NPC that should warp out if not pointed. Not only does it not warp out, it can be volleyed by a T2 fit dominix in the first pocket (bad - that should be an artillery only thing or not at all), and in the second pocket its there if you failed anyway. The mission should fail if you chase it out without killing it.



The sandbox problem is that the sand really isn't that deep (ie most players need money), and missions affect other tasks and things (standings). Also eve ships are mostly balanced around having to sacrifice a couple of slots for utility and the fits kinda fail when compromising to get utility is not required.

Again most PVE is minion slaying and I do not care if minions do not warp. I also don't think the point is the general solution, it should be far more effective to bring suitable utility for each mission as required. I'd even prefer it if the npc's had standardised groups of spawns across missions, that forced you to warp out and go fetch the required utility if necessary. (ie mission x has a slot for a "large npc group", and the "large npc group" could spawn up as RR sometimes, and need you to use utility to break it. Instead they have this minor meaningless variation thing that causes you to not need to do anything different.

the ships are also far more balanced as a group, when the tasks require utility, as that forces compromises on fit.

How about anew agen type, let's say warfare, with pretty much the same missions but with added randomness/difficulty/odd fit requirement? You keep your low effort lvl 4 and people who want something more investing can get it. Of course, the more effort/risk coming from the randomness/odd requirement also means a better payout...

Dosen't that involve being at war with a **** load of people?

So you would be ahppy witha button in sattion you press to recive isk automatically? It would interfer much less with your beer/youtube...

It always stumps me when I see these posts.

‘’- reduce isk/hour from plexing in high sec and increase in null sec’’
I don’t think this is fully thought through, further reductions of rewards in High-sec will in no way add to the number of people in Nul-sec, or did you not notice the immediate drop in people running LVL5’s when they moved to Low-sec. All this suggestion would do is reduce the chances of a new toon attaining the ISK to try out other aspects of the game.

Most noobs I talk to are ready to go fly in Nul before they are even skilled for T2 frigs but after a week of dealing with scammers (Selling opportunities, or Goon transports) and politics (CTA’s and OPS they are in no way equipped to handle) and Bitter vets (‘’That fit is a total fail’’, ‘’Your don’t know anything so shut up and do what I say’’, ‘’What do you mean you can’t afford a replacement ship submit a E-mail to the alliance and we will get you a new one, free or charge *clears throat, in 4 to 6 weeks’’).

Nul-sec politics is the reason Nul-sec is empty of Noobs, not LVL-4 mission rewards. As is pointed out later in the same post
‘’ -revamp radar sites: in null secs no one run them!’’
''most escalation are not worthy and not fun to run, especially those in null secs,''
Nul-sec has unused Content already, so why should they get more rewards for current content? Which reminds me of another complaint a new recruit pointed out, the tax rate of 50%, while with the Nul-sec Corp that recruited him he made half as much, and lost 400% more than he made, he never saw any benefit to Nul. I know there are benefits of running in Nul-sec, having spent quite a bit of time in those ventures as well, but buffing rewards ‘IMO’ will just justify corp leaders and alliance leaders to raise the tax and buff their wallets and war chest not benefiting a Mission/Plex runner in anyway whatsoever.

TL;DR Nul sec rewards getting buffed is not a solution to PVE or Nul-sec population problems. It’s just a way for taxes to be levied on the lowly mission runners to pay for the habits of PVP’ers. (Or Blobbers rather)

Then why are you arguing with me? You're the one that picked up my point about points being a bad requirement and ran with it.

If you keep abreast of these types of threads, requiring a point/tackle is a very common theme and my view was it's bad move.


Basically I stated the premise of the change was decent, but a point as a requirement is bad....You seem to vaguely agree, albeit in your own special way.

A matter of awful communication, pretty much.

Profit of missioning scales non-linear with mission lvl, so as long as you can not solo lvl4 missions, running them in a fleet with similarly affected players would be a lot more profitable than solo running lower level. (Most lvl4s can be run with as few as 1 T1 logi and 1 full DPS, as that's my dualbox setup until i can go spider)

The problem is finding a reliable fleet composition in a game full of cutthroats as a new player without in game contacts - since at least one member of every fleet needs to specialize into logistics and thus won't even have the fallback option of solo running lower level missions.

i'd really like to see more pve content as well...