Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I like the sounds of this a lot.

Giving NPC's teeth may require more game design perspective than what I have.

For instance, pulling off the top of my head - emulate player behavior. Teach the NPCs to have roaming gank squads, or hotdrop in, or specifically 'probe out' and hunt players in missions/sites/etc. Allow them to have the same tools players use, and they become just as dangerous as other players.

But how do you program that? Is it a good idea to give NPCs the same potential as players? How will it affect the consumer base? etcetra.

The feature as a whole needs to be 'threatening' but not 'impossible'. It needs to be difficult and behave in nature similar to a campaign against players. You need to take out strategic targets and cripple the enemy, not sit in one range of sites and pad your wallet. Some parts of it should be profitable, but others should be driven by their threat value - not their isk value.

This can sound fairly obvious, but it represents a fundamental shift in how to look at the NPC environment. Players and developers alike I've spoken to are generally of the mind NPCs are 'lesser creatures'. In EVE, they exist to enable your game play against other players. The mentality you find in Guild Wars 2, or other MMOs, where NPCs are constructed to be seriously threatening, isn't found here.

Before we can pull out specific suggestions on how to make NPCs dangerous, we have to decide - are prepared to make them dangerous? The mentality that has prevailed in this game for a decade, where NPCs exist only to pad your wallet, would have to be removed entirely. Players would need to adapt to an environment where it is equipped and prepared to murder your multi-billion isk marauder if you aren't taking it seriously.

This is why I offer the Outbreak method - it is a continuation of the status quo. It can stabilize the Incursion area of the storyline with a healthier prospect that is nonvolatile. If we were to take the other route, and make Incursions 'dangerous', we would have to reevaluate fundamentals of the game. NPCs would have be redesigned, if not globally then locally, to have the tools that players cannot 100% anticipate. The idea you can get 'ganked' by the system like it was a player would have become accepted. The idea that some fights will just be 'unfair', like it can be with player fights, would have to become accepted.

In the end, giving Incursions real meat might simply be too daunting. It comes down to if the community wants to continue to treat NPCs as flying banks, or an actual challenge.

I think you'll be hard pressed to find ANYTHING that stops us from adapting.



These might be a bit too much to expect from NPCs. Given that they are non-player characters, they do need to exhibit some manner of predictable behaviour, otherwise people will just avoid them entirely. It may be difficult to figure out, but there needs to be some pattern that will allow the player to come up with a solution for dealing with them.

The more I ponder this however, the more I think it'd be a great way to clean up empty 0.0.

Perhaps they only spawn in Sov space (or maybe just sleepers invade sov space? or "insert new dangerous force here"?). Perhaps in the sov window there could be an additional measurement for the amount of activity from the sov owner in that system. The less activity, the higher the chance sleepers or rogue drones invade and attack the sov structures of that system. Also, the MORE sov that sov owner has, the greater difficulty of the sleepers that spawn. So if a corp only has one or two systems, at most they'd be attacked by a couple dreads with battleship support. Alliances that own entire regions should need to mobilize supercaps against the invasion fleets that attack their unpopulated systems.

You just need to make the NPCs matter, just a little bit. Right now if you jump into a 0.0 system and there's rats on the gate, you don't care, because they aren't going to do anything to you. You're either going to warp off to your next destination, or you're going to farm them up because they're easy to kill. When sleeper rats set off my armor buzzer on a shiny fit archon, and I'm tackled and losing cap fast to neuts, pve actually gets kind of fun.

And just to be clear, I'm not currently a 0.0 pilot, and I've never really gotten very deep into the whole 'taking sov' business. I've done my time in 0.0 and my biggest peeve was the vast number of empty systems in apparent "sovereign" space. You shouldn't be able to drive 50 jumps through someone's space without running into them. If someone owns 50 systems you should be able to regularly find the owners of that space there. Not just holed up in one system stuck off in a corner somewhere. But since there may not be a good reason for other players to go and structure grind a bunch of systems with little tactical value, NPC's should do this sort of cleanup monotony for us. While making things a bit more interesting for the space owners at the same time. If sov starts being about taking systems you actually need, it would open 0.0 up to smaller groups that maybe don't have 200man supercap fleet required to actually hold key systems these days.

This is a really good Idea for a new feature!! also congratulation for the good text!

i'm not an expert on lore but i faintly remember reading that at least sansha and his top officers have retained their free will and should be capable of making rational decisions (at some level at least). right now, the whole incursion story reminds me of blackadder goes forth...