Jita Park Speakers Corner

I would like to see them implement all the missing agents. I do not think this needs to be done as a big bang approach but rather an on going week content and enablement project.

Level 5 mission LP stores VS FW LP stores. Why can you earn more ISK with a frigate fitted with a prototype cloak and 3 meta 0 stabs than with billions of ISK invested in carriers and unique PVE ships? Any reason why we shouldn't be adequately rewarded for risking all of this to make a living?

Does CCP actually consider PvE important in its own right or merely as a means to an end for players to get money and other resources to do Sandbox Things with?

A closer balance between LP gains in FW and regular PVE is atractive to me.

Randomizing the spawns in the missions makes sense to me.

One day I would love to see a PVE overhaul. Or a new PVE system added. PVE as it is today is obviously dated and one of the most primitive parts of the game. I understand to an extent that it's not the best bang for buck, but I think it will have to be tackled eventually.

This is a critical question. With nullsec alliances far more dependent on bottom-up (or at least, middle-up) income, there will be much more top-down pressure to seek out PVE that provides for something as close to a salary as possible: reliable, relatively safe, lucrative enough to keep up with doctrine, and doable in T1 ships for the sake or relatively new players. Anything that makes PVE riskier or more dangerous or more unpredictable will meet with stiff resistance, both from people who only consider player-created content to be worth anything, and from people who simply need the ISK necessary to participate in corp or alliance activities. (There are also the people who play EVE to relax.)

For people who like the lore and the universe and also the player contributions to it, anything that livens up PVE is good. In fact, it may be useful to consider the idea of "PVE" to be an archaism, and to look at environmental response to player choice instead. Having the Empires hand out LP for player kills in FW is a first step along these lines. This is considerably more complicated, but the potential reward is tremendous.

There's no particular reason to do either/or. The first case is essentially already done, and requires little more than a tweak here and there. There can be parts of the game where NPCs are such a distant concern that players who hate NPC interference can go there. Then there can be parts of the game where NPC interference is considered an obvious consequence of sharing the galaxy with trillions of other people, and their intrusions are, if not always welcomed, at least taken in stride. Fortunately, these parts of space are already fairly well delineated, and the players mostly located where they want to be.

Right now, the general consensus of the last blog banter was that lore was wallpaper, and people were either indifferent to it or frustrated by it. There are people who wouldn't mind if you just ripped it down and exposed the bare wall, and there are people who'd prefer something more interactive (which is a very tall order). How much of what kind of PVE CCP chooses to implement where is a major decision, but CCP Seagull has already detailed what seems like a relatively near term scenario where it will be important: will capsuleers have a say in determining where and how and how far the Empires fall, and where and how and how much the capsuleers take over (in other words, will the Empires respond to capsuleer pressure)? Or is CCP just going to rip the wallpaper down, and say whoops! look at that! no Empires anymore. It's all yours, have fun?

PvE is important

Tell me that all the renters in null do so because they make beaucoup iskies doing PvP

It is where a LOT of players start out and I agree with Malcanis in that some variation and spice would be good for the game.

I am the RP guy (or so I keep being told) on the council. You know I want the Lore to mean something and what we DO to become a part of that. We should be making decisions based on Lore and Lore making decisions based on what the players do.

But to get back to the initial premise of PvE being important. Go back and look at past economic chats from past fandests. Tell me where all the isk faucets are.

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I would like that players were provided tools to set up PvE content to other players.

FAI, make players earn "agent points" and set up missions with elements provided a price tag in "agent points".

Say you need, in order to set up a Lvl4 mission, 10% of the total bounties in ISK plus 20,000 agent points. Adding a Meta 1 frigate could cost 100 points, an acceleration gate 200 points, first gated room 500 points, second room 1000 points, a Meta 5 BS could cost 1500 points... just throwing numbers, obviously the price tag should be carefully tested and balanced.

The player setting up a mission would be rewarded, either by unveiling another agent, or eliminating it, or with just more agent points. The ultimate goal would be to build a network of agents able to cordinate in political decissions that affected the evolution of NPC corporations or even the empires. Let's say that, for a modicum 500 billion agent points, you could access Empress Sarum herself and convince her to ban access to Amarr trade hub to all Minmatarr players for 1 month...

At start, the idea would apply only to FiS, but WiS would be a much richer environment. Political clienteles would be a relevant part of RP as capsuleers infiltrated the structure of power, buying favors through agents and points, killing, defending or bribing NPCs. The system could be dynamic, no need to set a roster of NPC agents, rather they could be spawned on demand (say set up mission, someone else fulfills it, and now you acces the "Head of Security team of station Z at system Y moon X", which didn't existed until now... and may suffer a grim fate as soon as other players notice that agent has become "active".

So you unveil the poor devil in charge of a certain station and bribe him to steal T2 modules and sell them to you at a discount price, someone hires the local mafia gang to kill him, other hires the security chief to protect him, and three missions spawn; one to kill a freighter and steal the T2 items, another to kill the corrupt station director and another to kill the assassins before they assemble.

The whole agent system would play like a maze of cards for a cards game. Agents would be the cards, each one with an "efffect" (certain kinds of missions) and a "cost" to "cast" the card; direct cost in iSK and agent points, but also in opening the agent to retaliation form players owning "hunter/killer" cards, which in turn could be blocked by "healer/guardian" cards. The players taking on the missions would never know who they are working for and would be provided only limited inteligence (level, total esteemed reward) unless they had some agent points to spend learning things like main damage type, main damage resist or the presence of webbers/jammers. Each mission would be unique and players could specialyze building "mission runner killer" missions -and fits appropiate to lose when things went sh*t.

The result would be a whole new venue of gameplay, based on dynamically generated PvE, a new type of PvP that rewarded skill and cunning instead of brute force (picking the right agents, the right missions, not just putting 500 agents on the same target), and on top of it, it would be a soloable and casual-friendly hisec activity -something a new player could start from scratch and develop a uberplayer career without ever being bothered to become a target for tear collector or a cog to nullseccers, without a need to "jump the wall" and leave hisec.

Is the goal of CCP still to make PVE more like PVP in regards to the fittings of ships? That seemed to be the case before Foxfour got moved to Dust after the initial NPC AI release fiasco.

CCP Affinity made a thread: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2650656#post2650656 got it stickied, then abandoned it in one day. Does CCP think that's a great way to deal with the community?

One possible way to deepen PVE at least slightly would be to diversify it enough that players weren't put on the frigate->battleship treadmill, with battleships as the endgame (well, except for those select few people running L4s in assault frigates, etc.). It would be cool if advanced PVE depended more on the ability to choose the ship and the fit for the job than presenting yet another occasion to undock the Raven Navy Issue.

I'm not sure what balance can be made between lvl 5 missions or (what I'll assume is the focus) lvl 4 faction warfare missions.

People doing lvl 5 missions do put quite a bit on the line, but this is usually their choice for method of running them. You could use more people ala incursions and avoid carriers all together. I'm not saying this is a good idea or a justification for any balance activity, just that the ships you are using are not alone even worth entering into a balancing discussion. Number of rats in the mission? Mission goals/types, that would be productive discussion.

People doing fw missions are by it's nature at war with dozens or hundreds of people in their immediate vicinity and their missions are advertised to the world the moment they activate them. Again, this has nothing to do with balancing actions either, but does show the stark difference between the two.

In fact the only thing these things have in common is that they are pve activities and they draw from many of the same reward pools (one being isk obviously and the other, more importantly, their shared LP store choices.

And this specifically is where I think the focus here should be. It's the only link and as such the only thing worth discussing at all if we must discuss the activities in the same building.

As long as each has it's own niche then they can be balanced independently. Which, as they are completely different activities built on completely different types of.. platforms? They likely should be.

If one steps on the others toes, unless we want to open a giant can of worms by balancing these two completely different things in relation to each other (lol) then the focus should remain on the stores and the stores alone.

We don't balance dead space complexes against high sec level 2 missions.
We balance dead space complexes against their own equations and we balance level 2 high sec missions against their own distinct equation. And with good reason.