Missions & Complexes

I have been doing lvl 4's for a while now on my main. They haven't seemed to change much. I see a lot of new players aiming to do level 4's but in reality they aren't as lucrative as other activities (which are more fun and require less time, within reason) and grinding them takes all the fun out of them anyway. It's a nice benchmark for other things (such as incursions?) to say you can comfortably solo lvl 4's, but it seems right now they are nothing but a stepping-stone/one of those boxes in Mario where you hit it and gold coins fly out (except that was marginally exciting)

If you do them for fun/lore-reading then chances are it will get boring for you quickly, too, as there's only a set amount of missions and you end up repeating them a lot. Unless you're with friends they tend to get boring within the space of an hour and feel fairly unfulfilling.

Maybe missions could be made more immersive, with more elaborate scenery, storylines and NPC-player interaction. There could be more chance for shiny loot at the expense of more challenging fights. Some missions could be more dynamic with their NPC spawns or even randomized, making them less predictable. More risk = more isk?

I think there is a lot of potential for missions, but at the moment it feels like it's kind of stagnated and more dated than my 50 year old single mother.

Reasonable thoughts//opinions?


Thanks

There's a lot of room for improvement in the mission system, but there's a lot of unnecessary bitching also. Its great ISK compared to a lot of activities; people think that for example running a c3 makes 100 mil an hour. It does when you're running it. It doesn't when you consider how many toons you have to use, scouting, closing your static etc etc. Its basically the best activity you can do for ISK where you can sit down and make enough money to play the game another couple days in under an hour in any given situation.

Its not nearly as stagnant if you have multiple jump clones, multiple agents, and multiple ships.

If I sat down and did missions in one or 2 systems all day long, and nothing else, I would pull my ******* hair out. But as with every video game, most people only metagame. Or better yet, what they think is metagaming, or what they think is min maxing.


Personally, I think it would be great if every mission wasn't a Bruce Lee fight. 50 vs 1 and the 1 wins every sequel. I was rushing WC4 yesterday and I thought how lame it was that I was bbq'ing Rattlesnakes in my Tengu, and the Rattlesnakes were shooting freaking hybrids at me and didn't have drones. That makes zero sense.

But as mentioned, it would screw the economy if they revamped them and did a poor job. It took them a while to "fix" Incursions. The income is relatively the same now, but the number of people doing it is much less.

The reward should be more in LP, less in isk. The missions that allow killing swathes of battleships should be scarce for this reason. This would differentiate nullsec and highsec into mutually supporting rather than competing income.

Faction modules should be on t2 level or above to make LP stuff more attractive and shift t2 demand down a bit in comparison. The latter would just be a slight move like making faction guns as strong as 10% skilled t2 guns but use less fitting. This would also shift t2 material demand slightly lower and move nullsec income from blocs to players.

Short:
• less mission bounties and isk reward
• LP stuff better than t2 to drive LP value
• nullsec makes the solo isk, highsec makes good LP stuff to sell

Yes they do :) and it is on our to-do list.. but the content revamp is going to be a long process.

Very true, imho new mission content is needed. But it won't have to be like re-inventing the wheel or revamp. We do need at least more level 4 missions. So effort geared more to addition.

As i proposed, what about making a thread, so players (those who will of course) could propose design content for a level 4 mission of their dream in detail of course ? You could utilize that ready made useful information to cut the length of that long process.. Other MMOs have already done that and you will be surprised what players could have to offer!

The problem with making missions more about LP and less about isk reward and bounties is that then the market will become saturated with LP items and the prices will plummet.

You could increase the number of missions 10 fold, but eventually they'll get stale as people run them over and over. As long as the game relies on a static mission pool created by CCP the problem isn't going to go away.

A 'mission editor', for lack of a better term, that allows players to create pve content is really whats needed.

The easier way to revamp missions is to look into the LP store and faction items in general.

The LP stores of most corps are ridiculous. This is due not so much to the LP cost (you can make 40K LP/hr) but the cost in tags. 140+ tags for faction 1MN MWDs is silly, especially because some of them are sub-par to T2 and some, even, are worse than T1 basically.

Mismatches between tag cost, LP cost, usefulness (ie; advantages over and above T1/T2, disadvantages to complex modules) and ISK cost should be systematically looked at. Tag drop rates can be increased or, more usefully, the tag cost can be reduced.

It is of course impossible to predict the final market prices of some modules from current tag prices, because if you adjust tag demand and supply it will affect the price, but it should be logical. For instance, it should cost 50 small tags for a 1MN MWD, 50 medium tags for a medium MWD, 50 large tags for a 100MN, etc.

The rank of the tag could be used as well. eg, 50 Private I tags is a 1 run BPC or a swap; 50 private IIs for a 2 run BPC, 50 Private IIIs for a 5 run BPC.

Fixing this will flow on to more production of the currently rare and useless modules, which may see them get recognised as being useful (eg, faction smartbombs), which underpins prices and makes currently useless LP valuable.

It is also not true to say nothing has been done with missions - the advent of sleeper AI (lite) for mission rats has been an improvement in interactivity and dynamism.

For the part of the LP, it is all about keeping a balance, in order not to have the saturation. And it can be done. This refers more to the revamp.

For the 'mission editor/creator', what i can think as closest is something similar to that of Star Trek Online Foundry http://sto.perfectworld.com/about/foundry/foundry-tutorials, but to be honest i don't see it very achievable in reasonable time and resources/cost. That's why i proposed players' contribution. And of course proposing/making a mission is only the first part. After that, it will be submitted to the CCP Content Designers so they can accept/reject/accommodate/balance accordingly before added to game (if accepted), to avoid exploitations and guarantee a minimum quality/suitability.

The better AI will truly make difference but all those referred above and especially content will make it too. At least to me and i believe to the majority of the PVErs out there.

So called new content will be old the minute you'll have every spawn and damage type listed on eve-survival. Spending DEV's time in such a way would really be a terrible waste of time - EvE is not so much about providing us players with new content but rather providing the right tools like better AI; smarter, more radnom & dangerous so we can create our own content flying in fleets and socializing instead of flying solo, bored with life.