Missions & Complexes

That's why the proposal is to provide us, at least the tools for all of us who enjoy them.

I have considered it :) Not sure it is the path we will go down.. but I am at least considering it

Everyone enjoys different things :) We should make an effort to cater for as much of that as possible or at least give the ability for players to make their own fun.

I'm just sad that no one found the joke about my single 50 y/o dated mother funny.

after telling you once more how awesome you are for communicating with us carebears (you're awesome!), i would like to chip in on what Jenn wrote:
- tedious/grindy missions: undoubtedly there are some missions that are more popular than others. but in the grand scheme of things, the only missions that are generally disliked are those with excessive amounts of ewar and the ones with excessive amounts of warp gates (especially when they are not blitzable and the gates are 50km away.). i think it is fair to say that most pve players enjoy shooting at things and/or looting shinies more than warping or slowboating around while watching youtube on the other screen.

- UI additions: great, no question there.

- docking after each mission: tedious. with most battleships' terrible agility i end up wasting 1-2 minutes per mission just watching my ship align to the next jump gate or waiting for "docking request accepted". i would much prefer just cruising through my corner of space accepting missions through the agent finder. or better yet, make a common, regenerating mission 'market' for people to pick the missions they like most. you will then also see which ones are most popular (those will get snatched up instantly). needless to say, you would have to look closely at the ISK/hour and nerf accordingly.

- rewards scaling with distance: it is not true that incursion runners do not have to travel. they travel across all of hisec to get to the incursion, whereas a mission runner never needs to leave his or her constellation. while jumping through the same gate for the 1001st time is annoying, i do not see how it would justify better payouts, especially if we get rid of docking as proposed above.

- randomness of missions, refitting: right now, since you are docked anyway, i see no problem with switching fits or even ships (i run recon 1-3 in a slasher for example). if you do not like switching around (or if we get rid of docking), there is nothing stopping you from flying a slightly less efficient but versatile ship (mach, vargur, CNR, rattler etc.).

- bruce lee fights: it always struck me as strange that one raven hull can obliterate a dozen raven and scorpion hulls without breaking a sweat. are the NPC engineers so incompetent at fitting their ships? on the other hand, from a design point of view it might become a little tricky to tune mission difficulty if the DPS difference between 2 and 3 rats shooting forces you out of T2 and into a deadspace tank. (not to mention the woes of new players who come in underequipped and underskilled).

- mission escalations, random faction module drops: it does sound interesting at first glance. i'm not sure i subscribe to the mandatory lowsec idea, but even then it would at least provide me with another reason to skill into stealth bombers... valuable module drops are not a bad idea either, but you would have to keep them rare enough as to not step on explorers' toes.

What might improve missions..


Add more missions to the mission pool. At least this will add some more storylines (As in the storyline of the mission not storyline missions).

Higher standing unlock additional missions or rewards. I could be wrong but to the best of my knowledge having 10.0 standing vs 5.0 makes no difference in missions. I'm not talking about the ability to install jump clones or anchor a POS. I'm talking about something directly related to the mission as in higher LP, maybe a chance to receive a random bonus reward (faction item) as a mission reward. Yes I know this would have to be a very rare chance and you can buy these with LP.

Add more lore and have the agent recommend you to another agent after you got very high standing. I'm thinking something like a "path" in Eve where you have to work your way up though a series of agents to complete a chain of missions... It's just a thought and I'm not sure how you would incorporate it in Eve.

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What I think won't improve missions.


Randoms ship spawns. Yes maybe for newer pilots that have to use more caution but for pilots that have all their core skills this won't make a difference. Missions are just a grind so if it spawns 10 battleships or 20 cruisers the only difference that it might make is ammo choice.

Random faction spawns. This will just force everyone to omni tank. Again not really helping anything and making fits more expensive.

Trying to make missions more like PVP. It's just not going to happen. The experience is nothing alike when your shields are going down in a mission vs PVP. You're not going to recreate the "I'm an innocent ratter in a belt" then as you attack him figure out he's bait when 10 of his friends warp in. Even highsec dueling where you have to figure out how your opponent is fitted, look at the age of the pilot etc..


Of course this is just some ideas. I'm glad CCP is actually looking at this!

Does that mean the current missions are likely to stick around in more or less their current form while any "redesigned" missions become additional (rather than replacement) content? I hope that's what that means.

Please cite your source that level 5 missions were never intended to be in highsec and this was a bug. I've never heard this before but I'm not up on all the dev blogs either.

I like what you did with sleepers and I like what you did with Incursions, but if you make missions too similar to them (they are essentially the same thing, one armor tanked one shield), then there will be no reason not to go do those things because they make more ISK.

The other problem is that while I said I don't like the "Bruce Lee fight" aspect of it, I rely on salvaging and looting for the basis of my entire industry toons career. A fight with a couple battleships and a few support ships would be WAY more realistic, but would screw industry over big time. And it would give miners a huge buff, which would make me hurl. I am happy they fixed the profession for the people that choose it, but taking money out of my pocket and putting it in theirs would be tragic.

And especially after the changes to marauders have been made. I would hate to do all this training having burned my yearly remap only to be wasting my time.