Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So in light of more and more posts about new players complaining about how long it takes to train perfect battleship skills, I propose a new mission style that is easy to get into and has a low cap of skill points to be efficient, or really just adding content for low sp characters.

The endurance mission.

This is a deadspace mission that only allows up to 4 ships in (can use off grid fleet booster if you want) and basically pits that team against infinite respawning and escalating pirates of all factions. These rats do not leave wrecks, loot or bounties when popped and hit progressively harder with more hitpoints and damage application (better tracking/optimal but no ewar) as time goes on, to the point where logistics will have to be used to stay in the mission, by spider tanking or dedicated ships.

There is a beacon that attracts all pirate factions in the complex and this beacon can be blown up to stop the mission and collect the reward. If any player looses a ship or warps out the reward is lost for that ship and halved for the others and mission ends. destroying the beacon is the only way to collect the reward at its fullest. This can scale to 30 mil per person for the first hour and 100mil per person by the 2nd hour where it will cap out with the beacon destroying itself. Waves spawn at set timers and when the field gets inundated with 30 ships a 90% web and painter battleship spawns with mwd and 250km range so no just flying mwd and orbiting at the edge of the grid. Every 20 minutes a transporter spawns that will drop cargo that has random standard small hybrid, projectile, and missiles about 1000 of each. The timer starts with the first frig to warp in. This mission can only be attempted once per downtime.

The catch is that the deadspace complex are only available to T1 frigs and destroyers. as in they are the only ones allowed to use the gate.

With every pirate faction being there you need to plug resist holes, you need the dps to prevent the battleship spawning, it gives a better reason for T1 logi frigates to exist and best of all it is a great way to get people to work together for greater gain with far lower skill point requirements while making it risky not in ship death but opportunity cost. The longer you last the better the reward, but if you are not careful someone can get popped crushing a ton of your reward if not all if its you that dies. This can be griefed with people scanning you down and warping in to the complex and by either force too many ships in spawn or warping out once they land the site and stopping all rewards, so keep an eye on short scan and pop the beacon if neutrals land on your gate.

I feel this promotes good plays and practices grouping with people and making friends while giving great isk rewards for low sp players. Yes this can be be done by one person with 4 alts, but 2 hours of constant flying and action spread across 4 characters for one person, that should be rewarded, but they probably have much better opportunities to make isk with that many alts anyway.

numbers can be fine tuned, but i want 600 dps required for the final 20 minutes of the mission, with 3 remote reps barely keeping you afloat with most tanking skills at IV.

The mission should be offered by concord with no standing increase or lp, but give sec status, because you are killing rats. Should be titled, Concord basic training or similiar. Lore wise it can be justified that almost all pirate factions want some new research tech or to destroy an important sensor that detects pirate activity, but is just a lure by concord to pick off overconfident rats, hence the beacon to draw them in. This mission cannot be attempted on trial accounts.

Yeah you could, but I like having more than one choice.

once a day is a limit, and its open to griefing, as in anyone can come in and with just their presence stop the mission. and if anyone has to warp out or die there goes half the reward. Disposable ships they are but not done correctly will ruin your isk income for opportunity cost. You must be focused and not afk for the 2 hours. I think that is a good trade off.

I'm open to numbers tweaking, such as reward amount or possibly instead of once a day be once a week. 100 mil once a week sounds great already for 2 hours of work as it puts you just shy of being able to plex on this mission alone if you succeed regularly. I want to promote interactions with people, people who want to earn isk, people who feed off tears, friendships and enemies. I just want this to be available to everyone near the start of a characters life instead of requiring months of skillage and hunting for good newb friendly corps.

I don't really like an idea that makes a mission where only 4 people can be on grid (impossible to grief) and can only be run once per day. Arbitrary restrictions in sandbox gameplay are bad. If a player doesn't have high enough skills to adequately run L4's, why not just run level 3's? I'm fairly certain I was running L3's in a cruiser at like, 10m SPs.

How long does it take a noob to train 10mil SP...

its around 6th months... that's not solving the common urge for instant gratification. And let's face it most missions aren't that interesting. Look up survival, Shot the right ships, Salvage. and anything less then three is just really poor. Let's not bring up the doll mission... (oops)


I agree with the OP there should be more interesting and exciting options for new players. Whether this option is a good solution, or not is more dependent on if waves of combat bring an interesting option for new players. I don't think grid limit is good or necessary, and neither are arbitrary restrictions. The isk amounts should be significantly lower then proposed. If the gameplay was really interesting then they could be scaled to all classes.

I think the general idea of wave combat that you can stop anytime for less reward is a really cool scale-able and intense sounding idea.