Player Features and Ideas Discussion

In theme with Rubicon's ideas of Capsuleer actions in defiance to the empires, here's an additional content idea: Empire-aligned NPC 'rats' going about their business in various parts of lowsec... who can be attacked and killed directly, in direct opposition to the empires.

Some of these will be military patrols, which will be rather similar to the current rats, except they don't have bounties. Instead, their value is entirely in the tags and other loot they drop, much like the empire NPCs you fight when you take anti-faction missions, which means you'll have to loot their wrecks to gain anything from fighting them.

Others will be civilians, doing normal civilian stuff like mining the belts, or hauling goods between stations; they will be less well-armed, but may have escorts. Civilians will try to warp away if targeted, so you'll need to stop their warps (either with traditional points, bubbles, or maybe even just clever bumping) to secure kills. Civilian miners will drop ore when killed, while haulers will usually drop civilian trade goods (which can be sold off to NPC buy orders in various places, as usual).

Of course, directly attacking faction assets will draw a response; you'll take sec status hits from fighting these guys, and the local empire factions will send reinforcements your way to try and deal with you, quickly escalating the threat you'll be facing. These dangers will be the reverse of the usual system security ones... the higher the security, the more dangerous and numerous the empire forces that can respond to attacks. The reinforcements will keep escalating until the lawbreakers are destroyed... and like the more dangerous rats, they will use EWAR, including propulsion jamming, to hinder their enemy's ability to fight or escape.

Accordingly, attacks on empire assets need to be hit-and-run... if you stick around too long looting, there'll eventually be too many enemies for you to deal with, and you'll be caught and destroyed. That said, there IS a limit... each system has a finite defence fleet, whose strength based on its security status, which is depleted as faction NPCs are killed. The defence fleet will be reinforced in waves at regular intervals (possibly with a bonus if a military patrol manages to make its rounds unscathed). If the system defence fleet is destroyed, the system becomes vulnerable, and can be contested much like a FW system. If the empire infrastructure holding control over the system is destroyed, no more reinforcements will arrive, and a pirate fleet will soon arrive to occupy the system, temporarily lowering its security status for the purpose of rat spawns. Pirate agents will also appear, and will start offering their own missions and rewards.

Anyone who doesn't mind their sec status going to hell can join up with the pirates in a quasi-FW sense, although the pirates aren't nearly as picky as the empires, and don't require a full-time commitment. Anyone who isn't in one of the militias can join a pirate faction by talking to any of their agents, and this does not require their corporation to be aligned with the pirate group in question (though a player in an empire NPC corp who opts to do this will be moved to an appropriate pirate corporation as a result). Anyone who is aligned with the pirates can leave at any time in much the same sense as retiring from FW, though the empires will still consider them a pirate for 24 hours.

Anyone signed up with the pirates will be flagged as a pirate, and may be freely attacked anywhere without loss of sec status... but in exchange, they'll get pirate LP when they kill empire NPCs and FW players. Similarly, the FW guys get FW LP by fighting the pirates, and helping to retake any of their empire's systems that have been occupied by pirates (a similar process to conquering the system in the first place; just kill off all the pirates, including the command ship that's leading the occupation... which will only appear when the pirates are vulnerable to being driven off). People explicitly interested in anti-piracy, who don't want to join faction warfare, can instead sign up with CONCORD, sec status permitting... this is otherwise as easy as joining the pirates, and grants them CONCORD LP rewards in a similar way.

sounds like faction warfare...

On the reward side, I'd envision that if you're going to be deliberately fighting large fleets of empire response forces, you're almost certainly in it for the LP (after all, if you're going to be burning your sec status by fighting the law anyways, you may as well get paid fully for it). As for fleeting up to do so... yeah, that's totally intentional; the escalation mechanic is meant to encourage people to try going after the Empires with fleets; I feel that content which encourages players to group up (as opposed to just soloing everything) is a good thing.

That said, a key difference here is that the guys involved will be fair game for PvP wherever they go, since in choosing to fight the Empires directly, they forfeit all protection the Empires offer... and with a sec status resembling that of any other career pirate, it'll take some effort to let them safely return to hisec again afterwards. Also, unlike Incursions, the Empires aren't going anywhere. As such, people farming them would tend to be in the same place at the same time doing the same thing... predictability which makes the job of the anti-pirate a lot easier.

EvE does need more background stuff going on to increase immersion into the game, civilian space mining, hauling, ect. the empires doing covert operations, mercs running about, pirate fleets roaming systems ect.

I think it would add to the game alot if we had you know the daily lives of the empires and the other factions going on in the background around us!

depends like I mentioned before it could be roaming gangs of ships, and military ops for the empires this would still add alot to the game and make it more realistic!