Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Rather than just ask for more/random missions I thought I would suggest a possible means of generating them. Hopefully it'll be a good idea in itself or be developed into/prompt others to suggest a good idea.

Rooms: A random number are generated, number to be skewed by mission level
Enemy: Random selection from the the usual suspects
Spawn triggers: Entirely random to keep us guessing
Objective: Random selection from a pool of objectives.
Reward: Would be a function of the number of rooms and level of mission with some randomization
Ship Restrictions: random, based on mission level (could make for some nice challenging missions if you draw a 'hard' level 4 in a BC for instance)

Warp-Ins: A new mechanism whereby reinforcements for the enemy warp in after a randomized time instead of appearing on a trigger spawn, also warp to a random location - could be 100Km away, could be right on top of you...

Since the pools of enemies/ships/rooms etc are just a list then it shouls be relatively trivial to provide updates for new mission objectives/enemies/etc each month. This could then be used to adapt to changing storylines in lore terms too. Names for characters to catch/kill/save would be randomly generated using the existing character creation random name list. No more saving that stupid Damsel for the gazillionth time.

Any thoughts gladly received...

I like the random everything! Missions would take on a whole new complexion without the 'Do steps a, b, and c to beat this mission' guides that are out there. If the parameters used to generate the missions are in discrete lists/tables then it becomes trivial to add new mission objectives and remove any that are dull/imbalancing.

never sure whether to put things like this in the direct channel or features :D

Actually it should be able to be developed stand alone, they could re-use the existing settings and just add a few more, the gate models already exist, random name generator already exists. It would need the work to produce the number of rooms, rewards etc but much of the required stuff exists already. Once the system is ready just run it few a few agents first to test it. If it works well roll it out to more agents, if not just shut those agents down.

I personally think all PVE should be randomized. Honestly I do not get why this has not been done over the 10+ years this game has been around. The repetitive and ridiculously predictable nature of PVE in EVE makes it more of a chore than anything. The only pleasure I get out of PVE is the flow of isk.

if it was implemented, it may mix things up for a little while, but in the end it is still predictable damage types, predictable AI, the only objectives are to either destroy something or pick something up, after u've destroyed something.

many ppl will run over 100 of these in a month, after that it would be just as repetitive. More work than its worth?

Agreed that you will hit the point where you will get the same missions again, but then it should be easy to add new room templates/objectives into the lists where they are randomly selected from. This could be planned by the events people to drop in each month, and could also be used to generate missions leading towards live events.