Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Its pretty much fundamentally impossible for eve to have "hard" or "interesting" PvE.

People would figure out their stats and how they behave and find fits/strat to farm them just like incursion.

Its neither hard nor impossible.

The most difficult aspect is simply ignoring the absolute fecal storm the pvp crowd has anytime something is done that does not lead directly to a ship explosion.

After that you put some time into some actual game development. There are a great many things that got started in this game that were half done and then backburnered and ultimately forgotten. Some of this is getting glazed over again to streamline more ships getting exploded, like the industry revamp we are beginning to see.

Factions. There are standings for a ton of groups, and most of them mean absolutely nothing. Even the ones that do matter really only determine where you can pull missions from. They are painful to raise, easy to lose and almost completely ignorable. They should determine all sorts of environmental things like who your npc allies are in space, prices on items in LP stores, corp tax rates in npc corps(and you should be able to aplly for employment in all npc corps), and tons of other stuff, if they felt like devoting any thought or time to it at all. PvP elements could be added with 'warflags' which would allow those in opposing corporations to fight unrestricted by CONCORD.

Missions. This is just event scripting. The toolset to create them should already exist. They should make it a point to release a few of each type with every patch. I can think of several ways of making new mission types, and variations on go forth and kill are endless. PvP elements to include mission items that could be turned in to agents of other factions for status and rewards, and that could even utilize the 'warflags' mentioned above by flagging those with that cargo in their holds, either with the flag of the granting corp if you are the mission owner, or some sort of pirate flag (maybe general suspect flag) if you are not the mission holder.

There have been other ideas like ring mining, distress calls, open battles between npc factions that can be joined on either side, and others I have read over the years.

But almost without fail, any idea that is not directly linked to predator/victim PvP is met with horrendous outcry by the vocal PvP crowd.

PvE could do with a touch up. but dnt hold ur breath.

How would you know? All people like you do is advocating against better and more diverse PVE, as it would make ratting harder. Look through the forum and you see the multitude of compelling ideas for new, more challenging and more diverse PVE in EVE.

I've always thought that it would help having more difficult rats. Omnitanked w/ scrams, etc. Player equivalent EHP... able to launch drones...

The problem is that in most games, there is a hard limit on how many players you can bring into a fight in a particular PVE activity. That limit makes balancing the difficulty of an encounter fairly easy.

As EVE lacks this (sandbox, of course) it would be hard to create any kind well balanced PVE involving lesser numbers of stronger NPC ships which could not be farmed. A challenging solo matchup with an NPC would be easily farmed by gangs.

The equivalent in most other games would be a small dungeon raid designed for a group of 5 (as an example), using EVE mechanics you could bring in 30 players, rather than 5, removing any difficulty to the encounters.

That said, if NPC's were capable of summoning backup & reinforcements to deal with a larger group... Might have some promise.

You're missing the problems entirely.

First, nothing in Eve can be "hard" when there's no limit to the amount of players that you can bring to do it. If "hard" PvE content is put into the game, it will simply be trivialized by zerging the crap out of it until all the mechanics are figured out
well enough that one knows exactly how many ships they need and what fits they need. At no point will there be any challenge other than finding enough warm bodies. This is exactly what people did with incursions. Nobody is going to take the "intended" amount of firepower into a PvE encounter known to be hard when they know nothing about it, because chances are pretty high they'll all lose their ships. So any kind of PvE that isn't going to be boring and trivial has to come with a mechanic to limit the amount of players.

That brings us to the next problem, how exactly do you limit the number of players attempting the PvE encounter at once? Does it lock and let nobody else in once the maximum number of players is reached? Well, now that group of players is completely immune to PvP for the duration of the encounter, and we definitely don't want that in Eve. Perhaps the encounter spawns more ships if too many players are present? Now a couple people in disposable blackbirds or even just noobships can grief you out of the content endlessly simply by warping in and there's nothing you can do about it.

But let's say they manage to solve even that, and figure out how to limit the player numbers in a way that's not totally broken. Now, how do you balance the actual content? Do you balance it around T2 modules and T1 ships? Well, now everyone will just show up in deadspace-fitted Marauders and it's totally trivial again. If it's actually hard and balanced around deadspace-fitted Marauders, then nobody can ever actually do it because there's no way in hell anyone's going to risk losing a fleet of deadspace Marauders to hard PvE content about which they know little. It would probably require several attempts before the mechanics are figured out and that's a whole lot of ISK down the crapper. Some really rich people might do it for bragging rights but they probably aren't going to want to share the strategy with everybody else.

Bottom line, Eve is not like WoW and can't put in legitimately "hard" PvE content where the expectation is that you have to practice and fail many times until you learn how to succeed. Every failure is an expensive ship loss so they can't put in content that you're expected to fail at 20 times before finally beating it.

More ewar and scram NPC would help a bit in using different tactics and fits. More Diversity, random seedings during mission in and such could freshen Iit up a bit too. Random triggers on certain missions make missions twice as hard. I feel that if there was a way to take into account how many players are in the pocket and adjust the difficulty off that would be tremendous improvement to PVE.

Excellent post.

as tedious as the current system is, it does not exclude newbies from accessing basic content

this would, and is therefore a 'bad thing™'