Player Features and Ideas Discussion

http://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/26k1xi/being_born_into_pirate_factions/chrt2hf?context=3

Hello reddit, I've gotten a bunch of people to request me to post the suggestion here.

In short: NPC are boring. They are lifeless. Their only life is death and free isk.

But what if, we could get NPCs to be useful and improve factional life?

x from my reddit post

I kind of wish NPCs would act friendly if you were friendly for the faction.

Lets say you live in Blood Raider Null (Delve) and you become bros with Blood Raiders. They can assist you at times for doing stuff.

Lets say you see a guy running Sanctums vs. Blood Raiders. If you warp into the site to kill him:

-The NPCs wont shoot at you
-(If they exist) Logi NPCs will heal you
-Killing the scrub will give you Blood Raider LP
-Once he is dead, they will scoop and give you loot
-They will cheer you on in local.

By helping out NPCs in battle and pushing non-Blood Raiders from their space the faction will help you out. They might gift you some free BPCs, ammo or even have NPC support warp in to help you (fighting a blood raider enemy) creating a factional warfare like system while allowing a corporate/alliance life in null

And to add to the solo-pirate bro theme, you could get Blood Raider exclusive stargate (they constantly move like WHs in the system) which allows pirates to freely move around, encouraging solo piracy. These stargate could be scanned down by non-Blood Raiders, so you can camp these too.

In short, make NPCs more likeable and useful.

That seems the self serving option. Especially since you haven't looked at the flip side of that guy should have a bunch of Amarr Navy ships helping him now since he's 9.0 with Amarr Navy also..... So suddenly it's just about NPC vs NPC's.

A better starting point would be dynamic NPC creation which has a number of fits & 'crew/capsuler skill' modifiers to select from so you no longer know exactly what is on an NPC ship and they use at least mostly player fits (If not 100% accurate to keep maths simple). Which then allow far fewer NPC's in a site and PvP tactics such as Ewar start working properly.

Then move onto dynamic site creation so we don't have to save the damsel 100000000000 times.

Then the last step is the after spawn behaviour, since if you do the behaviour based on hard coded ship types, you have to do it all over again once ships are dynamic.

Nevyn this is not about your L4s, but about faction standings being actually meaningful.

In addition to OP's ideas, I'd like to see standings having an effect on common stuff such as docking rights.

Totally ok with this.

+1

that's nice in theory

but every player in the game needs to be able to access L1 agents

just because they do not NEED access to those agents now, doesn't mean they won't at some time in the future
the option for a change in playstyle and character direction needs to be available to all players at all times






edit
@OP
I feel NPC's should exist in 2 states for players, based on standings
Hostile or Neutral

We players are capsuleers, we can work for any faction, but ultimately we are working for ourselves
You can work for the Blood Raiders, but does not make you a Blood Raider yourself
with good standings they should ignore you, which is a big advantage considering the background lore to that faction

I'm someone who currently doesn't give a flying **** about NPC's or lore, and I feel like this is something that would definitely pique my interest in this side of the game.

As a lowsec pirate, why wouldn't the local rats look upon me with favour when all I do is run around shooting people who are members of the factions they fight on a daily basis? When somebody is running an anom (something I never do, so they shouldn't look at me as a secondary aggressor) and I go to fight them, why wouldn't the NPCs recognise me as an entity with a shared goal?

Imagine an ishtar running a site in your home system. You in a lowly enyo, warp in in attempt to get tackle and tank a flight of warriors and kill the valks that he drops. You start dipping in to structure between reps of your small AAR...until you hit broadcast for armour. The local rats lock you up and give you a small amount of reps and cap, just enough to keep going and hold tackle whilst your friend who is more equipped to deal with the ishtar's tank warps in and finishes the job.

That would be badass.

Really, really badass.

It's not a one sided thing either. The ishtar could sit in the anom with + standings to that faction too and bait us by looking like a pve fit runner on dscan, and obliterate us when we warp in with our neutral or negative standing to the npcs. I'd imagine they'd stay out of conflicts where both parties are + standings.

Overall I feel this idea has the potential to really be a meaningful revamp to NPCs across the board, and provide risk, rewards and deeper levels of immersion for all of eve's players.

up