Wormholes

There's a monstrous amount of background on sleepers, all it takes is a quick google search to find some of it. A lot of it is in the game, you just have to look.

By making sleepers move around, you spend more time shooting them rather than less because you'd have to fight them of a WH or wherever before going and doing something. Also, this is WH space, not k-space, it goes to say that by default the behaviour of certain things are different.

I personally find missions more dull than sleeper sites. Unless you're hoping for something that's more blitzable. Honestly, if your mind goes numb after 15 minutes (that'd be 3 sites, so a few), maybe you should look into a different venue for making isk. If done properly you can bang out pretty much all of your escalations in an hour or less.

I won't pretend to speak for Mel, because, well, its Mel, nobody can predict the full breadth of the thought process, however, I believe that's the core of the problem she's getting at. I tend to agree with what was said, in that, whenever we decide to go NPCing (which is really not very common), I think the fact that we CAN motor through it all with really no thought involved other than spamming d-scan, and having no real 'story' to what we're doing other than "farming ISK!", I find to be kind of mind-numbing.

I'm a lore whore and do read all the canon stuff as well as a lot of the fan fiction, but indeed you have to look outside the game for it, finding the tidbits in-game are rather few and far between.

The droneslands NPC's outside POS's was a bug, for sure, I remember it happening, but I've also seen it happen around NPC stations in lowsec and such, its generally a bug and AFAIK hasn't happened in a long time either (probably fixed).

However, some sort of meaningful progression to what's being done in the sleeper sites I agree would be neat, some sort of storyline progression or something.

I envision though not something like lvl4 missions or anything, but more like something I saw a long time ago in Catch (maybe Curse?) I believe. It was a randomly spawned Concord beacon (yes, in Catch), and it had red plusses that were concord NPC's that you were supposed to kill (presumably it was some storyline piece to an Angel mission or something from the Curse NPC agents). It was visible to anyone from the gate however (it was around 200km from the gate), and didn't need to talk to an agent to go interact with it.

Seeing some random "gathering" of sleepers around a planet, orbiting a wormhole, whatever, I think would be interesting variety.

How long before a gathering like that moves from interesting to commonplace and boring? It might be cool the first few times, but eventually it would turn into a quick cash grab by blapping however many sleepers are there and then moving on. If they don't drop loot, then what's the point of it? It would just end up as a minor annoyance were they to orbit WHs and completely ignorable if they're anywhere else.

I personally view sites as a means to an end. That end being PvP. I don't expect anything when I run them. I just want to get them finished. Even if there was a story, I wouldn't give two fucks about it. Maybe the first time, but then it turns into the same **** over and over, just like how missions are. It just turns into a grind to make your isk so that you can do something else. If you run L4s, how much of the story do you really pay attention to?

If the current 4 types of site format is kept, I don't think there's a way to do a story without it quickly getting monotonous and repetitive.

Adaptive AI for sleeper NPC. This way they learn from players interacting with them and tries to vary their tactics and ship types (limited to the site type of course) to counter what players do.

I do totally agree with your sentiment here, I suppose what I envision would require deeper code changes (ie, a 'new' kind of subsystem that actually has some sort of AI that's actually, you know, 'I'), I certainly wouldn't want to see what I described done with the current missioning/inskursion/etc mechanics. I envisioned something a little 'different' that doesn't necessarily have any objectives or rewards, but something in the way of content, even if its to hinder us from rolling a hole because there's 5 sleeper cruisers sitting on the hole.

Indeed though, using existing mechanics but just inside w-space, no that's not what I was envisioning. I was thinking more compelling and more dynamic than that. :)




In our corp we've talked about this before, having them start attacking POS's and what-not. I think its an interesting idea but I think the only way to avoid mass outcry is to limit them to only shooting anchored modules and not the tower itself. If they would potentially reinforce a tower (or destroy it if no stront) I think a lot of negative would come back at CCP from a lot of the community (especially the casual older player types who don't play every single day). But incapacitating a bunch of the guns/ECM/etc? I think that'd be neat.

Hmm, thats interesting, making the sleepers aware of their environment, and acting outside of sites, based on our behaviour, who knows sleepers might communicate and send information back to their friends when we change wormholes.

Theres the germ of an Idea there, possibly something to flesh out into something that CCP could achieve. Possibly C2 C3 and C4 escalations in the second site, after you have cleared one and they know you are the enemy? They need an income boost opportunity. just need to be careful to feed them in rather than BLAP everyone dies........

Possibly camping the hole If they work out you are from elsewhere? Possibly following you through the hole if you come from KS and disrupting everything within a system or 2? Like a mini Incursion that does not always require a shiny fleet?

Like kicking a hornets nest, they can go off in unpredictable directions.

Has the potential to add interest, see what everyone can come up with.

You can even really annoy hunters by having all the sleepers leave to go to the hole when someone comes in, when you are running sites, the ultimate warning, and because the sleepers have pointed them and rolled the hole out behind them, you have time to reship and go and fight the hunters. Could be a real turnaround.
Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it could be a balanced thing.
Edit This part is going into f&i as a new idea

+1 for purple wormholes, ideal for new lightweight holes.

Well there is lore to support some sansha presence, and Guristas technology might lead to them having "portals" into alternative space that could be wormholes.

It is just we are familiar with the current locations of the different types of NPC, if CCP were going to create new wormhole space accessible through the new type of lightweight wormholes, well either or both would work depending on the effects.

But why not? Just let's not break the immersion unless there is a good reason. If there is a benefit, then they can write some new lore to support it.