Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I would like to begin this thread with an assertion: In order for the fires of industry to burn there must be fuel.

What is the fuel of EVE Online's industrial furnace? Conflict of course! This industry is composed of many resources but the first and most important of these resources is players themselves. In order for Null Sec to operate players must be flowing into it and bringing their resources with them. Profit is enough to bring Coalitions into Null Sec but this also makes Null Sec less accessible to medium or even large corps and by extension individual players.

Incursions and Factional Warfare help give players things to do and places to go but many still operate in High Sec and don't bother heading into Null Sec for various reasons. They also help to consume the abundant resources built up in the trade hubs. This is the key to keeping a game and economy like EVE going: By adding more diverse and profitable things for players to spend their ISK on. This can be taken to a next step and there are many reasons why it would be advantageous to all groups involved.

In order for the proverbial fire to be lit in the furnace of EVE's economy there must be conflict and I believe the best place to apply this is in Null Sec. The wide black beyond currently houses its fair share of dangers but few things are more threatening than other players. What do you fear in Null Sec the most? Perhaps being ganked by a small gang or roam? What I propose is a gameplay-driven solution to inflation and overabundance in EVE. Burn the ISK in Industry to fight an encroaching threat that poses a constant risk to Null Sec systems.

As EVE players I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of Infomorphs: Sentient beings that inhabit the form of data. As Capsuleers our characters are essentially this. Imagine flotillas of traveling NPC ships fitted with the equivalent of high tier capsuleer modules that move as fleets do and travel to a target system where they begin to manufacture a form of Incursion that once consolidated will spread itself to neighboring systems. They could even send resource harvesters out into other systems to mine out asteroids for their industrial purposes. In order to end the process you may have to destroy the Titan or Supercarrier at the heart of the Invasion.

From a lore perspective it's not entirely out of reason for a Mad Capsuleer commanding a fleet of vessels crewed by his own clones to come rampaging through Null Sec to stake a claim. Rogue Drones also present an ever present and ever evolving threat to space fairing folk and are always looking for more scrap. Transhumanist factions bent on claiming resources necessary to their personal ascension would pod you if they thought it'd bring them one step closer to their goal. In the darker reaches of lawless space who knows what horrible things you can find? Who knows what kind of horrible things can find you? Something terrible and strange from beyond known space knocking on your warp gate would certainly keep things interesting.

The key feature of these threats is their mobility and their needs. These aren't just Incursions that pop up to take control of a system these are mobile threats with goals and a target. Depending on their nature maybe they want to take control of a particular system or hijack POSes to obtain a certain amount of resources before departing back from whence they came to leave players to clean out the stragglers and pick up the pieces. It could be that they are there to set up shop for good until someone comes to extricate them. Maybe they just burn a path through Null Sec without stopping for anything.

Still with me? Fantastic! Here's the part where I start talking about how and why this is good for EVE, High Sec, Low Sec, and Null Sec. You may have been enticed to continue reading by all the talk of Industry earlier and I would be very happy if that were the case. When ships get destroyed and ammunition gets used supply goes down and in response demand goes up. Prices for these commodities in lower security areas will continually work to justify the risk of the trip and it will become a large Coalition's prerogative to secure trade routes and resources through which they can continue to fight off persistent threats. Both goods and players will flow into Null Sec from Low and High Sec while players are encouraged to both co-operate and take bigger risks for bigger returns.

Hopefully such changes would encourage wealthy coalitions with large wallets to spend their money on a more defensive oriented strategy consisting of more advanced and expensive ships rather than a cloud of cheap throw aways. It may even open up opportunities for corporations or new coalitions to stake a claim in areas of Null Sec that would otherwise be practically uncontested space. This may sound like big dreaming but in my mind I see EVE managing its own economy and player progression by generating scaling conflict which consumes resources and ISK. The more wealthy players become the harder they have to fight to keep it.

These events could also set the stage for more DUST/Project Legion integration. Mercenaries would be hired to clean threats off of a planet's surface and there would be various profitable ventures to be made onto a world that was occupied by Rogue Drones. Please tell me what you think and thanks for reading!

Less of a scripted storyline and more of an event generated as the game progresses which players adapt to. I'm not proposing that the fleets of NPC ships be unstoppable in their assault on wherever they wish to go. Players would certainly be free to destroy the fleet themselves and the EVE playerbase has consistently proven their ability to co-ordinate large scale ship conflicts.



As I said it's not scripted so much as it's an event occurring. Players are not stripped of their ability to react to or even terminate the event.



Ship battles are intrinsically tied to EVE's industry. The ships, the ammunition, the modules, and the components that make these things are player manufactured and so long as there are ship battles there will be people manufacturing the means with which to have them.

Trusting isn't quite the word. It's more of a sense of acceptance that in a game like EVE there will always be those forms of emergent player behaviors occurring. If Industrialists and Traders trust the wrong people to protect them in Null Sec then that is their fault and I would not recommend doing anything to actively curtail that behavior.



Hopefully emergent threats would increase the volume of items that would need to be freighted in the first place. One jump freighter can only haul so much after all.



One of the primary goals in creating this sort of event structure is to give people a reason to head out into Null in their big expensive ships despite the risk.

You are very correct in many ways. The goal of making Null look more enticing to players who usually stick to High Sec would certainly make one consider altering that status quo but you must remember that the players who already operate in Null should not be driven out or back into High Sec. Stripping power from the Coalitions overnight by hitting them with an overtly large amount of NPC fleets would be counter-intuitive to the concept. On a short term time scale this certainly reinforces that status quo but as the playerbase adapts to the changes the form of Null Sec will shift to compensate and the status quo will change from the bottom up.



It is certainly very difficult to change the basic behavior of people. You mention that large ships tend not to move out without significant support. This would encourage more powerful and wealthy players to seek out less wealthy players capable of acting in such a support or logistics role. Remember: The end goal of this concept is to draw more players to Null Sec by making it more interesting and lucrative. The idea I propose is a mechanism by which the game may work to change its own form and encourages players to do the same.

This may sound like a bit of a radical assertion but extremely valuable solid assets that never leave a Hangar are a cancer that will eat EVE from the inside out. The worst thing that can happen to an economy is for large amounts of assets and wealth to remain in one location without being used.

I understand your point and I appreciate you making it. In my defense the kind of gameplay mechanic that I'm proposing isn't something that would likely get implemented within a few months. It would be quite the undertaking to implement roving bands of co-ordinated NPC space ships that follow a specific set of instructions and operate in relation to their environment.

However, as a previous reply has pointed out, Industry doesn't really have much reason to move into Null even with the changes. Jump Freighter services provide more than enough ability for Null players to trade and get the resources they need. The recent changes are definitely a step in the right direction especially in the case of the changes to reprocessing returns. These changes definitely perform the function of making the Industrial economy more stable and lucrative but one must keep in mind that as Industry becomes more lucrative and more goods are produced there will be an abundance of these goods as more players produce them and the resulting drop in the price of goods will put Industry right back where it was.

Having an ambient threat in Null Sec provides an excellent long term solution to this problem that can be scaled to match production. As goods become cheaper and more abundant while the market begins to stagnate more NPC fleets invade into Null Sec causing ships and modules to be lost in large quantities as Null Sec Coalitions ramp up their defense efforts. The resulting need for more ships and modules causing demand among Industrialists to increase and prices go back up. So long as money is moving and Null Sec is still significantly more profitable than High Sec nobody is really losing anything.

"The Sandbox" (™), isn't a suicide pact. When players fail to generate content the gaming company must step in and "shake the ant farm" as CCP put it or create interesting content themselves.

Seems to me that players are more interested in friending everyone so they can make a living off online advertising and ahem "other things" then creating conflict and taking risks in the game. If this continues long enough, the game will die, of that there is no doubt.

Other groups also have to deal with this in their own back yard. And the usual opposition to roaming gangs, response fleets, home defence gangs, other roaming gangs, the usual.

Unless these things are massively more disruptive than anything NPC related in the entire game, they're not going to actually change anything. Few ships will be lost, events in unfavourable locations will be flat out ignored, and those in good spots will be farmed mercilessly. Inside of a month, the mechanics will be examined, documented and analysed to discover the ways to extract the most profit with the least effort, same as everything else.

If the events are too short lived, too remote, or the terms are (somehow) unfavourable to the actual players, the NPCs will be ignored. Given the limitations of EVE's PVE in general, I find it incredibly unlikley that these NPCs will actually be able to threaten anything anyway, unless the game actively cheats in their favour (for example by having NPCs ignore reinforcement timers, which simply makes it impossible to actually fight them.)

If the events are huge, then only the biggest blocs will be able to actually co-ordinate any kind of a response, and honestly, who the hell wants to do that for PVE? Where's the reward for me, a line member, in helping to deal with one of these super fleets of NPCs? What do I get out of throwing my dread into a glorified incursion?

So ratting, structure shooting (going to use incursion rules to prevent capitals from coming in?)...

Massive phalanxes of structures warping in with billions of ehp that you must kill or something? Dozens of high ehp, deathstar-like poses that continally add to their number. And they return with even more dozens if you do successfully structure grind it all




Instead of course of running vanguard sites until the mothership spawns, you kill belt mining rats, until the NOS (npc owned station) phalanx spawns, then you structure grind.