EVE New Citizens Q&A

I will delete it for 500mil isk

This, And it gets tedious, really tedious, ccp have given us stats before on player retention and solo mission runners have one of (if not the) highest attrition rates amongst all eve activities, in short it's bad for you and the game as statistically you are less likely to commit.
What tends to keep people around is us I.e. the community, any facut of involvement will have a dramatic impact on a player's likelihood of sticking around.

Ah, I see some have read my topic before being deleted

So... I knew some would resort to the 'EVE is sandbox, it shines when you interacts with others, not when you mindlessly grind missions'.

Yep, I'm with you on that. BUT

1. Don't serve me the 'Missioners have the highest attrition ratios among all players in EVE'. Because that's a chicken and egg argument. Sure missioners quit EVE in drove (to be replaced by new players who will most of the time sacrifice to the unholy mission god too many hours). But this is partly because missions are boring and done as 'quests' were done in early 2000!

Not going to happen, but missions done with engine cinematics presentation and mutli-path choices and 'special approach' bosses?? Much more sexy, more player retention. New players retention. New blood is important for any game, you know.

2. Missions not the core of EVE gameplay sure. I would still be quite interested in knowing how many hours of EVE game time is spent in missioning each month. Are you implying that this amount to a so small amount that buffing up, diversifying missions serves no one or only a tiny part of the community. A poll would be a good thing here, or simply an official stat.

Like missions, hate them, still... Just too many players spend too much time on them. And they get bored. Or not. But they spend innumerable hours. So this is also EVE. And so it deserves some love from the official channel.

Because the current mission system and missions in general are terrible PVE content. They used to add them once upon a time and very few gave a ****, since ISK/hour is the main thing people care about when the new content is the same in nature as the existing one. Missions in general and especially their solo nature isolates players from interacting with others and leads them to a path where they are much more likely to stop subbing. As long as the mission system is like this adding a mission here and there is just adding another nugget of poop to an already large pile and that is just a waste of development resources.

I don't think PVE content is a low priority nor is developing the mission system, but just adding more of the same with a different text screen isn't really going to make a difference and CCP knows it. In fact they've added new missions and PVE content to the game with every release, but they've tried to add something different rather then just churning out more of the same. Burner missions would be the most recent content that pops to mind as an example of this. They might not be what you want, but it's new PVE content being added to the game and it is something different.

Too bad even CCP says it:




Direct quote from the official New Player FAQ - Chapter 5.3 - 15

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Same source - Introduction to PvP - Page 21

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So, if CCP says that at it's core it's a PvP game...how come you claim it isn't?

They did...

*cough* Incursions *cough*

If you think about it, CCP has added quite a lot of PVE content in the last few years. Wormholes were originally designed with PVE in mind, incursions were added to add variety to PVE, and very recently burner missions were added. All of these types of PVE cater to groups in particular, because like Ralph said player interaction is statistically proven to promote long-term game play.

However, players always ruin these good intentions by "figuring it out". Optimization of your ship has always been one of my favorite parts of PVP. So many ways to fit it for so many different situations, learning your strengths and weaknesses, testing them against unpredictable opponents. To me it's what makes the game great and keeps me coming back. There's always something new to try. With PVE though, it's all done for you already. Everyone knows the easiest way to do level 4s is a sniping ship. Everyone knows exactly how many invulns you need on your blinged out incursion BS and how many capitals to warp in at a time in a C5 capital escalation. If you don't know these things, they are a short google search away, because really, who wants to lose a ship to PVE when the answers are so readily available?

In my mind it's not really a "problem" or something that can be "fixed". The new burner missions are a good example. They "act like" player combat, but CCP has to make them very challenging to be interesting at all. Which leads to a few set ships with predetermined fits that should be used (figured out on the test server of course, because who wants to lose a ship to PVE?) To me this is less interesting than if the missions where significantly easier and I could experiment with different ships and fits to accomplish them.

Now many people disagree, but in my mind PVE is just a necesary evil. You need isk. Missions provides a reliable fallback in case riskier isk making endeavors fail. However, trying to make it more interesting is near impossible (as evidenced by the fact that they keep adding new PVE types and people still find all of them boring), and to me rather feels like a waste of resources that could be better spent improving the real game (testing your wit against real thinking opponents!).

Just my 0.02 isk and not something everyone will agree with. But I think you'll find many similar opinions, at least among the consistent long-term players.

OP restored, and the thread is fine where it is (for now, at least).

Missions are generally pretty repetitive, I agree. It's just the nature of the beast. CCP doesn't (to my knowledge) currently have the tools to make missions be more random than a couple of rat selections, but if they did (or once they're finished if they're being worked on) they'll probably make these sorts of changes.

As someone who tends to run missions as a "well at least I undocked to do something today" activity, I do find myself getting bored with them every so often.

My usual solution is to do something else instead for a while, but sometimes I decide to just come up with some arbitrary limitations on the mission. Stuff like "try to run it in under X minutes" or "do it with an under-classed ship". CCP can't always provide the variety that would make missions interesting, but as players we do have a variety of options available to us to work with if we want to try it ourselves.

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Now to answer your original post now that LackofFaith restored it.


Even if they added a couple of missions each micro-patch, it wouldn't make a difference.

Why, same script is used for NPC, so mission A's rats behave just like mission B's and mission C's. The only change would be scenery and possibly a new item to deliver to an agent...that's it.

This would become AS boring as the others after just 1 try.

No offense to any mission runner or what so ever, but PvE in terms of missions just suck in EVE.
Hell, PvE in general sucks because it's easy to predict a scripted thing, it's the same in other game too though. As long as it's a fixed script that is used, people can document and predict it and thus it will become boring.

That's the fun part (in my opinion) about PvP. No 2 fights are equal, even if both time the same ships + fits are used, fights will still be completely different because of choice made etc.

Now say that CCP changes NPCs to not have a fixed type of damage and fixed type of tank and make spawn location and types random in missions, it will change stuff, because now you have taken out the "predictable" part of it.