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Mission changes and Tags4Standings
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Zappity
New Eden Tank Testing Services
#1 - 2014-11-02 02:46:31 UTC  |  Edited by: Zappity
Apologies if someone has already posted this but it wasn't immediately apparent if so. To continue an old debate (e.g. https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4818895#post4818895) about faction standings in which I tend to use terms like “annoying”, “pointless”, “complicated” and “the whole standings mechanics could really use a makeover” I would like to present some quotes from the CSM9 minutes:

CSM9 Minutes wrote:
CCP Soniclover - We are going back to the drawing board and putting everything back on the table. We are looking at standings. They are a barrier to content. You cannot do a level four until you have a certain standing. They are also a service. They reduce your taxes and fees, jump clones, and the item offers at top standings. But some of this is very obscure.

CCP Soniclover - The early states of looking at changes we are thinking that standings will no longer be a barrier to content but they will be a service instead. There will still be benefits and we may need to add more benefits so that having high standings is beneficial. But, telling you that you cannot do a level four mission because you are not ready for it is not really ‘EVE’. We allow people to fly into low sec and null sec on the first day. How much you risk is up to you. If you want to fly your destroyer into a level three mission why should we stop you? We should warn you that you may not be ready but it should be your decision.

Sion Kumitomo - An upside of that gating change is that older players could drop in and mission as they please without having to grind standings.

CCP Soniclover - It is not great that you can only do level fours for a certain number of agents and if you wanted to go and work for another faction you have to start with level ones again. It is a ridiculous thing. It can also become an issue if you have been working for a faction for a long time and now you need to correct your standings. The only option is to do level one missions for a long time. There should be ways for you to rectify this beyond endless level one missions. We are looking at something similar to Tags4Sec.

CCP Soniclover - We somewhat have this feature currently. They are datacenter missions. However, they are obscure and not well documented and they are also all in high sec. That causes a problem if you have low security or faction standings. Whatever we do will require effort and some risk. Your standings will at the most be able to come up to zero, never positive. However, instead of resigning yourself not playing you will have options.

Sugar Kyle - Tags are great, especially for people in Faction Warfare who have badly damaged their standings. However, some people are going to want to heal their standings without using tags and spending money and without doing 1000 level one missions. Just more options for them that does not force them into low sec.


And, since this is missions and complexes, there were also some interesting comments about missions:

CSM9 Minutes wrote:
CCP Soniclover - We are looking into the mission structure itself. How we access content. How we distribute it. Not the content of the missions, that belongs to Space Glitter. This is how do we get missions, how do we locate them, how are they available to you.

CCP Soniclover - The design department is looking into the current system. Questions that the design team is discussing:

Cherry Picking - To what extent do we want to allow players to cherry pick content? How can we give them more choices in picking the content they want to do and not end up with everyone grinding one mission forever.

Cluttering - Do we care if lots of mission runners operate in one space? If we do care how do we spread people out in a fun way

Dynamic Payment - Do we want to move mission payments towards a dynamic system so that payouts are balanced based on activity?

Immersion - How important is it to maintain the immersion factor of NPC friends and enemies? To what extent should this influence gameplay and how easy should it be to change course? In other words, how powerful should faction consequences be and how lasting?

CCP Soniclover - Dynamic Payment would mean removing NPC bounties and put that into the mission reward. Right now we are still deciding how to calculate the full rewards of a mission with bounties, LP, and payouts. We are thinking of using the new notification system to create a breakdown of the gains from the missions in loot, LP, bounties, standings, etc.

The CSM discusses how to find current standings gains from missions.

CCP Soniclover - Then we could now show this in one view

Mike Azariah - That would be very nice. It’d let people stay more updated

Steve Ronuken - With removing bounties, you don’t get bounties until the tick so will this pre-calculate?

CCP Soniclover - We will have the finished amount and we will be able to give a range

Mike Azariah - Are people still farming Angel Extravaganza?

CCP Soniclover - We do see this due to how long they have particular missions open. 25-30% of level 4 missions are declined every week. That tells us that something is wrong if people don’t want to do this content. The top 25 missions run are 63% of the missions completed. Players are favoring some missions over others and those are the missions where the effort and reward meet a certain point.

CCP Soniclover - This is where the idea of dynamic missions enters. We could adjust the less popular missions upwards until they are worth it for people to do. There is a lot of content in the game that is not being used. Before we look at only adding new content we need to look at how to make this content appealing.

Steve Ronuken - Some of these missions you see and you just say, “No”.

CCP Soniclover - If it paid out three times more?

Steve Ronuken - That would be different

CCP Soniclover - Exactly.

Zappity's Adventures for a taste of lowsec and nullsec.
Zappity
New Eden Tank Testing Services
#2 - 2014-11-02 03:03:43 UTC
More on the standings:

CSM9 Minutes wrote:
CCP Soniclover -... We really think we are going to move away from standings stopping people from accessing this content and we know it will make some people angry.

Mike Azariah - There are some people who make their career out of helping people get standings to access missions.

CCP Soniclover - We know. We are aware that lots of players have spent a lot of time grinding standings. We will not be removing this barrier without giving something in return. We are looking at adjusting mission rewards, LP changes, and things like that. We will make it very useful to have high standards but not a requirement like it is now.

CCP Soniclover - We are looking to start after christmas at the earliest. We are still in the early phases of design as well.

Zappity's Adventures for a taste of lowsec and nullsec.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#3 - 2014-11-02 05:36:33 UTC
Data Centres are "obscure and not well documented"? The Faction Standing Repair Plan documents data centres well enough for anyone that needs to know about them: https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Faction_Standing_Repair_Plan

All you need to do is post something about "standings" on the forum and you'll get the FSRP linked to you in at least the first page of responses.

The "lore" side of the standings equation is simple: an agent for the Amarr Empire isn't going to give you missions if you're a known advocate for democracy and a campaigner against slavery. Especially not for sensitive missions like, "rescue this woman of noble lineage who keeps getting herself in trouble", or "please go and destroy this Minmatar rebel fleet."

Standings provide an emulation of the trust relationship between Capsuleers and the empires. If CCP are really keen on removing standings, what have they planned in order to perform that function? Are the empires just going to go full mercenary and trust a known Minmatar rebel with the recovery of sensitive information? Transaction data that is too sensitive to send through fluid routers instead gets handed over to a Minmatar spy?

Note that it is quite possible to get missions from one specific L4 agent well before you can get L2 or L3 missions: if you run missions with a friend, and that friend splits their mission rewards, you'll gain enough standings with the agent to request missions for yourself within a dozen or so missions. Agent standings increase quite rapidly.

Removing standings simply because "it's too hard" is repeating the mistakes of removing agent quality, which shifted focus from "high quality agents" to "agents in 0.5, in constellations that are all hisec".

"Standings are a barrier to content" only makes sense if a player wanting to start missions is either expected to have the appropriate skills and fitting capacity to complete those missions, or will always have enough friends to bring the firepower and defensive capacity required to complete the mission. In the latter case ("bring friends"), it only takes one of those friends to have access to the agent at the beginning of the weekend for all the pilots to have access to the agent by the end of the weekend, so we're left with only one option: a new player who can fly battlecruisers the moment they wake up, and wants to get into the "big money" activities right away. Which means F2P/P2W. Which is terrible.

Sure, the situation is somewhat different for people who have -2 or worse standings with the empire, but there are ways out of that which are very clearly documented (as per the FSRP). Rather than removing standings, CCP might look at the option of splitting faction standings gains upon completion of storyline missions. Then all the standings correction can be outsourced.

This reminds me of the time CCP removed Agent Quality to encourage more agents to be used than just the "best" ones, instead the pilots just migrated to the "new best" agents. CCP changed some agents from Security to Distribution, so suddenly all the SOE missioners were living in Osmon instead of Gicodel.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#4 - 2014-11-02 05:51:20 UTC
As for mission payouts, the missioners already have spreadsheets tallying up time and ISK inputs to each mission, along with the ISK and other payouts of each mission. They will decline the least profitable missions, with no concern for the four hour lockout since they know it doesn't happen often enough to be concerned about: just run a dozen missions more and your standings are back where you left them.

NPC corp and faction standings causing sales taxes to change should be kept as part of the price of participating in the NPC driven economy. If CCP wants to change that, give us player-established market hubs ("no sales tax, but you have to pay a subscription to be able to dock here").

Continually raising the value of less-frequently run missions was supposed to be part of the existing balancing mechanism. If it's not achieving what CCP Soniclover wants, he'll need to explain why. The missions are still run, but only by the people who consider their current payouts to be worthwhile. As an example, Smash The Supplier looks like it's worth about 30M ISK in tags and loot, which is better than you'll get from most Angel Cartel missions (20M ISK), then there are the higher LP rewards because nobody runs that mission.

Adjusting the mission payout until everyone runs that mission is a bad idea. Everyone will be running just that mission, and ISK will be flooding into the economy uncontrollably.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#5 - 2014-11-02 06:02:12 UTC  |  Edited by: Mara Rinn
The nonsense in the CSM minutes gets worse:

Quote:
Sugar Kyle- Yes, have more ways to get them. People feel that the disadvantages of low standing are far worst than the advantages are good. It is good that it is harsh but the harshness is out of proportion with standings gain, hundreds of missions in gain equals one podkill in loss. We want people to kill people and we do not want to discourage this. This is exceptionally true in FW when people leave with destroyed standings.

Mike Azariah - From the high sec point of view you want to give people a reason to not just sit at a gate killing everyone. Standings are the one protection against gankers being full time.

Sugar Kyle- No. That is security status. I’m talking about standings. And people who say, “I’ve left Faction Warfare I want to try Amarr space but I have to spend how long grinding so that I can reinvent myself?”

Mike Azariah - There is no way to repair them

Mynnna - It is hard enough to get them let alone repair them


So first we have Sugar Kyle claiming that you suffer faction standings loss from pod kills (only security status loss), and then we have Mike Azariah, the Care Bear candidate, not knowing about the Faction Standing Repair Plan even though just about every forum post that even looks like it mentions standings has an obligatory FSRP link.

To correct the issues of aggression between militias leading to poor standings with their sponsoring states, I would recommend removing the militias from the states and having the states not care about standings (e.g.: no derivative standings from standings changes in a militia, the multiplier would simply be 0).

So in order to address the problem of -10 standings from Faction Warfare participation, I would simply remove the -10 component, not the standings component.

If there was an option to only accept the positive derivative standings, it might be nice to allow a Faction Warfare variant to retire and go live on a farm being fed L4 missions for the rest of eternity, for example.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#6 - 2014-11-02 06:06:59 UTC
And I definitely do not like the idea of a "bonus pool" to be distributed to the "top mission runners". That's just rewarding the richest, most efficient mission runners by making them more efficient at converting hours to ISK.

I'd prefer to see the content team working on new missions at each "difficulty" level, oriented towards different classes of ships. Thus the L4 frigate missions would be the current "burner" missions, while a L1 battleship mission would be something like "Buzz Kill". Then have these missions specifically offered by agents who specialise in that mission type, or each agent would provide a certain roster of missions (much like a research agent has a roster of science skills which they provide data cores for).

But now I'm wandering a long way off topic.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Chainsaw Plankton
FaDoyToy
#7 - 2014-11-02 06:11:30 UTC
as far as I'm concerned standings are about 90% useless. I mean jump clones and taxes are really the two main things I think of now.

also I disagree with the whole run lv1s to fix standings, far easier to find an allied faction and do missions for them. I've run a ton of enemies abound, and it only took a few SoE storylines for gallente to not bother me anymore. Maybe for pirate corps it is more of a challenge, I'm not really sure how their standings work.

also I think most of the standings services were either for trade hub tax purposes, R&D agents, or for POS anchoring purposes. if someone wants standings to run missions they should be able to grind that out fairly easily.


cherry picking, well with the way agent/corp/faction standings works probably isn't a huge difference anyways.

Clustering, well people tend to follow the LP, and look for 0.5 systems without a nearby lowsec. The 0.5 and no lowsec is probably one of the biggest issues there imo, The LP part a bit less so as with Concord LP you can convert to other forms of LP (maybe consider removing this?) Also I would consider making it so the navy corps and the FW corps don't have the same LP store. FW corps see nice bonus items (and/or reduced cost), but still can kill the price of other items in the Navy Lp store. I've run many missions for Corporate Police Force, but well I won't ever run for them again as I know I will be competing with FW LP, and I know there are a bunch of other corps that have the same LP store. I have 1.7mil LP with them that I just CBA to convert. Caldari FW seems like it is in the dumps right now, so probably not a bad time to take a look.

as for Immersion, see previous comment about standings being barely relevant.

"Mike Azariah - Are people still farming Angel Extravaganza?" sounds like the worst way to make isk since mining.


as far as the payout factor yea there are probably a few missions where I would be much happier if they paid out 3x what they do now. I just wonder how that would affect say Enemies Abound where there is a ton of value in the loot, a good LP payout, and a high reward/bonus. Also how would that change with the other changes, as some people are "afraid" to lose standings.

@ChainsawPlankto on twitter
Zappity
New Eden Tank Testing Services
#8 - 2014-11-02 07:31:47 UTC  |  Edited by: Zappity
I'm absolutely delighted by the proposed changes. The second session on general game design near the end goes into missions. I suggest you all read it. Basically it hasn't been changed since the early days and will be getting revised soon. This is great.

As for standings, they are just awful and need to be fixed. Of course CSM and CCP know about the repair plan. It is inadequate. The whole standings mechanic is a disincentive to try different areas of the game with penalties that are far too strong and enduring. I can't wait for whatever modifications they are planning.

Right now, I have no way to do a burner mission on TQ. And I have no intention of grinding stupid missions in order to be able to do so. Being able to just jump into a level 4 mission if I so choose would be nice.

Zappity's Adventures for a taste of lowsec and nullsec.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#9 - 2014-11-02 10:41:00 UTC
Zappity wrote:
As for standings, they are just awful and need to be fixed. Of course CSM and CCP know about the repair plan. It is inadequate. The whole standings mechanic is a disincentive to try different areas of the game with penalties that are far too strong and enduring.


There's nothing "enduring" about any of the penalties of standings.

In the meantime, I'm looking for a way that I can just jump into Nullsec and run sanctums in my Ishtar. The barriers to entry there are significant, even when you have standings there is no guarantee that you'll be able to rat in the system of your choice. I have no intention of joining a nullsec alliance. Being able to jump into sanctums any time I want would be nice.

It sounds ridiculous doesn't it?

Why should certain NPC-facilitated activities be easily accessible?

What is the reason that you want burner missions?

Why do we have to run normal missions until the burner is randomly offered?

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Zappity
New Eden Tank Testing Services
#10 - 2014-11-02 11:00:34 UTC
What? I just left a jump clone in Venal. I spent a couple of days doing exploration combat sites for a change and made 2b without even realising it. In my Ishtar. Who needs an invitation? Just go. You are better off running signatures instead of anomalies for security, especially against interceptor scouts. I even wrote about it: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5162278#post5162278

As for burner missions, maybe I just want to try them, exactly as I just wanted to try running nullsec sites. And no, you shouldn't have to wait for the burner missions either (last paragraph in particular):

CSM9 Minutes wrote:
CCP Soniclover - I think the dynamic payment can help with cherry picking. We think that this is important to look at because we are looking at breaking out of the current method. If you ask your agent for one. If you decline we have a stupid mechanic where you get a second bad mission and now you have to wait and people may not log back in until the next day. It is a feature that encourages people to log out.

Mike Azariah - Many missioners have a core of hubs that they go to. They move from agent to agent to kill the four hours.

Sion - Could we give people instead of one offer several offers?

CCP Soniclover - We are looking to give more offers. If we took the standings barrier out so that we did not need agent levels anymore you would just talk to an agent and they would offer you missions. You would choose what missions you wanted to do. The idea is that you'd have a list of several missions. We want it to be exciting and we want there to be more interesting and special things that happen every few missions.

CCP Soniclover - The storyline missions are not very good. Plus you need to run sixteen missions first. We may lower that to five to ten so that they come more frequently. We can mix things in like burner missions so that you know that every five missions you will always get a burner mission as well as the random offers. It incentivises them to try one more mission.

Zappity's Adventures for a taste of lowsec and nullsec.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#11 - 2014-11-02 11:14:13 UTC
Zappity wrote:
CCP Soniclover - The storyline missions are not very good. Plus you need to run sixteen missions first. We may lower that to five to ten so that they come more frequently. We can mix things in like burner missions so that you know that every five missions you will always get a burner mission as well as the random offers. It incentivises them to try one more mission.


I'm not convinced that simply altering the ratio of "normal" to "burner" missions is an advance over the state of affairs at present.

I'd prefer to see either dedicated agents to provide small/medium/large missions at each level, or have the current agents offer small/medium/large missions when you ask. Thus all level 4 small missions would be burners, either Anomic Agents or Anomic Teams. All level 4 medium missions would be similarly balanced for T2/pirate cruisers, level 3 medium missions would be balanced for high-skilled T1 cruisers and faction T1 cruisers, with L2 missions being "standard" for cruisers and L1 medium missions being for people who should really be flying something else.

Thus there would be a matrix, with "Level" being the difficulty, and "Size" being the type of ship you want to fly. No longer would you be forced to upgrade to a battleship to run L4s. Well, you can run L4s in an assault ship, but make sure you have an hour of uninterrupted time.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Zappity
New Eden Tank Testing Services
#12 - 2014-11-02 11:17:55 UTC
Oh, I forgot to reply about "enduring". I just meant in the sense that they don't erode over time and so must be ground down. I understand that you can get rid of them if you choose to. There was discussion about that, too:

CSM9 Minutes wrote:
Sugar Kyle- Next! Standings! CCP Affinity and I had a conversation about standings yesterday.

CCP Affinity - I'd love to remove standings, if I had my way, but a lot of our systems are tied into them.

Sugar Kyle- People do not seem to want to remove standings. Talking to them it seems that they want them to make more sense, be rebalanced.

Mynnna - Have more ways to get them.

Sugar Kyle- Yes, have more ways to get them. People feel that the disadvantages of low standing are far worst than the advantages are good. It is good that it is harsh but the harshness is out of proportion with standings gain, hundreds of missions in gain equals one podkill in loss. We want people to kill people and we do not want to discourage this. This is exceptionally true in FW when people leave with destroyed standings.

Mike Azariah - From the high sec point of view you want to give people a reason to not just sit at a gate killing everyone. Standings are the one protection against gankers being full time.

Sugar Kyle- No. That is security status. I'm talking about standings. And people who say, "I've left Faction Warfare I want to try Amarr space but I have to spend how long grinding so that I can reinvent myself?"

Mike Azariah - There is no way to repair them

Mynnna - It is hard enough to get them let alone repair them

Sugar Kyle- We shouldn't devalue the gains people make above zero. What they worked for should be preserved. My goal is to let people get back to zero. Not to make it easier to get from zero and go up. There should be an alternative to grinding for months just to get somewhere.

Asayanami Dei- Maybe tie the ranking system in FW to standings? For example, you can join at 0 standings, you work your way up in ranks and gain standings that way. That when someone joins a corp with no standings and talks to any NPC agent it resets the player corporation standings, etc.

Mynnna - We need Tags4Sec for standings. There are the data centers that somewhat do this but they are not even accessible unless you have a certain level of standings already. So they are not useful for repairing.

Sugar Kyle- It is about harm.

CCP Affinity - We've discussed having standings decay over time if you're not actively working for a faction.

Mike Azariah - I'd almost be in favor of that if it works both ways. They'd need to decay both ways back to zero.

Xander Phoena - A specific skill to reduce decay over time?

Zappity's Adventures for a taste of lowsec and nullsec.
Zappity
New Eden Tank Testing Services
#13 - 2014-11-02 11:21:12 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
I'm not convinced that simply altering the ratio of "normal" to "burner" missions is an advance over the state of affairs at present.

I'd prefer to see either dedicated agents to provide small/medium/large missions at each level, or have the current agents offer small/medium/large missions when you ask. Thus all level 4 small missions would be burners, either Anomic Agents or Anomic Teams. All level 4 medium missions would be similarly balanced for T2/pirate cruisers, level 3 medium missions would be balanced for high-skilled T1 cruisers and faction T1 cruisers, with L2 missions being "standard" for cruisers and L1 medium missions being for people who should really be flying something else.

Thus there would be a matrix, with "Level" being the difficulty, and "Size" being the type of ship you want to fly. No longer would you be forced to upgrade to a battleship to run L4s. Well, you can run L4s in an assault ship, but make sure you have an hour of uninterrupted time.

Oh, I understand now. Yes, that would be great. I think the changes will be broader:

CSM9 Minutes wrote:
CCP Ytterbium - We don't want to end up with NPCs ganking you and talking smack about your mother in local, but they need to be more dynamic. There's the possibility and there's been the consideration of grading people's efficiency in missions against eachother and giving a mission report at the end of your mission that defines what reward you'll get.

Zappity's Adventures for a taste of lowsec and nullsec.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#14 - 2014-11-02 11:55:08 UTC
A bit of "thinking-outside-my-head" going on here:

Having barrier-free access to L4 missions would make it too easy to regain security status. On the other hand, many gankers operate on a perma-flashy basis anyway, others are so cashed up they just tags-for-sec their way out of trouble regularly. So who does security status actually penalise?

Having barrier-free access to L4 missions removes the feeling of being superior because one has grinder dozens of missions to get access to an agent (LOL). On the other hand, access to L4 missions is about a dozen missions with a friend, so there's not really a barrier at the moment anyway.

Having barrier-free access to L4 missions encourages pilots from nullsec to jump clone to hisec to make their pocket money instead of making nullsec work for them. CCP needs to think about this too: Mynnna doesn't like the idea of agent missions in nullsec but I'm sure many corps would like something like that as a "pot sweetener" for their recruitment process ("fully upgraded mining and missioning hubs, come care bear in our utopian paradise!" LOL).

I'm all for deteriorating standings, where the standings are just the service that affects sales tax, availability of NPC facilities, etc. This ensures that services such as Imiarr Timshae's TSCA continue to have a role to play.

And then we get to security status: many folks operate perma-flashy, so -10 is no barrier to ganking in hisec. Would removing crime watch except for the "CONCORD attacks you if you do X in hisec" part be useful in terms of reducing code complexity? Perhaps the police webbing you into warp faster is actually a service that can be bought with standings?

Looking at someone's character information and seeing a positive or negative security status doesn't really mean much (except for people like me with +5.0 or +5.1 who are obviously part of the "level their Raven" crowd). That person with the +3.0 security status might well be a suicide ganker who just tagged their status back to sensible levels. That person with the -1.0 security status might be a genuinely nice pilot who just happens to like blowing stuff up in lowsec from time to time.

I'm just trying to imagine what the PVE side of the game might end up looking like if standings are built by missions but have no impact on missions.

Why shouldn't people have access to L4 missions from day 1? RMT: brand new account starts running L4 distribution and mining missions from day 1? Devaluing the LP stores. With no need to grind missions to get access to better quality missions, there's nothing stopping [insert unpopular group du jour] from sending all their pilots into SOE missions, specifically to flood the market with undervalued probes and launchers (for example). Deteriorating standings, and the requirement for standings as an entry criteria, prevent this kind of market manipulation from happening except by the most dedicated corps (because you'd have to … eeew… PVE regularly to keep standings up).

How much fun is it going to be for a brand new player to head off to a mission, having no idea what they're doing, and find that they simply cannot complete it without outside help? Sure, there were a dozen warnings, "this mission is really intended for someone flying a very well equipped battleship, are you REALLY SURE you want to take it on in your Slasher?" But who listens to silly warnings from a computer game?

As for people who just want to try missions out, what's stopping them hopping into "HelpMyMission" or similar channels in order to get access to missions? Is encouraging people to interact with other people really such a bad idea?

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#15 - 2014-11-02 12:12:34 UTC
CSM9 wrote:
CCP Ytterbium - We don't want to end up with NPCs ganking you and talking smack about your mother in local, but they need to be more dynamic. There's the possibility and there's been the consideration of grading people's efficiency in missions against eachother and giving a mission report at the end of your mission that defines what reward you'll get.

Sugar Kyle- This forces the people to compete against each other and harms casual players, pushing them into min-maxing in order to compete with the more hardcore mission runners. Some of these people don't want to compete with other players, they want to relax and have fun shooting red crosses. It is why the log in.

Corbexx - This already happens to an extent with incursions and makes people whine.

CCP Affinity - People will not be getting less they will just have a chance to get more.


People who are highly efficient at running missions already get more. There's no need to reward the rich by giving them performance bonuses. Missioners already engage in pissing contests and phallus-measuring contests. There's no need to rub it in. Even more importantly, missions already generate enough ISK, there's no need to go pumping more into the system when particular missioners are good at pumping more ISK into the system. Doing so simply devalues the ISK (and LP) generated by the lower-performing ISK generators.

Perhaps each agent might have a selection of offers to make to the top n% of missioners they've been doing business with. For example, a Core Complexion agent might offer a 1-run BPC of a Core Complexion ship skin relevant to the types of missions that agent offers. Or a bomber jacket. Or a pair of sunglasses. Or a gold watch. Thus missioners would be motivated to spread out in order to qualify to be the "top n%" of a lesser-used agent, and then stack the agent with their under-performing alts so that the "top n%" becomes a larger group more likely to include themselves :)

Still rewarding the rich of course.

Make it a lottery. If you've run more than 50% of your missions for that particular agent, you're in the draw. One ticket for each mission you've completed.

But I'm wandering further and further off-topic.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
Chainsaw Plankton
FaDoyToy
#16 - 2014-11-02 19:58:34 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
A bit of "thinking-outside-my-head" going on here:

Having barrier-free access to L4 missions would make it too easy to regain security status. On the other hand, many gankers operate on a perma-flashy basis anyway, others are so cashed up they just tags-for-sec their way out of trouble regularly. So who does security status actually penalise?

Having barrier-free access to L4 missions removes the feeling of being superior because one has grinder dozens of missions to get access to an agent (LOL). On the other hand, access to L4 missions is about a dozen missions with a friend, so there's not really a barrier at the moment anyway.

Having barrier-free access to L4 missions encourages pilots from nullsec to jump clone to hisec to make their pocket money instead of making nullsec work for them. CCP needs to think about this too: Mynnna doesn't like the idea of agent missions in nullsec but I'm sure many corps would like something like that as a "pot sweetener" for their recruitment process ("fully upgraded mining and missioning hubs, come care bear in our utopian paradise!" LOL).

I'm all for deteriorating standings, where the standings are just the service that affects sales tax, availability of NPC facilities, etc. This ensures that services such as Imiarr Timshae's TSCA continue to have a role to play.

And then we get to security status: many folks operate perma-flashy, so -10 is no barrier to ganking in hisec. Would removing crime watch except for the "CONCORD attacks you if you do X in hisec" part be useful in terms of reducing code complexity? Perhaps the police webbing you into warp faster is actually a service that can be bought with standings?

Looking at someone's character information and seeing a positive or negative security status doesn't really mean much (except for people like me with +5.0 or +5.1 who are obviously part of the "level their Raven" crowd). That person with the +3.0 security status might well be a suicide ganker who just tagged their status back to sensible levels. That person with the -1.0 security status might be a genuinely nice pilot who just happens to like blowing stuff up in lowsec from time to time.

I'm just trying to imagine what the PVE side of the game might end up looking like if standings are built by missions but have no impact on missions.

Why shouldn't people have access to L4 missions from day 1? RMT: brand new account starts running L4 distribution and mining missions from day 1? Devaluing the LP stores. With no need to grind missions to get access to better quality missions, there's nothing stopping [insert unpopular group du jour] from sending all their pilots into SOE missions, specifically to flood the market with undervalued probes and launchers (for example). Deteriorating standings, and the requirement for standings as an entry criteria, prevent this kind of market manipulation from happening except by the most dedicated corps (because you'd have to … eeew… PVE regularly to keep standings up).

How much fun is it going to be for a brand new player to head off to a mission, having no idea what they're doing, and find that they simply cannot complete it without outside help? Sure, there were a dozen warnings, "this mission is really intended for someone flying a very well equipped battleship, are you REALLY SURE you want to take it on in your Slasher?" But who listens to silly warnings from a computer game?

As for people who just want to try missions out, what's stopping them hopping into "HelpMyMission" or similar channels in order to get access to missions? Is encouraging people to interact with other people really such a bad idea?


Sec status matters less than standings thanks to tags for sec and the ability to clone jump out to null and just rat it up if wanted. not to mention 0.0 pvp never even touches sec status.

well if it gets null-seccers to clone jump to HS is that better or worse than having highsec mission alts? For the most part I believe in play with your main, but hey, alts are more sub money. I really couldn't get into 0.0 because of the whole if more than 2 people are in a system I'm not making much money. so having missions in null, well it really isn't what I want to see, it would address that problem (I'd rather see something that gets people to play together). I haven't played in a big block so I'm not really sure how that plays out. Plus it seems to me that most space is pretty empty, so the ability to move around a bit and go to a different system to rat isn't currently a huge barrier. Then again with as many empty systems maybe having a few agents around would be a good thing as it would get multiple people in one set of systems?

I don't know that I like deteriorating standings. I tend to play a lot when I do play, and then have long stretches where I can't play much. I have very good standings with a number of corps/factions. I guess it depends on what ties into those standings. then again if standings don't matter, and I can run missions would I really care?

@ChainsawPlankto on twitter
Zappity
New Eden Tank Testing Services
#17 - 2014-11-02 20:11:40 UTC  |  Edited by: Zappity
Good posts, page Mara. Sec status does penalise to extent that can't sit on gate. That's about it. And Tags4Sec are great for lowsec so I wouldn't want that removed.

Now that you mention it it is strange that you can't readily tell whether someone is a regular suicide ganker in game. You need to go to a killboard. Maybe adding a # times concorded to the character sheet would be good.

CSM9 Minutes wrote:
Mynnna - We had people really disappointed when burners were not going to be in null sec


Agreed that access to missions doesn't mean you will be able to successfully run them. If someone chooses to ignore the warning then welcome to EVE I guess. But promoting cooperative mission channels would be great and probably tie in well with NPE for corp transition etc.

I think the increased rewards but was talking about mechanisms to spread people out if CCP figured that this was a design goal. The CSM was against penalising current mission runner play styles in favour of using carrots rather than sticks.

Zappity's Adventures for a taste of lowsec and nullsec.
Gaia Ma'chello
Photosynth
#18 - 2014-11-02 22:21:12 UTC
Mara Rinn wrote:
Data Centres are "obscure and not well documented"? The Faction Standing Repair Plan documents data centres well enough for anyone that needs to know about them: https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Faction_Standing_Repair_Plan

All you need to do is post something about "standings" on the forum and you'll get the FSRP linked to you in at least the first page of responses.


That's fine for people who know the forum exists.
DeMichael Crimson
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#19 - 2014-11-02 22:41:01 UTC
Zappity wrote:
As for standings, they are just awful and need to be fixed. Of course CSM and CCP know about the repair plan. It is inadequate. The whole standings mechanic is a disincentive to try different areas of the game with penalties that are far too strong and enduring. I can't wait for whatever modifications they are planning.

Right now, I have no way to do a burner mission on TQ. And I have no intention of grinding stupid missions in order to be able to do so. Being able to just jump into a level 4 mission if I so choose would be nice.


Definitely looks like CCP and the CSM don't know about the 'Faction Standing Repair Plan' since it's not even mentioned at all, either that or they're simply ignoring it because it doesn't fit in with their objectives. Also there's a lot of other options available in-game besides using Data Centers to repair/raise Faction standings, a fact that anyone could see if they even bothered to view 'The Plan'..

Maybe if you had done some research first on 'The Plan' before creating and ranting in this thread, you'd know exactly how easy it is to actually repair negative standings, let alone the fact that it can be easily done within a short amount of time.

Obviously the main problem that's currently plaguing this game is the lazy 'Instant Gratification' mentality which has greatly influenced the recent 'Dumbing Down' aspect of game play. After reading this thread I can see that you're not only a part of that problem, you're also helping to instigate and spread that problem everywhere.

I hate to say this but if CCP continues down that path, this game will soon become Vaporware. As for you not being able to run level 4 Burner missions, that's all your fault due to being lazy.


DMC

'The Plan' | California Eve Players | Proposal - The Endless Battle
DeMichael Crimson
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#20 - 2014-11-02 22:53:11 UTC
Gaia Ma'chello wrote:
Mara Rinn wrote:
Data Centres are "obscure and not well documented"? The Faction Standing Repair Plan documents data centres well enough for anyone that needs to know about them: https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Faction_Standing_Repair_Plan

All you need to do is post something about "standings" on the forum and you'll get the FSRP linked to you in at least the first page of responses.


That's fine for people who know the forum exists.
That's a very poor excuse, especially since there's plenty of people in various corps, chat and local channels who do know and usually inform others in-game about the forums, Evelopedia, UniWiki, EveWiki, etc.


DMC

'The Plan' | California Eve Players | Proposal - The Endless Battle
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