Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've often wondered why missions are popular with people who otherwise aren't concerned with maximizing ISK/hour. This experience is mostly anecdotal as I haven't done an exhaustive survey, but I think I've come upon something.

Missions guarantee a relatively consistent and short time-to-content ratio. A player can move to a system with an agent and chain-run missions for however long they have to play and they can get to actually shooting at something in a relatively short period of time.

Most other types of content don't share this feature. Ratting isn't quite as consistent and exploration can take awhile before finding you something and if you have to switch ships, often someone else will get to it first. PvP is notoriously unreliable for guaranteeing content quickly.

I think, in addition to looking at ISK/hour, CCP needs to address the time-to-content for a lot of its activities. Missions, especially after the distance buff (shortening average distance to mission), have the best time-to-content ratio and, I believe that is a major factor in why missions are so popular compared to some other activities.

I think he means (near) instant-action.

Its also that missions are like ship spinning in space. So if they want to improve missions, they can make each mission best done with certain ships instead of others, improving the ship spinning experience.

You sure want me to feel bad about myself...

You are living in the wrong area in this case. If you want constant, uninterrupted, nearly-instant action, you have to live in the active FW areas, not some remote Low sec in Solitude or Aridia, let alone Null sec. You also have to create content. This is a Sandbox, not a PVE- and not a PVP-game where content is served to you by the game. If you want to PVE, you have to look for your agents and go to their mission signatures. If you want to PVP, you have to look for active PVP areas and live there and more importantly, make sure to create something to do for yourself and others. If you only have 40 minutes to play and you are not willing to invest some time into finding things to do, that's not the fault of the game, but the fault of players like you who rather sit in stations and spin ships instead of sitting in space and do stuff.

I find it deeply troubling that flying around in space and not finding something to shoot during every single trip is such a burden and reason to rant and quit for player, when it is them who cause this in the first place. Fly around a couple of times in suitable ships, make yourself visible and people will eventually flock to you and blast you away, giving you the content you are looking for (and then it's probably too much. Oh, the hypocrisy. ). You can also do some limited public events like public fleets or such or fly with an announced public fleet and have fun with them or fly against them and provide them with fun. The basic principle is that you ought to not expect that others always take over your responsibility to create the player-driven activities you want to pursue. If you want something to do, you have to make yourself a part of the Sandbox outside the station hangar/CQ.