Player Features and Ideas Discussion

But...but...but what about all the wisdom collected on http://eve-survival.org?

If they wanted to be clever, they'd let us send in probes that gathered eve-survival type intell before we went in with our 5 bil ISK ship.

It's been suggested for years. I got bored and even wrote a framework for it one time, and it certainly wasn't a 'small' project even on the framework I designed, which wasn't 'true' procedural but more kit-set assembly.
Which is probably why they haven't done it. Because a vocal segment of this forum would scream their heads off at that much effort being put into PvE

One would think that with such simple systems it would be easy to mash something together. I mean.. a few structures in space that look semi feasible, some gas clouds and npc's to kill coming in random waves and have random tactics. Of course following certain guidelines depending on the level of the agent and possibly the pilot him self. If he's alone or not, what kind of ship, what kind of damage types, etc.

I'm not a programmer and in my mind it wouldn't cost a whole lot of time and money to put something like this together.




Haters gotta hate i suppose... no of course it was not my idea.. very few of the ideas on this forum are original. Hell.. ideas in general aren't often original. Whether it's music, science, engineering or anything man made, someone is always building on other peoples ideas. But i digress.

I'm actually quite certain they have discussed this at CCP. Why they haven't implemented it is the mystery that i want solved with this and add my voice for this kind of element to be in the game. And the link explains it waaaaaaay better than a wall of text, that I would write, could.

I and many others would forgive if the badger isn't docked to the little platforms. Most people only look at it once and then never again while grinding. Also, these structures can be premade.. a few dozen handmade structures placed randomly in sites.

I presume that there's a system of gauging strengths among the npc's. Then you'd need to write a math formula to correspond to the mission level. A point system like the alliance tournaments use and many other forms of games.

A reasonably vague text would do the trick. "Caravan getting attacked. Save it.", "Daughter of X corporation has been kidnapped, rescue her", "A gang of X have been spotted in the X system. Go deal with it". It may not be as pretty as the hand made ones. But doing the missions themselves wont be as tedious.

It would be in a few steps as you said.
First being what level is the mission agent. How many points of npcs should there be and how hard it should be.

Second would be what type of mission, rescue, kill, acquisition etc.

Third would be the structures. Here i'm very forgiving. Empty space is logical to me. Not every combat situation is at a station, mining belt or gate.

Fourth would be to generate the npcs. Possibly based on the types and number of ships in fleet.

Fifth would be to ascertain the rewards for the players when done. On how fast it was delivered, how many ships were destroyed and even how much damage was dealt by both npc and PC.

It could be just a new kind of missions in the beginning, it would be a step towards a more entertaining and interactive missioning. It wouldn't be perfect at first for certain but many, i think, would prefer it to the same mission over and over again.
It would be amazing if it could also change as the mission goes along. Evolve into a different type of mission or random events could happen.

There are very easy ways to put some twists in. When building a mission, for instance, in stead of writing in one single design, they could write in two or more elements, one of which is selected. Like maybe you fight an enemy group that is sometimes Sansha, sometimes Blood Raiders, and sometimes Serpentis but you don't know which one you'll get till you get there. For maybe twice the work spent designing a mission, it could be transformed from a boring mappable experience to a rich randomized one. It may feel about the same each time, but there's just enough unknown that you can't make a perfect fit for it and there's little point in studying it on EVE Survival.

Damn and here I thought EvE was a sandbox full of tools and toys and it was up to we the players to create the content using those tools and toys. In other words stop flying missions in maxed fit ship and start experimenting with other ships and other fits to see what happens. All of a sudden missions are a whole lot less boring and predictable and can become extremely challenging. The trade off is your ISK / LP per hour is going to suffer so I guess you have to make a choice.


Don't know about massive incoming fire but a few thoughts.

Why do we have to change a portion of the game that many players enjoy simply because you do not? And spare me the "it's boring" crap because there are many that actually enjoy the very thing you dislike about them and there are a lot of other things you can go do with your time in game besides running missions that you do not like.

When those opposed to the war dec mechanic post they are resoundingly trashed with what amounts to "don't crap on my play style" comments and yet you and others feel it is OK to turn around and crap on their play style why is that OK?

Now to get back to the OP.
What makes you think that CCP has not looked at or is not looking at procedural content generation for things like missions?

EvE is a game with an almost infinite number of options for ships / fits that a player may bring into missions, this causes me to wonder if it would even be possible to code a fully procedural based content generation system.
All of the games that I have played that have this type of system severely limit the tools / toys the player has compared to EvE. Do they do this because they are lazy? Or does this type of system get dis-proportionally more difficult to code as the number of options increases? In other words do these other games limit the player side on purpose so they can be more free formed with the NPC side? If so are we willing to give up some of the flexibility we have to get a more random nature to missions?

Doing procedural content generation for EVE pve sites would not be that hard. In fact, it would be easier than it is in most games because in EVE the environment is all but meaningless. You'd just have to pick from a set of objects (based on some theme) and scatter them semi-randomly in the area with a minimum distance between collidables to avoid pathing issues. Then you assign each NPC attacker some value based on their difficulty and choose a total value for the site, then spawn a group of attackers that fits the difficulty level of the site. It's basically the same system that's used for building random encounters for tabletop RPGs.

CCP won't do it though because they don't care that PvE activities are by far the most popular activities in the game.

At least it would feel like i'm exploring, not looking for specific sites that have the highest payout.