Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Incursion do have something for small group (3-5 people) but most people feel it is undervalued for its difficult

maybe I recommend make scout site (for small group) much more easier to manage as entry level into Incursion.

Maybe this is what level 5 missions should become, since nowadays nobody ever runs them.

Is this true? I have seen many people claim the contrary.

This is a sandbox game, you want group PvE create a Corp based on running PvE

Yep, did this a few years back, it was a corp thing.

After one mission I had a huge increase in my Minmatar LP...I was shocked. Everyone else on comms who had been running them before laughed at my reaction....ahhhh the good ol' days.

Oh, and that is where the money is in these missions, the bounties, IIRC, sucked, but damn the LP....

Even though scouts were buffed, to run them effectively you are looking at needing a full group of marauders. Unless you and your group are dead set on running scouts, you are pretty much better off just running with a light vanguard group. You just need your 2 logi, ideally 1 vindicator for the webs but you can get by with any ship that can fit the proper tank with webs and high tracking guns and then whatever ships that can apply some decent dps.

Who says you can't already do what you do solo now with a group instead?

Notice how missions and DED site gates have ship restrictions but no one's even heard of a player number lockout? It's so either one player can run them solo or a group can if a group wants to. If you want more group PvE, then I'd say you already have both the incentive and the means. Group PvE in Eve doesn't need its own content, PvE in Eve is already able to accommodate a group same as the solo player. All that needs to be really done is for players who genuinely want more group PvE is to simply fleet up with some friends and go talk to an agent or find some sites to run, same thing you do now solo. The tools are already their. CCP doesn't really need to do anything, even though they are already in fact been working on PvE content intended for groups both past and present: Incursions, Drifter Incursions, upper tier wormhole classes too harsh for one ship, etc.

That said, with most people asking for more group centered PvE, what they are really asking for is for group centered rewards. It's the only group-oriented element that's really missing from most PvE activities, and thank the Maker it is so; it's already massively simple and easy to make tons of ISK solo or group. Why do you think L5's are in Low?

Why don't we just make PVE more like PVP. Less rats, stronger rats, rats that have capacitors and respond to EWAR, rats that have randomized fits and don't always use the same tactic. Less static scripting and more dynamic scripting.

There's actually a whole host of problems when it comes to introducing group orientated PvE in Eve.

- Trust, or lack thereof, is a pretty big one especially for Eve and excludes things like Pug type groups in any situation where there isn't a lot of safety. Think Low/Null incursions.

- Needing it to be comparable in rewards to existing(Solo) PvE content or else no one will run it. This is probably the 2nd biggest concern and taking a stick to current solo rewards will have an extremely nasty effect on the game and is definitely not recommended.

- Not be soloable(Null Anoms, Burners, etc) or exploitable/alt exploitable(Incursions, WH to a lesser degree and Null anoms) or mass/infinitely farmable(Incusions, FW though they're working on that, Null Anoms).

- Be actually interesting to people outside of a small erm, special group of people. Incursions pay out nice but damn the same 4 or 5 sites doing the same thing with the same ship in the same system listening to the same person saying the same thing every 10-15min for 8h or more... Been there, never doing it again.

- Permanent ship loss, ties in with the trust issue. Don't get me wrong, this shouldn't change at all but compare the ease and fluidity of other MMOs group content (think STO for example) with Eve's current popular group PvE content like incursions. Paranoia and permanent ship loss rules how and where incursions are run and not run and with what they are run. This should at the least be a consideration when suggesting PvE group content. Maybe an opportunity here for game supplied ships and/or scenario based PvE content? Just spit-balling here.

- Ingenuity, drive of the playerbase and the complexity/number of parts, both ship and mechanics, available to said player base and just general sandbox nature of the game already require heavy limitation of what the player can do or bring to the content(Think Burners, WHs, Lv5s, FW, etc.)

There's many more minor and not so minor issues around introducing any kind of group PvE and we can already see where CCP has tried things and failed and how they're desperately trying to make it work with the Drifter Incursions. Also how the player base has reacted and how the game itself has reacted. The players has balked hard enough at the guaranteed ship loss of the drifter DD that CCP has made it so you can speed tank it. The game itself broke so badly due to the AI changes that they had to disable Drifter incursions as it was having performance impacts on the systems they were in. And a lot of what I've seen people want in terms of AI or Dynamic behavior is far beyond what caused those performance issues.

I think one of the biggest opportunities being missed here both by CCP and by the player base is that they're still stuck thinking inside the incursion box. Burners I think is something that they did right because it adds a lot of content with very attractive rewards simply because almost every mission requires it's own fit to do optimally. As a bonus it's borderline impossible to exploit with multiple alts. This means people are undocking in more and different ships, skills previously exclusive to PvP are being trained on PvE only characters and people are being exposed to PvP concepts like OH, Links, Logi and Solo Frigate/Cruiser combat. And it's very focus intensive content meaning you'd be hard pressed to run it on multiple characters at the same time.

Think what kind of group content will continue to push those concepts without falling into the pitfalls above. Who knows, maybe with some fine tuning Drifter incisions will be a stepping stone to the group PvE content we want.

Please excuse me for selective quoting here but I just want to mention that I agree with you to a degree here. This is part of the reason why I put a burner guide together in the first place. Getting as many people on the same playing field as possible means you can more accurately see what effect a specific PvE activity has on the game. Incursions is a perfect example of this as it has a disproportioned effect on the game compared to the amount of players taking part in it.

The difference between incursions and Burners in this sense is that because incursions is an inherently group activity the know how you talk about is quickly and easily disseminated. With a Solo activity like Burners not so much. Maybe Burners are payout too much LP and too little isk, maybe it pays out too much isk but not enough LP, maybe it's paying out the right amount and maybe it's paying out too little. Without enough datapoints anything anyone says is theory. An interesting thing I have noticed is that SOE LP items value has gone up over the last month or two. This is counter to what certain people have been predicting rather vocally. I don't know why this is happening as it's counter to logic. Need more data to understand why and need more players to take part to get more data. If the rewards aren't good enough you will never get enough people and thus enough data so a small handful profit while no one else makes use of the content.

I would also like to add that an interesting side effect of this has been that gankers started targeting the blingy fits, this lead to people now mostly using T2 fits thus reducing income and tempering the issue you have of top-end gear.

Emergent, dynamic, player driven game play. That's what Eve is all about right? Now imagine if Group PvE can get in on some of that.

Edit: Also I like the idea of how to adjust NPC AI to make it possible to add more people and AI to a site without making it impossible etc.