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Well, I've been discussing a lot the steep decline in PCU. My main argument being (and is) that most people pay CCP for the PvE, PvE is a short career with poor quality and that kills population faster than anything else in the game, thus in the last years people who start playing are outnumbered by the continued pressure of quitting PvErs. That drives PCU down despite all of CCP's increasingly desperate efforts to improve PvP, quality of life and anything but PvE as PvErs want it.

In this context, one of the usual counter-arguments is that multiple character training and long skillqueues are to blame for PCU going down.

So when CCP comes and tells us that unlimited skillqueues have taken a toll on server population after Phoebe, I am more or less willing to take their word for it. It goes a bit against my main argument but makes sense.

We may discuss whether it's bullshit or don't, but there's one deeper layer into it: lower PCU (which is real) is toxic to EVE and CCP. Enough toxic to lead CCP into taking a controversial step to bribe players into becoming/providing content by just loggin in and being exposed to the sandbox.

As someone who would profit from this measure (pennies from heaven just for playing my way), I am perfectly OK with it. To me, it's a nice bribe to counter the desperate stupidity of higher NPC taxes in the futile attempts to make Citadels into acceptable trade hubs.

Not to mention weer know ccp was blatantly dishonest with us when they said training would be the only way to get sp fir the injector because this was in the works when they posted that

So at the very least we know they don't respect is enough to tell us the truth

Tinfoil hat EDIT
Also this is kinda big yet there is not even a hint that a dev blog will be put out anytime soon. It's almost like ccp doesn't want to be called out for sneaking thus in but they also don't want the majority of eve to know about it yet

I tried to think the goals of CCP and how to get there. So the idea is that player would think "I would like to have more SP, so what would I need to do?", but if one plays the game already with all of hes alts the reward should be more or less automatic.

Second goal is to get more players "active" in the sandbox so they can effect others or at least make it seem there is others in space too. At least personally seeing someone is undocking hauler and probably transporting some goods feels nice even if I'm not there to shoot him.

Idea 1, activity counter:

So, could we just track the activity? Basically if one is in space for 15-60 minutes (I don't take oppinion about the amount) and active. The active is counted from actions coming from the client e.g. warp to, aproach, lockj, shoto etc etc etc... At least for AT there was some technic to count actions per minute, thus if there is at least one aciton per minute for total of 60 minutes I would count that as active for 60 minutes. You could even make it so that specific actions count to it too e.g. killing a rat would count as 5 minutes of activity or selling 100m3 of items in market as 5 minutes too. But basic idea stands, one should be active e.g. 60 minutes per day.

This way it could also be balanced for weekend actives too, so every day system would add 60 minutes to the counter and when ever you get that to 0 you would get the reward for all of the additions (thus being active 7 hours on Saturday would cound for total of 70k SP). Of course with limit of 7 hours and 70k SP, thus being away for 2 weeks wouldn't count.


Idea 2, task pool:

Lets think these as agent missions, but real implementation sohuld count them automaticalle (so no need to click accept mission etc). Let's have more than 7 tasks to do. Few of them would be kill npc in different spaces (so one for wh, ns, hs and ls). So one would do one would kill npc in hisec. That would check that task completed with some reward. At any given time one can have max of 7 done tasks. So if you do 7 tasks today, you could complete any for that day.

When tasks is complete it would start timer of 20-24h to reopen that task. Thus you could repeat to kill npc in hisec daily. If there is one task that has timer running, second completed task would go to queue for refresh, thus if you would do 7 tasks, it would take around a week for you to do another 7 tasks.

So this would allow doing the same task daily for daily reward as same as current proposed system, but it would also make it possible to do 7 tasks in weekend for those that can't be there in weekdays.


conclusion:

So the basic design behind these both ideas is to make it possible to do your acitivity on smaller calendar days, but would require more activity from the player in those., but still keeping the total required activity same per day.

I would prefer the first as that should be easiest to balance in the end. It would also make it possible to just scout the eve to count as activity or being an hauler that just takes stuff from place A to B. If market gets counted well enough it should work for market traders too.

Any case I hope weget some day away from specific action to a lot of more actions.

Also I would create "what to do" page for people that they could look for things to do. Though I would it would be more or less the opportunities system, but maybe a extra tab with "opportunities that you haven't done in a while".

Well.. these are my thoughs I hope they help in some way.

So, you have created one mindless "human bot".

How is Dailies gonna fix this? If PVEers are quitting because of burnout from PVE then dailies wouldn't make PVE any more interesting. Instead they will most lkely just log in a do dailies and then log out afterwards until they burn out of that as well which in the end may extend their activity for 1-2 weeks but still wouldn't make them return to the game. I have been in many games where I slowly drifted into the 'just do dailies and then log out' cycle as I was burning out of the game and it honestly leaves a rather negative experiance of the game.

Mr. Fox are you serious? Few years ago CCP make a statement that there won't be any options to buy SP. Times go by, people are changing. BOOM skill points trading. I guess changes just gain momentum. Nothing is set in stone - favourite Seagull saying. In terms of making money ofc.

I resubbed after 3 months. Now I don't know why. Bull**** camera change (because of citadels), tax changes (because of citadels), probe window didn't touch since my last loggon at the start of the year (because every resource is redirected to citadels). From the model of patch every 6 weeks we are going back to 2 expansion per year with many little things that could be done easily, forgotten (sorry guys changing DCU icon is not a feature, adding 3 background or extra SKINs also). If I may point out worst management in history of gaming guess who would be my bet.

All they care about is PCU...

That wouldn't surprise me. Unfortunately, giving these guys skillpoints for what they already do and find boring isn't going to help.
There's also the problem that PvE content is expensive.

The devs of SWTOR came up with a dirty trick to make PvE content seem like it had more variety than it actually did. The Kuat Drive Yards flashpoint (dungeon) was linear as usual, but it would pick 3 of 5ish trash rooms and 1 of 3 boss fights, which led to a different sequence of fights every time.
Or we could hear a voice-acted Kruul raging at us whenever we plowed through his minions on a similar theory (random selection of first dialog -> random selection of next). They could have a lot of fun making PvE sound alive. Not necessarily equal-random: rare enough that someone will say "Heh, never heard that one before!" on the 100th time, or depending on what kind of ship you throw at the mission, or if you bring friends. Sound and dialog add pure flavor, no ISK, no skillpoints, and, most importantly, is not telling us when we have to rescue another distressed damsel.
Or if we bring a fleet, any mission about The Seven could have them shout some flavor of "You mock us!" or a different version of the mission. There's PvE stuff which can be done with the engine as it exists right now. Which would shoot the moon with development costs because of all the languages...
Or, if we want to really put the sandbox into it, have a mission design contest once in a while. We do the imagination and theorycrafting and surprise each other what we come up with.

But that's not what this thread is about, and it's most definitely not why we've hit page 70.

Would you be OK if they made you burn ~25M in other-player assets instead of the rat?
It's a threadnaught because the OP says they're going to make a very simple and blunt attempt at telling us how and how often to play the game, and it's a huge no-no in a game where the only real objective is to go places, meet people, and be free to do (almost) anything we want with and to each other and the space around us.

The only difference here is, that the Dev blog, i was quoting, was 3 months ago, not years.
The Daily Quests are ready for deployment on Sisi. So, i guess, it took less than 3 months from the first idea to the finished feature?
If not, that would mean CCP Rise lied to us...

No he lied dailies were talked about a few years ago just back then it was more along the lines of your first mission of the day had a better lp payout

I doubt they swapped to sp in the last 3 months at the very least they knew it was a possibility

CCP, PLEASE RECONSIDER THIS!

[To Matthew Woodward, senior designer at EVE Online developer CCP, ['Sandbox'] is really hard to define, because it's so ingrained in what we do, that we know what it is, but it's hard to put into words," he tells Gamasutra.

But he offers up a pretty good definition anyhow. "Basically it's three things: being social, goal-driven and emergent -- making a game open, giving players control, essentially, and if you're making a multiplayer game, making it as social as possible, because that's why they're playing the game in the first place." ] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/179811/EVE_Online_and_the_meaning_of_sandbox.php

What happened to the sandbox? What happened to the player driven universe? Didn't we learn from other MMOs how daily missions are bad? Look at WoW, they make playing the game a daily obligation, it makes you do stupid things like "killing a certain NPC" each 24 hours because if you don't others will have the advantage.

We have two problems here:
1 - CCP desire to make the game more noob friendly and appealing to generic MMO players. This alone would be the worst thing ever done to this game, the moment you **** up the game in order to appeal to a broader market like Sony did with Star Wars Galaxies, you're officially killing EVE.
2 - In doing so, you're implementing ****** dailies where the right thing to do (if you want to improve PvE and narrative) is to implement new lore and modern missions related to the NPC empires.

I understand that you may want to make it possible to new players gain SP in alternative ways like rich people can with money, but this is NOT the right way to do it and we all fu**ing know it.

NUKE IT FROM ORBIT!