Assembly Hall

From this thread a lot of support has been given to the idea of upgrading the current npcs you see when flying around.

At the moment outside of missions, plexs and anomalies the only npc ships you see are the concord faction ships at gates and a few haulers flying out of random stations and slow boating off grid. This really shows how little NPC activity goes on in EVE it's like pod pilots are the only ones flying around which is not the case, there are trillions of people in the galaxy there should be more NPC traffic.

What started as a cosmetic change, (just seeing more ships flying back and forth) has become more practical after suggestions from others, a whole bunch of player activities set to challenge a pilot have been suggested.

My proposal is that CCP take some time from their development cycle for summer to add new scripts for NPCs to move about the galaxy.

Some ideas thrown about in the thread were:

Haulers travelling from station to station or system to system delivering goods which can be dropped if the NPC is destroyed.

Haulers travelling to low sec and null sec with an armed escourt with smart AI (incursion level) that low sec players can attack for loot or protect for faction rewards, like a dynamic mission source.

Other rare ship types like Luxury yachts cruising around planets.

Nocti roaming battlefield complexes providing salvaging missions.

Factional fleets fighting pitched battles in FW, highsec, low sec and null sec, which players can join on either side for rewards.

The full realisation of this concept can be done in stages, the first iteration can be improving to original caravan script so that ships go station to station or system to system and add more ship types, before adding more opportunities to the npc environment.

The npc activity could be scalable to server load to avoid performance issues also.

I think a more dynamic npc environment is better for the players than waiting for certain identical instances to spawn be that in missions, anoms or incursions a bit of variety would challenge players more, increasing fun.

What say you?

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This seems good to me and a definitely an improved and interesting way to provide new PvE content, but I would like to have such initiative to be function and gameplay driven. Basicly keep the NPC ships which serve neither of those purposes to a minimum. Some fluff is fine to improve immersion, but the main drive the project should be to add to the actual gameplay and improve the PvE aspects of the game.

Additional idea for attacking convoys/haulers would be to allow ransoming them instead of killing them and looting them. That option should be available only after all the escorts have been killed. You would get cash instead of the loot drop, if you choose to ransom. If you want to get fancy, allow dishonoring the ransom with reprecussions. One such thing might be losing the ability to ransom after a few times or other fitting sanctions. Alternatively you can just despawn the hauler, make it invulnerable and have it warp away and disappear, if it was ransomed and not allow people to break the deal at all.

supported.

Is this also in favor of making EvE more difficult all around as well?

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Thanks for the support so far!

sported, could be useful for multiple areas within the game once its implemented, it could be easily expanded on as needed.

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Great idea, Eve really needs to become more lively.
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