Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Pretty simple concept: Incentivize landmark exploration with one-time awards. Perhaps a small SP infusion per site.

There's lots of landmarks and points of interest across New Eden. Veterans think nothing of them, and would never suggest to a new player to visit them for any reason, short of something like the Eve Gate or Titanomachy.

But in fact, the sites can be neat to look at. And the act of seeking them out is an attractive gameplay concept, replicated in all manner of different games. If there were a mechanical reason to seek out these landmarks, it extends and deepens the concept of Exploration, as it occurs in Eve. It also makes your travels feel more real and tangible, as your movement between dark, un-populated systems are punctuated by real highlights, a purposeful lingering in one spot, a distinct break from grinding through anonymous anomalies.

In addition to this, new players are given incentive to venture out into low-sec and nullsec for a task that they can do on their own, while risking very little, for an easily conveyed objective, and for an immediately useful reward. This increases their likelihood to encounter PvP, and elements of the gameplay that are unknown in high-sec. Where joining a corp would typically be their impetus to leave high-sec, this presents a strong pull that does not require meeting that benchmark.

Landmark exploration could be introduced via simple text tutorial, granting some minor story element, and an additional guidepoint to focus a confused newbie's sense of purpose, if they so choose.

Since Eve is large, and accessing some areas can be inconvenient, this activity could have potential use long into a players lifetime, while yielding the strongest benefit early on.

I could go on. But mostly I just like the idea of places in space being pulled out of their anonymity, and adding a little bit to a region's sense of place. Where little optional blips of history are dusted off, giving your home or journey waypoint a real identity and personality, distinct from wherever you might grind out relic sites, and so on.

When I take a road trip, I love hitting museums along the way. Increasing peoples pull toward these landmarks and oddities, and getting a little bit more of that roadtrip museum feeling within Eve would be incredible.

+1

Finding these sites can be a challenge. I like the idea of an Epic Arc. Perhaps 50 non-expiring missions that can be run in any order with a unique cosmetic reward (clothing etc...) for completing it.

just let explores.... explore. this makes it seem more like an automated tour.

Excellent idea, but I think making SP the reward would make it like a gotta catch em all grind. Instead I think maybe each landmark should grant a skill with a minor buff related to the event in question. For example the site of the pipe-bombing Battleship fleet should give a small buff to smart bombs.

Another thing to consider is that such a proposal would mess with the world order quite a bit as people fight over control of the landmark systems and the routes to them for camping purposes. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, it would even be like fighting over IRL pilgrimage routes of medieval times, it must still be considered carefully so as to not make a mess of things.

Personally I would be fine with an in-game checklist too. Right now I have to google to even identify the places. The EVE gate, the broken CONCORD station (I saw it a few times, but totally forget where it is), player events like the blood bath, etc. If I go there and inspect the object or a "memorial plate" it checks the location on my list and unlocks the related lore information that I can read any time. EVE has a rich lore that is quite hard to find since the official wiki is closed and EVE Uni is more likely focusing on gameplay related pages.