Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Burner mission, Level 5 missions and high-level DED complexes in low/null sec. And guess what? They are mostly being run by alts or blitzed in carriers. (I have run a couple of L5 missions in the past with a fleet. The added organizational effort as well as the shared rewards without any significant completion time reduction made it an activity that we dropped very quickly). And guess why? Because running them with other players is neither enjoyable nor efficient nor does it allow for any flexibility because you have to depend on other players.

Group PVE content is already there, plentiful. It is just that the group aspect of it does not make it viable for a wide variety of reasons unless the rewards are incredibly high, like high sec incursions. And if you increase rewards or introduce more incredibly well paying group content, it will end up just like incursions or get mostly neglected, like low sec incursions, because of the above reasons.

On the matter of incursions. They are only really viable in high sec because you can run them uninterrupted by other activities of the game. In null sec, it's easier, more efficient and more rewarding to just keep ratting in anomalies than waiting for enough people to form for a fleet, then run a couple of sites and then stop again because "someone has to go, RL first and all that stuff". The plight of "smaller groups", again favoring the biggest groups. To me, group PVE activities are nice in theory but having no other choice than to do group PVE lacks any appeal whatsoever.
Having said that, I am not arguing against no group PVE content. It can be fun and entertaining sometimes or evolve into weirdly comical PVP. However, it should not replace PVE activities that you can run on your own and that is worth the time. Instead of forcing people to group play, new activities should expand on solo play, for instance, like escalations from anomalies were originally planned to work.

you know what is an even better way to teach that?

take them on a roam to null and LS then there is no risk of them getting stuck in HS ratting until they burn out

Not really. Incursions are lower pressure, give more time for explanation, and help them earn the ISK needed to go out into Null and whelp as many T1 Frigates and Cruisers as it takes to 'git-gud'. Anyone who finds a PvE activity and *just* does that until they burn out was going to do that anyway no matter which PvE activity they stuck on.



I can assure you it's not the latter, I've never seen a shortage of new players interested in Incursions both during my time in Eve Uni and now that I'm off flying with other new player friendly groups. I personally see around half a dozen new players a week run through fleets I'm in and I represent a *tiny* amount of coverage, so the total number is probably well over a dozen just for one group.

As for the former I'd argue that it's not a problem. Incursions aren't intro PvE they're end-game and they're intentionally quite difficult to do without organization and knowledge, which the community has literally distilled down to a drip IV that anyone can digest so long as they can read, listen, and push a button around the time their shield alarm goes off.

If you're just talking about PvE then CCP have already flat out said they're thinking in this direction. A couple of o7 shows ago they said they want the end-game PvE in Null to be more group focused as well (and low already has Factional Warfare).

That said, I doubt you're going to see this brought backwards to Level 4 missions. Some people really do want a solo activity to do, either occasionally or because they only want to interact with people they can immediately shoot. Besides, Level 4 mission revamps would be kind of off topic for this thread. If you want to go into what about Incursions you don't like then by all means elaborate.

The problem with this is avoiding it turning into something easily exploitable, either by finding the optimal ratio of payout to difficulty to ships in, or by intentionally warping more ships in on alts or something to spawn more money. Heck, I could probably create a new Alpha account and warp it over to a Level 4 mission pocket in about the time it would take me to clear a wave if I set it up right.

This sort of thing is basically what killed Drifter Incursions. People found a way to do them with very minimal pilot count and risk, and the end result was people making billions of isk a day across as many characters as they could bring.

It's not so much that I think this is insurmountable as I think it's not worth trying to surmount, for reasons that pretty much address your next point...



Any balanced PvE content is, almost by definition, going to end up being repetitive and boring. All content has to be created and CCP (or any other game dev) can't churn out content fast enough before it becomes a 'solved game' and becomes repetitive.

Even fully random sites would get boring because either they fall within certain parameters for balance reasons (like Incursion sites do) or they swing wildly in terms of risk and aren't terribly fun as a result. After all no one wants to show up with a fleet and discover bad RNG has doomed their efforts.

The sort of happy middle ground is gluing semi-random set pieces together like Diablo-style ARPGs do for some of their levels but with enemy scenarios instead of map tiles and random enemy types. The problem with this comes back to the need for PvE to be balanced and profitable combined with the rate players consume content and it becomes repetitive. There's just no way CCP or any other game company can keep up.

I've kind of already addressed everything in the last block of your post. Basically I just don't think that's a terribly realistic or tenable goal for CCP to be working towards and to my knowledge there is no game currently existing today that's achieved what you're talking about.

A lot of this is flatly inaccurate.

First off, Alphas really can't do Incursions. VGs really require something with Battlecruiser level tank and DPS at minimum, and T1 Cruiser Logi really don't rep enough to allow the fleet to survive the site.

Second, the idea that "losses should never happen" is ridiculous. Just for a start there are certain circumstances that can and will guarontee one or more ships die. They're relatively rare, but they do happen. On top of that you have things like player interference to contend with, as well as player error on the part of the Logi or someone else. Add the potential for technical problems on top of that and it's very possible to lose ships in Incursions and it happens relatively frequently. In a discussion a few days ago the group I fly with, which does accept newer players and therefore probably has a slightly higher loss rate, estimated that we lose around 2-4 ships a week on average to various circumstances. Not all of these are SRP-able but most are.

Both of the major incursion-only groups that I'm aware of still going offer SRP in some form, and Eve Uni has an informal SRP system as well.

Most people sitting on HQ waitlists either do go run with other groups while they're waiting or do other things in or out of game. If you're not then that's on you. Also generally speaking the number of groups running VGs and Assaults has dropped significantly in the last year or two, as has the general Incursion population.

The issue with Drifter Incursions was actually the cheap ships, you used them to 'tank' the DD (or one of a variety of other methods) and got a massive payout for the whole fleet. It wasn't even one exploit, it was like half a dozen different ways of breaking the system.

Making Incursions shorter would just drive people away from them due to the frustration of moving ships around all the time on increasingly short intervals and IMO is a poor idea in general.

You complain its all about efficiency,
Then you compare it to raiding.

Ok, I wouldn't have compared it to raiding seeing how its not a must to do incursions to play Eve.

But if you want MMO raiding:
1: At first, its was about a lot of players beating on 1 big boss (sometimes needing to clear a host of "guards" first).
Then was added:
2: Requirement to do it to play the game (locked zones, keys, required gear stats to survive things etc).
3: Locked amounts of players allowed = 100% about efficiency (right classes, right group set up, perfect optimized gear, correct rotations etc). This lock exist in all games today as far as I know.

Incursions have 1 and 3. Personally I am very pleased it doesn't have 2.

Your biggest gripe is against the core of what raiding started as.

I actually don't get what you want from this post.

not always ideal dude, try learning fleet mechanics with Perunga as FC and you'll know what i mean.