Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The new belt miners / response fleets got me thinking about CCP's desire to add more advanced NPC AI into the game. There seems to be a consensus (according to things i see/hear) amongst players is that there is not enough in game to force/encourage large scale player encounters. This seems to be from pvp'ers concerned with content - all the way down to miners/industrialists concerned with market prices because little that gets produced gets destroyed.

Hear me out - how would a big project 'Drifter Invasion' sound? Not as in small isolated Drifter incursions, as in global 'This is it' Invasion across the cluster. Perhaps they have finally gotten to the moment their intelligence form the Jove observatories combined with the completion of their buildup has come to a head. Have them be their own NPC alliance hell bent on eradicating the capsuleer threat that is keeping them from conquering the major empires. Let them use stargates, let them have advanced Capitals that take major investment of countering. Let them attack Citadels and come back for the RF timers. Let them take Sov from nullsec and spread like a real alliance/corp. Fail to stop them and they take over your space, and if you want to keep your space there needs to be a lot of assets 'out in the open' to encourage player engagements. To prevent further worsening of the economy, perhaps the rewards should be nothing. Too harsh? lol. Too easy for players to simply 3rd party?

Surely the details would matter, for example perhaps the strength of them in Nullsec could be scaled to some kind of index, size of alliance, something clever to avoid circumvention like farming out Sov you've claimed, etc.

Fair critiques. You must admit though that if Eve becomes/remains an ISK making utopia the economy will not be healthy. Some kind of isk sink would be a welcome shot in the arm, and that doesnt happen with isk farming, it happens with things getting blown up.

fyi - I'm not sure you are understanding the economy I mention. The isk you make in PVE is only worth something if someone is willing to buy it for that price.

Destruction is not an isk sink. Its actually an isk faucet thanks to insurance.

Haven't read the economy updates recently but the isk faucet/sink wasn't to bad last i saw. You're damn right about production being way higher than destruction though.

Things getting blown up are not an ISK sink they are a mineral sink. ISK sinks take the form of Corp and Alliance fees, market fees, NPC sell orders, and similar things that take ISK out of the economy directly. Ship Insurance is actually a net ISK faucet.

Also if you check out the EVE Prosper segment from the latest o7 show you'll note that we're actually currently running ISK negative in terms of Sinks vs Faucets, in large part due to people moving away from ratting and towards things like Rorqual Mining to make their ISK.

If CCP wanted to add another ISK sink to the game this sort of thing would not be the way to do it.

EVE's PVE is awful. Making it mandatory is not going to make it better.

What if there would be a huge PVE event instead of constant threat: the Drifters figured out, that the best way to break the current economy to make it easier to conquer is destroying the main market. This could be a kind of simulation about what would happen to the global economy if suddenly we would lose the market of China.
During the event the Drifters attack every structure in Jita, regardless if it's player-made or NPC. If the Drifters win (spoiler: they will) all of the stations and everything in them will be destroyed.
Players will have 2 options during the event to participate:
- killing Drifters for ISK and Concord LP
- accepting contracts to evacuate the properties from the system (as a response to this as we getting later in the event the Drifters will more likely attack haulers too)
By the end of the event, Jita is full of station wrecks.

Look, all I know is this: It would be absurdly fun to fly a Drfiter ship (even toned down and with a suspect status).

he's in nc., nobody wants to play with nc.

I, for one, welcome our new Drifter Super/Titan overlords. Although I don't think they want to set any blues. Also, CCPlease- have the drifters talk smack in local, post their killmails into local or something.

So I take it not many forum readers (and trolls) take kindly to NPC demolition as a tool for increased player interaction and economy stimulus. I have no idea what caused the Drifter Incursions (last?) year to make the servers choke so much, but it does seem like the bones of something like this are becoming present in the game already. The Lancers/Drifters already have more advanced stats and AI and warp about systems and remember players aggression, and NPC belt rats mine actual ore and make off with it, etc.

The main reason the Drifter Incursions got removed was because players very quickly found a way to turn them into a free ISK printer to the tune of billions an hour.

The reason people are not in favor of this is because NPC combat isn't all that engaging by itself even with the changes that have been made, because NPC combat is and should remain largely voluntary, and because the economy doesn't work how you think it does. Destroying assets does not remove ISK from the game it removes minerals. This pushes mineral prices up, but it actually increases the ISK supply in the game because across all players insurance is a net ISK faucet, not a sink.