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You don't need a themed winter expansion to add more scripted missions to the game for the first time since 2010. And this is just the very first thing CCP should do in order to sort the mess they've created about PvE.

Which PvE are you talking about? The meat-and-potatoes PvE of Null-Sec where one has to fit a ship with the best modules to take down the highest level DEDs, or the High-Sec PvE based on Mission running and the like?

EVE is too big a game for a player to restrict themselves to just one style of game-play. People have alts for when they want to switch up what they want to do in the game i.e. a guy can have a main for PvE and PvP, but have an alt who specializes in mining and Planetary Interactions, and some will have alts dedicated to profiting from the market in High-Sec, or one who operates as an Incursion runner. Some players even have alts specialized for flying Capitals all the way up to Titans.

The way you call yourself a "Baseliner", however, makes me think you seem to not have any alts at all (which I would assume is nigh-impossible). Are you honestly trying to tell me that you don't have an alt in Null-Sec in any known alliance that can take part in these Sotiyo Shipyard battles?

First I apologize to anyone who may be reading this if my questions have already been answered elsewhere

1) How exactly will these BPC's drop once this feature is released? Will they just be in a cargo container, where anyone can come by and ninja salvage it if they are fast and sneaky enough, regardless of whether or not they just participated in the epic battle that most likely preceded the Shipyard's destruction? It seems like an awfully unfair and random way to determine who will get this multi-billion isk blueprint if so

2) What will happen if players bring capital ships? Will the Shipyards respond with capital fleets of their own? Will they have doomsdays and fighters too? Or will the Shipyards simply just spawn enough non-capital ships necessary to counter the player capitals which are on field?

3) Will the Shipyards be spawning warp disruption bubbles when in Null sec, and will player warp disruption bubbles work on NPC ships to keep them from pinging to a more strategic location?

4) Will NPC ships have access to the same ships and modules that players do? Can NPC ships cloak up, and will they have stealth bombers? What about ECM ships like the Falcon? Will there be NPC ships with MJD capabiliity? Or Bastion modules? What about command boosts?

5) Will NPC ships have drones, and if so will the NPCs pull the drones back to the ships if they start to take damage (like an alert pilot should)?

6) It's been said that the ships the NPC's are using are drawn directly from how a player would fit a similar ship. But what about the "pilot" flying the NPC ship. Ex: Capsuleers can get bonuses for flying a ship based on their skills, as well as for using implants and combat boosters. Do the Shipyard NPC's get any such bonuses?

7) How far away from the Shipyard can NPC ships/fleets be kited before giving up the chase and returning to base?

8) If the Shipyard AI is always escalating to match the current threat, what happens when the player fleet starts losing significant numbers of ships, or if some or all of the player fleet cloaks or warps off entirely? Will the Shipyard eventually despawn/dock the excess numbers of ships, and if so how long will that take? Or will there always be an ever increasing number of ships that player will simply have to match once spawned?

9) Am I right to understand that once this feature goes live that there will only ever be 1 shipyard in all of New Eden at any given time? Will it just sit there indefinitely until someone happens to stumble upon the NPC mining operation and then bother to scan down the hauler?

10) If these shipyards will always be spawning enough ships to counter whatever numbers of ships are brought by players, then doesn't it seem logical that the answer is for the players to NOT bring large numbers of ships, and instead to focus on just bringing a small number of well-trained and well-equipped pilots to keep the Shipyard from spawning too many defenses? What would happen if just a few capsuleers tried to attack a shipyard? Or if someone tried to solo it?

I apologize again for any previously answered questions, and if any of these questions seemed stupid, uneccesary, or obvious

Wow, thank you sir. That definitely clears up a lot for me, and hopefully for others as well

Hi Jenn, thankyou for your post. It is a little off topic, but I think its valuable to answer it.

TL;DR: All new PvE content won't be PvP-like.

I understand where your coming from. Sometimes, you just want to watch Netflix, or chat with your mates, and only half pay attention while running some Sanctums, or running The Blockade.
And yes, much of our new content has had a considerably higher difficulty cap than previous content. I can assure you we recognize the value of both.

We understand the importance of 'low engagement content', and we believe we can deliver that while staying true to our push for player-like-NPCs. We can use a couple of different strategies at lowering their power level. Low skills, poor tactics, bad fittings, providing you with allies or handicapping them in other ways.

Additionally, there is the question of Mastery. I've spoken about this at round-tables at Fanfest and EVE Vegas. Players have Mastered content, for example, the Mission system. They've spent the time to find the right ships, skills, fits and tactics to optimize that content. Changing that content has a cost, it reduces or removes the investment someone has made in mastering a system. This is a large part of what attracts many people to EVE Online, complex systems to master. This doesn't mean we'll never change missions, or any other system, but we do recognize the cost it has. And sometimes, this Master is just kinda bad...its not optimization and player skill, its just figuring out the game system (i.e. mission blitzing).

Lastly, no matter how hard we try, I doubt we'll ever get to the standards of player flown ships. Theoretically, its possible, but we can't have a super computer to run every NPC in the game :) And, there is just mental difference between knowing their is another person controlling the ship your killing (or getting killed by) than a computer.


Much of the push for adding the Mining Ops, and Blood Raider Shipyards has less to do with the specific PvE content and much more to do with the tools we're creating. How NPC's chose their targets and maneuver around the battlefield. NPCs respecting EWar resistances, or being effected by sensor dampeners and energy neutralizers. NPC's using capacitor when they activate a webifier or repairer.
We're creating these tools at the highest possible difficulty level, trying to replicate PvP as much as possible. Ensuring these tools are rock solid. But these tools will be very useful for lower-intensity PvE as well. A Rifter fit with Civilian autocannons still needs to find the right range to orbit its target at, and respond appropriately when you use a Tracking Disruptor on it. We're striving for internally consistent PvE.

We want to provide a variety of PvE and PvPvE (which is probably where the Blood Raider Shipyards fall) for EVE Online. Casual, High Risk-High Reward, Group Based, Solo, and everything in between.

Thanks CCP Larrikin, for taking the time to make such detailed replies!

I like what they did with the burner missions: high difficulty, high risk - but completely optional: does not affect your agent standings if you decline. I hope newer, high risk highsec mission content will be just as optional. Perhaps when CCP has enough exotic new stuff, they will introduce new "special ops" agents, so player expectations can be met and set appropriately.

Mastery also haves another face: people who have mastered how to build the same jigsaw puzzle for the 100th time without growing (too) bored of doing it.

I don't know what you will think of this mastery, but to me it was one of the reasons that kept me playing EVE Online for 8 years.

Not the fact that missions can be optimized in one "blitz" way, but the fact that they can be sub-optimized and tinkered with in endless ways because you know the picture and how the jigsaw puzzle will look once completed, and there's a myriad creative ways of reaching that (satisfactory) conclussion.

And that's the exact opposite of the most lucrative thing I've done in EVE, Drifter Incursions. I was in a fleet that harvested n milion ISK per hour, two hours a day monday to friday and two fleet ops (thus four hours) on Saturday and Sunday. And it was always the same drill as any single mistake could spell doom. It was boring beyond words, the less sandboxy thing I've ever done in EVE.

Thus it turned that the more challenging a content is, the more boring it becomes once resolved, whereas less challenging content allows more diversity of approaches and becomes a better sandbox to try different tools.

The problem I see with developing complex tools is that they might become a solution in search for a problem, aka "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

An AI that can effectively overwhelm a well organized and FC'ed PvP fleet is a challenging achievement, but, you don't need it to overwhelm a new player in a poorly fit T1 frigate, and first of all, there should come the consideration of whether you want to overwhelm new players by showing them how even NPC AI plays EVE better than them.

More seriously, what this player doubts (and according to them, other players doubt too) is whether CCP knows what problem do they want to fix about PvE, because as far as my experience goes, all new PvE is added out of the blue with results which, as JennASide pointed, are less than optimal.

>.>

Did you teach the Blood Raiders to set smartbomb traps or something?

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