Agreed. Farmers need to be punished, instead of being encouraged. And it is farmers who cry, not those who want challenges. I disagree on the wording of “hooking” people via missions. you can’t hook people with missions, even procedurally generated ones. it’s a dead end, because either they all get beaten easily eventually , or the npc AI learns and continuously wipes them out of space. no matter what, it’s generic MMO content and will not hook, because it’s not the game that hooks them, but the people’s hoarding instincts.
it’s okay to look for short term and medium term customers, but the eternal september phenomenon needs to be taken care of first.
Anyhow: What gets people hooked is adrenaline. adrenaline creates a direct hook to where it comes from, compared to targetting hoarding instincts which don’t care about the source, because that source can be anything that throws things at it. see also: most MMOs who do not deserved to be called *Massive Multiplayer". you’ll have a much harder time finding the adrenaline anywhere outside of EVE, in games that feed the lower instincts.
wanting more players, without care about who or what kind of people, only leads to the situation we have now. nothing you suggested hasn’t been tried already and nothing of that really helped. except for harder missions, which are supposed to come in the highsec expansion.
highsec is a core part of the game. where people start and the game’s culture develops and evolves. it’s not just a noob area, but actually the centerpoint of the game… at least until CCP decided to ruin it. lowsec is lowsec, arguably one of the best places. nullsec is whalesec.
re nullsec i gotta say that anyone who complains about the lack of wars misses the point. the problem isnt the lack of wars, it’s the special snowflakes who can not play the game without someone feeding them content. there’d be aay more wars if nullseccers weren’t mostly a big pile of consumers only logging in for fun.
i need my notebook. i’m on the phone and it shows. i dislike that a lot, but i’m also at work and after a week of barely posting, it’s another week of barely working… lol (not complaining on a high level here :P)