So here is what I think we need to do to cure Eve’s current stagnant and broken highsec PvP model.
kick T3 and the high end faction boats out of highsec. Let T1 boats (and T2s because of their drawbacks) be it for highsec. This will make battleships relevant again (new players LOVE battleships) as well as T1 fleets. This is good for the accessibility we claim we are trying to achieve.
drop mining vessel ore holds to 1000m (this prevents noobs from being AFK in their first mining ship, which has a 15 minute cycle time to fill its hull. It encourages people to mine/haul together, and it encourages the risky activity of jet can mining which is a trigger for emergent gameplay and learning PvP.
roll back petty theft (could put a value on it, if you wanted) to just aggression against the Corp instead of everyone. This will encourage more petty theft (pre-crimewatch rules for petty theft). This will encourage emergent gameplay and theft of assets from those who accept the risk of solo jet can mining in a public space (also re-opens the door to baiting).
leave alliance wardec costs there they are. But drop the total wardec capacity of a corporation to 1 wardec a week. Insert whatever structure mechanics you are working in. Set the fee for that 1 wardec to 1m per member of the Corp.
This will disband the merc corps (largely, there will still be someone on top) because players won’t need a sugar daddy to pay for war decs. It will encourage PvP at a smaller level by organizations that aren’t incentivized to have large quantities of isk. This will make the aggressors attack from a position of poverty and underwhelming numbers.
make locator agents tel you if someone is online before you pay. This enables hunting, but at a reasonable exertion level.
introduce tactics to level 3 missions and above, make overwhelming force result in a tactical change or retreat on behalf of the NPCs. Randomize the difficulty and escalations such that the missions require some thought in an appropriately sized ship… and can’t be upshipped enough to eliminate thought because the NPC’s will retreat.
Not necessarily. You could get a subsequent mission to locate the criminal or agent again, with or without a new objective. You could get reduced payout because you failed to grab the guy but still confirmed the whereabouts and activities. You could immediately get a new objective to destroy something important on grid that the your agent noticed. There are lots of ways to make this interesting. And most importantly: No new mechanics or weird code needed unlike for Abyss, RW or the likes.
As for the rest of the OP’s suggestions: meh. The war dec change in particular is horrible. Huge alliances must be put under never ending blanket wars.
No, it is. If anything does the PvE content need to match up to the aggressiveness of actual players so it can serve as a training as well as income source. See the burner missions as an example. Having to chase after weak PvE targets is terrible for both the player experience and income. All it will do is to make players find better sources of income.
Of course, exceptions to the rule bring diversity to the spectrum of missions and we do have some already like the Dread Pirate Scarlet mission, but this doesn’t seem like what OP is suggesting - or he doesn’t even know we do have a few missions similar to this.
yep… that would totally work… get someone who is a station day trader… good luck finding and killing them. I know of some peoples accounts that have NEVER left a station after they got there.
Uh, Players run away if you bring too much on grid, so NPC’s running away makes sense. It should of course take some time for them to evacuate from where ever they are.
As long as the missions complete so you get the mission pay out and LP reward that’s fine.
I don’t know how you run missions, but I usually only bring one ship and the NPCs bring many. If your experience here is that players run away when they outnumber you then you’re must be very lucky.