That’s what players are for. You do know you are playing an MMO, right?
low effort response. You could make the same argument for removing all the npcs from the game.
Do NPCs haul for us? No. Do NPCs run missions for us? No. Do NPCs mine for us? No. Do NPCs fight wars for us? No. Players do all that. The sole purpose of NPCs in EVE is for PLAYERS to shoot at and interact with. EVE is an MMO, not some single player game where you hire NPCs…
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Player structures have had automated defenses for as long as I can recall. When you pay your sov bill or structure upkeep costs, you’re already effectively paying npcs do to things for you. They’re just not visible.
What’s the problem with paying for some npcs to sit on your structures waiting for enemies to come by to shoot? Whether the pve is designed by ccp, or players, it doesn’t make much difference.
I’ll never understand why EVE tends to attract certain types of players who want to play an MMO with other players, but want to do things solo and be left alone. It’s like that guy who goes out to a bar to be around other people, but sits in the corner by himself all night and won’t talk to anyone…
The problem is that would allow SOLO players (look at my above post) to defend structures that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to defend. If we allow this, then what else? NPC guardian fleets for haulers? NPC followers for mission runners? NPC haulers that haul things for you? There would be no end to it. Give 'em an inch, and they’ll take a mile…
PVE exists, might as well make it as compelling as possible. One of the methods to do that, is to allow players to customize it.
While I can’t speak to citadels specifically, I know posses used to. There are also guns on every empire stargate and npc station.
That’s merely a question about balance. I’m not sold on the idea that someone could just take a gank cat and knock down a bunch of structures without any resistance. The amount of resistance offered though… that’s certainly something worthy of debate.
First off, just because something can be abused at a later date doesn’t make an initial concept poor. The fact that you’re relying on this argument instead of something more substantial kind of proves the idea is solid.
Secondly, CCP already has a game design rule of limiting passive income streams. As such, npcs would not be ale to be hired to earn the player income.
That said… there would still be room to have mission types that have npc helpers, but those npcs would be baked into the mission… as such it would be balanced around those npcs existing. There are already some missions that try to mimic this, but they do a poor job of it. Personally, I want the career missions / tutorial to have npcs join the player’s fleet… to teach the player it exists and how to use the interface.
If the hired NPCs can’t really make you a decent amount of ISK or they provide only a limited defense, then why bother hiring them in the first place?
well that’s the balance aspect isn’t it?
Yes, it does. Case in point, Alpha accounts. Everyone and their dog could create 1,000 free Alpha accounts and use them to gank to their heart’s content with absolutely zero consequences. It was being used and abused to the point that CCP finally had to do something about it…
And they did. It didn’t make alphas a bad idea… it just meant they needed to balance it. thanks for proving my point.
No, it doesn’t prove your point. Alpha accounts were a piss poor concept to begin with. The ganking thing is only the tip of the iceberg. Player still use Alpha accounts every day for all manner of exploits. We have players in Rookie Help that spam and troll endlessly on free Alpha accounts because they know there is absolutely nothing that CCP can do about it. When they get banned or blocked, they simply create 20 more accounts and keep right on doing it…
Spam how? With links? Seems like an easy fix.
Long story short, every game that implements some kind of F2P mode ends up having trash people playing for free and doing whatever they want with zero consequences…
Please stay on Topic an post constructive…
The spammed links are easy enough to deal with by preventing alphas from posting them in public chat channels. Except for maybe ship fittings since sharing them could actually be helpful.
Fair enough on the not being able to permaban trolls. That is the price you’d have to pay for having f2p accounts.
You could do a temporary ip ban… but there are ways to circumvent that. But imo… if someone is willing to go that far, they’d probably be willing to do so with a paid account anyway.
EVE had trash people long before f2p became a thing. Some might even say the community is less toxic than it was years ago. Which, if true, is an incredible feat considering the world at large is more toxic than it’s ever been.
Thank you
I love talking to people, I love the economy, I love the spaceships, I love the not-being-in-first-person, I love the insignificance od most individual players, I love the sandbox, I love the piracy, and I love the fact that it’s all in one world, no getting around it. I also love solo pvp. My goals in this game do not revolve around sovereignty or structures or capitals, just a dank solo ratio and a blinged-out T1/Faction Frigate that is to be feared by all.
Solo playstyles are not designed around structures, and structures are not designed around solo playstyles. Anything that makes it easy for a single person to defend multiple structures would be a very unfair mechanic towards the grops that htis game is so clearly made for.
You lack vision. It’s true that the current space infrastructure doesn’t really have need of npc protection… this is mainly due to reinforcement timers. But what if we had stuff that didn’t have reinforcement timers… and could just be blown up like mission assets.
It would be useful to at least have some defense on these objects. This more or less ends up being a mission site a player could create.
So example structures:
Deadspace Beacon: structure that creates deadspace pocket.
Acceleration Gate: you’re familiar with that structure.
Proximity Alarm: Hackable structure that will alert the deadspace owner of the intrusion and suspect flag intruders if the alarm isn’t deactived within 60 seconds.
Hangers: for npcs and drones.
Intel Structures: There’s a wide variety of things these could be used for, but if CCP ever wants to get rid of nullsec local, this could replace it as an intel tool.
Industry:
shipyard: : sub capital construction yards. High risk due to not having reinforcement timer protection, but also potentially more efficient resource build cost. It’s also a way to avoid taxes.
farm: in space pi. grow organics (for the picture below, I coudln’t find an example of the stand alone farm asset, but you shoudl get the idea.)
other industry stuff: reactions, invention, create trade commodities, ect.
This is actually where The OP’s idea could come into play. Allow the player to use npc miners to mine non-caspsuleer minerals … like bandine. You could use some bs lore reason like the normal minerals are too volatile for npc miners to mine.
Anyway, these npc miners would mine these new mineral types specifically for deadspace construction. This will allow for an rts / dungeon master style of game play. Which of course other players can come in and smash to pieces with their immortal godlike powers.
@QuakeGod Last year I created a post that covered much of this topic (and more) in a more complete package. Just because you want pvp, doesn’t mean working on more compelling pve is a terrible idea. Especially when you start blending the two playstyles to be indistinguishable from each other.
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