Abyss Style Group PvE

TLDR

  • Abyss sites designed for group PvE that uses Alliance Tournament like restrictions.
  • Low tier sites don’t kill you if you fail. They just eject you.

Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of instances and not a fan of abyss space (I was in two minds about posting this at all). However, Abyss space is probably here to stay and, despite my lack of love for abyss space and instances, I do think it is the way to get the most out of group PvE.

Disclaimer 2: I am not very well versed on writing in these forums. My apologise if the format is bad.

So why do I think Abyss Instances are better for group PvE?

  • On demand.
    I do believe that having PvE ‘on demand’ is a great benefit to keeping players engaged. It means players don’t have to suffer waiting or searching for content. They can also start an abyss site anywhere, which means all you need is your mates and a shard. So no jump cloning or travelling back and forth between PvE areas or staging systems. No having to set-up your HQ near a decent agent. You just bring along a bunch of shards to wherever you wanna operate out of.

  • Instant Entry.
    Sort of related to the first point, one of the problems I found with Resource Wars and acceleration gates was forming a fleet with some buddies, counting the size of our fleet when we were all ready, looking in the agency window for a site that will fit us all in and then travelling several systems to the site with the whole fleet only to find it already half full with another group or randoms. When this happens, you are left with two choices, find another site that can fit your gang or split up the gang and leave some of your bro’s behind. This was in fact a way to troll Resource Wars. A player could put a couple of alts into a site, denying some genuine resource war runners entry to the site, and deliberately be unproductive. The way resource wars and their acceleration gates work in fact encourage smaller gangs in two ways: First, smaller sites are more frequent than larger ones and second, you are more likely to fit into sites if you have a smaller gang. Abyss space on the other hand suffers none of the above. You will never have to worry about having to find a site that fits your gang. You will never have to worry about the site being already half full or randomers trolling the site. You will never have to worry about leaving bro’s behind. You make your gang, choose the site you want and instantly everyone in your gang enters.

  • No Blobbing.
    Perhaps the most key feature of Abyss space is that it cannot be blobbed. You cannot bring in an overwhelming amount of friends and alts and logi to make the content brain-dead easy. By restricting the content to a certain number of a certain type of ships, setting the difficulty of the content within is much easier to tweak and therefore much easier to make the rewards less exploitable.

  • Time Limits and Walls.
    Again, related to the above point, having to complete a site within a time limit means players cannot use mass logi or over tanked ships to slowly but safely grind through the PvE. In a similar way again, the restricted area means kiting and sniping are less of an option. Min-maxing is harder to do.


Onto the idea itself:

The core concept of the idea is that new Abyss shards will offer a variety of sizes and difficulty of sites for players to run. The spectrum starting at small-and-easy and scaling to big-and-difficult. Small sites will be designed for small gangs, and big sites around big gangs. Easy sites will be designed for low sp ships/mods. Difficult sites will be designed around high sp ships/expensive mods.

How do we do this?

To put it bluntly by restricting how many and what can get into each site. How all these restrictions work is up for debate. They could be hard restrictions where breaking a limit means that the site will not open for the fleet or we could introduce something like a soft limit where the limit can be broken, but at a cost.

Cost proposal 1:
One of the most obvious costs and perhaps easiest to implement would be a shortening of the timer for any fleet comp that breaks any of the limits for that site. And how shortened the timer is could depend on how many or how far limits have been broken.

Cost Proposal 2:
Another way to penalise breaking limits could be increased points costs (see below) where limits have been broken. How I imagine this may work is detailed below, but these are just suggestions and open to criticism (or ridicule).

Point system. (Associated Cost: Breaking the points limit would shorten the timer for the site.)

Anyone familiar with the Alliance Tournament will know that each ship type is allocated a points cost and a team is given a points limit with which to make their gang. The more powerful the ship the more points it costs. This system could, easily in my opinion, be adapted to this type of PvE content and provides players with an extra strategic element to running PvE. Smart crafters will squeeze the most out of their fleet comps. This will also allow a way for devs to balance sites for correct difficulty in two ways beyond redesigning the sites themselves. Much in the way that ship point costs are tweaked if people feel a particular ship type has become too dominant or weak in the alliance tournament. Or, if a particular site is proving too difficult or easy, the points limit for the site can be tweaked.

Player limit. (This would be hard limit that, if exceeded, would stop the site from opening.)

Again similar to the alliance tournament and current abyss space, sites will restrict the size of a gang that can enter. Obviously small sites will be more restrictive, starting at something like 3 ships and then big sites allowing 10 or maybe more.

Ship limits.
Ship limits can work in a few ways:

  1. Setting a max number of ship sizes for a site. So many small ships (Frigs/Dessies), so many medium ships (Cruisers/BC’s), so many large ships (Battleships).
    Exceeding these limits would increase the points costs of all ships within a size class. For example, if a site is limited to 2 battleships but the gang entering has 3 in fleet, the points cost of each battleship increases by 20% (see Points System above), kinda like a stacking penalty.

  2. Some sites can simply not allow certain types of ships, a straight forward example may be that small sites never allow large ships, and easy sites never allow tech 2 ships.
    Marauders and Tech 3 ships may be restricted from this content all together.
    This would be a hard limit. The presence of these ships would simply prevent the site from opening for the fleet.

  3. Limits on how many of the same ship you can take. Again, like the alliance tournament, we could force a gang to take a variety of ships by restricting the number of identical ships to 3. So you couldn’t take 10x Thorax’ (congrats if you get that reference). Exceeding this limit would increase the points costs of such identical ships (see Points System above).

Why might that last one be a valuable restriction? It puts a stricter limit on ships within types and roles that out shine the others (e.g. Gila compared to other pirate cruisers) and encourages players to put more thought into fleet comps.

After reading all that you may think that some restrictions are unnecessary and that its too complicated. But the above are just suggestions on how we may restrict such content. It does not mean I envision all of these restrictions all working at once.


What might this look like? (UI)

(Prepare for awesome paint skillz. All numbers are place holders and have no basis in maths. They have been pulled from my arse)

  • Abyssal Filament information would be updated as follows, showing the points limit for the site, the player limit and the ‘Fleet Specifications. The Abyssal filaments themselves will be renamed with the suffixes small, medium, large etc.

Abyss%20Descrip

  • On top of that the fleet window will get a slight modification on the ‘My Fleet’ tab. In the top right there will be a new feature called ‘Abyss Mass Energy’ which is simply another way of saying ‘points costs’ of the current fleet. Any fleet exceeding the maximum points capacity or including any ships disallowed into Abyss sites (caps for sure, T3’s, Marauders or whatever are disallowed into abyss space) will simply list the Abyss Mass Energy as - N/A.

Fleet%20Window

  • When entering the site there will be a warning sign that allows a comparison between the restrictions for the site against the current fleet trying to enter. If there are any penalties for the gang they will be clearly marked on this warning sign. Note the shortened timer in yellow (again, numbers pulled from arse. Actual math not used)

Abyss%20Warning


What happens if we fail? Do we all die and lose our stuffs?

Running out of time.
Some players have said in a previous forum thread that they have little interest in Abyss space because the risk of getting trapped and losing the loot, their ship and their pod. This risk is amplified several times over in a situation where there are a bunch of you running an abyss site, and I admit it seems harsh that the mistake (or deliberate sabotage) of one player can destroy everyones stuffs. As ‘EVE’ as this might be, it does seem to be a good reason to deter or reject noobs from running these sites with other people, and of course that’s exactly the opposite of what we are doing here.

So I propose, that Abyss sites of difficulty tier 1 (and maybe 2), Aka Calm (and maybe Agitated), of any size do not cause instant destruction and podding for running out of time. Instead they will immediately eject all players out of site with no rewards.

Higher difficulty sites will behave as normal. Everyone takes the pod express.

Destruction due to excessive gunfire.
Players that lose their ship will remain in the site in their pod. Their friends are free to continue the site and try to complete it (and loot the wreck of their fallen comrade). They can even follow through gates to further rooms to watch their buddies battle on (or die in a fire). If the survivors succeed, anyone in a pod leaves with them.

If everyone loses their ship in a Calm (or Agitated) site before the time runs out, their pods are ejected. In more difficult sites, their pods will be destroyed.


Proving grounds. Why not?

Certain tiers will have proving ground options for survivors at the end.


So there we have it. Let me know what you think, good or bad.

I think I had more in mind for this idea but after coming back to it after a while I seem to have forgotten what it was. Probably something to do with only being able to open certain sites in certain sec status to balance the reward with risk (and suspect timers are clunky).

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So… you mean group frigate sites.

A bit more complex than that. But a ‘small’ site may look similar to what abyss is today.

What is the means of ensuring that PvP risk still exists with these private instances? Will the higher-tier ones be limited to use outside of highsec, or will all players involved in them be flagged when they exit?

Current preference is that higher the tier needs to be used in more dangerous space.

Not that interested in flags of any kind except maybe an npc log off timer (which the gang will probably have anyways).

Normal suspect status rules are very bad for group play and situations involving logi.

…and that reminds me thankyou!

Proving grounds. Why not?

Certain tiers will have proving ground options for survivors at the end.

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While people are in these instances they are not in EVE, this therefore competes with EVE and is bad for EVE.

Mini Trammel for those who get the UO reference.

-1 On all instanced activities.

I accept that will be a drawback of the idea and is why i was reluctant to post it.

This idea has the unfortunate nature where the more successful it is, the more it takes away from the main game.

An excellent proposal and I think it was well-formatted as well. Made what might otherwise have been a wall of text more readable.

I do agree that this should fill the gap of “I want something interesting to do with other folks in limited time” and promoting players to start down the path of fleeting up for content.

There should be other mechanics that encourage them, once they are used to fleeting and have established some contacts they can fleet with, into heading for group-PvP content.

And of course there should be improvements in the way EVE present opportunities for solo PvP as well.

For the intended purpose, this idea is effective and workable (ie., iterates on already-existing code and mechanics, rather than introducing new ones).

2 Likes

Thank you for the kind words. Especially about the format and readability. I was worried it was too complicated or difficult to follow and that had caused the limited responses.

Sorry I missed the original post; very well presented and would improve group PvE opportunities. Concern: rewards will have to be carefully determined and frequently adjusted, otherwise it could be ripe for abuse. Perhaps some mechanics that adjust the overall payment based on how many are run over a certain time period, either per each player, corp, or just overall in game. High rewards when no one is doing them, smaller rewards when they become overfarmed.

Wouldn’t non-isk rewards, like typical abyss space, remedy this?

Anything that is over farmed will saturate the market and lower the rewards.

Other than that, I’m not against something of a ‘fatigue’ like mechanic. At least that way the mega farmers cannot spoil it for weekend players.

True, in part, but any non isk reward has to be deemed worthwhile to obtain and, yet, not something that can be easily or even able to be found outside of the new content or else those players doing the existing content will feel “cheated” out of their EVE gameplay to satisfy someone else’s gameplay. So now we need a new set of rewards that are valuable ( but not too valuable), scalable,and not game breaking in effect.
Based on recent CCP dev planning and execution, I’m worried they couldn’t get it correct and we would get RW2 instead. Now if they could…:grinning:

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