But you can’t do it that way. For a PvE activity to be enjoyable you have to have some kind of consistency and rational behavior. An NPC can choose randomly between engaging at long range with drones only vs. moving in close to add its guns, it can’t choose randomly between sitting idle in space doing nothing vs. opening a cyno and dropping a whole capital fleet on you. And the NPCs in the event have to act with some level of consistency, if they all randomly go do their own thing instead of focusing their efforts the player wins too easily. So there just aren’t going to be 100 sensible actions to pick from. In reality what you’re going to have is a branching tree with a few weighted options and a table of potential NPC spawns picked at random. And given enough time players will figure out the rough probabilities of each outcome and make the how-to guide.
Sure we can know the upper and lower bounds but now you can no longer see 5 drifters and go “I have exactly that much tank”.
Right, but there’s still going to be a how-to guide. It’s just going to say “you need to grind your SP to X level and have Y million ISK worth of gear so you can survive the worst case spawn”. You may end up with less than perfect optimization since some sites will have less incoming damage and your tank will be overkill at the expense of DPS, but you’ll still have guides.
To be fair that is what is present in abyssal deadspace - somewhat randomized spawns that are perfectly easy to understand how to deal with them, but sheer number of possible spawns and variation in ewar used by triglavs makes things more enjoyable as you can’t be 100% sure what is behind next gate.
Getting some randomization in spawns of missions / anoms / deds would be nice break from perfect runs. After all you can’t do perfect runs when you can’t be 100% sure what is going to spawn. But first we would need to get increase in variation of kinds of rats that spawn from each faction - and likely also up a bit the challenge from them … at least get them fitted with t1 or even meta 4 instead of civilian grade. Smaller spawns of more reasonably fitted rats is better than huge swarms of useless crap… honestly, I have seen rats orbit me at 60km… and be unable to hit 'cuz it is just outside their falloff.
Bad choice of example xD Very bad one.
Out of those 120 million different possibilities most are bad moves. And that is why you have opening theory in chess… and hence first couple of moves are basically scripted - is just that first move tends to pick which script is played out.
It is a bad example because you ignored the entire point about total decision numbers vs. relevant decision numbers. You can multiply the number of theoretical possible moves/NPC actions/whatever together and get some absurdly huge number but that number has nothing to do with reality. Most of those combinations will either be useless (because they don’t produce a fun experience for the player, are an obvious losing strategy, etc) or so close to another option that they’re effectively the same thing (an NPC moving forward at 999m/s vs. 1000m/s). The actual number of valid moves/actions/whatever that you have to work with is much, much smaller.
In the context of PvE what this means is that you’re limited to a fairly small design space where there’s a “standard” event that is slightly modified by RNG. And because there will be tens of thousands of players doing the event hundreds of times eventually they’re going to figure out how it works and find a way to reliably beat it. And at that point you either replace the content (which creates massive problems of its own) with something new that they haven’t analyzed yet, or accept that your game is now predictable for the farmers and just hope you’re getting new customers faster than the old ones solve the game and leave out of boredom.
Obviously you aren’t going to get an exact number for a hypothetical system in a hypothetical game that doesn’t exist. Who knows what the number is. But the point is that the design space for something like this is relatively small and you’re going to have a lot of trouble keeping ahead of people solving it.
You realise that PvE could pretty much present any situation that exists in PvP, except that NPC aren’t limited to the fits that players are, so there are more possible variants of PvE than there are for PvP.
This is completely false for two reasons:
NPCs can’t adapt in real time. Once someone does figure out the winning strategy that’s it. The NPCs will never deviate from their programming in unpredictable ways. The developer has to change the game code to make a new script, which can’t be done until at least the next patch cycle and will also be solved eventually. It’s very difficult to stay a step ahead of thousands of players doing their collective best to figure out the script.
Tolerance for “random” events is much higher when you’re dealing with player agency vs. RNG mechanics. If another player group hot drops you and blows you up you at least have someone to get mad at and a feeling that it was a deliberate action that makes sense. If NPCs roll “auto-kill the player” on the RNG table it’s just a frustrating experience. There’s nothing you can do about it, no reason for it to happen, the game just randomly screws you. And that’s exactly how you drive people to quit. So NPCs have to have a more predictable and less extreme subset of the things that are available to players.
That’s simply not true though. That’s an incredibly simplistic view to take on it. Do you have any experience in programming AI? It’s not just a handful of trees and some RNG.
I’m not talking about the code and what software can technically do, design space is a game design concept. It doesn’t matter what modern AI software is capable of if the players you have to retain as paying customers expect behavior within a certain scope centered around a “normal” version of the encounter.
That’s where it being an MMO is beneficial, because they can change the variables at any time.
Can? Yes. Should? Hell no. People don’t want to play a game where learning how to succeed is impossible because the mechanics are constantly changing faster than they can keep up. That just gives the impression that there’s no point in trying, they’ll never make any progress beyond clueless newbie level. You need to hold things static long enough to let people have a sense of progress and accomplishment, and that means you have to deal with the how-to guides.
Agreed.
So you won’t get 100 per NPC. But even 10 behaviours per NPC is far more than our current single identical behaviour per NPC. They have hard scripted orbit ranges even.
And you build that consistent behaviour alongside faction lines. So Caldari ships won’t use lasers, but they could be missile, blaster, rail or even dual fit.
Npcs should sometimes make bad choices after all just like players, and sometimes those bad choices will mess with someone’s fancy strategy from a how to guide.
Actually even one behavior per npc TYPE is fine if we have plenty of types - like for example with triglavians. They do a lot of things… and so we have to pay attention into what spawn we actually get.
They’re definitely not getting rid of PvE. Plus, there’s evidence of the contrary. They’ve recently added new missions … I think lvl2s. Triglavians also aren’t going to go away. Going from “reducing the amount of farmers” to “they’re removing all PvE” is quite the mental leap and I hope that’s not what’s actually being discussed.
Just cancelled 4 accounts and will play them out, MAYBE, until they lapse in a couple months. That depends on how destructive the ‘new’ Eclipse PVP For All and Only ends up being.
CCP is only interested in bleeding players dry by forcing everyone to PVP and nothing else, all so they can pay off their new owners’ acquisition costs before they get fired.
There is basically nothing left for people who do not enjoy PVP and constant drain of ship losses.
Do they really think this is going to reinvigorate a player base that has slipped to Pre-2008 levels for online player numbers? This is only the umpteenth time they’ve tried this with numbers still plummeting.
Strange. I seem to find plenty of PvE. Maybe tell us what exactly the problem your having is and people.will be able to solve where you are going wrong.
One reply I think was enough now you do look like a snowflake so mabe just drop it and move on gate camps will happen and nothing we can do about it so either stay in high sec or fight back we did and the idiots paid they don’t camp the gate any more cause we kill them when they do
Legit dude you’re just terrible at the game. Lowsec isn’t scary you just need to learn how to survive. Crying isn’t going to help so why waste your time doing it? Plenty of people manage to do PvE in lowsec just fine, how do you explain that exactly aside from just a big difference in skill between you and them?
Why must people beg for changes to the game instead of just learning how to play it properly.