I am curious if it is possible to create missions for players with rewards storylines etc to add a bit more intrigue to the weak story of EVE.
I would like for example to have the ability to allow players to unlock specific areas , or hide from view containers that contain clue , rewards etc. Controling also the spawning of NPCs will be nice for some extra chalange.
Is this possible or is the whole " player created content" a wild rumor ?
Have you tried doing something like this for yourselves ?
If not possible have you found any at least partial workarounds ?
I kinda miss the old day when game devs created the mod tools first, the used those tools to create the game and gave those tools to the players to allow real player generated content. Its how we got DOTA which end up spawning a new genre PVP and becoming the most popular.
You are missing the abuse people would do with the system. Yeah It’s good when created with balance and care. Yet I know mods that were simply spoil yourself dungeons where you could get every item in the game with no effort.
People would abuse such a system and it would not work.
Part of it is the tools. Part of it is the design.
The original tool used to make essentially every single normal mission and combat site was likely just notepad doing raw code.
Then when epic arcs came out part of the justification for limited content was “but yeah, now we have the tools to make more content.” Apparently the tools weren’t good enough because they went years before adding so much as a single piece of new PVE content. When they added incursions they were all “hey, now we’ve got all these new tools to streamline content output!” and then never iterated on them, not even once. Apparently also not very good tools.
Now CCP is claiming to have new tools again, and since they are actually putting out content with them, I suspect these new tools actually have some usability. However, bittervet burnout on “new tools for PVE” breeds skepticism that it’s going to last much longer. And even then, it doesn’t appear that the new tools can make particularly complex dungeons, at least not compared to just normal missions.
With 15 years of bad tools behind them, the idea of them ever creating usable user-facing mission creation tools is likely nothing more than a wild fantasy.
The other aspect is game design. If I were to design a mission, I’d minmax it. I’d spawn whatever has the highest value/hp, spawn them within blaster range, and just sit and push the isk button as fast as I can. It can’t be balanced. It would either have to be too good to be worth doing anything else, or suck too bad to be worth using at all. That’s just the nature of having multiple options for infinite PVE, it’s going to be all or nothing.
Even better min/max… Create a mission with near infinite frigates. Have them spawn at zero. Then you can park a Smart bombing, cap-stable BC, and get high isk for no effort.
Or… Make it purely quick LP farming. Create a Recon 1 of 3 equivalent where you warp in, race to a beacon, face no threat, earn 1000 l.p., rinse and repeat.
Back in EVE’s glory days where both monetary and creative assets were at their highest, CCP could have developed a new mission/site generator to replace their current “hand drawn” missions they started with ( and kept for 15 years). CCP management decided that rather than do that (since HS group had little CSM or bloc power), the company would expend their assets trying to develop stuff like vanity items, walking in stations, and DUST as well as improving gameplay/content in NS. Now that it has become apparent that the HS pool of new players (As well as veteran players) has significantly shrunk over the last 5 years, CCP appears to be shocked that the number feeding into LS/NS is also down.
CCP Guard explained that since the largest number of people living in New Eden live in HS and that a lot of people in HS have continued to run the same missions for years, CCP determined that no new development tools or missions were needed. (???) Despite years of people voicing missioners’ concerns, CSM and NS blocs which elected them held CCP’s ear and focus, resulting in a development draught that had CCP’s ability to create new missions fall behind the industry standard. The result is the CCP developers don’t have access to the normal development tools other MMOs have currently.
Bottom line is that CCP got distracted and lost focus, failing to create tools to generate missions/sites or to control bots among other failures. The result is an unstable game ecosystem that is currently showing how business/development decisions made years ago are now slowly strangling the health out of EVE.