That’s something missions achieve more than anything. Compared to the 10 anomalies, there are hundreds of missions. And you can spice them up with rotating triggers in multi-wave missions, you can spice them up with varying objectives in the same mission, and so on. And best of all: You don’t need to laboriously fly around looking for something, which wastes your entire play time.
What about the agency so far has led you to the conclusion that it will ever be done in a worthwhile way? CCP has made the crappy agency thing (with its retarded name) with a focus on new players. The problem with training wheels is that when you grow out of them is you’d be an idiot to ever touch them again. ANY other interface would be better for the fantasy features people want to cram into it.
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Sure, but that’s gasp randomizing content. What we have now doesn’t achieve that. Not really. You get a mission, you know who you’re up against. So you know how to tank your [insert non-Drake hull here or just use a damned missioning Drake they’re still stupidly good at it for cheap]. Then you look it up online and you know exactly what you’re up against.
Making it more like what you’re suggesting—procedural generation of the mission elements—is a relatively significant chunk of work, because either they have to get it right all in one go, or they have to introduce all new agents to iterate with, and leave the current ones in to confuse people.
Edit for clarity: If they don’t, then they risk breaking the game while they fix stuff. And worse, they’ll get everyone ignoring their attempt at a fix, which means they’ll show low uptake numbers and maybe abandon the idea. And that will just make things worse because the devs will be frustrated, the players will decide the devs don’t know what they’re doing, and worse, they’ll decide the devs have just half-assed it again without iteration. It’s a dangerous self-fulfilling cycle of discouragement.
The same thing that’s led me to the conclusion that every other part of EVE will eventually be done in a totally awesome way that isn’t Fozziesov or Turtling Up With Citadel Spam While TiDi Rages Outside… boundless optimism and good drugs. 
Seriously, though: CCP wants to get this right. They do. And I don’t know how many developers they have working on this, but each of those developers only has 1 brain. Between us, the playerbase has a grossly unfair advantage in the number of brains we can throw at a problem. So, the more we can spitball ideas and distill them down so the devs don’t have to sift through all the dross, the better our odds of them having good ideas to work on. It’s a ‘help me help you’ situation.
Also, total props for ‘led’. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to see people use ‘lead’ (the metal) as the past tense of ‘lead’ (to guide or command).
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My thought’s on bringing Eve back to its deserving greatness, linked rather to not cause a huge wall of text.
The minutes make it look like everything they are doing with the agency is targeted at week 1 players. Their attempts to force non-rookies to use it by removing functionality is failing miserably. Hence the training wheels analogy. Adding advanced content to the agency would be like putting training wheels on a Harley. Reread the agency sections of the minutes. Every feature asked about to make the agency not suck is responded to with what can be summed up as “that’s not a priority for us. Not even a little bit. In fact, we’ve hidden the existing functionality in it to make it even less useful for more people.” Agency needs to be scrapped and started over by someone who actually plays EVE, because it’s obvious the people working on it never have.
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Well, it is good that you as a company look to know that people. But it doesn’t explains all the last years when PvE development has been alienated from PvE players according to those PvE players.
Doesn’t explains why “Why don’t they add new missions?” is answered with a new AI instead of, you know, more missions with the good ol’ dumb NPCs, which is a kind of content perfectly suit to what a EVE PvEr expects from PvE:
- doable in less than an hour login to logout
- dependable (they’re rewarded each time they do it)
- rewarding (in any sense: ISK, or fun, or allow socializing, or just allow doing other stuff while they EVE)
- allow multiple tactics, aka reward creativity (say, try to run a Level 4 in a T2 frigate for the lulz)
- must be expanded regularly to avoid staleness
All the new PvE content from the last years which players perceive as a failure failed to fulfill two or more of these points.
Take RW: no to the first point, no to the second point, no to the third, no to the fourth and now no to the fifth… they were doomed from the start.
I am one of those players who has spent years (2009 to 2016 as active subcriber and player, 2016 to now as Alpha forumite) trying to voice what me and other players like me think about PvE in EVE. And yet all what we get looks like is designed according to somebody else’s needs.
Maybe we aren’t silent enough. Maybe we aren’t talking enough. But sweet Jesus, CCP is doing a terrible work with PvE. All it has needed for years was more red crosses to shoot at and new reasons to keep shooting them. And that’s precisely and exactly the thing CCP hasn’t done not even with PvErs at the CSM.
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That’s something CCP needs to fix internally, but it seems like it is not happening. One just needs to look at the beta map as a glaring example. Instead of fixing the attempt or starting anew with the countless of suggestions from players, the devs dumped it on the new players, regularly re-enables it for old players, but decided to not work on it any longer in the necessary seriousness. This dropping of “projects” just “because they don’t perform as expected” is big part of why a portion of the players thinks CCP has no idea what they are doing.
Another issue is that they keep saying we want to do this and that and those things, but then nothing comes forth from the said phrases. How long has it been since CCP said they wanted to work on missions, as you said, make them more procedural? 3 years or something. They always get “distracted” with other things in the middle of the process.
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Amen. But neither me nor you will see CCP trying that before kicking the bucket, as it would require the corporate equivalent to an epiphany.
“I was blind and now I can see, PvE players just want more of the same braindead stupid PvE they’ve turned into a compelling grind for their self-established goals! Hallellujah!!”
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Auto blocking makes one ignorant :] but sure I can understand I hate trump too, changed it, also flagging is a bit rude don’t you think, especially when you haven’t even taken the time to read it.
The issue isn’t being met by people who do this day on day out and it doesn’t help some members just outright hate our community and type of gameplay.
I ain’t sitting here saying war decs are perfect but the sheer effort it takes to hunt due to CCP consistant nerfs forced this hub/pipe meta that people hate. Even when I focus Dec a group to hunt they all start dropping like flies into another corp.
This report has got a lot of people on edge as the nerfs we’re minor things, this is our whole gameplay
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I’m sorry, but YOU’RE REMOVING FEATURES that let us see “what gameplay is available in distant systems,” like the god damn Agent Finder, so you’re not just “focusing” the game, you’re nerfing / completely limiting the game.
I mean I could see if we still had the tools to see info anywhere on the map, and the Agency was just a focused local view or a gateway to content that we could find in other ways, but it’s not. It’s not a gateway. Imagine if ■■■■■■■ Google replaced your entire website, CCP, with just the first page of results that Google shows when you search for “EVE Online.”
Imagine if THIS was www.eveonline.com, CCP:
This is what your Agency is.
It’s not a focus.
It’s a replacement.
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… that their internal data seems to show isn’t retaining players. So they’re using their limited number of developer-brains to try to find solutions that will retain players, and can be scaled up and iterated on, rather than producing yet another goddamned season of The Simpsons.
Hell, even Matt Groening got tired of doing that. They’re looking for something that can be empirically, not anecdotally be shown to be what people want. So they’re trying things. It behooves us to help them find the best things to try, rather than just telling them ‘no, dammit, people are happy with their horses, they don’t need your stupid internal combustion engine’.
And yet, it’s something they’re actively being told to do in the minutes AND in this thread. Welcome to ‘why trying to give people what they say they want is frustrating as hell’. Irony: that’s why the CSM exists. It’s supposed to help them figure out what we want. In the past, they’ve had trouble listening to it. Now, I get the feeling that a lot of the key people are listening… and just as frustrated as all of us are by the way things seem to ‘just miss’.
And when I say ‘just miss’, that’s really what I mean. Think of it like the Uncanny Valley: as you get closer and closer to getting things right, there’s a point where you go from ‘this is much better’ to ‘OH MY GOD NOW I NOTICE ALL THE TINY PROBLEMS!! THIS SUCKS NOW!!!*’ CCP has, in a lot of ways, built the game Chris Roberts is trying to build.
Think about it: thousands of people all over the world on a single server. Viable playstyles ranging from exploration to market trading to industry to piracy to quite literally the largest-scale warfare online gaming has ever seen. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and if we’d been handed the current EVE codebase in 2010, we’d have fainted with the improvements.
But each improvement means our brains narrow in on ‘what’s wrong now?’ Issues that weren’t fixed become worse because they weren’t fixed. New issues get noticed. Issues that arise from the emergent effects of the fixes crop up. Can CCP do better? Are there better ways to try to do what CCP’s trying to do? Nobody’s claimed perfection, so the answers have to be ‘of course’.
The developers are working with a limited number of lumps-of-grey-matter-in-skulls. They’re also working with a limited amount of money, time, and support from above for any particular direction they try to move. The more we can stay constructive, and temper our urges to say ‘this is bad’ with ‘here’s some ideas to make it better’, the better our chances of getting things that we all recognize as better for the game.
And let’s face it, as I said above, happy players don’t speak out much. Game development’s a pretty thankless task most of the time: all you hear is the bitching. It’s easy to get demotivated in that kind of atmosphere, and that doesn’t help any of us get what we want.
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I’m with you, and I’ve only ever been a wardec target, never declared war since I started in 2009. The problem was always an educational problem, never a mechanics problem. At least not at first. All the nerfs to a mostly-balanced system mostly just spread the misery.
The proposed change though. They are getting a whiff of the problem without actually coming close. It needs a system for ranking corps according to experience. It would help the other issues they were complaining about in the minutes as well (such as recruitment and mentoring), but making a wardec system where there are only 2 ranks (either structure owner or not) is retarded. The formula for corp rankings would need to be fined tuned but it should take into account assets, SP, corp size, kill history, loss history, age of corp, character ages, activity rates. I’m not a mathematician.
The corp is the single most important organization in EVE (and for CCP considering corps are what retain rookies), and according to the minutes, CCP refuses to acknowledge anything corp related because it’s automatically too hard.
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Remember, a ranking system (like literally every other system humanity has ever devised for anything) is asking for abuse: you’ll basically be serving up those ‘lowest-ranked’ corps to the people who just want to pad their killboards. And they’re definitely out there.
So while there needs to be thought for how highsec mercs find clients, there also needs to be thought given to how victims find affordable mercs of their own to fight back.
Make wardec price proportional to the rank discrepancy. The problem isn’t actually using rank to farm rookies. The problem would become using tricks to artificially modify the ranking. Things like dropping members to lower your rank, wardeccing rookies cheap, then filling out ranks. Or on the other side, storing assets in alt corps, things like that. I’m not saying it wouldn’t take thought. I’m mostly just saying that according to the minutes, it appears CCP refuses to use any thought. “Why don’t we just grant wardec immunity to a ton of people, it sure beats actually thinking about the issues.”
Balancing around economics is a bad idea. Remember how the changes in the last 2 years were going to break up the ‘everyone uses Machariels’ meta? And ‘we expect there will only be a handful of titans in the game’? Do you think that CCP expected that 18 months after Citadels went in, a group would go from ‘we just got evicted’ to ‘we have 16 Keepstars’?
Don’t balance around cost. EVER. The older, established players looking to abuse the system will have the money to do it, and the new guy who can’t play for 2 weeks… will stop playing.
Also, everything is balanced on economics. Otherwise literally everything would be exactly the same price. In the case of a ranking system, maybe a corp where none of the players can even fly a cruiser might be wardec immune. If you figure out a rational ranking system, you can start to build other useful things around it, from wardecs to recruitment.
Now that I think about it, it seems CCP’s mindset has always been that you’re either their nullbear buddies or you’re nobodies. A little bit of an unofficial ranking system. Adding a 3rd rank of “noobs” I suppose is progress, but still dehumanizing.
No, things are balanced around effort. Price isn’t the determinate, price is determined by effort and rarity—market pressures, not the market itself. That’s a key difference.
Also, thanks for reducing me to ‘nullbear buddy’ there. Dehumanizing works both ways, you know.
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The way I see it, CCP has been designing the game to give nullbears everything they could possibly want. But wealth only exists where there is also poverty, so they have also decided that there will be poors. They’ve decided in advance who the losers will be, because those losers aren’t really people, just numbers.
edit: and when the customers you are trying to develop for are just numbers, they are there to be manipulated and controlled rather than being people to be understood and served. Minutes stink of that attitude throughout.
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right no indy in npe to introduce it so than players are even more lost and confused when coming into industry and related fields that are geared towards strictly pvp. your one of them.