With all due respect, I think you are missing the point.
With normal agent mission running, the player has the choice of looking at what is required, especially the route, and declining without any penalty (unless they decline twice in four hours).
With an epic arc, like the SOE one which is so good for new players, there is no option. You can delay flying it, but declining kills the arc. You then would have to wait three months, not four hours, before trying again.
I am afraid I just cannot accept an excuse of âoh, let us wait, see how it pans out, then CCP might get round to fixing this.â It is alleged that they have thought through all this Triglavian nonsense, that there is a cunning plan, that it is not a case of them just chucking out half-witted ideas from a cohort of game developers who have never truly played the game. Well, if so, they should have thought about this before implementation. How many of the current devs have ever flown the Blood Stained Stars? The fact that not so many months ago we actually had an invasion in one of the starter systems from which CCP itself quite rightly bans the griefing of new players fills me with⌠limited⌠confidence.
I can ask about this, but I can almost guarantee that theyâre going to tell me that they wonât have the resources to make massive changes to the current Triglavian invasion content because it is temporarily interfering with decade+ old missions.
There is a ton of stuff for everyone, including new players, to do.
Is this to be understood as a confirmation that the invaded systems will revert to their former status in the future? Like e.g. Inaya being a Triglavian Minor Victory⌠or even Niarja turning high-sec again?
Thatâs a pretty big leap. Not sure how you read that into things. You either have a somewhat temporary situation while the invasion is active, or more likely they would eventually move the mission systems to one that didnât go âniarjaâ
But delay how long is the point? Months? Define âtemporarilyâ.
The key point is that they either have not given enough prior thought before introducing the Triglavian nonsense, or else that they just do not care. Neither reflects well on them. Top tip - if one does not have the resource to deliver something properly, best change oneâs plans, rather than invade Russia anywayâŚ
And really, what ton of stuff to do? Fly Abyss? (A concept which, even for a sci-fi game makes no sense whatsoever.) Fly Arenas? (Ditto.)
The Blood-Stained Stars was a key part of the new player experience / progression - not vital, but damned silly not to do it. Given how shoddy the rest of the NPE is now, messing with it is just another self-inflicted wound.
Not getting at you, but please do not defend the indefensible. The invasion could have been so easily scripted to avoid certain systems: do not spawn in starter systems or the following ones for the arcs. The arcs are not dynamic as far as I have ever noticed - the missions are always to the same locations. All that it requires is for CCP to actually understand where it already has âcontentâ scripted.
Because that is the funniest possible outcome. âEdencom and the Triglavians, after months of fighting, have agreed to a ceasefire. Triglavian systems will henceforth only provide pretty backgrounds - they will be otherwise indistinguishable from their previous state.â
I have no idea. I expect there will be some things that are permanent, but until it happens we wonât know for sure. They havenât told us anything about resolution to the storyline. They want it to be a surprise for everybody as far as I can tell.
Oh, I have, but in a different context. Spent hours recently looking for the Warrior rats in Araz, which you need for the initial Amarr Cosmos stuff. None. Nada. Now, in the past, the drop rates of the essential loot - Dynasty Rings, etc - was low. But now I could not even find them.
Maybe I was just terminally unlucky. However, I also wonder whether they still exist. Would not entirely put it past CCP for someone to have said âWhat is the point of this oddly different NPC rat?â and removed it, without realising they had just screwed the Cosmos mission. Probably a dev who does not even know what a Cosmos mission isâŚ
Does it really matter how long they have to wait? I donât think Iâve ever actually done those SOE arcs. Maybe I did a long time ago but I canât recall. In the end, this game has an absurd amount of content, and there is no reason why anybody should be sitting around saying âoh man, thereâs nothing to doâ because they canât complete one epic story arc.
Iâm not defending anything - Iâm telling you that Iâll express your concerns, but my expectation is nothing is going to happen. But the bottom line is that if a new player canât find anything interesting to do in a 17 year old game with more content than dozens of other MMOs combined, I donât know what else to tell them.
The problem with the âthere is plenty of other contentâ is that the plenty of other content needs to be playable. Fine, perhaps it will no longer be sensible to start an Epic Arc, for example, because laziness/stupidity/developmental âprogressâ has corrupted it or massively increased the incidental risks involved. It would be more honest to remove this material than just leave it in place but corrupted.
But how do players know in advance what bits of this vast legacy of content are still working? What is not rewarding is to commit to a fifty mission arc, then suddenly hit a brick wall at mission thirty. How can longer-standing players sensibly advise newer players as to what content might still work? Until now, I would have firmly suggested someone did at least one full set of the Career Agent missions, then did Blood Stained Stars. That might now be silly. And the new Amarr player certainly has a very long way to go to reach Arnon whilst staying semi-safe in HS, much further than any of the other three factions.
The whole point of the Blood Stained Stars is that it takes a new player, who may thus far have stayed in one factionâs HS area, and takes them to all four factions, and pits them against those faction relevant NPCs. I would never call that arc spectacularly good or exciting, but it has a definite progression that reflects someone at CCP once actually put some effort into it, making it gradually more challenging for the relative newcomer. The Kritsan Parthus mission, for example can be very demanding for a new player - a suddenly much harder target; either get a lot more DPS than you have ever needed before, or get someone to help you.
This
this is also the moment you teach your newbro how to link his fit, and you explain him why 50 different guns on the ship is bad, etc.
I donât even count the number of time I flew in my sunesis to arnon to board my cynabal and help one, or sometimes two, or even three, newbros do the mission. Explaining that the reward can be shared in fleet so they need to leave, the idea of standings, sometimes even of the agents.
Sure this is not mandatory as NOTHING actually is. But this is a fallacious argument, the epic soe definitaly helps newbros even just talking to people.
The possible interpretation I asked about is not too different from your own: if, in the first case you pose, the situation is temporary while the invasion lasts, that would imply that things would go more or less back to normal once it is over - at least to the extent in which they impact the Epic Arcs, in the present context.
That was the straightforward way to read Briscâs statement, even though in the end it was just a matter of wording w.r.t. what he wanted to say.
Otherwise, if the solution will be remapping part of the arcs, that wouldnât have much to do with making massive changes to the current Triglavian Invasion content. At most, depending on what they may have in store, it would have just to be deferred until the outcome of whatever systems remain in the buckets for Tranquility and Serenity is decided.
First time I flew that arc, I kept thinking, God, how many more missions? It was a grind. However, I also had a sense of achievement at the end of it, and more self-confidence. I had encountered capacitor draining EW for the first time (naughty old Kritsan Parthus) and survived it once I worked out the need to keep him at range.
If I had suddenly found that the risks for me during that arc had gone from manageable to unmanageable, thanks to Trigs or whatever, and that the only option would be to walk away from a partially completed arc into which I had made quite a bit of commitment, at such an early stage in playing the game, then I would quite likely have walked away from the game full stop.
I think many of CCPâs dev problems are due to the fact that they themselves do NOT do that particular content and they also mainly associate/interact with players/blocs that donât either. The Devsâ history are filled with many cases of gamechange being brought in that influences or badly damages a whole another player group than what they intended. Almost every new mechanic changes has seemed to have a far more detrimental effect on a collateral group and the devs seem so surprised and unprepared when an issue is brought up.
Whether it is the out of control botting in Fountain creating tons of ISK and minerals or the new requirements for structures, the big corps and blocs seem to be getting far less damage from EVE changes, while the little guys take it on the chin. They need to at least to reassure or at least explain the future time table for all epic arcs, even if the big corps and blocs donât do them. The last 3 months of going dead silent when fundamental changes in EVE were implemented was a poor business decision. Both the CSM and , far more importantly, the devs need to be active in these forums to accurately inform and explain recent changes. They donât have to expose all the new surprises, but they do need to stem the increased recent loss that is starting in some areas of player gameplay styles.
When will CCP forget about this âchoose a raceâ selection screen and just have the new player sign up for Pandemic Horde or Noobswarm right from the character creation page?
since you seem to have rolled over my comment, CCP said if its screwed up and broken by the time Ch 3 is over, they will fix the issue with the epic arcs or COSMOS
