Hisec players tend to be mainly a lot of solos with a small percentage of those willing to group up and try new things. If this change only increases the numbers willing to try by even a few percent it’sworth the effort imo. Anything that updates the stale hisec pve and gets more players involved long term is a good thing.
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That’s interesting, current refineries become less than optimal and CCP gives nothing in return…
Most current refineries won’t be able to re-sue existing rigs, they will drop in resale value as they are no longer optimal - So basically CCP is stealing isk from players who have what is currently the best refining structure, to further create a nice static game of - Who wants to waste time shooting one of these things…
New Eden is already flooded with cheap unused structures and now CCP wants to add even more to that list…
CCP headline - You can now spend X billions of isk to achieve what you could previously with a billion isk Astra.
Structure itself will cost you more, rigs will cost you more, fittings will cost you more - Time needed to defend it will increase, amount of people needed to defend it will increase. Yeah Refineries look like a win win, as long as you don’t need one.
NB; Unless CCP do add a negative attribute to existing structures - They will still give maximum yield. Sort of defeats the purpose of refineries, unless the plan is to increase yields to above what they are now. I wonder how that would screw up an already screwed mineral market.
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Some time ago CCP add BR new UI content in null. Clearly for null players, becaue I can’t hardly imagine hisec players will benefit from it. Now they add same thing in hisec, guess for whom? Nullsec players alts? If you think hisec solo players will start to group and do this content think again. I can’t even imagine I’ll start doing them with people I don’t know.
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CCP likes buying dog toys for cats, then wonders why there’s less and less cats in the game.
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I’ll defer to the coding experts in this thread, but is it really that tough to code in a dynamic mission generator that would create a random enemy,objective, and reward? I know it would take time and cost, but instead of wasting resources on another balance pass or another feature that will be most/best utilized by Hisec alts of null players, recreating something along the lines of the old DnD random encounter tables would do more to re-energize Hisec PvE,especially for the usually solo player. After assigning a battle value (BV) to each NPC ship in the database, create a program that generates for missions a random NPC opponent, mission goal, toughness of mission (easy (x%), normal (y%),hard (z%), and OMG(-%), and generate salvage/loot/reward for the mission based on BV. Have each mission behind a gate that opens/can be used once only every hour and then throw in an occasional mission where the opponent is unknown until the gate is used (stops always bitzing and mission specific ships). Add the new AI and prepare to tweak/balance as needed and you have just solved much of the need and wants of the Hisec crowd of customers.
If you combined the above into a similarly based exploration site generator you would then fill in the last large missing piece of PvE that so many people are looking for in EVE. Sure, what you are giving us this Winter is better than nothing. At least you are admitting that there are people playing in Hisec and it sure beats these lame daily missions for drabs we have currently going on.
If games from over a decade ago have already in place mechanics/programing to generate random encounters, why can’t EVE’s programmers accomplish the same thing? We don’t need another ship redesign, a color change, nullsec buff, or large group content added at this time. What we need is solid programming that generates content for ALL of EVE’s groups; something that should be CCP’s priority for the next couple of years.
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if highsec people don’t want to do this, then they just hurt themselves. what’s the point? i see no point in being completely stuck at the idea of playing all alone, all day. that’s not even a playstyle!? how can it be so bad to sometimes play with others? the high amounts of social interactions is literally a selling point of EVE. Everyone’s somehow connected to everyone else, and has some influence onto others.
you’re just making it hard for yourself?
Not even going to comment on the programming. Back in the day some of my earliest attempts to DM for my high school buddies relied solely on those random encounter tables. It was an unmitigated disaster. The first combat was fun… three or four later booooooooooring.
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In game that does everything in its power to drive home the “Trust no one.” credo and actively punishes those that dare to form groups via serial wardeccers why do you suspect people tend to be insular?
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No, it doesn’t… but of the two of us, I’m not the one telling other people how they have to play, now am I? Look at some of your own responses here. You’ve been telling other ‘just HS’ people that they have to do solo content, that cooperative PvE is bad and has no place in high-sec.
Look, I’m not gonna tell you that CCP hasn’t screwed the pooch a bunch of times over, through the years. We all know they have. We also all know that when you’re hiring devs from the playerbase, you’re going to get developers who know the parts of the game they play. That’s why Fozzie’s answer to everything was ‘let’s make it more like FW’, and why Larrikin views things through the lens of fleet combat.
What I said was ‘they’re trying’. And they are. All of those feedback threads on The Agency events, in part, feed into what the devs work on beyond events, too. That doesn’t mean a bunch of guys who don’t do HS, and don’t do solo PvE are gonna hit it out of the park. Obviously, they ain’t, and they haven’t. Drop a 50 year old lawyer into a World Cup match, and he’s not exactly going to lead the scoring, either. But who exactly is it you should be pissed at in that scenario? The team lawyer? Or the dude that put him on the field?
Yelling at devs who are good at what they’re actually there to do because when they focus on things they’re bad at, they don’t get it right… that’s just beating your head against a wall. You want devs who get the particular needs and goals of single-player gaming, who understand the complexities of high-sec? So do I. Browbeating guys who are making a legit good-faith effort isn’t gonna achieve that, though.
Yell at their bosses. CCP’s been able to finance forays into VR, into mobile gaming, etc etc, and each time, that’s a different team of developers. Usually, it’s developer teams who don’t have to move out to a barren rock in the middle of the North Atlantic (Valk team’s in the UK, for example). Yell at the upper echelons of management to get the EVE team more people, people who specialize in single-player, people who like PvE gameplay. It doesn’t have to be a lot of people. 1 guy who can sit in on the development meetings and say ‘guys, you’re not asking the right questions. Let me show you…’ can make a massive difference.
But bitching the dudes who are already working their asses off for you isn’t gonna get you the results you want. They’re doing their job. ■■■■■ out the dudes who aren’t.
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That’s because of how simple those charts are. Procedural generation can do some pretty good stuff with enough complexity built in. Look at Rebel Galaxy, for example. That’s a potential direction for solo/HS content: mission sets with story arcs (and I don’t just mean the ‘oh, look, The Damsel series again’) but where each element in the story arc is variable, so they’re never the same. The new AI that was developed for the BR ECs is definitely up to the task of ‘what did the player(s) bring, what should I use to challenge them?’, even for single-player encounters. If they’d build the rest of the decision-tree for generating the missions, they’d be pretty well on their way.
Of course, doing that means diving a bit deeper into the lore so their decision trees make sense from the in-game perspective… ( “I’m in Inoue, what do you mean ‘go rescue the Sanmatar’?? Wouldn’t the Republic Fleet have noticed he was missing?” ), but they could stand to sink more resources into the lore and live events team, as it is.
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Making dynamic missions will just get the highsec crowd yelling “but now I can’t basically just afk/blitz them all anymore waaaaaaaaaah”. Missions are the way they are for the same reason ratting is damn near the same it always has been. It’s something that has been ‘solved’ and can be done with maximum efficiency.
Don’t mess with people’s favorite grinds. It’ll just make them cranky if they have to actually work for something.
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Maybe, but some of 'em seem pretty cranky already.
On patch day they plan to remove all refining rigs and put them back in your hangars, so you can decide to use them elsewhere. That’s the “compensation”, afaik.
Eh, sod’em. If they want to play a singleplayer MMO, I don’t particularly care what they think.
No. Funcom did it back in 2000 with Anarchy Online’s mission terminals.
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lol, I don’t despise you Arrendis, in fact, I only ever notice you when you either tag me like this, or break the forum rules and are reported for it.
No beef with you at all buddy 
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How soon will Sept stuff be on Sisi?
It’ll start to appear early next week as far as I know 
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Don’t be thick, dude. I am not telling anyone how to play, CCP does. And so I am telling CCP developers why what they develop is a waste of time and is useless to the average highseccer. I do so because it’s them who have access to their bosses. I don’t know who decides that AI is the way for PvE, but certainly CCP Larrikin knows, or shouldn’t him?
All in all, if CCP doesn’t asks, there’s not much an individual can do to be listened to. Being a part of the constant buzz about how they’re getting it wrong and pointing where the truth lies is the best I can do.
At least, no matter how much they know and how few I know, I am not the one spending thousands of euros and countless man hours to develop something that will be largely ignored by the intended targets and will not stop the loss of customers and money that lies behind the PCU chart.
CCP might be milking players harder so their finances look fine, but there is a truth about sales, and it’s that no customer will spend more money than he wants to… be it in three months or in eight years. There are no free lunches and all the money CCP is earning now it’s money they’ll be missing next year, or the next one. They’re trading future subscriptions for present skill injectors, not just litherally, but also metaphorically.
Pan para hoy y hambre para mañana, as we say in Spain.
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You are absolutely correct that we should lean on CCP’s management to step up their game in regards to PvE and solo content, but what else can I do? I have responded in threads on PvE ideas with solid questions and ideas, voted in CSM elections for those candidates that present themselves as champions for ideas I like, and been financially supporting CCP by subscribing for over 8 years (don’t worry, I have plenty of money to waste). Short of flying to either fest and cornering any management that shows up, what else can I do? I can vote with my wallet and say goodbye, but I hate to leave a game that I and many of my friends love.
To say that the devs are tone deaf when it comes to PvE and Hisec is correct and their play style bias shows in every new build they make and drop on us. I don’t mean to imply they’re trying to piss everyone in Hisec off, they just can’t seem to understand the points so many people are trying to make. Ditto the CSM. Almost anything in Hisec is approached as a “what can we do for the nullsec alts?” project, not as a “what can we do to keep a underserved part of our community happy” goal.
So, you’re smart and in the know: what the heck can we do to shake CCP’s upper management and the CSM up so that real, meaningful PvE/ solo content is introduced in Hisec? Our voices aren’t being heard and when they are, it’s usually accompanied by a “shut up and sit down” type of reply from either the devs or the nullsec crowd. I have supported EVE and CCP for many a year, shouldn’t a reasonable voice at least be listened to?
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