Yeah, they added the fleet finder a few years back, but it’s not much of an on boarding mechanic when you have to know it exists before you use the feature.
Good on boarding mechanics let players explore their environment by themselves, and let them happen upon situations where they get into other activities. You want to keep the barrier to entry low for these initial stages.
Yeah, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m suggesting needs to be addressed. That’s a more involved process that required the players to know what they’re doing in order to engage with it. Where’s the content you can just go to a place by yourself and find other people doing a similar objective?
DED sites are kind of like that, but there’s no benefit for people to group up to accomplish objectives within them.
The best example of a mechanic that seeks to onboard people into content together in EVE, is actually battlefields. It’s one of the reasons why they were so well received. But the problem with that content, is it’s not overly repeatable (not that it should be, but the on boarding aspect of the content is hampered by the limited nature of it.) On top of that the reward system puts people who are doing the content at odds with seagullers.
And like I was saying earlier, homefronts are the perfect place to do the sort of thing im suggesting, because it’s low level pve that draws people together. Another potential option is the reworked mission concept I’ve mentioned previously as well (in that thread I alluded to a possibility of multiple people drawing the same mission, allowing them to work together to accomplish the task.)
And finally, in the post before my last, I mentioned thumpers. That could easily be a deployable you drop on a planet or moon, or large asteroid… or something attached to the structure the OP is suggesting, which could be a content driver for group content.
Crab beacon, a beacon that tells rogue drones to drop off despawned system salvage at the location. A pirate den - basically a tavern attached to your structure that caters to pirate npcs - so pirate npcs would turn up at the location and serve as content for people to shoot.
There are many possibilities. But when designing these systems, it’s best to try to figure out how they can be scaled to empower the friendship machine.