Why? What experience is unique to those missions?
Oh that is where my Forrest Gump remark seems fitting - you donât know if you are fighting Guristas, Serpentis, angel cartel, Sanshas or Blood Raider until you are there.
Randomising Pirate types is enough for you to consider a mission âmore complexâ and therefore more interesting? Thatâs good to know 
Other people reading this thread, do you concur?
Randomising Pirate types is enough for you to consider a mission âmore complexâ and therefore more interesting? Thatâs good to know
Other people reading this thread, do you concur?
I donât know, but I can see it possibly frustrating people because they will fly to the mission, see what the targets are, fly away, fit their ship for the enemy, then fly back to the mission again.
I think a better option might be to have a mix of enemies. Maybe different types are working together so you canât just fit for one. Another idea for something different would be to have missions where different hostile groups are fighting each other and you need to take out what you can for the bounties before they destroy each other.
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Eh⌠to some extent⌠But, no, not really. It is not more complex as much as just more unknown/frustrating to optimizers at first.
Not knowing the type of rat means:
1 - You donât know what to tank for
2 - You donât know the type of damage to do.
3 - You donât know the type of ewar you will face.
So you adapt a bit. Fit a reactive armor hardener/omni tank, bring more variety in ammo/drones and pay attention to your mobility. None of that is very challenging or engaging.
Overall, marauders wouldnât really notice much, nor drone/missile boats, nor a machariel. So most mission running ships wonât really care. It will be a bit of an initial surprise, and will require some adaptation, but itâs definitely not a panacea. At worst, bring a mobile depot or warp-off, refit and come back, neither of which are fun.
Instead, I would:
- Make triggers random
- Change the composition of waves in a similar way to mining response fleets. Sometimes lots of small ships, sometimes fewer bigger ones, and a few things in between.
- Add more tackle. Thatâs one thing that makes mission runners sweat! Why would pirates let you run away after you killed their friends? Also, make them loot/salvage player wrecks
Theyâre pirates! - Use the new AI (and logistics for the NPCs), so the NPCs actually behave like they defend their installations instead of just standing still while their friends 50km away get blown to bits. That includes them having pings to warp around their home and try to save their skins. Hell, that could even make some fits with a point worth it (âreadyâ for PvP!). Encouraging points also encourages brawling mission fits. Those are a lot more engaging than MJD-snipers, which are the equivalent of mining for mission running (sit still, press F1, BORING).
Donât make NPCs outright warp out of the pocket though, itâs their home, they should defend it. Maybe, make them warp off to the last pocket where all the NPCs from that mission will hold their âlast standâ though. So you can eventually kill them, but you are creating a problem for yourself if you let them all run away.
Those things would make missions more challenging because you would have to think on the fly instead of knowing what the clockwork mission NPCs will do 100% of the time and you would have to put some effort into killing them instead of âsnipe group 1 while group 2-5 pick their noses; snipe group 2 while group 3-5âŚâ.
And of course, whatever you do, implement it gradually from L1s to L5s. One of the biggest flaw of FoBs and mining fleets is that there is no way to learn except jumping in the deep end (or going to SiSi, which I donât consider a valid solution, especially for new players who want to play the game, not the fake version). I would love to try FoBs, but until I find a few people I can trust and who are willing to throw away a bunch of BS to try it (it seems likely we will mess up on the first try, maybe more), it wonât happen. So it hasnât happenedâŚ
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Iâm going to try to be there to talk, however if I canât, hereâs my main two concerns. First, I believe that CCP should increase the signature radius of the Tower in the last room of the TPPH, and the TCRC, to at least 2000 meters. It would be better to have it around 5,000, but currently, regular Torpedos have trouble applying properly even with paints, let alone Rage Torpedos.
My second concern is something that CCP has stated that theyâre already working on, and I just wanted to bring it up again. It would be nice if the beacon on the inside of the incursion sites had no bump capability. Itâs annoying to land on the site, and I approached the anchoring position only to find that youâre stopped by a nearly invisible light beacon.
A minor thing would be to have the MTAC factory not ârespawnâ and thus disappear from your container list, but thatâs a minor concern compared to the other two.
Edit: That reminds me. It was nice to be able to see how much LP I had stored in an incursion without totalling up the number of raw payouts or payments to the LP pool. I hope thatâs brought back.
Resource wars, Honestly I donât know anything about them, and for how much I read about eve pve that tells me effectively no one does them. Heck the eve uni wiki barely has anything on them. That said there are some obvious problems
- LP store, it costs more to buy ships from the LP store than it does to buy off the market. You lose money converting your LP.
- Ship restrictions seem too restrictive. For combat ships itâs t1 only and also being race locked just seems annoying. Want to fly that cool t2/faction ship nope!, or want to play with a friend hope you both have the same race trained, or one of you is a miner.
This thread has some stuff, looks like the rewards are just awful to begin with and then you lose isk converting LP. Resource Wars Info Thread
Social tools: I think a big part of it is most eve pve isnât worth bringing more people. Incursions seem to be doing alright finding people, so when there is a reward thatâs worth it people will find groups. Incursions also have their own special constellation chat. Maybe you could get more grouping up with some changes to the 
NPCs. The concept of NPCs that adapt to what you bring, and scalable rewards has been thrown around a lot in the past, feels like we are so close but so far.
The agency: Iâd like to see slightly better filter options, being able to filter high/low/null at a minimum, and a sec status slider all the way from -1 to +1 would be best. Havenât really used it much as Iâm pretty established and not looking for new content. One thing I donât like is that it took some info out of the game, the Incursion tab in the journal used to have brief site descriptions and the fleet size payout modifiers, the agency doesnât seem to have those. Also fromw hat Iâve read it sounds like there may be a few issues with escalations.
FoBs: You can see the kills there: https://zkillboard.com/group/1924/ it seems the reward arenât adequate, for a long time the only kills showing up were the same 4 people and looks like they got bored of it as they stopped. Looking at it again now it looks like some people figured out how to solo them. Would be worth looking at how many spawn and how many are destroyed. And would like to see how the payout is calculated, as well as any bounties earned.
Sotiyo: Donât run these and not up to date on mechanics but from what Iâve seen the first few got frigate cheesed, and now it looks like people are just dropping carriers or titans and killing them. those kills are here: https://zkillboard.com/ship/45006/
A city made of wood is built in the forest
A city made of stone is built in the mountains
A city made of cheese is built in the land of NPCs
The NPCs still seem half baked, it was kinda funny seeing them just constantly warping to pings and back never being able to catch targets when they first came out but I expected a lot more out of them. I donât know what kind of tuning they need, as I havenât seen current mechanics, but the way it looks like people just ignore them doesnât seem like a good sign. Seems like there is a lot of potential with the NPCs, but right now it doesnât seem like itâs there.
Missions: I like missions, there is variety of things to do. They do get grindy after a while and I havenât been running many lately. I mostly blitz so Iâm in and out in a few minutes and can pretty quickly step away if I need to. Love the burner missions, each one is pretty much a fitting puzzle, and most require at least some attention beyond just pressing f1. Make me feel like Iâm actually flying my ship. Sadly a lot of blitzes have been removed in the last year or two.
I Dislike long missions, Angels extravaganza is pretty much the worst offender, wave after wave of weak battleships, Iâd rather go take a nap. And missions like the blockade just gets boring, sat still just blasting everything as it spawns in at range, at least that one has decent bounty and a risky blitz option, although with MJDs event he blitz is reasonably safe. If I wanted content like that Iâd go to null and run anoms. That everyone in null says to get a VNI and afk rat is a pretty damning statement. Pretty much everyone says itâs better to watch netflix than play eveâs pve.
Incursions. Iâve only done a few, they seemed okay. Not going to comment much on them, you will get better answers from others.
I think it is important to have easy access solo content like missions and anoms. Some days you can only log in for so long, or just want to play by yourself. But I think the rewards should also be structured to reward people for fleeting up and/or going to lower security space. Incursions do a pretty good job and pay more and let you bring more people the lower sec you go. Missions reward lower security in a very straight forward way and increase mission rewards for lower sec, but they also punish you for fleeting up, With missions everything gets divided by however many people, and overall everyone would make more isk running solo.
3 Likes
@Jin_taan No, I definitely donât need a randomly generated mission where I donât know which drones to bring. Warping 10-40 AU in a BS takes long enough as it is, I donât need that twice.
This suggestion, however, is interesting. We have that in a very crude form already with the Worlds Collide mission (although the NPC donât fight themselves there, contrary to what the mission description indicates) and I think in one of the career agent missions. It could definitely be interesting to have that properly implemented like the Drifter-vs.-Amarr Navy things. Or you could have a random chance of friendly NPC helping you in big missions like DED Blockades. There could be a chance that the pirates you work for warp in a small squad of their own to secure something or destroy something previously not worth noticing and you either need to help them do so with DPS or need to destroy the original enemies (DED in this case) faster/in a different pattern so that they donât destroy all ships of the pirate squad. If you manage, you have the chance for a better reward (similar to the rare chance for a faction spawn in a DED Blockade or Worlds Collide) if you succeed, or have a bit of the reward reduced if you donât manage to help the squad.
There will be basically two types of players when you spoke about that kind of pve.
- players that master current content, blitz them etc. They do not care how stale it is. PvE to them is gathering ISK, creating new types of fits to beat their mission completion timer.
- players that want content to be more random, which doesnât mean that it couldnât be bliztable. Why elitatwo likes randomized Dread Pirate Scarlet? Because he donât know what we will fighting with in that mission. Itâs always an element of surprise. I donât know if it is possible but mission generator would be a neat thing here. So instead premade named mission we would be offer types of missions like: recon, defend, base raiding, escort etc. Randomise background, waves spawns.
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ISK is always the highest factor that pve will be done. Why Stain relic sites are so desirable? They drop the best salvage.
RW was made around mining, the most boring activity in the game. What CCP expect? That vets will babysit new players for meanigless rewards? If nullsec aliance need miners they just jump them straight into nullsec and mine roid there. Whole concept is so blurry to me here that I donât even know where to start to fix those sites.
I donât use the Agency. Itâs useless to me. The types of content I do in EvE will only be showed on the Agency when I pass through the systems (explo sites) and that information is useless after 10 minutes, because that sites maybe finished by someone else. Which is good because that what exploration should be. Exploring.
The problem is, CCP is trying to create content finder. So instead of keep answering what to do, players should just open the Agency window. It wonât solve the problem it only shows what we can see in other tabs in game, like overview or scanner. Iâm not sure the usability of it, filters seems bugged and unclear. I donât for what I would use the Agency, maybe it would be usefull for FW players since it has map already. Can we talk about renaming it, this whole the Agency thing seems like a relic from the past event sites.
Letâs face it, itâs not content for wide use, so like incursions there will be groups dedicated to do them.
The thing about Dread Pirate Scarlet is that if you do that, you void your fit and face something else.
I forgot to mention The Blockade level 4, which I also like very much.
Even though I know before hand what I will be facing, messing up the triggers means, I can be in a world of hurt and isk is good.
Worlds Collide is also something I like because I know I will be busy for some time.
I do mission to earn some isk, so I donât know what this âblitzâ is about. I also do not fly baby dreads that cost 400 billion isk.
However speaking of 400 billion dreads (marauders), I have some very tough love for them in mind. Have the AI drop 500 haw dreads on them and see if the dread pilots fly them again - or not.
For me PvE content to be worth running the following is important:
- Easy access (e.g. not flying around in a BS dozen of jumps), soloable, ~5min
- Good rewards, minimum 100M/h, good sec bonus
- Open for competition, race to the reward
- Can be done competitively in a T2 PvP fit ship
and we got that, itâs called events.
Highsec explorer here. I donât run missions. I like doing DED scannable sites rated/unrated. I do ghost data sites. And I do mining fleets/haulers, preferably pirate ones.
Agency window doesnât help much. Only use it to track escalations, I would prefer stay with journal though. Tracking FOBs in Agency window is quite helpful too, its a bit confusing at the same time though, cause it doesnât show FOBs more then 5 jumps away and doesnât indicate it, so if you set 10 jumps/any distance you might get wrong impression. It also doesnât search past constellation/region borders, so you can get 0 result in one system and full 12 list in the very next. That 12 results limit is something very arguable too btw.
There, I wrote some thoughts on how I think FOBs and RW sites could be fixed. FOB should become system mini-incursion like event, with influence meter, popup chat channel for participants etc. RW sites should be part of that incursion, and running them will help bring FOB down.
NPC mining fleets are quite fun for highsec activity. Rewards are quite fair too. I think 1/20 boxes drops 400 mil mining upgrade or harvester drone BPC (or both, I got both once!). SKINs, I donât know. The more you run those fleets, the less the profit. Those SKINs are permanent, you know, you can only sell so many before their price drop to 0, some already pretty close to that.
Drifters. I loved when Jove Observatories appeared, lore hype train, rode it for months. Trainwrecked though as it appears there was no puzzle to solve. Not until next stage months or years later. Drifter WHs, I got 2 of them mapped with dozens of bookmarks, all around deadspace pocket. But its obligatory fleet stuff. And nothing to solve or to get going solo. Killing drifters is obligatory fleet activity also, with obligatory losing ships. Cheap destroyer fleet is just not my playstyle. Its sad how they fixed when people found ways to solo Drifters in first weeks. Not my idea of sandbox game.
This is the core of the problem: the bulk of player interactions with PvE in this game is done with the, or at least a, primary purpose of gathering ISK/resources/power. I will assert without evidence that the vast majority of player hours spent on PvE in this game are by players who are not interested in the actual content, but are mostly motivated by the reward from that content. This means that the reward structure of something is the most important thing for CCP to get right if they want to see uptake of new features by players.
Of course PvE should be fun by itself, and CCP should make every effort to come up with new and engaging stuff for players to do, but if the rewards arenât balanced, and I mean balanced overall against the other options on the table, they wonât be run. I have been continually surprised at how blind CCP seems to be to that fact over the last years. Some dev teams clearly get this - when CCP wanted to move people to nullsec after the Aegis Sov changes they upped the number of anomalies there or when they wanted Rorquals to be used after their latest revamp, they made them very lucrative, in fact too lucrative, mining powerhouses - but when it comes to PvE CCP seems unable, or maybe just unwilling, to look at the payout of their new content in the context of all the other options on the table.
Resource Wars are an example of this, as was the Drifter Incursions. Whatever other technical issues there were with Drifter Incursion, their lacklustre uptake was a direct result of the fact they were harder, riskier and payed less than the min-maxed and completely beaten Sansha Incursions they had to compete side-by-side with. They never had a chance when the bulk of the player base is going to ignore them based on the rewards leaving just a few PvE aficionados to partake in the new content. Of course the metrics are going to look terrible when ISK/h determines what content the majority of player base will run.
I agree this is problematic for CCP. They canât continually just increase the rewards with every new bit of content, and by its very nature, new content is going to initially appear less attractive (the uncertainty/difficulty), but the ISK/h will increase as the players master the content. Unfortunately, I see no solution other than to regularly rebalance rewards, which will sometimes be unpopular with the players. Just taking a hands-off approach will result in most new content failing as it cannot compete with existing content players are comfortable with.
The best approach would be to have a PvE balance team constantly monitoring and adjusting content in a systematic way, but if that isnât in the cards the second best is the âRorqual stratagemâ and just release all new PvE content in a super over-buffed state to get players to do it. Let them figure it out, come up with the min-max strategies, and then tune it down three or six months later to something more in keeping with the effort vs. reward and risk vs. reward balance of the other options on the table. Otherwise, the inertia of choosing the safe and known over the new and risky will doom most new content to a slow death. There will be some grumbling, but if you time the reduction in payout with the release of some new, overbuffed content, the players consuming the leading edge of content will move on to the new shiny.
That said, I think this paradigm applies less to the events CCP Dragon and his team are releasing. While rewards do motivate participation clearly (those accelerators are a perfect carrot and should not ever be placed in the NES) the limited duration and changing nature of them seem to drive participation beyond the base instinct to farm at max ISK/h. I think they do attract players purely on the merits of the PvE (and to be fair, PvP possibilities as well) and the novelty of their limited-in-time nature hasnât worn off as I thought it would, at least not yet. Perhaps more dynamic and changing PvE is the real key to this problem.
TL;DR - if you want new content like Resource Wars to succeed, release it with a significantly over-tuned ISK/h for the initial months. New things may still prove to be unfun and fail, but at least they will have a chance to break through the inertia the majority of people looking at their ISK/h have to try any new content.
4 Likes
Will be there. Booking out that Sat evening.
we need a data to support that statement. PvE players that do high end content will quickly fed up with ISKs, what then? How many stratioses or T3C can I have in my hangar? Or PLEX?
events a good for short time but they become stale and fed up fast.
why invent new content instead looking up at what we already have and try to improve it? Why do we need another RW failure?
You got me 
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This is exactly what FOB should not become if they stay as annoying systemwide as they are now. The incursion channel alone is one of the most annoying features of the entire system if you donât want to participate in the incursion. It not only messes up the chat stacks, it keeps poping up and closes whenever you enter or leave an incursion, and defaults the focus back to any channel in the stack and not the one you were in before the Incursion channel closed. W really donât need more of this in particular if itâs only 1 system, and especially not if a new channel opens up for those in every new system when there are FOB in systems next to each other.
I donât agree, this is not a good idea. People get used to this massive reward fix within days and will then complain very vocally if CCP reduces their drug fix to a more reasonably level, putting those players on a cold turkey.
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