Or maybe a certain band of apes had a better abbility to stand up than other apes and that abbility reinforced itself through nasty ape sex over generations until those apes had the ability to stand up most of the time. Then at some point, that abbility became a lifesaver under a crisis and those apes barely survived while other bands who hand’t inherited the abbility perished, so the new population of apes started with an already better abbility to stand up than before the crisis.
Complex structures and abbilities don’t need to be born in a perfect final state. As Stephen Jay Gould said, “even a proto-eye which only can tell day from night it’s an improvement over not having eyes at all”.
and what might that be? Improving visuals on anomalies backgrounds? CCP never tried to do good PvE, so either they don’t have resources to pull it or have no idea what to do. I think it’s both after those last “hisec content” expansion. Pve players never asked for pvp style npc UI. Most pve players never asked for group content and especially pve group mined content (it’s obvious CCP wanted to kill two birds with one stone here, changing passive mooning mining into active and in the same time introducing new hisec mining content have nothing to do at all…). In this game most pve activity is done solo. When everybody in this game tell you to not trust anyone, corporation assets are able to be steal (last year The Judge “event”), corps in hisec are in constant wardecc to provide targets at bottleneck routes, CCP discover that they push solo pve players into this? That’s how they change pve in this game? And you are surprised it’s not working?
What is good pve? Randomly generated content. Which is game-changer when we are talking about exploration in this game. What we have currently have nothing to do with it. It’s hacking containers in pre-made sites.
And no Jenn, nobody is talking about rewritting new pve content. It’s adding new content to existing one so you can farm your anomalies whenever you like.
I don’t know about randomly generated, but semi-randomly, ie: procedurally-generated content… now there’s the thing. (Note: Not saying this because I think you’re wrong, but because let’s face it, if we get Guristas shooting lasers from Minmatar ships somehow, someone’s gonna say ‘but the players wanted random content!’)
yep, we don’t want to go full random, full random is never great idea but you get the idea behind it, scripted things are single use only fun. I have no idea if CCP have tech enough to pull it, if it’s like 6k man battle then it’s never gonna happen.
Good PVE is PVE that keeps you engaged and that you can also do on your own without having to rely on other people, and which is rewarding. Forlorn Hubs are good PVE (challenging, engaging, risky, rewarding), an Angel Mineral Acquisition Outpost is nice PVE (challenging, rewarding, risky). Lots of missions are good PVE (challenging or just a quick trip to undust your lasers/whatever you use). Finding agents in space which give you some exploration and research missions throughout a region is good PVE (doesn’t exist yet, but it’s something I have suggested).
Group PVE can be fun, if it is optional and rewarding for the entire group, or mandatory but then always rewarding for the entire group (W-space ISK printing). But if group PVE is not optional and not rewarding, group PVE is the worst of the worst.
I don’t generally multi box in any game. Other’s will. If the player chooses to do so because it makes it easier,the solo content structure is lacking.
Their may be some inconsistent determinations in play as to what is solo content for/by the general community.
We all know multi boxing is generally accepted and expected.
Different people have different definitions of “successful”. This is just kind of a weird assertion to make. I’ve heard many a noob in the State War Academy channel declare their intention to fly a Titan. I honestly doubt many of them are “successful” in this.
People certainly have little successes on the way to whatever their dream is, but, more likely what happens is that they play EVE for a while and figure out what a Titan (or a Rorqual or a Keepstar or a Marauder . . .) really is and decide to do something else . . . like go play WoW. I’m not sure that’s the kind of success that EVE should be targeting.
That’s not really an argument. It’s just a statement.
Mining balance is not on topic?
It? Balance?
Solo what? Fleet what? Being blobbed . . . is an indication of the efficacy of group-play strategies; the more effective they are, the more likely it is to happen. PVE . . . must take place within a PVP environment; that’s just a core fact and feature of EVE. Getting past gate camps, or in other words, travelling, is actually a critical function of gameplay. Do you think travelling (successfully) should be limited to specialized ships (such as insta-align Hecates, interceptors, covops, jump capable vessels)?
“Random” or “procedurally generated” are never what people want. People say “random” but they mean “impredictable but I win”. And that is very difficult to develop, because random tends to be… random. Most randomly generated content looks like garbage and doesn’t even looks really random. Also human aren’t really good at random.
Congratulations if you keep it below 55% success… you’re not human.
We’re not just bad at generating random sequences; we’re equally bad at interpreting them. So randomly generated PvE would not look random for long; we soon would figure (in our mind) that there was some slant to favor d instead of f, and would blast the developers for not doing a good job in making the PvE really random but being slanted… in our slanted perception.
So what we want is to win in different ways against different odds, but, win. And that happens in a very narrow slice of the randomization spectrum, which would require being manually optimized and carefully designed and balanced to “look like” random without really being.
At this point, any developer will consider to just make it manually and forget about algorythms…
I’m guessing you missed the discussion when Tech III destroyers first came out. The jist of the complaints were that assault frigates were no longer able to outclass damn near everything else in a PVP soloist role, that Svipuls specifically were beating them up and taking their lunch money. People misguidedly believed that Tech II frigates were supposed to be a match for Tech III destroyers . . . in a direct combat role. Maybe that wil help to frame the “balance” issues that assault frigates supposedly have.
Tech III destroyers took a nerf to their combat potential as a result.
So, what kind of “progression” is it?
They’re trying to make the case that group strategies are more prevalent and more valuable using examples from nature and evolution and . . . crap. I’m trying to make the case that grouping is an emergent phenomenon and that basing game functionality and balance on the idea of grouping instead of individual gameplay is a non-sequitur.
you fail to see a bigger picture here. Exploration for example. After scan to 100% I already know what is the site type, it’s name (why would guristas have some “temple” on colony ships wrecks?), already know where cans are placed. Now add random and impredicable to this shall we? So after I scan to 100% I don’t anything until I warp to the site. Sites backgrounds are random, sometimes it’s just some ruins, sometimes it’s carrier wreck, huge ice asteroid. Cans don’t look like colony ships all the time, because they are randomly genereted and placed all over site. Maybe they are some BS wrecks, remnants of abbadon base etc. See the point? There is no immersion now, everything looks the same. For those who hunt pvers it doesn’t matter anyway.
Now to missions. Ofc procedurally generated is still scripted content, but:
“Rescue mission”
Help defend ship damaged in space/help repair it until it has ability to warp off. Sometimes it’s orca, sometimes it’s freighter, sometimes it’s BS - random. Pirates don’t just attack player but also protected ship, and waves are random. Tech is there I guess in RWs.
Randomly generetad, so those missions are not look the same all the time. Make mission comes in types: like recon, defend, raid, escort, ambush etc. We don’t need super npc AI here. Ofc we want to god-like to those puny red rectangles, otherwise we would be pvping, right?
Yeah, because we don’t really have true random number generators. You cannot use a deterministic process to produce true randomness.
I did…but then you have to realize that random sometimes means clumping–i.e. there will be sequences of just F or just D, do that enough, but not too often and you can get it pretty low. To most humans, when something is nice and neatly uniform in terms of say distance from each other they see random. Show something with things much more messy with clumps here and there and they’ll conclude non-random.
Indeed. People are really, really good at spotting patterns. Too good in fact. They spot them when in reality they are not there. The reason for this is if I “spot” a pattern that I think is a saber toothed cat and haul ass, and you stand there debating whether or not it is a type I or type II error, sooner or later you’ll get eaten and I won’t. And lets not even get into something like a conditional probability.
Problem is with true random content, setting aside the issue of pseudo-random number generators, means you should only win about half the time. You can’t go into a mission with a specific tank, for instance. You’d have to omni tank your ship. And with a random number generator what about damage type? And this will just piss people off by and large. “I used this fit last time and kicked ass, now it isn’t going crap!” Yup, welcome to the world of random.
I don’t think anyone can do this. You can get something that “looks like it is random”–e.g. a random number generator like the mersenne twister, but I am not sure you can then optimize as well in terms of ensuring players win a large portion of the time. And you can optimize to get a specific outcome, but then adding randomness on top of it to give the kind of challenge/“interesting factor” would be problematic. Don’t get me wrong, optimization with randomness is possible. You are basically optimizing your expected value, but that doesn’t sound like what you are talking about here, IMO.
Okay, I don’t do exploration, but yeah that sounds more interesting.
Sure sounds like it would look nice…but even though there is random, there is only so much to chose from, so eventually the list might get stale, but okay. And I guess there could be an ever growing “list” from which the pseudo-random number generator is drawing from to help keep things different.
Unless the game can build a balance team-play framework like other successful pvp games such as LOL, WOT, Overwatch, the effort to balance ships and modules does little help to promote pvp gameplay.
but you get the idea behind it, scripted things are single use only fun. I have no idea if CCP have tech enough to pull it, if it’s like 6k man battle then it’s never gonna happen.