Because people wanted EvE PvE to be different/evolved, they tried to do that, and it turned out people didn’t really like hard/engaging PvE. CCP invested a lot of tech and time into the new AI that would be ‘player-like’, there was an entire other team dedicated to that.
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See this is the thing, I don’t remember anyone asking for that. Most high-sec PvE’s simply want more missions in the pool. Instead of all those dev hours sunk into stuff that is ignored, a constant dribble of new missions ( say 4 or 5 per expansion/patch) would probably make a lot of people very happy.
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Sidebar - We did talk about iterating on missions at the last summit, I brought it up in the brainstorm + meetings with Ghost, as I remembered my previous discussions w/ most of the same people who are here around this topic. I actively tried to find out the time commitment that it would require, but was unable to get a solid answer.
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I know you can’t answer because NDA, but my guess is that it is not a question of time, its a question of finding someone that wants to do that kind of task. I doubt it is “sexy” development.
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Which we told them multiple times is wasted dev capacity … I mean it’s nice to have a flexible AI with a “dumbness” slider, but the more intelligent levels will just result in niche content. So, to be fun NPCs need to stay dumb.
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New NPC is more fun than vanilla one but it is more deadly as well there is nothing fun in missions AI they are easy and farmable and payments is basically CCP giveaway compare to that new NPC AI will never be worth it to run.
People wanted? What people? We’ve been asking more missions and more goals and purposes for PvE since Incarna. And each time CCP released useless PvE, we complained loudly and warned them equally loudly that it would fail.
Frankly, how can CCP be so disconnected from a cornerstone of their game? We’ve spent literal YEARS shouting into their deaf ears.
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Its your fault you tire easily 
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Just a serious warning: missions don’t need iteration. They need expansion. More damsels to rescue.
But let me guess, “people” also told CCP missions need to stop being as they are, right? And CCP is full bent on destroying missions as we know them and then wonder afterwards why everybody quitted. 
Changing missions is easily the second most stupid move CCP could ever do about highsec PvE, and a record breaker in the annals of stupid decissions.
Missions don’t need to change. We need more missions, and maybe CCP might try new things with those missions, but if CCP touches a single hair of the damsel, to say so, they will miss Incarna as that time when they would only lose X customers per day rather than per hour.
Just drop this into the appropiate ears: do not touch the old missions. Add new ones. Add new types. But never, ever, under no circumstance, change the existing missions. Because the average misison runner will not notice until he loses his ship in a WTF, and when he losses his second best ship in another mission that didn’t went as planned, he will not ask. He will not read. He will not write. He will just cancel his subscription and will go away forever.
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- Rorquals and moon mining arent really PvE content. The roids dont fight back. Also, its highend content for nullseccers, not for the average player.
- PvE events are nice, but they get boring after a few hours (There is little to no variety in the sites.)
- FOBs have terrible rewards. They are more annoying then useful.
- NPC Sotiyos - Highend content for fleets in null. Not for the average player.
- NPC Mining Fleets - Rewards are terrible, the haulers are empty half the time, and the rats have no bounty.
- Resource Wars - Again, terrible rewards. Not worth the effort.
- Drifter Incursions - Is anyone doing them? Are they still in the game?
- Drifter WHs - Have never done that, but sounds like highend PvE.
- The Agency - Is just a tool for finding content. Not a very good one …
- Shadow of the Serpent - ??? You man that short, super grindy event?
- New Burner Missions - Highend PVE, not for the average player.
Where is the content for the average player? The player in the middle, who is not a new Alpha player and not a capital pilot in null.
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No, I specifically wanted new missions that would introduce players to the new movements in the lore.
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Also, to reply to the few people who mentioned it - Rorquals & Moon Mining most definitively are PvE. PvE stands for Player vs Enviroment, not Player vs Enemy. Mining is one of the fundamental ways in EvE in which one can interact with the enviroment. If you want to narrow the goalposts to specifically Combat Based PvE, that’s fine and I’ll accept it, but I wish to defend the point that those are additions to PvE.
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Nullsec PvE, which is salt on the wound of highsec getting the short end of development resources.
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Moon Mining is literally coming to hisec in 2 weeks, they simply wanted to use the Nullsec players as guinea pigs to see how engaging the content is.
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What about new anoms for wh, it makes no sense that there are all these pirate data and relic sites and no one there. What happened to them, I can think of new combat sites that can fix status or destroy them and even think of how to make them unpredictable to a extent.
There are only 2wormholes that have npc rats and they are sansha. Most people may never even see or know about it.
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What I’m getting from this, is that you simply want lots of small time investment, easy content with great rewards for your time that are available in hisec, that can be completed with cheap ships? I find that to be a somewhat suspect list of attributes to give to one feature. Reward naturally must come with either Risk or Challenge. I don’t disagree that some of these PvE features could have been achieved better, or that missioning could be improved with adding simply more missions, but you have to be able to understand that fundamentally having content that fulfils all those criteria would create something that would be highly detrimental to the economy,
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This is actually one of the few pieces of PvE I regularly do - Roaming through WH’s doing relic sites is very fun, and rather profitable if you’re good at scanning & the minigame. And, they were added precisely to allow players to daytrip into WH’s in a scanning ship and make ISK. You can actually hear as such from the devblog IIRC.
All WH’s have NPC rats in their combat anomalies, they’re just more difficult to complete and give a higher reward.
Fixing standings is a COMPLETELY different, but very obnoxious issue that tends to trip up new players. Much like the attribute system, it feels like a system overdue for a revamp circa 2010.
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I’ve already foretold/warned that it will not work as intended:
CCP can’t make it competitive realtive to null mining, else nullseccers will come to high, so it will be nerfed to a point where anyone interested in moon mining will be better served moving to null rather than use the highsec version. People don’t buy “watered down crystal”, either they dope themselves or don’t.
And then there’s also people like me, who never owned POS or structures to avoid being forced to defend them in a wardec… I would had told that to CCP during the structures poll, if they even had asked. 
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Yeah, this should not happen. Small time content: fine. Easy content: fine. Great rewards: No. The first two indicate: small rewards unless it is on the social end of the spectrum.
Yes. And since much of PVE becomes “easy” in the sense that it is like following a recipe, the concept of risk isn’t there so it must on the challenge spectrum, IMO. No you can’t do a level 4 mission is a cheap T1 ship and get millions of ISK and thousands of LP. To create risk here we’d need something like an AI that is more “player like” which people seem to be against.
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Not sure if we are talking about the same rats, I’ve done both sleeper and pirate sites and only sleepers have rats in them. Now I only do them in C1-4 , so I can’t say about 5/6 but gurista, angel or blood data/relice are free of any rats
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