Eg: newbie mission runners from highsec could be assigned to fight in a large battle between Amarr vs the Blood Raiders, on a “front line” of an ongoing never-ending battle in some deadspace.
They could be given individual goals in the fight, to take out specific ships, or to just beat back the enemy forces together. Players from different mission levels could be given bigger targets.
Other Blood Raider pirate mission runners could be given supplies to deliver to the Blood Raiders in the battle, which would spawn reinforcements.
It could also be used as a way to introduce players to Faction Warfare… if instead of Blood raiders it could be an opposing faction… the newbies could be given dialogue explaining those reinforcements are coming from faction warfare missions… might make them want some revenge.
None of the players would have to fight each other. It would let you see multiple players doing various things all in the same spot. Maybe they make friends, join a faction or something.
A variation of this for mining mission runners could exist too. Some unique ore needs to be mined for the scientists or something.
Some players could be assigned to defend the miners. Other players could be assigned to haul the minerals to a station. And obviously some players are assigned to mine the ore and deposit it in a npc rorqual.
The issue with that approach is that X number of players from each relevant group must be available and running the connected missions at the same time. This is a problem with any game that attempts this. With EVE’s heavily reduced player count it would be even worse.
As Geo pointed out, your mining suggestion is pretty close to Resource Wars. Which was a poor attempt, true, but mostly due to the rewards and payout being laughable. The mechanics mostly worked, although they could have been much better.
The problem wasn’t even that it was a poor attempt rather just another thing that never actually attempted. They added in a proof of concept promised to build on it then promptly forgot it existed.
As to the ops idea i don’t really see it helping much, at best a few players might see it as neat, at worst it will be just another aspect of the npe giving a false impression of eve.
CCP really needs to implement a sort of mentor system seen in many other mmos. Problem is the lower player counts get the harder it is for those to work.
nah.
the battle could continue forever even without any players.
If only one player is active, he can simply destroy the target ships amongst the group and warp away, leaving the battle to continue raging on.
One of my favorite early memories of eve was finding a public deadspae similar to this. It was near Hek or Rens, and there was tons of players constantly in it.
Okay, well then you’re going to need an ongoing permanent conflict between NPC groups that essentially always has all the roles and targets available to fulfill any of the possible missions.
I don’t think this is impossible, especially since I was going to suggest something like it for FW, at least until I saw the new “narrative story arcs” developments. Basically I was going to suggest that FW include something like mini-Triglavian invasions.
Instead of Trigs pushing into a system and being fought back by Edencom, with players able to jump in and fight/logi/support either side or PvP the other side; you’d have an NPC declaring a military objective a couple systems away in FW, and having their NPC military fight the other NPC military as they moved towards the objective. Players could fight/support the side they’re aligned with. This could happen once a month or so and should provide a couple weeks of interesting FW.
So, not impossible, because CCP has already done it with Trigs. And as that idea, it fits with what already happens in FW (although significant changes would be needed).
To adjust it to your OP idea, you’d need to consider location: how do newbie mission runners get there? Either you need warp gates from all over to the one big perma-battle, or you need a number of perma-battles ongoing across several regions.
Then you need to ask: “How would someone grief/exploit/abuse this?”. It looks like it would either be very farmable (NPC perma-battle), very griefable (newbies flying in for PvP), or very breakable (fly in and take out known mission targets or hold the site hostage).
So I don’t have issues with newbie-oriented objectives targetting ways to get them started on PvP, but not sure “roles in a perma-battle” could be a workable way to do it.