The FOB and Resource Wars sites had some potential but I think that they can be expanded upon in some ways.
How about Team Missions? Lev 1 would be for 3 or so T1 frigs/destroyers, two dps, one logistics. Encourage players to learn team work and make them want to do these missions by having the rewards be a juicy carrot indeed. Not like the pathetic Resource Wars rewards. Implants, weps, faction ammo, mat researched single run BPC for standard ship maybe. All sorts of things can be put in here.
L2 could be a switch to cruisers, (problem there is the Amarr and Caldari T1 logi cruisers needing cap chaining). L3 Battlecruisers and introduce the concept of fleet boosts, and L4 being battleships.
Small sites being 2-3 ships, Standard being 4-5 etc, offering better rewards as you go.
This could encourage people to get together for these rewards as they only need small groups for small sites, helping bring new, small time and solo players out of their shells and learn to cooperate. Maybe new corps form as a result and new horizons open to these players.
Make rewards in LP with maybe an Agency Points gift plus bonus for time, dps, remote rep rate etc. with a nice agency booster selection as another tasty carrot after a few missions. DPS booster, remote rep booster, maybe even at the top of the tree a skill points booster for 24 hours.
I figured that one of the problems with player retention in EVE is that players don’t have sufficient incentive to reach out and bond with each other. If Small Team Missions were a thing with a mechanism to bring them together for the mission it could make alphas, soloers and small corps come together and maybe grow things and help with retention as camaraderie and maybe friendships form from shared experiences.
It would also help if CCP could use it as a mechanism to introduce fleet boosts, tackling and other teamwork concepts and thus as people move from small 3-4 ship sites to larger sites with, again, a mechanism to help players group up, extend acquaintances and begin to enlarge circles of friends to make new and bigger corps.
Existing teamwork is too demanding and too intimidating. There’s no way alphas or small time players can take on an incursion or an FOB but with Small Team Missions the seed can be sown for teamwork and help open eyes to better opportunities.
The Osprey does but you can fit an Augoror as a solo-logi if you want. The difference between 5 small remote reps (Augoror with 5x t2 small remote armor reps) and 3x medium remote reps (Exequror with 3x t2 medium remote armor reps) 9 hp/s.
In any case, you can always have 2x frigate logi for that level 2 one you are proposing, they do scale and are really alpha-friendly.
Yes, this is long overdue. Death to the “solo missions is best HS PvE” idea!
Who cares? With alpha no-longer being faction locked, that’s really not an issue. Training gallente or minmatar cruisers to 3-4 is not that big of a commitment, and not a waste either as there are pretty useful ships to be unlocked with those skills.
I’ve been asking for group missions for a long time. Incursion style pay outs, somewhere around the area of level 4 rewards.
It needs to be from an agent though. Sites in space are the better form of pve because it leads to competition and pvp, but there should still be more casual group pve that is on-demand and inclusive. The only form of group pve that meets that criteria is mining.
Small Team PVE has been a missing point in eve. You have Scout Incursions, but the payout is so low that they are almost not worth doing (3.5 mil and 500 LP for top 5 contributors per site iirc, which in many cases is lower than just doing level 4 missions and sharing the spoils) and now you have Resource Wars.
I think the best solution would be a revamp of Scout Incursions and not linking them to the main incursion areas (essentially just make system based instead of the constellation the incursion is in). This would make Resource Wars great for new players, but a small group of friends that find those too easy (and/or just dont want to mine) can do Scout Incursion Sites. Revamp would need to increase payout and change u p some of the npc’s involved.
An interesting idea could be FW style plexes (in that different sizes allowed in gates) with increased rewards based on ship size. So “Small” would be frigs and destroyers, “Medium” would be cruisers and battlecruisers, and “Large” would be Battleships.