With FCs recent focus on making things better for newer players, I figured as a new-ish player that has bounced off the game a couple times in the past I would just share one of the biggest pain points I consistently had (and still have) when playing PvE activities in EVE, and that is difficulty. NOT with how difficult things can be, but how difficulty is communicated to the player.
A couple examples:
Enforcer Agent Mission Running: The missions are broken up into levels and these act as difficulty levels in a lot of ways. Only, the missions themselves can vary widely in how difficult they actually are. I canât tell you how many times in the early days when I would head to do a mission only to sit there for 30 minutes trying desperately to clear a room and give up frustrated because my DPS was just slightly too low, or I couldnât tank enough damage. Even though I had successfully run 3 other missions from the same agent, with the same ship without issue. I am NOT saying that mixing in more difficult missions is the issue. I think throwing the player a curve ball here and there is fine. But giving the player some kind of indication that their current ship may not be enough, would go a long way.
Just one idea I had to solve this is the mission description page should have clearer indicators about what range you should aim for DPS and EHP wise. Maybe even tell you if your currently boarded ship fit is not recommended, borderline or recommended. I cringe that I am about to say this, but a modern example in games is gear score. I hate gear scores in games most of the time (looking at you Ubisoft), but I canât help but feel like an EVE equivalent for ship fits when interacting with PvE content specifically could go a long way for teaching new players if their ship fits need work or not. Or stop them from wasting their time trying to complete a mission they arenât going to be able to finish in a reasonable time.
Keep in mind that this issue gets compounded on the higher level mission agents you go. When you start running L4s and your finally messing around with battleships, the wide range of DPS/EHP these ships can have depending on skills of the player character, skills of the player themselves and fit setup can lead to people flying into missions with no clue what Level 4 even means anymore. Once again, I want to stress that the game spiking the difficulty is fine in my opinion. Not communicating that to the player is the annoying part.
Combat Anomalies:
The difficulty on these will just say âLevel 1 / Level 2â etc.. Meaning what exactly? Is this the same difficulty scale as the enforcer missions? Those already can vary widely, so it means nothing. Itâs just a vague suggestion, and the suggestion once again is just âGo to the Wiki, it can tell you exactly what spawnsââŚ
DED Site 5/10 - Hold up, did the difficulty scale just change? Or were the levels in the other parts of the game always out of 10? There are ship restrictions sure, but how do I know if my ship fit is enough. This oneâs in low sec too. Doesnât that effect difficulty?
I hope you can see how the way the game tells you about difficulty rapidly becomes confusing and inconsistent for new players trying to wrap their heads around what they are doing. This is before you even start to consider other parts of the game, like WH exploration, and the site names acting as indecipherable messes for you to Google to know âAm I going to die if I warp hereâ.
I am not sure exactly what the solution is, and if FC is already addressing this in some future update I missed, then glad to hear it. But as it stands now, I think this game needs a new unified difficulty scale thatâs easier to understand and more importantly, clearly communicated.
Fly Safe o7
