Aenikus
Gallente
Kingfisher Industries
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Posted - 2009.07.04 13:34:00 -
[1]
I would echo many of the comments here. PVE in EVE always was the very poor relation to the PVP. It has improved greatly from 2003 with the bugged missions and 5000 ISK reward but still has far to go. For me it is the one reason why EVE is not as popular as it could be, missions have poor variety and game mechanics.
1) Loot: there is too much, I am amazed how much in minerals I can get from melting down T1 unnamed and meta 1 and 2 crap. This has hurt miners. Be more imaginative and perhaps allow reverse engineering plus something else so that people can derive BPC's to make named items. Not BPO's as they just become cash machines for a lucky few. So more components dropping to make stuff and BPC's from, finding fully working named mods would be rarer. After all the ship has just exploded.
2) Mission generation is too arbitrary, agents need to be specialised. No mining missions from kill agents, no kill missions from mining agents. Players should have different career routes and it is very annoying to be a hauler, mining, manufacturer and get kill missions from a production/hauler agent. Also get rid of the 4 hour turn down faction hit nonsense. What would be better is a choice from a mission board for that agent (so can choose a quick or a long mission) and the option to make the missions harder or easier if you want to do it in a gang or solo. To me this is the game breaker for Eve, you are so restricted and if you only have 1.5 hours to play you find you log on, can't get a mission you can do (after you refuse 1 or 2) and log off as by the time you move your stuff to the next agent it is too late.
3) Better NPC AI and fewer of them. However if their AI is to be made much better then they should follow the same rules as us for EWAR etc.
4) Faction missions should be the only missions handed out by new special agents. Most players avoid them because of the faction hit, it is a pain if you have to turn down two in a row because of the nonsense 4 hour faction hit agent rule. If EVE was a truly realm versus realm game they would be understandable but as it is most player corp go across the empires. To compensate for faction hit make these missions very very lucrative in terms of payment, rewards and LPs. A new player career choice - mercenary.
5) Just because a Gall corp and therefore the Gall government likes me does not mean that Amarr should start hating me. Or are the Amarr secret service now spying on me? The whole faction juggling just becomes a nightmare. Only missions against faction should give a faction hit. The whole faction up-down juggling, story-line impact etc etc is very very poorly thought out. It is the reason that many new players by the time they figure out what is happening realise that one faction's agents will not give them missions and that the empire will now shoot them if they go into their space.
6) Payment for doing the mission is way below the extraneous rewards of doing the mission e.g. reward too low while bounties, loot, salvage is 90% of the ISK made especially for level 4's. Balance this out, less in bounties etc and more in direct payment from the agent. This would make sharing for gangs much easier as it would be in shared payment and LPs.
7) LP stores are crap, great idea, but too much on offer is not very good or is over priced. Their interface is also awful, the whole searching is far too complicated. So give it an interface like the market, reduce the number of items that need tags (in fact get rid of the need for tags altogether). If less named loot dropped then more of the items in the LP store would be attractive if there was a good choice and price was right, you could move named loot or similar into the LP store.
8) Agent quality from -20 to +20 is too great and makes it hard to understand the effects. So why not bad, poor, average, good and excellent.
9) More agents spread out better in a variety of security systems. Mission hubs are still crowded.
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