Quote:

---

Before lvl 4's, empire was pretty much a newb zone. The best activity you could do was mine low ends, and make ~500k/hour if you were lucky. Getting into a cruiser was many grind sessions split across several days. Getting into a battleship was a month of killjoy work.

I am not recommending we go back to those days, nor am I suggesting they chop agent payouts and call it a day. I wouldn't personally mind it, but there are better ways of preserving hardcore gameplay and meaningful consequences that don't involve reverting empire back to one giant starter zone.

Adam Ridgway already mentioned the key word: dynamic. Every single resource in EVE follows the basic rule of "more people in X system means fewer resources per person", with the exception of agent missions.

I don't know if they were designing it as a service or what, but it makes no sense that mission supply would scale infinitely with player demand. Agent hubs are the embodiment of this epic screwup. Jita, Oursulaert, Rens and Dodixie all came into existence because of this.

If missions came from a npc corporation pool where each agent hands out roughly the same number per day, it does two important things:


ò1. People move to underserved agents, and eventually underserved npc corporations. Starting from high sec, spreading into lowsec, and eventually 0.0. If there was ever a better way to make lowsec popular again and generally spread people out, I really haven't seen it.



ò2. CCP can more directly regulate the system; it wouldn't matter that a few agent missions have unbalanced rewards when you control the number of missions in the pool on any given day. Perceptions could change suddenly, but if a whole bunch of people enter the system, the money available for any one person drops. That isn't the case today and something which must be rectified.

---