DigitalCommunist
November Corporation
   |
Posted - 2011.08.03 18:53:00 -
[1]
Hi. For the record I don't like the way you guys solicit feedback when you haven't posted anything concrete to discuss. This thread will end up 60 pages of people's personal gripes that may or may not have anything to do with actually making 0.0 what it is supposed to be. The majority don't even know what 0.0 is supposed to be like.
Here's my feedback on what is wrong with 0.0:
1. It's optional.
2. It's not scary.
3. It's not relevant.
The reasons why:
1. You don't need to risk your chances in 0.0 to advance in the game at a comfortable pace.
2. The losses seem big on paper, but are not hard to recover from - and even less difficult when distributed across an entire alliance.
3. Nothing that changes in 0.0, politically or militarily, has any real impact on the lives of players in Empire.
You can talk about sovereignty and capitals and resource harvesting if you want. All of those areas have some bull**** game mechanics that need sorting. But none of it will make 0.0 better because 0.0 has lost its ability to create player driven events and stories that matter to the game. Events still happen on a daily basis, but they only matter to the people who are directly involved. And usually, those people are willing participants.
If you want to take the biggest step towards making EVE feel like EVE and 0.0 feel like 0.0, you only need to do one thing:
Stop making it easy for people who spend their time playing alone in a completely safe environment get everything they want at the rate they want. I can't stress this enough.
It does not matter that you make more money in null sec over high sec, people make it "fast enough" in high sec that they have zero incentive to work in teams (read: form actual corporations and not just social groups) and zero incentive to take on risks (attempting 0.0 before they are prepared)
To put it even more bluntly, you have to make serious and fundamental changes to what agent missions are in EVE.
1. Agent missions ignore resource scarcity and player competition by making the payouts the same whether five, fifty or five hundred people are in a system doing jobs for one agent. If supply scales perfectly with demand, you CONTROL THE SUPPLY. Put missions into a job pool and let players bid over them. The crowded areas would suck for a reason. The lowsec systems nobody goes to would start to look good again.
2. Agent missions let you mine with your guns. Expand the social skills of EVE and let people invest heavily into agent running as a career option. Give those people advantages in finding work and getting payment. For everyone else, it shouldn't be any more viable than strip mining asteroid belts with low/mediocre industry skills.
3. Create consequence. People who's standing goes up with a certain faction should be automatically included into factional warfare. Otherwise, FW remains irrelevant and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Conversely, give people with high FW standing discounts on office rentals, taxes and station services on their 'home turf' and penalties in 'enemy turf'.
4. Sorry, pirate battleship NPCs should not be in high sec. That is ****ing ridiculous and has been since it was introduced. Whether you balance the rewards for the lack of risk in high sec is meaningless, you remove one of the key reasons for them to try 0.0: more challenging PVE.
level 1 and 2 - high sec
level 3 - 40% high sec, 60% low sec
level 4 - low sec only
5. Remove the 'pure isk' payouts that agent missions create. Let them buy ships, modules and other things via the LP store and sell it on the market if they want isk. The net result shouldn't be too different (assuming they have the appropriate levels in the new social skills). But at least this way we're not pumping the game with ISK.
When you've done that to agents, you can start talking about problems in corp mechanics, sov, ships, etc.
If you don't, your changes create short term interest/butthurt and long term nothing.
|