Originally by: murder one

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Let's begin by establishing that Eve is a PVP centric game. That is, it's sole purpose for existance is PVP. No other MMO on the internet today is so completely player driven than Eve: it's markets are player driven, the raw materials are generated 100% by players, the large majority of items are created by players, etc. etc..

That out of the way, what if missions were completely removed from the game, and while NPCs would still be in the game, they were only available through encounters that could only be accessed by probing them out, similar to current encounters are now, but more common and with more variety.

Eve wouldn't exist exactly the same as it is now, minus the missions, but be rebalanced completely to take into account the complete lack of missions. Belts would be converted to scannable/probeable areas and NPCs would still reside there as usual, but there wouldn't be any more missions to be run, of any sort, in high sec, so the only way to generate income in Eve from a non-player related activity would be through mining or fighting NPCs in encounters that players would have to actively go find for themselves.

One key thing here is that mission running spawns NPCs on an as needed basis for each player. Encounters would simply be available to anyone and everyone capable of probing them out, and it would be on a "first-come, first-served basis", so to speak.

This would naturally apply player population pressure to NPCing activities. Population pressure will in turn force the bulk of the player population to spread out around the galaxy in order to farm the NPCs for ISK, which is exactly what we are *not* seeing with the current system.

Furthermore, with no way to generate ungodly amounts of ISK in empire/high sec anymore, players would have to move into low sec and 0.0 systems in order to find NPC encounters that would be of high enough value ISK/hour to be profitable. This in turn would lead to more pirating opportunities, and more team play and cooperative opportunities for players to coordinate between themselves to successfully farm the NPCs and not get pirated.

Removing as much of the PVE element from Eve as possible will only further improve it as a PVP game. Sure, a lot of PVE players will leave the game, but there are dozens of PVE centric MMOs out there for them to play (WoW for instance).

Eve is a truely PVP oriented game, and as such should (IMO) have a purity of purpose. By making belt locations dynamic, it's going to be a huge help in combating macro miners, which horribly ruin the Eve economy. By removing missions as they are now, it would be one more step in breaking the PVE chain that exists in Eve, and bringing it closer to the pure PVP ideal.

As for what to do with the concept of agents and similar fluff: why not repurpose them into factional warfare so that they can be used by ISD to direct players in the galactic conflict?

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