Thread unlocked by polite request.

Also please don't sign your forum posts. You aren't sending a letter to us.

It's in my opinion that you've poorly highlighted the problem, and focused on the solution. Your issue is that standings are currently difficult to attain and manage, as you are proposing a way to make it easier (rather than highlighting 'interesting content' with regards to PvE that has been removed). Standings and how they work are something we would like to look at, especially given the amount of Alpha players who are going into FW and not realising the impact that this has on their standings until far later into the game.

This is especially relevant given the way standings work with the new mining convoys, which are something I think represents a huge step forwards in using standings more actively in gameplay.

Also please don't sign your forum posts. You aren't sending a letter to us.

I always do because yes, I AM sending a letter to you

m

If you had bothered to read the proposal with an open mind, you would have seen I clearly stated the problem which is the original content previously known as Tutorial Agents had been removed by CCP and replaced with the NPE Aura Tutorial. A little while later the NPC Aura Tutorial was removed and the 60 stations that were home to the incorrectly named Tutorial Agents became empty, resulting in a major loss of activity in those systems.

resulting in a major loss of activity in those systems.

Also you couldn't be more wrong when you say my issue with standings is that they are difficult to attain and manage. Obviously you're not familiar with 'The Plan' which I created and gave to the Eve playerbase back in 2010.

I did read your post, hence why I tried to articulate what your issue was and address it. Please try not to conflate misunderstanding your point with not reading it.

The problem I have is that you have not elaborated on why these agents are necesary and what the costs of removing them were to the game. You noted that the benefit of them was that they gave a standings increase, and this is something that I understood as a problem within the game, so I addressed it. You didn't say that you enjoyed the missions, so I assumed that the PvE content itself was not the draw, leaving only the standings impact as a benefit to the playerbase as highlighted by you.



This in particular is something I do not understand as a 'downside'. There are plenty of underused systems in the game, especially in Hisec. Why is this a concern that needs to be addressed from a gameplay standpoint? I'm not being facetious here, I genuinely would like to know, as it's not a conversation I've had before.

These Agents are Event Agents which could only be completed once in the life of the character for Faction standing increase. They were important due to the fact that there was 15 of them for each of the 4 main Empires which made it easy for players to regain Faction standing. Their original 2 part mission series was actually quite easy to complete which contributed to them being important in regards to Faction standing increase.

The main problem is that they were never really listed or publicized like regular Agents and they were situated in the last system of dead-end pipelines with no other Agents, thus they didn't get much activity. Since they've been removed and the fact that no other Agents are located in those dead-end systems basically turns those systems into unused content that's a waste of server resources.

Most players didn't even know they existed until I published my first draft of 'The Plan' which actually contains quite a few Event Agents. I'm talking about content that was un-publicized and rarely used in-game. 'The Plan' brought attention to that content and as a result more players engaged in that content.


DMC

No, I get your point and yes, I agree that the process of standings repair could be better implemented within the client to be more intuitive. However CCP doesn't like to present things in Black & White. They prefer various shades of Gray and enjoy seeing the player base figure things out on their own. CCP distributes the content throughout the game for players to find and put the pieces together. Players then share that info with the community. That's what makes this game great.

A full re-work of the standings system would require a lot of Dev time and resources, not to mention it would probably remove a lot of the existing PvE content, mainly Event Agents. I never liked the idea of Tags for Security and I definitely don't like the idea of implementing Tags for Standing. That makes it way too easy for players to circumvent consequences for their actions.

All of the empty systems that were formerly occupied by those removed Agents may not be a drain on the server but it's definitely a waste of time and effort invested by the Dev's who had originally created that content. When those Agents were active a small percentage of the player base actually engaged with that content, thus validating the resources used to create that content.

My proposal is to not only bring those Agents out of retirement but to also improve and upgrade their content for the benefit of all Capsuleers. They could be classified and listed as Political Agents in the games Agent Finder. They could even be coded similar to the Epic Arcs, available to be redone once a year which would be very beneficial in repairing and maintaining positive Faction standings.

I understand this content may seem outdated and worthless to you but aside from doing a full standings rework, this proposal would be very easy to implement resulting in more content for all players to interact with in-game. Anyway, I sincerely thank you for taking the time to review this proposal and more importantly, for taking the time to discuss it with me.


DMC

No worrries, thank you for being willing to engage me in debate here and not flip out when I took a different stance. I'll definitely bring this up in our next meeting with CCP and ask if this was made as a design decision or as a consequence of simply purging a lot of previous content to replace it with the Inception NPE. Hopefully from there I'll be able to talk to CCP about it further. Obviously, no promises of action, as I've said before, the CSM doesn't have the power to direct workflow, and whilst you might expect it to be just flicking a switch to bring the agents back, chances are that a lot of background engineering would have to be done to add new agent finder filters, reimplementing the mission pool, without disturbing the existing tutorial path.