Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lyn Farel]

I really agree with 1 and 2, but I am somewhat mitigated with point 3. Similar cases are not unheared of.

Why criminals continue to appear and do their stuff on a continual basis ? Because they are stupid ? Maybe, but mostly because it can pay off, or either because they actually are stupid and rarely think rationaly. Ok, we can argue that they are not organized entities like the pirate and empire factions.

Then why do sovereign states IRL continue to send their infiltrated agents in other countries, at the risk for them being found out ? We still continue to hear here and there of blunders.

Of course, that is completely out of proportion considering the actual number of such cases ingame, but that mostly refers to point 1 and 2.

[Morwen Lagann]

It's a problem with lots of games, not just EVE or MMOs in general. Most games that have non-dynamic, repeatable content will run into the issue of sustainability sooner or later.

Even a game like Skyrim (yes, I finally picked it up in November; yes, I'm enjoying the shit out of it; shut up, I know I should've gotten it a year ago ) has it with enemies that respawn in dungeons after some number of ingame days - it can be explained away a few times with certain types of enemies (regular living enemies like bandits, Imperials/Stormcloaks, etc.) but one has to wonder how that huge barrow I cleaned out suddenly respawns all of the Draugr inside it... including the leveled 'boss'... over and over again.

[BloodBird]

@ LYn Farel:

Well, in RL, you may hear of one bad op every few years, give or take. If the ratio in EVE was reflected IRL, then if even one in a thousand bad ops were reported, you would hear of one to a dozen failed ops every week at the least. If, say, the US government was met with a situation where they lost thousands of agents every day, constantly trying the same things in the same exact ways and meetings with near 100% failure ratio, they would change tactics and/or try something else at the very least, and they would also run out of agents very, very fast. NPC factions in EVE do neither. They have nedless forces and keep trying the same things over and over again in the same ways, with the same results.

It's a problem with lots of games, not just EVE or MMOs in general. Most games that have non-dynamic, repeatable content will run into the issue of sustainability sooner or later.

Even a game like Skyrim (yes, I finally picked it up in November; yes, I'm enjoying the shit out of it; shut up, I know I should've gotten it a year ago ) has it with enemies that respawn in dungeons after some number of ingame days - it can be explained away a few times with certain types of enemies (regular living enemies like bandits, Imperials/Stormcloaks, etc.) but one has to wonder how that huge barrow I cleaned out suddenly respawns all of the Draugr inside it... including the leveled 'boss'... over and over again.

And this is the gist of my point; All the things you mention here and all the things mentioned in my post, things like missions, ratting and so on, it's GAME content, farmable mobs, it's the same as trying to explain why all those asteroids that was strip-mined yesterday has respawned today.

What I'm saying is, that it's a completely futile effort to try and rationalize IC the mechanics in the game that allows for endless numbers of farm mobs and resources because the only logical explanation is that it's a game-design to keep the player's floating with resources, standings, ISK and entertainment. It's the infinite supply of rats and resources coupled with the finite number of mission variety and variety of rat AI moves that limits the game. Don't matter how many there is, there are only so many.

So in the interest in maintaining our IC belief that the universe is a real place and things are done due to realistic reasons we simply can't go into detail about the game's mechanics, such as the missioning, resourcing and ratting systems, because there are no acceptable IC explanations available.

BTW, gratz with getting Skyrim. I should return to it and finish it one of these days...

[Morwen Lagann]

BTW, gratz with getting Skyrim. I should return to it and finish it one of these days...

"Skyrim" "finish it"

... Good thing I read this post after I got home, I might've gotten fired for how much laughing I'd have been doing.

[BloodBird]

BTW, gratz with getting Skyrim. I should return to it and finish it one of these days...

"Skyrim" "finish it"

... Good thing I read this post after I got home, I might've gotten fired for how much laughing I'd have been doing.

Oh come on, it's not an impossible prospect to finish all quests and story-lines 

[Streya]

I'm of the mind that the "same fleet comp, same formations" thing actually DOES work out for the NPC factions...most of the time. When they're not detected and a capsuleer isn't sicked after them, tried-and-true tactics are what the NPCs would stick with. The capsuleer doing contract work and popping up on their overviews is most likely an outside-context problem for them. So if the majority of these clandestine ops using the same predictable tactics and the like are succesful when a capsuleer doesn't show up, it would make sense to surprise the hell out of them when you do show up and they're massively unprepared.

But then, the above explanation contains much handwavium.

[Shaalira]

I'd like to see the scale of NPC slaughter reduced, without changing the reward system or difficulty of each mission.

For example, instead of slogging through thirty-six Serpentis battleships on a given mission, you instead fight through thirty-six frigates and dessies with lots of remote drones.  They'll have much higher EHP and DPS than before (still quite less than capsuleer standard), and offer the same kind of bounty and salvage.

NPC battleships would be quite rare, reserved for end arc bosses or rare plexes or whatever.

This would reduce the damage done to immersion while still keeping the economy more-or-less intact.  Aside from reducing the daily body count to possibly believable levels, it also helps explain the incompetent nature of your opponents.  After all, you're only facing mooks in frigates and dessies.  The masterminds of the criminal cartels, and the admiralty of the four great nations aren't sitting around in easy-to-kill battleships using the same tactics over and over again.  Just their lesser peons.

There are some pitfalls, however.
-  Killing heavily tanked frigs and dessies is a lot different from killing heavily tanked battleships.  Assuming you want existing mission-runner fits to still be viable, some balance will have to be done regarding EHP ratios to sig radius, etc.
-  This would require a LOT of work.  Designing new NPCS, modifying existing mission scripts, editing text where appropriate, etc.  I'm not sure it's worth the effort, especially if it gets in the way of an expansion or iteration.  And I don't think CCP will put out that kind of effort just for immersion's sake.

[BloodBird]

Neither do I. I'd love it see something like that indeed, but as stated, the likelyhood it will happen is just... really low.

Well, until it happens, the de-facto 'never detail me your mission/ratting efforts' simply need to be kept up. The only problem with that is the very idea to do so is not universally agreed on or even known. Oh well, what can you do?

(Other than remind anyone that don't hold to this, that is )

Actually, I would not mind if missions were changed like this and I had to run a little min-maxing to figure out the new 'optimal' missioning/ratting boat. Something tells me it would be something akin to a T3 crusier or HAC, and I rat null-space in HAC's allready anyway, so that wouldn't bother me at all. (Ishtar's and Zealot's make nice, agile, powerful ratting-boats indeed.)

[Lyn Farel]

So what would be the point to have battleships ? What's the use for maraudeurs ?

No, really, I would just prefer to see them make rats a lot tougher for very few of them, with increased bounties to compensate. Easier to do.

[BloodBird]

So what would be the point to have battleships ? What's the use for maraudeurs ?

No, really, I would just prefer to see them make rats a lot tougher for very few of them, with increased bounties to compensate. Easier to do.

Wow, totally forgot to add my toughts around Marauders to the last post, sorry about that.

... and now ofc I don't recall even half of it. Figures. Anyhow, it basically went along the idea that if anything like the above went through Marauders would need to be adjusted, perhaps to bonus a large number of smaller weapons (assuming they want to treat Marauders like the glorified mission-boats they are and not the 'leet pvp boats' their descriptions try to push them as) like say, 8 numbers of whatever weapon-systems your ship favors. 8 heavy missile launchers for the Golem that all get double DPS bonus or whatever. So long as they were brought in line with the new way missions work it would be fine, null/low ratting could still be done in HAC's as mentioned.

[Lyn Farel]

Not very impressive for a tech 2 battleship though.

A Paladin without tachyons ? :/

[Saede Riordan]

Give them a ridiculous tracking bonus that takes a module to work that can only be used on rats.

[Lyn Farel]

Wouldn't that look a little silly ?

You have seen what it looks like when firing on fast moving bugs with Large guns, especially lasers ?

[Shaalira]

Battleships would have use in Incursions, which is nominally high-level PvE.  The progression will still be there.

Also, we've yet to see tiericide hit ships battlecruiser and larger.

[Sakaane Eionell]

This thread was really interesting to me for all the different viewpoints expressed.

I have sat on the side of the fence that says "every kill counts literally". I've written a few pieces of fiction for Sakaane where she contemplates the literal numbers of pirate ships, and thus human lives, she has killed as a mechanism to explore how in touch with her humanity she still is, where her "badness level" might be, and so on, so this means at times I've used actual numbers of mission ships killed in my fiction.

But I also agree that we have to take certain aspects of mission running with a pretty big grain of salt to maintain immersion. I don't think the amount of NPC ships killed can be sustainable ICly. Even if ships can be salvaged and/or recycled, the materials have to be a finite resource. In real life, asteroids and moons don't grow back.

I've also tried to find ways to explain repeatedly offered missions ICly in attempt to keep my brain from oozing out through my nose. The damsel doesn't have to be the same chick every time; there are, after all, a lot of irresponsible young women in New Eden. There's another mission out there that bugs me too: Stolen Arms. The flavor text for that mission is ridiculous (9x crates totalling 5400m3 is a private gun collection? Do I look stupid to you?). But EVE being a :grimdark: universe, and the empires all having a certain level of corruption in them, I like to think that stupid missions like that one must be cover stories for Other Stuff (like someone else mentioend).

You can choose ICly to sometimes "read between the lines". We do have the option to decline the mission. Sakaane always declines Stolen Arms; in her world the agent admitted it's a bluff and she just doesn't want to be anybody's potential scapegoat (or whatever). The agent told her that cover story works on pilots more often than might be expected because a certain portion of pilots just don't care enough to dig more deeply or are too busy to look closely. And why should they? They're demigods. So long as it pays well, maybe they just don't care what "the little people" get up to.

Anyway, for someone like me, I think missioning serves a purpose in my RP but how I portray it (specific or vague) depends on the subject matter and what I'm trying to achieve with the RP at the time.