Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
The first banter of this 2nd year of EVE Blog Banters comes to us from Zargyl from A Sebiestor Scholar, who asked the following: On the EVE Fanfest2009 page are pictures of prizes for the Silent Auction that was held during the event. One of these photos was entitled “Design your own EVE mission”. My question now would be what kind of mission would you write if you got that prize? What would the mission be about? Would it be one using the new system of epic mission arks? What would be the story told by it? Feel free to expand upon his questions and put together your very own mission!
This is something I have given thought to a great deal, since I am a mission runner in EVE.
I would like to place my first point on the predictability of missions, even with interface improvements and refinements, you still get to a point where you know each spawn, and every type of scenario.
What I would propose would be to create missions which have huge rewards but are totally random in the formation and strength of the AI forces. This would I feel promote users to create a fleet to cover logistic roles, such as warp scramblers to stop microwarp driving AI frigates, ECCM to deal with ECM cruisers, cap transferring to combat energy neutralizing battleships, and remote repairing to combat the increased DPS.
This would open up whole new aspects in mission running, where no two missions are alike, and possibly enhancing it further by incorporating the AI from the sleeper NPC's.
I feel this would make missions runners be more careful in their fittings, it would promote teamwork, and with it I think it would bring more immersive gameplay to the current predictable missions in EVE.
I agree that this would be a welcome change frpom the routine of 'open eve-Survival and do what they say'
ReplyDeleteMaybe have a certain percentage procedurally generated but still keeep the predicatble fractor for those who like that sort of thing?
mike
Having random amounts of enemies is a good idea and ofcourse scale rewards accordingly. I also open eve-survival when I'm starting a mission but I don't really want/need more then just the enemy damage types. All the blog banter mission ideas should be combined to form an epic arc of awesomeness ^^
ReplyDeleteI like your idea though I think the reward should not necessarily be huge, but should stay in proportion to the difficulty of the mission. The missioner(s) would need to evaluate very quickly whether he (they) should commit to the battle or get out of Dodge before being scrambled. Currently we do this evaluation by looking at mission profiles. Doing it on the spot would be more thrilling.
ReplyDeleteI think it is pretty unanimous across the blog banter-sphere (if you read the other banters) - the predictability of Eve missions - that leads to boredom.
ReplyDeleteCreated more variety and more randomness I think would help. Also introducing more player with player, or player versus player into missions would help too.
Keeping along the same road I don't think will lead to anything but more boredom.