Eve Fiction

Hello everyone, I’m CCP Wanoah* and I’m going to be blogging about the upcoming changes to Eve’s PvE. Before people start pointing out that this is a PvP game, dammit, I’ll just mention that some of the changes I have in mind may have some positive impact on PvP encounters and will make a contribution to the player-driven aspects of Eve’s economy while hopefully building on the existing PvE play available to create something a bit more diverse and interesting.

*No, not really. I’d love to write a devblog like this though if I was…

Right now, PvE in Eve mostly starts with docking at a station and double-clicking on an agent there. The agent will offer you a mission, and you can choose or accept. Some stations have lots of agents; others only have one or two. For many of us, when we dock at a station, we will find that we don’t have the standings to use any of the agents there. Or the only agent available is a level 1 agent who will offer something that is way beneath our abilities.

None of this suggests a busy world where people and goods need to be transported and there’s danger around every corner. There’s a lack of choice, and there’s a lack of random encounters. I want agents to still offer missions, but they will also offer a range of missions of varying difficulty. The agents won’t be the only source of missions either.

So, I dock at the RSS station in Pator. I don’t have great standings, so not all the agents are available to me. Instead of talking directly to the highest available agent, I look at the contracts screen and check out the available assignments. I filter for the ones that I can accept.  There are about 50 missions available. There are passengers looking to travel to a variety of locations, there are courier missions - some created by players, some created by NPCs, and several created by the station’s resident agents, and there are also a selection of traditional kill missions offered by the level 1 agent available to me. I pick one of the passenger missions that looks to be paying pretty well, and this initiates a conversation with an NPC.

“Hello Captain. I need to get to Tanoo V - Moon 1 - Ammatar Consulate Bureau fast. No questions asked. If you can get me and my… associates there in 30 minutes, I’ll pay you 150,000 ISK. Any later and I’ll only pay 50 grand, OK?”

OK, buddy, you got it / Can you give me some details? / Nah, I’m not going that way. Sorry.

You ask for more details, and you get the route and the information that you need to carry 25 passengers to Tanoo V in the Ammatar Mandate. You accept the mission. Plenty of room in a Rifter for only 25 people, and you should get there in time in such a fast ship.

You load up the passengers and head out. Customs scan you at the gates in high sec, but they find nothing out of the ordinary. You have Black Market Trading trained to level 3, so the numbers are on your side anyway. A few jumps later and the Republic customs boys get lucky. They intercept and tackle you with scrammers and webs: “Halt, Ammatar scum! We have detected that you are illegally transporting slaves in Minmatar Republic territory.“

At this point, you have options. You can jettison the illegal cargo, and hear no more about it. Or you can run. As soon as you leave the grid, you will be criminally flagged to all customs and navy ships that will attack on sight for 15 minutes. Fighting your way out results in the same.  Aggression will result in a standings hit.

The mission could have been entirely legitimate, of course, but a fair percentage of them will involve some kind of criminal activity. Many will have no bearing on standings, but some will give you positive standings with a variety of factions. Smuggling fugitives for the Angel Cartel from high sec to low sec will pay well. Sometimes, the missions will involve moving incognito famous people, politicians and other VIPs. Some missions will generate random encounters en route.

I jettison the slaves and the slaver that duped me to be processed by Minmatar customs. I’m not happy about it - I am anti-slavery being a dutiful Minmatar - but I suppose I should have guessed that there was more to things than met the eye. The high reward was a giveaway.

I head back to Pator and look for another assignment. The missions from the level 1 RSS agent are ranked by difficulty. The hardest missions are rank 5, and there is also an indication of the recommended number of ships to complete the mission. I’m still in my Rifter, so I pick a rank 1 mission - easy. It does have quite a high collateral payment upfront, and it does recommend 2 pilots, but that’s not a problem for me.

So what are the differences between the agents? All the agents offer the same varieties of missions and the same range of challenge.  That’s the main change. Higher level agents offer bigger standings increases and more money and loyalty points as an incentive, but there is no need to grind missions just to do something that is sufficiently challenging to offer you some entertainment.

“Ah, Captain. Please take a seat. One of our field agents has located the coordinates of Angel Cartel smuggling operation right here in the Pator system, and we have a covert ops out there scouting it right now.  It’s only a small-scale operation, but nonetheless, these goons are smuggling people and materials right under our noses and they need to be shut down. Our scout has identified two structures that we believe are being used to hold contraband.”

Objectives:

1.   Destroy any hostile vessels

2.   Destroy any static defences

3.   Disable shields on Habitation Module

4.   Land Marine boarding party on Habitation Module

5.   Disable shields on Hangar Array

6.   Land Marines on Hangar Array

7.   Protect perimeter while boarding parties secure their objectives

8.   Recover boarding parties and contraband and return to base.

I accept the mission, but I have to give it some thought. I now have 2 platoons of Republic Marines in my hangar bay, but I’ll need a couple of LMAVs (Light Marine Assault Vehicle) to allow them to attack the structures. That’s no problem - I can buy them from any Navy station, but the problem I have is that the Rifter doesn’t have a drone bay.  I’m beginning to see why this is a two-man job: I need a wingman with 10m3 of drone bay.

I gang up with a corpmate flying a Probe, and pass him the two LMAVs and the marines to go with them. We fly out to the coordinates given. Resistance is pretty light, and I shoot down the defending Angel frigs without too much bother. There’s also a sentry turret to take care of. I batter down the shields of the habitation module, and my gangmate drops the marines into the MAVs ready to launch.

“Shields down!”

My gangmate launches the first MAV, and tells it to attack the habitation module. It works a bit like a mining drone - it flies towards its target then latches on to it so the occupants can tunnel through the hull of the ship or structure. If shields are still up, the MAV will simply orbit the target until the shields are back to 0.

While the marines are doing their work, I turn my attention to the Hangar Array. Just then, I see another Angel Frigate arrive, at 100km. I break off my attack, and move to intercept this new target. Too late. It warps out before I get into firing range. I head back to the hangar array to finish off the shields, but I know that the scout will probably be back with some reinforcements soon.

The second MAV latches onto the side of the hangar array. The first MAV, its marines having done their job, flies back to orbit my gangmate’s Probe. The habitation module launches a cargo container with the loot (slaves - mission item, prisoners - mission item, and some other misc loot - ours to keep).

The charges set by the marines explode. Pretty. No more habitation module. The Probe picks up the loot and scoops the MAV. He gets on with salvaging the wrecks while the second boarding party does its job.

Half a dozen Angel frigates warp in at close range and attack. While they are pretty easy to take care of, I need to deal with the ones not attacking me first - one of them is attacking the MAV (and that could spell mission failure) and two have targeted my wingman’s defenceless Probe. It’s a bit hairy for a little while, but the frigs die and disaster is averted. We scoop the loot from the hangar array (ammo, few modules, exotic dancers and some ship crew) and head back to base.

The mission rewards are split between us. We both get ISK, LP and a standings gain with RSS and the Republic.  The mission items disappear (marines, slaves, prisoners) and we are left with the loot plus some ship crew and exotic dancers. I can right-click on the exotic dancers and turn them into slaves or I can choose the release option.  Slaves can be sold as a commodity where legal to do so. Equally, I can right-click on slaves to release them. They will simply disappear from my hangar if I do that. I can sell the ship crew as a commodity on the market, or I can add them to one of my larger ships. You can fly a cruiser or larger ship without crew, but there are severe penalties. Zero crew means no modules online, whereas just having not enough crew is more unpredictable - some modules may go offline, cap recharge or shield recharge may be slower, or ammo may not reload.

So, what do we have here? First of all we have scope for missions to be a bit more varied and to not be quite so predictable. We also have possibilities for teamwork when running missions, complexes, etc. There is more of a possible role for a young character to play an important role beyond ‘loot bitch.’ We also have a mechanic for interacting with structures and ships in different ways. Disabling and boarding a ship to loot it could be a much more successful strategy than destroying it and seeing if anything survives the explosion. I see scope for piracy - something that has desperately needed some love for a long time.

My position is that Eve, while aspiring to be many of the things that Elite was (and has surpassed it it so many ways) has actually missed a trick when it comes to the NPCs. Elite’s system of missions, while very simple, was better than Eve’s. Another old game, X-Wing, could teach mission designers a thing or two as well.

We also start to get a basis for a future interaction with planets if we have a mechanic for launching personnel-carrying assault vehicles and dropships. They don’t have to just carry marines, the payload could be mercenaries, scientists, doctors, Serpentis goons, Sansha Slaves, Blood Raider Berserkers, Kameiras, etc. Then, somewhere down the road, when ambulation is well-established, you can imagine launching that boarding party and transitioning to some kind of third person tactical shooter environment where to and your squad have to actually fight to secure your objectives.

Right, that’s it for this devblog. Next week: lag solved!