davet517
M. Corp Mercenary Coalition
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Posted - 2010.10.08 02:24:00 -
[1]
This looks like something analogous to "raiding" in other MMOs. Could be cool, as long as you construct it with the realities of Eve in mind.
As we saw on Test this morning, this content will be trivial if players are simply allowed to zerg it (zerg: using massive numbers as a substitute for skill and tactics). Eve doesn't need any more trivial PvE grinds. There are enough already.
On the contrary, this content should be hard. Really hard. So hard in fact that you wipe entire fleets multiple times before you figure out how to beat it, and the strategies for beating an encounter should be closely guarded secrets for those who know how. If you did this right, Eve would have something that other MMOs don't when it comes to this kind of content, i.e. having to balance risk with chance of success. An encounter that's barely beatable with T2 fit BS might be easier in faction fit Marauders, but still easily fail-able by unskilled pilots. So, you have to balance your chance of success against what you're willing to lose if you fail.
I don't see how you do the above without some kind of cap on ship types and numbers. If you leave it wide open, overkill will be the rule.
If you make it really hard, the rewards should be really awesome, as it is in other MMOs where ôraid lootö >>>> ôgroup and solo lootö. It makes sense, because of the collective player hours that it takes to beat truly hard to beat PvE content. If the rewards don't far out-strip what can be had grinding anoms or missions, nobody is going to care about this content.
If you make it possible to grab off the phat lootz at he end of the rainbow by sending in a super-cap blob to lock down the final encounter, people will, at least until the peons get wise and stop doing the grinding just to be shut out at the end.
If you make it possible to farm this for real-world cash, and the real-world cash rewards are good enough, the RMT patrol will be all over it (see ôsuper-cap blobö above) and nobody else will get near it.
Eve has a (well deserved, IMO) reputation for having the absolute worst PvE content of any successful MMO. If you do this right, you might change that. If you do it wrong your shiney new feature will just be added to the collection of mindless isk grinds that already exist in the game, and your time and effort would have been far better spent enhancing the sov system, or the factional warfare system that you've neglected since it was released, or some other aspect of the game that people actually care about.
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