SO imagine you accept a mission. Rather than give you a mission item the mission gives you a mission location. You undock from station with two of your corp mates and theres no long walking - barely any distance to travel at all. You just drop a standard teleport beacon and, like all beacons, it gives you the island locations as well as the option to enter in a mission location. You enter the mission location and then jump.
You land on a new island in the middle of a static red spawn that immediately locks you and agresses. You can see the island your on is maybe 1500m long and 500m wide - its clear you have to work your way through the different red spawns you can see to get to the mission location and complete the task. After killing your red spawn you do some mining scans - this mission type has a mining spawn oevery time and 1% of the time that spawn has 60m epriton. Jackpot - time to clean out the mission and bring in the miners to suck some of that beautiful epi. You move up the thin island taking out spawn by spawn to get to your location - a mission activation static point. Upon activating you get a massive observer spawn, challegning but doable and you finish the spawn with just a sliver of heath .... but wait
When you accepted this mission it warned you that the mission location was one of 150 possible locations that were a PvP open zone. You accepted because the reward is greater but now a PvP gang who has been randomly going through known PvP mission location ID's with their teleport has jumped in and are moving to engage. Your gang takes some cover and lets the RR get some health back while franticly pinging your alliance mates for backup. Red and Blue teleports go up all over alpha as predator and prey call for reinfocements .. battle is afoot.
Now the escape teleport for this mission is right where you jumped in - the only way your getting out is through your enemy. You also know that this mission is worth over half a billion nic if you can hold the field and bring in the miners. A new battle arena has been created and its time to see who can kick ***.
The enemy is already jumping in miners. They have done their own scan and can see there is Epi here but know as soon as the mission gets handed in the location ID changes and theres only a way out and not a way in - they dont want to win the fight and lose the epi.
Now tell me .. does that sound more like fun PVE or not?
For this the devs would need to:
>Make 9 small islands and populate them with decoration and red spawns
Give each of these islands a server location which changes after each mission
>Allow beacons to be able to put an ID in to jump to a server location
>Change the mission description
>Once you have your 9 islands copy them a hundred times making some PvP capable, some have epi, some have star beacon style rats etc
To me that doesn't sound a lot of work - god knows you could spoend a lot of time making many different island types and making them look awesome but barebones islands that can be improved over time to start is fine.