Artifact hunting?

Not to be offensive but its who your doing it with. I'd your online later I'll take you through some other higher end stuff.

Of course, you just need to have a look at the content outside of missions such as beacons, artifacting and high level rat spawns.

The best way to do this is do something on a casual basis with us and armed with that knowledge you can enjoy more of the game solo.

Tbh, high level rat spawns, beacons, and even artie huntie doesn't decline the fact that there is lack of pve content. You might try and look for storyline missions if they are still exist, those are interesting at least.

Generally very good summary of existing problems with missions. I hope devs are paying very close attention to this thread as it will replicate significantly with Steam.

As for Jita's mention of alternative PVE with beacons, I'm thinking that Dev's new NPC teleporting AI may be pre-mature. Given that Missions are generally broken, is it really a good idea to take away the beacon farming alternative? I'm all for improved AI and the pit is a broken feature, but it may be more appropriate to 'fix' with the improved missions. Whatever though, do whatever you gonna do Devs.

This is kind of the problem.

New players will immediately turn to "quests" since most are trained to do this in other games, and attempt to use those as the main source of progression.

Assignments, at least to me, are just something to stack on to what im already doing, or if I feel the need to get tokens...nothing more.

If im going to mine an ore, and theres an assignment, why not?  Even if I park there for several hours.  Other than that, theres not much point to them.

Problem with a game like this, really any hardcore sandbox...metagame, diplomacy, corporations...that's the game...the rest is just grind/farming...

I feel new players are going to get the idea that they can spam assignments as a good way to progress...when they would probably be much better off just going off and farming stuff until their eyes bleed, get into a corporation to give reason for their efforts...and not even attempt to ease them in with assignments.

Im not sure what would be a better option for them.  Its going to be brutal when this goes live on steam and people pay $30 thinking they are getting a robot world of warcraft and end up with roboEVE.

Do assignments because you want beacons or ammo bought with tokens...or just want to have rewards....at least after your immediate entry into the game where that tiny amount of nic and guidance is needed.  Don't worry about relations or progressing with PVE factions.  Get into a corp, get some reasons to do stuff, then go do it...pick an assignment up if its convenient.

Not necessarily a bad thing, and it's what players expect from the genre. Besides, even EVE has a myriad of PVE stuff to work through, well before players hit limits (in EVE's case, arguably having skill training take longer than 7-15 minutes to use required equipment).

As far as assignments and the game's design in general; it's one of the game's biggest faults: assuming that players will group up whenever a challenge (which usually can be attributed to poor game design, like your example with the kill circles) is presented to them. On top of that, picking up groups is hard (the 'pug experience'), even within corporations, and the rewards are abysmal.

This game does need a good collection of carefully planned and tested solo content to keep players long enough and get them invested in their character and equipment. That's when they'll have something to loose and the sandbox to help them loose it.