no this time i tried to infinity loop ...

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.

For the love of *** at least spell it right.

A thousand metre island could be made in a couple of hours with the old terraform engine. Then you would just add some cosmetic *** and and put some permanent artefacts there that come up with big npc spawns. Mix it with some static spawns. Hey presto you have a decent mission island.

Make 10 of them and add 2 more a week for the next three months and your cooking.

Add the basics of cosmetics and the mechanics to make small terraform islands and get the player base to make them for you (and get the mission named after them as thanks) and you will have great missions in a few months.

Weird thing is that could be done with virtually no extra coding

It won't work. It's been tried. They don't listen and what they do change they roll back.

There have been a few round tables done and in the begining if the game there was a group of players who had Skype meetings to talk about direction and changes to be made.

In the end like most things it was stopped because certain entities cried about Dev access and secret Skype conversations. In retrospect I thought that these conversations were useful, however do believe the transcript should have been public.

The forums are a bad way to form game ideas simply because not everyone in game knows what they talk about. There are probably 6 or 7 people in game who understand gamma and I don't count myself among them. There are probably the same number who understand economics. To add to that some people in game will always look at changes through a prism of 'will this hurt me' and / or 'is this what my enemy wants'. You can't reason these people, they will fundamentally disagree because of who suggests it. A round table tends to cut through that bullshit - the last gamma round table was a good example of previously polar opposite parties largely agreeing and getting on fine. There was no bitterness or recriminations at all.

What's important however is a wide view. This game has dwindled for four years while,largely doing what it's player base asks for. They have screamed for endgame content because they are endgame and it has not alleviated any of the issues. What the players want May not even be helpful any more considering they are like 1% of what a healthy games population should look like.

Yeah I think so, if the turns lasted a specific amount of time

finally we get to the point. I agree with you wholeheartedly .. now what do we do about that?

there you go.

But in all honesty stations are a small part of the problem. It takes like two people to scout the entire of beta currently and sparks allow you to be anywhere.

Even if you removed both detectors and sparks and made all the outposts open it still wouldn't make a difference - without four of five entities in the game they would just be permacamped anyway.

What we have in place currently is endgame mechanics when the population isn't in place to support endgame gameplay.

It's always going to be impossible for the second most powerful entity and below to take the most powerful entity unless they are both very finely balanced. The game needs to make full beta control as close to impossible as possible. I think making you take your own saps to prevent decreases in stability would be a good start.

Really stations are only half the issue though. Detectors and sparks make you able to respond anywhere you want anyway (and thats before we get in to alts).