L1fe3looD wrote:Not that I'm against the fact that the company needs money to survive, I realize there are responsibilities and I would certainly want the people who make this game possible to get a great pay day, but it's not just about money. the moment you start making a game for profit alone, it's simply dead. What you're asking for in this paragraph is essentially your standard mmo, with no consequences, no REAL skill, and no intelligence required.
Wraithbane is right: it is foolish to ask PvE players to get more involved in PvP- you'll lose plenty of people if you do.
If you're interested in keeping the PvE players, the trick is to make them relevant to the game without forcing them to play in a fashion they don't want. At the moment, the game clearly favors PvPers: you can mine, research, and build fairly well with almost all of your EP spent in PvP extensions, but the reverse is not true.
Why not introduce some more complexity, but frame it in a way that PvPers and PvEers must rely on each other? It already exists in the form of epitron and high-end kernels but the dynamic is imbalanced: an industrialist cannot obtain these things without a PvPer's help, but there's nothing an industrialist can do that a PvPer can't (sure, with less efficiency, but the point remains).
What if we reversed that equation, and introduced some gear or mods that only a dedicated industrialist could make? Corps would be forced either to create/recruit dedicated industrialists (the mediocre solution), or engage in actual business transactions with them (the smarter choice).
Obviously, from the PvE side, the EP system is not sufficient for differentiating skills. Perhaps some additional mechanic is necessary- maybe an experience-based system, where miners can only gather certain resources after they've harvested one million units, or manufacturers can make T5 goodies only after building 1000 assault bots. The idea here is to make some things exclusive to the PvE side, where a PvPers alts are ok for gathering basics, but the real rewards only come to those who invest the time and resources.
L1fe3looD wrote:It doesn't matter how advanced "AI" will get, because it's still a program, and it's never truly random. The only thing that can make PVE truly challenging is the randomness that comes from other players possibly helping/ruining/stealing/killing/changing the field of play.
This is a pretty narrow-minded understanding of "challenge." If the game introduced a few economic systems, such as interconnected markets, or a stock exchange, there would be a new level of complexity, and successful players and corps would have to meet the challenges of long-term planning and diplomacy.
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