Teach a man to fish… (blog banter 13)

Welcome to the thirteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

The first banter of this 2nd year of EVE Blog Banters comes to us fromZargyl from A Sebiestor Scholar, who asked the following: On the EVE Fanfest 2009 page are pictures of prizes for the Silent Auction that was held during the event. One of these photos was entitled “Design your own EVE mission”. My question now would be what kind of mission would you write if you got that prize? What would the mission be about? Would it be one using the new system of epic mission arks? What would be the story told by it? Feel free to expand upon his questions and put together your very own mission!

I have to admit something that I’m sure will resonate with most of you: I think the missions in eve are bloody boring.  Not to say that Eve doesn’t have an interesting story with dynamic factions, etc.  but like most MMOs I’ve played, the missions/quests are a means to an end:  ISK or the odd implant.  (In other games the quests are means to leveling.)  I don’t know that letting me write my own text for a mission is the solution to making them interesting.

One of the most interesting ways I’ve made ISK in Eve was during an ice mining op for Dirt Nap Squad.  We were all sitting in vent drinking and someone was asking trivia questions, you’d X up in fleet chat to buzz in and the first to answer correctly got a million ISK from the corp wallet.

Instead of writing a one-off mission, I’d like to see an addition to the contract system that lets people write their own missions all the time.  For example:

  • Corporation A has declares war on Corporation B.
  • The CEO of Corp A decides that every 5 war targets killed should be rewarded with 10 million ISK.
      Targets should be able to be set by pilot, corp, alliance, or standing. (see also: fixing the bounty system)
  • He sets up a corp mission with associated text and becomes an “agent” in stations for corp members offering them this mission.
      The CEO, or issuing party would become available as an “agent” in stations for the audience of the mission: pilot, Corp, FFA, Alliance, etc.
  • Corp member Z sees this mission available, accepts it and decides to get a group of corp-mates to go hunting for the enemy.
      One would hope that these would become good incentives for corp-members to step up and lead groups, etc without the “leadership” having to do it all.
  • The fleet kills 6 war targets that night and each member who accepted the quest is rewarded with 10 million ISK when they return to the station.
      This is all done without the need for the CEO to be bothered by each pilot in that fleet asking for their 10 million ISK.

Clearly the game would need to be told how many times you’d be willing to pay this 10 million ISK reward so that it can subtract the amount from your (or the corp’s) wallet and hold it in escrow. It seems pretty popular to run a corp/alliance campaign for a pre-determined amount of time and then reward the people with the most kills, veldspar, exotic dancers, etc. for the time limit. This mission-writing functionality could be expanded on to provide a baked-in solution to running campaigns.

Imagine the application for things like races.  You could set it up to be offered from 12:00 ET to 12:05 ET and the first person to touch all the beacons (or maybe take an item from a can at each waypoint?) and return to the station is the only one who gets the reward.

For people who aren’t interested in doing corp/alliance missions you should have the option to create “free for all” missions of a similar type.  Players would need to meet the criteria put out by the writer and then receive some sort of reward.  It wouldn’t always have to be monetary—perhaps medals, ships, spirits, or other flavor items could be offered.  The reward would always need to be put up by the writer to prevent people from writing missions that reward trillions of ISK or Titans.  City of Heroes ran into these sorts of problems with their mission architect system.  I’ve been playing a lot of Little Big Planet lately and a lot of the user-created levels are made just to give people trophies or achievements.

I think a system like this would do a lot to increase the draw of missions, but to also deepen the sandbox experience that we love Eve for.

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