Fuck level 4's

[lac]

To be honest I haven't noticed any difference in l4 missions

The last change was when they buffed their ew I think.

[Reg]

EDIT: Also, if it wasn't risky to you how come you aren't out doing it? Is it because the enjoyment of Level 4 missions? Cause, if you enjoyed it I'd understand. If not, you are scared to take the RISK of losing your ship...plain and simple.

I make all the money I could ever possibly need building stuff and selling it rich mission runners. I'm not real interested in taking a pay cut. And golly I sure wouldn't want to lose my internet space ship!

[Murgos]

EDIT: Also, if it wasn't risky to you how come you aren't out doing it? Is it because the enjoyment of Level 4 missions? Cause, if you enjoyed it I'd understand. If not, you are scared to take the RISK of losing your ship...plain and simple.

I make all the money I could ever possibly need building stuff and selling it rich mission runners. I'm not real interested in taking a pay cut. And golly I sure wouldn't want to lose my internet space ship!

You're both retarded, ice mining is obviously the only truly rewarding profession in Eve.

[Reg]

Well that's true of course but ice mining is only for the bravest of the brave. :)

[Murgos]

Well that's true of course but ice mining is only for the bravest of the brave. :)

[Hoax]

Fuck running missions either way, I'm pretty sure nobody is going to say "zomg mission running is great and fun!" because that would be utter bullshit.  Hisec mission runnung and hisec mining are the only two ways to play eve where it plays like every single other boring ass diku pos mmo in existence if that is all you want to spend your time doing?  I just don't get it.  Not saying there aren't people that end up playing like that, but I just don't get it.

It is also a low risk way to make the isk to do other shit, so making it ball crushingly hard to do is not cool either.  There is nothing wrong with it not being cakewalk though.  You don't need to grind up that much isk before you can branch out and go after other income revenue streams.

People who can't step outside their comfort zone and run L4's 24/7 in faction fitted Ravens?  I say that they are the sheep and we are working towards being the wolves.  Gogo cov ops pilots and whatnot, wardec'ing these stupid rich mofo's is going to be interesting because you know they wont take it lying down or else they are inviting wardecs from everyone else.  Either that or they are going to be forced to run to alliances, mercs, switch corps (ala those miners in Niya) to avoid us.  But no matter what it'll be a fuckton more interesting and fun then being one of those guys.

[tazelbain]

In any case, the loss of high sec agents will directly translate into a loss of playerbase.  A majority of the EVE players are looking for PVE, and they'll lose those people.

True.  That seems anti-thetical to EVE's position as the leading PvP game with the bulk of its players avoiding PvP.  It think dovetails nicely with the market trend of "Carebear Intregation" as the primary issue for the PvP market.

[ajax34i]

Hisec mission runnung and hisec mining are the only two ways to play eve where it plays like every single other boring ass diku pos mmo in existence if that is all you want to spend your time doing?  I just don't get it.  Not saying there aren't people that end up playing like that, but I just don't get it.

I don't want to perpetuate the flaming here, but any single activity in EVE is boring and pointless if done endlessly.  For me, high sec mining is for when I want to be afk, and high sec mission running is for when I'm tired from work and am looking for some mindless blowing of stuff up, and absolutely not looking for adrenaline, stress, or being required to pay attention too much.

EDIT: to clarify, nerfs to risk-free mission-running wouldn't irk me because there's less income, they would irk me because they'd be taking away my options for absolutely mindless wasting of time, which I want to do now and then.

[TheDreamr]

What the fuck is wrong with me, I used to solo these things half afk in my raven, now I'm having to warp out 2-4 times per group of mobs.

There has got to be an alternative to the x-large booster+amp+3 hards+t2 LE setup, I know for a fact it's not what I ran before (shitty booster skills) and I don't fucking like it at all.  Someone HALP!

Something changed at/around the introduction of Trinity afaik - I think the damage has been tweaked a little, but I'm finding the biggest problems come from my own mistakes with regards to triggering additional waves of ships -- I rarely have a problem with the initial spawns, every time I have a problem it's with additional waves of ships and one of three things...


1) Mass Reinforcements - it's all too easy to trigger an additional wave / waves of ships by blindly shooting, and in some cases it seems like CCP have gone out of their way to make the most irritating targets the trigger; destroyers, interceptors, that kind of thing - so as you go for the easy / safety kills you get more ships dropped on you.

I'm pretty sure that triggering the secondary waves too early within "The assault" was one of the few missions where the normally solid perma-tank of my ship and a friend's basically crumbled under the combined fire & jamming from around a dozen battleships + support.    From what I'm told "Recon" also has a similar reputation with players not expecting so much support to appear on timed triggers.


2) Positioning - even when you're tapping the triggers sensibly it's still possible to screw yourself up by being too close to where the reinforcements arrive, basically leaving you to take wide-spectrum damage (angels & mercenaries) from a large number of ships who have you nicely in optimal for their guns ... and hey that nice frigate just webbed you, making it almost impossible to manouver evasively.

Case in point "Stop the Thief" - without moving too far I cleared the initial rats, triggered the second wave cleanly ... they promptly warped in on top of me and commenced firing, within 5 seconds I'm also webbed, making defensive manouvering impossible.  Fight was very close, with it only turning around as I was fighting to keep my shields at 10%.

Same mission a few days later, assumed the cliched Caldari stand-off position rather than being lazy and staying in close and took out the second wave at range without dipping below 98% shields.


3) Shooting stupid - same mission as above; my natural instinct is to kill the tackling frigates as they're webbing me, which I do eventually but it takes longer than I anticipated during which time I'm not taking out the damage dealers.

In retrospect it seemed the the smarter move would have been to target the cruisers (dealing EM, thus eating my shields) over the frigates -- the non-cruiser damage was tankable and being webbed while taking tankable damage worries me a lot less.

[lac]

high sec mining is for when I want to be afk, and high sec mission running is for when I'm tired from work and am looking for some mindless blowing of stuff up

too true 

Pirating in low sec is a lot of fun but I can't take too much standing hits. Having to run missions for a week just to recover your lost sec rating is quite a downer.

[ajax34i]

I'd be ok with them making sec standing revert back to normal when idle, TBH.  Exponential curve, so that if you're at -10 it goes to -9 and down fast, but if you're at -1 it goes to 0 very slowly.  Similar for positive sec standing.  And yes, I realize that those with a "perfect" -10 will hate losing their badge of honor, but, shrug, work for it!

[Kamen]

Pirating in low sec is a lot of fun but I can't take too much standing hits. Having to run missions for a week just to recover your lost sec rating is quite a downer.

Which is why my pirate character has a -10 sec status  

[Hoax]

Hisec mission runnung and hisec mining are the only two ways to play eve where it plays like every single other boring ass diku pos mmo in existence if that is all you want to spend your time doing?  I just don't get it.  Not saying there aren't people that end up playing like that, but I just don't get it.

[JoeTF]

Apparently they are killing mission runners in high sec 

Sorry for hijack, but I cannot stop laughing.
Chow and his "yeah, we're leaving you in a middle of a shitstorm but we will be fighting alongside you like brothers, till the end, promise, promise promise!" post on BoB forums. And people were surprised why some of us had unfavorable view on whole splintering thing.

I'd be ok with them making sec standing revert back to normal when idle, TBH.  Exponential curve, so that if you're at -10 it goes to -9 and down fast, but if you're at -1 it goes to 0 very slowly.  Similar for positive sec standing.  And yes, I realize that those with a "perfect" -10 will hate losing their badge of honor, but, shrug, work for it!

Ekhm. EKHM. You want to remove only real drawback to piracy and lag the game more?

On general note. Every fucking mmo needs a large base of PvE enthusiasts to fuel the PvP crowd. 92% EVE players are high sec dwellers. They like it there. They want to play Elite/X-wing Online and not some "retarded" play2crush metagame. They don't flame us 0.0 dwellers for doing pew pew, what right do we have to flame them for their carebear ways?

[Slayerik]

Cause they are pussies? ;)


You know what's pretty sweet about this game? The sheer amount of carebear options you have. Exploration, ratting, invention, trading, delivery, missions, mining, moon mining, building,research...and non carebear stuff like piracy, griefing, ganking hi sec, suiciding haulers, scanning and suiciding rich carebears, scamming, corp theft, ore theft.....

I wanna give a big 'Fuck yeah' for sandbox games.

[Hoax]

I have to say that I think that Security Status is something they need to take a much closer look at.  I have the following issues with it.

-stealing in hisec should give some sort of standing hit.  Not a big one, but something.
-getting your standing back up from -.5 or lower should be hellsa harder.
-traveling in a pod as a -.5 or lower should incur way more risk.
-taking sec hits when you are lawful or neutral should be less drastic.
-make bounties work.

[Tige]

Knowledge is power, or something like that.

http://ccp.vo.llnwd.net/o2/pdf/QEN_Q4-2007.pdf


For the purpose of this thread,  see Page 5, Table 2.

[K9]

Knowledge is power, or something like that.

http://ccp.vo.llnwd.net/o2/pdf/QEN_Q4-2007.pdf


For the purpose of this thread,  see Page 5, Table 2.

This is only further convincing me that CCP managed to do something quite special with EVE.

[Phildo]

Great call in the Ice Pirates pic, Murgos!  I tried to give Tragny a hard time over that movie a few days ago and it seems no one else has even heard of it!

[amiable]

Great call in the Ice Pirates pic, Murgos!  I tried to give Tragny a hard time over that movie a few days ago and it seems no one else has even heard of it!

Is the guy on the far right Jane from Firefly?

[ajax34i]

No, the guy on the far right is Ron Perlman; Jayne from Firefly was Adam Baldwin.

[Tige]

This is only further convincing me that CCP managed to do something quite special with EVE.

I agree.  The thing that jumps out at me here is CCP went and actually got an economist, something I wish more developers would do.  Watching development of games for years it is comical to watch many developers who view themselves as experts on everything. 

[Endie]

To be honest I haven't noticed any difference in l4 missions. I have only run them for sec status gains recently.

I agree with this: you just need to tailor your setup a little for certain missions.  I'm saving hard for capitals, and am running L4s at a tedious rate, and have only had one "oh shit" moment in thirty or so of them.

[Phred]

Level 4's being harder than they used to be isn't a result of CCP hating empire dwellers, it's a result of them being exactly what you said they were - stupidly easy to solo.

The reward for doing them is pretty damn good for beginning/intermediate players, and they are still easy to do as long as you set up a racial specific tank.

Try starting a new player and doing missions now. They are tough enough to chase someone out of the game real fast once you breeze through the 10 tutorial missions.

[Merusk]

Try starting a new player and doing missions now. They are tough enough to chase someone out of the game real fast once you breeze through the 10 tutorial missions.

Was that you having all the trouble yesterday, Phred?   Man I felt bad for you.  Did it wind-up getting better with a different ship?

[Endie]

Try starting a new player and doing missions now. They are tough enough to chase someone out of the game real fast once you breeze through the 10 tutorial missions.

I really don't agree with this.  I started a clean mission-running character for certain purposes recently and immediately went to lowsec to run my level 1s (you never get ganked in quiet L1 mission minmatar lowsec systems and the money per hour is better than highsec L2s) and breezed through them.  That was in a merlin, so I can't speak about other frigates.

[Phred]

Try starting a new player and doing missions now. They are tough enough to chase someone out of the game real fast once you breeze through the 10 tutorial missions.

Was that you having all the trouble yesterday, Phred?   Man I felt bad for you.  Did it wind-up getting better with a different ship?

Ya that was me. It sort of got better, if I spend a lot of time tracking down and picking off stragglers. If I can reduce the groups to 3 or so I can usually survive long enough to take one out before they down me. Can I fit any of these armor resist modules on a frigate?

The difference between a normal mission and one of the 10 tutorial missions is night and day though. In the tutorial ones they barely scratched me, now 4-5 shots rips me to shreds. I've lost a few ships today thanks to jump to 0's not responding fast enough.

[ajax34i]

The problem with missions is that what mission you get is random.  And, at each agent level, they have some that are easier, and some that require support skills to be in order, and a proper ship setup.  And the problem is that the 1-day-old newbie who's just gotten into the top combat frigate that the tutorial missions give might get hit with a L1 mission involving waves and T2 npcs, and get killed, on the first day. 

There is no ramp-up.  They should have something like a 2 week period where the agent doesn't give the harder missions.  Or, better yet, frequency of easy vs. hard missions should depend on your standings, so that the difficulty ramps up naturally as you progress.

[Endie]

While I stick to my guns in saying that I found L1s no more challenging than before (less so, now that Worlds Collide has been nerfed) i think that there is a problem in CCP's design of missions in general.

If you do the research on what to fit for a given mission and enemy, and are able to find out what the triggers are, then the missions are eminently doable.  If you are a new player without yet having discovered how to access to that information, or are of the "explorer" archetype who prefers to find out for yourself, then you can find yourself eminently frustrated, or even just plain dead.

Clearly, CCP have to satisfy advanced players who want a challenge, and also new players who are starting out, while only having six gradations from tutorial to L5, where the bell curve shows almost everyone is at levels 3 and 4 for almost all of the time.  Old MMO story: you have to assume that everyone is reading the Cliff Notes, or else the ones that are will walk it.

[Murgos]

The newbie ship sucks.  You have to get out of it ASAP.  Really, for Gallente frigs the most survivable one, for a low skill char, is the Tristan.  Even then I managed to lose one when I was a day or two old in a mission.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that there is so much to know to be effective, just minor differences in fitting can be drastic in terms of survival.  I cringe thinking of the newbies with their brand new tier 1 frigate armed up with civvy reppers and guns wondering why rats they wtfpwnd in the tutorials are eating their lunch and giving them swirlies in real missions.

[ajax34i]

It's not like that anymore, though, Murgos.  They actually give you a tier 1 frigate, then a tier 2 frigate, as well as the good frigate weapons, as part of the 10 tutorial missions.  And you definitely have the money to insure and fully fit it by the time you're done with the 10th mission.  It's just that your skills suck (Engineering 2, Electronics 2, Navigation 2, Afterburners 1) and you can't really fit a proper tank on it (and I'm talking "proper" and "tank" for a frigate), and you get killed.

[bhodi]

The problem is that you need to be able to put basic hardeners on your ship to be able to do missions like worlds collide, and missions like recon are still going to kill you if you didn't pay attention.

It's pretty unfriendly to newbies. I ended up burning straight into cruisers because I *knew* how bad the newbie frigate experience was from a previous trial.

I pretty much recommend everyone get into cruisers if they are a newbie, then you have some leeway to figure out the game before it kicks your balls in.

[Murgos]

Meh, I'm a month and a week old.  My experience, last month, was fairly successful but that comes from being an anal fucking bastard when it comes to scouring boards for info and then doing the work to figure out whats real and what's board bullshit.

Without the time investment for research and the 10 million Slayer fronted me (thanks again btw) I probably would have been far less happy with this game.

[Slayerik]

No prob man, ill give Phred the same if I havent yet.  kinda lose track of my donations...

[Numtini]

The problem is that you need to be able to put basic hardeners on your ship to be able to do missions like worlds collide, and missions like recon are still going to kill you if you didn't pay attention.

The big thing I think is some of those missions, and recon comes to mind, will kill you unless you've read the cheat notes for it and set up specifically for it.