While I was sitting in a mission hub last night waiting for one of my modules to activate I had an idea. Everywhere on the forums and in local you can see people complaining about the lag in the big level 4 mission hubs. Aside from spreading the high-sec level four agents around a bit (they do seem all clumped together) the most common suggestion is to move all of the level 4 mission agents to low sec space and let the pirates remove the problem for us.
In my opinion that is a bit extreme, but here's my basic idea:
Allow players to 'war dec' a mission agent and by association everyone currently running missions for that agent. I can see the flames already, but let me press on and try to flesh out my idea.
First we need a fancy new name, lets call this a 'vendetta'. Now we have some options.
1) We could make it work very much like a war dec mechanic, with a corp having to pay a fee (bribe) to declare a vendetta. Then after some time the corp is allowed to shoot anyone running missions for that agent.
2) We could make it work more like an aggression timer. An individual pays a bribe to concorde and gets an aggression flag for everyone running missions for that agent.
In the first case, the fee's should be high, something like dec'ing an alliance. Say 50M for a week. And with 24 hours before the fighting starts.
For the second case the fee should be lower, say 1M for a 15 min aggression flag (and you could give a 2M bribe for 30 min etc).
The Balance Some things to keep the pirates from completely taking over
- Anyone running for an agent with a vendetta is obviously free to attack back (or first)
- You only are paying off concord, not the faction. So station guns WILL attack anyone who's declared a vendetta on their agents. If you have a vendetta against a caldari navy agent, all guns belonging to caldari navy will fire upon you. This will keep people from just camping the station
- Declaring a vendetta will cause loss of agent standings (corp/faction too?)
- You can only declare vendetta's on high level agents. Level 4's and up, or maybe level 3's and up. This lets the new player actually fly missions.
- Add a new dialog to an agent conversation along the lines of "Are there any active vendettas against you?". The agent will list them and give you the option of running a 'vendetta mission' where your task is simply to kill anyone with a vendetta against the agent. You're now a mission runner so both of you are targets to each other
Why?The biggest high-sec mission hubs will be the biggest targets. This will cause people to find less used agents without 'forcing' them to do so (like you would if you just move all level 4 agents to low sec). This should help 'load balance' the population and lead to less lag.
It adds some more pvp into the game too, just like war-decs.
It provides npc-corp players who are running missions with a bit of risk *cough* macros *cough*.
Now I know people will complain that it will ruin mission running totally, but we can already do this to some extent. Even now, in a mission hub you only have to scan down a mission runner and go steal thier loot and salvage their wrecks to ruin their profit. This is almost the same, it just lets the pirate shoot first if they paid a bribe (and lets the missioner shoot freely too if they want).
I'm sure this will destroy eve as we know it, so please let me know why you think it will. (or if you have constructive thoughts, those are welcome too)
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