Look at the most popular form of PVE and realize that at the high levels it doesn't lend itself to low sec risks. The traditional battleship grinding level 4 missions is easy meat In low-sec. Adding Low-sec specific missons as part of a cops vs robbers story should take this into account.
Posiibilities include
- special mission keys that let you sneak in the back door, while pirates who'd want to warp in and kill the mission runner would have to grind their way through the heavily defense front door.
- missions designed to be runnable by multiple frigate sized ships cooperating. The gallente storyline missions are an accidental example of this wher one pilot could distract the guards and pull them off station while the second pilot warped in and killed the undefended freighters.
(was thinking that there's maybe scope for specialst missions designed for specific t2 frigate classes) cooperation between pilots is the real secret to success in hostile territory and the aller sig radius makes it harder for random pirates to disrupt their mission activity.
- deadspace dampening reduces scan signature, making random pirate scans hard
- better npc ai that actually have a chance of switching targets to other players in the mission space
- borrowing from the pirate codes again - as part of sme pvp activity you may be given, or have to acquire by other means, codes which make the automated defenses ignore your ship. But these defenses would still target pirates.
- fix the overview setting editor so it can be set to display (and thus scan for) probes only
Comments (5)
The biggest problem I have with missions is that surviving the gank (scout, scan, be aligned etc) only solves half the problem. You still have an unfinished mission, that you nave to complete or fail. If pirates sit in my mission pocket for 15 minutes after chasing me out, they've halved my Isk/hr. I'm back to earning more in highsec.
I'm not overly worried about losing ships in lowsec. I'm worried about losing time.
If you could fail a certain number of lowsec missions per day without losing standings, that would help a lot.
Agree with the comment above about being able to time out/fail missions without losing standing. FW agents follow a 1 mission declined per 4 hour rule with no standing loss, along with no penalty for non-completion. Using the same mechanics for all low-sec missions just makes sense.
"borrowing from the pirate codes again - as part of sme pvp activity you may be given, or have to acquire by other means, codes which make the automated defenses ignore your ship. But these defenses would still target pirates"
I like this, makes sense also. And evens the score a bit, not much, but a bit. The time thing can't be helped I'm afraid.
Good ideas here so I gave it an agreement. Of course, the fw missions already work quite well in low sec. Thats why I proposed they be expanded outside of fw in low sec. FW style missions are a ready made fix for the problems you correctly identify.
I liked the idea that showed up in Mynxees forum thread a lot. Allow only a limited number uses per time for the mission gates.
One could either limit this to non gang-members of the mission taker or as well overall.
I have no exact idea on the numbers here, but if maybe the acc-gate allowed only one pilot every minute and one made sure that everybody who uses it lands next to something (gets uncloaked when entering the pocket), ganking would be a lot harder while giving the mission runner the feeling he has a chance to kill or tank the intruder.
And i agree, agents in lowsec should really get used to people failing their mission and not get angry about it.
Overall it is my opinion that pirates need targets and targets only show up if they feel they have a chance to survive (and that they could have done something better if they didnt survive this time)