Agent qualities and mission hubs (CSM)

Stats

• Raised by: Tusko_Hopkins
• Submission Date: 2009/01/02
• Issue ID:

Summary

Agent qualities have been in game since agents were introduced. They are supposed to represent a kind of "minor ladder" while climbing the standing tree, to fill in the gap between level n and level n+1 agents. Unfortunately, this ladder is pretty short. Most players overcome lower quality agents very quickly, and as there is always a "highest quality" level 4 agent, all the agent runners are flocking to these, creating massive mission hubs.

The entire philosophy of agent quality should be revisited, or at least discussed between CSM and CCP.

Solutions worth mentioning

There are several ideas about how to tackle this crowding problem.

Remove agent qualities alltogether

This is a quick and dirty solution but might do the trick. With all agents of a given level having the same quality (e.g. no quality at all) will discourage players from ramming the same systems all the time and they would spread out nicely all around empire space.

Pros

• removes mission hubs

Cons

• Less variety of the game
• Might discourage mission running in lowsec even more

Make agent quality dynamic

The idea here is to make each agent's quality change over time. A factor for example could be the number of missions ran in the last 24/48/168 hours. This would result in a simple "supply and demand system": agents needs their missions to be completed, need players to do that, so if there are no players around, they increase the mission rewards accordingly to lure more players. If there are lots of players doing missions, he can lower the price as there will be people doing it anyways.

Pros

• removes mission hubs
• makes people fly around a lot
• might solve the low sec problem partially, as rewards there would naturally grow higher

Cons

• makes people fly around a lot

Cap maximum agent quality based on system's security level

Put a cap on the maximum agent quality based on the agent's level and the system security level. For example level agents:

• system > 0.6 quality up to +5
• system > 0.5 quality up to +15
• system > 0.4 systems quality up to max

Pros

• helps lowsec
• May help against overcrowding a little bit

Cons

• Pilots would just flock to 0.5 systems. No real solution at all.
• Does not really solve clogging

Relevant Forum Threads

• http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=777841
• http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=940182
• http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=661549