In all honesty even if we set said districts to pump out a set amount of ISK gear over a set timer with PvE missions run every Hour that would honestly make being a PvE, Manufacturing corp worth while.

Well, the reason I said aurum gear is that isk gear can be got just by getting the profits from selling clones on a district - aurum gear is more valuable and can't be gotten any other way without paying real money. It also wouldn't have a huge impact on CCPs aurum sales because you have no control over what you get, hence the random gear production.

I've been mentioning lately how desperately new gameplay is needed and then last night had a bit of a brainwave as to one way this could be done:

All districts have the option to become mining/manufacturing districts. You have to buy a new SI to do so but when you do your district now produces a daily amount of random aurum gear that goes directly into your corp armoury (yes, corp armouries would be needed for this too CCP!). The value of this aurum gear would obviously have to be reasonable and tweaked accordingly.

Since your corp is now gaining valuable gear, the value gained by producing clones should either be totally nullified or at least reduced. Initially, it could set that manufacturing districts only produce 40 clones per day instead of the 80 on other districts - future iterations could introduce an adjustable mechanism that allows you to reduce the clone output all the way to 0 in order to make more gear.

You could run PVE missions on these districts once an hour every day and success increases the amount of gear produced. My thoughts for this are that there are automated mining vehicles on the surface that randomly go around drilling for ore and minerals and stuff to take back to the refinery/manufacturing plant place. If you don't run the PVE mission, they just pick up the base amount but if you run a mission, your scanners (passive and active) now can detect where large ore/mineral deposits are and you can explore to find them and mark them for the harvester vehicles to locate. As well as slightly increasing the gear output for your corp, each player in the mission would gain some aurum loot and an isk reward.

These districts could be fought over in the typical PC fashion and only conquerable in the RT set corp battles. However, and this is where the real fun begins, if your district has a manufacturing SI, it can be raided by anyone at any time without warning (a notification could be sent out when the attackers load into the warbarge). This attack has no chance of conquering the district and does not affect clone count or clone production These raids also cost nothing to perform and do not require corps to have a district nor clones to attack with. In line with the PVE missions, a raid can only happen once an hour on each district.

In the raid 2 thing can happen:
1) The attackers can either work on hacking the storage areas to gain all of the gear that would have been produced in that hour (1/23rd of the daily total [manufacturing can't occur during the RT because of risk of attack])
or 2) The attackers can destroy the harvester vehicles and stop all manufacturing on the district until the harvesters can be reinforced at the next RT.

The really interesting bit of this comes when you say that a raid can be launched while players are doing the harvesting PVE mission and also that when a raid is launched, players from the defending corp can go down to defend against the raiders. In these situations the battles are winner takes all - if you don't win, you get nothing, like in PC battles.

Manufacturing districts would have really ramped up automated defenses - i.e. installations and hopefully drones; and the harvester vehicles would have an absolute tonne of eHP and decent automated anti infantry and anti vehicle turrets that only fire after being fired upon.

Further down the line we could have the ability for corps to purchase more and/or stronger defenses for their districts and more efficient or greater numbers of harvesters for better mining. In the distant future, when we have a full Eve link, the could even be mining only districts that produce ore/minerals to sell to Eve players.

The benefits of this system are numerous:
- it gives us some PVE, both offensive and exploratory
- smaller corps can get at least a little involved with PC
- it sets a great foundation for future iterations
- stealing stuff from the top corps while they aren't there would be really cool!

All Industry needs to be done by EVE.

If people are worried about this game losing players now, try and consider what would happen if shooter players had to start worrying about producing the guns they use.

All Industry needs to be done by EVE.

If people are worried about this game losing players now, try and consider what would happen if shooter players had to start worrying about producing the guns they use.

You would essentially mean exlusive named sort of gear right? They kind you only get by participating in this kind of thing.

Right now if you do the math, unless you are fighting less than once a week or something, the isk you make from clones doesn't compare to what a good corp can make from public matches.

Nah, I mean just normal aurum gear that you can buy with aurum on the market. If it was isk gear, there'd just be no point but aurum gear is more incentivising. Making it special stuff you can only get from this activity would mean that only a handful of corps would have access to it and that would be bad.

The manufacturing might need to be heavily EVE side, but I believe there should be mining in Dust for the resources to produce items. Also, there are players in EVE who have never manufactured an item and yet are never in want of ships or equipment. Some people enjoy logging in to create items and make money, I imagine Dust would have similar types of players.

What I'd love to see is station shootouts... In null sec I mean. Instead of having ships kill off the services, have Dusties run in and obliterate the opposing Alliance. Then if/when they win, station changes hands after battle automatically so no ransom crap happens lol. Same as POS shoots... I hate POS shooting in me carrier. Haven't got Dread skilled yet...

I don't like the idea of the SI churning up AUR items, it would be bad for CCP financially. I do love the idea of raiding other corps for their resources.

You would need to rethink the game mode where you can destroy the manufacturing gear for the entire day. Think of the fun the EU peeps and Australians would have crashing all of the USTZ districts manufacturing. Every. Single. Day. Or the opposite. Allowing that functionality would essentially make it untenable. Perhaps there could be a single daily timer for that mode to happen and it would start 1 hour after RT.

Also, would this mode require the use of clones? This is taking place on PC districts....kind of sounds like someplace to introduce different tiers of clones.

Finally, I doubt we will get any sort of PvE until probably the December patch at the earliest. Foxfour bashed some other game mode ideas mostly due to the amount of code time and development that needs to go into them. Not saying your idea isn't a good one. Just that it'll be a while.

Exactly. Make it some unique items (rare) as in some officer gear, and just random ISK gear. Or just planetary resources, raw mineral and the like that can be sold for ISK. Incentive to get that is just fine. I always want more ISK. Keep the manufacturing on the EvE side but some of the resources could be generated by Dust.

For pure ISK profits it does need to be tenable (as in reducing PvP/E raiding to perhaps 4/day with a total take of about 10 mill and a 8v8 game mode so that player profits are ~300k per raider) Meh. getting to in depth again.

Station warfare could be really cool. Stations are worth billions of isk and that could fuel a lot of combat for us bunnies.

CCP wants the games to be able to stand alone so I'd suggest make it so mercs are required to take stations but pilots have the option of blowing the station up if they can't get merc (and then building a replacement).

And we could easily have NPC contracts too.

+1

Aurum gear, no. Officer gear, yes.