Throughout these notes it is important to know that CCP Bettik's philosophy is that EVE is a living universe, and the traffic of mission runners and haulers are part of the life of this universe. I thoroughly agree with his opinion. IMHO, where any other MMO might have NPCs doing stuff (kodo wandering the plains of Mulgore, for example), EVE should strive to fill that role with players doing stuff (miners in belts, explorers in space, etc).
Missions
CCP Affinity made the scandalous statement that perhaps the "Damsel in Distress" mission has seen enough air time and should be canned. I vehemently disagreed!One of the audience asked about being able to accept and complete all non-handin missions remotely.
IMHO, Damsel in Distress deserves a sequel, depicting the life of said Damsel after she realises that running back to her drug dealing casino-running boyfriend is a bad idea. Maybe she starts her own drug ring and becomes an agent for the Serpentis.
As far as remote completion and handin of missions, I disagree. Although we do have FTL communications and funds transfer the idea of having mission runners never set foot in station except to pick up or drop off items removes too much content for tourists and gankers. In addition allowing remote acceptance and completion of missions will boost mission-runner incomes far too much. Without the extra travel time you can shave 2-3 minutes off every mission, in some cases (esp. Cargo Delivery) this will double the mission runner's income, before any clever tactics are applied to maximise ISK/hr.
Mining
The discussion about mining mainly centred around the desire to remove the current mechanic of respawning asteroids once per day. There was no mention of my awesome ideas suggested in "Mining is Boring". I'll forgive them for now and simply ensure that Ripard Teg and his soon-to-be-CSM-minions get the right message.CCP Bettik suggested that in keeping with his desire for a living, organic universe it might be worth compressing many of the existing belts into one or two: thus rather than a half-dozen miners doing their own thing you would have a half-dozen miners in the one belt giving the feeling that stuff is happening.
I dislike CCP Bettik's idea of condensing asteroid belts into mega-belts. Currently there is a rule of thumb: if there are more people than belts, move on. One pilot is able to clear out a belt in a manner of hours. If all the miners had to share a belt there might be more "social" interaction in the form of "get your grubby mitts off my rock", but there would also be easier ganks to be had (because all the miners are in one spot), less relaxing and chilling out available due to the requirement to pay attention for the purpose of negotiating rights with other miners, before you even consider the attention that will be required for avoiding the now-more-prolific gankers.
Moving all mining to bigger asteroid belts also removes content for explorers, as opposed to moving mining to grav sites.
Exploration
The discussion of exploration mainly revolved around hacking: the idea proposed by CCP Affinity was that only one player at a time would be able to hack a crate, but once hacked anyone could loot it. This further led to discussion about whether looting crates hacked by other players should trigger suspect and/or limited engagement status.CCP Affinity expressed an interest for introducing a Guild Wars 2 style questing system to EVE: for example you wander around and see a "shiny thing" which you investigate which then leads to a mission, perhaps with an agent contacting you for follow-on missions. There was a leak about the new discovery system involving a system-wide "ping" which would highlight probable signatures in your view of space, enticing you to stop and smell the roses even if you are just flying through a particular system.
My opinion about hacking is that all pilots in range of the crate should be able to hack it (just like all miners in range of an asteroid can start mining): the one with the better skills gets to unlock the crate first. Then everyone gets to dogpile on each other until someone is left with an intact ship and the remains of whatever was looted.
The new discovery system sounds awesome.
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