EVE Online's Player Versus Environment content can be broadly broken down into three tiers of accessibility; content located at celestials and other in space locations, content that can be found with any ship's scanner, and content that needs to be found with scanner probes. Generally speaking, these content categories scale in reward directly with the amount of time it takes to find them, and this is where a major problem lies: an increase access time directly contributes towards safety when engaging in money making; potential predators have to go through just as much effort to find the content as the potential prey did.
There are two ways for a predator to get around this conundrum; they can either stake out the location in advance, or gamble on their target's failure to pay attention. Generally speaking, it's nearly impossible, or at least very difficult, to catch someone lurking in a hidden piece of space. The inverse scale of accessibility and reward does not, at this time, feel adequately offset by Eve's design and game mechanics. Other than making it easier to access most PVE content, I do not have many ideas on how this could be changed. However, I think this is something that is worth looking into.
Before EVE's preferred PVE content largely moved towards scanner-sites, before Warp to Zero made point to point travel a high speed endeavor without the aid of bookmarks, and before local provided instant knowledge of standings, players in nullsec (and to a lesser extent, lowsec,) would have to work together in the face of predators stalking their space. With today's buried content, rapid movement and perfect intelligence, it is the preferred state of affairs to perform one's money making alone as possible and flee from detected threats until the danger has passed. When afforded large opportunities for escape, there is little dependence on one's fellow pilots for personal safety. There is a missing sense of community in potentially unfriendly space.
Today's Eve Online encourages a great wasteland of sprawl for money making and territorial buffering purposes. I'd like to see players return to group efforts to fend off solo attackers; group responses to individual threats are a fantastic dynamic, and reintroducing community with new design would be a breath of fresh air. For want of a smaller scale, more intimate 0.0 experience, a restored balance of risk versus reward, and increased amounts of daily interaction among the residents of 0.0 space, any efforts guiding Eve Online in such a direction would be welcome additions indeed.
