Missions & Complexes

Contrary to facetious title I actually think that exploration was overall improved in Odyssey. New minigame is nice because now it actually gives people reason to train “archaeology” and “hacking” all the way to 5 if they want to reliably access all sights. And loot scatter mechanic is good because it incentives people to do exploration with other people instead of solo or with alts.

However with good also came two problems. First, and minor one, is that new exploration scanner immediately revels presence of all signatures, even for people that make no effort to find them, or carry special exploration equipment. When that is added to much easier probing, that requires less of both player and character skill, exploration is suddenly much less wondrous and special. When you probe down that signature you are no longer discovering something hidden, but just going throe the motions to get to the loot.

So this is a game flavour problem. And while some might dismiss it as irrelevant , I think flavour is important for overall enjoyment and immersion in the game, and it should not be neglected.

Second, and much more serious problem, is that CCP lowered entry barriers to exploration profession, and promoted it aggressively, resulting in six time more people doing it, without CCP introducing any new demand for exploration loot. This resulted in massive deflationary pressure making most of that loot worthies, thus running exploration for old explorers without actually giving viable now profession for new explorers.

To fix this CCP should act fast to possible to introduce massive sinks for exploration loot, to restore it's market value. And under no circumstance should they increase actual quantity of existing loot drops, this will help nothing, only cause even grater deflation.

Good news is that, ad lest according to Mynnna, odyssey introduced massive new supply shortage for certain R64 elements, and I think this shortage is exactly what is needed to make exploration profitable again, as well as make it feel more flavourful and adventurous.

My idea is that exploration sights get a chance to drop bookmark to “pirate's hidden precious metal treasure trove”. Those should be special sights that spawn good number of jumps away, after bookmark to them is recovered in exploration sight. They should remain for a few days, or until treasure is recovered.

Key is that treasure should be 3000 to 20000 m3 of R64 and R32 metals, depending location of the treasure. From small deposits of R32 for higsec, all the way to the large deposits of R64 in deep 0.0. Frequency of bookmark drops should be set so that they cover shortfall of R64 materials introduced in Odyssey expansion.

Also type metals in treasure trove should be function of their market price, so that more valuable metals have higher probability of appearance. This makes more sense both IC (pirates would use most valuable metals as store of value in hidden troves) and OOC (increased spawn of more valuable metals generates negative feedback loop helping to balance price of moon metals).


Advantages of this mechanic:.

• gives opportunity for greater income for explorers, something they now need

• gives another bottom up source of moon materials accessible to small time players, instead of only big alliances that control it now

• gives CCP easy way to control supply of moon materials and prevent appearance of new bottlenecks like technetium, simply by regulating spawn rate of those bookmarks

• travel to and back form “pirate's hidden treasure troves” creates easy targets in industrial ships for small gang PvP players and pirates in low and 0.0

• possibility of trading treasure bookmarks opens up new market

• possibility of scamming people with fake or expired treasure bookmarks that either have no loot, or lead in to a trap

All in all win for everyone, explorers, pirates, industrialists, scamers and CCP.

So instead of letting people leave exploration because it is not 'profitable', you are encouraging more people to enter. Since the amount of r64 loot will be directly tied to the number of explo sites someone can run, then you are asking for a further diminution of explo loot value since that will be the waste product of farming bookmarks.

BRILLIANT!

I agree with the possible decrease in explorers in the next few months however you you cant deny the current drop in price on Relic/Data items. Have you seen the price of decrytors lately, they have drop by like 75%.

DS stuff seems to be fine though, people always want shiny stuff.

Hacking/Archaeology escalations would be pretty cool. Tying it in to R64 moon goo.... not so much.