Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So i've given it a few months and originally was fine with it, but have come to the conclusion that truly it has been made far far too easy. Exploration is supposed to be about the unknown and reaping the great rewards that come with braving out far from your home system. But a funny thing about the unknown is that it stops being unknown when everyone is able to jump out and see everything and do everything with no skill needed.

First off please remove the pinpoint formation. I loved it at first, not having to play with my probes every which way, but quickly realized that it made the process stupidly too easy.

There used to be a small skill in fine tuning the position of each probe to scan out the site. The new system completely removed that learned skill. Now all one needs to do is make sure the little red dot is centered on the white box and just shrink the bubbles down. I remember when was down to .25au having to constantly play with the probes position to finally jump the sig from 97% to 100%

This was not a skill that could be trained, but had to be learned from others and then fine tuned yourself to make your scanning efficient.

The new system spoon feeds everyone far far too much.

The sensor overlay is ok in a sense. I would like to see some changes regarding it.

First off it doesn't make too much sense that everyone can see everything. The anoms and grav sites are fine for everyone to see. Those make sense to an extent. Only ones that dont are the non-system upgradable grav site spawns. But i'll give and leave that be.

What doesn't make sense is a non-explorer trained pilot in a non exploration ship being able to detect unknown signatures right off the bat and doing this with some degree of accuracy of their location just doesn't make any sense.

Ships that should be able to detect unknown sigs are exploration class. I.E Exploration frigs or T3 with appropriate subsystem.

Outside of those, no ship should be able to see unknown sigs without launching probes.
Now in addition to that. Exploration ships should not have the sigs location determined to any degree without any additional skills.

For example right now. I launch probes when i see an unknown sig and right away I can generally avoid scanning the whole system to find it's general location and just pinpoint down to 8au and place probes around the red bubble that automatically comes up without scanning and work that down in a minute.

I propose introducing 2 new skills that would effect exploration ships.
(i'm terrible at coming up with names be forewarned!)

Exploration detection
Each level of this skill increases the range of detection upon initial overlay scan of unknown signatures in a system.
Note: Only effects exploration class vessels.

I - Detects up to 5au
II - Detects up to 10au
III - Detects up to 25au
IV - Detects up to 75au
V - Detects up to 300au (aka an entire system I know there are some massive ones out there)

Exploration pinpointing

Each level of this skill allows for more efficient scanning. Allowing a pilots overlay scan to pinpoint what section of space the signature resides.

(essentially without this skill you can still know there are scannable sigs in a system via exploration detection, but that's all you know. You launch probes you don't get a nice red bubble telling where you start. You have to manually start by scanning whole system. Like the old days)

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Completly agree, but no need for an extra detection skill. Just add it to Astrometric Pinpointing.



I would like to see a general decrease in site strenght, as everyone can now use 8 probes. Players have to be forced to use different ships for combat and exploration or at least multibox.

Rats & Booby traps, well people will find a way to avoid them, no need to reintroduce them again.
But adding an extra branch of Data & Relic sites that involves combat sound's good.
Maybe add a special item to regular sites that triggers an escalation into a combat relic/data site. In these you can aquire some pirate bpcs or rare meta level items. The really rare ones, for eg the pandemonium bcu.

Btw, T1 frigs work well in hostile enviroments, such like low and null. Main reason is their flexibility. You can fit everything you need on them, plus some drones, huge cargo space and everything for a dirt cheap pricetag. Downside is you cant warp while cloaked and got -5 strength. Unless you have covop 5, they even offer almost the same probe strength.