Player Features and Ideas Discussion

To be fair I don't see a disconnect with the copy and my point of view which I stress is mine rather than speaking for CCP as a whole.

In general I don't think the Exploration system which is a product of the time it was created aeons ago is a great starting point to thinking about what exploration in space should entail as actual exploration.

Here is my full post on what I think are the main 'beats':


Improving the experience and content of the Exploration sites is definitely something we should also think about.

Fair enough. Don't take it personally. There is a obvious disconnect tho between the advertisement and what Odyssey has on offer for explorers. I have a hard time hiding my disappointment about it.



Yet it's the only starting point that we have and will ever have. If the system isn't completely revamped in the exploration themed expansion then it never will be. So focus should be on how to improved what is there.
Dynamic universe is out of the question because of how large the player base is. Things would get blown out of proportion quickly.

What i have a problem to understand tho is that a company like CCP which has the luxury of a constant income stream for many years doesn't have the ressources to create new content for players within the existing systems on a regular basis. Bits and pieces of lore, variations of what is there. Frankly the missions and sites are so simple. It can't take longer then a few days per month for a single person to design and script some new missions, escalations or surprises. I have worked as level designer/scripter on singleplayer games so i feel qualified to make this remark.
I think every player in Eve who does the pve grind would more then appreciate some variety.

They said there will spawn t2 capital rig bpc's and faction pos bpc's if i'm not mistaken. That's a good thing. Not everything is bad. The hacking game starts to show potential and it's one of the areas where exploration can be made more interesting within existing systems.

That's the crux of the issue - what are the tools?

- New PC structures?
- New player placed sites?
- New universe shaping tools - player stargates, wormhole burrows (a chain of player placed wormholes that can be navigated through to a unknown destination)?
- Player actions effecting the nature of a system or point within a system?

A purist example might be a player warps to an asteroid belt, only to find it is depleted. That depletion has been caused by other players (universe shaping) and is therefore a 'explorable discovery' - albeit a rather boring one. Why is it boring though? Probably because it is a common and frequent occurrence? A mechanism that is well understood?

Exploration might be realised upon a grand scale to find what other players have done to given area of the universe, drained a sun of its minerals to change its hue, established a giant ice refining facility, or left the wreckage of battle strewn in orbit around a planet?

These need not be persistent changes, some might degrade or dissolve away but they probably need to be infrequent enough to be remarkable and enticing enough that players would want to find them.

C.

Cailais, that's the sort of thing I mean. By more dynamic I also mean how the Universe works should be more dynamic, rather than static mission data we should allow for some procedural variation, likewise exploration and other content. This is the sort of stuff people are talking about here really.

Further the spawning of these things could change over time both as a 'natural' process of the Universe (think seasons) and based on player actions (think creating a crazy "weather controlling" laser).

Then we have the true Universe shaping things where players can actually build and blow up things in space in a more vibrant manner than they can currently.

I'm just shooting from the hip with ideas but ultimately I don't think exploration is ever a game system but the result of curiosity about something unknown. This generation of 'the unknown' occurs as a result of the emergent interaction between systems.

I also think just sneaking things in would be lovely but we need to work out ways of doing that without it being far too easy to discover. People already data mine everything that is publically accessible. But that is a different technical problem.

That'd be great if that's anything at all like what you're doing. But CCP is not giving us anything procedurally generated. You're taking something that's not broken, adding a terrible minigame to it, calling it gold, and telling us we should be happy about it. I'm not finding anything I wasn't finding before with this new game, I'm just doing it in a way that's sure to get old and annoying in less than four years that it'll take CCP to make any changes to it. You're dodging actual issues because they're hard and asking us to be happy about it.

Similarly, CCP failing to use resources that you have, like talking to the CSM to get feedback, when making major change to something like scanning. Obviously this is extremely frustrating to watch you guys have to do extra work when you intend to improve things but you could have saved yourself by using the tools you already had.

The exploration is not about running sites - it's about finding them.

"- there is no sense of adventure and exploration" There is if you leave hisec. An adventure lies in outmaneuvering hostile gangs, pirates that want your ship and its cargo. It's in outrunning others to a site hidden somewhere in nullsec space, finding the good stuff and freighting it back where it needed.

Lore will be discovered in a month and nobody will give a damn. Making sites more difficult/complex will just turn them into mindless grinds nobody will bother with. Making them somewhat of a unique profession (that doesn't need a mission running boat to do at times) that's also rewarding could drive people out into low/null. Means more content for gangs - in MMOs, npc content will get depleted in days or months. PvP content won't.

IMO, exploration sites != Exploration....

Exploration is the journey, generally flying around the galaxy, looking for people to shoot, objects to loot, sites to run, etc.

Exploration sites is simply one objective that people go out an explore for. The truth is, what is at the site is mostly irrelevant to notion of exploration. While the site rewards are a form of motivation for doing the exploration, but running the site is NOT exploration.

I personally like how the new scanner places brackets in space! I like the easily deploying probes! I'd like to see more "objects in space" to locate, but I think this should be done not with "+x PvE sites", but more as Player operated Farms & Fields!

Hmm, i think something like this might be worth, pardon the pun, "exploring":

- Create individual exploration events

What I mean is, say you randomly travel through a region, warp to a station, kill a few npcs in a belt, whatever...

Suddenly YOU get a quick popup hinting at something, possibly daring you to explore a random object/station/system. You decide to follow the "arc", and it will lead you to something unique.

The rewards should obviously be something material, like ISK or Faction ships or whatever, BUT the journey itself ought to be the real reward.


The idea behind that is to make people actually PLAY the game for a change. Not just look up guide x, and wonder wheter reward y will be worth their time.

Create something random, that will FORCE players, who choose to participate, to do a broad a diverse spectrum of tasks in eve, have them salvage a wreck in a wormhole, have them travel to a station in deep 0.0, have them assist a NPC fleet mining in a hidden belt, have them settle a planet for PI.

it might sound like a tutorial, but its really not, its meant to give players the possibility to break up their monotonous EVE experience once in a while.

- Make it a random occurrence that happens every few weeks/months to a character.
- make the involving steps random, i.e. each step triggers another random one in a random system.
- At the end of the hard, and time consuming journey, when the player has gone all around the eve universe finish the event with a random, but worth it reward.

- that reward should be easily able to clear the 1 - 3 billion isk mark, and possibly give the player access to something very rare, yet random.

Finish strong by showing the player how far he traveled during his journey (may take a week a month, a year, depending on the player) to complete.

Create meaningful experiences!

For things to explore, we can always look at what is actually out there in the real world. For example:

Real asteroids are isolated from each other. Even in the asteroid belt they are on average a million kilometers apart. To some extent we already have these: Whenever you find an anomaly or signature that has asteroids its like finding one of these RL rocks.

Comets. Most are out in the far solar system and are single isolated bodies. There are most likely millions per solar system. Procedurally generated, they would always be a new discovery.

Rogue planets. Estimates range from 2 to 100,000 of these floating between the stars for every star. Imagine building some sort of scanning array for finding one, then having to fly out thousands of AU to get to it. By going from one to the next we could even get interstellar travel without gates.

Player built space stations. Let us build them at all sizes and at (almost) all locations and space will be full of stuff to find.

But we need stuff to be there to make it worth finding them. The content quickly become documented and repetitious if there is not enough of it and its not expanded. (Oh look is a type 3 rogue planet. The guide says we need to do X, Y, and Z to claim it, and then we get A, B, and C). A huge amount of content is a huge amount of work. A player can find, do, and document a site in maybe 1% of the time it took CCP to make the site.

I wonder if there could be a way for players to add missions and exploration sites to the game. That is I write a mission, CCP approves it and adds it to the list. I pay Aurum to CCP to cover their time. When any player does it I get ISK. Not sure if that could work....... but it sure would cause an explosion of content.