Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Just to build on one small segment of this very good post,
I've always thought that asteroids should be fewer in number but hold more individually.
A good roid should be difficult to locate, and should be something to keep secret and protect.
They should be something that could keep a dedicated group busy for hours if not days before it is mined out.
Claim jumping should be a very real and serious occurrence.

There's a solution more simple than "varying it up" - it's called "putting shinies into null/low sites."

If I'm not mistaken, I've heard that we're going to see some shiney things in sites that spawn outside of hisec. Chasing people that 'ninja' sites in our space isn't exactly uncommon so it's not like people don't explore.

Even without complicated "arcs" and "expeditions" there is always something that draws people deeper into nullsec systems - greed and confidence that they can get away. Now, most people go after combat sites because they drop expensive mods and bpc's. A "Jackpot" in such site can make you a billion ISK. WIth common exploration sites 100 million ISK is a good haul.

Random content cannot be 100% random and whatever non-random elements will be created, will also be put into a neat guide by some people and status quo will return. Forcing a player to do something is a bad idea - a good one is give him incentive.

Creating an artificial journey and forcing the player to look back on a trail laid out by events following a scenario is a step towards a good ol' theme park - there is one thing I could agree with here however.

Exploration-related events that dangle a shiney thing before the eyes of a player in hisec if he ventures out into low security space or has to go against another player in some way. Sometimes all it takes to kick off a story is one step and this content should help make it.

Competition is good. It's a match between two pilots in the end, and there's a tale to be told in how you outsmarted him or got outsmarted.

I'm also pretty sure there are tales out there. There's at least one explorer that can tell a story without a happy end - how he moved in the shadows of a certain region of null security space. How cautious he was to avoid a few local pilots hell-bent on chasing him. So cautious in shaking his pursuit that he ran face-first into a camp set up by another group of locals.

Or one that tried to smuggle a viator out and failed after no less than four attempts to decloak. Or one that succeded in escaping with his naga, carrying an expensive faction module onboard. A sudden spawn of rats from a failed access attempt will be put on a website with a warning and months ahead everyone will know what to expect. As they are, rats are also easy to tank and dispose of if you come prepared.

It's the players that will surprise you when your perfectly laid out plan fails and you are found. Removing rats from exploration sites (and, I suppose, a message "you cannot access this container while it's being guarded") could actually go a long way in making explora-boats not into something that falls into bits the second a pvp ship hits grid and tosses it an angry look.

I think thers a difference between adventure for adventure sake and the isk grind that is PvE in Eve. We can't get rid of the grind because everbody needs isk. Let's not fool ourselfes, PvE isn't what most people do "for fun" in Eve. So the least we can do is to make the grind more compelling.
As it stands for isk making i have no reason to go 40 jumps deep into null. I can look for sites closer to my home base. The profession sites, at least to my knowledge, don't get more lucrative the deeper you go in. So from an economical perspective it's bad idea risking to haul back that billion isk jackpot over 40 jumps when i can try to find it much closer to home base.

To solve this with theme park ideas is a valid concern that you have but since Eve has this long established dichotomy between PvP and PvE play i'm not sure how it could be solved without any compromises.

One compromise could be that expeditions from profession sites work in a less stringent way then combat site escalation.
What if the expedition site spawns randomly somewhere in a constallation. You can't directly warp to it. You only get a journal entry where to look for it roughly. And other people can actualy probe it down before you even get there. Sorta like it works for some epic arc missions. Hell some ppl could actualy make a living probing down these expeditions instead of sites or wait for you to finish it and let you walk in an open knife. But of course these expeditions shouldn't be as easy to find as looking on the new system scanner.

If it is worth flying 40 jumps deep into Null for an outsider, the locals will farm the sites, so the outsider won't bother flying 40 jumps deep into null as the sites will be gone already. This circles back to Null Sov mechanics.

Some good, honest posts from Bayesian over the past week or so.

This was less good:

We all appreciate you have to play nicely with the other children, but whilst technically correct (the copy and your PoV aren't outright inconsistent) this does carry the flavour of rather weaselly backpedaling. It's painfully obvious from the voluminous criticism of the new scanning and probing mechanics that Odyssey is a step in the wrong direction compared with your ambitions to improve upon the dynamic and player-generated aspects of the EVE universe.

Now here are two extracts which are, IMO, right on the money:


Really that whole post was excellent. But I think it also tells you why some players like AutumnWind1983 have been critical without being explicitly constructive. Sleeper Social Club are a wormhole alliance. W-space is the closest thing right now to genuine exploration. It has dynamic routes between systems and the absence of local chat contributes towards imperfect information. And even though wormhole mechanics are now well understood and the once-challenging PvE elements are routine, at the time of release they too were new and forced players to explore and experiment with things. [Hint: recovering some of these aspects might have been the way to go!]

Odyssey is supposed to be an expansion in the style of Apocrypha. And, rightly or wrongly, in many players minds it is what we are getting instead of a POS-based expansion. POSes are undeniably one of the major tools with which players can shape the universe. But instead, development time has been spent on things like recasting a perfectly functional navigational tool into a flashy but rather unwieldy new UI.

So yes, they might look like "off-topic scattergun complaints" but I think there is more of a theme here than meets the eye at a first glance. I could go on and talk about some concrete changes which I'd consider if I were trying to bring about the sort of exploration experiences you and the players in this thread want, but this post is already long enough.

TL;DR to make the constructive element of this post absolutely clear:

I think your approach towards exploration is absolutely the right one to have. I think the game environment where you are most likely to be able to realise some of those ambitions is W-space.

Very interesting thread! My thoughts are centered around the idea of player build hideouts.

I would like to see more features that support sandbox exploration. Let the players create the content. Let exploration sites be more than just locations for player interaction.

If players are supposed to explore other player's activities, this means that one has to be able to hide in the first place. Otherwise it is not really a search ==> Let players build hideouts in space. Deadspace would be the obvious choice but there could be different classes of locations where this could be possible, such as interstellar space, comets in "Oorts clouds"... Let's call them deep space signatures.
Make players build acceleration gates to reach these places. Make player built acceleration gates hackable by other players. Alternatively/in addition the users of an acceleration gate have to carry a key in their cargo hold which drops when they are killed and can be reused by the new owner.

Make deep space locations interesting in terms of actually flying a space. A labyrinth of deadspace pockets connected by player build acceleration gates would be straight forward. But I also could imagine labyrinthian gas clouds which block the view (and the overview) on the structure and ships hidden inside. There are conduits of clear space through the clouds that can be navigated but if your ship touches the gas itself it takes damage. Make asteroid fields which are actually a challenge to fly in because they are more like a cloud than like a string. One class of player build hideouts could be anchored on large asteroids inside these fields. Players could set up perimeter defences using the natural environment as anchoring points. Make it a kind of 3D tower defence. All structures hackable of course :)

Finding things and getting there must be difficult. The exploration scanner provides a nice canvas which could be enriched. Deep space signatures should not show up initially. Maybe the blue cloudy structures in the scanner overlay actually mean something. Mouse-over highlighting instead of the brackets could be used there to indicate interesting structures. To find objects farther out of the solar system make a new class of ship (or module). Two ships have to work together to perform a triangulation of an object. The ships have to establish a baseline by positioning themselves at different places in the system and lighting a certain beacon each. Then each ships can measure the angle of a deepspace signature relative to the established baseline. Combining both measurements allows to locate the object, a comet or deadspace pocket for example. A third ship in the triangulation chain would improve the result. The outcome of the operation would be a datacube which is needed for the manufacturing of the acceleration gate that will lead to the deep space signature.

Why would people want to go there? Make hideouts the place for booster production. Any illegal or outlawed activity can go there. Unlicensed clone production for example? Mercenary equipment production? Or simply move some moon minerals there. It would be super cool if the installations were hard to destroy but exploitable by the clever explorer. Thieves and hackers

Please, make exploration sandboxy, give us deep space hideaways!
Chira.

I reckon destructible stargates is a great place to start with making exploration a more interesting part of the game.

I hope the fact Signatures (not anomalies) showing up on the ship-board scanner is temporary, and not part of Odyssey. Tested it last night:

B274 wormhole - collapsed it, and using only the on-board, was able to see the new sig appear

This same thing applies to K162 wormholes - no surprise PVP for those not being cautious with probes watching. You are able to get their perfect base signal strength (10% for a B274/K162) using your onboard scanner, but launch probes, and hit scan and it drops?? The anoms in the space overlay are fine (and good for directional scanning to locate targets), but signatures should only appear if you scan with probes.

The next problem are the anomalies themselves. If you switch ships (at an SMA for instance), your anom list is cleared, and the only way to restore it is to jump systems and return, or relog.

it is final. Idiots shouldn't be gimped in their play by challenging probing system so more idiots subscribe for eve.
For the same reason DSP are getting removed.