Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I foolishly posted this in a thread that was locked on the GD forum. I think I'll re-post it here.

I am still waiting for new exploration content.

Exploration = Exploration is the act of searching for the purpose of discovery of information or resources.

Currently there is nothing remarkable. Odyssey was not an advancement but rather a step to the side; a lateral. The exploration "content" is the same as before. The only thing that changed was how to find and get the loot. Which in turn is simply a variation on an existing theme.

I want EXPLORATION! Regardless of the sec status, or if its a WH, I want to discover undocumented sites. Eve is ten years old. Make exploration fresh again. Add thirty new sites. Expand the loot tables radically to include clues to find NEW systems with restricted access. Think new world. Let us map these new areas, sell the knowledge to gate builders who can charge for every passage through the gate (toll gate?). Open a new wave of colonization into systems, constellations and regions that are DIFFICULT to discover, difficult to build infrastructure, difficult to tame.

The reward is a successful discovery, colonization, control. Allow market investment into grand effort to tame the unknown. Isk generation is a by-product from this success.

Make the second ten years of EVE about expanding EVE's real estate. Don't make it easy. Make it hard. Make it challenging. Make it a space opera in the grandest vision of the genre. Make it only possible with dedicated exploration to allow for grand industrial endeavors that cost hundreds of billions; that requires real in game investors; real corp/alliance investors; that requires real cooperation on a grand scale.

It can be done. It has been done to varying degrees in many different kinds of games. Scifi literature is also replete with inspiration. Make EVE an even greater playground than it already is.

So here are some ideas to make this a reality:

• Add a deep space exploration ship - something that can stay undocked for weeks
• Re-purpose an existing ship for deep space exploration (like a variation of the Deep Space Transport with specialty bay(s) maybe?)
• Add 20-50 new undocumented sites in all sig bands
• Sites to be ancient or active (with or without rats)
• Loot table to be radically expanded and to include loot for industrialists to build jump gates etc
• Loot to include lore/clues to finding WH that lead to unexplored K-space
• These WHs to unexplored K-space can be tracked once found if skills are sufficient
• New found systems may also have WHs to more unexplored systems
• Planets and moons need to be surveyed for PI and mining purposes (accuracy of deposits depends on skills)
• Gates need to be manufactured to allow for regular travel to the new systems (gates to stabilize and anchor the WH?)
• Gates must be expensive! (Market investment and exploitation)
• A toll can be assigned to the gate by the manufacturer to recoop the cost of construction and maintenance (think investments)
• Gates can be public or private - Set for corp, alliance or everyone
• Allow system sec status to be determined by the gate access - If public the system, over time becomes high sec (without of Concord?). If private the system become lower sec status.
• Newly established systems can still be accessed by WH and thus allow entry for people into "hostile" controlled space.

Eventually everything gets documented and posted but design the new sites to be random. This way guides are in fact guides and not "how to" documents.

Anyway, I suspect variation of this topic have been coming up a lot lately. I just wanted to put my 2 isk in.

The bottom line? Make exploration something that can feed industry that can feed colonization that can feed markets that can feed hostilities. Make it grand. Make it so EVE remains CCP's flagship. Make it so other companies wished they did that...

Thanks

I support the addition of new exploration content. Odyssey added no content except the minigame and the loot bukkake. Even many "new" decryptors are just renamed decryptors from pre-Odyssey.

The Ops proposal is simply going to spawn another one 6 months after it happens. Because in less than 6 months (I predict two weeks), documentation to all the new material will be online available for look up just like it is now.
If you want to discover, don't use the guides on how to do stuff, use just the in game tools and explore without reading the internet.
The actual solution is dynamic content. EVE's sites (Missions, Plexes, Anoms, etc) are all 'static' spawns. They are predefined, and the server plonks down a 'Blood Den' on demand, with several pre generated designs with spawn waves of known ships.
Dynamic content instead would detect 'Blood Raiders ship signatures, Class 3/10'. With different randomly generated building layouts each time, and a whole lot of different ships of the appropriate sizes in randomised waves, all of which were 'Blood Raider Frigate' rather than 10 differently named frigates each with their own unique names based on their abilities. They might have visual queues to let smart players detect which is which in order to make player skill matter. But.... Designing a system to generate random content like this is incredibly complex, as well as the difficulty in bug tracking since your players can't give you as specific feedback on what they were doing when a bug occurs.

This is excellent feedback and addresses the idea of making the game less predicable. Truly dynamic content would be the holy grail I suppose. That said, and not being a programmer in any way, I imagine developing the rules to create some dynamics within the existing mission/DED/unrated/Cosmos/and anything else that is instanced, might be possible. The purpose is to make it fresh(er) with each running or at least less predicable.

This is just a comment.




OP spoke for himself. I just want to add this as I see it alike the OP.


It doesn't matter in the end if it is a x year plan.

The point is just getting the topic on the table.CCP has its own head and most of the time, they are reading. Hence, just write the ideas. There is no point in putting up barriers just because somebody is trying to imagine what the CCP game designers, chief financial officers, president etc have at their disposal.

As long as the ideas are down to earth enough, good to go.

Sure, walking on stations was long anticipated and CCP attempted at it. I'm not going to say it failed - but I think we can agree that certain things on their side could have been done better. Let's not forget that this was tied in with that "Arab Spring style Gold Ammo horror protest", too.
And there have been things implemented to the game without anybody even expecting it.



Though mentioned indirectly somewhat;
You are right in the point of course that we as players need to know how things roll - like the limits of the game engine etc.
But in this case, I think this original post is just fine.


The OP is giving more than sufficient realistic suggestions to expanding on the pure essence of the word EXPLORATION. And with some imagination, anything could be squeezed to specific time plans. But it will only work if there are resources for it.
It just happens to be right now that the current focus is Tiericide. However, we received Oddy at the same time and it did not live up to what various players love about Exploration (and it somewhat got worse).

So this is why we have this thread. It has a reason.


Lastly, over the course of all these years of EVE there have been good and bad implemented into the game - regardless of 5 year plans, our common whines, etc.
Posting here is to ensure that maybe somebody will read and elaborate some ideas on their own.


There is nothing wrong with debating and pummeling ideas down that you do not like. But saying he or she should worry about interal regulations of the game devs is just silly. It is not like we can change much (unless we were really an organized mass, as we are the paying customers using these forums too).

It would be useful of course if the OP were to add short term and long term suggestions, but I don't recall the forums rules stating that we are obliged to post what fits a 5-year-plan. We only need to see if the idea has not already been posted unless we have something vital to add.



Anybody playing EVE long enough should know the How's and Whys already. A recap is of course nice, but as soon as somebody starts talking about the "Whys" and all that, people start hurl tears about wall of texts.

OP focused on stating the idea directly. If the why/how needs to be mentioned, that can be worried about... much later.

In fact, he already posted the Why in the first post, as well as others who mentioned the same about Oddy addon being the "exploration" addon. I suppose "meh" is the word on that term.




I'm a fan of that Deep Space Vessel idea. Also working on one myself actually.
However, yes, there needs to be more elaboration on its uses.

The game unfortunately does not have the depth to suffice the "survival in the wilderness of deepspace" gameplay.
That would really require an extreme makeover of how the High/low/nullsec world is structured.

I get what you mean about being a bit more independent in general, but I think the game (and community) doesn't want to see that.

Hey, what if you could set up sophisticated scanners to scan distant stars, and receive reports on what resources might be there. You would then construct and build expedition ships to journey to a promising star system (NPC piloted with extensive travel times, perhaps something like a month), and set up a small limited jump gate to allow access to the system. You would then have to invest in the infrastructure of the system for things like an improved jump gate or other possibilities. You could use this system as a staging point to discover new systems the same way, or install jump gates to other systems you may have discovered near by.

Edit: New systems would hopefully be dynamically generated. They would (for the most part) be unpopulated (so no rats except for the occasional sleeper system perhaps). There would need to be obvious advantages to balance this out (hopefully not just new/better ores, or something like that). Maybe the jump gates built by this mechanic would be hidden? An entire hidden system to build ships/launch offensives from could be very advantageous.

Yet after 15 years we still havent reached 500k players on a single server?

Im sick of this rubbish responce.

EvE Needs to start thinking about bringing more people in

We do low sec roams and we go to ALL low sec regions and most of the time we see NO ONE

But if sumone tries to move in, boom, pirates of eve screw em hard n its back to square one

There is no growth anymore

It is simply players buying mroe accounts

Once built, you turn on your multi-plexing beacon and after a period of time the server generates a system to be accessed. Exploratory jump gate is build for a exploration ship to jump through further refine the scan results. During the recon all sorts of things could be discovered including new rat factions or other players. If the system is worth it the investment then wars of conquest could be had to secure the system from others.

Rinse and repeat.