Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I've made this to try and respond to some of the complaints and criticism about the current one by proposing a new one.

I work in the cyber-security industry, and know a great deal about the actual mechanics of cyber-warfare/cyber-defense. My goal for this was to create a system that is (very loosely) based on real cyber-warfare without being overly complex.

The board would be similar to the current one, but without power-ups and without healers/debuffers. Each defense mechanism will protect a few nodes around it (difficulty dependant). Each node will represent a possible reward object.

The minigame would have two main parts, a scanning part and an attacking part. During the scanning stage, the gameplay is similar to the existing game. There are a few important differences though. You can click on any space you wish, and none of the board starts revealed. If you click a node that is being protected, the defending node will become highlighted, but will not be revealed. It will also display text that hints at what is in the node being protected (i.e. data, parts, materials, etc.). Each successive scan on a protected node increases your detection level (the reverse of virus coherence) slightly. Scanning an unprotected node gives no penalty.

The beauty of this is that once you have cleared a defense node (discussed later), you can roughly estimate where the next one will be without accidentally scanning a protected node, given the density of defense nodes on the board.

Removing a defense node:
When you come across a defense mechanism, you can begin attacking it. If your vulnerability knowledge (replacement for virus strength, and modified by skills, etc.) is enough to know a vulnerability for the specific defense node, it will be green and can be eliminated immediately, by clicking on it. This will reduce the detection level you gain from subsequent hacks. If aren't aware of specific vulnerabilities, it will be somewhere on the green-red scale, representing your knowledge of it. To remove it, you can either switch to attacking mode and brute force it directly with a random chance of success (failing gives a harsh penalty to detection, but succeeding reduces detection), or scan it further, with each successive scan adding more and more to your detection level, but increasing the chance of finding a vulnerability (turns the node green). Greener nodes have a higher chance of giving up their vulnerabilities than redder nodes.


End-Games:


Unlocking:
If you eliminate all defense nodes without being detected, the can can be opened as a regular container and looted.

note: cargo scanning will still show the exact rewards that can be obtained, even before hacking begins.

Detection:
If you reach full detection partway through, the container poofs and the contents that are unprotected and uncovered are loot-spewed. The contents that are still protected or uncovered are lost. Because detection rate decreases as the game goes on, you will likely be detected in the early-mid game, so the loot spew will not be so dramatic. If you majorly mess up in the final stages, there will be a huge amount of loot to deal with.

Forfeiting:
You can end the hack at any time to loot what you have uncovered as a can. This means that people who don't like loot spew can simply end earlier and possibly miss out on some rewards if they have messed up. People who don't mind loot spew can take that extra chance to either solve it, or have it blow up and loot spew.


Site scaling:
High-sec sites might start with some nodes unprotected, representing an unmaintained and idiotically protected computer. Any hacker with full hacking skills (before ship bonuses and hardwirings and such) should know the vulnerabilities of all the defense nodes in the grid.

Low-sec sites have all nodes protected, and some (very rare) defenses might be unknown, even to a perfectly-skilled, shipped, and hardwired hacker, though they would be light green/yellow at the hardest.

Null-sec sites would vary in difficulty according to some metric (true-sec or something), and be more difficult than the high and low sec ones.


Advantages:
-Re-uses already existing mechanics (some) and art assets (all)
-Better difficulty scaling, prevents ridiculously easy and unwinnable boards at the same difficulty level.
-Difficulty scales with rewards.
-Lower skilled (in-game) people can do well on higher-difficulty hacks if they know which items they want to go for and don't get greedy. I.e. hacking will require actual skill.


Disadvantages:
-People complain about changes
-People may complain about loot spew still being present, albeit as more of a punishment than a reward

Yeah, there was a huge boom in "new hacking sucks, fix plz" posts right after odyssey launched, but the number of people actually doing the sites seems to have dropped off pretty significantly recently, thus fewer such posts. The issue isn't gone, but not enough people do exploration anymore to complain about it.

Really though, if they got rid of the spew thing wouldn't most everyone be happy (or at least shut up)?

Not that its a bad idea, particularly balancing the difficulty levels a bit more sensibly is something that would be great but I'd have to agree it seems like wishful thinking at this point.

At this point, a little iteration (remember that word, CCP?) on all the mechanics would be nice.