Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Expand the hacking game.

The chance of losing loot through loot spew would have made adding additional complexity to hacking feel redundant and frustrating, but the dismissal of loot spew opens up an opportunity to really take advantage of the hacking mechanic's potential.

Instead of hacking one loot node for all the loot, make the hacking grid a bit bigger and add additional loot nodes. The more loot nodes successfully hacked, the more loot the explorer gets. Another way to do it would be to decrease the complexity of hacking but add additional arrays for each can up to a certain number (you could even reduce or remove multiple cans and just have to do several hacks on one can). Maybe clues could be added to indicate what type of loot each node probably contains, or better loot could be generally placed in stronger nodes.

Taking advantage of the hacking mechanics like this would keep expected loot return more in line with what it currently is reducing the need for the extensive loot table rebalancing that seems to be necessary with the removal of loot spew, provide a small amount of additional effort that will keep less dedicated explorers from flooding the profession and loot market, and force explorers to spend a little more time in the sites (while focusing on hacking) than they would otherwise once loot spew is removed, something that should keep the hunters very happy.

Each node could have separate hacks for Data, Materials and Parts. Make it very tough to hack all three and make the nodes so they can't be cargo scanned.