Player Features and Ideas Discussion

NPC buyback is taking away player agency and diluting the player-drive economy. That's why the only items that are sold to NPCs are generally those that are *only* sold to NPCs and basically act as ISK tokens that require a little more effort to turn into raw ISK. Blue-loot in wormholes being the biggest example.

At the end of the day these just aren't intended to be a huge bottleneck on production, which is pretty much what it would take for their price to shoot up like what you're proposing here.

I always thought it would be cool if WH data sites could be hacked for some kind of "treasure map" similar to DED sites.

So the idea here is that you get an item, its consumable the item itself lists its site type and system. These are tradable cargo "data Vaults"

The sites themselves are randomized DED-ish single room affairs with officers to kill/salvage for drifter officer mods/blue loot. Could also be just an abandoned box of loot, or a single very difficult hack, or whatever.The idea being an alternative to cap escalation, but one that requires significant amount of exploration or wheeling and dealing to actually find the places where these "treasure maps" point to.

SO, you have a basic bottom level expected payout for the sites, 100-200m or so, but the problem is they could be in any system. So it's highly unlikely that the system you found the core in is also the system its "treasure" is in. Thus, you're probably not going to be able to sell the maps for that same 100-200m since it requires significant effort/luck to actually access the system.

But you can sell OR use the maps. Consuming them just adds the site to your journal with no expiration. Thus, if someone wanted to go full on drifter treasure hunter, they could buy these off the market en masse and eat them all. The more they've eaten, the larger their list of known coordinates is, and thus the greater the chance thet they'll find themselves in a system that has one of their sites.

Or you could bank the maps until you actually find the system and sell them to the residents at a premium.

You could even expand the "treasure" pool to lowsec and null sites as well, giving small groups and independant pilots reasons to travel around that aren't immediately known/camped by the locals, and a good reason for small scale exploration fleets to actually exit wspace while they're running chains.

Would put the exploration back in the exploration profession.