Player Features and Ideas Discussion

If this is done, I would suggest it worked like this.

Ships drop 'Insert Faction' logs. For example 'Angels Cartel Log'
These then stack with other logs of the same faction. The log itself has nothing on it other than a basic description.
"This damaged ships log came from an Angels Cartel ship, Decryption of this log may provide further information"

This solves the issue of static descriptions & item bloat/tracking as it means there aren't a million variants out as physical items that all have to be updated when things change, but only a few, one for each faction. These could also exist for Empire factions possibly & even Sleepers.

To use these logs, they can then be decrypted via some sciencey based skill. This adds a value to the science skills for explorers, as well as a time based element, so you can't spam 100 of them at will and blitz, due to the decryption time.

When decrypted you get a mail notifying you (New notification category), with a short blurb. This is where you get the mentioned 'Funny' stuff. Since this occurs when decrypted though, these can be simple database entries that are much easier for CCP to change over whenever they want, rather than physical items needing updating, since a change won't impact anyone else who has already decrypted it, only people in the future. If it leads to an expedition, you then get the standard journal expedition entry also.

This could be further extended by having 'Damaged' logs 'Partial' logs & 'Complete' logs to give tiers of likely-hood to getting expeditions from them as well as quality of expeditions easily.