Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I am of the opinion the single biggest thing missing from Odyssey, which is presented as an expansion of the exploration profession, is missions to support that profession. Missions have the following advantages over other behaviors:

1) Non-competitive. The money obtained through performing missions is independant of how many people are engaged in that activity. If a profession becomes more popular, or less popular, it is impossible for others in that profession to drive down your profit margins from missioning, as they feature direct, non-competitive income generation. This would allow those who wish to explore the profession mission exclusive items (rather than items being sold on the market), and contribute to overall market stability, while providing stable income regardless of current market price of items obtained through the profession.

2) Standings gain. Missions offer a direct benefit over any other activity because they directly affect your standings with the desired corporation / faction. Though it could be argued standings gain (or loss) should be decentralized, and occur from such activities as mining, exploring or trading within the space of an empire, there are serious balance considerations for such a change. It is far easier in the short term to merely allow a profession access to standings gain through offering missions of the appropriate type.

3) Loyalty points. For those who wish to take advantage of the loot obtainable from loyalty point stores, their options consist of performing missions to obtain the loyalty points, or paying many times the cost of said item in the open market. It makes almost no sense, then, that one can not obtain a Sisters of Eve Core Probe Launcher through the use of its prerequisite (a standard Core Probe Launcher) and must instead engage in mining, trading, or PVE combat to obtain the desired item at less than inflated pricing.

Thus, exploration missions would: provide incentives to engage in that profession for those who are focused on standings, whether due to eventual motivations of trade or factional warfare, or whatever else; contribute to the stability of the marketplace and the isk generation possible through the exploration profession; allow those engaged in the exploration profession to directly purchase their own upgrades using the resources obtained by performing their profession; and make exploration a truly supported "profession" beyond the initial profession agent.

Exploration missions would be easy to implement, and easy to balance in difficulty as well. Simply have the person fly to location X, scan down mission site Y, hack container Z, retrieve mission item and return. Difficulty is adjusted by the difficulty of scanning down the site, the difficulty of hacking the container, and is easily able to feature more esoteric restrictions (unusually large items requiring a ship with enough cargo space to get it and return, having to mine or harvest resources at the site instead of just hacking, having NPC combatants which must be cleared before the object can be hacked, etc) if desired.

One could also have multiple possible sites for the object, and the player must scan them down and hack the containers at the sites until the object is located. Variations could also include scanning down an NPC fleet to obtain its composition, identifying the location of a lost drone (or rogue drone), scouting routes to identify the best route for an ambush of NPCs, or virtually any other activities which fall under the scouting or exploration professions. Regardless of how complex you choose to get with the creation of the missions, the bulk of them can follow the basic formula for rapid and easy development and deployment.

Finally, a request: Get rid of the sites showing up when people first warp into the system. It promotes rapid harvesting of sites, diminishes the challenge of the profession, cheapens the feeling of actually discovering something, and makes almost no sense from a gameplay *or* from a fluff perspective. Make it so that people don't have any idea if there is a site or not until they send out the probes and actually take the effort to scan things down, and they actually have a reason to look above and below the solar plane, as they truly do not know if something is there or not. Please.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

def a good idea

1) I agree, exploration missions and "true" exploration are not, and would not be one and the same. This would not come at the expense of "true" exploration, but would instead suppliment it. See #6 for more on this.

2) Features being non-competitive certainly seem to be taken as an advantage by some players. The main reason why I consider it an advantage here is because it provides independance from market fluctuations. As you may or may not know, the isk/hr generated by exploring data sites has plummeted since the release of Odyssey, to the point where it's simply not worth exploring them, as virtually any other activity provides better return on investment of time. This is mostly because of a large increase in the supply of a limited consumption market item (datacores) without an increase in the use of said items. There is serious concern about the market for the reward for relic sites crashing as well.

By giving budding explorers something to do to hone their skills and while away their time which does not contribute to the supply of items whose consumption remains static, it helps prevent the value of those items from decreasing. Similarly, if sites are all used up in an area, or are too low in value to provide meaningful return on investment, exploration missions would provide a way to still engage in the basic actions associated with exploration, and would ensure a competitive return on time invested. This is what I meant when I refered to them contributing to "market stability", and it is *only* true because it provides (in addition to the normal exploration activity, which is in all ways a competitive activity) a non-competitive income source.

3) Agreed. Eventually, I'd love to see standings come from a wider variety of sources, but as you said, a new mission type is better than nothing, and at the same time is such a small departure from existing mechanics it has virtually no balance concerns regarding its impact on that mechanic.

4) It's not a real problem. Not at all. Having a market for LP items (and therefore being able to turn them into money when your own needs are met) is one of the income sources for the mission runner "profession", as it were. As well, no activity is self sufficient. Your modules came from somewhere, your ship came from somewhere, and unless you're involved in mining, manufacturing, and trade, it's unlikely everything from the base materials on came from you. I was simply refering to the advantages mission running has over other activities, as well as the effects this would have. Forgive me for my tangental remarks regarding the fact that while a core probe scanner is a requirement for the sister's core probe scanner, its use is not, and in fact could not possibly contribute to obtaining it.

5) Though this is a completely separate point from the exploration missions, perhaps a middle ground would be appropriate- if wormholes (since they are giant holes in space) showed up in the way sites do now, providing players with a frequent reminder that things are out there, and encouraging people to engage in that activity, without essentially "giving away" the rewards currently available for engaging in that activity. Wormholes do not disappear when found, so the number of signatures would remain static throughout the day, so people wouldn't automatically know if a system is "tapped out" yet or not. It would also provide players with frequent reminders that wormhole space exists, and that other exits from the system are viable beyond the stargates to the adjacent systems. Thoughts?

6) In reality, I'm trying to develop that "stepping stone" you refer to in number 5. Have players have a means to engage in the activity, without giving them the whole thing all at once. Prevent variable numbers of players wanting to explore that profession from having market massive impact on the rewards available from that profession. That, in and of itself, *does* benefit the exploration profession. It aims to benefit a) mission runners, by giving them more variety, b) explorers, by reducing supply of their rewards and contributing towards market stability, c) those interested in the mechanics of exploration, by giving them a guaranteed site, independant of the number of explorers in the region, and d) those who are fond of the mechanics, but either come on too late to find much, or are concerned about the market for the rewards, by providing them a guaranteed income level.

Sure, it doesn't do much to expand upon or contribute towards exploration as a base activity. However, it does provide some benefits to some people. The bigger question then is, would it hurt anyone, and how difficult would it be to implement, compared to its benefits? It pretty obviously doesn't hurt anyone, and I attempted to address difficulty of implementation in the first post. You can consider it an exploration idea or a mission runner idea. It's actually a bit of both, but it wouldn't matter if it was neither, as that's kind of independant of the merit the idea has, imho.