Exploring star systems is boring

[Irredrache]

I was thinking player-driven-economy lite. AKA, unlimited resources that fluctuate based on player consumption. Something to give players an incentive to fly to Uranus to buy Bromine from me instead of Sol Corp, but not so extreme that it would mean bromine costs 10000 per m3 after Raph is done building shields for his next ship 

I don't know, just thinking out loud. I'm sure there are other more pressing projects, regardless... LIKE ALIEN SHIPS!!!

[Antilak]

In order to do a proper player driver economy resources could no longer be unlimited at Sol. Your right this would help out miners a lot. This is an idea some people have wanted to see in the game for a long time. But it does present another problem. Adding in such a thing at this point risk to throw things off balance. There is nothing that can prevent bigger players from coming in and taking control of the areas with good resources. Assuming the area isn't mined out in the first place of course. Also it would make it that much harder for newer players to actually grow. They would have to either mine to get everything or have someone else make the stuff for them. Meanwhile bigger players who make in solars by the buttloads will not only take over the best mining spots for resources but they likely would buy out everything that comes up on the Earth trading outpost and horde it back in case they need it for later.  This would of course make it even harder on newbies to grow. The only way such a system could be added in fairly would be if either a wipe was done of all accounts or a 2nd server be started.  I think the latter would be a better option. Of course if SirEmi were to do that he might as well add in my suggestions I posted a while back for pvp into that server.

Ya with any kind of player-run environment there's monopolies and ugly rivalries and griefers. This is the dark side of player-run activities. There're liars and cheaters in abundance. Freedom has a cost. If the game maker doesn't control some things then they can't guarantee a consistent and fair experience for the players. I guess each game has to determine the right balance of freedom to do as you want (including harming others) and restrictions placed on you to keep it fair for everyone. For example, if a resource is limited and players or corporations can "own" it via their superior forces, thus making it harder for others to gain access, then a game maker could do several things to restrict the ability of players to own said resources, via things like: respawning said resource in random places (giving others a chance to have it for a while), limiting when and how or if players can forcefully take resources from others, making it droppable in events or environments all players have access to, reducing its actual value (as opposed to the price players put on it).

This is why mmorpg pvp games generally don't allow free-for-all mechanics because it's so easy for a high-level player to kill you if you're just beginning to climb the ladder. Generally, there're limitations on the skill/level range, the reward, where and when.

How adverse do we want our  gaming environment to be? I imagine the safer it's the more stale it'd be for anybody who prefers player-run envrionments. I know in my case I prefer player-run environments and some risk involved in my decisions. But does that mean I want the risk of being imprisoned by Hitler into concentration camps, forced to eat the corpses of other prisoners like myself while making military parts for Hitler's army? I can't think I'd enjoy that. Or what if I was forced to live in a empty cold dark room (aka MK Ultra)? Adverse circumstnaces can bring out the best and the worst in our existence. Some of it's worth it and some isn't.

[GoodPerson]

if planets can hold more than 10k m3 amount of each random resource, this problem can be solved
restrict player with 10k m3 mineral/gas buy quota and then there are still massive amount of resource from outer system. It is not possible to monitor 20 planet per player (it will make your head hurt) and if lucky, you can get a diamond planet with 10k diamond
this will make the game have more thing to do than just farming solar and searching for you-know-not-where alien module

[JamJulLison]

I was thinking player-driven-economy lite. AKA, unlimited resources that fluctuate based on player consumption. Something to give players an incentive to fly to Uranus to buy Bromine from me instead of Sol Corp, but not so extreme that it would mean bromine costs 10000 per m3 after Raph is done building shields for his next ship 

I don't know, just thinking out loud. I'm sure there are other more pressing projects, regardless... LIKE ALIEN SHIPS!!!

This here would be the best way to do it for this server.

if planets can hold more than 10k m3 amount of each random resource, this problem can be solved
restrict player with 10k m3 mineral/gas buy quota and then there are still massive amount of resource from outer system. It is not possible to monitor 20 planet per player (it will make your head hurt) and if lucky, you can get a diamond planet with 10k diamond
this will make the game have more thing to do than just farming solar and searching for you-know-not-where alien module

1. It is possible to monitor a lot if you have corp members helping you to do so. Also monitoring 20 wouldn't be that hard really if you got a ship patrolling each system.  It doesn't take long to check every one.  Though it is boring.

2. 10k though is hardly enough for larger players.  At your level it might seem like it, but trust me, that wouldn't even cover 1 module upgrade on most of my stuff at my tech.

3. Also I doubt you would have us worried about actually finding diamond to use for anything. Chances are the price on that would drop quite low since so many of us get a lot of it from COMs and either use it for duel or sell it to Sol anyways. 

4. Not trying to condescend you or anything. I remember what it was like back around your power. Modules were much cheaper back then.  I miss those days sometimes. lol

[Harachte]

This is why mmorpg pvp games generally don't allow free-for-all mechanics because it's so easy for a high-level player to kill you if you're just beginning to climb the ladder. Generally, there're limitations on the skill/level range, the reward, where and when.

This game, however, is very selective on its limits: it limits economics, but not module mk, for example,
so new players have a very hard time to catch up.


The only things that I can think of that keep high-level players from whiping us all out are:

- they're just really friendly people that prefer to play nice 
- they got bored with trying to find our stuff 
- they got bored with the way to easy victories 
- they prefer to have at least one or two other players around 
- some other reason(s) I haven't thought of yet 

[JamJulLison]

You forgot insanely long attack timers. lol.  Even with the ability to power down timers are still an issue. Most of the time it wouldn't even be worth spending QP to speed up an attack.

[Rostin]

- they're just really friendly people that prefer to play nice 

[sargas]

- they're just really friendly people that prefer to play nice 

[Rostin]

New idea:

An "Explore Nearby Stars" button in the nav room.
It will automatically plot a course for the nearest KNOWN star near the ship and once it gets there it will automatically survey the planets and moons and send a message to the captain that it's done its sweep.

It could be a toggle feature that could be left on to have a ship auto-exploring by jumping to a different star each time if the intel for the nearest star is older than a month old or something.

After playing Civilization V I have fallen in love with the idea of an auto-explore mechanic. It would help mining because you could actually find what you want without manually going to EVERY FREAKIN STAR and you could progressively fill your star map with info as you progress in other parts of the game.

The ship would run on this complex system of autopilots as long as it had fuel, but the idea is that if the nearest stars are stars A, B, & C (in that order) and the intel on Star A is pretty recent, the ship will recognize this and instead of just bouncing between two stars it will go to the next nearest star with old or non-existent info.

Pretty good right guys???

[sargas]

we have actually been asking for that type of 'chain-jumping for quite a while now.I think JJL brought it up first. Maybe it going to be one of those pesky small updates we have been waiting for.

[Antilak]

New idea:

An "Explore Nearby Stars" button in the nav room.
It will automatically plot a course for the nearest KNOWN star near the ship and once it gets there it will automatically survey the planets and moons and send a message to the captain that it's done its sweep.

It could be a toggle feature that could be left on to have a ship auto-exploring by jumping to a different star each time if the intel for the nearest star is older than a month old or something.

After playing Civilization V I have fallen in love with the idea of an auto-explore mechanic. It would help mining because you could actually find what you want without manually going to EVERY FREAKIN STAR and you could progressively fill your star map with info as you progress in other parts of the game.

The ship would run on this complex system of autopilots as long as it had fuel, but the idea is that if the nearest stars are stars A, B, & C (in that order) and the intel on Star A is pretty recent, the ship will recognize this and instead of just bouncing between two stars it will go to the next nearest star with old or non-existent info.

Pretty good right guys???

What of those players whom have dozens of ships, high MK engines and hundreds of millions of solar? They could produce a fleet of autoexplorers and know almost immediately when there's a good mining spot. This might be ok on the frontier, far away from SOL, assuming there's enough room for extremely wealthy players to compete for good spots, but close to SOL it could make it substantially harder for new players to find good spots. Presently, the "tedium" of exploring does balance somewhat the extreme wealth of some players versus the lack thereof amongst new players.

I do support a feature like this. I thikn hte real problem is once a player has tons of ships and fast engines, the pressure to use them to explore is too great. They bump up against the limitations in the system, like a fat man in a small car. I get the feeling this whole congestion in the exploring system is hte procuct of a game which is still confusing a single ship with a fleet of them. A game needs to decide whether it's going to be about a single ship experience or a fleet of them or both. If it wants to be both it needs to figure out how to make it work smoothly all the way from a single ship to a fleet of ships.

I want to add I'm becoming more like that fat man in a small car everyday. I have more and more ships, more and more modules, more and more mining units and so on. More and more I get the feeling I'm losing something by being away from the game. When I first started out it was very leisurely. Star travel was a dozen hours and I just walked away without even a glance. Now I look and it's only a couple hours or less. And I got more than one ship. More and more the game feels too real-time.

So I feel you. The game needs to be able to run on  its own better, no matter how powerful a player is.

[Matamaure001]

I think I could fit in the category wealthy and numerous ships. I do not explore & I do not mine simply because it does not pay as much as other missions. Also I take missions at a minimum of 2 sectors away from earth to give a chance to newbies. So auto-exploring, I suggested it, but more for finding derelict alien ships than anything else. Try to use simultaneously 40 ships to explore!!!! You will get bored pretty soon.

[Fenix]

Yea I do all of my SoS and COM missions quite far away from Sol, usually in the 4th ring because those are the best paying SoS missions and I've seen large numbers of COM missions all bunched up out there anyway.

I would like to see some kind of long range scanning module added into the game. Basically you could navigate to a system and then go to your scanner module and have it scan the system. The higher mk the scanner the faster the scan is completed. It wouldn't give you the same detailed information you would get from manually moving to each planet/moon/asteroid field it would just give you some basic information. Things like number of slots on the planet, if there are any modules/ships/stations in the system and the total amount of minerals and gas that a planet has (not the specific types but rather a total amount for each planetary body). That would allow many of us to see if there is anything of interest in the system and if there is then we could manually poke around and get the details, if not we could move on. These types of scans would be one time things, not something that would go into your database to look at whenever you wanted, you would still have to manually explore each planet to get that. Of course any ships in the safe zone of a system would be exempt from these scans since you couldn't attack it or even hail it in the first place anyway.

There would be a sister module as well called the scanner jamming module, as you might suspect it would serve to jam a scanning module so that your planetary forces (if deployed on a planet), your ship or your station would remain invisible to a scan as long as your jamming device was the same level or higher than the scanning module being used.

I really like the idea of an economy system where prices fluctuate based on demand, perhaps something like the demand for a certain mineral exceeds 1,000% of the supply (minerals that are sold back to Sol) for a week so the price goes up by 50% for the following week. Then if the same thing happens the next week the price goes up by another 50%. As long as there was some kind of cap like prices not being able to exceed 300% of their original price then it wouldn't be too bad, big players like Jam, Raphel, Mata might decide to do more nest missions to get the minerals they need rather than pay 3x the price for some mineral they need like 400k of. As a result that leaves more potential hijackings out there for newer players who just need some cash, and also perhaps the minerals for other modules that people might not normally build could be cheaper so we see more diversity in the types of modules that are built. Feel free to add to the idea but hopefully it would result in cycles of sort when certain minerals are more expensive and people go find them instead of buying them and cycles where other minerals become super cheap and making modules out of those is a better option.

It actually gives me an idea as well, I would kind of like to have multiple options for what to use when making a module. For example if a module needs Iron-nickel, why couldn't I substitute Iron instead? Or perhaps just Nickel? Maybe even Aluminum since that is another metal used for construction. Obviously it wouldn't be the same amounts because those resources have different prices but it could adjust accordingly. Idk I have a lot of different ideas floating around in my head after reading some of the posts here. I might just make another thread for that though, it's a bit off the exploring star systems topic lol.

[Viracocha]

2 ships is max for exploring aliens you can't menage more in same time ...

[Matamaure001]

When the new cluster was created, I did exploration with 30 ships !!!!!!!