ZenThunder
Thirtyplus Spaceship Samurai
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Posted - 2013.11.14 22:15:00 -
[1] - Quote
PVP is exciting for a few reasons, but one is that it is completely unpredictable. Its a real adventure, with an unknown outcome that falls anywhere from 'oops I lost a ship in 5 minutes' to 'OMG the plex dropped gimme moar beer!'
PVE also could be more exciting. PVE encounters need to be more random, difficulty wise. It should be possible in a 1.0 system (once in a looong while, of course) to get a multiple BS rat spawn - heck the RNG for spawns should be random with an 'upgradeability' factor,. unknown outcome = more fun, as long as over time the reward is greater than the risk.
lets say we are in an average null sec belt.
if the 'tails' on the probability curves went wayy out there then it should happen, rarely, that I could warp into a belt and see a whole fleet of rats, complete with commander and equivalent to a 10/10 complex. (or greater!) - this wouldn't happen very often, but it would happen enough to generate stories that would keep people hunting.
Its not that we need more loot or better spawn, I think what is needed is the *chance* for something really cool to happen..
its like the old DnD loot tables.... roll a d20 and most of the time (5-15) get a normal type of loot, sometimes (1-4) you get less, sometimes (16-19) you get more and sometimes (20) you roll an a whole other table where normal = high... and even on *that* table you could also roll a 20 and get up to an even higher table, almost ad infinitum...
My point being is that on any given day no encounter should be predictable enough that you can just 'google it' and know what you are likely to be facing, what the loot will be, etc.. Its a shame to see that loot drops are so predictable that many people dont bother to loot wrecks at all, unless they are faction-spawn. On the other hand if someone in my corp got a machariel BPC off a frig rat in a belt yesterday you better believe I would start looting all those wrecks. Would it happen often enough to unbalance things? No thats not what I am asking for - it just needs to happen often enough to make the hunt for pve more exciting, like its counterpart.
Imagine if you knew it was possible yet unlikely to get a spawn of 10 faction cruisers at once in a belt. Would you hunt belts all day hoping for such a thing? I know I would. Would I ever actually find it? Maybe, maybe not but it would be more exciting than knowing generally what I will see.
Same thing goes for complexes and anoms - its silly unfun that you can know what to expect in these things. CCP needs to come up with somme way of randomly generating them and 'varying' the difficulty so that it isn't a given anymore that if the first wave is easy the second will be, or that I could even know what I will find. Room full of haulers? POssible. Room full of scram/web frigs? Possible. nothing but turrets and no loot? Also possible.
Mining should also be less predictable - like the gold rush days. It should be possible for overly large size asteroids of a random type to spawn, rarely, in a belt. Should the type and size scale with security level? Sure, but it should still be *possible* yet almost never occur that a 10M M3 asteroid of mercoxit should spawn somewhere, a HUGE ROCK that would attract mining fleets for many jumps out (and the pirates of course).. Its the unpredictability of things that brings the excitement.
Ships - when a ship is built the stats should have a small chance of varying to a degree, such that perhaps 1 in 10 might have a random extra slot, resist, powergrid, cpu, etc... which of course would demand more in the marketplace. This would sometimes result in overpowered 1-off ships but the price would certainly show it. The ship bonuses too could be rarely random or varied in a weird way as to create unique ships - like a covops interceptor (the only one on the server probably) or something odd like that created by random variance in the bonuses of the ship. All sorts of cool things would exist, be unique, and highly sought after by collectors and/or people looking for 'the golden ship' - its not necessarily OP if only one exists...
PI/etc - some rare planets would be extremely profitable and wars would be fought to control them for PI purposes.
anything to make things more exciting is a win in my book - if anything really unbalancing occured it could be petitioned and removed from the game at the discretion of CCP.
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