It's fair to say that the resource extraction sites aren't working as expected at the moment. The following changes were made for 1.3:
- Added in the new ships for each of the archetypes that spawn into RES locations. There are now between 4-7 different ship types that each of the 3 spawn maintainers can choose from. There’s also a nice selection of different scenarios for each scenarion to choose from.
- Smoothed out spawning by delaying some of the ships. Same number of ships will eventually appear after approximately 30-90 seconds, it was merely added in to reduce any heavy load slowdown when you first arrive at a RES site.
- Made high, normal and low intensity also mean high, normal and low skill for the ships that spawn into the RES site.
- Balance of high intensity is in favour of pirates and security ships for low intensity.
At the moment it seems that these are sometimes working and sometimes not so we're investigating why this is the case.
Michael
Glad this is being looked at. The most frustrating aspect of it for me is how hard it is for players to figure out where might be a good place to go and where not. This is often what causes me to just put the game down for an evening. I spend half an hour figuring out a potential site for hunting and flying out there, just to get to the system in question and find the res completely and utterly devoid of life. When you have limited time to game, this is incredibly annoying. It is just dead time, and worse, there is nothing you can do about it. It feels like trial and error. Elite is too big for trial and error
I found somewhere which gave me tough pythons, clippers and dropships, but was bizarrely devoid of miners. Then the next night, it was completely dead. No amount of rerolling would trigger decent spawns. Whilst you're reading this, this whole mechanic needs reworking, imo. RES should ramp up to allow you to make increasing money for increasing risk. That way, it would still provide good credit rewards for people who like combat, but also represent a real risk when the spawns start to increase, and it would give wings something to do. Me and a friend in 2 vultures are bored to tears even with spawns of anacondas pythons and clippers.