Some brainstorming ideas I have had for balancing the game in general
EDIT:
I will try to articulate the reasons why I made the thread. All of my brainstorming covered several topics but here are the main themes that my poorly thought out ideas were coming from:
1. People that are already involved in Open in Powerplay - A way of funnelling those players to choose combat on the frontline (rather than ambushing unprepared players all over enemy territory) and to incentivise the players on the frontline to attack and find other players preferentially over npcs.
2. Players that prefer to be in Open but find Powerplay objectives are best done in other modes in order to be more efficient - Finding some way to make it that all players find that their preferential mode is just as efficient for Powerplay objectives as the other modes. If Open punishes Solo players etc for not playing Open then my brainstorming in the opening post has so far failed.
3. Accepting that all modes will always continue (including the Xbox population) finding a way beyond filling up bars for players to conduct indirect Powerplay warfare across the modes - for example players in a private group could work together to build and deploy a capital ship for their empire that sits in a system across all modes with the intention of slowing or stopping progress being made by Open players in that system.
4. General ideas for just improving Open for anyone so they feel they can participate there if they so choose but again without Open punishing Solo/Group players for not being in Open.
Influenced by the the mod Viajero's thoughts in this
thread I have some general ideas I think might work (but need fleshing out):
These ideas cover several topics but I didn't want to spam the forum with threads.
Powerplay - Merit Multipliers
Combat:
My concept involves a new temporary ranking for Powerplay activities called
Valour. The idea revolves around a multiplier that temporarily increases the amount of merits you make based on how many enemy players you encounter in that moment.
The more enemy faction players that are with you in the instance/combat zone the higher the Valour multiplier rises. As soon as the enemy presence decreases the Valour multiplier also decreases down to 0 if there are no enemy player threats around or if you die. This would hopefully give an incentive for players to go and seek out other players and the increase in merits recognises the risk of player interaction but does not give the risk bonus to players who are encountering just npcs like solo (as this would be unfair to solo/group players).
This would also reward players who are skillful. If they manage to fight off larger numbers they can gain enough merits to lessen larger numbers of enemy players activities (rather than an artificial bottleneck instance).
Also Valour could possibly have an extra multiplier based on whether the system is on the
frontline of faction territory. This would hopefully incentivise the player to fight on the frontline and slightly dissuade players from attacking hostile faction ships deep within enemy territory.
AI Factional Capital Ships that spawn in a system where there has been constant
large amounts of faction player combat activity. This would give a way for PCOpen/XboxOpen and various private groups to fight and counter each other. If an AI capital ship spawns all the faction players in that system that the ship belongs to gain a massive multiplier in merits. The other factions and instances would have to either destroy the ship (which would take a lot of concerted effort over the various game modes) or bring enough player numbers to spawn their own capital ship to fight the other capital ship. This needs more thought if anyone can weigh in on this.
Trading:
I think traders involved in Powerplay objectives (carrying Propaganda etc) also need a bonus multiplier. For this I was thinking of another temporary multiplier called
Hazard Pay. The incentive here is that Powerplay traders get a bonus multiplier based firstly on the
number of enemy player ships they detect in the systems they travel through. The traders would also gain bonus merits for every player interdiction or enemy player encounter they escape. As soon as the trader dies or completes their delivery objective the bonus multiplier resets.
EDIT - The trader delivering the propaganda would have to not be able to gain any other combat merit bonus as I think we would find a situation where combat players carry propaganda with no intention to deliver it. Maybe a time limit on delivering the propaganda as well. Any ideas on this would be welcome.
General Pirating and Trading
Pirating:
Much like my ideas with Powerplay I believe pirates should have temporary ranking multiplier called
Infamy. The notion behind this is that pirates should get an infamy bonus at anarchy stations (such as better black market prices, reduced outfitting costs etc.) based on how many
player traders they manage to
successfully gain cargo from without killing. The infamy bonus would reset on player death.
The Infamy multiplier could also become negative (as you
gain a poor reputation from killing players) until the player gains the status of
Raider. This Raider status would be like an Ultra-wanted status where basically everyone is hostile to the Raider. After a certain amount of time (as long as they kill no more players) the Raider status would disappear. I'm not sure whether the pirate's death should reset this status.
Hopefully these ideas would incentivise a pirate to try and gain cargo from player traders without killing them. Npcs would not affect any of these multipliers/statuses.
Trading:
Much like the pirating concept I've also been trying to come up incentives for open trading based on the number of hostile players a trader encounters. Like my powerplay trading idea a multiplier based on how many enemy player encounters they have during a trading run. So far I have been unable to come up with a multiplier that is not immersion breaking (why would a trader be paid for avoiding pirates?). If anyone can come up with a good idea for this please state it.
One thing I have been toying with is that if a Trader is killed by a player
Raider in a non-anarchy territory then they get no insurance costs to rebuy their ship as the system authority pays it as an apology for not being able to keep raiders out of their system.
One last idea was incentivising the use of pure trading ships. A trader in a large T9 etc could get some sort of small escape shuttle where they can fly back to a station and get their trading ship back at reduced insurance cost (as the insurance company doesn't have to recover their escape pod). The escape shuttle would be very small and incredibly hard to detect on radar so the pirates would not be able to find it easily/at all. A trading anaconda etc could also have this escape shuttle but would have to sacrifice cargo space and/or outfitting slots for it.
Thanks for reading and let me know if you can expand any of my ideas to make them work better.
