Exploration Enhancement

[shadragon]

Suggestion:

When your ship blows up when exploring, a small pod with all your scan data should survive and stay where you were destroyed. Then you have the option to go back to pick it up, salvaging your previous trip and giving you an in-game goal to boot.

This also brings up the possibility of players hunting explorers down, killing them and scooping the data for themselves.

It adds an additional dimension I thought was worth considering. Thoughts?

 

[varonica]

Suggestion:


This also brings up the possibility of players hunting explorers down, killing them and scooping the data for themselves.

It adds an additional dimension I thought was worth considering. Thoughts?

Yes good ideajust what every explorer wants, guaranteed death on returning from an extended expedition. Spend six month or a year out in the black exploring, scanning, gathering data only to have every ganker and griefer sitting at the edge of the bubble just waiting for you to return so they can steal your 500m+ worth of data, it's to great a target to lure people in.

Two things,

First, losing a ship and cargo to griefers is one thing, losing a years worth of data would probably make it the end of the game for many explorers, the punishment is way out of proportion to any sort of gameplay mechanic enhancement.

Two, data is used to acquire exploration rank, making it trivial to rank explorer, just go out and murder unsuspecting players, steal their data and rank up, I mean you could probably do that without even leaving your home system.

Game play mechanics should never able to be exploited to raise your rank in one of the professions, and the punishment for being destroyed should not be out of all proportion for one group of players as opposed to another. A trader just loses ship and cargo, an explorer loses a years worth of data, basically a year out of his life? No.

It's a nice thought and there should be dangers out there, but nothing that an experienced, properly equipped and cautious player can't manage, making them a target as big as Fort Knox simply doesn't fit the bill. I would be all up for allowing a player to travel out and pick up their data, but not for others to kill steal it.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Yes good ideajust what every explorer wants, guaranteed death on returning from an extended expedition. Spend six month or a year out in the black exploring, scanning, gathering data only to have every ganker and griefer sitting at the edge of the bubble just waiting for you to return so they can steal your 500m+ worth of data, it's to great a target to lure people in.

The edge of the bubble - let's say 150-250LY from Sol - contains 8,000 populated systems. It would be an exceptionally patient pilot who waited in supercruise in one of them in the hope that one day an explorer showed up ... conversely the sort of person who would do that is unlikely to care about a couple of hundred million in data and is probably already waiting there just for the kill.

Road-to-riches + Quince-likes means anyone hanging around the bubble has plenty of easy ways to gain both cash and exploration rank without going to anywhere near as much effort.

Believe me, the fewer people who have incentives to kill explorers, the better - but except in the case of an exploration CG (or especially competing exploration CGs) - I can't see the ability to collect someone else's data significantly changing things in practice.

It could also lead to more cooperative gameplay if the data collected was as a cargo pod, rather than just going straight onto your data bank - lose your ship on a bad landing? Maybe another explorer is heading home the same way and will bring your pod back to you.

 

[CMDR Spadino]

I found that the main idea is ok; for an explorer, have his/her skip destroyed after months or years of scanning it's a punishment too hard to stand with. Be able to rescue it's data it's mandatory. We already can find exploration data canisters out there, which are tagged as stolen and, if sold, they do not worth many credits. Possibly, if you find an explorer black box, you can rescue and sell it, but the data are tagged with the explorer name, so they are processed as the explorer itself has sold it. What about that?

 

[Lestat]

Here a trick I learned long time ago. Never fly at the Planet always offset your course by 3 to 5 degrees. So it prevents you from hitting a planet. If you are not paying attention you will fly past the Planet with out damage.

If the issue landing on planets it best to use low G systems and put the shield on max when landing.

I started exploring after the SRV was released and I still out in deep space.

 

[Teh Smoo]

Suggestion:

When your ship blows up when exploring, a small pod with all your scan data should survive and stay where you were destroyed. Then you have the option to go back to pick it up, salvaging your previous trip and giving you an in-game goal to boot.

This also brings up the possibility of players hunting explorers down, killing them and scooping the data for themselves.

It adds an additional dimension I thought was worth considering. Thoughts?

The data should not be dropped for others. Exploration requires STAGGERING investment of time, and time-per-hour is probably not even that great, aside from the enhanced turn-ins.

But not negating weeks, or months or more of work? Totally on board with that, here. That fits in with the rest of the game, where a severe screwup is out a rebuy. An explorer screwup, IF they can get to the can (neutron star or heat death would be terrible), would require another massive trip, probably.