One of the problems facing Ed is the lack of player-player interaction, due to the immense distances involved in the game - even across civilized space, or the space of the individual superpowers. Community goals go a way to helping with this, and you will often find a decent amount of players in the instances of community goal systems, but the purpose of being there is very narrow - you're either trading, stealing, or killing people - and while that isn't nothing, most interactions consist of pulling someone out of warp, and murdering them. Maybe stealing, but most likely murdering.
From the words of David Braben (iirc), "combat in open space isn't that interesting" (paraphrased
). What if, consistently over long periods of time, there could be "galactic points of interest". Players could learn of these from GalNet, or by seeing the icon above the system of the galactic POI on the Galaxy Map.
Galactic POIs could consist of:
- Deployed capital ships, in combat zones.
- Special resource extraction sites, where the RES in question spawns only special/rare minerals/metals which are worth more than any other mineral/metal, e.g. Platinum, Rhenium, Iridium, Artifacts.
- Anarchy system with armed trade convoys carrying expensive and rare commodities, such as Hafnium, AI Relics, Antiquities, Intel Packages, etc. smaller convoys for players with smaller ships, and full-on combat zones with pirates vs traders/mercs. mercs get bounties and combat bonds, pirates get nothing but cargo.
- A coriolis on the fringes of human space found an amazing new resource on the planet it orbits, and to garner attention is selling it off in bulk, cheap, for a long period of time (maybe a month?). e.g. Pukkeenat Spice, Freeholm zero-G biofilm.
There are plenty of these that could be added, but the idea is to have interesting areas that are clearly better than their alternatives, so players can conglomerate in small portions of the milky way. They should stay in the same positions over long periods of time, so as to not force players who are interested to trek around the bubble to get to them. Another thing, please prioritize instancing based on ship type and elite combat rank. It would suck to have cobras and vipers fighting fer-de-lances and anacondas - no fun in completely unbalanced fights.
From the words of David Braben (iirc), "combat in open space isn't that interesting" (paraphrased
). What if, consistently over long periods of time, there could be "galactic points of interest". Players could learn of these from GalNet, or by seeing the icon above the system of the galactic POI on the Galaxy Map. Galactic POIs could consist of:
- Deployed capital ships, in combat zones.
- Special resource extraction sites, where the RES in question spawns only special/rare minerals/metals which are worth more than any other mineral/metal, e.g. Platinum, Rhenium, Iridium, Artifacts.
- Anarchy system with armed trade convoys carrying expensive and rare commodities, such as Hafnium, AI Relics, Antiquities, Intel Packages, etc. smaller convoys for players with smaller ships, and full-on combat zones with pirates vs traders/mercs. mercs get bounties and combat bonds, pirates get nothing but cargo.
- A coriolis on the fringes of human space found an amazing new resource on the planet it orbits, and to garner attention is selling it off in bulk, cheap, for a long period of time (maybe a month?). e.g. Pukkeenat Spice, Freeholm zero-G biofilm.
There are plenty of these that could be added, but the idea is to have interesting areas that are clearly better than their alternatives, so players can conglomerate in small portions of the milky way. They should stay in the same positions over long periods of time, so as to not force players who are interested to trek around the bubble to get to them. Another thing, please prioritize instancing based on ship type and elite combat rank. It would suck to have cobras and vipers fighting fer-de-lances and anacondas - no fun in completely unbalanced fights.
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