Premise: the current npcs suck. Too predictable and too opt-in and too limited in how we as players interact with npcs.
Improving this requires a couple things so as we dont solely rely on combat skill. I dont think a good solution to difficulty scale should be one dimensional.
First addition to the game is an augment to the reputation system. This would allow the recent history of (upcoming described changes) to player actions to be seen by certain npcs.
So the below would be used to drive the npcs ...and the added challenge primarily comes from overwhelming numbers vs cheating individual npcs ...as well as the decrease in predictability.
Reputation (Permanent):
So how do npcs utilize this new system?:
Different npcs can see different levels of notoriety. Low level npcs will only see the highest level of notoriety actions. This scales up to the highest level npcs seeing all of your reputation. This creates a scale of behavior response.
The npcs then construct an archetype of the player based on the reputation that they see and respond accordingly. This archetype will vary depending on the faction doing the calculation.
Temporary reputation acts as a kind of short term memory to a faction and the fact that it doesn't sum means your most immediate actions can more easily dominate the npc's archetype calculation than older actions.
Temporary reputation is given first priority over perm reputation (weighted higher).
the longer a player has played, the longer their reputation takes to degrade and the more items are seen. The highest notoriety levels will never degrade if the accumulated count gets to a certain level.
Effects on gameplay:
The idea around the additional complexity of the above is that npcs can make educated, reactive behavioral decisions based on the individual player rather than rely on RNG or predifined scripted behaviors that are always the same. This allows the game to automatically scale npc actions to players based on their playstyle and skill. Creating a natural cap to player actions - forcing them to move around and do a variety of things instead of the same thing repeatedly or the same thing in the same area if they are having a lot of success.
Players wont know exactly how a given faction will respond to them because factions will always have a mix of archetypes and it would be unclear at first just where they fall in how they take your reputation. Players also dont know exactly what is listed in their reputation. But npcs will parrot some of the most pertinent ones to them often when interacting with the player.
So a miner dropping into a ring wont know if the npcs around them will continue doing what they're doing, leave you alone, try to pirate you, ask you for help, offer you missions, or show up with a legion of ships to take you out. At best, they'll be able to make a basic guess given the factions in the system and their own leanings.
A combat pilot going to a Combat Zone will have to think twice about what side they agree to fight for because while you'll still be able to pick any side you want, the npcs remember your immediate past very well and will turn on you if you are switching sides .... or your perm reputation may lead them to not offer you much assistance .... Likewise the forces on the opposite side may decide you're a priority target based on your reputation. or let you retreat if you were a friend (though opposing them would effectively burn that bridge fast).
Traders would see commodity prices fluctuate based on their reputation on top of the general economy of the station - dictated by the faction controlling that station. This would mostly be leveraged to decrease profit to the player or increase cost via a kind of invisible tax (not provide increased profit or decreased cost over the economic levels set by the bgs). The benefits to traders would be in missions provided and assistance during those missions - as well as assistance during interdictions.
Speaking of interdictions.
Some of these will behave as they currently do. Added to the interdiction minigame will be system authority assistance. If you hold out long enough for assistance to arrive before failing or submitting, they will either stop the interdiction and take out the offending party or drop in with you and immediately begin attacking the offending party. depending on your reputation will determine how many and how fast this assistance arrives. This assistance can come from other pirates if you happen to be friendly with their types and you're being pulled over by the cops or some other do-gooders / other powers for pp.
Another change to interdictions is that if you submit to npcs demanding your cargo (pirates), your cargo bay automatically jettisons 10% (or 20 units whichever is greater) of a random selection of cargo once you drop out of SC. You can choose to run - and the pirates may leave you alone to do so or you can kill them and take your cargo back. If you fight the interdiction and lose, you do not automatically jettison any cargo, but you are given the option to via coms prompt. Agreeing will automatically jettison 10% (or 20 units) of your hold randomly.
If you have less than 20 units of cargo, all of it is released.
If you have no cargo and have the right reputation criteria, the pirates will instead try to co-opt you into their crew. giving you a mission to help them pirate a ship with them immediately - if you refuse or fail the mission - it will result in an attack or impact reputation - making the next interaction much worse.
Most npc interactions will create comms prompts - with the responses to those prompts usually being yes/no/accept/decline or other choices and the choices will play in to your reputation and npc response - even if they do not have anything to do with missions.
Conclusion:
i think with the above persistence of reputation should allow for a scaling of difficulty and unpredictability that doesn't currently exist in the game and improve the gameplay significantly without having to have players opt in to anything. It also gives the player an opportunity to role play their character in a more believable way than just doing whatever they want whenever they want with no consequence. The additional comms chatter and prompts allow an aspect of diplomacy to be simulated in the game that allows for non-combative gameplay and interactions with npcs to be more viable. The updates to interdiction make piracy more effective and the non-combative way out more fair - as well as scale the danger to interdiction due to assistance for-or-against the player. Traders will also see improvements to strategy and consequence by having profits and costs directly impacted by their reputation with the faction in control of a given station. This also makes it harder to rely on third party tools to give mindless get-rich-quick directions since they wont be able to take into consideration your reputation 100% accurately as your reputation is not outputted in the player journal in any way nor is it able to be accessed thru an api.
Improving this requires a couple things so as we dont solely rely on combat skill. I dont think a good solution to difficulty scale should be one dimensional.
First addition to the game is an augment to the reputation system. This would allow the recent history of (upcoming described changes) to player actions to be seen by certain npcs.
So the below would be used to drive the npcs ...and the added challenge primarily comes from overwhelming numbers vs cheating individual npcs ...as well as the decrease in predictability.
Reputation (Permanent):
- Each interaction is assigned a notoriety level (this is a different definition of the word than just the bad connotation used in the game).
- Each interaction is recorded when a trigger event occurs. Those trigger events are either accomplishing a mission, killing a ship (heavily damaging), killing a ship's attacker, being killed (or heavily damaged), getting pirated, other communication with npcs.
- Each interaction records the faction's alignment and archetype and if they were system authority.
- Similar actions sum existing entries and update their timestamp. This count factors into priority in sorting reputation by npcs.
- Temp reputation lasts for 48 hours and deletes the oldest stuff first. This is stuff that is specific to particular factions. Behaving much the same way as perm reputation but a faction can only see reputation items that involve the given faction, not others.
- All entries are available to all level npcs.
- Reputation doesn't sum.
So how do npcs utilize this new system?:
Different npcs can see different levels of notoriety. Low level npcs will only see the highest level of notoriety actions. This scales up to the highest level npcs seeing all of your reputation. This creates a scale of behavior response.
The npcs then construct an archetype of the player based on the reputation that they see and respond accordingly. This archetype will vary depending on the faction doing the calculation.
Temporary reputation acts as a kind of short term memory to a faction and the fact that it doesn't sum means your most immediate actions can more easily dominate the npc's archetype calculation than older actions.
Temporary reputation is given first priority over perm reputation (weighted higher).
the longer a player has played, the longer their reputation takes to degrade and the more items are seen. The highest notoriety levels will never degrade if the accumulated count gets to a certain level.
Effects on gameplay:
- npcs will call in wing reinforcements to deal with players that faction finds particularly annoying... with the likelihood of this occurring being higher with higher ranked npcs than lower ranked ones. The size and makeup of the wing will be proportional to the reputation.
- npcs that like you will do the same to assist you if needed.
- if you have been pirated - you will be given the option to be pirated again ... but depending on your archetype, you could also be asked to join them as a pirate. and tasked with a mission to pirate other npcs in the area to prove you are one of them.
- Npcs will have tailored comms chatter with you based on your archetype and theirs. Including bringing up certain events in your reputation that they see
- ad-hoc missions will be provided when appropriate - including immediate calls for help that will further impact your reputation if you choose to take the call or ignore it.
- Instead of other factions showing you their reputation to them, the player is provided a circle graph that acts as basically a moral/political compass with the various general archetypes around it with a neutral weighting applied and how much you align or oppose each shown in the height of how attracted the circle is to that archetype or opposed to it.
- This is separate from the temporary reputation that is specific to a given faction - which the game will reuse the existing reputation ui to identify.
The idea around the additional complexity of the above is that npcs can make educated, reactive behavioral decisions based on the individual player rather than rely on RNG or predifined scripted behaviors that are always the same. This allows the game to automatically scale npc actions to players based on their playstyle and skill. Creating a natural cap to player actions - forcing them to move around and do a variety of things instead of the same thing repeatedly or the same thing in the same area if they are having a lot of success.
Players wont know exactly how a given faction will respond to them because factions will always have a mix of archetypes and it would be unclear at first just where they fall in how they take your reputation. Players also dont know exactly what is listed in their reputation. But npcs will parrot some of the most pertinent ones to them often when interacting with the player.
So a miner dropping into a ring wont know if the npcs around them will continue doing what they're doing, leave you alone, try to pirate you, ask you for help, offer you missions, or show up with a legion of ships to take you out. At best, they'll be able to make a basic guess given the factions in the system and their own leanings.
A combat pilot going to a Combat Zone will have to think twice about what side they agree to fight for because while you'll still be able to pick any side you want, the npcs remember your immediate past very well and will turn on you if you are switching sides .... or your perm reputation may lead them to not offer you much assistance .... Likewise the forces on the opposite side may decide you're a priority target based on your reputation. or let you retreat if you were a friend (though opposing them would effectively burn that bridge fast).
Traders would see commodity prices fluctuate based on their reputation on top of the general economy of the station - dictated by the faction controlling that station. This would mostly be leveraged to decrease profit to the player or increase cost via a kind of invisible tax (not provide increased profit or decreased cost over the economic levels set by the bgs). The benefits to traders would be in missions provided and assistance during those missions - as well as assistance during interdictions.
Speaking of interdictions.
Some of these will behave as they currently do. Added to the interdiction minigame will be system authority assistance. If you hold out long enough for assistance to arrive before failing or submitting, they will either stop the interdiction and take out the offending party or drop in with you and immediately begin attacking the offending party. depending on your reputation will determine how many and how fast this assistance arrives. This assistance can come from other pirates if you happen to be friendly with their types and you're being pulled over by the cops or some other do-gooders / other powers for pp.
Another change to interdictions is that if you submit to npcs demanding your cargo (pirates), your cargo bay automatically jettisons 10% (or 20 units whichever is greater) of a random selection of cargo once you drop out of SC. You can choose to run - and the pirates may leave you alone to do so or you can kill them and take your cargo back. If you fight the interdiction and lose, you do not automatically jettison any cargo, but you are given the option to via coms prompt. Agreeing will automatically jettison 10% (or 20 units) of your hold randomly.
If you have less than 20 units of cargo, all of it is released.
If you have no cargo and have the right reputation criteria, the pirates will instead try to co-opt you into their crew. giving you a mission to help them pirate a ship with them immediately - if you refuse or fail the mission - it will result in an attack or impact reputation - making the next interaction much worse.
Most npc interactions will create comms prompts - with the responses to those prompts usually being yes/no/accept/decline or other choices and the choices will play in to your reputation and npc response - even if they do not have anything to do with missions.
Conclusion:
i think with the above persistence of reputation should allow for a scaling of difficulty and unpredictability that doesn't currently exist in the game and improve the gameplay significantly without having to have players opt in to anything. It also gives the player an opportunity to role play their character in a more believable way than just doing whatever they want whenever they want with no consequence. The additional comms chatter and prompts allow an aspect of diplomacy to be simulated in the game that allows for non-combative gameplay and interactions with npcs to be more viable. The updates to interdiction make piracy more effective and the non-combative way out more fair - as well as scale the danger to interdiction due to assistance for-or-against the player. Traders will also see improvements to strategy and consequence by having profits and costs directly impacted by their reputation with the faction in control of a given station. This also makes it harder to rely on third party tools to give mindless get-rich-quick directions since they wont be able to take into consideration your reputation 100% accurately as your reputation is not outputted in the player journal in any way nor is it able to be accessed thru an api.
