Honestly, the big kick in the proverbials is what Exploration means. A lot of people would say it's "Finding new things"... which is fine, but I think FD's definition is "Finding new things, and finding new things only". What I want to see is things like deep-space (5,000-10,000LY+ from any inhabited system) mining, salvage, archaeology and xeno science.
Of course, there's only one form of "reward" here at the moment... money. And frankly, it's a proper disgrace that you can venture 10,000 LY, get a seed pod biopsy, and get paid around 10,000cr for it, when you can probably hop a couple systems and get an ELW system worth up to 10m credits. Most "explorers" balk at the idea of fitting things like cargo racks, research/recon/hatchbreaker limpet controls and the like, So.... either that biopsy sample is also worth 10m, or we introduce a situation where the activity is the fun bit, at something like not-engineer outposts.
Problem is, FD probably know full well all that stuff is broken AF, so they can't do anything with it:
Can't biopsy molluscs, even though they're valid biopsy targets.
Can you scoop anomalies?
Research Limpets rarely return with a Thargoid Tissue Sample
So what do I want to see? Going back to my "not-engineer" outposts point, let me illustrate it with engineers for a moment
- Ram Tah: Why doesn't he offer missions on a mission board at their base to recover Guardian items/data scans/materials/destroy sentinels? Why isn't he a guardian material trader?
- Palin: Why doesn't he offer (from his outpost) missions from a mission board at their base to recover Thargoid Cargo/Tissue Samples/Hearts/data scans/materials/barnacle scans/meta-alloys. Why isn't he a Thargoid material trader?
- Why doesn't Felicity Farseer offer missions from a mission board at their base to recover biopsies from life forms/scan surface features/scan aliens/other anomalous things?
- Why doesn't Lei Cheung offer missions from a mission board at their base to use a seismic launchers/other mining techniques against the Metallic Stars/ball/buckyball things (I forget their name) to recover rare, interesting and valuable materials?
- Why doesn't someone like Etienne Dorn give you missions from a mission board at their base to go crack escape pods out of rumoured Generation Ship locations? The lost can't go missing after all.
- Missions don't have to give you a specific location name, just some (reliable!) hints about a region of space to search. Heck... this can be the mechanic to populate rumours in your codex.
Alternately, lets make these outposts just engineers... and lets put some unlocks around these things which require combinations of fittings and other things.
Also, if people want to put up an argument that Exploration is just finding new things, rather than doing things with them, and I'm "missing the point", fine, whatever, I'm not trying to define what exploration means. But there's way more activities we could be doing[1] besides just "finding things", which the mechanics already exist for in the game.
tl;dr I don't want more things to find... I want objective interaction with the things we find.
[1] Just like the absence of a military career "pathway". In FE2, all it did was give you medals, permits, rank, and access to unique-themed missions, but even that sufficed.
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