Horizons Risk and Reward – A question for PVE players (I am one), what reward is worth the risk of Open?

[Chaparral]

I share many of Misty's sentiments about the authentic nature of High, Medium, Low and Anarchy system security levels - and I really do appreciate Marcus' ideas that improved pvp skill makes Open more survivable and exciting. Planning routes through different security level systems might be a more purposeful enterprise with good C&P. Ideally, it would had a layer of complexity and make the bubble feel more alive - with varying levels of authentic threat and risk. However, players engage in the calculus of risk and reward - and I don't believe the rewards are there.

Random positive reinforcement has been shown time and again to be the greatest modifier to promote a repeated behavior.

Random negative reinforcement has been shown time and again to result in decompensation, and behavior avoidance.

The presence of purposeful, dev-promoted (through special engineered and PP game mechanics), random griefing results in behavior avoidance (participation in Open).

I don't think FDEV has really thought through the behavioral mechanics of game mode participation, and C&P will be an under-appreciated commitment of resources.

 

[Misty_Dark]

Hey Misty, my group had bad experinces as begining characters in GTA online! Not elite! Thats why we all started out in PG so we would not start out with a bad time.
Please note that this was the FEAR of grifers, not actual real ones.
Nothing that FD can do about that, hense we brought this game not SC because of the different modes.... so maybe they did do something about it.....?

I totally get the fear factor. And the best way to overcome such things is to understand how things works and have a good build, and in most cases, just to escape you do not need engineering, even if you are attacked by highly engineered ship.

If you can ignore the stupid synthetic voice and the attitude, after all it is made by SDC.... anyhow, the points it makes about outfitting a trader is bang on, and also quite a few tips on what most players do bad, I was doing most of these myself... But after I started to understand the interdiction mechanism and many other game mechanics that griefers often abuse, it makes you in control, you decide to submit, you take action to escape once your FSD is ready and so on.

And best part of this video, you do not any engineering or any powerplay modules.
There are several nice things you can do at an engineer to further help you be prepared, heavy duty e-rated shield boosters is one such great update for "anyone"...
Also I cannot stress how good a Prismatic Shield Generator is, and now I am talking about explorers and traders... I just adore these shields on my explorer and trader ships! So if there is one powerplay item I recommend, this is it! and if you are afraid of powerplay related PvP, you can always do the 4 weeks you have to be part of Powerplay in Solo/group and do not have to risk any unwanted PvP.... then how you get the needed merits to be allowed to buy the shield is up to you, I choose the easy route of buying powerplay cargo to transfer, about 8 million is nedded. And then buy a bunch of these shields and store. unless you want to do combat, you do not need to buy anything bigger than size 5 (size 6 if you have cutter and not doing the engineering secondary effect to fit a class 5 shield on the cutter, btw it works wonders!!!).

these two things can have a huge impact on non combat ships, or your standard multi purpose ship. I was a long time reluctant to collect the powerplay stuff, and then I started to check how long I have played and how many times I could have unlocked any powerplay modules, and realised I could have had them all by now....

I hope this give some hint about how to be ready, and as with much of this is practise,.

[video=youtube;Uh9AWV_BWo0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh9AWV_BWo0[/video]

 

[varonica]

Based on the responses, it appears that in game rewards and C&P are not significant factors regarding the decision to play open. That's interesting. Small sample of course - but I wonder if the C&P efforts will result in the desired outcome for FDEV...

No, because it's wrong headed. It's like telling people, "it's fine to come into the city at night, if anyone kills you we will sure to catch them and punish them."

That doesn't encourage people to come into the city, it does the exact opposite, if anything the concentration on C&P actually discourages people from coming into open because if you have to put so much effort into C&P then open must be a nightmare to play in. The correct response to a crime problem is to make it safe, not to increase the amount of punishment offenders receive.

Just to be clear, I always play open except for times when I feel it may be dangerous turning in a lot of exploration data. No amount of punishment for an offender would make losing that amount of data ok. You could permanently ban a player and it still wouldn't be ok, I am not advocating that by the way, it's just as example, punishment after a crime doesn't fix the suffering the victim has gone through. That's the entire issue in a nutshell, as long as a player can suffer a disproportionate amount of suffering you aren't going to fix it. I have enough money to replace my exploration T6 endlessly, I can never replace 30k, 40k, 100k of exploration data, it's gone forever.

 

[Misty_Dark]

I have enough money to replace my exploration T6 endlessly, I can never replace 30k, 40k, 100k of exploration data, it's gone forever.

I do not get why we can't have personal salvage missions to go and collect our "data" if our ship is destroyed. That way we can always get back our "lost" data. And we get like 1-2 week or so to before the beacon "fails". So that if you lost your ship far out, you have possibility to get to it.

 

[varonica]

I do not get why we can't have personal salvage missions to go and collect our "data" if our ship is destroyed. That way we can always get back our "lost" data. And we get like 1-2 week or so to before the beacon "fails". So that if you lost your ship far out, you have possibility to get to it.

Yes the loss for explorers is out proportion to other professions. Mining? A ship load of ore, can be replaced in an hour. Combat, bonds, again a couple of hours. Trading, a ship load of goods and a failed mission, meh. Explorers, months or years of careful exploration to the far side of the galaxy, never able to be replaced.....who in their right mind would take that risk? Yes I get that not making exploration data persistent over ship destruction leads to issues, people traveling to the other side of the galaxy then suiciding to get their data back fast.

So for one profession there is no possible reward that makes flying into the bubble in open a good idea ever. Out in the black of course it's pretty much irrelevant.

I have edited so it makes more sense, I had disaster instead of data.....I blame autocorrect....just cause I can.

 

[EvE4evah]

OP: for a large chunk of the non-Open crowd, no amount of rewards is worth going into Open. Either because:

1. They 'don't like people'

2. They would rather there was an offline mode from the beginning (I'm totally for it)

3. They're against anything that improves PvP.

 

[Para Handy]

OP: for a large chunk of the non-Open crowd, no amount of rewards is worth going into Open. Either because:

1. They 'don't like people'

2. They would rather there was an offline mode from the beginning (I'm totally for it)

3. They're against anything that improves PvP.

... I would add:

4. They don't want to be other people's "content".



(P.S. I still don't see why this belongs in the Horizons sub-forum. )

 

[varonica]

OP: for a large chunk of the non-Open crowd, no amount of rewards is worth going into Open. Either because:

1. They 'don't like people'

2. They would rather there was an offline mode from the beginning (I'm totally for it)

3. They're against anything that improves PvP.

I am happy for PvP to be improved, but it appears that you are of the belief that improving PvP requires that players not interested in PvP become victims....sorry content. When a suggestion to improve PvP comes along that doesn't require I hang around in open to be destroyed I will be all for it, but for some reason every suggestion so far made seems to come down to this in the end.

 

[Cpt Shadow Wolfe]

Yes, it would be very unfortunate for me to lose any exploration data, my OCD would never allow me lose it. If I did, I would have to start the whole trip over and go to each system that I had scanned and do it over again, or at least from the last docking location. On my way to Beagle now, so have already progressed over a 100 jumps since I sold my last data batch in the Colonia Region, and have amassed close to 900 potential first discoveries, it would never sit well losing it and would not take as much time to go back and get it since I would know where to go on each jump since Capts Log and ED Discovery keeps track of each jump. Early on in my exploration exploits, there were several systems that I had gone through and only "half" scanned, I was able to do this and appease the OCD by telling myself that I would come back later and full scan it. Well, it bugged me a whole year before I finally bookmarked all the 'half' scanned systems then it took a month to fly over 25k Lys 'cleaning' up those systems. Now there is only one system left on that I need to go back to, and will have to swing by it on my return from Beagle....I only fly in Open when I am far out and the chances of meeting someone is slim to none, and mainly because I don't want to take high res screenshots, and sometimes while taking screenshots I accidently hit the wrong key (still haven't figured out which key does it though) and it does the 'high' res shot which screws up the shot and I have to delete it and take another shot. Doesn't happen in 'Open'.