You beat me to the gun a little there
Was planning in writing a post-mortem on finding free-floating UPs...
The crucial aspect that seems to get missed in the implementation of this stuff is that
it doesn't follow any gameplay interaction the game has "trained" us to do. As a sometimes-DM I know this feeling all too well. I write my own campaign stories rather than use packaged ones, and there's been plenty of times when I've had secrets miss the mark, and I've had to drop very directing clues to get the party there.
Starting with free-floating Unknown Artefacts, these were implemented mostly well. Exploration trains us to fly around unknown systems for up to an hour, scanning the objects in it. Every now and then we'll spot a signal source which, under todays game mechanics, we know to at least check the category of and threat level and, if it's anything weird or possibly something we want, we'll drop out. Combine those two, while scanning bodies in a shell-system we might stumble across an unknown signal source, which happens to be a T4 anomaly containing a UA. Cool. The only issue is the particular region of space they spawn made it pretty much just chance-based that we found them.
Barnacles on the other hand... the game teaches us "fly around the surface at 2km+ with your radar zoomed out looking for blue circles (which are points of interest) to find interesting stuff". So because of that, what players *aren't* going to do is fly around the surface of a map at 2km+ looking around where there *aren't* blue circles. That's very dumb, because it's the exact opposite of what the game taught us to do. We eventually found some, but the proof of the pudding is that we're still finding new ones on known planets. We needed to be dropped a lot of hints to look in the general right area too (heck, apparently the Merope barnacle which was the first find was one of the harder ones to find... sounds very familiar to the UP...).
Conversely, Tip-offs are great! Engaging normal gameplay (running missions) we suddenly get dropped a hint that "There might be something of interest on this planet at this location". It's easy since it's quite specific, but it doesn't have to be. What if tip-off style mechanics, when doing a detailed surface scan of a planet containing barnacles, simply dropped a message into your inbox simply reading "Anomolous signals detected on this planet". As much as I hate the fact barnacles don't show up as blue spots,, we now have a mechanic for scanning a planet and letting us know *something* is there. And that's the hint to go scouring the planet for anything, whether it shows up as a blue poi or not.
Which brings us to the UP. Location-based USS spawns were a hinted at thing... that Shipping Lanes vs Deep Space vs Proximity to a stellar object would spawn different USS.
What does exploration teach us again? Fly around a planet, point at things when you're in-range til they scan (which takes a couple seconds), move on to the next target", which is pretty much the polar opposite of "Fly around in relative proximity to a rare type of planet for up to an hour, waiting for a USS to spawn and hope it's an anomaly on the first or second go".
Nothing in the game teaches us to fly around in proximity of a planet in an unknown system for up to an hour or longer, cycling through potentially tens of USS waiting for an Anomaly to spawn. Do we know the exact spawn mechanics? No, but given UAs can also take up to an hour to spawn anywhere in a suitable system, it's likely UPs have the same USS-spawn rules, and the requirement simply is being IVO an ammonia planet. But this just deepens the problem that normal gameplay won't get you anywhere near likely to get one of these spawns. Factor in it's Ammonia planets possibly only in a certain region of space. These factors stack, and not linearly either. In summary, UP free-floater spawns are:
- (probably) In a very small subsection of the universe
- Spawn IVO a very rare type of planet
- Spawn so rarely you have to hang around them up to an hour or more to be satisfied they are/aren't spawning, and
- Have a player-search mechanic that isn't reflected in any other gameplay activity*
So what can I do to make this not just complaining, and actually more productive? What I've been suggesting for probably the lifetime of these things.
- Introduce mechanics around the scanner/detailed surface scanning that, at the very least, go as vague as "Hey, that solar body, i'd pay more attention to this than usual", or as specific as "Anomolous signal at (coordinates of fixed POI like a barnacle)"
- Make Barnacles show up as blue POIs (seriously... at the very least this will help all the people complaining about UA bombing...)*
- If you rely on RNG rarity, make activities related to finding these things tie-in with common game and activities, so people stand some chance of stumbling across them.
For what it's worth, as one last comparison point, a week or so ago I was spending time flying around the orbit of planets in systems within the shell (Remember when I asked if anyone had had a UA spawn within the radius of a planet in a system in the shell?) , so I guess it wasn't that outlandish an idea, but I didn't pursue it more than two or three planets because once again, these things have no feedback to tell you if you're on the right path or not (like the disco scan suggestion), and, frankly, I have better things to do than get into orbit of a planet, set a low-but-not-zero speed so I don't go flying off into deep space, and do other things around the house for an hour or so while I wait for that faithful click indicating "Discovered new signal source".
*EDIT: Also, barnacles have been around a while now, and they're being actively researched. Surely there's a "Barnacle surface scanner" by now from Palin or something that could make them show as blue POIs...
