Diversifying Money Making Opportunities And Removing Activity Reliance

[Lythrilux]

Money Making In Discovery: Why Missions Are Great And What Can Be Learned From Them

So quite clearly and obviously, after a prolonged period of being heavily nerfed and unviable for many factions in the game, the community has reacted with hostility to the suggestion that there's anything wrong with missions right now. And to be honest, there really isn't, and literally right as the rework dropped activity shot up and there is a clear argument that the addition of the rework has been far more beneficial to server health than silent power trading in recent years. It's fun, it's engaging, it's a way to make money, you can roleplay or just do the activity with friends, and it's very easy to interact with other people that do missions. It's anything but f2/f3ing on the lanes whilst watching Netflix in the other window. But the one truth of Karst's thread is that its likely piracy activity will suffer as more people move to missions because spoiler alert: it's literally 100x more fun. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and it's not a reason why missions should be nerfed. You could make a single trade route net me 1 billion and I'd still be unwilling to do it because it's trading.

And then I had a realization of why Missions are truly better for not just the server but the mod as a whole than trading, mining, piracy and even bounty hunting / pvp: they're not reliant on other players to entice people to log in.

• Although you can log in on mining transport and fill a POB, largely speaking mining is reliant on haulers to come and pick up your mined goods, and isn't profitable as a solo gig.
  
• Piracy completely relies on Traders in lanes, even worse Piracy encounters are usually crappy and not very fun, not just for the Pirate but also the Trader sometimes.
  
• Bounty Hunting completely relies on player bounty targets.
  
• Whilst trading isn't reliant on other players, it's built around a need (a great need at that) to login to grind cash whilst simultaneously not being very enjoyable.
  

In my opinion, the reliance found in all these activities is very unhealthy for server activity and if not for missions could hypothetically lead to the server's demise if they were the only means of making money. Basically, I think all these activities should get some kind of support or mechanics so that players can take the initiative to it themselves, out of their own volition, and for it to not near-exclusively require the involvement of other players. I'm pretty tired so I'll wrap up the thread with some suggestions for each of these activities that I think would diversify money-making activities on the server, as well as make them more rewarding.

• Let Miners get a credit bonus per rock they break. Nothing too crazy, but just enough so that their income isn't reliant on players. With the dawn of things like Mining Discords, there's no reason really for Miners to just sit in a field for hours and accumulate ore to sell to people anymore like they used to. This will be really good for just creating ambient activity within mining fields. Mining becomes an activity generator within itself, rather than the Hauling part.
  
• Bring back NPC Cargo piracy. This was nerfed because neutral IDs began to camp places like Bethlehem in Penny and shoot NPCs to make money and still dock on Bethlehem. I think we could easily reintroduce this into the game in a way that's balanced, as the nerf was a lazy general change to fix it, and the best answer would have been to just tweak things individually. Pirates camping lanes for things other than players (and actually making money) would be great for ambient activity.
  
• BHG ID should get some kind of additional bonus for shooting Unlawful NPCs outside of missions. Enhance this further by introducing automated bounty hunting against players, removing the horrid paperwork that comes with Discovery's archaic bounty system.
  
• Trading... what to do about Trading... It really just needs some kind of gameplay enhancements to make it more fun, especially when done solo. Something to keep you engaged and discouraging alt+tab. @massdriver was working on trade missions years ago and got close. Something like that could really help improve trading.
  

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[Lonely_Ghost]

*Applauses*

[Dark.Star]

Trading... what to do about Trading... It really just needs some kind of gameplay enhancements to make it more fun, especially when done solo. Something to keep you engaged and discouraging alt+tab. @massdriver was working on trade missions years ago and got close. Something like that could really help improve trading.

This
This actually is something, and that would be very good.

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[darkwind]

*Sigh* This time it is not cutting content idea, but actually, really good propositions to enhance and bring more of good stuff.
Yay and +1 to things above.

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Interstellar	Autogit	Ctrl-V	Encryptor	Discovery At Linux
Dark Tools	DarkBot	DarkLint	DarkStat	DarkMap

[Karlotta]

Diversify money making methods, per type (mining, trading, missions, cargo piracy), per faction (every faction should receive more ways to make money), and per play style (solo and co op), but do NOT diversify money making locations. Concentrate the methods to certain locations (active locations should have several ways to make money there) and keep other (most) locations yield 0 money making opportunity (isolated irp unexplored places that are far from busy routes).

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[Lemon]

I don't know why people hate solo AFK traders so much
As long as the trader stops for interactions
And it got totally killed now

It was just cool and relaxing to work and fire up relaxing click F3 in a window with occasional interactions

[Dan.]

• Trading... what to do about Trading... It really just needs some kind of gameplay enhancements to make it more fun, especially when done solo. Something to keep you engaged and discouraging alt+tab. @massdriver was working on trade missions years ago and got close. Something like that could really help improve trading.
  
  

+1

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[HoakinBlackforge]

Trading... what to do about Trading... It really just needs some kind of gameplay enhancements to make it more fun, especially when done solo. Something to keep you engaged and discouraging alt+tab. @massdriver was working on trade missions years ago and got close. Something like that could really help improve trading.

Yeah, trading missions would make the experience on the game so much better, something like adding a bonus to doing a delivery of a commodity to a specific base.

After all, credits are the blood necessary to progress on the game,.

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[pillow]

I wonder if NPC transports with real stats and real escorts would would be beneficial. It definitely would feel better for a pirate bomber to destroy those escorts and that transport if they posed at least some threat and while they couldn't pick up the cargo they could still get some payout from the plugin. I'd definitely make more pirate bombers if I could simply fly around and make passive money on lanes while also potentially meeting a player.

And about trading, I've always wanted trading to be more dangerous in general. Hauling from A to B wouldn't be so brainless if every once in a while an NPC Barghest dropped your lane and started shooting EMPs and Energy Cannons at you. Depending on the area you could increase the difficulty of these types of NPCs so that they pose more of a threat, meaning you would potentially be required to have a player escort you or something.

Mining would also be improved by a similar system, simply spawning NPCs that are dangerous in asteroid fields that not only give money when you kill them but that also encourage you to do stuff with friends. You could even add friendly NPC patrols that you could stay close to for defense if no player is around to help you out.

Plenty of things you can do with NPCs to improve gameplay and immersion without garbage like NPC gunboat patrols with CDs near Missouri.

[Dan.]

• Trading... what to do about Trading... It really just needs some kind of gameplay enhancements to make it more fun, especially when done solo. Something to keep you engaged and discouraging alt+tab. @massdriver was working on trade missions years ago and got close. Something like that could really help improve trading.
  
  

And about trading, I've always wanted trading to be more dangerous in general. Hauling from A to B wouldn't be so brainless if every once in a while an NPC Barghest dropped your lane and started shooting EMPs and Energy Cannons at you. Depending on the area you could increase the difficulty of these types of NPCs so that they pose more of a threat, meaning you would potentially be required to have a player escort you or something.

Both Ideas are awesome.
Combine them for Trade missions and you will never get bored, people will love to hire Escorts.

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