Diversifying Money Making Opportunities And Removing Activity Reliance

[HrabCOrp]

Trading missions? Sounds interesting! I'd love to have other purposes for trading, not only the money-making or POB support aspects.

Edit: The best and hardest way would be to implement a system like in X series. Every station needs certain materials to produce goods. Well, we always can come up with something much simpler, yet engaging. Just need to give it a meaning, an in-game meaning.

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OS&C|Aestheta
Graceful Elegance in Every Aspect

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[Binski]

Spoiler

tl;dr change my mind

[Kazinsal]

I need to figure out exactly what the mechanics are that Freelancer uses for NPC transports and what they have in their hold. I'm unfortunately pretty sure it's rather simplistic, but I would love to have a setup where, for example, occasionally near a mining field you'd see a battletransport with a few thousand ore in it, but it'd have a full proper loadout, aggressive AI, player-grade armour, and escorts with the same. You could stand to make a pile of money... or you could end up getting completely splattered a dozen transport Charons if you're not paying attention.

(not my idea mind you, jammi proposed this somewhere and I like it)

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Retired, permanently.

[Grumblesaur]

I need to figure out exactly what the mechanics are that Freelancer uses for NPC transports and what they have in their hold. I'm unfortunately pretty sure it's rather simplistic, but I would love to have a setup where, for example, occasionally near a mining field you'd see a battletransport with a few thousand ore in it, but it'd have a full proper loadout, aggressive AI, player-grade armour, and escorts with the same. You could stand to make a pile of money... or you could end up getting completely splattered a dozen transport Charons if you're not paying attention.

(not my idea mind you, jammi proposed this somewhere and I like it)

This would certainly give transports a place in PVE, both on the P side and the E side. Seeing transports used for shooting things stronger than the usual nuisance NPCs that disrupt lanes may be useful for future endeavors in balancing them for combat. (That is, more data points for players to report, as they'll be flying them for purposes other than mindless power trading).

There may also be ways to make smaller transports (like the Gull and the Mammoth) better for NPC piracy than a big, bulky Pirate Train or Luxury Liner. If not better, then at least to give them a different role or playstyle besides "be weaker and make less money".

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A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

[Lovecraft]

[*]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.

Loving all of these ideas, personally. Great work.

I'd love to see this type of thing in-game.

Also, Lyth's idea of actually dangerous NPC's trawling lanes for traders would be fun, as long as it's not happening every two minutes or whatever.