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.
  

---