Diversifying Money Making Opportunities And Removing Activity Reliance

[LuckyOne]

Are you a mind reader? ( Of course you are not, it's that all of you are figments of my own imagination and I'm just a crazy man living in his own imaginary world )

On a serious note, I was planning to make a detailed suggestion regarding just this topic over the upcoming weekend. I've got loads of ideas, but I'm not sure how much can the current Freelancer systems be stretched to implement some diversity. That's why I was planning to do it over the weekend to have more time for research.

To whet your appetite I was thinking about these:

• "mining" missions
  
• "mining" roaming comets / asteroids (actually neutral NPCs in disguise)
  
• courier "missions"
  
• missions where you destroy transports for cargo instead of people smuggling 1 unit of mutagenic weapons
  
• smuggling "missions"
  
• special locations where players can go "steal" some interesting cargo while fighting weapon platforms / NPC patrols / disabling shield generators
  

The quotes are for things that would not be implemented in the existing mission system because it's impossible AFAIK, but they could be implemented via a few creative workarounds and reusing the existing mechanics (for example NPCs scanning / demanding cargo from the players) and some creative station / system building.

I really love that the new beefier server gives us all the opportunity to experience the great atmosphere that was present in vanilla Freelancer where every system felt "alive".

How about this? Destroy 1000 NPC pilots and you weaken the defenses of a base, then you go to forums and plan an attack, then you go there and you see a Titan Armor'd NPC Battleship, which players can defend to keep the base.

This would be the next logical step, an actual interactive universe where you would have an algorithm analyze player activity vs NPCs and make adjustments automatically. For example shooting lots of lawful NPCs would make their spawn rates lower while increasing the spawn rates of unlawfuls. Systems could slowly fall into anarchy if no lawfuls bothered to do any lawful missions. The same mechanic could also be extended to cargo prices, NPC spawn zone radiuses, NPC base takeovers etc..

The main story would still be in the devs' hands but players could actually make certain systems more or less dangerous to travel through, even asynchronously, without having to be logged on at the same time, because let's face it the days of full 200 people servers are long gone...