While waiting for my next call, I wanted to share a few thoughts one reasonable changes/additions I was discussing with my kids last night:
- Passenger ships should have benefits for travel from point A to point B…like cruise control. You can choose a location within lets say 1000LY, and the ship makes the jumps, scoops, and navigates around the star for you. You can only jump through known systems, get no discovery credit, and your only option is to emergency stop.
- This makes passenger ships have some value over other ships, and can even be used by other commanders for transport (without their fleet) without a fleet carrier. You effectively have a shuttle that enables "fast travel" (while not saving real time), that already exists in the game, but for non-FC owners. It makes long-distance passenger missions more viable, and folks would choose the passenger ships because they can set the destination and make the jumps while doing something else around the house.
- This offers something that already exists in the game in a larger scale (fleet carrier transport), but at a smaller scale.
- Salvage from high value pirates/ships could contain a loot table with engineered mods. Like a "named mob" in other games, these high value targets would be sought after (more than current rabble) and once intercepted and killed, could get you an engineered module. This would be the same as if you engineered it yourself, but could be something you can't afford to engineer, or don't have that engineer unlocked yet.
- There are many unique activities that can be performed in the game, but few people do them because they are an extreme waste of time. Tipoffs, surprise missions, side quests, discovery missions…these are opportunities to distract the player and give them something exciting to do. And yet, their loot table is absurd. 1M credits for an hour of work? 50K credits in cargo strewn on the ground? And I'm getting shot at by scavengers?
- In short, the code already exists to share these events. It seems silly that they haven't been modified to appropriately adjust the reward to make it worthwhile to the community. Give me a box full of materials. Give me a stash of high quality cargo. Let me make 10-25M credits if I can get out of there alive before the pirates come. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, and it's so easy to fix.
- If I have supercruise assist on my ship, give me a toggle to use it all the time, or not use it all the time. I don't understand why I need to go into a menu every time I want to make use of it.
- Add more time sensitive content…where you need to jump from point A to B and NOT use assists to get that medical patient to the doctor in time. Where you have to jam through the mail slot and land faster than the automated system otherwise the patient dies. This would be one of those big risk, big reward activities…only reasonable for experienced commanders.
Just some thoughts. Meeting starting sooner than expected.