The exploration clusters were worse than nothing and the mere mention of them gets an automatic "hell no" from me.
Also, there is a metric boatload of content with zero reason to play it already in the game as it is. There's no point creating even more "fun" content nobody plays because it rewards bunk, they have to fix the rewards first.
I don't think the OP is asking for a reintroduction of the exploration clusters. Perhaps the re-introduction of an improved legacy system or something else entirely different. This is not about the foundry but what Cryptic can do to inject a bit more exploration into their own game over time. There must be a lot of unemployed game devs with initimate knowledge of Cryptic's engine to categorically state "it" would cost too much.
I really think a game has to step out of it's box and break it's usual pattern once in a while to remain viable and appeal to a wider audience. Was the re-creation of DS9 down to the very last detail 100% revenue related?
Every time I see an abandoned ship, or an unexplored nebula or some such out in sector space, I feel sad. I see a missed opportunity. It's just a crafting node. You fly over and click F and that's it.
All I can think of is what MIGHT have been there. What if we could BOARD the ship? What if exploring the nebula started a MISSION?
A ship might have nothing aboard except some crafting materials to salvage, but it might have something ELSE to do. Perhaps the ship has been taken by pirates, who are still aboard trying to override the main computer. Perhaps the ship has suffered a catastrophic system failure, and the crew is trapped. Perhaps one of the crew had a sniffle the ship's doctor treated with a synthetic T-cell that mutated the whole crew into creatures from their genetic past... You get the idea. There might be any number of things here.
The same is true of the nebula. Perhaps it's just a matter of collecting crafting materials, but maybe there's a system there to explore, or an abandoned base, or pirates hiding there waiting to attack passing ships... again, there's a lot of potential.
So, I'll suggest (again) that we get something to DO with these encounters in sector space. More, I suggest they appear more often, and in random locations. It would give us a reason to be IN sector space, at least.
I'm with the OP: the game has a severe paucity of "wandering around the overworld" sidequests.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
I'm with the OP: the game has a severe paucity of "wandering around the overworld" sidequests.
This is why the Roundtable came up with the idea of making Patrol style missions to give at least one mission to every available starting location in the top 3 system.
Because there is no such thing as an infinite system when it comes to games. Even Minecraft's world ends after a certain point once the math used to generate it breaks down at some absurd distance from the center of the map.
In the context of STO, the genesis system, which was billed as being able to generate infinite quests for exploration cluster, really only had about 300 or so missions, because that is all it could generate with all the variables it was given. Said system also had the problem of having so many variables that it created nonsense situations like "The Third Borg Dynasty".
In order to prevent that from happening you have to place more and more checks on the variables, to lock out variable combinations that don't make sense, and each check you adds cuts more and more variables from the equation, decreasing the total number of possible outcomes each time.
In the case of the abandoned ship in space, there would need to be variables to account for where the ship is, so that it doesn't place Tholian borders on a ship in the middle of the Delta Quadrant, where there are no Tholians. And not only that, the time it would take to build multiple copies of each ship interior, in order to keep it randomized, would be insanely costly for how little the system would give back, meaning we would only get one ship interior for each of the three main factions. Alien ships wouldn't be included because most have no hallway/chair/table assets in the game for those races to begin with, meaning it would be impossible to build a functional interior for them.
The end result would be a situation where you go into a copy paste ship interior that's just dressed as either Fed/Kdf/Rom, and fight one of only a handful of races(limited by where the ship was in space), meaning there would only ever be about 20 variations of the event, and those variations would just be in enemy type and ship dressing. The actual layout, spawn points, objectives, etc. etc. would be the same for all of them.
I appreciate you going into such detail in your explanation. One can only remain hopeful that technology can improve upon what is now a near 15 year old system (Genesis) at some point in the future, perhaps to the point of reliably recreating a like number of missions minus the nonsense situations. Expansion 10: Genesis
I'm with the OP: the game has a severe paucity of "wandering around the overworld" sidequests.
This is why the Roundtable came up with the idea of making Patrol style missions to give at least one mission to every available starting location in the top 3 system.
You mean like the systems near New Romulus?
If so, they're SORELY limited, because they're all EXACTLY the same, every time. I'm suggesting something that can be different each time we go there... and having them appear in random locations, so there's some reason to explore sector space.
I'm talking about the Foundry top 3 system. It gives you a random pull of missions from those at a location. thus it won't always give you the same options. Also, it is possible to partially randomize a Foundry mission. It's just... not easy since we don't actually have a dice roll function..
Every time I see an abandoned ship, or an unexplored nebula or some such out in sector space, I feel sad. I see a missed opportunity. It's just a crafting node. You fly over and click F and that's it.
All I can think of is what MIGHT have been there. What if we could BOARD the ship? What if exploring the nebula started a MISSION?
A ship might have nothing aboard except some crafting materials to salvage, but it might have something ELSE to do. Perhaps the ship has been taken by pirates, who are still aboard trying to override the main computer. Perhaps the ship has suffered a catastrophic system failure, and the crew is trapped. Perhaps one of the crew had a sniffle the ship's doctor treated with a synthetic T-cell that mutated the whole crew into creatures from their genetic past... You get the idea. There might be any number of things here.
The same is true of the nebula. Perhaps it's just a matter of collecting crafting materials, but maybe there's a system there to explore, or an abandoned base, or pirates hiding there waiting to attack passing ships... again, there's a lot of potential.
So, I'll suggest (again) that we get something to DO with these encounters in sector space. More, I suggest they appear more often, and in random locations. It would give us a reason to be IN sector space, at least.
I would not call that a missed opportunity, since that would imply that they could have just added a mission map instead of a crafting mini-game. It should be obvious that the two are very different things in the complexity and time required.
It's a bit like saying. "When I look at the ice cream I got today, I see a missed opportunity. I could have instead spend 2 weeks on a sailing trip!" Nope, you couldn't.
You could perhaps say:" When I look at Victory is Life, I see a missed opportunity. Instead of making all those Deep Space Nine related missions, we cold have had exploration content, maybe hooked up behind those anomalies we find everywhere in Sector Space!"
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I agree that something needs to be done. I am one of the players that spends time flying around sector space NOT at transwarp speeds, trying to get where ever that much faster. The first time I ran across an abandoned ship I got excited, then when I realized all it was was a node to get crafting material from and nothing else. Well, disappointed was a good way to put it.
What about adding in an option for these things, Add something for the foundry authors that they can click a check box to put the mission in a rotation for these things, so that when you approach the whatever, it triggers a random mission from the rotation, you click accept and away you go. As for the top 3 foundry, I am not a fan of it. I can not remember a single episode where any of the captains were contacted by Starfleet, and Starfleet said, We have three missions which would you like to do?
I am much more likely to click that accept button, by approaching a planet and a single mission pops up than I am having to open up all three one at a time and picking which one to run.
It was mentioned there is a ton of content to play in the game, I agree that there is, but just how many times can you play the same ton of content over and over. Patrol missions are hit or miss and then most of those are one and done forever. Ques are a pain as if you want to run one then unless its one of the handfull that pop regularly you can be sitting there forever. Battlezones? Again how many times can you play it over and over.
What about adding in an option for these things, Add something for the foundry authors that they can click a check box to put the mission in a rotation for these things, so that when you approach the whatever, it triggers a random mission from the rotation, you click accept and away you go. As for the top 3 foundry, I am not a fan of it. I can not remember a single episode where any of the captains were contacted by Starfleet, and Starfleet said, We have three missions which would you like to do?
I am much more likely to click that accept button, by approaching a planet and a single mission pops up than I am having to open up all three one at a time and picking which one to run.
As a counterpoint... when did they EVER actually get asked to do things? Realistically it's a concession to the fact that this is an MMO and you can't really "tell" the player what to do.
While I like the idea of adding a new way to start Foundry missions, it'd take "creative coding" which may or may not ever happen.
Every time I see an abandoned ship, or an unexplored nebula or some such out in sector space, I feel sad. I see a missed opportunity. It's just a crafting node. You fly over and click F and that's it.
All I can think of is what MIGHT have been there. What if we could BOARD the ship? What if exploring the nebula started a MISSION?
A ship might have nothing aboard except some crafting materials to salvage, but it might have something ELSE to do. Perhaps the ship has been taken by pirates, who are still aboard trying to override the main computer. Perhaps the ship has suffered a catastrophic system failure, and the crew is trapped. Perhaps one of the crew had a sniffle the ship's doctor treated with a synthetic T-cell that mutated the whole crew into creatures from their genetic past... You get the idea. There might be any number of things here.
The same is true of the nebula. Perhaps it's just a matter of collecting crafting materials, but maybe there's a system there to explore, or an abandoned base, or pirates hiding there waiting to attack passing ships... again, there's a lot of potential.
So, I'll suggest (again) that we get something to DO with these encounters in sector space. More, I suggest they appear more often, and in random locations. It would give us a reason to be IN sector space, at least.
I agree. My latest foundry mission is all about that. I wanted to explore coming across one of those abandoned ships in space. I really believe they missed opportunities to turn an arbitrary thing in space into an actual adventure.
Fleet Admiral Duane Gundrum, U.S.S. Merrimack
Fleet Admiral Ventaxa Proxmire, U.S.S. Shaka Walls Fell
Blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/?page_id=1990
Foundry series: Bob From Accounting & For the Sake of the Empire
These kinds of thing, the ships, nebulas, comets and so on, are just there to provide crafting materials. That's all they are.
My suggestion is simply to give us a more engaging and, dare I say it, FUN way of getting those materials, as part of a mission... preferably with as many random elements as possible. They might even throw in some desirable rewards as part of these missions, like marks or special rep doodads.
There are already a bazillion places to get R&D mats, marks and rep doodads that nobody plays.
As for this notion that people don't want to go through the bother of playing the game to get their rewards... I have to wonder why they're playing at all, if that's the case.
Players would, if they actually had to. The problem is, if everything and the kitchen sink gives out the same rewards they don't have to do anything but the best/fastest source. Which is exactly what people are doing.
Lately, this has been my game experience.
I log in. I'm currently trying to get the Iconian rep set (I'm told it's wonderful, but I'm currently using the Tzenkethi Preeminent set, and it seems good), so I have to get Iconian marks. That means I queue for the four available missions... and then I sit. And I sit. And I sit. And I sit. And I sit. Sometimes it will take hours for a queue to come up... sometimes it doesn't come up at all. During that time, I fiddle around at the tailor, or maybe go blow up random stuff in a DSE... because there's nothing else to do except the missions I've done a thousand times before, for next to no rewards, and nothing to advance my character at all, or get me closer to that gear. It's BORING and FRUSTRATING, and you don't want those words describing your game.
And why do you think that is? Because everything rewards the same thing so everyone is where the numbers go the highest in the least amount of effort.
Fact is the way things are, if you're queueing for anything other than borg/tholian alert for marks, you're doing it wrong. And putting up ever more and more sources of the same junk only makes everything worse.
And just BTW, the iconian rep set was wonderful like over a year ago. It was nerfed into the ground in the infamous "balance pass" like most other wonderful items in the game.
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Also, there is a metric boatload of content with zero reason to play it already in the game as it is. There's no point creating even more "fun" content nobody plays because it rewards bunk, they have to fix the rewards first.
I really think a game has to step out of it's box and break it's usual pattern once in a while to remain viable and appeal to a wider audience. Was the re-creation of DS9 down to the very last detail 100% revenue related?
I'm with the OP: the game has a severe paucity of "wandering around the overworld" sidequests.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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My character Tsin'xing
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -- Benjamin Franklin
My character Tsin'xing
It's a bit like saying. "When I look at the ice cream I got today, I see a missed opportunity. I could have instead spend 2 weeks on a sailing trip!" Nope, you couldn't.
You could perhaps say:" When I look at Victory is Life, I see a missed opportunity. Instead of making all those Deep Space Nine related missions, we cold have had exploration content, maybe hooked up behind those anomalies we find everywhere in Sector Space!"
What about adding in an option for these things, Add something for the foundry authors that they can click a check box to put the mission in a rotation for these things, so that when you approach the whatever, it triggers a random mission from the rotation, you click accept and away you go. As for the top 3 foundry, I am not a fan of it. I can not remember a single episode where any of the captains were contacted by Starfleet, and Starfleet said, We have three missions which would you like to do?
I am much more likely to click that accept button, by approaching a planet and a single mission pops up than I am having to open up all three one at a time and picking which one to run.
It was mentioned there is a ton of content to play in the game, I agree that there is, but just how many times can you play the same ton of content over and over. Patrol missions are hit or miss and then most of those are one and done forever. Ques are a pain as if you want to run one then unless its one of the handfull that pop regularly you can be sitting there forever. Battlezones? Again how many times can you play it over and over.
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While I like the idea of adding a new way to start Foundry missions, it'd take "creative coding" which may or may not ever happen.
My character Tsin'xing
I agree. My latest foundry mission is all about that. I wanted to explore coming across one of those abandoned ships in space. I really believe they missed opportunities to turn an arbitrary thing in space into an actual adventure.
Fleet Admiral Ventaxa Proxmire, U.S.S. Shaka Walls Fell
Blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/?page_id=1990
Foundry series: Bob From Accounting & For the Sake of the Empire
Players would, if they actually had to. The problem is, if everything and the kitchen sink gives out the same rewards they don't have to do anything but the best/fastest source. Which is exactly what people are doing.
And why do you think that is? Because everything rewards the same thing so everyone is where the numbers go the highest in the least amount of effort.
Fact is the way things are, if you're queueing for anything other than borg/tholian alert for marks, you're doing it wrong. And putting up ever more and more sources of the same junk only makes everything worse.
And just BTW, the iconian rep set was wonderful like over a year ago. It was nerfed into the ground in the infamous "balance pass" like most other wonderful items in the game.
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