No, the issue with exploration is that everything is already visible in The Agency.
That’s why it’s not exploration. Your theory is wrong, because people know what they can explore. There’s wormholes out there, combat sites, loot sites, etc. That’s how it has been for ages. The only thing that changed, was that CCP basically is telling everyone where everything is, so they don’t need to ■■■■■■■ explore it anymore.
You’ve never done this, hu?
This is a great idea, actually,
but people would likely associate it with mining.
I’ve done that, and I was one of the people to raise objections to putting ‘exploration’ sites to The Agency as well.
However, does it really matter if the information about exploration sites is in The Agency or on a 3rd party website? I think The Agency is actually pretty good at giving new players a bunch of structured information about activities they can take part of.
For exploration to feel like ‘exploration’, it would be nice if we could find some incredibly rare sites. Easter eggs in sites. Similar to some of the easter eggs that are already in the game in some wormhole systems.
Oh, I was not talking about high rewards. Just to have a rare sight every once in a while, so you go ‘wow, I’ve been exploring for years now and never seen this site before’.
Correct, it won’t be a lasting thing. That’s the issue with exploration for money, people keep going from site to site, so after seeing the same site a hundred times it won’t feel like exploration.
So that’s why it would be nice to have some rare sights show up once every 100 sites. Some site once every 1000 sites. Another once every 10000. Or some insanely rare site that has a chance of 1 in a million to show up, where the player would yell in their fleet channel to let people know to come take a look, if they’re interested.
Not monetary value, exploration value is what I’m looking for.
While the pure mechanic of exploration may not have so much immersion after hacking 100 + sites, there still is the sense of exploration, but not in the mechanic itself, more like in what region, or route you choose to do. The exploration for me are the players, corporations and alliances.
I do agree with the idea of something deeper. Maybe a collection fragments of lore pieces that you can build together and get an escalation, and delve deeper in to something you only can do with all these pieces for example. Should be rather easy to do, but like many others have stated, they wont change it because people grind it so much already so they dont put any effort in it. Which is kinda ironic lol.
I think that triglavian content looks pretty cool, way nicer than the generic bullsh1t mission or hacking site. I really hope they buff the visuals atleast, it does so much.
Komi, have you ever tried No Man’s Sky? Walking on overly colourful, life-threatening planets? Eve is a most abstract space game, maybe you want a more personal experience.
I agree @Aen_Clarke … to me exploration is more about the situations it puts you in. When I do explore, I attempt to tie it in with other behaviors and benefits. I will try to combine it with scouting defensively, for allies. Or have an option to switch it up, and kill an enemy explorer. Maybe kill an attacker.
Also there are so many alternative fits for exploration. Some can fight. One that is lesser known is that you can do relic hacking in a gas mining Prospect. Uses different cargo type, so when you do a hack it’s pretty easy money for the time.
In trading I used to be travelling around a lot with multiple accounts. Was easy to spot war targets, use locator agents, and so on while relocating cheap goods.
It’s EVE. You don’t need to sidestep and tank your profits while being awesome at several things. Certainly not if you have friends around. They’ll love you for it.
When you factor all this together, and possibly spend some of that isk on a second account—there’s a gigantic list of things you can be doing while you “explore” … !
Bring back the OLD system of probing, with different probe types and having to manually position the probes. That would go some way to creating a barrier to entry (even if it is an illogical, time-consuming and annoying one), and thereby discourage every Tom, Dick and Harry from doing it…sure, it wouldn’t make exploration more exploration in the way that you want it to, but at least it will re-elevate it to a moderately-skilled activity that requires real thought and persistence.
Bring back physical dice, and playing boards, and books of rules to be read every time there’s a dispute amongst the players (who all have to be in the same physical space, of course).
Exploration needs to be gritty. I mean so dark and dangerous that you have to actually probe down every single object in a solar system to make it appear on the Overview. Once the object has been probed down, you warp to it, put a marker on it and then a day later it appears to every on their Overview.
No one knows what you would find. Abandoned structures, long lost ship’s, asteroid belts rich in undiscovered minerals. That new NPC hiding in the Pirates Cove that you failed to probe down…this is what exploration is about.
You know how it is… if EVE has hidden and dangerous mysteries then 90% will complain about the game being too hard for new players and it will be perceived as too hard to play.
Just take a look at the amount of whining currently taking place, just because some high-sec systems got invaded which is now creating inconvenience, risk, and mystery.
