actually my origonal thinking on this subject would be creating a degree of seperation between PVE exploration ships and other possible ships such as combat ships like the stealth bomber (which was the implied form of combat ship as well as the black ops ships in my origonal post) and by doing this making exploration much specialised role within the game
given resource distribution and rebalance in the game especially including the importance of gas sites.
giving exploration players something to do other than finding gas, data, relic & FOB sites would be highly important.
it is my opinion that by adding this skill and creating a degree of seperation from combat and industry roles could be used as a stepping stone to building on content for exploration users, which could then be used as a building block for further content for other players and be hugely benefical to game play
other than creating new assets, older assets could easily be recycled and furhter repurposed for content for example in mission sites there are an array of assets which are used and labelled as things like “drug lab” or “refinery” and such things there are also things such as “asteroid colonies”
so how cool would it be to find an old abandonded drifting in deep space refinery and you warp in to discover you can hack the refinery to get it working.
the refinery could have either stored amount or perhaps even produce some minerals over time untill it despawns due to “being old” and “suffering from tidal stresses” this of course is just an example
but the point behind this example and this concept is by creating a more discoverable assets in the game which could be calculated balanced and accounted for in dynamic resource distribution meaning actively having exploration players who are involved in PVE by naturally being curious and exploring sites which exisit in the game or by perhaps facing rooms and challanges which are unlocked via the hacking mini game at increasingly and scaled difficulties.
you naturally want exploration players exploring the game, because as they do it trickles down into other aspects of game play, weather or not this is some kind of “experimental module” or “abandonded refineries”
further more these types of discoveries would actually be REALLY REALLY COOL if there was a relaunch and intergration of the FPS shooter again, which in fact my old dust corp still exisits within the game, further more the code for and given the recent events in high sec the code for orbital strikes still exisits in the game (titan doomsday’s a planet)
given i CAN do exploration but however don’t actively do it at the moment, i can understand how i have made some flaws and errors along the way in this post. but if you took for example the heron and took away its ability to fit guns and had it focus more exclusively on exploration.
an exploration player, could find something and then keep it for themselves.
or alternatively can call out to his corp / alliance mates that he’s found something
should the something be valuable or an asset in high demand it could then lead to fleets flash forming and content for all players (perhaps like a capture the flag or defend this area for x amount of time mini event) the idea being you can find these sites and the low level ones you can make some good quick isk from, but further implying juicer (POSSIBLE resource finds) or other mini events require players to defend or get in quick before it despawns.
this is similar to escalation sites for combat.
i mean how cool would it be if you’re an exploration pilot, flying around and you detect this really unusual signature and you find its an acceleration gate, so you actually hack the gate and can warp through and on the other side you discover say a combat site…
the combat site looks like a mission site, decorated accordingly with several assets, there being asteroid colonies and other structures and things where in the center you see several carriers which are BEING infested… then a timer starts
you then have say… 30 minutes to clear the site, but you clearly can’t clear it alone, so you put out a ping.
failure to clear the site means those infested carriers start warping around the system.
or perhaps even something like a titan, giving the feel to the game that the ships we fight in space are actually constructed (so following this, in this example, these infested carriers would of actually been constructed here and are being infested before release)
again though this is all concept and ideas ideas, the idea would be to improve aspects for exploration players being able to act and operate independantly but also be of importance and their activies relevent to larger groups, making them as pve players just as important to game play experience for different approaches as pvp pilots.
but In my humble opinion to do this you would need to create a relevant degree of obvious seperation (and further content, which i believe they’re working on) where you can explore and make a living on exploration. but sometimes you might find something that your group needs, or you might come across a challange you can’t handle by yourself, which should be a viable aspect to exploration.
finding old and abandonded stations and being able to hack the databanks for the isk stored in that stations wallet which could be exchanged for isk (similar to bank robbing)
edit: in the examples given these are just concept examples and ideas i came up with on the fly i’m not saying that these exact scenarios should be implemented should anything on this post be liked the idea and approach of balancing it as i have said in many other posts will come down to the dev teams / better minds than myself.
