The Loot. In some rather big games I don't want to name here, its a key element. Sure those games mostly come with ultra-unique/rare items and randomly generated Items, but what do you think about the element in disco?
Right now, the loot is rather ... pointless. It is basically giving you only 3 things:
1. Nomad guns! (yay)
2. Credits (Credit Cards or random commodities)
3. Regens
Since Nomad Guns will most likely not be dropped in the next version, Credits don't matter much since we are talking about really small numbers here and dropped regens are hated by most players as some rather unsprotive PvPers tend to "farm bots" in bigger fights, the loot is somewhat decorative.
Now would it make sense to make codenames only droppable by High level NPCs?
Would it make sense to make them drop stuff like enhanced thrusters, nuke mines, class 10 shields and heavy CM's and remove it from most of the bases to give the loot more weight?
Would it make any sense _at all_ to make the loot more important? As many games just implement it to be a rewarding element to keep the grindage of monsters more interesting as you basically only have to do it for your char's stats.
Would a more important loot make discovery annoying? Or just more addictive and time consuming?
I believe it would. Moreover, if we had classes of equipment that could only be dropped...well, one could have an interesting story for the battle with core headhunters that they got their armour upgrade in...
Of course, the potential for abuse is...extremely high.
Codenames are the best compromise there, in my opinion. They already flood the market, but are hard to find. Creating another way for them to show up evens the odds a bit, and takes a bit of market pressure away from the dealers(sorry gurj). Moreover, they could give the codenames more of a sense of origin.
Might I suggest spyglass encounters, where there is a chance to salvage the scanner array?
On another note, if drops could include the mission commodities, that might add a bit of flavour.
on a side-note we will have to deal with a "swarming" issue. If, for examples, hammerfalls (yuk!) and excaliburs (yay!) are only dropped in 55, then people might go there to just completely ooRP hunt those specific codenames. So in our case, balancing the loot regarding its position is a delicate thing.
It seems like it could be really interesting if things could show up in a random sort of way. If it's just npcs in one area dropping good equipment, wouldn't that just lead to more farming?
What about some sort of commodity that isn't sold anywhere, but might make sense for a ship to be carrying. Like some kind of classified information document? Seems like it could be fun.
Or just make more npcs use and drop the better debilitators.
Npc's are already buffed, I mean - they have infinite power supplies. Give them a few codes, wild armor and shield busters and you can forget about looting them in anything smaller than a cruiser.
I do agree on the idea, we certainly need more items, commodities and other unique stuff in the mod.
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Mephistoles
I would be all for making NPCs a heck of a lot harder to kill in all but a few systems. Such as making a BS encounter something more then entertainment.
Hmmm... I like the idea of more loot too, the only problem with that would be that people would farm NPC's even more than they already do (Nomad guns for example) and the only solution to that would be to increase the difficulty of the NPC's which would be horrible because most NPC's are already annoying enough as it is to kill, especially for low level players (*thinks back to Liberty Rouges in NY when level 10*).
One other thing about regens being dropped is that it can make PvP battles VERY laggy when 3-5 different people try to tractor in someone's regens. Maybe removing regen dropping from players wouldn't be a bad idea...