Please Remove Encounters Mechanism

[SPiDER]

Which would be fine if they were not broken..

However some sectors are just noy worth risking the comtinued reputaion loss for every encounter.

Seriously..being attacked by a pirate....then I fight back and get reported as an attack againt this station..then taking the reputation loss gets old...

Perhaps if they worked as intended it would not be so bad...

But when my traders are getting attacked and I cant take out the attackers....wrong

[Kadatherion]

You've missed the mark there, sorry. First let's address the issue of why these encounters happen at all.

Actually, I believe you have misunderstood the discussion and are going on a slightly wrong assumption of what we were chatting about.

People have told us many times that they want "exploration" gameplay, but nobody is going to explore unless there is something to find. There is a limit to how much we can place manually, and people will find those "fixed" things fairly quickly, after which there is a significant danger of them having no reason to leave known areas of space ever again. This is a game that people play for hundreds of hours, and in order to keep people exploring, there has to be some reason for them to head out into the unknown. Reasons can be anything, including resources (be they mined or looted), missions, or just something to fight.

Which is exactly our point: something is needed to encourage exploration. Background noise doesn't encourage it. And these generic encounters are just it currently: background noise. As long as they are like this, we feel there's no point in them and are actually annoying: we do want them, we just want them better and better distributed.

The simplest solution, of course, is just to spawn things (missions, ships, whatever) as we did in the past. The problem with that, as people have pointed out to us many times over the years, is that such spawns come from nowhere and go nowhere, which works contrary to our aim to have a "living, breathing universe". In particular, they have no effect on the economy, and the economy has no effect on them. This means that the spawned ships don't use resources and their loss means nothing to the factions they belong to. For the Kha'ak, this game mechanic actually makes sense, but for the other races and factions it is not so good. Using existing ships for such encounters, even if they have to be relocated, means that those ships and whatever you do to/with them have a real effect on the factions to which they belong.

No one here really focused on the fact encounters are spawned or "warped", if not for one point when proposing possible alternative solutions: spawned encounters make it easier to have more "unique" encounters, while the warp mechanic, for obvious reasons, leans more towards the genericness of them, given it simply takes ships from around the universe, still doing their common, generic, simulated tasks, and teleports them to the player. Then they still go about their basic AI tasks, which can be battles when the warped ships are from opposing factions.
Personally I'm all for the warp mechanic, to stay inside the simulation rules, what matters is what those ships do and "are" when they are choosen to be an encounter. If they don't have anything "special", out of the ordinary, that you couldn't do or encounter hundreds of times while NOT exploring, then there's still no additional reason to explore offered by the mechanic itself: AKA, there's no additional "exploration gameplay", by definition. And yet it's the goal you yourself say Egosoft was going for, right?

Obviously it would be nicer if the ships were just flying around randomly rather than being moved to ensure an encounter, but this presents a very real practical problem with the size of the game universe. The chances of you encountering something "flying around randomly" in a space the size of the game universe would be so tiny that you would barely see anyone in hours of gameplay. This isn't just a theoretical analysis; we tried it and it didn't work out; all that empty space was, well, too empty! We also tried increasing the number of ships "flying around randomly" to make it more likely that you'd encounter them, but then we ran into the problem that there were simply too many ships overall. The sheer number of ships required to make a difference is too great for the universe simulation to handle, even with the simplifications we apply when the player isn't around.

Ahem, which is exactly what I've said a couple posts ago...

I've little expectation that everyone will suddenly agree with the design decision having read the explanation, but LameFox is right that we're not just going to reverse it, because there are good reasons for it. Clearly the system is not perfect, but it's as close as we can get given that we have to balance the desire to go out and explore with the the relative emptiness of space. However, that doesn't mean that this topic is entirely closed, as there is definitely more that could be done to improve things.

CBJ, again, I believe you have too quickly skimmed over the conversation. We have nothing in particular against the mechanic per se, or at least what it could do. The issue is it doesn't really do anything it's supposed to do, if not being "just for show" (and also what was the OP main point, actually, the fact currently and in this state the mechanic has WAAAAAY too high encounter rates, which make the deep space not feel deep at all).

What's not up for discussion?

• Having nothing happen at all when you fly out into empty space, and just relying on random chance, would make exploration largely pointless, so we're not going to do that.
• Making it all optional does not solve the problem (for reasons I have explained in detail before) so that's not likely to happen either.
• Having things just spawn is possible, and will continue to happen for Kha'ak ships, for example, but not desirable in the majority of cases for the reasons set out above.

What points are very much worth discussing?

• What kinds of encounters could occur that would make exploration more varied and interesting?
• Have we got the frequency of such encounters right, and could we improve the locations and circumstances in which they do or don't happen?

Yes, these are exactly the points we were discussing (in the second half of the thread, at least ). For this mechanic to feel interesting, rewarding, worth it, we'd like to see more varied, special, unique encounters (which could also, as I've mentioned, not be just ships, but maybe even other unusual things: anomalies, wrecks, you name it). By all means, warp those assets instead of spawning them if you feel you can't go out of the simulation "rules" (not that the player would ever notice anything detrimental to the simulation if a RARE encounter is spawned and then despawned outside those rules), but then assign these assets something special. Anything, really, because anything would be more than the current NOTHING they offer. Why would we bother with exploring deep space if there's nothing there we couldn't encounter in the middle of Argon Prime?

To some people loot can be the main attraction, so maybe some of these "encounters" could be wrecks that - kind of like the data vaults - can offer some rare module to "dig up".
Other players are known to go crazy about unique ships: a warped S ship, to make an example, in a certain RNG encounter could be converted as a special "explorer" variant with some unique stats that differ from the main sentinel/vanguard branches, which would make it a great incentive for those "gotta catch 'em all" players (I'm among those, how many hours I spent in X3 hunting for prototypes ).
Yet other players value interaction over anything else: some encounters could offer something like "mini-missions". I don't know, I mentioned science ships as an example of something that would make sense to encounter out there. A warped carrier could be given the "science ship" tag and then offer the player something unusual: maybe a quick task of scanning a few waypoints around it, or maybe they could have some special crew with high engineering skills for hire on its bridge (like they had because of a bug in the early versions of the game, remember?).
In a previous comment I mentioned X3's unfocused jumps: you sure remember how many players spent dozens of hours doing unfocused jumps pretty much just to find the "legendary" Aran to recover and retro-engineer at their HQ. Let's make a super rare random encounter in deep space that spawns (yes, this time I guess it would need to be a spawn) a unique ship type that has to be recovered, maybe through some special requirement (have to restore it by bringing on it certain supplies, or having repair drones with you, etc): this would excite both the collectionists and those who hunger for varied interaction.

Honestly, the limit here is just imagination and, of course, dev time to invest in a feature that still is a marginal one in the grand scope of things. Which is why I also said I wouldn't mind them spawning from nothingness (and then, if needed, despawn): because it simplifies it even further from a workload perspective in actually coding it.

As for the frequency of the encounters, yes, they are like 10 times higher than needed. In this generic state: if most encounters were to be more unique, "unusual", the frequency should probably be lowered even further.

[LameFox]

While I can't off-hand think of any way to make flying into nowhere feel meaningful indefinitely (and I don't really feel that it needs to), I don't really think encounters in their current form solve that problem at all. There were maybe a handful of times at first when I was like 'hey I found something, there's ships fighting out here' but the pattern quickly becomes obvious and then soon I was just left baffled by these ships out in the middle of nowhere, that seemed to all want to immediately fly back somewhere meaningful as soon as I found them. I actually hopped on a couple of the friendly ones to see where they were going and what they wanted out there, and invariably they're just headed back to the world. It kind of lures you into flying out into space and then lets you down with the eventual realization that you're not actually heading toward anything meaningful, and they are instead being sent at you.

After that, why would you leave known space anyway?

in fact, here is what I posted about this experience before I knew the encounters existed, which is about as unbiased a take on it as I can offer: viewtopic.php?f=146&t=407601

One thing I will say as far as teleporting ships goes: when you have a lore friendly reason to make things mysteriously teleport into nowhere, why not use it? Give us a sensor ping for an anomaly, wait til we get close, and then you can have it spit out a bunch of random ships and it would at least feel like it was part of the universe instead of a game trying to feel less empty. Also solves the problem for people who don't want encounters since all they'd have to do is not go looking.

[Kadatherion]

One thing I will say as far as teleporting ships goes: when you have a lore friendly reason to make things mysteriously teleport into nowhere, why not use it? Give us a sensor ping for an anomaly, wait til we get close, and then you can have it spit out a bunch of random ships and it would at least feel like it was part of the universe instead of a game trying to feel less empty. Also solves the problem for people who don't want encounters since all they'd have to do is not go looking.

I like this idea too. And, indeed, it's also much more compliant to the simulation "rules" the universe is supposed to follow. I do believe it shouldn't be the ONLY way to have a random encounter (after all, part of their point should be to surprise the player), but it would make sense as at least one of the various things that could happen out there when we boldly go where no man has gone before

[CBJ]

CBJ, again, I believe you have too quickly skimmed over the conversation. We have nothing in particular against the mechanic per se, or at least what it could do.

You're right, I did skim over it, but I'm aware that some of you are not against the mechanic. However the OP, as evidenced by the title of the thread, was quite clear about what they wanted, and I wanted to make sure that that specifically was addressed. I'm also aware that you, and others, have been coming up with ideas that do fit with the intended design, and that's great. However your assertion that we were, to paraphrase, just doing it to save ourselves some work, was not accurate, hence the first sentence of my reply.

But when my traders are getting attacked and I cant take out the attackers....wrong

I think you might be confusing different things here. The encounter mechanism is not used for ships that you are not personally flying. If your trade ships are getting attacked, they are getting attacked by actual local pirates patrolling that area, not "encounter" ships.

[Len5]

Can I at least know the story behind the attacks? For example, I think I'm top priority for Xenon. When they spot me, they seem to ignore everything else and go after me and I have no idea what I've done to them.

[arragon0815]

I think you might be confusing different things here. The encounter mechanism is not used for ships that you are not personally flying. If your trade ships are getting attacked, they are getting attacked by actual local pirates patrolling that area, not "encounter" ships.

That is a good information, then you can build in the middle of nowhere and the miners can work without harassment

[SPiDER]

I think you might be confusing different things here. The encounter mechanism is not used for ships that you are not personally flying. If your trade ships are getting attacked, they are getting attacked by actual local pirates patrolling that area, not "encounter" ships..

These attacks do happen after I have arrived in a sector...( Pirate ships along with Xenon M's, Khaak and faction Miners are the ships that appear ) the Pirates then start flying around and attack my traders ( if carrying tech cargo )...and I cant defend them...because as soon as I attack them it gets Reported as "an attack against this station" and I get a reputaion loss from the local police...if I stay out of the sectors the pirate encounters are way way way less...so the universe ends up being the core systems on the superhighway ( and only the major ones at that ) otherwise the "encounter" pirate ships appear and then do their pirate thing.....which as I have stated wouldnt be a problem if the mechanism worked as you intended.

If a Pirate has fired at my ship do I not have the right to defend myself??.........because at the moment your game says that I dont

[Kadatherion]

Can I at least know the story behind the attacks? For example, I think I'm top priority for Xenon. When they spot me, they seem to ignore everything else and go after me and I have no idea what I've done to them.

I *believe* (emphasis on believe) this comes from two things:

- Perception bias: we are psychologically built to notice (and remember) what concerns us 10 times more that what doesn't. IE: if you find yourself 100 times at the same distance from a xenon ship and an argon one, and the xenon who's enemy to both goes after you 50 out of 100 times (as on average should happen), your lingering perception will make you have the feeling the xenons went after you 80 times at least.

- Game bias for/against the player: this is where that *believe* applies the most. Most often in games such as this, the AI is biased to interact with the player as a priority, because it's important to keep a certain level of engagement to keep the player's attention and prevent boredom. Sometimes this goes too far and leads to either really unbalanced/unrealistic behaviour, that can feel unfair or, once again, create boredom because of repetition and linearity. But I have no idea nor proof if X4's AI is biased in such a way: would make sense, and as said it's nothing out of the ordinary, but I honestly can't say. If CBJ keeps following the thread he'll of course be able to have a much better answer.

[Bozar69]

One of the things that really annoy me are the mining ships that appear in systems without any resources to mine. I get its an opportunity to shoot stuff since they get attacked by the random pirate spawns but IMO a good sandbox shouldn't have to force encounters like this.

[CBJ]

IMO a good sandbox shouldn't have to force encounters like this.

I explained why it can't work like that in this game in my long post above. Space is big; too big for chance encounters to be viable. By all means make suggestions, but just saying it shouldn't be necessary doesn't add anything to the discussion.

[Kadatherion]

One of the things that really annoy me are the mining ships that appear in systems without any resources to mine. I get its an opportunity to shoot stuff since they get attacked by the random pirate spawns but IMO a good sandbox shouldn't have to force encounters like this.

I agree, another one of the issues and aspects of this genericness is sometimes warped ships make little sense. Encounters should also be tied to some situational variables: don't warp miners if you aren't in a reasonable proximity of any minable resource. Or, again, don't (or much more rarely) warp traders of a faction that's enemy with the faction that owns the sector you are currently in: once in a while it could happen, you could imagine for them to be smugglers for instance, but the % of this happening should be much lower than the average. Given the size of the sandbox, as explained by CBJ, a compromise from the strict simulation has to be made to actually allow you to have something to encounter on a reasonably regular basis: it's an illusionist trick, but for the trick to work and be believable, to "fool you" looking like it's still following the rules, it has to be a bit more elaborate.

[Kernel Panic]

These attacks do happen after I have arrived in a sector...( Pirate ships along with Xenon M's, Khaak and faction Miners are the ships that appear ) the Pirates then start flying around and attack my traders ( if carrying tech cargo )...and I cant defend them...because as soon as I attack them it gets Reported as "an attack against this station" and I get a reputaion loss from the local police...if I stay out of the sectors the pirate encounters are way way way less...so the universe ends up being the core systems on the superhighway ( and only the major ones at that ) otherwise the "encounter" pirate ships appear and then do their pirate thing.....which as I have stated wouldnt be a problem if the mechanism worked as you intended.

If a Pirate has fired at my ship do I not have the right to defend myself??.........because at the moment your game says that I dont

This is a pretty accurate description of what happens every time I visit the PHQ. I have a small fleet of fighter ships that I keep docked there so I can assign them to defend any of my ships that are attacked and I usually stay busy with them for 15-30 minutes after I leave the sector. Since they are not in a wing of there own I have to tell each one to go defend a ship and then find it later and tell it to defend another ship, and so on until the enemies are gone and then find them all and tell them to dock. Then for a very long time (That is to say until I revisit the sector) I will only have to send out one or two an hour.

As far as the idea of transporting enemies to the player so we can have encounters anywhere I think there needs to be a stricter limit on their frequency. I also think that they should limited based on the distance to station where they could dock and resupply. When I got hit by the ship teleporting bug a few weeks ago my ship was teleported over 32000 KM away from the nearest jump gate (It took it more 8 hours to fly back usung it's travel drive) and all the way out there I found not just Xenon, Khaack, and pirates but also mining ships and freighters. It's no wonder the economy needs so much help from the player if the ships hauling goods are being redirected just to make my universe look busy.

As far as Egosoft considering this to be "an imperfect solution" goes all I can agree with is that it is imperfect. I don't think it's a solution because I don't see a problem with having empty space stay empty.

[Alan Phipps]

CBJ wrote earlier in this thread: "I think you might be confusing different things here. The encounter mechanism [that is being discussed here] is not used for ships that you are not personally flying. If your trade ships are getting attacked, they are getting attacked by actual local pirates patrolling that area, not "encounter" ships."

[SPiDER]

Let me repeat these are " Encounter " pirate ships....they appear cause havoc and then reputation loss when attacked after attacking me ( PLAYER SHIP ) or traders....these are NOT local pirate ships on patrol.....

[flyboychuckles]

I don't agree with the mechanics as is, random ships just scanning your cargo 1000 km from trade lanes doesn't seem plausible, but I do like the idea of random encounters while exploring. Encounter ships should have a reason to be out there, a little scenario perhaps based on a signal/mission/or still just stumbling upon them, but why they are there builds the story and immersion and keeps engagement with the game.

And to kind of answer CBJ's questions:

What points are very much worth discussing?
What kinds of encounters could occur that would make exploration more varied and interesting?
Have we got the frequency of such encounters right, and could we improve the locations and circumstances in which they do or don't happen?

I am brainstorming now...

• Distress signals/random - new scan type or random, could be a miner, freighter, or other ship that either needs repair, or is under attack by Khaak/Xenon/Pirates. Who do you help for maximum profitsss?

• Distress missions - something other than my ship is surrounded by mines. Fly to point in space and like above, do you help or hinder?

• Lock boxes - I see prospector NPCs now, so either an encounter to fight them for the box, or fight pirates for the box "You found our stash!". Maybe get a pass code for the box instead of the 8 lock mini game. Or Prospector fighting pirates over a box, can I swoop in under their noses and claim it myself and escape?

• Scouting Missions - We have reports of Khaak/Xenon/Pirates in this area, go check it out - minor reward for scouting
  Two part? - after scouting, destroy the build up - higher rewards based on difficulty

• Hostile signals/random - High energy signal or stumble upon, what is it? Build up of Khaak/Xenon/Pirates, could be minor a few ships, or scale up to a few destroyers (fight or run?)

• Salvage - I love salvaging in the x games, so random abandoned wrecks found would be awesome, could be heavily damaged so that you have to repair/transfer repair drones, or call in whatever this new supply ship is.

• The large wrecks that can be found currently in some systems - but randomly in space - why is it there? Get in the wreck and find simple log messages (reactor melt down, pirate attack, the khaak) More varied salvage for rare parts (special weapons please!!!) Or even freight strewn about so you can call in your own freighter to scoop it up.

[Kernel Panic]

CBJ wrote earlier in this thread: "I think you might be confusing different things here. The encounter mechanism [that is being discussed here] is not used for ships that you are not personally flying. If your trade ships are getting attacked, they are getting attacked by actual local pirates patrolling that area, not "encounter" ships."

So what you are saying (without saying it) is that the pirate patrols become much more active when a player enters their sector and for a while after the player leaves?

[mr.WHO]

IMO a good sandbox shouldn't have to force encounters like this.

I explained why it can't work like that in this game in my long post above. Space is big; too big for chance encounters to be viable. By all means make suggestions, but just saying it shouldn't be necessary doesn't add anything to the discussion.

Speaking of ships spawning out of thin air - do you have plans to fix in 2.5 the constant spawn of ships with minefield (probably related to the mission where you have to save the ship from minefield)?
In a few hours game spawned like 10 ships next to my HQ. At first I was really happy like it's chrismass, but this chrismass doesn't want to end
I start to consider manually fly my Zeus to ram those ships and their minefields like this (travel drive will come in handy ):
https://youtu.be/d66NOXhwfoI?t=295

[EmperorDragon]

What's not up for discussion?

• Having nothing happen at all when you fly out into empty space, and just relying on random chance, would make exploration largely pointless, so we're not going to do that.
• Making it all optional does not solve the problem (for reasons I have explained in detail before) so that's not likely to happen either.
• Having things just spawn is possible, and will continue to happen for Kha'ak ships, for example, but not desirable in the majority of cases for the reasons set out above.

What points are very much worth discussing?

• What kinds of encounters could occur that would make exploration more varied and interesting?
• Have we got the frequency of such encounters right, and could we improve the locations and circumstances in which they do or don't happen?

Well, if the game must have an encounter system, then perhaps it's frequency can be guaged according to how many admin modules is in the sector?

For example: A player-owned core sector with 4+ admin modules will mean no encounters i.e. no unwelcome ships gateless jumping into your sectors and bypassing all your defenses, whilst unclaimed sectors with no admin modules will mean plenty of encounters (imagine how dangerous unclaimed sectors will be once SCA relations are fixed).

In any case, such an encounter system doesn't do well for the exploration part. It may only be my opinion but, it really kills the sense of exploration if ships just pop in out of nowhere. Flying across empty space with a slight chance of meeting another ship (that's there for a reason, even if only exploring itself) gives you a much greater sense of discovery if you do happen to come across such a ship. Space is vast, very slim chances of coming across other ships in empty space is how it should be.

[Buzz2005]

IMO a good sandbox shouldn't have to force encounters like this.

I explained why it can't work like that in this game in my long post above. Space is big; too big for chance encounters to be viable. By all means make suggestions, but just saying it shouldn't be necessary doesn't add anything to the discussion.

Speaking of ships spawning out of thin air - do you have plans to fix in 2.5 the constant spawn of ships with minefield (probably related to the mission where you have to save the ship from minefield)?
In a few hours game spawned like 10 ships next to my HQ. At first I was really happy like it's chrismass, but this chrismass doesn't want to end
I start to consider manually fly my Zeus to ram those ships and their minefields like this (travel drive will come in handy ):
https://youtu.be/d66NOXhwfoI?t=295

Cant you just read the changlog of the beta??? Yes they fixed that