--!Here's where my idea is different!--
- In station a sort of puzzle appears. If you solve it you get the XiteGauss, if time runs out you can take the upgraded blueprints (20% XiteGauss prototype) with you or hire the lab for another month.>>>

Doing logic puzzles as a way to get an updated item sounds like a good idea at first, but it has 2 very very fatal flaws in it.

flaw #1, someone has to create the puzzles. this takes time away from other development, and unless you are creating totally new puzzles, someone will have seen it before.

which brings us to flaw#2, which is the more dangerous and problematic one.
within about, oh i dunno, a week of this being added, a webpage (or several) will go up with solutions to the puzzles, making the puzzles worthless as a means of limiting the players with the items.
No time limit is going to be long enough to give players a chance to actually work a puzzle yet still short enough to prevent checking a webpage for the answer.

not a bad idea, but unfortunately far too easy to powergame.

As much fan as I'm sure doing logic puzzles would be (lol) I think the best 'challenge' to get something would be if a bot challenged you to a duel.

/me takes notes for future presentation

Anymore content ideas or suggestions besides crafting?

"As much fan as I'm sure doing logic puzzles would be (lol) I think the best 'challenge' to get something would be if a bot challenged you to a duel."

activities and challenges would make the scavenger hunt for parts more exciting. I'm not sure how fun being challenged to a duel by a bot would be, since I'm sure we all bot enough already in other missions.

(1) logic puzzles: there are a lot of puzzles out there that become 'new' each time just by randomizing: rubiks cube, tetris, lights out, for example. These will work well until someone posts a solver program for each of the puzzles.

(2) minigames?

(3) problems to solve. "figure out the best location onboard to place the cargo holds for maximum balance and manuevarability of this TPG ship." *insert picture of special maud, its weight distribution, thruster positions, etc.*
"you can keep the modified ship plans"

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Anymore content ideas or suggestions besides crafting?
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GAMBLING

The game could use a few more credit sinks. Perhaps slot machines or other gambling games can be installed in the bars of certain stations. It would also give people who are really bored another thing to do.

FUEL

I would also like to see the ships use fuel. The fuel should last a long time so that there is no serious danger of running out. Still, it would give the game a more realistic feel, particularly if the faster ships use the most fuel. If someone does run out of fuel their ship becomes derelict and they have to take a taxi home.

SALVAGING

In addition to mining perhaps there can be salvaging. This is something that EVE does not have (at least in the form I envision it) and that I think would make Vendetta unique. When a ship blows up it can leave pieces of itself behind that players in specialized ships can pick up. I can imagine salvagers lurking around the edges of battlefields waiting to swoop in and scoop up the junk once the dust settles. Perhaps there are space junkyards that they can also salvage from just as if they were orefields. The loot can be scrap metal, or sometimes whole systems such as weapons or devices that are in working order.

I can write a whole book filled with content suggestions, but I'll leave it at this for now. I realize that the developers can only accomplish so much in the short term.

Well, according to the story the rogue Hive bots have "turned the mining industry into a salvage industry."

I like the idea of gambling and mini-games though. Mini-games are always fun. The NT can have a huge casino themed sector with lights and giant neon cowboys and seedy looking stirp-club signs all over the place. The home of blackjack bot, slot-machine bot, and other spiffy little things.
The Serco can have a deathmatch sector too. Some sort of gladitorial combat that people bet on. People can take a "gladiator" mission and compete for a grand prize. Others can bet on them.
The Itani are a bit on the boring side though. . . A stunt flying competition? Racing? Some sort of Olympic event sort of thing.

Oh. . . and don't forget Chocobo racing ;-)
For this we'd probably need a more advanced in-station chat menu. I imagine that once we go public global chat will be less common among regular players, so the bars might become more interesting. Especially if they have the gambling options listed above.

<thread-a-porter hums>
All crafting comments teleported to their own thread. You heard sarahanne. She said suggestions for content BESIDES crafting.

Id like to see a bigger reward when the final missions come in. Missions are kind of repititive and boring right now. Id like to see missions like you can go out and kill a certain NPC whos an enemy of the Itani where you get faction, experience, AND a small bounty.

Right now I dont feel like I am getting very much for doing the missions. What I would maybe like to see would be:

-Mission based-ships. You could do a super long complicated mission, and your reward would be a new ship purchasable from stations.

- This doesnt have anything to do eith missions, but it would be cool if every so often, a message would go on 100 saying that a wormhole has opened up briefly in <system>.It would stay open for a few hours and would have bots that drop rare cargo in them. A timer would appear on-screen, lets say 15 minutes.

After those 15 minutes, you wouldnt be able to go back in that wormhole. Players would have to get within 3000 km of the wormhole in order to be able to see it, so people couldnt just warp into every sector and find it.

I like all the other ideas in this thread, maybe there could be random appearances of a NPC frigate, and the people who destroy it get cargo? The gambling and mini game ideas sound fun :)

Gods, there's a lot of messageboards to dreg through.. still trying to get the better of this particular topic, for it is quite interesting.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet - the gritty, filthy any old day. It's all fine with heroics, grand intrigue and epic dramas - but what's the deal for joe schmo? Where's the non-space-adventurers and what are they up to? How do your blasting around space affect them? The UIT oldtimers who mine rocks because that's all they've ever done, all they've ever do. The hardcore, nationalistic and annoyed serco population down planetside. Et cetera.

The Gap cycle (Stephen Donaldson) is a good example of an environment that's filthy, somewhat down to earth (well, okay, the first book is at least) and somewhat belieable because it is.. well, filthy and down to earth.

Sloanesky, I like your idea for the temporary wormholes, plus since they are temporary, its not continually expanding the map.
I would say make the penalty for loitering in the temp system should be much higher than just dying or something, like say, you get "banned" (just temporary, so you can't log in or something.) for a day or something, while your character finds its way home.

Plus the temp wormholes would encourage exploration. And they could give you exploration experience points (if that is added)

I REALLY like this idea. :)

I was thinking more along the lines of after the 15 minutes your character would automatically be kicked out. Maybe give like warnings every 5 minutes, and then one when there is one minute left. The one day ban seems a little harsh to me. :)

Maybe it would automatically throw you into the sector that the wormhole was in, but the wormhole no longer exists for you. Its kind of timed race to see how many of the cargo you could collect in the time provided. A kind of "mini-game".

Gambling Stations
Player vs bot and Player vs Player

Destroyable dock's
maybe they fix them self's every 24 hours... This could give way to itani assaults on serco stations or vise versa.

Player to Player trading
We should be able to trade directly with one another, MANY games have interfaces that could accomodate this... 3 fields, What I have, what other person has, and whats in the center to trade... we both have to click "agree" for the transaction to finalize...

More nation unique ships models
There are about 11 diffrent ships in the game, 1 per nation is unique. By adding "MkXX" you've created more "options" but still the same 11 borring ship. Add more models and make 3 per nation unique to the nation. Perhaps 1 of each nations could never be attained directly from remote nation. which leads to...

Ship Value
I should be able to purchase a serco unique ship and fly it to itani station and sell it there for a profit and vise versa.

Character robustness
Ok we now have faction standing for diffrent factions... how about things that affect how the user performs... piloting skills, targeting skills, NPC interaction skills. designed to give the user an advantage over his own skills. Maybe piloting skills could slightly increase the ship's control response. Maybe higher targeting skills will increase the efficentcy of auto aim etc. etc.

NPC
You've talked about adding more NPC traders to create hussle and bussle... GREAT! now lets make some NPCS that greif! I've never been tracked and attacked by NPC pirates other than when I get stuck in a storm and MAYBE the NPC's get close enough to fire. Maybe thats a roll for the queen and her hive. She can camp on WH's and KOS anyone who enters the sectors... this of course should be out side of tutoral sectors... gotta have noob space... but the non nation claimed systems should be a hell of alot more hostile.

Bring back diverse/unique sectors
its been said that the devs are bring back those old 10 7 13 style stations built into roids... AWSOME!... lets get all those things from the back story in there too... Goliath cannons... and i wana see those baby's fire on serco pilots!!! Roid belts with battle scars (which goes with ctishmans ideas about visual evidence of current wars).

Paint
I've mentioned this idea before in another post, to add to uniqueness of each players ship... let us have total control over the paint scheme... Like the Valk has a nice racing stripe... there should be a few variations that we could also choose. double stripe, single stripe, triangle stripe, stripe down the center or down the sides or bottom. Able to choose the base color of the ship out of a limited light shades swatchs, and then the color of the stripe from the current color swatches. maybe even the color of the cockpit shield, blue is cool but maybe I want a shinny red wind shield. also maybe be able to afix my guild logo some where on the ship, or the ability to create these logos and place them on the ship.

Logical Trading...
I knowticed that i can take XirAlloy from UIT space to any itani station and get the same price... Perhaps Scientific or Military stations could give a better price casue they'll use the alloy to build ships or weapons. The capital might not have the demand for such items cause they have fully devloped communitys, so trade goods, luxory goods would sell better there than scientific/military stations. How about raw minerals (Carbon, Aquatine, Xircate... etc) in the raw form should only be purchasable from "minning" stations.

I also second everything ctishman said... good stuff.

MorbidlyWrong

Okay, this is a LONG post, rehashed ideas from the in-game log from some time ago mostly, but in a bit more stylized fashion. :)

Missions:
Longer missions == More rewards, both a higher standing, and higher XP. Only the latter is implemented at the moment, so if you do missions to boost your standing, you become incredibly picky about it.

Subclass the cargo / trade missions into "long range" and "short range" missions, of course, shortrange pay less and so on, could also involve larger amounts of cargo to be transported than "long range" . This gives players a chance to actually do interesting missions while they wait for The convoy to appear, or in that 15 minute dull-time.

Make the followup missions worthwile. They aren't at the moment, since they risk sending you from a 2 jump mission to a cross-the-universe mission. Effort/Reward is skewed.

Need-based cargomissions. Fex, Gauss MkII is greyed out, unavaiable until the various parts necessary can be provided. Theese include personal defense systems and mechanics units. Supply the station with those for a mission, and suddenly the station can actually sell those pieces. Make sure the player gets involved in the tech-tree so they "know" what to bring.

Example mission:
We need a large quantity of Ferric ore, you and your group will have to provide us with 300 untis. We will pay 57c / unit.

Example mission:
We can no longer sell the Warthog MkII due to a lack of plasteel, xithicide refined ore, mechanics components and targetting systems. We need you to overstock our supplies so we have can hold a reliable production of units. We need at least 300 units of plasteel, 600 units of refined xitihicide ore, and 200 units of mechanics components.

Suggested modification: The mission gains -only- standing, and a minor XP, however, you get paid per unit in a marketing competetive way, as well as a minor economical reimbursion. As a trader, you do this to keep the market up, and the bloody good + Standing ;)

Suggested for easy levels: A list of places where they sell the items. ( a few of the nearest places, not necessarily the lowest priced ones. )
Suggested for higher levels: Don't tell them where they can get the items ;)

Economy even-out missions:
Make missions above trade.. 6? go in order to stabilize the economy, ie you get told to fetch or deliver items that would actually sell for quite a profit if you were to just ferry them. This gives hints of the economy without actually resorting to trade-lists.

Basically, hook the player-driven missions into the demand-increase of items.

trade/cargo:
"Establish trade" mission. This is a group or solo mission, and basically you're out to commune two stations. You need to find prices and retailers for BioCom. Its avaiable at BioCom when you are Respected, and all factions involved need to respect you. Basically, you find them somone who sells an item at or below a given price, and report back. The only thing is that you can only establish trade between two factions that respect you. If you aren't respected, you can't do it, since they don't trust you. :)
(somewhat meaningless mission, but its content! and could be used as a bridge for new missions.)

AI/Bots:
Targetted bots and bot-ai. Fex some more personalized NPC's that act in more interesting ways. A hostile bot that stays with storms and will follow you mercilessly until you dock? Random NPC encounters in this sense. Tie them into combat missions to find and annihilate.

Storms:
When there's a storm in a sector, have the bots "hover" towards the focal point of the storm, IE the exit. make them keep within 3km of the exit rather than just dumbly flying around in the area.

Spy/Recog missions:
Mapping missions, "We want intellgence of metana, go to theese sectors and update our counts of bots"
(as the skill increases, so do the hostility of bots in those sectors. Ie from orun collectors at low mission levels, to Axia RA-18 bots in higher missions. )

This comes in together with a more dynamical universe where the bot presence changes over time. (Bye Bye cartography! ;)
Mission example: For a serco pilot, "Map the strength of Itani defbots around Itan E12, E13, F12, F13"

Spy / Recog mission:
We need a provider of Personal Defense units. Find a provider who will sell them below 180c / unit
(or similar. Youre runnign around to find the prices, then report it)

Spy/Recog mission:
"Infiltrate TPG and get the blueprints of their recent ships."
This requires you to have multiple missions at the same time, and more require time spent than actual skill. You need to run enough TPG missions for them to trust you with blueprints (above 400 or so? ;) and then you're off with them to deliver it to Corvus.... +100 Corvus standing for a good mission, quite some bonus too. But just a slight drop in TPG standing for selling out.
However, do it multiple times? You're soooo screwed ;)

Spy/Recog:
Corvus have a Trade agreement with NS2 that they want out of, therefore they hire combat pilots to attack traders that go from NS2-> corvus. By strangling this link they can tell NS2 "bye bye" since they don't follow the agreement.
This would require working PVP settings, so forget it at the moment.

Spy/Recog:
Orion have a trade agreement with BioCom that they want out of. They hire a pilot to deliver a mission to Corvus.
However, the person doing the Orion->Corvus mission can "sell out" with Orion, and deliver it to BioCom instead. (-300 standing Orion, +300 standing BioCom +10k cash )

this also enables:
Trade conflict missions, Orion->Corvus. where you are shutteling information about trade convoys from Orion to Corvus. If you get intercepted, or your pad is dropped and sold by a pirate, then your standing with BioCom hits the shits.

Combat missions from Corvus. To kill BioCom transports headed to Orion stations. This ensures neutrality of Orion in the matter.



Spy/Recog:
Axia and TPG have a trade agreement. Orion wants to take over Axias part, and hire combattants to attack Axia transports headed to TPG, as well as hire traders to establish trade from Orion->TPG . (establish trade routes)

This will incite hostility between Axia and Orion, so people who work for Axia will take a drop with Orion.

Spy/Recog:
Serco hires traders with high standing with Orion to convince them not to trade with Itani. Or to simply intercept Orion->Itani convoys, tradeships.

Combat:
Itani hires people to protect the Orion->Itani tradeships.

Item transport:
Corvus mission perhaps? "transport this marauder to Bractus Watch, Bractus C-5" if you bail out, you loose a lot of Corvus standing, but you gain a marauder. If not, suddenly somone who's good with standing with Bractus C-5 (ns3, I think) can buy a Corvus Marauder for a -quite- hefty fee. (profit margins! ;)

Item Transport:
Empower the front. You're shipping military equipment from your nations Capitol to the Serco/Itani border. Could be sent raiding parties to intercept theese.

Combat mission:
Disrupt itani trade lines. mission is to stop and kill at least 5 itani transports. (NPC transports)

Weapons trading: Chance to trade weapons as cargo even if you can't buy it as weapons. This could effect your nation standing. UIT selling to Serco could piss-off the Itani. Anyone selling to unaligned pisses off everyone (just a little, maybe) This could make trading more than just a money making mission.

Station Assault/Defence:
PhaserLight had a great thread that I thought about too (after his ideas)

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/6352#79469

All are great ideas, but I especially like #5 and #6. Please look at. Great ideas.

I like a lot of the ideas here. I'm especially fond of such things as Gambling (yay Credit-sinks! Help keep that inflation in check!) and mini-games.

How about special time-sensitive missions, like a race? Drop a server-wide or nation-wide message, saying "A race is forming at station W in sector X for Y people and starting at time Z". Then, it could be the equivalent of "take item a to location b" mission, but with no actual cargo (or a token cargo - a baton, if you will), and only the first person or the first three people get the reward...

Crafting promotes interplayer trading so weps need to be tradeable and batteries and engines. Make ships more race specific, giving better race identity.
Guildies show up as identifiable dots on radar (purple?)
Give me a face (Uma Thurman will do) for bar chat and in station trading.
At the moment our identity is name and skills, the ability to create ship skins and faces would allow those who want to to project their alter ego.
Quests, complex missions, puzzle solving. When the devs get bored they can intoduced a mission from a specific station, an extension of the current spy mission. A key to a new sector, a blueprint for a wep.
The combat is good and patches have improved gameplay but I would like to give my toons more character and individuality. I am not in favour of uber weps etc. we want to avoid ebay trading

I like the idears of when you destroy a ship, you could scoop up parts from it, ie: battiers, guns ect..

I would also like to see some logic puzzles, in the game along the lines that there is an alien race out there some where, and the player comunity has to deciver what they are saying, even if it is only giving cords for new wh's ect...

Hi all.
Thanks go out to Spider for encouraging me to post my thoughts here.
I only played in Itani space so far, I am currently 3/4/2/3, so all observations are made on basis of this (limited) experience.

There already are a TON of great mission ideas to be found here, I'd like to focus on a (imho) more pressing issue with "content". I started playing only recently (Tuesday) and one of the first things I noticed was: wow, there are way too few missions for newbies. The problem here being that there is absolutely no unique feel about the missions provided, you don't have to have epic storyline quests available to you from the start (that would be ridiculous), but currently there are only three types of misions available, and it shows.

Suggestion 1:

A way to adress this would be to try to give the missions more "personality", e.g. change the mission description according to the type of staion it is offered on. Mining stations woud have mining-related cargo missions, barracks stations would have arms shipments and so on. This would not change a thing about what players are doing now to earn Trade XP, but it would dramatically increase the feeling of immersion, players woul feel more like a part of a living universe. Now, you deliver stuff for nameless faction corporations (this apparently changes if one travels around a bit, remember, this changes are mostly meant to affect the first few hours/days of gameplay), without the feeling that what you are doing is mattering AT ALL to your nation/in the universe.
Same goes for the combat mission. Having a training mission as only option availabe to seriously increase your combat skills is ridiculous. Have stations issue missions to "help contain the bot population of F7" or "help protect our mining operation in C12 by destroying 10 collector bots", anything but "kill the bots from the list for XP".
In my opinion, changing mission descriptions could greatly improve the "first impression" time spent on this game, as well as reducing the impression that you are just "grinding" (botting) for XP, without doing anything in the universe set up by a GREAT background story.

Another issue is with ships available: Simply put, there are too few that are useful. I cannot imagine why anybody would buy a anything other than a wraith for his/her second ship or anything but a Hornet for third. This impression could be solely due to my personal preferences or the order in which I aquired my licences, if so, please kindly ignore this paragraph. Nevertheless, I'll try to provide a

Suggestion 2:

There should be a higher range of weapon slots/speeds/cargo space available, so you could really choose to buy, for example, speed and firepower over cargo and armor, armor and firepower over speed or a pure speed thingy or glass cannon ship. It would also increase the sense of uniqueness for players. The "MkXX" approach is great in concept, separate the stats of the different ship models more, then increase the differences between the various submodels. This sounds like it would take a lot more work than suggestion number one though...
I think it would be worth it, of course :-)

Suggestion 3: (they just keep coming)

More ship outfits. This is a space game, a hefty amount of those interested in it will have had contact of some sort with EV: Nova (myself included). If so, they will be very disappointed by the lack of outfits available in Vendetta (again, myself included). Don't get me wrong, I don't want uber-upgrades availabe at 0/0/0/0, just some gizmos to strap onto my ship, like enhanced sensors (make all dots appear grey on the radar until you buy some IFF system), different radar subsystems (one mode showing all objects that would inhibit a hyperspace jump, for example), armor plates from +250 armor upwards, maybe an autorepair module that repairs your ship every time you dock, an inertia sensor that shows on the HUD which way you are going for use in physics flight mode, that sort of things. The possibilities for outfits are nigh limitless, I could come up with dozens more (useful and balanced, I'd hope). Again, this would add the possibility to "customize" your vessel and increase immersion/fun plus providing another moneysink.

Overall I think that Vendetta rocks. I used up my 8 trial hours, payed for a month and played for a total of 20 hours straight during the first day after I downloaded it. But I am a freak :-) I saw a lot of players saying "boooring" and leaving because they felt that this game hadn't much to offer. I blame this largely on the players, most didn't even do the tutorial mission, but I also think that there is much room for improvement, especially for the way the game presents itself during the first hours of gameplay.

Thanks for bearing with me, I hope somebody actually reads through this

Cheers
Yugo

I have one little thing.

Largely, all the galaxies and sectors look the same:

mix:
(1) part space w/
(1) part asteroids (different colors)
splash of station. :)

I'd *love* to be able to go exploring within the universe.

Other MMORPGs have a dual-job system. It should be possible to adapt it to VO while improving it and at the same time solving the lack of outfits and lack of ship customization: by making ships made out directly of basic parts. If I mix *this* propulsion system (with its specific weight, thrust and power requirements) with *this* armor and *this* hull (specific cargo and weapon ports + weight), then toss in this powercell and this armament that fits, I get a new type of ship that few other people have. The resulting 3D model would be simply an assembly of the parts chosen.

I know this is quite a departure from the current ship system, but hey, if I can be Samurai-Priest in some game I should be able to have an Alpha-Maud in VO ;)