[GrimGriz]

JoeNoob doesn't think of himself as a vulture, even though that's what the station crew at GBS calls him. He fancies himself as a reclaimer, turning trash into treasure. When a ship explodes, not all is necessarily lost. Sometimes he can salvage an engine, sometimes just wiring and electronics that he auctions at the core station to people making new radars and such. He has the necessary scanners, and his ship, the monkanic is designed to transfer miscellaneous debris into his cargo hold with it's built in insights and displacer. Of course, he's gotten plenty of practice in the top mounted turret as well, what with the pirates and the flux....not to mention competing vultures*ahem*.....reclaimers.

When his scanner hits the debris sticking out of a roid in a sector they used to call the Great Venure Belt, he doesn't expect it to hail his ship, but it does. A voice from the past plays from a recording device embedded in the wreckage. It tells JoeNoob a story about Quantar and Hyperial, and the lives that were lost when a station exploded thousands of years ago, the only remnant of that station the debris he just scanned.

[Wild_Bill]

Excellent idea GG!

[Hornet]

That is an interesting idea...almost quest-ish. I like how WoW does that.

[Jonboy]

Grim,

Do you expect there to be one story, that is revealed slowly over time, with each pilot finding a little piece?

Or do you expect the same story to be revealed a thousand times, once to each account that goes to 'what used to be GVB.'???

Do you expect ND to write a story and have it revealed slowly as a group project, or do you want them to pretend that everyone is a hero, and that everyone is the first person to reveal this fabulous information? Hint: WoW does it the second way.

[Scorch]

We have a similar idea about revealing back story one piece at a time to a player. Of course they could go online and read the whole thing anyway but some people still like to have to find things on their own.

[GrimGriz]

Originally Posted by Jonboy

Grim,

Do you expect there to be one story, that is revealed slowly over time, with each pilot finding a little piece?

Or do you expect the same story to be revealed a thousand times, once to each account that goes to 'what used to be GVB.'???

Do you expect ND to write a story and have it revealed slowly as a group project, or do you want them to pretend that everyone is a hero, and that everyone is the first person to reveal this fabulous information? Hint: WoW does it the second way.

I'm not sure if you remember, but there was once an event called blue GVB. While the fact that there was a war between Hyperial and Quantar was on JOSSH, during the event one of the RPCs gave details about that war that weren't on JOSSH. That's the kind of thing I would like to be revealed this way. Back story though, not present story. And everyone who ever scans this piece of wreckage would hear the audio, regardless of whether or not it's been scanned before, and whether or not they've scanned it before. Neat stuff for players to discover, share, and then start looking for. Stuff for fansites to publish the location of all the different ones that have been found....etc

[Jump]

Easter eggs are good IMO. They add fun to games and don't really interfere with anything other people might be doing.

[Jonboy]

Yes, Easter Eggs rule.

However, (sorry, again I'm comparing with WoW) many story arcs proceed through missions with this mechanism. It's another version of the word 'instance.' In WoW there are Instanced Dungeons, Instanced Raids and Instanced Encounters (but no instanced graphic skins???) When the discussion here has been 'We Want/Hate Instances', they should really append Dungeon/Raid.

Instance really means... we coded this event so that a number of people could enjoy it, and feel like it was unique, when in-fact it is re-used 9 million times.

So, in an Instanced Dungeon, a boss dies, yet you come back to it the next day, and there he is again.

The same is true of missions. NPC Quanus Ironroid wants you to go fetch some Quantar beer from tripoint for his grandmother's birthday. Yet the next day he wants more beer and it's his grandmother's birthday, AGAIN! Thus, you learn of Ironroid's grandmother and her story.

It's kind of fake, but still fun. It's a good way of getting people to enjoy content and creating a world.

Not all the content is mission stuff. Some of it is just there to create atmosphere, but is connected to previous story arcs from earlier warcraft games - or just for fun.

[Anvil]

Originally Posted by Scorch

We have a similar idea about revealing back story one piece at a time to a player. Of course they could go online and read the whole thing anyway but some people still like to have to find things on their own.

That's almost a requirement for todays MMO's. Glad to see it incorporated.

Anvil

[Ambrosius]

This is kind of like one of the the Exploration ideas in the JGCentral wiki:

DSS are underutilized opportunities. Right now they are simply throw-away artifacts. Because of their nature (data storage), DSS present an excellent opportunity for random luck information. In order to do this, each DSS would theoretically hold some kind of encoded data.

That data on a DSS would fall into the following categories:

• important historical data for storyline advancement {GM intervention}
• artifact-based equip information {GM insertion}
• rotacol coordinates (for artifacts stations, semi-stable wormholes and pure roid fields) {very rare}
• history “snippets” – interesting but not storyline-critical {rare}
• trivial information (e.g. recipes, legal docs, receipts, journals){occasional}
• corrupted data {frequent}.

Because some of the information on a DSS could be of significant value, the retrieving pilot would have two decipherment options:

At factional core stations, you turn in your DSS to a TRI representative and are paid a salvage fee. For uncorrupted disks, decryption will be made public as follows:

Types A & B - via TRINN (I believe this would require some GM intervention)

Type C - KTRI announcement could create a kind of gold rush, and (perhaps) some conflict. The alternative would be that the announcement would identify only the sector.

Types D & E – KTRI announcement. Historical data is added to a JOSSH “repository” or time-line. Trivial data could be posted on JOSSH by a NPC{???}.

The alternative would be to take the DSS to a private decoder (an illegal profession). You would pay a high fee (e.g. 500,000c) and the data would be given only to you. Since most times, the data is corrupted, this is a long-shot gamble. We would have to figure out how to handle type A and B data since, for storyline purposes, this may be important to get out to the player base.

FWIW I think it would be a shame to give the whole backstory out day one. It would be better to give something fairly generic, that has lots of detail and color added by the information recovered by explorers. As they recover it, the published storyline can then grow.

[Anvil]

Originally Posted by Ambrosius

FWIW I think it would be a shame to give the whole backstory out day one. It would be better to give something fairly generic, that has lots of detail and color added by the information recovered by explorers. As they recover it, the published storyline can then grow.

/agree

Anvil

[GrimGriz]

Originally Posted by Jonboy

Instance really means... we coded this event so that a number of people could enjoy it, and feel like it was unique, when in-fact it is re-used 9 million times.

yeah, but in this example there was nothing unique about it. You could go scan the thing every day if it made you feel better. It's definitely more of an easter egg than an instance. We're talking back-story here, not current plot.