Gameplay Suggestions...That fit with existing capacities

Look, a lot of people here love Elite: Dangerous, and I think all of us want it to be better.

However, I think a lot of people vastly underestimate how hard it is to fundamentally change underpinning mechanics, rules and structures of a videogame world without totally borking everything. And a poorly implemented or buggy feature is often worse than no feature at all.

So, I'm trying to think of ways to improve quality-of-life (QOL), immersion and overall fun that wouldn't be massively time-consuming or buggy to implement. Because if we're being honest, most of things are either a) Planned and coming later; b) Planned but with no timeframe; or c) Never coming at all.

Here are my thoughts, organized by Profession, since that kind of determines the key decisions you make in terms of ship purchase, outfitting and where you hang out.

Bounty Hunting:

• Reduce the HazRes and HiRes spawn rates, BUT - increase the bounties and the variety of bounties on the mission boards. Also, instead of having NPC fly around in Supercruise and contact us constantly with missions, have them contact us when we leave the station.

Also, make the bounties multi-stage. We already have the ability to a) change mission targets in space; b) spawn different targeted NPCs and c) scan destination systems.

Imagine taking a bounty, getting a message from a Wanted Eagle that could fork it off onto another questline (Kill a Trader or BH NPC, for instance), then going into SC, finding a USS, dropping in. Your bounty is there but he immediately highwakes and you have to fight off a few smaller fighters/gunships. Then you follow the highwake, tackle the target in a dangerous Anarchy system, and get paid 2-3M credits. All of this is 100% possible within the current engine, AFAIK. It would make up for a nerfed HazRes farming rate, and I'd personally find it a lot more interesting.

Piracy

• I think this one is easy, to be honest - increase trade traffic and trader cargo volume, but also increase fines for stolen goods (vs illegal goods), and have illegal cargo be CONFISCATED on scan. I'm not sure if there's a clean way to do this, unfortunately, but I think that given the size of these stations and the amount of goods in them, they'd require a steady flow of Type-7s and -9s to keep them in business.

How do you balance it? We've already seen huge NPC wings, a Type-9 with 500 tons of Palladium should have 2-3 Gunships/Clippers/Pythons guarding it, at a minimum. Cargo ships are both currently weirdly rare and weirdly solitary in the current mix, and all this involves is changing the spawn rates.

Trade:

• I believe the Galactic Average Price is actually the problem here. With the exception of certain return trips on a loop, there's no point in trading anything but high-value goods like Imperial Slaves and Palladium. They've already kind of established that faraway systems need things by making systems like Robigo and Sothis pay out huge missions - why not just flip things around so that Food Cartridges, Atmospheric Processors are much more valuable the farther they are from civilized space?

Also, I think the Trade Routes generally need fixing - maybe by reducing the number of goods available to buy at given stations, so that multi-hop routes make more sense than fast loops.

Ultimately, trading will always be a bit grindy. This is one place where I think real tools - with bookmarking, dynamic access to market prices, and a more robust simulation are really necessary, rather than just checking EDDB and finding the best Palladium/Slaves loop.

Mining

• Mining is kind of weird, but I think the best way to make mining more interesting is to dramatically reduce the supplies of metals and minerals at every station/outpost, make a tighter relationship between the two - i.e. a Station that can't input Bauxite can't sell Aluminum - and then make mining more lucrative instead of just a hunt for Painite. Though, it does make a certain amount of economic sense this way, since in real life a single miner could get rich striking gold/diamonds/silver, but mining iron and aluminum and coal requires brute force and massive industrial economies of scale.

I don't have clear thoughts on exploration because I like being able to get back to the bubble for CGs and powerplay, so I don't have thoughts there.