Goonhub
06-21-2024, 06:27 PM
I already spoke with Scaltra about this before they put it up on the forums, so in short I'm an advocate of the suggestions.
One thing I do want to go over specifically though as the focus has been more on the hotspot mechanics from an engineering perspective in discussion. That's an important discussion, but I do think that retooling the miner/engineer interaction would be helpful without vastly changing the dynamic. Right now, oshan miners have two basic options and a "bad" third option when it comes to oshan hotspots: communicate and cooperate with hotspot augmentation, or avoid hotspot areas for good, and "just level the z-level" for "bad" I'm not going to fall into the trap of anecdotally saying which one I think happens the most and just focus on the idea that it always felt like this is a gameplay opportunity for cooperative play between engineering and mining.
Just having some basic method to allow hotspot mining to be "confirmed" by an engineer for me would help that. Even if you wanted to avoid making the process an automatic bonus for hotspots (because miners just level the z-level and engineers come by and sweep up the benefits) you just make it require you react to hotspot mining at the same time, so that a miner mining a particular area requires the engineer to lock down that hotspot at a similar time to capitalise on the power increases. I don't think that's actually necessary given right now engineers can already just sweep up the benefits, but I'll offer up what I can for an idea I'd want to see implemented.
The last part of my post is entirely anecdotal and supposition, so feel free to ignore it but: I feel like people like Oshan, I feel like there are engineers who love oshan. I think there would be a lot more people who might be interested in engineering on Oshan if there wasn't a negative feedback loop of: People complain about damage (however much the game tries to avoid hotspot damage, it happens though I agree frankly it tends to to be minor, though there's occasional unfortunate/funny accidents) which puts people off giving the role a go, which leads to a death of engineers, which puts pressure on the engineers left, which discourages them from playing engineer on oshan so on so on. But I accept fully that's just my opinion which I only offer here because others have done the same to support their discussion so far. If this is a thing that's happening, I'd enjoy a simple solution to break that cycle.
One thing I do want to go over specifically though as the focus has been more on the hotspot mechanics from an engineering perspective in discussion. That's an important discussion, but I do think that retooling the miner/engineer interaction would be helpful without vastly changing the dynamic. Right now, oshan miners have two basic options and a "bad" third option when it comes to oshan hotspots: communicate and cooperate with hotspot augmentation, or avoid hotspot areas for good, and "just level the z-level" for "bad" I'm not going to fall into the trap of anecdotally saying which one I think happens the most and just focus on the idea that it always felt like this is a gameplay opportunity for cooperative play between engineering and mining.
Just having some basic method to allow hotspot mining to be "confirmed" by an engineer for me would help that. Even if you wanted to avoid making the process an automatic bonus for hotspots (because miners just level the z-level and engineers come by and sweep up the benefits) you just make it require you react to hotspot mining at the same time, so that a miner mining a particular area requires the engineer to lock down that hotspot at a similar time to capitalise on the power increases. I don't think that's actually necessary given right now engineers can already just sweep up the benefits, but I'll offer up what I can for an idea I'd want to see implemented.
The last part of my post is entirely anecdotal and supposition, so feel free to ignore it but: I feel like people like Oshan, I feel like there are engineers who love oshan. I think there would be a lot more people who might be interested in engineering on Oshan if there wasn't a negative feedback loop of: People complain about damage (however much the game tries to avoid hotspot damage, it happens though I agree frankly it tends to to be minor, though there's occasional unfortunate/funny accidents) which puts people off giving the role a go, which leads to a death of engineers, which puts pressure on the engineers left, which discourages them from playing engineer on oshan so on so on. But I accept fully that's just my opinion which I only offer here because others have done the same to support their discussion so far. If this is a thing that's happening, I'd enjoy a simple solution to break that cycle.