Their current world structure cant support dungeons, at least thats what I've heard.  Basically the world can only have 1 point on the Z axis that the player can stand on at any given location.

This also makes sense in the fact your movement speed is only calculated laterally and not vertically.  Your actual distance from another object is calculated in 3D space, though, which is why you can put distance between you and an enemy faster when changing elevations without changing speeds.

Dungeons also dont make much sense in this game, and would be very feasible without extremely large dungeons to allow for LOS.  Making really small passages would just cause tons of issues with LOS, especially if they changed in elevation along the way.

Actually dungeons could be interesting.

You can imagine something like this :

/On the map you find a teleporter that move you into a small map (ideally with an underground feeling or -why not- on the moon !), where you have to kill stuffs to get reward.

/The dungeon should not be an instance, everybody finding it should be able to enter.

/The reward could be the npc loot, and/or a cargo to find/hack (like in intrusion).

/To make things a little more interesting, once the dungeon was looted:
    -> it could change location. So you have to find it again.
    -> or dungeon can be only found by artifact hunting.

/You can also make different level dungeon :
    -> lvl1 close to the outpost not moving much for beginner the reward begin basic mods, kernel... And the TP can only TP light bots to avoid guys in Mech raping it.

     -> up to higl level one where you must be a team with hacking modules, ewar...

I don't know how much work this can be to implement, but it looks to me like a great idea to improve PVE content.

Cu on the field

Tereva

I would like the dungeon idea if it was more of a heavily populated NPC area. Take something smilar to the "cities" on the new alpha and basically make a whole island like that. You have to fight your way to the various bosses to open up new areas you can get to. Additionally, bosses are not always spawned, they have a random chance. Think "Observer Island"

Please, no dungeons

Instanced areas with more involved PVE content could be fun. Think of it as an opportunity to give players something complicated, grouped and interesting to do. So long as they're only in alpha islands (and thus not limiting pvp) and not more rewarding than activities in beta islands (to keep the risk reward balance) it'd be a good combination.

As an additional island that everyone can acces. Filled with random spawns of random mobs (even not implemented as a test ). Enter is random and not the same place as exit (which one is random too). That will be great Island of Death

Instancing fragments the game world, limits player choice, and inhibits emergence. Therefore, no instancing plox.

Underground areas would be cool though. Gotta deal with more complex walkmeshes and pathfinding or whatever, but you could add bot height to terrain limitations. Camera work could be a ***, too.

I think this team could easily make viable and interesting dungeons for our bots to explore.  Nothing is wrong with more content.  It's just more content.  Even in a sandbox game, I would love the ability to log in for 20-30minutes and do a quick cave crawl or instanced dungeon.

technically, there is a limitation on stacking content vertically.

But, a seperate island would provide the same type of isolation as a dungeon.

Right now we need more PVP luv though, I can hear the frustration in their posts about spending hours doing nothing, and giving them something to shoot in PVE is OK, but it would be better to increase PVP for them.

I'm not a pvp'er, but it drives the economy and the basically the whole industrial vertical, and a healthy world economy is going to make the whole game feel more alive. After that though, I would really like to see more and harder PVE scenerios including the suggestion of a citadel. But, because the market and the economy is off, if it was so hard that PVE'ers were losing bots (and it should be hard) the reward to compensate that loss would be highly out of balance. Just as an example, if it took losing 4 T1 fitted mechs to storm the citadel, the reward would need to be 30M NIC, or some type of mk II bot fitted. And then T4 heavyes would pwn the place and get out of balance reward for no losses.

tl;dr - Balancing the reward vs. risk in a long mission objective is very difficult.

How would other players be able to affect you while inside this dungeon? If two other players are each in a different instance of the same location, would there be a menu to choose which you go into? How is it good for people to be able to completely disconnect from each other and the game world when the goal of PO is explicitly the opposite of that?

While on Beta, I'll keep a few missions open so I have little rabbit holes to jump into if I'm being hunted. Metaphysical dislocation tank is best tank.