Topic: reason for a small group/solo player to be out on beta
Ideally I would like to know what kind of vision the DEVs have for beta islands in the near future. At the moment there are 3 main types of activates on beta:
1) Ninja mining (maybe harvesting) alone or in a small group (with or without detector). Makes sense if you are trying to get epi.
2) Big organised mining/farming ops with scout on all/most gates.
3) Roams, groups of people running around looking to kill stuff. These require a lot of time, usually about 2hours from starting to form up to coming back home. Nothing wrong with it in principle but its hard to get a roughly even fight. This is due to the low population and lack of incentive to engage without having the superior force.
RESULT: people sit around ninja mining or being semi afk until some kind of pvp occurs. Often one side by chance or due to the time of day will have considerably more people. Please leave the politics out of it because its a question on incentives (ranting at your enemy telling them to undock in the type of bots you would like to shoot at is not gonna solve the problem).
WHAT IF: You instead of ninja mining/farming you could get into your combat bot and wonder around beta running a detector and collecting small patches of some kind of resource (maybe a rare plant that doesn't require a harvester or some kind of artefact that doesn't require scanning). I am being intentionally vague here. The idea is to give people who want to be out and about on beta in a pvp capable bot some reason to do so. The reward does not need to be nearly as large that gained by a dedicated mining/farming operation. However, at least the person/small group would not feel like they are committing suicide by SWAT (ie the next roaming gang that comes along) for no reason at all. Also the resource value would be sufficiently small and widely distributed so that it would not be worthwhile to form a large group to go around collecting it.
TLDR: A lot of people would like to be out on beta and would like to have the chance to engage in occasional one on one or small group pvp. At the moment the incentive is to form big groups and going around alone feels like a completely unjustifiable risk.
-Confucius