What is long distance probing?

Well, long distance probing is basically a system that we want to introduce where players have a ship somewhere in space and they can send out probes and place them anywhere in the same system. And those probes will ping and reveal basically objects that are of interest there, or anything that might be there. And those objects could be mining places, derelict stations, ships, anything that we could imagine that you could find there and we could spawn. And yeah, so you find something, then what you have to do there is triangulate. So you have to bring the probes into position so you get a more precise signal on that. And once the signal strength is enough, you can either decide to generate a quantum beacon that you can basically jump to. You could store that information and sell it to other players. Or what we aim to have there is an analysis gameplay where you basically have a signature, a unique signature of what you found there, and then you compare it on your ship. The drone or the probe sends back the signature and you sit at your PC on the ship and you compare the signature with everything that you either bought or you collected yourself in the library. And then you get an idea: OK, this might be a Gladius, this could be a mining field. And then you can still decide: OK, I jump there and I look at it, or the risk is too high, I don't jump there. So that's the rough rundown of it.

I think what's important here, what we're going to try to introduce here, is that uncertainty. You'll be able to see the graph of... it's like seeing the drive signature of a ship. You kind of know the EM, you know the IR, you'll get the curve of how strong each part is. And you might look at it and go like, this looks very similar to an Idris. And when you jump there, you might have a surprise that it's a lot of smaller ships or a fleet or something like this. Or it might look like a hauler that you might want to pirate. And you get there and, oh, no, it's actually an Idris with a lot of its stuff turned off, waiting for prey to jump in, because its signature, once they turn off some of the things on the ship, might look a lot smaller than what it actually is. So it opens up a lot of exploration for a lot of players. It also opens up a lot of options for traps and creating interesting scenarios where you're kind of going like, well, let's see what happens and who jumps for the bait here. And it's up to the players, once they get the full analysis, to figure out what that thing is. They can jump, they cannot jump, they can sell the information, they can sell it as, oh, I found this very rich asteroid field. And when that person buys it, looks over the analysis, they go, oh, yeah, that looks like an asteroid field. But when they jump there, it's not an asteroid field. I don't know, it's a booby trap. There's a turret on every rock there. And as soon as you jump in, it goes up. Because the guy that did the analysis didn't go all the way to figure out everything and actually jump there and see himself what is in that space.

What is important for us is definitely that it's player skill based. The more data you collected, the more precise your predictions are. So the longer you have been doing that already, the more precise your data is, the higher the value is that you can ask for if you sell that.

And the risk-reward goes both ways. Let's say you're scanning for something. No, it's not scanning, it's probing for something. And you find a thing and then you go like, oh, I want the last detail. I'm going to spend half an hour getting that. By the time you spend half an hour on it, it might be gone, because that might be a ship, it might be a player, it might be an NPC that just goes away. It's not going to wait there forever for you to get all the data about it. So it's up to you how much time you want to invest in that analysis part, or do you risk and jump, or do you risk it jumping away. It's all up to the player.