Do you follow / avoid deep space rumors?

[Fenikso]

There are rumors about something happening in deep space:

• Merchant fleet
• Terrible radiation storm
• Horrible war and violence
• Dreadful report of alien attacks
• Swarm of refugees
• Notorious fleet of pirates
• Syndicate Navy
• Valuable shipments

I remember first time when I tried to follow "Valuable shipments" or "Merchant fleet" rumors. I was very disappointed. I did not feel any difference. Following the rumor even a few sectors across the Quadrant did not seem worthwhile. Nowadays I just ignore these types of rumors altogether - well except Alien rumor as if you are hunting for Aliens every bit counts.

I think it would be more fun if the impact of said rumors would be bigger. If military officers would hunt down said notorious pirates, and the pirates would prey on merchants and valuable shipments. If merchants would avoid sectors with war and violence and everyone not equipped to fight Aliens would run with terror around said sectors.

What do you think?

[contributor]

I'm with you. Most of my strategies rely on participation in wars/spy battles or doing contracts to make money. Since I can normally fight off anything I don't worry about flying right through a pirate, navy or war rumor. I'm also constantly having to repair solar sails so it's not worth the time to locate and fly around storms. The only deep space rumor I pay attention to is the alien one. There are times when I'm certain I must be flying through one of the other rumors, as I get a military or pirate contact 3 or 4 turns in a row, but yeah I've never found it worth it to go looking. Even as Pirate it was rarely worth it to chase down a merchant/valuable shipment rumor. I keep my stealth really low in that situation so I get lots of contacts already.

[slayernz]

I pretty much ignore deep space rumors because they never yielded any results for me. Even the Alien rumor doesn't help.

That's why I had originally requested that we have the ability to dismiss rumors so our rumor log is less cluttered with stuff you can't be bothered looking at

[Cory Trese]

The math and tests don't lie, but player perception is ultimately the currency of the land.

I'll keep an eye on this thread.

So often I hear about people running into deep space rumors and blaming the game, interesting to hear long time players say they ignore them.

[slayernz]

I run into radiation storms and the like - but even if I had the rumor in my rumor log, my ship's autopilot would ignore such hazards and fly straight through them anyway! ... Maybe the deep space rumors/hazards should appear on your general ship navigation screen rather than the galactic map. Then we'd begin to pay more attention to them

[Fenikso]

Storm is easy to spot if you stumble on it by accident. But it is usually not that bad anyway. Maybe the hidden deep space rumor can be revealed with "Something does not feel right here..." notice similar to planet rumor? My inner feeling tells me that it is not worth to look out for the rumors as either avoiding them or following them does not pay off the effort.

[slayernz]

MAYBE because we are actively ignoring the DS rumors, we aren't aware that sometimes we have higher encounter rates when we fly through an area that is marked with a rumor. We just think "Oh cool, more things to kill"

[Fenikso]

Well, people usually do not want to try things which do not yield results many times. When I first followed rumor like that, I thought that I am almost guaranteed to meet one or three ships with valuable shipments or high level military ships securing them. Or a high level pirate in pirate area. I did try like three times and never encountered anything in weeks. Maybe I was lucky / unlucky. But why would I try again?

Not sure if that would be doable and how it works now. But I would probably be more happy with very high probability of encountering said rumor a few times and then depleting it and having it disappear. Similar to shortage / surplus situation.

[Cory Trese]

Ha, as if on queue an e-mail shows up from a new player asking for DS rumors on the main map.

He apparently thinks they're the secret to success in the game and having them back in the zoom map is too slow.

[contributor]

I'm wondering if maybe the problem is playing at the highest difficulty levels where your patrol ability quickly becomes rather useless, unless you're putting tons of points into Tactics. In a late, high difficulty game your odds may go up from 1-in-200 to 1-in-100 but that difference is still not "felt." What if the some of those rumors (Navy, Pirates, Merchants) had a fixed encounter rate rather than simply increasing your existing chance of of finding something via patrol.

Edit: I guess I should add that I'm making a lot of assumptions in this post about the way things work. I might be way off on this.

[slayernz]

I would like it to be like a contract where you get to a rumor location, and if you did a patrol, you are guaranteed to have an encounter with the type of ship in the rumor (pirate, merchant, navy, etc)

[Lesleyr]

How about an IAP that gets rid of flavour and deep space rumours?

[slayernz]

Oh oh oh ... an IAP that gets rid of Steel Song!!!!

No ... actually on second thought, I get great satisfaction from killing them, so would actually be doing myself a disservice.

[johndramey]

I tend to avoid them, but I think that's mainly because of my play style. I usually run with high stealth spy like builds, so an increased encounter rate is exactly what I don't want.

With that being said, what about rumors of areas with decreased encounter rates? That could be an interesting thing to add, maybe allowing people like myself to scoot around in those sectors with a greater sense of security?

e.g.
Merchant fleet <------> Planetary recession
Pirate Fleet <-----> ??
Increased patrols <-------> Redeployment of forces

[athios]

Same deal with me as others have mentioned above.

Initially found nothing when looking for Merchants with valuable shipments, then never bothered again after that.
I only actively follow Alien rumors if I'm Alien hunting.
If I happen to notice a Syndicate Navy crackdown in hostile faction territory while scanning the map, and I'm in poor health or ship in poor condition, then I would avoid it.

Yeah, for radiation storms... while doing Surveillance and flying back and forth between Xeen Prime and Rychart Prime, I've had my Pilot run into the same fixed-location radiation storm over a dozen times. He doesn't seem to learn from his mistakes. Too bad the airlocks were not an option for him.