MU Calibration Improvement Suggestions

[TobiwanKenobi]

 

The calibration minigame could be fun. But right now it's tedious and frustrating.

 

I want to suggest a few changes that I feel could make calibrating MUs more fun.

 

1. Please speed up the animations or allow us to skip them with left click. The animations are cool, but after the hundredth time seeing them we're all just clicking on the spot where we know the button will appear while we wait for them to end. By making the minigame faster paced it will be less tedious.

 

2. Make hotspots more rare. Instead of searching for the hotspot on the cloud map, players should be just searching for dense clouds. A hotspot should be a lucky find, not guaranteed on every calibration, and not necessary for optimal results. You should be able to achieve your full calibration potential from just a dense cloud. A hotspot should give other bonuses, such as boosting the mining rate of the unit by 20% until the 2 day grace period expires, or spawning a sizeable surface deposit to harvest. This gives a nice reward for players, something out of the ordinary to give them that dopamine hit.

 

3. Give us other neat things to find as we scan, such as the gems mentioned in the roadmap, Or larger surface deposits to unearth. We can have the option of expending battery to unearth them and risk failing to find a good final calibration spot.

 

4. I think most players would greatly appreciate a longer calibration grace period or a slower calibration decay. Right now we feel a bit pressured to go do what we consider tedious work every couple days. If calibration was only necessary once a week, we wouldn't mind it so much. I understand that this would imbalance the ore supply, since players would be able to run more miners, so of course you might have to change the calibration charge supply rate to match.

 

5. Make the calibration reward rocks larger - like just one big rock rather than a bunch of 100L ones. Retrieving them is boring, it would be less so if it took less time. Or better yet, just deposit them directly into the linked container.

 

Right now, calibration feels like a job. Hopefully NQ can inject some more fun into it, and diminish the tedium.

Edited January 3, 2022 by TobiwanKenobi
Another idea

[blazemonger]

The surface harvestables from the MU minigames are the perfect link into more diverse gameplay, especially the mentioned idea of gems which may be found in these rocks. That would for instance play nicely into THIS idea.