Ion Storms currently are only annoyances to players. As they are fairly easy to avoid once you know to go around asteroid belts, players rarely enter them, and almost never stay when they do get caught. Ion Storms would be excellent places for pirates, except that there's never anyone to actually pirate there. So, here's a couple suggestions on possible ways to get players into Ion Storms (as it happens, I've mentioned both of these before, but not in this context).

1) Have some type of reward(s) inside Ion Storms. For example, make ores mined from Ion Storms 'Ionized <X> Ore', which would be worth say 25% more credits & XP than the 'Premium <X> Ore'.

2) Reward taking a direct route (that usually is more likely to hit Ion Storms) rather than taking an indirect route. One way to do this would be to change how sector-to-sector jumps use the battery. Currently they drain the battery completely, but do not require any level of charge. This could be changed to require a certain level of charge, but only drains that much (say 10 units). Also possibly make the amount it drains based on the distance of the jump, so a jump across 3 sectors would drain less than a jump across 8 sectors. This would make a direct route take less battery charge than taking an indirect route with more jumps around asteroid belts. A possible problem with this though, is that it would dramatically affect a large number of other gameplay areas. I say this is only a possible problem, because I don't think it would take any fun away, and may even add some. But others will likely disagree. ;)

I'm one of those others.... Taking more time to travel isn't cool. If the fastest route was a direct one... and a direct one sometimes means going through about 3 ion storms....... My god beolach WHY!?!??! That means it's going to take me about 10x longer to get around. I like your # (1) idea tho.

/givemoney Devs 2c

I don't think it would necessarily add significantly to travel time. A little, yes, but not 10x longer. The thing is, I find I tend to plot courses around asteroid belts, not only when I know there is a storm, or don't know one way or the other, but even when I KNOW that there is NOT a storm. If #2 was implemented, and I continued to plot courses around 'roid belts, it would only add enough time for the battery to carge 10 units, or not even that much if I started with a full battery. In fact, because this way you would jump into a WH sector with a only partially drained battery, you wouldn't have to wait as long for your battery to charge, so you could actually end up taking less time to travel.

Anyway, I'm not too attached to that idea, although I do think it could work out nice. Anyone have any other ideas on ways to make Ion Storms useful?

How about Ion storms charge your battery faster or give you some sort of "residual charge" for your batteries once you get out for like 150% battery life until you deplete it? (NOT permanent 150% battery life...)

And in order to encourage straight-through jumps, how about having some more "intelligent" bots hang out in the obvious sectors for avoiding the asteroids? Perhaps only in grayspace in order to avoid lots of newbie corpses piling up. (This is more the stick than the carrot, tho.)

I like Beolach's idea #1 as well.

*bump* Mostly in response to the comments on Ion Storms in this thread: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/1/11089

Also, terjekv suggested some missions that would send players into ion storms: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/10251

I'm actually in favor of making ION storms general throughout the universe once the hive AI is a bit more interesting and NPC pirates and such can be used to set up ambushes in non-asteroid storms.

The main thing that needs to be done with ION storms is to make everyone passing through the sector use the same exit point, otherwise AI or human pirates will have no chance of being effective.

I think remove the random "sector X now has ion storm", attempting to fly through it via a /navroute drops you out of warp and you must reach an exit point. Here's my alternative:

How about making ion storms NOT sector-wide? Make them very large areas of space that occcur only near wormholes due to spacetime vacuum energy - the random quantum fluctuations sometimes become stronger and an ion storm pops up, close to a wormhole.

The spherical size of the storm would be more or less random, and just like a real storm, your ship is buffetted by "quantum wind" or "neutrino gusts" (or whatever) that buffet your ship and slowly damage it until you escape the storm. I'm thinking the damage and buffeting would be more intense near the heart of the storm and have a simple linear reduction until the edge of the storm is reached.

The storms would always have the wormhole as a point within their spherical area, but the storms could grow/shrink and move around. I'm envisioning a kind of spherical hurricane. How about having an eye in the storm, a shelter? Or, how about having a gravitational attractor in the storm, if you get sucked too close to the center radiation levels fry you like a crispy sausage?

Even better, eliminate radar functionality when in a storm.

Even better than THAT, yes have rewards of some kind within ion storms. Like ionized ore, or somehow your battery gets recharged faster, or your hull plating becomes ionized and repels energy weapons 50% better for a limited time, something.

I think this would introduce some tactics when doing trade runs to avoid pirates, or perhaps help pirates hide somewhere.

1) brilliant... perhaps there should be a 25% increase on all experience earned within an ion storm. Given the additional challenge it makes sense that the player's character would learn more. Ion storms would be a prime spot to go botting.

2) Three words: warp countdown timer! This would give current ion storms a point, since you would probably have to fight off at least one wing of bots before holding still for jump, but the timer could also be made a function of the distance you are jumping across. Nothing drastic... say 0.5 seconds per sector. This would definitely give one single jump a greater benefit at a greater risk.

3) I always had imagined different classes of ion storms (kind of like category I-V hurricanes).. with the storm severity incurring different conditions:
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/7644#96710

I'm also a big fan of anything that takes the distance of a jump (number of sectors crossed) into account.

Right now we just have all this empty space that we never use.

The battery part, having jump distances take different amounts of energy is a great idea too.

So how bout the following:

Warp: 250 energy
each sector jump: 15 energy

so,
crossing from one corner to another would be:
SQRT(16^2 + 16^2)=22.63

or ~340 energy

This could lead to actual strategic placement of people in battles, you can't just jump past a system, you really have to move through it.

I personally would be very happy if they made the universe a bit smaller, (drop speeds and distance to jump/wh) and then also forced players to move through some of the intervening sectors.

I think my ideal system would allow pirates to force routes through ion storms.

Would also give a real reason for using the Heavy Battery over the F/C. It'd be capable of longer, and more jumps w/out waiting to recharge.

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Re: LeberMac

I agree, a wider variety of types of storms, with different effects effects would be nice to have. But I don't think we should remove the ion storms we have now. I really like the effect they have of interrupting intra-system jumps.
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It strikes me as sort of odd that our current ships can move so quickly. Have any of you read the backstory? (*crickets*). I direct you to http://vendetta-online.com/h/storyline_section10.html . If you read the AD3844 entry, you'll note that from the time the Sercos entered the Eo system to the time they reached the actual planet of Eo was a matter of several HOURS. Yet a good pilot can loop the entire known universe in 26 minutes 55 seconds. Quite odd indeed. Space feels so... small... in this game.

Do you really want the game to take several hours for you to travel from Eo C-12 to Eo J-11, roguelazer? And what does that have to do with storms?

[edit]
Simple solution: change the loading screen tip that tells us the modern jump drive was invented in AD 3785, so instead the jump drive was invented in 3985. Then we have a reason the Serco ships took so long: they didn't have the modern jump drive.
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'twas in response to Shape's post. And yes. I should think that capital ships should take about that time to travel. Big, slow, lumbering behemoths of doom. It's not much fun defending your border if the enemy can get a fleet large enough to blow up your base by you in a matter of minutes.

Yes, but hours? Not every game session lasts that long. I don't want to spend most of my play time traveling.

[edit]
Getting back to the topic of Ion Storms...

How about making Ion Stoms have a multi-sector area of effect, that extends into non-asteroid sectors? Currently, adjacent asteroid sectors sometimes are all affected by one contiguous storm, but the non-asteroid sectors around them don't. Why not make it so so the storms can continue out to affect non-asteroid sectors, too. Storms will always be centered on an asteroid sector, and some will only affect that sector, but others will be larger, and affect multiple sectors, including empty sectors.
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the only reason ION storms are even centered in asteroids at all is because they were boring as hell in empty sectors.

when they were first introduced they could occur anywhere, but because everyone entering an ion storm has a different exit point, trying to catch people in an ion storm was no easier than trying to catch them in a normal sector, and was actually harder because if you missed them you then had to fly BACK to YOUR exit point before you could follow them.

coupled with the low player count and the fact that you spend long periods of time without ever running into ANYONE caused the spawning of ion storms to be changed. I think that once the AI is capable of handling a bit more (the hive goes on a raid in ion storm XYZ to see if humans have gained any new technology it needs) it should be changed back.

I'm actually for the idea that ion storms should provide more combat XP, and i've always been in favor of the "ioniozed ore" concept.

Is there a reason everyone has a seperate exit point in storms? I agree w/ what I've heard a lot of players saying, that there should be one storm exit for all ships in a sector.

it has something to do with the entry vector. in theory two players warping into a storm from the same sector should have similar exit points, but even those can be widely seperated based on the random scatter built into the warp in point.

I think the ion exits are generated at X distance from the point at which you warp into the sector in the direction you are traveling as you enter.

Since the area you enter a sector in is determined by the sector you jumped from, and when entering a sector your exact location of emergence is somewhere in a sphere that has a diameter of roughly 3km, that leaves a lot of variation on destination WH.
To make matters worse i think there is an cone variable of enterance as well, meaning that when 2 people enter a sector at thier initial heading might be different from each other. a 10 degree difference in heading makes for a large linear distance at the end of a 7K trip.

As to why it is that way, I suspect it was simply faster to code the ion storm exit to just appear XXX distance from where the player entered the storm.

Beolach, yeah, one exit point per storm would be good, not a huge deal though.

Also, how about occasionally having storms in station systems? Dau Senate: "We're having some interesting weather today..."

your first is idea good... But the rest WTF I hit ion storms like 1 in 5 jumps!!

I like the idea of Ion Storms in Station sectors.

It would also be cool if there was a way to have player created storms... which would make trading more interesting, and pirating more fun/easier.