Thinking about capships hiding in Ion Storms to avoid pursuit had me wondering... Why the heck are they only found around asteroids? That makes them trivial to avoid, even without the use of plugins.

Why not enable Ion Storm generation for empty sectors as well as asteroid fields?

Also, generate a legit storm exit jump point when the storm is created instead of relying on this silly hack that's been in place for the last 3 years. Most storm jumps are less than 2000m away because they are always at the sector origin.

Good lord, are you serious about asking for MORE storms?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm asking for.

YES
I've always thought travel needs to be harder. Arf, I love you. Please implement this.

-1. I like the fact that the current asteroid-tied storms create a sort of predictable terrain at the system-level, which can impact the routes people take through the system even before people have found out where storms actually are. I'd probably be okay with it if the odds of a storm generating in an empty sector were only 1/2 the odds for an asteroid sector, but not if the odds are even.

Wouldn't it just be preferable to have more sectors with roids in ?

-1.

Remember when everyone was bitching about the storms before, and complained that "omfg.. I have to travel 4000m to jump out" type stuff? Well, they fixed that. Personally I like it the old way.

Attaches a Ion Storm generator to your ship arf.. happy flying. ;)

There you go, a deployable turret style object that creates a storm for 30 minutes

Let's discuss making storms nastier before deciding whether we need more of them or not.

Personally, I'd love to see it become necessary to shelter to some degree in a storm, unless staying near asteroids for example. But frankly, storms are mostly just a nuisance atm. (unless you're in a heavily loaded XC and run into a storm in a hive sector, in which case they're decidedly NOT merely a nuisance ;) )

I'm suggesting making them less predictable, since they're an easily avoidable nuisance.

Is this really about making ion storms harder to avoid, wouldnt more sectors for them to choose from make them less common on normal routes unless there was a change to the overall number of possible ion storms or the chance of there being a storm in any given system thus achieving the opposite to what is intended?

-1

TRS, I'm not sure how the game decides which sector to make a storm if it's a total number that it has to distribute or whether it's a per-sector chance. Good point though. If they decide to make this happen that's important to consider.

Well yeah, can't fathom another method that they would possibly use to determine it. In either case, Ion storms aren't the ideal way to make any given trip more interesting, those scripted event thingys that incarnate is talking about are probably what we want. It's nice to have variety.

+1 to focusing on making more fun things in game as opposed to making more annoying things more prevalent

I think it would be interesting if there were different "categories" of storms*, but I like that they only exist in sectors with asteroids.

* = NOAA's description of hurricane storm categories

Reminder of this game-direction RFC:

Fogged Sectors, Removal of Ion Storms.

Yes, it's five years old. But it's still the overall goal. More persistent choke points to make for interesting interactions and strategy.

-1 storms are enough of an annoyance already. Keep in mind that they can pop up in uncharted roid sectors, which makes avoiding them altogether non-trivial.

A better way to keep things interesting is Inc's proposed foggy reefs idea. Those would be unavoidable for the case where you want to visit a station completely surrounded by one.

EDIT: er, see inc's post above

I like the idea of harmful space debris. Maybe radiation from the sun, or maybe rocks heated to a certain degree do some damage?

Yeah i've read that post before, getting rid of ion storms is way better. I'm sure ARF just meant as a meantime sort of thing.