Taelessael

So, what do you all think of the idea of having a heat-management system? Not EVE's "periodically emergency over-clocking your elements until they melt" mechanic, but just actually having elements give off heat when used that then needs to be either dissipated via radiator, or stored in some manner of thermal-battery/capacitor? I'd figure it wouldn't be like power, where things probably just wont function if you can't power them, but perhaps the ship itself can start taking damage in some way if it cant adequately store or dissipate the heat and you keep generating more of it. Any thoughts?

EVE was a huge space-game with massive player owned factions and alliances, as well as what I'd assume was a substantially greater risk to pvp than was in most mmo. They didn't form these factions to avoid getting killed by Starvation, or blown up by random space-lightning, or even running out of fuel like you can in DU. They also didn't form quickly. Goonswarm is a massive alliance with tens of thousands of members in EVE, they didn't start a major faction because the game made them join one that was always there, they started their own after the game was already going because they were a bunch of guys in cheap ships that got together and thought "let's just go use overwhelming numbers to win in pvp". If the game keeps going, and gets enough players, it will get there. Also, seriously? An org doesn't need to have a planet with dev-made cities and governmental structures to be a faction, an org with 2 or more people in it is a faction (albeit a very small one). People are in fact capable of organizing themselves, and building constructs to operate these organizations out of as they see fit. It happens all the time, I've taken part in such on more than one occasion. ... Please stop talking about taxes, not only is it a new system that has yet to stabilize properly, but it is readily apparent that you don't understand any more than "they need to be paid" and "the government irl uses the money for stuff". Having an NQ enforced tax to pay for other players to do something is seriously just asking to see some clown try to find out if he can pile enough abandoned wrecks to climb to space because they can do it on someone else's dollar. Players hold each other accountable, they observe and determine trustworthiness, this game wont make enough money to pay NQ to employ enough GMs to reasonably do the same.

I'm aware that none of these ideas are new, I am simply trying to spitball things and see if anyone else has something I didn't think of to help encourage combat ships to not just be needles and nintendo cartridges. Cross-section is fine, it gives people a reason to not build cubes. What we need is something to conflict with it, a reason for people to build big. The goal is to make it such that you need to decide between having good defense against conventional weapons (small builds), having a good defense against the new thing (large builds), or keeping a balance somewhere in the middle.

To keep it simple, the game as is can't be finely tuned enough to make mixed-size/design combat fleets reasonably viable, the combat system isn't complex enough. Every change to the existing numbers results in a lot of players sitting down, doing some math, putting some test shots down range to check their math, and then deploying fleets of copy-pasta ships built to the new mathematical definition of "best". They have no reason to deploy anything else because there is no counter to this best except more of itself. As this results in boring copy/paste fleets, this is an issue. To solve this I would suggest the inclusion of additional elements that are only permitted on one or two sizes of core, or elements that encourage people to build large/heavy to defend against (since avoiding conventional damage pushes people to build as small as possible) such as: -Bombs/Torpedoes: An exceptionally high damage short to mid range weapon with severely limited ammo, tracking, and firing cone that can only be fit to xs core constructs (perhaps also prevent it from being fired while docked to stop people from making docked-xs core turrets). -Targeting Computer: A device that substantially augments the effective range of weapons that can only be fitted to an s core construct, allowing it to better serve as a picket ship against xs bombers, and not be hopelessly out-ranged by m-core constructs. -Radar Booster: An element that augments the radar of the ship to which it is attached, such as by allowing it to spot targets at ranges longer than 2su, or having it display data on its target (shield hp, mass, ect...) -Shield Booster: A large element that recharges a target's shield (perhaps expending some manner of ammo/fuel in the process) and can only be fit to L cores. E-War: ---Radar Disruptor: A large weapon that has a chance to blind the target's radar for a short period (perhaps to all targets other than itself and other ships using disruptors) that. The chance to work is inversely proportionate to the target's mass. ---Tractor Beam: Applies a set amount of force to pull a target toward you or push it away from you. -Interstellar Drive? (can't hurt to ask): A large element that can only be fit to a large/XL core, and allows a craft to transport itself, its passengers, and docked ships between solar-systems. Uses a lot of fuel, ends up in a random location in the target system if it doesn't have some manner of beacon at its destination to lock on to. Rather obviously we don't need things to be these specific elements/ideas, just as long as whatever extra complexity we do get encourages diversity of fleet composition. Elements for larger ships should probably be quite large in size, or require large periphery items to help encourage people to not be flying the smallest thing they can fit a shield, guns, and engines to. Any thoughts/ideas?

Right... my apologies if I over simplify any of your points, your post seemed to me to be a lot of "stream of consciousness" and it was hard for me to follow without trying to boil it down and sort it first. I admit, I am not familiar with Everquest. Did it have a "You permanently lose all your gear on death" kind of mechanic? Games that do tend to have much more paranoid player-bases as far as pvp stuff goes. Such paranoia does not however permanently prevent large groups from ever forming, it just makes it take longer. You say that like you think he tried to claim he was an experienced game dev and came up with all that stuff first. The game is far from perfect, the devs are obviously borrowing basic concepts from other games and learning as they go, and this was obvious back at the start of beta. People do that, nobody has experience their first time around, nobody writes a book or program without errors and good enough to make them rich on their first draft, and almost nobody comes up with a totally new idea. If ya don't like it, nobody is keeping you here, but if you stay, then you can always help try and improve it. -EVE Online proves that enough people can trust that much in spite of the paranoia of losing all their stuff given sufficient time and size of player-base. -Cost is relative, economics of scale require consideration, and while you wont be often seeing people spamming general chat for enough new-joins to hold all their guns, faction-scale pvp still happens whether or not your a org can produce combat ships at a speed it is comfortable with. We may not have whole planets worth of resources going in to 1000-ship battles any time soon, but the game is still young. -Again... EVE... all those news-worthy major battles between players, those weren't fights between the NPC factions players were forced in to, they were wars between player-made orgs and alliances.

Fiddly. I can see use for this reducing the game-load in pve areas like the markets where so much stuff is just parked that it lags, but it would remove people's ability to just find a base and look at all the cool stuff parked there, and there'd have to be some manner of provision to allow constructs parked in such a manner in pvp areas to be looted.

Right... to the important bits... This has nothing to with factions, and needs its own thread to be discussed there. I can certainly appreciate the intensions here, but DU is currently generally incapable of having NPC dynamic constructs, so odds are you are not getting npc cops. This isn't to say that I don't want them to find some way to include npc dynamics for other various reasons, just that it would be a lot of work and possibly better to focus their efforts else-ware in the short term. I'm sure the pirates appreciate your willingness to recklessly slow-boat directly between planets and in to their blockades, and the irony of linking a video of a guy complaining that there isn't enough risk in the game before asking for the inclusion of a massive area where people that are willing to shoot first aren't even allowed to play is not lost on me, but you really need to stop asking the devs to protect you even more from pvp players in a game that already affords you substantial ability to do that yourself. Seriously, make a friend, join a faction, have them fly scout/escort, or pay someone to do that, or fly around where the blockades normally are, or just warp. Asking the devs to provide you risk free all the resources accessible to those willing to take risks just removes the point of taking the risk in the first place. If you want a faction-city, try playing with the existing large factions, such structures already exist and are entirely player made and operated. Forcing factions could be iffy. WoW got away with it because in spite of all the story being about a war it was first and foremost a PvE game with little in the way of consequence resulting from an entirely different risk/reward system. EVE got away with it because the factions were just shy of irrelevant and were for the most part just flags to fly with players already having decided to cooperate (or not). NQ isn't forcing enmity between everyone, they are simply not requiring cooperation and allowing players to make their own decisions in an environment with more consequence than having to run the quarter-mile from the nearest graveyard to your unlootable corpse.

We definitely need a higher-grav planet, the starting worlds shouldn't be the hardest ones to operate off of. Even 5g would be a bit much, and would quickly result in a planet festooned with space-elevators owned by single-man orgs (or small groups of such orgs). Between 2 and 3 G would probably be good. The Ion-storm idea sounds cool, and would certainly be needed on a "challenge world" where the whole point was just that it was hard, but I suspect that with nothing else to focus on *cough* planetary pvp *cough* it would just annoy all the miners and haulers that claim the "have" to fly there to "remain competitive" (ya know, like those pve guys that constantly demand the benefits of pvp space without the risk of pvp). A gas-giant planet on the other hand would be quite interesting. You could make it as high grav as you want at its lower levels, we'd just need players and docked cores to not be able to survive body-slamming planets, and perhaps some manner of harvesting valuable materials from the ever more dangerous lower altitudes.

What you ask for is not an enhancement, and would change the way combat works entirely... because you want to have the option of flipping the table and burning the game pieces when the game isn't going your way. DU is not catastrophically missing out on players just because piracy is a permitted part of the game in locations known to everyone that pays any attention and that can be easily avoided. Real life doesn't work that way, there are a lot of interactions in the real world that go entirely against the desires of one or more of the parties involved in them, such as: war, crime, gambling, accidents, politics, religion, economics, voting, planning with more than a single knowledgeable person involved, and so on. Benefits of peaceful play: not having to risk losing a ship in pvp zones if you don't want to, having a reputation as not going to backstab and shoot your hired escorts, having to not waste huge amounts of time and resources just for the chance that someone else will let you do what you want to do, and perhaps even let you break even with the subsequent loot. If you want to go in to pvp space without getting shot, and without shooting, then what you need is friends to do the shooting for you, or hired escorts to do the same, not an ill-conceived game-breaking weapon with a token limitation that can be easily circumvented.

Paying to have things repurposed in that way would just be an annoying money-sink for when players have to re-purpose things a lot at the start, it would hurt the newer manufacturing players more than the more established ones. It would perhaps be more practical to make schematics have limited runs before they must be replaced, and then reduce the cost of schematics a bit to make it seem like a more easily played path for newer players while adding in a money-sink for more established ones. Perhaps let t1 stuff run infinitely, t2 a few hundred runs, t3 fifty to a hundred runs, ect... It would perhaps also be advisable/practical to allow players some method of researching schematics themselves instead of having to buy them. An industry unit could be added for such a task, with the "required materials" perhaps being a lower tier schematic and a volume of other resources suitable to keeping the cost of research high enough to prevent the return of "everyone has their own private mega-factory". As for everyone always saying "they must wipe" or "they will wipe", and their argument always seems to be that someone somewhere has an advantage others don't. These advantages can't be avoided in an mmo, someone will always be more experienced, or have more time invested, or a bigger cooperative group. If there is an exploit, it should be patched, nuking the possessions of everyone that isn't exploiting in a game like DU will just drive off the player-base.

The lack of NPC means that the police are in fact real players someone is probably paying to play as space-cops. If you want defenders, trying hiring some. Additionally, a benefit to players that get attacked a lot without shooting back will immediately benefit the allies of the pvp players, as the people with guns would simply call all their non-pvp allies and non-pvp alts out where they could fire off a shot at their allies and then disengage, then immediately do it again, allowing their non-pvp friends and alts to rack up the non-pvp bonus faster than actual regular pve players. If you don't like getting shot at, but you still want the rewards equivalent to someone who actually risks perma-loss of their stuff, try out-smarting the pvp players instead of just lobbying to get bonuses for not being one of them.

Have you then considered hiring guards? Or scouts? Or just bribing the pvp players to leave you alone? Have you considered out-flying the pvp players? Or out-smarting them? It isn't exactly hard. As for balance, you fail to understand the concept. A pvp player risks perma-losing their stuff, a pve player does not, there for a pvp player gets better rewards. A pve player willing to risk the perma-loss of their stuff should get the same rewards as the pvp player if they meet the same conditions- in this case not gaining the loot of a wreck because they didn't kill it, not losing their ship, perhaps making off with some pvp space-ore if they find it, or getting the pay for a mission through pvp space if they complete it. This is balance. A pve player asking for a weapon of mass destruction to use against pvp players isn't a pve player, they are just a pvp player that wants an "I'm not going to win, there for nobody else should be allowed to" option. This isn't balance, it is just being a sore loser.

Could it please be made such that a tile colored for informational reasons in the map can have that color altered or its transparency/intensity changed. As is those of us with poor vision have been having a harder and harder time telling when a hex is highlighted for any reason (seriously folks, almost totally transparent yellow is the wrong color for anything, I need to play with the graphical settings so much as to make it near impossible to see anything outside the map just to see it at all). Alternatively could we get an optional toggle-able setting in the map that hides the terrain features and just shows the hex-lines and other markers over a featureless black sphere? it would make it a lot easier to see things.

Given this seems like it was taken out of eve and is being suggested without the rest of the systems eve had to make it work, you may wish to flesh the idea out a bit more... such as: "It would be cool to have a heat-management system where in every element generates heat during use that must be dissipated via a radiator or thermal-storage system to prevent element damage, and then add in some manner of overclocking module that pumps up the connected element's output at the cost of pumping up the heat even more."

1) I don't recall self-destruct in eve being anything more than a way to pod yourself with an in-universe explanation as to how. 2) Any pvp player with the capacity for forethought knows that taking a ship in to pvp means they may lose that ship, so please don't sit there and insult the pirates with the suggestion that they are afraid to lose their ships, it just makes you look disrespectful and not worth listening to. 3) An AOE that does not require target-lock does not work well with a system that needs target lock due to client-side operations. 4) An AOE that does not require target lock may as well be useable anywhere without restriction, as "unarmed and being shot at" takes no effort to achieve with all of two people, and could depending on how it works potentially be managed with just one. (a lot of folks may be dumber than bricks, but there are a lot of smart folk out there too who's first thought is always "how do I break this to win"). 5) An AOE that requires target lock but still has the capacity to significantly cause harm over and above all other weapons will still be a horribly imbalanced weapon that will get abused to no end. 6) If you want to hurt the pirates back, try bringing friends and fitting weapons like most pirates do. ---If your counter argument is any form of "I'm a solo player but still should be able to win against teams because balance" then it is automatically wrong for incentivizing solo-play in an mmo, and because if it did work that way then instead of a team working against you, you'd just be facing a bunch of solo-players that all happen to share a discord and have decided to gang up on you.

Allowing players to boost their skills directly with quanta is a terrible idea, it wont fix the disparity in talent points between new and old, just increase it when the players that have had the option to harvest now patched loopholes for cash can suddenly burn their near infinite wealth to skill up a bit.

Right… where to start… -Claiming hexes- Put simply, allowing players to place TCU with so low a cost as was seen on the PTS will allow players or groups with stockpiles of them to temporarily claim huge amounts of territory, and while the taxes on such a volume of land would inevitably force said claimers to relinquish it later, it would give them a significant amount of time with which to scan the hexes, cherry-picking all of the best ones and leaving everyone else to pick through what’s left. Allowing old tile scans to display the new auto-miner values for their respective hexes will have a similar effect, allowing persons or groups with massive stockpiles of old scans to sort through them and locate the best hexes to claim far more quickly than anyone (or any group) that has to scan tiles to determine their content. If you don’t want new players or orgs to be forever handy-capped in the area of territory-mining when compared to persons or groups with these stockpiles already prepared when the patch drops, I would strongly suggest that you keep the TCU deployment cost as it is now (significantly higher cost when you already have several deployed/owned), and that you make old scans not depict the new auto-miner values. -Upkeep on the miners- There are some days I can do this because they are weekends, or holidays, or snow-days, ect… but like a lot of other people I do already have a job. An upkeep feature that requires more or less daily tending in the form of a mini-game that needs to be played multiple times to keep producing enough t1 ore to break even with the new hex-tax will quickly become just another grind. I would advise that this area be altered to reduce the amount of upkeep required. As the hexes are taxed once per week, matching to this pace may be ideal (such as by extending the time the calibration lasts, and reducing the speed calibration points are accrued to match, thus maintaining the same maximum number of miners for all players). -Taxes- A tax on hexes is practical, as it adds in a badly needed money-sink for the game and allows new players to not be forced to fly half way around a planet to find somewhere to get started, but a million per week will destroy new players that don’t join established and experienced players before they try to pursue this path of play. At the same time, it isn’t going to significantly hinder large groups, as they have the option to simply withdraw from undesired hexes without any substantial drawback in order to minimize their expenses. In this area I would have to advise making taxes per hex scale to the total number of owned hexes, as a flat tax rate will substantially risk disheartening new players that see a million a week as an enormous amount to try and manage, while doing little to diminish the overwhelming volume of cash owned by many of the richest players/groups. If you are trying to reduce in-game cash, you may also find it practical to adjust missions. Randomized start and end locations for each player (as opposed to having every single player in the verse having the same missions with the same start and end locations), shorter durations for both the time it is available to be accepted and the time in which it can be completed (perhaps a week), and making them non-repeatable (with fresh randomized missions being added to the list regularly). -Asteroids- This one has a couple of issues. Re-spawning all the asteroids at a single time just pressures everyone that wants to mine them to be there on the starting line the moment it happens. The safe-zone players worry that they won’t get what they need, so they all rush out and strip everything in the bubble, leaving anyone late to the game to wait a week before they have their own opportunity. Meanwhile the dominant pvp-org/alliance has the numbers to simply either scan down every non-bubble asteroid simultaneously, or watch their d-sats to know what asteroids people have just found and subsequently send their own explorers and pirates to chase off/kill the original finder and then strip the rock of the best materials, leaving all those that can’t compete to eventually just write-off hunting the pvp asteroids all together. It also causes people not living in an optimal time-zone to just feel left out/ignored, as this part of the game may be entirely inaccessible to them simply because of an inability to get on due to things like needing to be at work preventing them from getting on at all when they would otherwise need to be on to have a chance at getting an asteroid. Adding in more asteroids will obviously help with the safe-zone rush cleaning things out before other time-zones get on, but so will altering the cycle-time (perhaps reducing it from a week to 50 hours) so that asteroids intermittently spawn more often and at all times of day. As for the pvp asteroids, the most effective thing I can think of to prevent one group from driving everyone else out of hunting them would be to limit the range of the dsat and allow asteroids to spawn beyond that range from all of the planets/warp-pipes so as to encourage the exploration of otherwise empty space and allow stealth-mining to be a possibility.

I imagine a computer on a starship capable of managing whatever mathematical gymnastics are required for punting a ship in to FTL would probably be capable of compensating for very easily predictable orbits, but making it so that future planets must be reached manually before they can be warped to could be interesting.

You are a little difficult to understand, so please forgive me if I am not correctly interpreting what you are asking for. -The loss of element lives to crashing in to the ground was removed to avoid penalizing new players who were still learning to fly. EVE was not easy, but as I don't remember being able to lose a ship in a non-combat situation by turning left the wrong way. If crashing is to be altered so it reduces element's remaining lives, it should only apply to ships not in the starting areas (Alioth, Madis, and Thades). -The ability to travel to asteroids that have already been discovered is a good thing, it lets poor miners and pirates fight when they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford the risk of losing such an expensive element. -Moving cargo in VR is useful for other stuff that is just tedious and not hard when you cant use VR, the issues of organizations farming them for money come more from everyone having the same missions all the time. If the game made random missions that were different for everyone then it would help solve the problem.

A ship's core can be moved within the build area using the move element tool in build mode. The ability to shift an entire build volume around to help adjust the locations of everything (say, because you built too far to one side or the other and want to center the construct in the volume again) would be a nice feature to include. As I recall, the game engine does not like non-round numbers (relative to what it thinks are round), so changing the shape of the build-box on the fly such as to poses different lengths and heights and widths while maintaining volume would be tricky (though nice to have). It also has a hard time with single-core dynamic constructs above L size. It would perhaps be simpler to just have cores with alternate geometries to start (such as a "long XS" that is really just a lower cost and smaller S that has its build volume reduced).

This isn't required, but it would be nice if the map opened to the system map rather than "no planet selected" in the planet map if the map is opened in space. It would also be nice if the planets in the system map were moved around to more accurately represent their actual locations (Jago is not that close to Lacobus).

To be fair, there were a lot of relatively tiny M and L cores flying around with what are supposed to be the biggest guns in the game that would have been s-cores were it not for the capping of weapon size to core size. That said, having the giant square at the bottom of all the new models is a bit annoying, not because it exists, but because it is a giant plain square that often doesn't match the color of what it is placed on. would be better as a circular structure with a beveled top edge and with braces or anchors or what have you that extend in to those corners to give it the same footprint.

I second this motion

This would be a nice thing to have.

I should point out that last I looked, mass free money tends to cause inflation. Better to have players actually have to do something to get it. (also, it takes like 10 min to get 300k from the daily challenge in the surrogate pods with no risk to your stuff)