Zeddrick

Also you're forgetting the ganking element of PvP, where 10 players gang up on some unfortunate victim they managed to find: A,B.C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J -- + 5 joy *each* K -- -20 joy That's still a net positive and if you think about it. So I really don't think PvP is net negative at all.

I don't think PvE in DU would be like you want it to be, at least in the short term. Making AI based opponents to fight against and be challenged by sounds like something which requires a significant amount of work to get right. I don't think you could just knock up a fully functioning combat AI in a few weeks. That alone puts it outside what we could have in the near term. Even if you could make an AI, PvP combat in a game like DU will eventually follow some sort of meta, i.e. the best way to build ships and do fights, which evolves over time. The PvE bots are unlikely to be following the meta, meaning that the PvE experience is likely to be different from PvP and won't really teach you how to PvP at all. Also most combat ships at the moment need at least 2 if not 3 people to fly at a minimum -- one to fly, one to shoot and one to repair. You might possibly be able to combine shooting and flying, but it seems like it would be pretty hard to have fun fights against NPCs solo at the moment. Making the activity one which requires a group is going to take it out of the hands of new players unless they join a group and play with more experienced players. I'm also not so sure about the 'net loss of joy' mentality. While it's probably true for non-consenting PvP I don't think it's right when both players want a fight. I've played other games as a PvP player for years and when I lost sometimes I cared but mostly I didn't really, but either way the joy was still there. I think it's more a case of 'A wins +10 joy, B loses +5 joy'. The real loss of joy was when I went out to PvP and nobody was there to fight against. If DU can introduce fun PvP with inexpensive ships and get enough people back in the game I think people would go out and have fun doing it and even losing would be a net positive so long as people eventually win.

It's probably fine until you try to do it at scale. Trying to make 500 ships from a blueprint might be really annoying if you have to try to get 500 of the same parts or have a way to switch out the parts for what you have, etc. Perhaps that's the way it should be though, I do like the idea that my ship would be unique and become more so over time as things break and get replaced, even compared with other people who bought the same ship as me.

Sounds really fun, but how does it fit into a market orientated game? It's easy to make a market where you have things like 'basic engine', 'advanced engine', etc, but when all the engines are different, do I sell 'basic engine 800' and someone else sells 'basic engine 802'? How does the game manage the sell orders for all these things sensibly?

OK, so market bots are bad because they change the economy. Players need to earn cash in the game and will generally pick an activity over others if that activity is a lot easier and more profitable. DU is also a social game and the core idea behind 0.23 was to get people to interact with one another using the market (forgetting for a minute that this is not real interaction because you don't even know who you bought from, it's what DU said at the time). But when you mine and sell to a bot order you interact with nobody at all. I do get that bot orders are a necessary crutch at the moment because cash has to be injected somehow and this is the way. But the way they are set up is game breaking IMO and could be better: -> Some of the prices are way too high, distorting the market. Quartz, for example, established a price of around 14-17 quanta before 0.23. Since then it has been bought by bots at 25. That means people have more money than they should. Artificial prices are relevant when you are, for example, assessing whether or not you'll make money back from a schematic. You look at the build cost, look at what the item sells for, then look at the profit and the schematic price. But then you have to ask 'what if these bot orders all go away? People will suddenly have less money so I won't sell these for as much, but I have no idea what the ore cost will be because it's all artificially fixed just now so I have no way to know if I'll make my money back'. Had they put the prices at, say, 1/2 the prices which had been established then the game could work out the 'right' price, which would be higher, and the price of elements could adjust accordingly. Since so many were mining for schematics, they could have halved the price of those too and it would work out at the same number of hours mined for a schematic. -> The bot orders are too convenient. Bot orders are literally everywhere. Wherever I find a node I can just haul it a short way and be guaranteed to sell it to a bot order. Previously you had to think about what you were going to do with the ore before you mined it and it was possible to make a living as a trader, buying ore on planets with no buy orders and hauling it then selling it for more where it was wanted. All of that gameplay is shut down completely with bot orders everywhere because it isn't needed. Also, as a manufacturer, it will be really hard to buy ore even at the bot price because hauling to where I put my buy order is inconvenient. I'll probably need to put in an order a lot higher than the bot orders just to get anyone selling to me at all. This could all have been fixed by making fewer bot orders and having them pop up at random in different places for short periods of time or something to reduce the convenience. But the worst thing IMO is that having a quick, easy way to make a decent amount of money (bot-order mining with reasonable skills is in the millions per hour I'm told) is that it becomes the low-bar in terms of reward-per-hour that people want. Want to pay someone to escort your ship? You probably have to pay at least what they'd get mining in the same time period to make it interesting. And the artificially high price and convenience mean that you probably won't be able to afford to pay that person at all. tl;dr the bot orders are too highly priced and too convenient and they turn the game into 'mining to bot orders online' to a large extent.

Yes, I know. I'm one of them. But I hope they might do it differently. IMO Plex was where EvE started to go wrong and enabling easy farming to pay the sub made things a *lot* worse. When people can have hundreds of accounts you can't really balance the game with limits, etc any more and that's bad. If it were me I'd make the DAC offer something like a 75% discount instead of an actual free month. That way people can still use them to subsidise their gaming and run 5 accounts for the price of one, but trying to run 100 accounts still results in a big monthly cash bill as it should. Also having some sort of payment is a great way of tracking which accounts belong to which people by comparing the payment details.

There's a lot we don't know about mining units but so far it sounds more like EvE's PI than SP farming. There will still be the need to collect up the ore from however many units you have, move it and sell it to get money. The big problem with SP farming in eve, of course, was that you could use it to run an account completely for free and with very little effort then do other things with it as well. People had 50+ accounts doing it. But without any ability to pay the monthly sub using quanta that can't happen in DU yet (and I hope it never does!).

Seriously NQ, can we have those T-Rexes please?

OK, I certainly don't want to knock anyone's efforts so please don't take it the wrong way, but I think one player being able to have 120 tiles is a big problem for the game. IMO owning that many tiles should require a whole organisation of people working together and paying upkeep in some way or other. Perhaps have tiles immune to territory warfare so long as a fee is paid every month on them and when it stops being paid people can come and contest the territory. Why? Because at the moment territory is too easy and cheap to claim and once claimed it can be held forever. I've claimed a few tiles myself -- it works out at a little over 500,000 quanta per tile and you can keep scaling that out forever by creating more and more sub-orgs. I'm not a particularly rich player, but using just the spare money I have in my wallet at the moment I could go out and claim 2,000 tiles right now. Madis moon 1 has less than 1,500 tiles and moon 2 has under 2,000. So I could go out now and claim a whole moon for myself (except the territories which are already taken ofc). Then I could leave the game and that moon would be unusable forever. Or I could start having fun by picking out city projects like yours, claim whole rings around them and put up big walls, loads of those ugly spike things people build or whatever and there would be nothing at all you can do about it. Now bear in mind that there are players who made 10s of billions out of getting schematics for 1% of the normal price. Those people can claim a *lot* of tiles now if they want. Whole planets in fact. That can't be a good idea can it? Like I said, I'm not suggesting that everything should be vulnerable all the time, but that there should be a mechanism where people who want your tile can contest it and where you can do something to keep it safe. Be that actual PvP (and you have a week notice and can hire mercs and are then safe for a period after) or some sort of money based system. My preferred way would just be to limit orgs so they have to have one subscribed player in every org. Since one player can only be in 5 orgs, the costs of tile ownership would start to escalate quickly as more were claimed (as the devs intended). And have rent work the same way. To have hundreds of tiles you would need to get other players to join sub-orgs so you could scale out without it getting madly expensive. And if those players stopped playing you'd need to recruit more, etc. The 'pvp' approach here would then be for someone to try to recruit your players away from your org so you couldn't afford to keep the tiles any more.

Well everyone has their own playstyles and I suppose it's all a question of degree and balance. I don't really like PvE types of risks because they tend to be quite predictable. Personally I enjoy the possibility of being randomly robbed and murdered so long as it's very small and possible to plan around. Eve's suicide ganks are a great example of this, I got ganked about 9 months into that game and lost half of what I'd made up until that point, but it made me more interested in the game not less. It gave me a whole bunch of new things to think about like how to set up my ships to counter it (i.e. stay alive long enough), plan how not to look like a target, pick better routes, etc and without that sort of thing I would probably have got bored with the game before I ever got into the best parts of it. For me it's all about the stories. Getting robbed is a good story, see, I just told it! Also I quite like robbing people and stealing their stuff from time to time, mostly for the lols and the stories. And I also quite like trying to rob the thieves from time to time as well, because good stories again. If you're playing a game for years and don't have good stories to tell you're probably bored or doing it wrong. And if you're playing in total safety then you won't have many good stories IMO. 'I got killed by a rat' is a funny story sometimes (I've got some like that in fact), but I'm hoping for more. But yes, there needs to be counter play so you can grief the griefers back! I quite like the idea of bounties if properly implemented. Or robot police drones that show up and chase the person around for a while if you report the crime. Perhaps you could have the player sent to an actual prison if the robots catch them and then they have to manually mine a certain amount of ore to get free again? It would be even cooler if your friends could do a prison break by assaulting the prison in a territory warfare battle ...

I agree with this, and I actually said somewhere above that I think there should be safezones where PvP can be avoided. Those can host all sorts of things from theme park-like cities to ship showrooms and even pirate bases like Tortuga because yes, nobody likes to spend months building something to have people blow it up once a week , ransom it, try to force them into an org to protect it, etc. I also agree with rent/taxes as a good mechanism for returning unused tiles (perhaps with the ability for someone else to bid up the rent on the tile if they want it). But I think there still needs to be some sense of danger wherever you are so the game stays fun. Perhaps someone could push you off a building when you're too close to the edge and loot your inventory at the bottom (getting chased by robot police or whatever). Perhaps collision damage into buildings could be a thing and buildings can have shields to protect against it? Also I think allowing people to scam, steal things which aren't nailed down (and fly them into the PvP zone and kill them) etc would also make it more fun and challenging. At the end of the day DU was always supposed to be a game and not just a showcase of cool stuff.

Generally, though, the games where there is fenced in PvP are not true open world games are they? Second life, for example, wasn't an open world game in the sense that there were people playing a game and creating a story? It was just a theme park for people to create/consume things and interact wasn't it? IMO the direction of DU has already been set by the features which have already been implemented, particularly territory ownership. If you have a true open world game where people can claim territory and build things, how can you have territory claiming without some sort of way for people to contest a territory they want? Over time won't that just end up with miles and miles of territory owned by people who aren't playing and all the active players all spread out so far apart they can't really interact well or have fun?

I think a sandbox MMO without PvP is an oxymoron. Open world sandboxes are all about players coming together to create a world where they can have adventures and create good stories for people to tell. A lot of that good stuff is going to be driven by conflict and for conflict you need to have PvP. I'm not saying there has to be PvP all the time everywhere. In fact I think that it should be possible for people to play the game in a largely PvP free way just by sticking to the safe areas (although I don't think anyone should ever be able to consider themselves 100% safe unless parked on their own sanctuary tile). But the PvP has to be there and it has to be front and centre otherwise the whole DU world is just going to be a big theme park showcase of the clever things users have built.

The monthly sub price planned for the finished product is the same as for a AAA MMO. Therefore ...

"Deploy a ground unit on your tile and it generates ore" sounds a lot more like the sort of income generation gameplay you'd expect from a mobile game like Clash of Clans (Gold mines, etc) than the sort of thing I'd expect on a AAA PC MMO. I hope there's going to be more to it than just dumping down an item on a structure and the ore magically appearing in a container that has to be emptied by hand regularly ...

I don't have any experience writing games but have spent 25 years building and writing software for large scale high performance distributed computing systems and would definitely second this. Putting things like physics simulation on an unreliable client at the edge of the network is a problem which will need to be fixed at some point IMO, you'd really expect that stuff to be done inside the server cluster. With this stuff in the client, large scale battles, for example, are never going to work at all because one computer lagging/breaking can freeze the simulation for everyone else. Also I'm guessing putting the simulation in the client probably stops multiple clients from running in 'lockstep', so the client has to tell the server 'move ship X to here' and server has to tell every client that and it happens over and over. Whereas if simulation is server side the clients can be aware, so the server says 'ship X is here and moving in this direction at this speed' to all clients and they just move it independently. Then you just tell the clients when things change, which is a lot less frequently.

Right now there are plenty of orgs (even individuals probably) who have scanned thousands of tiles and TCUd hundreds of good ones all over the place for later use. You could probably have fun with territory warfare if you just go around scanning the tiles with just a TCU on them then contest the best ones. Ore respawning is probably a bad idea because there are so many hexes that a few 10,000s of players could mine heavily without ever needing to contest anything. Just own a few good tiles and constantly re-mine the respawns. Nobody needs to take them from you because you don't need to own very many, meaning that there are a lot of spare ones around to take. Doesn't sound like an exciting game does it?

Personally I would prefer to pay a sub and get a high quality, maintained game (don't say it!) with a long life, feature updates, a committed player base and barrier-free access to all the content the game has to offer. I don't like the games where you can play for free but then the game tries to find ways to get you to pay money anyway essentially by annoying or limiting you (pay to have a bigger inventory, pay to be able to use this special outfit, pay to fly this particular ship, pay to skip 1000s of hours of grind, etc). It is true that over time you'll have paid a lot for the game, but you also got a lot of hours out of that game too. Eventually games start to run low on new players and are mainly played by the existing base. At that point they have to continue to make money out of you somehow in order to keep the servers running or the game will die despite being popular. I did find it annoying, though, when EvE started selling stuff like t-shirts and ship skins for RL money or immersion breaking amounts of in game cash. I was thinking "I've paid 1000s into this game and am still paying £20/month, I should get all this stuff for free". I hope DU doesn't plan to go down the same road.

Argh! Another old thread which I didn't notice was old! Can we fix these?

Hi there. I played EvE since 2008 before finally winning in early 2020. Did a lot of different things but mostly spent my time doing solo and small gang PvP. Am hoping to see DU shape up into a better eve which is a bit less min/maxed, a bit less risk averse in general and a lot less controlled by a few large nullsec corps who deliberately make the game less fun for players in order to further their own ends (hands up who experienced 'weaponised boredom'?).

Stable door is now fixed and shut. Tick. Now where did those horses go?

...not sure if serious... But the content in these 'missions' doesn't sound all that much fun. If it's not all that much fun and makes less money than mining to bots then I think we can all guess how many people will be running these after the first couple of weeks. It was a serious question, the op was talking about offering the jobs and I was genuinely interested if the jobs they would offer would compete with bot mining or not. IMO what we need now is things that are thought all the way through, not more stuff chucked out there "because it's something to do", "because it's on the roadmap" or "because it's late" without any real thought for whether it will actually change anything.

I don't mine and haven't played for a while. That's what someone told me was a good mining rate several months ago. IDK if it's true. Giant mining robots would be cool though

Do you think it would be economically sensible for people to run those jobs you would post? Or would people be able to make a lot more money in the same amount of time mining and selling to bot orders? Say you can mine 200kl per hour and sell at 25 quanta per kl, that means you're making about 5 million per hour. If your hauling job is going to take someone a total of 30 minutes to complete, would you be paying them anywhere near 2.5 million? If not why would they do it instead of the mining?

I think at this point it's pretty clear that whatever happens they *can't* honour all the promises (i.e. to make a release quality game with a functioning economy and territory warfare by the end of the year). At some point those promises are going to get broken and expectations will not be met. IMO it's better to do that early, take it back to alpha, review, re-plan and try again with a more credible roadmap forwards as others here have said. Arguably trying to keep going and meet all the expectations regardless of the observable reality of things is how we ended up where things are now. And I don't think there's anything wrong with having a money-person as CEO. No reason why a CEO has to directly produce the game, they just need to pick a good team and keep them pointing in the right direction.