Kurock

For those that have read this far, kudos. This thread is about bounty hunting, not a law system. Sure, bounty hunting could be used to "enforce" a law system and it is difficult to talk about one without the other, but I think that a law system is a more than large enough topic for its own thread. (Any takers?) Everyone is entitled to their own opinions no matter how misguided they may be. Please make an attempt at a minuscule amount of civility. P.S. Preach it, Twerk

A few points: Assassins vs Bounty Hunters Sounds like an epic battle. ahem. Hiring an assassin to go gank someone does not require a special system. There will be players even orgs that will provide such a service and they will only get clients if they are successful. Bounty hunting, I feel, does need some sort of system to be lucrative. Morality of Bounty Hunting Games tend to push the "bounties for PK'ers" stance. It is righteous retribution and protecting the weak. Except this feels rather forced. I don't think a system should take away a players right to decide on their own morality. Restricting it to only one group locks away so much potential game play and takes away player decisions. A system should be a tool which is unbiased and can be used for good or evil. This allows players to play as the "good" bounty hunter that only hunts those evil PK'ers. But also allows for those morally bankrupt bounty hunters that preys on citizens. And perhaps we will get some excellent stories when the "good" bounty hunter hunts the "evil" ones. YMMV. I like the discussion's so far. Keep the ideas coming.

This reminds me a bit of how in a Tale in the Desert players can petition the devs to create a new feature (or law). Though there is a large backlog of features NQ would like to add so I don't see something like this becoming a thing especially when there are idea forums like this one. The title of this thread did make me think more of massive collaborations for researching/investigating a relic/artifact found on a distant planet to unlock its secrets.

While the other suggestions are good, this one is golden. Added. Also it answers Lethys's question to an extent.

With the bounty system being the next stretch goal, I thought it was high time we take a look at what it could mean to "set the bounty and put a price on somebody's head". For me at least, there are three factors that are important in a bounty system: Fun: That bounty hunting *feels* like bounty hunting, not an unlucrative fetch quest. That it is challenging to succeed at collecting a bounty and the bounty provides a suitable reward. Fair: The average player is (relatively) safe. The system should ensure that the game does not devolve into a gank fest. Less abusable: Ideally a system should *not* be abusable at all, but in an MMO setting where alt's are cheap, this is very difficult to achieve. So minimizing abuse is the goal here. First, I will go through how MMO's in the past, present and future will have done their bounty system and then give a suggestion of one that could work in Dual Universe. This might get a little long, so strap in or just skip to the suggested system at the end. Past: Ultima Online I have fond memories of my years spent in this fantasy MMORPG in the early 2000's. PvP was changed multiple times over the course of the game and a bounty system was one aspect of PvP. This was "justice system" which could be triggered when a player was murdered by a player killer. Usually after a number of murders, a bounty from the victims own pocket could be placed on the murderers head. A list of bounties could be looked up at a nearest bank. If the murder could be found, killed, butchered and his head returned to a guard, the full bounty would be awarded. In some cases the head could be ransomed back to the murder or the murder would suffer a stat decrease for a defined period. In other cases, the murderer would lose his own money from the bank and it would be placed on his head as a bounty. In yet other cases the murderer would suffer stat penalties for dying at the hands of a "blue" player. In short, there were many different variations, but most revolved around the concept of a justice system specifically targeting perpetual player killers. Present: EVE Online There is no justice here: only money. Bounties in EVE can by placed on anyone, by anyone. And everyone can see all the bounties. But a player having a bounty does not give all other players the right to kill that player anywhere, for example a bounty hunter attempting to collect in high-sec will still be attacked by the ever vigilant defenders, CONCORD. Although any where else, all bets are off. The bounty is not paid to the bounty hunter in full, but is instead based on the value of the bounty targets destroyed ship starting at 20% of the actual bounty value. While this system reduces collusion to split the bounty between the bounty hunter and target, it also reduces the potential earnings of a bounty hunter, making bounty hunting less viable. Future: Star Citizen I say "future" because the game is not technically released yet. The idea is that the bounty system is a justice system: bad guys (both PC and NPC) could have a bounty and good guys attempt to collect it. That's it. Moving on. But wait, you say, surely there is more? Well yes. But at this point it is conjecture. For example some bounties may be "capture alive" some may be "dead or alive" perhaps depending on their misdeeds. Star Citizen plans to have a legacy system where, after a random amount of lives , characters are permanently killed and replaced with their offspring. The offspring do get a bit of inheritance (and/or debt) and there is a slight neutralizing of reputation. The bounties will probably simply disappear on death. The take home point here is that this is a justice system. A note on abusing bounty systems The simplest way to abuse a bounty system in a free trade game is to have the bounty target and the bounty hunter collude. The bounty hunter brings in the target and they split the bounty 50/50. In Ultima Online, there was an inherent loss of skills at death and skills are really difficult to increase. In EVE the target must lose more than the bounty but bounties are so unlucrative that they no longer feel like bounty hunting. In Star Citizen, a character will have limited number of lives (for that character at least), so death may mean losing that incarnation of your character. But why collusion is not an issue is that it requires trust. Trust that the bounty hunter will not just take all the money after the bounty target rolls over. I am sure there are other ways to abuse a bounty system but these I leave for another post. Suggestion for Dual Universe Dual Universe is about giving players tools to run systems, not to have systems run the players. That said, none of the above example bounty systems really tick all the boxes. So a suggestion is as follows: Create a bounty: A bounty can be placed on anyone by anyone (minimum amounts on the bounty apply). This moves the bounty system away from being a justice system tied to reputation and makes it another useful tool in the DU belt. This, on its own, does break the "fair" goal, since anyone can be targeted but a single point does not a system make. Read on. Get the contract: A bounty contract can only be picked up at a special terminal and is chosen from a randomly generated list of say 10 nameless bounties with a last known location (with a possibility of a reroll within a set time frame). Only those with the correct bounty contract can claim the bounty. This means a list of bounties may be optionally published, but they will have no effect since only allowed bounty hunters with the correct contracts will be able to collect. This makes investing into bounty hunting skills viable as it would be possible to tier bounties. But why contracts? This means the game won't devolve into a griefer gank-fest. Accept the contract: Once a contract is accepted, the bounty's name is revealed can track the target, the name remains unknown. A bounty hunter can only have a set number of bounty contracts active at one time and this does not preclude others from gaining the same contract. There should be some potential for competition after all. Also there is no auto tracking built in at best a proximity beep. Completing the bounty: The bounty hunter kills the target and gains the full bounty amount. A bounty should be completed within a time frame (say a month) of being accepted or the bounty hunter will suffer a penalty (e.g. monetary loss and/or temporary loss of skills). Likewise the target could suffer a temporary loss of skills. This is a broad outline of a system and definitely still needs details filled in, but as you can see from the earlier examples, a bounty system is far from easy and straight forward. Do you like what you see here? Do you have ideas for a bounty system? Feel free to discuss. P.S. A further insightful video on the subject.

Don't worry. There will be more people joining in.

I believe the idea is that after a while the first arc zone will get old and used up. At this time a new arc zone may be discovered on a distant planet and everyone may get the opportunity to switch over to the new starting zone. I do hope that it will be found through exploration. Though I expect there to be other interesting "secrets" to find through exploration (of which there are at least 6 from kickstarter Kyrium backers).

The short answer is "No". The longer answer is "If there is enough interest, maybe later". And I am paraphrasing.

Mirroring is a very handy tool to have when making symmetrical constructs, though this can also be done using copy and paste. And we know copy and paste is confirmed in a quite a few videos and dev diaries. There are no elements that allow moving of voxels that are attached to the same construct. i.e. no pistons or rotors or hinges. This may be added as an expansion after release.

I think JC says it best at the beginning of very dev diary: I don't see what you mean by "clay-like". The metal structure built in the video looks very "metal-like". YMMV.

Welcome and good luck with your organization.

Hopefully the scripting will be advanced enough to be able to create our own in-game games that can be played on long voyages like card games.

Reflective metal? I have a sneaky suspicion it has been done.

DU is about optional depth. Being against heatsinks is like being against liquid cooling systems on a modern desktop PC. It is an optional extra that allows for better performance tweaking of existing components. For normal use the cooling built into the elements will suffice, but if you want to go deeper, like making a stealth ship or a high performance hovercraft, then those that want to, can. (On a different note: Still not convinced about explosions when a shutdown-until-repaired will suffice.)

ffffffff - final words of yellow balloon 12/31/16-05/05/17.

Welcome and make yourself at home

Citation needed. As to why DU is subscription based is described here: https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2016/04/08/monetization-player-happiness-and-economic-viability/

I did mean to imply that there is space for both elements in DU. So I would also like to make this request.

This is going to be a long one, so skip to the TLDR section for the summary. Heat mechanic for all the wrong reasons At first I thought, DU is set far into the future. Lore wise, the technology could be said to be so advanced that constructs can "simply" ignore the second law of thermodynamics. The reasons currently put forward as to *why* a heat mechanic should be added are going to have no effect and not drive the desired behaviour. To encourage "spaces" inside a construct - I would think access to the various elements is enough to drive this, as previously stated. And adding a heat mechanic does not encourage space inside a construct it does encourages adding heat sinks, which is not quite the same as space. Give engineering something to do - This certainly creates another dedicated job of "heat watchman" and gives an incentive to reroute power to give elements a chance to cool down. But this alone is not enough of a reason to add an entire mechanic as well as having an engineer to do spot repairs or enhance elements would also fill this design goal. To discourage certain ship designs - As previously stated in this thread, aesthetic construct design should be dictated by the players. But then this got me thinking, why would a heat mechanic actually be useful mechanic to have? It should not be an invasive mechanic so it needs to be transparent most of the time except when someone really wants to push the boundaries on what their construct can do. Limiting density of high heat producing elements - Not all elements are created equal and while active, they will produce different amounts of heat. And also have different tolerances for heat before shutting down. Pack elements like weapons too tightly together or firing them all at once may cause no small heat issues. This encourages alternate fire and not having a constructs every available space covered by weapons. Power generators will necessarily create heat as well which means adding more power generators to power more weapons won't solve the heat issue. Thermal signature detection - The side effect of having heat is that it can be scanned for and read at amazingly long distances. So much so that given a specific signature, a skilled player could be able to tell if a ship is powering up an warp drive or charging its weapons. It's getting hot in here - This could be a survival element requiring a thermal suit to circumvent. Though survival is not the main aim of DU. Radiation would fall under this category too. But a heat mechanic will kill the server! This is demonstrably false. Much of the mechanic can be abstracted in such a way that it will cause no more strain than the physics calculations for multiple thrust vectors on the same construct. One way could be to use a directional graph with each node being a DU element with it's neighbours being nodes within the first nodes "heat range". These links could be boosted by the presence of highly conductive voxels, like gold. But what about scanning? There are multiple ways this could be handled from only transmitting the highest heat signature to the top three to some aggregation. Not all heat signatures will be transmitted to all other constructs in the area. Explosions from overheating! No. Exploding constructs are generally very easy to abuse. I am firmly against constructs-as-explosive-torpedoes. Lancers are another story. Bonus: Heat sinks vs thermal radiators Just a minor gripe on terminology. What this thread is actually talking about are thermal radiators. These are the elements that radiate excess heat away from the construct. A heat sink is pretty much anything that can take up heat: from a chip to the Mississippi river. Though what would be nice to see is a heat sink element in DU that can temporarily contain a certain amount of heat from a construct, drastically reducing the thermal signature of the construct, but only for a short amount of time, before the heat must be routed back to the thermal radiators. TLDR Yes to heat mechanic. No to the previously provided reasons as to why it should be added. my 2c P.S. I talk about thermal radiation in this post. This is not to be confused with nuclear/gamma radiation which is a completely different topic.

Each org has already uploaded their logo into the community site. Wouldn't it be grand if that one is imported in game and used for things like that organizations Territory Unit? For everything else, there is voxel painting.

Gross exaggerations are why Twerk can't have nice things. And let's face it: it's better than Dualies.

And Dualists trailing at 5. Come on, Dualists!

Is the pip-boy on the left arm or right? *ponders*

Best of luck growing your organization.

Absolutely cracking. Best wishes to your org.