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Arisilde

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Posts posted by Arisilde

  1. And there will be organizations that will provide new players the information needed to make those first tough choices and to teach the basics with player made tutorials. This will happen. It won't happen immediately (sorry new players at launch) but it will happen as soon as possible.

     

    Kurock

    CSYN Chief of Development

    Again, it's very bad to rely on players to create game mechanics to make other's experience in the game worthwhile. They need to have at least a baseline created beforehand. The new player experience needs to be handled by the game. Everything past that is based on player interaction.

  2. OR ... automate a mining cart that moves on rails powered by something .... maybe redstone so you keep mining and inventory space isn't a problem.  I don't know why but that idea now that I think about it sounds familiar for some reason.

     

    Seriously though, automate everything else that you can besides the actual mining which you must do in person. So even with no automation in the actual mining there is still ways to speed up the process/efficiency involved.

    I imagine this is what they'll likely do. Automating everything but the actual act of extraction is a pretty decent middle ground.

     

    I know people love the idea of planet cracking and massive automated mining systems, but honestly it's just way too unbalanced. Better the devs stick to their guns and require the players to do it. That way, it'll always be a matter of player effort, rather than time spent in the game. What I mean is, with enough time, any player can build anything. So really, all you'd have to do is spend enough time to get to the point of automation, and then after that it's just a snowball effect of progress. The automated systems keep giving you more resources. You use those resources to make more automated systems. It's a cycle of upgrades requiring almost no effort on the player's part. 

     

    Manual mining will always require basically the same amount of effort on the player's part, it's just the auxiliary tasks that get easier. The way to improving speed and efficiency in mining is to gather more people to help. That supports the whole concept of the game as a community simulator, reinforcing their design choices across the board. Larger corporations will still be able to gather a lot of materials fast with the large labor forces they'll be able to support, be they corporation members or contracted workers. They'll always have an edge over individuals. That is as it should be.

  3. To balance that (keeping in mind that it is off course really hard to predict anything at this point), I can see established players or organisations ferrying new players out off the starting area/planet for a couple of reasons:

     

    -New players, would be one of the most valuable resources for competitive organisations, and these would surely invest into a couple of recruiters and "space-buses" at spawn areas to snatch up new recruits. Depending on the population of the game, and the level off competition between factions, new players could be faced with a very large choice of organisations and frequent departures of ships to these destinations.

     

    -For the same reason, as the game matures, and given the right game mechanics the starting planet's economy might develop to be centered on new players, with accomodation, jobs, storage, as well as organisations dedicated to the interstellar/interplanetary transport of new players once they've earned enough money to pay for the ticket, but not enough to pay for their own space/jump worthy space-craft.

     

    -Some charitable people/organisations might help out new players by handing out starter ships, or organizing free transportation though I wouldn't count too much on it.

    While all of those are possible, and even probable, it's never a good idea to design a system that relies on player behavior to make it work out correctly. They need to design the game from the start with these issues in mind, and have a way to mitigate or remove them from the start. That way no matter what players decide to do or not do, the new players will always be ok. That's just a matter of the devs protecting their own interests. The new player experience is going to be vital for a game like this. Player retention is going to be vital. A game like this, with a fairly steep learning curve needs to have a good first hour or so. Ease the player in before dumping a bunch of heavy choices on them. Players will have a lot to figure out already. Not just game mechanics, but players will need to learn the current politics, expected behaviors, and everything else on top of it in order to get by in the game world. It's a known fact that most players are lost in the first few hours of their gameplay. It's vital those few hours be good enough to hook them, and again, the game needs to be designed from the start to do that, irregardless of how other players choose to play.

  4. Day one the starter area is going to look terrible just from people testing out the editor tools. It's going to be a real problem. It has been in every single "builder" game I have ever seen tbh. I actually just started a post about this very topic before I found this one.

     

    Frankly, there's basically no way people are all going to be conscientious about keeping the planets looking aesthetically pleasing, that doesn't even take into consideration people who legitimately enjoy trashed landscapes. People just go the path of least resistance because we're all inherently lazy. Tearing stuff up and moving on rather than taking any time to repair the land, or heaven forbid being careful not to tear everything up in the first place, lol. 

     

    The devs will certainly need to come up with some way to make sure it's not a problem, at the very least the starter planet and the ones closest to it. Otherwise before very long at all the new player experience is really going to suffer. The idea that you can always move further from the center if you want to find somewhere that looks nice is a bit short sighted. Sure, you can, if you're an established player with the resources to do so. New players don't have that ability though. They are left with the wastelands left to them by previous players.

     

    On top of that, at some point people will just get too far apart and no longer interact with each other. You see that a ton as well. Even down to small ecosystems like a minecraft server. People move out really far from the center in order to find some security and a nice looking place to build. Soon everyone is so far apart it's too much trouble getting to each other anymore. In a game like DU, people are going to naturally stay closer to each other due to markets and trading. So more likely than moving really far out to live, they will colonize near the markets and then move out to mine, bringing the resources back to their more centrally located bases. This will create a large dead zone around the markets of fairly trashed planets. You'll then have to move even farther out to find resources and it just increases the time sink. I'm sure this is where warp gates will come into play, but really, depending on how that whole system works all you're doing is buying a temporary reprieve each time to make a gate. People will colonize near the gate for ease of travel and then lay waste to a ring around it.

  5. This idea would go well with warring if it extended to data about planet surfaces too, tbh. Especially with the way the respawn points work. As was mentioned in one of the interviews, destroying enemy respawn points would be a good way to get them out of the fight for an extended amount of time. Scouts out looking for these points and sending the info back to the attack forces would synergize well.

  6. In one of the recent videos they mentioned they didn't want to add anything as big as planetary destruction because they never want anything to happen that the player doesn't know why it's happening. If you're standing on a planet and a company comes along with their mining ship and cracks the planet, insta-gibbing you and you ship/town/whatever you have on the surface, that's fairly imbalanced. 

     

    Also, as someone else mentioned on page 2, they also said they don't want to automate things like mining because taking it too far would destabilize the economy and trivialize the work efforts of new players.

     

    Honestly I agree with them on both of these points. I really like their design philosophy. At least as much as I have seen so far.

  7. So one thing that always ends up being a giant problem in games that allow you to dig and build anywhere is that the whole world ends up being dug into swiss cheese, and tons of ruined and abandoned buildings end up everywhere. 

     

    In DU, all players start in the same spot. I fully expect this to be a huge problem in that 20km safe zone. I'm just really curious what the devs plan to do to address that. There's nothing worse than logging into a new game and then the whole world looks terrible because the players have trashed everything.

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