LurkNautili

This is basically what I was about to post. Start with procedurally generated names, and if an organization gets 100% (maybe less) control of a region (planet or larger) either delegated to them, or through total domination, they get to choose the name through voting or whatever system they please. Therefore it would be up to the community to make sure unqualified people (read: trolls) don't get absolute power over a region (probably won't happen). And then developers would naturally have a veto abilities to remove names that are against their ToS or whatever.

You raise some valid concerns regarding safe zones and unintentional collisions. Potential solutions (again, all of this is assuming we can come up with some simple heuristic model that's not computationally infeasible): 1. Limit collision damage to collisions between ships and planets, or ships and static buildings (maybe only do damage to the ships). This would solve the "flying recklessly with no recourse" problem. This would require constructs to carry information of what kind of construct they are. 2. Alternatively, one could have collisions be a different type of damage, in terms of repercussions (oh, I have a looong list of thoughts about how to implement things like ownership, law enforcement and so on, but that's way too long a tangent for this). So that when you collide to another player's construct, you're liable to pay for the damage you cause, instead of being gunned down by turrets. Maybe you'd have black boxes and investigation boards to figure out whose fault a collision was or something like that. There's a range of options you could go for, depending on how much you'd want to automate and such. At its simplest, you could have it such that if a pilot is involved, they have to pay. E.g. A is piloted, B is building, they collide, A pays. Or: A is piloted, B is piloted, they split 50/50 or just mutually agree to drop it. And so on. As for the mechanic being inconsequential and wasting dev time, I disagree. For me at least it would be immersion breaking to be allowed to fly like a lunatic without any regard for safety or consequences. That said, it's not a #1 priority so I wouldn't place it first on the development agenda. Not everything has to be 0 or 1, black or white. We can arrive at some optimal middle ground solutions in most situations.

When we were beating a dead horse, it was still kind of OK... Now that it's *completely* off-topic, I couldn't agree more -- lock it, maybe delete the off-topic posts (including this one and other off topic ones of mine) [EDIT: Also, this will indeed be my final post here, trolls rejoice]

English isn't my first language either, you presumptuous ass xD It does happen to be the lingua franca on the internet, as well as on this messaging board, so you can either: A. Learn it like all the rest of us B. Suffer and complain, to no avail C. (BONUS!) Pretend like you understand the language, and then get upset when your inability to comprehend it leads inevitably to misunderstandings... Any more misguided, snarky remarks, or are you done being a hypocrite?

Says the guy who can't read or write fluent English and blames it on his counterparts... tsk And fails to understand anything correctly as a result. At least this wall doesn't scramble the message before echoing it back, like you... xaxaxa)))

k

Yeah, it's kind of snowballing out of control. If you want to know why I'm doing it, it's because people typically only read the last page or two of posts on long threads, so as new people keep posting misrepresentations of my views on the top, I have to keep reposting my views, usually expressed in slightly different words, in hopes of getting through to the person in question. Frankly, I'm kind of growing tired of this myself, and I have excellent stamina when it comes to this sort of thing... so that should be saying something Maybe I'll make a new thread with a summary of my analysis of the situation either here or on the ideas subforum and leave it at that?

Your stubborn rejection of "words", collectively, has lead you to completely misunderstand my position. If you really can't be arsed to even try to understand the actual positions of the people you're conversing with, instead choosing to attack some strawman version of their views, I honestly don't know what the fuck you're even doing on this thread. O.o (or on any forum in general)

I'll ignore any further posts by you unless you make them more specific, I don't have time to wade through all the ambiguity.

Ok, look man... You're way off basis, you're misunderstanding almost everything I'm saying, you're putting words into my mouth, and overall missing the point completely. So let's just go through this point by point, shall we? Alright. Now it's my turn to say that I have no idea what the above utterances mean. Lost in translation, sorry... Moving on. Again, first sentence mostly lost in translation... And I've said nothing about banning organizations or communication...? Moving on...? DAC trade is an intrinsic, inseparable part of the overall economy, since DACs can be traded for in-game currency. This is a matter of fact, and in public record. I don't want to ban DAC. In fact, I've explicitly stated exactly the contrary. No... As stated, he would get the money by selling the DACs he bought with real money, on in-game markets, for in-game currency. The whole point of this is that you can beat out players because you can effectively buy your way to the cutting edge, where no single player competing alone against him can do the same without also paying for DAC. PLEASE read the rest of my posts where I outline what I think on the big picture level. In summary: * I think DACs are the best way to go * We need to promote cooperative mechanics rather than competition to prevent things feeling like pay-to-win * Even if we fail at the above goal, the effect of this real, but small pay-to-win element may be negligible in practice, time will tell -- but it's good to keep an eye on

Just to make an addendum and clarification to anyone who's been following along like a true masochist: If I don't pay for additional DACs on top of maintaining my playtime, I'll get my ass kicked in an isolated 1v1 against a player who does, all other things being equal -- I don't think there should be ambiguity about this. That said, it has been noted that I can join big unions, alliances, militaries, whatever protective organizations, to lessen the effect. This is true... HOWEVER, it's not that the individual mechanism mentioned above is less pay-to-win, it just diffuses the effect, such that the game as a WHOLE is less pay-to-win. I hope you can see the distinction. So if we can find enough of these mechanisms (and I still think, as I have since the beginning, that we will) to have in the game, it is likely we'll end up with a game that will, on the whole, not be very heavily pay-to-win. I just thought I should clarify this explicitly, in case some of you didn't bother reading every single comment I've made in this very drawn out thread. [EDIT: Addendum addendum:] It is also worth noting, that this game isn't particularly skill-based, but rather the outcome of a battle will be mostly determined by seniorship (at least this is my speculation). In that sense, there is built-in asymmetry even without paying to gain an advantage. Given that, the notion of paying to win is somewhat less applicable to this type of game on the whole, compared to something like counter-strike or DotA or whatever, since it further dillutes the influence bought power will have in the already existing asymmetry. Of course, you might argue (and I'd agree) that this in and of itself poses another issue, if you want to have a competitive game (which I don't, I like care-bear, pussyfooting, hippy-ass cooperation gameplay for Minecraft-like games such as this one -- I only compete in FPS where it makes sense). Which is another reason why I emphasized the importance of making the game more about cooperation than competition earlier.

Ambiguity and veiled sarcasm does not a witty quip make, but for the purposes of ending this seemingly fruitless exchange, I shall merely nod and smile like we understand one another... *nods and forces an eerie smile*

You openly admit you don't even understand the words that make up my line of reasoning... and then proceed to rebuke me anyway? As I explained, it doesn't matter where the resources come from, we're not examining the economy as a whole. We're looking at whether a player can gain a differential advantage over another player with money. So if player A buys ship components from players B C D and E each the first to research their respective element crafting skills to their respective levels, with DACs, his ship will be more powerful than player X's, who either uses all his resources to build the best he can on his own, or trades for inferior versions of the same components player A used. They will be inferior because of how supply and demand will determine the prices of the cutting-edge tech (a player's time should in theory be worth the same regardless of how he spends it, and player A effectively buys multiple peoples' time -- it's a bit complicated but if you think about it you should see what I mean).

I'm not sure what you're implying. If you read the kickstarter page, watch their AMAs and interviews, read what has been relayed on the forums and so on, I think you'll find that many aspects of the game are not actually in their "tech demo" stage yet. They're very open about this and I didn't think there was any ambiguity. One of these things includes the economy and combat system and other aspects of the game that are crucial mechanics when determining whether you'd consider a given mechanism "p2w" or not within the larger context of the game. Am I missing something?

Bro, that's not how dictionary definitions work. Is it a noun, verb, adjective? (verb, presumably?) Who is doing what? How? Why? When? To whom? Picking one aspect of it and giving an example of how that one word is defined doesn't equate to a definition of the larger word... Come on, work with me here -.- [EDIT] As for the fallacies, the only one I'll admit to is a condescending tone ( tough break, it's just the flavor of today, I might be nicer tomorrow ) As for the other fallacies, you'll have to point out the exact positions in which these occur.

A DAC has commodity value, it's essentially a form of currency, since you can presumably trade them as many times as you like... and even if you can't, you can just use the in-game currency as an in-between stage, doesn't matter. What you're describing is how a market exchange would take place. This isn't in itself problematic. What makes it problematic, is that: A. In game resources translate to power/influence over others B. You can buy in-game resources via DAC -> Therefore, you can buy power/influence, therefore, by my definition of pay-to-win (again, please tell me if our definitions are incongruent somehow), would constitute a pay-to-win mechanism (with the assumption that the world is competitive, i.e. you "win" by hoarding shit and preventing others from accessing things, killing people or whatever -- and that more resources make that easier for you [perfectly valid assumptions from my point of view])

Didn't seem like it. You didn't seem to address my point at all, to be honest. Non sequitur. I addressed this in the last third of my response to your comment, in saying that if the way you envision the game (which none of us have seen yet, and which has, in fact, not been coded yet, probably not even concepted yet) is truly that there will be no way to "win" over your opponents, essentially meaning that competition/fighting is due to... some other motivation than winning, I guess? (roleplay? heck if I know...) ... Then yeah, I guess you'd be correct ( I already said this if you read my comment, I guess you missed it? ) and you've successfully resolved the dilemma in design that I posited. I don't completely know what you mean by the last part. It seems we still disagree about what comprises a competitive advantage. (Since you haven't read my comment regarding this yet, you haven't defined what you mean by pay to win... still waiting...)

I refuse to cater to a dyslexic audience out of principle. If someone else wants to play the role of accessibility ambassador, they're more than welcome to translate, though... I do my best to keep my comments concise and to the point, if the complexity of the topic escapes you, despite my best efforts to break it down, I can't help you, sorry. For what it's worth, I have (due to people not understanding me at first) been forced to re-iterate the same message in various different forms, one of those must be sufficient, surely?

You're absolutely correct, that is equivalent. Which is exactly why we need a design philosophy that promotes cooperation OR a model where there isn't a clear "win" -- which is much harder to actually come up with than to spit bars about. Thanks... I guess? I think we should abstain from jerking eachother off in favor of some other time, though, I don't think this context is appropriate for it. I like to keep business and socializing activities separate for the most part.

I don't want you to like me, I want you to value my comments for their informational content and scientific rigor.

First of all, I'm still playing devil's advocate for the sake of presenting both sides equally. I'm not running around touting end of the world prophecies, I don't think this is a big problem personally. Do you understand what the term devil's advocate means? I'm representing the OPs point of view after deconstructing his poorly put-together arguments, because I didn't think this thread was fairly representing both sides otherwise. Secondly, you're completely missing the point. Which is that money buys influence. If you have to bring together a clan 10 times the size to beat mine, it's not a level playing field, because I'm using real life money as a force multiplier. As for how long I can hold it: as long as I have money to pay for it. I've now expressed this more times than should reasonably be expected for a rational person to understand the point. If you still have your "side blinders" on, or whatever, I can't be bothered regurgitating this very simple notion again. You're not clearly defining your terms like I am, you're just roboticly gainsaying. What do you mean by pay-to-win? Do you disagree with my definition of spending money to gain resources and therefore a competitive advantage being pay-to-win? If you are, then I don't know what to tell you, because we're not speaking the same language in that case. Nothing about pay-to-win the way I see it prevents a large enough group of people from creating an equivalent force -- the whole point is that you're creating the same kind of asymmetry with your wallet, rather than having to group together. If you don't believe there is a "win" in the game, then congratulations, you've successfully resolved the second part of my message. That's my ultimate message here. If you design a game in such a way that there is no "winning" over others, you can't pay to win (if you think we're now in agreement, you should've read all my posts instead of just reacting to parts you think you disagree with).

Well, the notion of "direct" communication and frequency of updates are kind of separate topics, right? Would this routing service be running on every cluster? Even so, I reckon physically messages would still be direct rather than daisy-chained or whatever, to answer my own question... I think my notion of it causing congestion in some special way was naive. I still think update frequency will be a function of not only distance/adjacency, but also player density (you said as much above, I misread -- also you add type importance, which I forgot to consider)... So a naive way to implement it would be the number of cells between you and a target cell you want to figure out the update rate for. Still, we agree that messages, physically speaking, should be addressed directly to a target region, rather than propagating/attenuating recursively through directly adjacent nodes? I figure since we don't know the geographic distribution of the clusters (or do we?), we don't know what kind of delay we'd introduce by doing it the second way. I concur, although I believe the part in boltalic is incorrect. I haven't seen that since GunZ: The Duel, and I believe most games I play have a server-client networking model rather than P2P (at least all the source games and ArmA 3). Do you think moving from one region/subdivision to another would also move you to a different cluster? I could see that causing some overhead... How would a swarm of players moving rapidly on an FTL-speed ship be handled? Or even just a group of 1k people running in the same direction? Would there be a hand-off every n meters where n is the current width of a region-subdivision (cell-width)? How about keeping the same cluster that just moves with the players from cell to cell? What about if they disperse, or some blend of dispersion/moving together? How would you blend between... am I making a problem out of something that is actually trivial and simple? I feel like I might be. The notion of server side sync didn't even cross my mind, to be honest. Seems like it wouldn't be worth it to trade redundantly copying data for a likely small increase in predictability, though. The source of uncertainty/fluctuation in the other model would be between one client and the server at a time, whereas the other model spreads those routing/whatever other issues to other clients effectively, if my intuition is right... Though I guess the real benefit would be larger scale homogeneity of the distribution of players' pings... I think that's a good thing...? I mean if you did distribute, your region would be disperse, your interaction with the world would be snappier, your interaction with other clients in your region would be dependent on roughly the same sort of geographic distance as in the other case, plus some (constant?) term added due to overhead... Your interactions with other regions' avatars would be similarly distributed, I think... Yeah, perhaps that would be the smart way. I actually think l|1yriad's communications are slightly clearer and to the point, I was refering to these pages by MS. After I forced myself to read through the overview, I think I eventually formed a decent enough picture to get what's going on, roughly. Like on this page, if you skip over the BS to the pictures and the text next to them, it's not that bad.

... What? =D I guess you don't really get math. I'll have to find a way to put this into some other terms, then... The reason skill limits on time don't matter is because at a given time, the economy as a whole will have some given level of technological progress available to both parties. While this may seem like it's an "equalizing factor", it just means the type of ship will be the same. Sure, we're both fighting with ships made out of cardboard because nobody has figured out titanium alloys yet. Does that make the fight fair? Heck no, because guess what... While your clan of 10 people work your asses off to cobble together one ship, I can buy 900 of them, and hire people to crew them, to completely and utterly shit on your faction, because I happen to be a multimillionaire in real life... Is this clear enough for you or do I need to express the same facts in yet another form? [EDIT-sidenote: funny how neither side of this "debate" seems to know how to think properly, but it's ok, I'm fine with thinking for both parties...] [EDIT2: Yes, I'm aware that I'm extremely sassy, snarky, sarcastic and obnoxious -- it's just a part of my charm]

Are you familiar with the notion of initial value problems? You're essentially ignoring the constant terms here. Sure, group X, with nothing but the sweat of their brow can reach the same military strength as group Y can, given enough time (KEY THING TO NOTE). The point is that group Y can amass that same military might basically within an arbitrarily short span of time, limited only by A ) the amount of real money they are spending per unit time and B ) Skill tree progression, whose change per unit time is constant. We can more or less ignore B for the purposes of this discussion, because it's the same constant factor for both parties and we're comparing the derivatives. End result, group with real-life clout gets army basically instantly if they want, group without gets rekt because they can't put resources on the field at the same rate. As for where the money goes? It gets diffused into the economy. Where it goes doesn't matter since it gets distributed evenly (unless you literally buy from your enemy like a fucking idiot, haha xD). So yes, it is indeed pay-to-win. And I'll stop here because the rest is me repeating myself.

You can make your organization win a war. You buy DACs, you use them directly to buy ships, crew, ammo, etc. (I mean, either directly or through some proxy medium of exchange, it doesn't matter) You then use these resources to straight-up out-gun your opponents. My main original point being that if you set up the rules of the game such that this kind of advantage seeking behavior is a part of your gameplay and the world is not somehow forced to be symmetric and fair, you WILL end up with some degree of pay-to-win, and DAC or no DAC isn't about removing this aspect, because it can't.