LurkNautili
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Posts posted by LurkNautili
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I'm pretty sure we need to let this thread die
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]
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Then why don't you continue the discussion with him in Russian? Or is his english probably better than your russian....
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?
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I have nothing to say more here... I think this guy just lost in his opinions))))
Honestly, it like debate with wall =)
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)))
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I do not.
k
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has everyone heard their own voice enough yet?
this stopped being a debate and just people repeating the same shit over and over 6 pages ago.
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?
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* We need to promote cooperative mechanics rather than competition to prevent things feeling like pay-to-win
That's complete bullshit because there's no p2w like you described in some wall beforehand. Competition is a motor for the economy and gameplay.
You can also use p2w for your carebear city in some safezone. No difference there.
See, you don't need so much words
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)
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Hahaha well you read, but don't understand - that's fruitless. Happens to the best, I forgive you. Don't worry.
You could add tl;drs to your walls, would help.
Oh and your first point on p2w will never happen in DU, but you know that, right?
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.
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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?
No, source of resources is main factor. Where it came from is the definition factor.
Alright. Now it's my turn to say that I have no idea what the above utterances mean. Lost in translation, sorry... Moving on.
You as one of those poor guys starting saying about advantage, which is absolutely formal. Let's ban all organisations and communication, because players sell their time to achieve somdbodies project, which is absolutely equal.
Again, first sentence mostly lost in translation... And I've said nothing about banning organizations or communication...? Moving on...?
Then you start mix basic economy with DAC trade.
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.
All I see, you don't even want understand basic and find this basic in other features. Want to ban DAC? Everything need to be banned - organisations, playtime, trade, grinding other players, multi-accounting, even basic chat. BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS SUPPORT P2W (with DAC or without).
I don't want to ban DAC. In fact, I've explicitly stated exactly the contrary.
P.S: about example, I would say it is stuoid at all.. player buy ready components, he doesn't spend time... lol, wut? What PlayerA will use as payment? Money! Where did he get it? Grinded/Traded/Stole (spent his time)! Result: Player A grinded money to buy components to create ship and sell it for DAC (time for timeplay).
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
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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.
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You miss something mate
but you clearly are eloquent and intelligent enough to figure that out.I like you, you are funny
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*
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A. Have no idea what you mean at all. Words on water.
B. You don't buy resources, you buy players time (all these resources do not come from nowhere).
As I said, don't like this model, want fair model? Let's make 2-3 hour game allowed every day. For everyone.
If somebody want to work (grind resources, build ship or something else) for getting 30days sub, go on. If NQ would sell resources, then it would be P2W.
Really, need to learn what real P2W mean, not what stupid community think last years (to excuse themselves).
Archonious
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).
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Not coded yet and no one seen it..... I see what you did there
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?
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I have defind what Pay to Win means to me multiple times, including the post you just quoted.
For playing devils advocate you sure seem more engaged then just playing that role. Strawman, cherry picking, condescending tone. You have fun playing, I'm not going to play that game though.
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.
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I don't see any problems.
1. Player A sell his time to player B
2. Player B buy time of player A.
Time - this is time spent on resource grinding, crafting or any other.
Player B employ player A in other words. As many times, I would say, only one not abusabke and clear model is:
Player B can sell DAC as an owner. Player A can use it only.
So DAC is out of trade/economy model. It is barter - time to playtime (gold/resources/crafts to 30days sub).
That's it, simple!
Thanks,
Archonious
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])
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I just did that though in my last post and you talked it down like it wasn't a valid reply.
Didn't seem like it. You didn't seem to address my point at all, to be honest.
Again thats not even much to do with P2W anyways as that's always the case in games like this.
Non sequitur.
The "win" factor also I addressed by saying there is no permanent or insurmountable win that can be achieved by paying cash, hence NOT Pay to Win. At worst Pay to progress faster, not win outright.
See the "win" part of Pay to Win also denotes the insurmountable factor, ie if you can't overcome the advantage with in game available mechanics and systems then and only then is it P2W.
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...)
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XD those newcomers that just come and type a wall of text. FIRST OF, it's not that way you can be easily understood or heard at first, then, that's all, trynna be easy first, explain with less words, the clearer the better. You can highlight somehow the text.
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?
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Everyone who has no money complain about this "they can buy resources". It would be interesting if those who has not so much time start complain about "everyone must play limited amount of hours a week".
Why not?
P.S: Do not see any P2W model in DAC. Do not plan use them at all.
Thanks,
Archonious
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.
And I am the same way, but you can do the same while being friendly.
Thats all I was saying, welcome btw.
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. -
No its not.
You'll find people around here prefer others to be friendly and polite.
But whatever.
I don't want you to like me, I want you to value my comments for their informational content and scientific rigor.
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That's talking about Zerging though... which has nothing to do with P2W. Can make a zerg with or without RMTs. Besides going back to my initial post asking those questions, what exactly are you winning? Yeah you claim a bunch of territory with your insta corporate sponsored zerg but how long can you hold it? Your one guild bought 900 ships.. ok an alliance of 10 guilds with 2500 ships is coming to wipe you out and they insta bought their zergs as well. Silly example sure but just as silly thinking one guild can just buy everything and "win" the game. Yeah I just think you got side blinders on and not really looking at the whole picture, point was there are MANY factors that go into these games so can't just ignore facts because they don't work for your argument.
Don't need to be a math expert to know that based on experience in this genre nothing NQ or this game has to offer so far is Pay 2 Win.
Anyways there's always a few chicken little's running around portending the end is nigh because of RMTs and warning of the P2W apocalypse, you're this forums versions, gratz on that I guess.
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).
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I don't believe it would work to have them communicate directly. That'd be too much traffic, essentially bottlenecking it back down to the problem you get with a single machine. Instead, everything would need to go through some sort of event router service. The service would have a Level of Detail algorithm to intelligently route messages to valid regions (and players) on a scaled back frequency by distance and importance of the message. Adjacent regions to the source would get the messages on a semi-frequent basis, further regions would get even less frequent, and even further regions may not get them at all. You would also need to take into account that region can be really small in that router. So region size would also be a factor in messaging frequency.
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.The regions could be comparable to the old-style notion of a server shard, to a degree. A region knows about all the players in it, and all players know the region they are in. This is an in-game region, a chunk of the universe space. The region is also responsible for all the players, NPCs, and constructs in that chunk of space and performs all of the physics/actions/voxel manipulation within it. Because this is all processed on the server cluster, ping time in a region would be dependent on yours and their connection to the server, more so than to each other like you get in typical multiplayer games. Your typical game creates a lobby and may try to establish more of a peer-to-peer connection, which won't be possible in DU.
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.RL geographic regions would need to be handled differently. To minimize latency you would want to distribute the cluster globally, but this can create other problems, such as keeping copies of a region in sync across datacenters. I'm not sure what the best solution is there: distribute globally and minimize player latency, while increasing some server-side latency (more predictable than user latency) for synchronization or have exactly one copy of each region and players will have to deal with additional latency dependent on how far they are from the actual datacenter hosting that region. That is a difficult problem to solve and I don't have an answer yet.
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.
To a degree, yes. But I am a Microsoft / .NET developer. So it is what I'm used to, and actually quick clear. Linux docs make me crazy. But yes, there is a lot of marketing in there. That was likely the trade-off Illyriad Games made with Microsoft. They got early access to Service Fabric and a lot of direct assistance from Microsoft in the architectural design/development. In exchange, they share some cross-marketing.
Illyriad has actually made a lot of code contributions to the .Net Core codebase, making huge leaps in performance such that Asp.Net Core can actually surpass Node.js now in raw throughput. I'm impressed by them.
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.
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Yes of course ignore the equalizing factors that diminish the argument against it being P2W
That fact that there is time based skill progression, stats and things that can't just be bought instantly is what takes away the P2W factors, but yes lets just ignore those inconvenient facts...
... 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]
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They still have to fight though against other players who got that same stuff either the same way or through playing the game. they don't live in a vacuum and all those credits they spent don't just disappear they get used to buy stuff as well.
Like said at worst its pay to progress faster or pay to be lazy but not Pay to Win.
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.
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Lots of points already made but the simple test I use to determine P2W or not is: All factors in Pay to Win must occur. Paying is the constant but what exactly are you winning and how? What insurmountable advantage are you gaining by throwing rl cash into the game?
In this game and many like it items must be produced by players. There is no NPC vendor you pump a bunch of credits into and get gear and weapons from. Resources still have to be gathered by players and items need to be assembled by players. There also isn't anything that can't be acquired by simply playing the game. At worst its pay to progress faster but again nothing you gain from buying a bunch of DACs and selling them in game will give an insurmountable advantage.
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.
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Actually, you know what. Since I don't think you're very good at presenting a cogent argument, I'll do you a solid. I've played devil's advocate for this side, now I'll present a better case from your point of view.
The one cogent argument you've made, is that doing DAC versus doing a non-transferable subscription based model, is that the former will probably have a lower barrier for people to use their money to gain influence in game. That's what you should focus on if you want to convince people. Does this effect (more paying for resources) translate to more pay-to-win, and does the cost of that outweigh the benefits (devs get more money, have to spend less on policing, and so on)?
Well, let's see what we've got.
On the DAC side:
Pros:
- Developers get the revenue from wealthy people buying in-game resources
- Developers don't have to spend resources like development time on defeating means of people using their money to gain resources
- As I've shown, it's not possible to completely remove this outside influence, as people can always just pay people to play for their org and legitimately create resources for them. You might say this doesn't apply to single persons, but a dictatorial org effectively is one person wielding all the resources.
Cons:
- Even honest people with money can buy resources, which might be socially acceptable (more on this later). I'd predict at least a 2/4-fold increase in flow of real money into in-game money (might be generous, but let's just stick with that for the sake of argument)
- Legitimizing this mechanism might make it less frowned upon by the community (kind of the same con, but I wanted another bulletin point)
On the non-transferable/non-liquifiable subscription model side:
Pros:
- Probably reduces the amount of flow to some fraction
- Enables enforcement of ban on real world influence with money, based on TOS
Cons:
- Enforcement only applies to cases that are detectable and don't exploit obvious, easy loopholes I've mentioned
- Creates a black market for unsanctioned trading of in-game resources outside the game
- -> revenue leaves the game, we get less features because devs get less money (only from subs used for playtime, not ones bought to use as currency)
In summary, I think DAC overall is better, but I'll also posit that neither model completely addresses the issue of pay-to-win -- they both miss the mark.
Let's examine the dynamics of what makes pay-to-win possible.
The more the game is set out to be a competitive environment, the more mechanics we have that pit players against each other, the more incentive there will be to pay for in-game advantages. Conversely, the more gameplay revolves around co-operation, the less need people will have to seek an advantage over one another or pay-to-win. In other words, what do we consider "winning"? If I win by making you lose, "pay-to-win" (in the anal discomfort inducing sense) becomes possible.
Also, it kind of depends on how you gain an in-game advantage. We need to promote mechanisms that are not achievable through resources that you can acquire with real money.
How you actually reach these goals is a super complex topic. You could discuss things like not having a monetary system in game at all, somehow simulating a post-scarcity society a la Iain M. Banks' Culture society... But we might be too set in our ways and fixated on our money-based world view for this to be possible. Again, really tough to come up with workable models.
Collision damage - workaround suggestions
in Idea Box
Posted
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.