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mrjacobean

Alpha Team Vanguard
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Everything posted by mrjacobean

  1. I believe you are over-stating things. Whilst this design decision can be exploited, it is not by any means all bad. First off, there needs to be a unique email address for each account. Second, NQ could restrict the amount of accounts registered from one household each [insert period of time]. Third, the amount of money given at the start should be enough to get you a cheap ride to somewhere nearby, but not enough to get you off planet (you would have to sell something or do a contract in order to do so). It should also be enough that you can start playing with the market (albeit in the low margin section) from the get-go.
  2. You are still off by two orders of magnitude though. Players start with a bit of cash, and there are market bots at the arkship that are used to keep the economy afloat (maintain the credit-to-player ratio). You should be able to afford a ticket off-world.
  3. Which is why an org made of people from across the globe will be easier to defend than one from one county only.
  4. Because then I will make millions selling mine at what they assume to be reduced price
  5. I wonder what the maximum possible effective range on a weapon is. I bet someone will attempt to create a security net around an entire planetoid (probably a moon) to prevent anyone else from getting through (and they will most likely learn that it does not work).
  6. I would not recommend 'selling' DACs early on, since the price will be WILD. If you find them at a really low price, buy them (their value only increases with time/player count)
  7. I love how this ore debate is happening on two threads at the same time... Yeah, each of his 'voxels' is actually a cube 100m in length. Did the maths myself, remembering that 1km^3 is 1,000,000,000m^3.
  8. Instead of having NPC/BOT shuttles, I bet there will be someone who will just build a cheap one and use it as a taxi. Maybe even a taxi org (an early version of an interplanetary transport org). Remember that mining will not remain stage one of player progression forever.
  9. I think the current plan (last I heard) was that someone had to own a certain amount of the available TUs on the planet to have 'control' of the space around it (don't know how far that extends). This is also the same with renaming planets.
  10. Assuming everyone will mine for days on the same planet. This flat up wont happen, since there are people who will just wait and kill miners, and those who will be paid to protect said miners. Also keep in mind that wood, dirt and stone are probably going to be building materials, or at least sell-able to the bots at spawn for cash. Since your estimates don't account for nearly as many variables as it should, don't take them as gospel. Something more accurate is to assume only half of the players (which still might be an overestimate) will be (effective) miners to begin with, so doubling your numbers gives us about 0.28-0.46km^3 of ore per person, which you didn't convert properly or didn't use metric units and went for voxels (because that makes sense?). Either way, thats a cube with dimensions between 654m and 772m. Now, we could change the ore density to something a bit higher, but we don't have any figures to go on, so we'll keep your numbers for now. But as you can see, this ore will last a while, because the number of miners on Alioth will reduce over time (increasing the amount of ore per miner) and not many people would be willing to mine out a 654x654x654m cube of ore, let alone that amount spread out across the planet.
  11. You do realise that a city with that amount of players is less than the 20KM safe zone in surface area, yes? Also remember that there are timezones, so not everyone will spawn in at once. It is going to be chaos to begin with, but it would be the same when these hundreds of thousands of people have just woken up after they have left their planet of birth. Only a few 'chunks' radius will be rendered on the client, so the more people/activity nearby, the lower your view distance (due to smaller chunks) Remember that the devs can learn from alpha/beta world start, so they will have accurate models for how to approach the problem.
  12. This would split the playerbase and only effect the players at launch (both bad things in an MMO). Imagine the frustration on finding that you and your friend have started on different planets when you were going to work from the start. In the long run it wouldn't achieve much either. There are already factions in the game (see the top 20-ish orgs). Remember it would also take several months in order to have common transport between neighboring systems (the few months to get the stargate expansion and then a few more months to build and deploy enough of them).
  13. ... Further than they already have over everyone else. You already have a safezone where you can avoid combat, you already have the depth of space to solo-roam around (if you can survive) and there are many opportunities to RP (in fact, you can RP all the time). The open bounty system does the same function as the one that Lynkx suggested, but instead of only being a select group of players and funded from the hunters themselves (via the tax, which would not work anyway), anyone can be the target and its from your own money: the way it should be. You want that PKer to get hurt back, you are going to need to pay for it. The bounty system is what is supposed to be the deterrent against pirates, griefers and scammers, but it won't be if it only targets those who kill.
  14. Here is the thing though, aren't players supposed to place bounties on PKers? If you managed to scan/identify who that PKer is before death, you should get the ability to put a bounty on them. What if the PKer in question is actually a very good commando, operating behind enemy lines without being detected? Wouldn't they just get a massive automated bounty on them, making it easier to track? Also, there is no overarching law in the game which applies to everyone, so they can only be a criminal when looked at from a player/org perspective (at which point, they put a bounty on them). In addition, I feel that since the hunter has already wasted time if they fail the contract, they shouldn't then lose money. A monetary loss combined with deadlines and the random assignment of contracts means that you might be unlucky enough that your target is piloting one of the most feared ships in the galaxy and since it would take too long to work your way up into being a crew member of that ship and getting close enough to the target to kill them, its just a failed contract when you identify who your target is. What they should lose is hunter reputation (the thing that is used to determine what bounty you would be assigned) which they would have to build back up.
  15. Who does the tax go to? Wouldn't this remove money from the economy if it goes down a drain (since we have a fixed-ish amount of money in the economy)? Surely you don't lose a contract unless a target is terminated or you abandon it. Also having the number of other hunters hidden would make it so that the hunters are cautious about how leisurely they would hunt their target. But the hunters already lose out by not getting the bounty, meaning it was a waste of time. Why would you take more from them?! There is no penalty from having more hunters, so why penalise having more of them? I believe that this would drastically reduce the amount of 'official' bounty hunters in game and therefore make the official bounty system useless, people would just do it through unofficial channels which would have no guidelines or enforcement.
  16. What if the target wants to pay off the bounty? Yeah they could just ask, pay the bounty amount to the contractor and then hope they pull the bounty down, but this could be used to scam people out of their money (put a bounty on them, get them to pay up, don't take the bounty down). You could place a bounty on them, but they already have your money. I would suggest an 'official' method. The target puts forward money to the contractor (held in escrow) inside a request, where the contractor can then either accept (taking the money and the bounty being pulled down automatically) or deny (in which the money goes back to the target). If no option is chosen in a set time-frame or the target is killed, the money is automatically returned to the target. However, this then gives us the problem of what happens to the bounty hunter if the contract is terminated. Do they get a small portion of the money, or are they left with nothing?
  17. It would technically be the same for the level/specialisation of tool your using. Some tools may increase efficiency, others may decrease crafting time. Try to make a crafting profession as deep as a combat profession. Have not just skill level but factors like material quality, crafting precision, build speed and power drain all a part of things to consider when crafting. For example, when creating a warp drive component, you could either make as many as possible at an average quality (faster to build and less power drain when building) or focus on making a few/one precisely (which will take longer and consume more power to make). Each of these circumstances would be better with specialist tools built for the task, and these tools would include workstations, suits, specialist nanoformers, etc., which are also made of components which themselves could be built to give variable bonuses.
  18. I prefer building things in a survival setting, makes everything feel more purposeful...
  19. I would say it would take a few tries to narrow down what the weak spot of that ship design is (and thats when you are actively trying to find it. It would take too long with trial and error to get an effective set of weak points for each objective (disable engines, command, gunners, hangar, etc.), hence the overall point of not having the ship magically turn into a loot box when it is destroyed so that people can board, capture and reverse engineer the ship to both find out how to build it and how to destroy it.
  20. Depends on the fuel being contained. I'm pretty sure an antimatter fuel tank would do some very nasty stuff if containment failed due to low power...
  21. Surely what remains of the construct is then just left there, floating with no acceleration due to thrust? Also, as said above, CPU's don't explode. A necessary step into capturing an enemy vessel is replacing their ship cores, so having the core explode or vaporise the entire ship into a loot box would be counter productive (not to mention it gets rid of the salvaging gameplay). I imagine that anything that could explode, like fuel tanks, that are also stabilised (directly or indirectly) by computing power would be prone to exploding as a downside to something better (in the case of the fuel tank, storing antimatter).
  22. If you take out the ship's central computer, it can't do anything. It can't stabilise the reactor so that goes offline. You could have multiple ship cores so that you cant be focus fired down, but people need to know where the core is in order to focus fire (and they usually don't).
  23. Just have ships stop accelerating due to thrust, and they will enter an orbit around the nearest body (or be at zero, depending on how the sun is done)
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