[Imperial foundations.]

How about tweaking it a little so that the three ruling bodies each have more clearly defined roles.  The Empire is still a trifector, but the three parts instead are considered to be equally powerful, at least in theory.  In practice they will have different roles and different numbers of members so you won't really be able to compare the amount of "power" they have, but they will certainly have equal ownership of the Empire.  The three parts are the Emperorship - responsible for military matters, the Senate - responsible for internal politics and laws, and the Guild - responsible for financial matters.

 

Composition

 

The Emperorship consists of a single person - the Emperor.  She/he can use however many advisors, and delegate whatever powers she/he likes to whomever she/he likes, but ultimate power of the responsibilities of the Emperorship belongs to the Emperor.  The first Emperor is likely to be the leader of the organisation(s) from which the Empire was born.  If an Empress decides to abdicate the Emperorship, she selects her successor, and the Guild and Senate must then each cast a vote of confidence for the succession to take place.

 

The Senate consists of a number of elected Senators.  Senators are elected per territory that the Empire controls.  Anyone who lives in the territory (how this is defined and controlled is not clear) can run to be the Senator representing it, and only people living in that territory may vote.  There may also have to be an additional Senatorship for members who do not have a fixed abode within or without the Empire's borders.  Elections take place once per defined term (a year?).  After elections of Senators, the Senators vote amongst themselves for a President of the Senate who has certain executive powers.  The Senate vote on the vast majority of matters that are within their power and the voting system can be as complex or as simple as they collectively decide.  It will be a living, breathing political system.

 

The Guild consists mainly of leaders of prominent organisations and super-rich players in the empire.  There are three ways to become a Guild legate - buy your way in; be voted in by Guild legates; or through an empire member organisation.  The price for buying your way in is decided by the Guild and can be whatever the Guild chooses it to be for each individual case.  The percentage of votes required to be voted in as a member should be 67% although the Guild can change this figure via an internal voting system.  The third way is to ensure inclusion in the Guild of newer or growing member organisations.  Any organisation within the Empire that has a minimum number of members must have at least one player in the Guild.  Say the limit is 100.  If that organisation does not yet have a Guild member in its ranks then it can select any one of its player members for accession into the Guild.  The Senate decides what this minimum is within pre-defined (probably by the Emperorship), unalterable percentage limits.  The Guild can decide and change its internal structure as it sees fit, can have a leader with a few or many powers, but leadership must be termed and decided democratically amongst Guild legates.

 

I've thought about how the legate and member system defined in the devblog https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/32-devblog-organizations-build-your-corporation-faction-nation-or-empire/can be used to put this together and it shouldn't be too difficult.  I won't go into it here, but if anyone wants to know, I'll explain.

 

Powers and Responsibilities

 

The Emperorship's main power resides in the control of the military and war.  Its main responsibility is in the protection and expansion of territorial borders.  The Emperorship has complete control over the recruitment, training and deployment of forces and can unilaterally declare war or peace.

 

The Senate's main responsibility is to keep the every day members of the Empire entertained, provide content, listen to and understand their needs, wants and concerns.  The Senate also decides on Empire-wide laws which apply to its members, what is and is not allowed, and resolves disputes between member organisations.  Each Senator has some devolved powers which allow her/him to apply laws to the territory she/he represents, and resolve disputes between members.  The Senate and each Senator are also responsible for the deployment of police and militia forces provided by the Emperorship.  The Senate should also have certain powers which temper the powers of the Guild and Emperorship, but I haven't thought that through properly.

 

The Guild's first responsibility is to ensure that the Empire is rich, and gets richer.  Where the Emperorship's power are mostly outward-facing, and the Senate's are inward-facing, the Guild's crosses both lines.  Externally they have most of the powers over foreign policy and are responsible for maintaining and nurturing alliances and relationships with other large organisations.  They are also responsible for espionage, diplomacy.  Internally, they have the power to decide taxation limits, can grant/deny access to important natural resources, and can grant major contracts on the Empire level to its member organisations or external organisations.

 

Some powers should be shared between two or all three of the trifector.  Such as deciding to admit new members / member organisations to the Empire.  Or overruling destructive decisions made by one of the three, by having the other two unite against it.  Or major Empire-wide decisions such as relocating the entire Empire (although if it is a military necessity the Emperorship can decide this on its own).

 

I see this kind of structure possibly working for an organisation that has a fair bit of territory - at least 20 claimed territory tiles, and at least a few hundred members.  Less than that and it is too much for too little gain.

 

I know I've missed plenty out, but I thought I'd add my ideas to the mix.  Now that I read my post back I wonder whether it should have been a separate thread, but hopfeully it's okay.

[The Economy]

I asked about whether or not players will be able to create their own currencies and the answer I got from Nyzaltar was no, and for good reasons.  Thread: https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/21-devblog-from-barter-to-market-economy/

 

That same devblog talks about market units which can be placed in any player made construct and just require energy and storage space for goods being traded.  

 

I think the intention is also to have the ASA have a few NPC markets which sell some basic stuff to help kickstart the process.

 

The system sounds really flexible.  So you can build a shop, or you can have a little market stall, or you might be a mobile caravan (except more sci-fi-ey), or you could be on a huge space ship, or a dedicated orbital space station with masses and masses of goods from all over the galaxy!

 

An implication I can see is the potential for destroying market units and stealing the goods inside.  I'm guessing they'll need an immunity timer once they are damaged a certain amount to give people a chance to get their stuff out, otherwise the economy would suffer greatly because the rewards for destroying market units would just be too great to pass up.  Imagine that orbital space station being blown up with all the goods on-board, just floating in space... salvagers flying in from wherever they can to get a piece of the pie...

 

As for business ventures, I wonder whether it will be more profitable to specialise in a particular area.  Say you build small spaceships near a reasonably populated area.  Rather than transporting your ships to a market, you decide you have enough clout to set up a market - to sell your ships, yes, but also to attract people who sell the materials you need to build your goods.

 

Probably the most profitable will be the generalist who manages a large market unit in the centre of a bustling city of a major organisation.  I wonder if the market unit owner gets to claim a percentage of all transactions.  The more transactions the richer you get.  Realistically the organisation itself will get be the owner of the market unit and most of the money will go in their coffers.

[DevBlog: Multiplayer Ship Crew]

Makes me wonder how much room we'll have to build things 

 

Shipyards in space...

[DevBlog: Multiplayer Ship Crew]

I definitely think there has to be a careful balance between the size, speed, cost, maintenance, and difficulty of operation of spaceships.  Since ships are designed and built by players it is the building blocks that need to be balanced rather than ships themselves, but the end goal should be balance between the large and the small.

 

Personally, it makes sense to me that smaller ships will be more easily specialised into a particular role.  Smaller generally means cheaper, so if you want your one man ship to be extremely fast then you can pile on the FTL power at the expense of defense/cargo space/weapons/etc.  Or you can make it quite slow and leave off an FTL altogether and just have a tank with powerful weaponry - this ship will be powerful in defending a fixed region of space, or reliant on bigger ships carrying it to other sectors.

 

If you try the same thing with a large ship you are glutton for punishment, and the larger the ship the worse it gets.  If you try to make a 100 man ship go extremely fast at the expense of defenses it is going to go boom and you will have lost an awful lot of time and money, not to mention respect and probably members.  Make it specialise in combat but without an FTL, and it becomes a fixed fortress, again, probably not the best use of resources.  You can still specialise big ships, but not to the same extent.  Even a large freighter that requires an armed escort cannot truly specialise in speed because it has to have a lot of cargo space, and hence a lot of cargo i.e. mass, to justify its cost and complexity.

 

I also think that there should be an exponential relationship regarding speed and size.  The bigger you get the bigger your engines need to be, sure, but as you go bigger and bigger the amount of energy required of your engines starts to become unfeasible, or requires extremely disproportionate specialisation - the freighter needs to ditch 90% of it's cargo hold and costs 10 times as much to build if you want it to reach 1 man scout speeds.  I guess that sums up to an opinion that the fastest ships should be small ships that are specialised in speed (it doesn't take nearly as much force to propel a small mass to a high as speed).  A ship 1000 times larger can theoretically reach the same speed, but it just isn't practical.  That doesn't rule out reasonably fast 100 man ships, just not as fast as 1 man explorers and scouts, or 10 man smugglers, or etc etc etc...

 

EDIT:  Speed and range are two different things.  I haven't really considered range here.  It probably makes sense for a slow massive ship to have a much greater range than a small speeder before needing to stop for petrol.

 

I think there are lots of reasons people would want to fly in large multiplayer ships, but the first thing that comes to mind is that it would be f*ing awesome

[Player systematics]

How do you intend to go about the colonization process in DU?

Based on my knowledge of what is planned, I think the only specific game mechanic they will have related to colonisation will be claiming territory tiles with territorial units (TU's).

 

Other than that colonisation is simply a group of people injected into an area/territory to live there permanently. There's nothing to stop you doing that (apart from your fellow players, of course).

 

how can there be enaugh players to increase your empire in size and have all the worlds inhabitated by players?

I imagine the size of your empire will be limited mainly by how much it is able to defend, and how much it is able to exploit. If you're strong enough to defend 100km2 area but can only populate/utilise half of that area, you might not bother trying to encompass the less useful parts within your borders.

 

if an empire has 100 players, it can merely fill out the capitol of the empire on the homeworld. all other "cities" would be ghost towns. are you planning to include NPCs?

Cities will be built by real players brick by brick. It's unlikely that there will be large quantities of uninhabited buildings and structures.

 

I'm pretty sure there will not be any NPC's that can be used as substitutes for real players. The closest thing will be player built programmable bots which will be able to perform simple tasks. Not sure how cheap these will be or even if they are definitely going to end up in the game.

 

It's also unlikely that we'll see a single empire control an entire planet for a long time, if ever. That example planet looks huge... I think it would take lots of medium sized entities banding together. But we players won't really know how many of us it will take to control a sector until we're actually playing and get a real sense of scale and what is possible.

 

also how will the server structure work?

will all servers be located in europe? if so that would be a lag issue for american players.

 

Yeah, you need Nyzaltar to answer this... I have a vague recollection of him answering a similar question but can't find it... I might have imagined it.

 

and also: unrelated but still important;

if you can program machines via LUA, can you create self-replicating machines and build-bots?

Interesting. The spirit of the game is player led, so anything self-replicating needs to have strict limitations. But it's an interesting idea, you should post it in the idea box.

 

I think the thing to remember is that players take control of a single character in this game, not an empire. You can (try to) form an empire but it wouldn't be easy as you'll need a lot of real players behind you. Plus an empire is not the only kind of entity you can form by a longshot. In the end there will be very few "emperors" in this game.

[Alpha/Beta]

Free Death Star for all early backers.

[How much Hype! did YOU experience?]

I was searching for a new game to play. Something spacey and sandboxey. I started looking for single shard MMO and came across DU. I started reading the devblog, I think the first one I read was about the resurrection nodes and the part they are likely to play as war targets. I was hooked, couldn't stop until I'd read every word and clicked every link. It took a while for me to calm myself down and remember it is pre-alpha, years from release.

 

Soon after the forum went up and the rest is history.

[There's Gold in Them There Hills!]

Thanks for the response, Nyzaltar.  It's great to hear you were already planning this kind of immersive and meaningful experience!  There's plenty more to discuss and potential issues to consider, but perhaps it's best left there for now until it comes up in a devblog or something.  Cheers!

[Salutations Fellow Dualists!]

Welcome Sylverwulf!

[There's Gold in Them There Hills!]

that is of course true, but its not sustainable, not even with a small ingame population (and we all hope it will be a huge one)^^

Indeed that is why I made some assumptions in my OP. Assuming there is a large player base, it depends on how large the game universe will be, how fast players will be able to travel, and how difficult it will be to travel fast. Lots of variables. Ultimately it depends on whether NQ want the universe to ever become fully "known". Personally I'd like a universe that always has wild, unknown frontiers

[There's Gold in Them There Hills!]

Making exploration worthwhile is actually a pretty interesting and complex topic.

There are several possible aspects of exploration, ranging from only small impact to a very heavy impact on the game.

The easiest possibility would be to have mining/ressource gathering. Explorers would travel the world, scanning for rare mineral nodes, botanical features etc. and sell the information about the locations to other players/organizations, or just using the discovered ressource for yourself.

The second, more interesing way is to include archeological sites to the planets, explorers could find ancient alien artifacts, which improve certain aspects of crafting or are just collectibles.

 

The most interesting possibility to include exploration in the game is connecting it with science, let me explain this more detailed

 

I wouldn't underestimate the importance of knowledge of terrain and raw materials locations in a large PvP arena-type game universe though - to my mind this has the greatest potential impact on gameplay.

 

I like the idea of having unique and/or rare items in the universe which add additional types of specialisation for explorers.  I view these as separate ideas from exploration though.  Just as exploration is separate from mining, even though you can't mine without knowing where to mine first.

 

I think we need to be careful about forcing explorers down a particular path, or into equipping themselves for an activity other than exploring.  Some players may only be interested in getting the most basic "images" of each area - those will equip themselves for speed so that they can visit as many places as possible as quickly as possible.  Others may want to search nearby, barely explored areas for natural resources - those will need advanced scanning equipment.  Others might be on the look out for rare items - those will want a small cargo hold.  This kind of specialisation and variety adds richness to the activity.

 

What I'm trying to get at is that exploration is the base activity and should be catered for in and of itself; additional reasons for exploration and things to do while exploring on top of that are a bonus, but shouldn't be forced upon the explorer.

[There's Gold in Them There Hills!]

I've been thinking about how explorers might be able to make a living in DU.  There is only one game I know of that has it right and that is Elite Dangerous.  Explorers fly out into the unknown scanning stars and planets with specialised scanning equipment.  When they come back to civilisation they sell the data to NPC empires for a price.  This works well for two reasons: E:D is huge so there is always something new to find; NPC empires always want to buy the data.

 

First I have to make a few assumptions because I can't really talk about the first aspect definitively as I don't yet have a good idea of how large DU is going to be.  Initially it will be a single planet and even after official release it seems it may be months before any player manages to launch themselves into space.  However, the territory control blog entry talks about a 30km planet being divided up into 1km hexes.  That would mean over 11,000 territory tiles to explore on the starting planet.  I think it is a fair assumption to make that only dedicated explorers are likely to see a sizable fraction of those hexes and that the vast vast majority of those hexes will not have players living in them.  Once players start venturing off into space, there will be other stars, planets, moons, asteroids, regions/bubbles of space, etc to explore, also with hexes.  So another assumption is that this space will also only be seen by players who make an active effort to go out and see some of it, and that it will largely remain uninhaited by players even once the game is in full swing with thousands of active players.  My final assumption is that the DU universe will actually be enlarged as and when the developers see fit and that ensuring explorers always have something new to, uh, explore, is a factor.

 

If a similar, true exploration system were to work in DU it would naturally need to be entirely player-driven, which means there must be a player demand for exploration data.  That in turn means that, ideally, players need to start the game starved of map data.  The most basic type of exploration data would simply be an image representation of a territory tile.  Players can fill out their world map by exploring the world, or by buying map data from people who have already been around.  This type of data will also have a "resolution" of sorts once space exploration begins - resolutions may be "solar system", "bubble" (as mentioned in the territory blog), "astronomical body" (i.e. star/planet/etc), "territory tile", and perhaps smaller if there are plans to split tiles up into smaller pieces.

 

Now anyone with feet can go out and pick up that kind of simple data without any kind of specialised equipment and it likely wouldn't sell for very much, or anything at all once a sufficiently large number of players have it.  A true explorer will have scanning and analysing equipment of various kinds to retrieve more detailed information.  A territory tile could be analysed in detail to provide a terrain map.  Other details might include information about flora and fauna, player presence and player built structures, yet more may include some mining information, and the most sophisticated triquarters might be able to give detailed information about the composition of the land and presence and size of underground caves and mines.

 

Now explorers have a reason to exist.  Players who want to move to a new, untouched area but don't have the time, resources or inclination to scope out hundreds of potential places for themselves can simply buy it from a professional.  Larger organisations may have the resources to employ explorers to search for specific things or specific areas, and during times of war or pre-war explorers may double as scouts and spies.

 

In order for this to work there needs to be a framework in place where exploration data can be reliably traded.  NQ have written about the market but exploration data can really only traded in a specific contract.  There might be a buy order contract for land within x radius that contains at least y amount of raw material A, for example.  I seem to remember NQ saying a contracts system is planned, and if it is anything like as flexible as the RDMS, tagging and organisation systems then it would probably be able to cater for this kind of trading mechanism without too much tweaking.  The other requirement is for different types of scanning and analysing equipment to made available or buildable.

 

I think there are lots of players, myself included, who love to go out and explore game universes, but it is always a richer and more rewarding experience when you affect the game and other players in doing so, while also making a little profit.  So with a little attention to ensure the game mechanisms support the activity, and keeping in mind my assumptions above, it could be workable.

[Dual Universe Lore (Part 1)]

 

Never underestimate fans. After all, they even know Dagoba's gravity (https://what-if.xkcd.com/3/).

 

Regards,

Shadow

 

Awesome linkage.

[Hello everyone.]

Welcome!

[Land Ownership]

I was under the impression that the Arkship Secure zone would be the only place that "indestructibles" could exist. I remember reading in one of the dev blogs that players could set up safe zones outside but that a concentrated effort by determined players could bring it down. Have I not understood this correctly? Maybe I should go back and read that again...

[Diversity of Battles and Wars]

Thank you for the detailed reply, Nyzaltar. While many of the things mentioned are related to strategy, usually planned in advance, the friendly fire / manual targetting issues are really the only ones that specifically ensure individual pilot and fleet commander skills and tactics play a big part. Obviously, I completely understand if implementing such features is I feasible, but how do you plan to ensure massive fleet battles don't devolve into a single guy on each side ordering "Everyone destroy target A"? Perhaps some kind of targetting interference mechanic?

[Diversity of Battles and Wars]

Not sure I'd like a skill that reduces damage taken from friendly as it dilutes the purpose without any kind of compromise.  That skill would become essential training for anyone who flies in a combat fleet.  How about being able to adjust shields to match the frequency of the phasors Star Trek style.  The risk is that spies could discover the frequency and adjust their shields too.  This could be a simple system or something more complex depending on what they want.

 

I actually think super-capitals will have less balancing problems than they do in other games because of multi-crew ships.  In other games a single player can operate a ship the size of a small moon, but here it will be a massive coordinated effort to fly one effectively.  Traveling in one will be interesting.  As you say the engines will need to be something more and more incredibly the bigger the ship gets, but they should also have serious acceleration and manouevrability issues.  Again, it depends on what space travel and spacecraft piloting mechanics will be like in the game.

 

Nyzaltar has said that there may be consequences for mistreating or over-exploiting planets so in the long term resource replishment could be related to that somehow.

[Concept : Blackout]

I agree keeping a character that is flagged as "in combat" spawned in game and limp even when the player has logged out is essential in this kind of game.  The body and vehicle the the body is in remain in game until their timer runs down and during that time they can be killed by the enemy.

 

Jails and the ability to keep another player captive is an interesting concept.  Captors could try to extort money, or they could have deeper motives: information, vehicles/building designs, tags/functions, or even getting a legate to vote a certain way.  Most of the time the captive player will commit suicide, but if the captors plan carefully at a time when death would be more costly than complying, it could work.  I think I like it.

 

On dead player bodies, some players might like to keep them as trophies (not me, honest...), but yes, if a body is left alone it should definitely despawn after a few minutes.  Massive graveyards commemorating huge battles might be cool... until the next empire comes along and builds a metropolis on it.

 

Sorry if this isn't entirely on topic but you brought up some cool talking points.

[Diversity of Battles and Wars]

 

 

We also try to find a way to give some advantages to smaller organizations to make them attractive compared to what is usually called "megaguilds". But so far nothing has been decided yet.

 

How to keep blob fleets from happening?

 

I think this is a very important game design issue that needs to be addressed and re-addressed.  How to avoid the single strategy that more numbers = win.  Now, there is nothing wrong with the zergling strategy - it should be as viable as the next and I don't think the game should prevent organisations from adopting it.  The problem occurs when it becomes the onlycounter to itself.  A game that has only one viable strategy is either broken or boring.  The key is in providing variability and making combat complex enough that the difficulty in leading players into a battle becomes exponentially higher with larger and larger groups.  Here are some specific features that I think would ensure that wars and battles remain dynamic.  Each topic could probably have an entire thread to itself so I'll try to be brief.

 

Friendly Fire

If you accidentally shoot your guildmate, he is shot and takes no less damage than an enemy would have.  Ideally, this would be implemented by making projectiles, missiles, lasers, etc actually have to travel to their target, and if they hit something else on the way, then so be it.

 

Manual Targetting

If weapons have some kind of auto-targetting feature, it should be sub-optimal and unreliable.  If there is some way for weapon designers to increase auto-targetting effectiveness it should come at a large cost of compromising with damage, range, mass, etc.

 

Bigger Means More Complex

There should be nothing from stopping players building a massive mothership with thousands of players and dozens of capabilities, but piloting and maintaining such a ship should be extremely difficult, and the ship itself should have weaknesses and be very far from invulnerable.

 

Terrain

This is less of an issue on planets as there will always be hills, forests, mountains, rivers, etc, etc that make natural choke points and affect what kind of tactics will be most effective.  In space it is less obvious, but equally doable.  Have vast regions of space encompassing multiple star systems that are saturated by nebulae.  Include dense asteroid clusters, regions of space that are more rocky, planets with immense rings.  There could also be regions affected by strong gravitational fields caused by black holes or neutron stars, and many other possibilities, and they could all be intertwined and overlapping.  Each of these features would have some effect on travel and/or weaponry and defences just like "normal" geographical features do.

 

Terrain on the battlefield and on the meta-scale creates opportunities for inventive leaders to shine and take a larger force by surprise.

 

Resource Distribution

My thought on this is to avoid static, infinite, and clustered sets of resources, particularly high-end resources.  If there is a portion of the map that contains a lot of one particular type of resource then this will encourage "turtling" and make the acquisition of more players unto a single organisation easier.  At the same time, a perfectly even distribution means trade between regions is less profitable, perhaps even not required, so this is a tough topic.  One option is to have resources be finite at their given sources, but to have sources re-spawn elsewhere in the universe keeping the meta-game dynamic and ever changing.

 

Arms Diversity and Rock/Paper/Scissors/Lizard/Spock

Something that DU already has going for it is that all ships will be designed by individual players/organisations so we should expect a lot of diversity.  However, there are bound to be certain a types of weapon and defences that can be mounted.  I like GalCiv's system of having weapon types lasers/missiles/projectiles and their corresponding defences shields/point defence/armour.  In addition to that, adding in mines, mine sweepers, cloaking devices, stealth detection, more and less effective propulsion systems, hangars for carrier capability, and Death Star type weaponry are all elements which can be included, each with their own advantages and drawbacks not just on the battlefield but in including them in a given ship design.  And that's before mentioning ground weaponry (although I'm sure there will be a lot of overlapping) and the possibility of space-ground/ground-space interaction in battles.  This kind of diversity provides more opportunities for inventive leaders to do something special against a superior force.

 

Now, with these elements I believe it becomes much more difficult to adopt a zerg strategy.  A massive army/fleet necessarily requires a practical chain of command, training drills, and disciplined soldiers who have been briefed by competent commanders who have a plan and can think on their feet.  The more players in the fleet, the more difficult management of it becomes and large numbers of inexperienced and undisciplined soldiers will be a liability.  Knowing and understanding the terrain gives a kind of "home advantage" for smart generals, and appropriate use of a variety of different kinds of ships/weapons, or having intelligence on the enemy's new ship designs could be put to devastating use.

 

A quick note: we tend to think of a blob as lots of little ships, but in DU a blob could be a single super-massive ship with hundreds or thousands of players on board.  In this thread when I say "zerglings" I mean massive numbers of players, but not necessarily massive numbers of ships.

[Questioning Fleet Role: Carrier]

Personally I'd like to see a carrier that uses some combination of stealth, speed, and range to defeat a battleship. Battleships are all about firepower and armour, carriers should use that against them. Carriers should try to fight a one-sided battle, where lots of small, difficult to hit bombers bombard the battleships while they cannot hit the carriers because the flight range of the bombers is too high and the carrier is either too fast (not amazingly fast, just faster than a slow hulking behemoth of a battleship) to catch, or hidden away somewhere behind a moon or something. Add in some fighters to protect the bombers from smaller ships and to do some screening, maybe throw in some supporting cruisers and you've got a force to be reckoned with.

 

Of course, there'll always be a counter. Battleships should be accompanied by battlecruisers and cruisers, either of which should be faster and more powerful than a lone carrier caught with its trousers down.

[Bounty Hunting]

Also, dont forget about mobile nodes. I do plan to have one installed in my ship, for sole purpose of exploring.

 

In regards to bounty hunting, say I have a 1M credit bounty on my head, the bounty hunter can get a notification that I have a nearby node on my ship, giving him the option to target that 1st then proceed with the bounty.. This will allow, as you guys have mention... Increase the effectiveness of bounties.

Good point.  Although, carrying around a node on your ship when exploring  is risky too.  It's fine once you land, but while travelling, if your ship is destroyed and you are killed, then your node is either destroyed with it or drifting in space, defeating the purpose.  In fact explorers who do that will be juicy targets for pirates and bounty hunters.

[Bounty Hunting]

Well, my definition of a 'charge' is a security that you won't lose anything when you die. When a player has zero charges they get taxed for each death afterwards, increasing the toll for each resurrection without a charge.

 

I completely forgot about the pre-installed node in the ark ship, that makes more room for concepts. I think your idea sounds better on paper, but what if a player's RN is light years away? It will mean that, in order to explore, nodes need to be placed close. If that node is unfortunately not charged, then you'll be resurrected farther, potentially having a huge loss if you're indeed light years from the next charged node.

 

I have an idea. Let's say you're exploring in an unfamiliar territory located next to a community with a working node. It so happens that you die while exploring, it will then be possible to ressurect at that node (if the community has made it possible) for a fee. I think this is a great way to establish commerce in communities. This is of course only possible if RNs can be shared (excluding the preset ark ship node). It'll be better than having to retrace your steps from a far away node. Thoughts?

 

Edit: This may be off the topic of bounty hunting, so I apologize in advance.

I think the devs want to make sure that nodes can't be used for teleporting about, which is a valid concern.  But it could be that "your" nearest node is simply the nearest node to you that you have been given the tag for (which may also have a duty on it, like a flat or regular fee).  I think that would be a good balance.  You wouldn't want to give out the power to use a single node to too many people as if someone dies it will need to charge up again before you can use it (and then you will be teleported to a further node if you die before it is re-charged).

 

I really like the implications of this, because it means organisations will want to set up lots of them for their people, or there may even be "Resurrection Node Rental" corporations.

 

I actually wouldn't mind potentially losing your position when exploring far from home.  It makes the game universe bigger and the risk/reward of deep exploration greater.

[Bounty Hunting]

@astrov I think resurrection nodes do need to be charged to work and that you respawn at your nearest charged node when you die. I think that presumes that your original node which is pre-setup in your home arkship area is always charged. Perhaps losses will be proportional to how far away you have to "teleport" to be resurrected when you die.

 

@saffi that is a smart way of dealing out bounty contracts though you would have to be careful who you give the bounty hunting out to. Otherwise if someone find out Guild-Banan-O-Rama has put a bounty on their head they could get their friend to get hold of a tag and them kill them and split the reward. In fact, even trusted people might do that and the bounty hunting MO could even just become advertising for the target to come out to be killed and split the reward. Having said that, the system you mention would work pretty well for hired guns and mercs contracted to destroy expensive equipment.

[Bounty Hunting]

This is a great way to ensure that people don't just cheat the system, Even if they spawn x miles away I feel that that wouldn't effect them very much I'm thinking that you could lose money or items every time you die making it actually useful to kill people. All I'm saying is that death should be more harmful. On a side note you could also use this system to hire an assassin to kill like the head of an organization.

Well, it depends.  If somone moved to a planet and has just one resurrection node on it, then losing that node and then being killed, thereby sending them back to their "home" planet, could be a real pain.  Plus losing the node itself would be a massive loss.

 

But yeah, if you want to inflict economic damage on someone you'd state in the contract that bounty is paid out in some proportion to the money they lose when dying (e.g. ship or items destroyed/lost).  The dev blog on resurrection mechanics had something about items being lost when you die, but it didn't say exactly how it works and how severe it is.

[Bounty Hunting]

Bounty hunting is an activity that many players find alluring but there aren't really any games that do it well, at least not PvP bounty hunting.

 

The problem with bounty hunting is that hunters expect to be reasonably well-rewarded for their efforts, but a reasonable reward does not usually scale well with the damage inflicted on the victim - death simply isn't costly enough in most situations. If a victim discovers that there is a bounty on her head, she might let a friend kill her so they can split the reward.

 

Reducing the reward won't work because hunters just won't bother putting in the effort. The consequences of dying can't really be changed either for many reasons that go well beyond the scope of bounty hunting.

 

I think the answer lies in redefining bounty hunting to fit the game world, and in keeping with the features that have been introduced so far, my idea is essentially to allow players to define what it means.

 

Similar to the Market Unit, there will be a Bounty Unit, which players can set up in their own self-styled Bounty Offices. If an entity (i.e. player or organisation) wishes to place a bounty on another entity, they go to a local bounty office and set up a contract. The contract is defined by the entity setting it up. Some of the options available could be availability, i.e. who can claim the bounty, a certain amount of damage inflicted in pure currency, specific items being destroyed or stolen, number of times killed, reward, how the reward is granted, etc. Entities could even specify that the body (or head...?), or other item belonging to that entity be delivered to the Bounty Unit for collection as a trophy.

 

Example. Player A has decided that he wants player B to suffer for reasons unknown and unimportant. He places a bounty at a local bounty office of 1000000credits. The contract states that for every time player B is killed, 50% of the monetary losses he suffers as a result of the death are paid out from the bounty up to the 1000000 total of whatever remains.

 

Another example. Player C wants player D out of the picture. He puts a bounty of 100,000,000 credits to be paid out in full to the first entity who kills player D causing a respawn at least Xkm away from the office. (This may involve necessarily destroying one or more resurrection nodes, though perhaps a more reliable way to do this would be to include a resurrection node's destruction as part of the contractual obligation, i.e. the bounty is only released to the single entity who both destroys one or more specific resurrection nodes and then subsequently collects and delivers player D's head).

 

This obviously isn't a polished idea and it depends largely on what other features and mechanics the devs have in mind, but it's a start and I thought I'd throw it out there and see what people think.