virtuozzo

No, I'm not. I don't even see how you got that idea.

Kinda makes sense now why he keeps trying to prevent people from quoting him >.< It probably only makes sense to old EVE players, but it's starting to feel like a revival of Xetic.

Ah come on, when have CCPians ever had problems or made weird decisions EVE's an amazing cash cow, definition of succes.

Never underestimate the sheer impact on development and growth of a game from things people are enabled to do out of game. Like, at work Joking aside, I am serious. I can understand the reservations, but a sandbox is about human behaviour in all its forms. Community building is a huge part of that, and while the game "is" there that does not mean that everybody always has acces to it. There's a default element of game / out of game connectivity that ties in with both making a game succesful commercially as well as rewarding from different player perspectives. In game also carries limitations on its own. No developer can provide for everything a player might want or need. That isn't just a debate on resource allocation in development for and by developers, it's also a product marketing topic. And a topic for players themselves. Practical example, I'd love to be able to dig through market data in game. But game time is limited. Elsewhere I typically have more time to dig through things. As such from my perspective I'd be happy with just a market interaction mechanism in game, but I would appreciate deeply a way of having an out of game webapp that would let me figure out patterns, logistical dependancies, historical tracks and so forth.

I believe that ended up as being considered, though I might be confusing this with advanced camera controls (positioning, so not camera drone constructs).

So .. basically options to strip UI, but do you mean in full, or selectively?

I'm not sure it's something I'd implement right off the bat, if I were NQ. I'd want people to first build up attachments to the game, before expanding features. That said, at some point it is something which will add a lot, and attract a lot.

Ah, that just somehow made me think of prefab constructs for rapid development and production ...

I've played/lived/worked EVE since well before beta, and ever after. I can understand how EVE is often used as a reference and comparison point for DU. For over 15 years since formal launch EVE has set the de facto standard in terms of environment, genre and gameplay. That said, while there are similarities the simple given facts that 1) NQ is in a position to learn from everything that has happened in the industry since that time, 2) can learn from mistakes made by CCP and 3) is able to set its own vision it follows that DU is not going to be EVE. I'm not even going into consequences of differences in venture development and funding. Not simply because the technology base is different, even if this already provides a different set of behavioural pathways within the environment. And also because NQ appears to favour the subscription + gametimecode model whereas CCP has chosen to go F2P in a race towards retirement and other plans. I do think that people with experience in sandbox games, including EVE, will have advantages that others without such an experience will lack. That said, this is not something NQ is unable to compensate for. I don't think people will ever stop comparing DU to EVE, there simply isn't that much available which shares the elements of science fiction, economics, space environment and sandbox. Is this a bad thing? Maybe, I can see it being irritating at times. But it also is a way to test vision and not repeat mistakes and avoid pitfalls. DU sharing many baseline concepts with EVE will automatically lead to similar types of stories and behaviour. That's hardly a bad thing. It's what people do in and with the sandbox that makes it grow. And let's be honest, EVE no longer is what it could have become. Once upon a time EVE was not simply a game, it was a sandbox of emergent gameplay. It was something of a virtual Frankenstein creation in its evolution, up to a certain point, becoming alive. But at some point the decision was made to no longer follow that road, for understandable reasons regardless of whether those were good or bad. With the adoption of that one roadmap and the revision of niche based feature sets and the introduction of F2P EVE set a different course. It's becoming a more stricht mechanisms based kindergarten. It's moving away from emergent gameplay. And that quite logically diminishes the value of generated stories and human interaction. It'll allow CCP to create an EVE which can stand up to the inevitable competition and bank on EVE while packaging it up. But it will also leave room for players who seek experiences and (the creation of) stories of more than just mechanically defined stimuli and boundaries. Not a bad thing for DU. DU can become anything really. Vision will define how it can evolve. NQ has a lot of options to avoid mistakes and stumbling blocks. That's a big advantage in its own right. Add to that how NQ's team is diverse in focus, and you get a pretty open visor while facing challenges and decisions. They've also hired Hrafnkell Oskarsson recently, an amazingly civil and smart guy who also brings his own practical experience. All in all it gives them a potential to really create a meaningful sandbox which players can take just about anywhere. Sure, the argument can be made that DU is getting somewhere slowly, and yes overall general experience with half made games and kickstarters in the industry isn't that pretty, but at the same time development is consistant. It demonstrates awareness of requirements and of vision. That sets it apart from others who stumble and fail. People aren't going to stop comparing DU to others. It's only human. It's not going to stop DU becoming something in its own right. It's been a long time since people with the affinity for general type and genre have had the opportunity to create in meaningful ways. That cements its potential.

Eh ... this has nothing to do with minority / majority consensus on how to design the game. As pointed out, what you envision in terms of boundaries and rules for behaviour and organisation already is possible. Within / with / by organisations and its members. You keep stepping out of the way yet you also keep coming back to this It makes me curious, do you feel that the sandbox concept might have an adverse effect on what you would like to see in a game? Or have you accepted that sandbox nature but find yourself looking for mechanisms / features which might enable you to structure an organisation along the lines of your ideas / wishes / ideal gameplay (which ideally could be multipurpose / reused for other purposes - like the vote mechanism discussed earlier)?

Ah, that makes me think back to old mines in EVE Online. At some point there was this dev with the idea of selfdestructing a ship causing a splash damage zone. Brilliant idea, but sadly we, well, kinda already went bonkers with mines themselves (players can and will go apeshit with anything) so they ended up tossing the idea and scrapping mines alltogether I'd put selfdestruct damage with the topic of ramming Either way, I do think that the concept of salvaging ought to be something founded on a shared tech base which enables salvaging as we think of it, but another tech branch would enable building sneak weapons that operate on similar principles. Robot sabotage kind of thing Oh well, I'm sure that at some point NQ will let us know how they want to approach these matters. In the mean time, considering that resources are as important as roles players may adopt I do think that there should be means to make use of both empty and wrecked constructs.

Always be careful in establishing analogies between the real and the virtual world. Yes, it is a sandbox, so it is a pressure cooker of human behaviour served with a sauce of environment and a few touches of mechanical spices. But the real world is already being made, and has been subject to that for a great while. This virtual world isn't even there yet, so choices for development paths remain. In regards to automation: 1. Effort makes for a deeper game experience 2. It promotes a lot of people towards teaming up 3. It stimulates others to invest in multiple accounts 4. The game is in its infancy so there is no real roadmap yet as to what players will be enabled to in regards to automation One of the potential pitfalls of DU is in its crafting / voxel system. In terms of implementation it attracts a lot of player types who lean towards solo / introverted gameplay. Good game design can overcome that, and DU is outlined to be pretty open and brutal so a lot of that can easily be overcome by means of positive stimuli for such player types towards multiplay / organisational play. Automation is a big part of discussions on that. But that is NQ's domain really. Their currently available statements and information on LUA scripting do appear to provide interesting opportunities in these regards. But it will be a fine line to walk between human engagement and automation of processes. Labour in DU strikes me as not so much a balance between the two, but a combination. I guess we'll find out somewhere during beta. The same is likely to apply to economics. But there it does get a bit more murky. Every game attracts abuse. DU will attract people who try to abuse the economics angle, and since NQ gets to learn from quite a few previous sandboxes and their historic challenges on these matters I'm getting the idea that economics is more likely to be a domain of teamwork, rather than individual + automation.

I do think you're on to something. It strimes me as taking lessons from both systems / games. EVE's got its issues with the push on buyer mechanisms (not just a skill thing, but also took the brakes of symptoms connected to economics of scale application, and it opened the doors for trading bots in never before seen ways). The old SWG had its own little stumbling blocks. From what I now understand I like the potential correlation between investment, maintenance and commercial activity and gameplay. I could be wrong, but I suspect that team based commercial activity might very well be more rewarding than individual activity. Not simply in terms of logistics and production. What I wonder about is the actual connectivity/visibility/hub mechanisms. That's still something which makes me wonder about some side effects from economies of scale.

Am I the only one seeing this topic thinking "boarding" --> "hit self destruct button" --> "gtfo" --> "then salvage"? Or building salvaging bots that leech on to someone's ship ...

I'd leave all that up to api/scripting support for out of game stuff. Third party apps, community integrations, etc. It's a hell of a lot of resource allocation for something which in games tends to give very little actual pull factors. Maybe it's me, but these thinks tend to be in-game currency sinks where there's general markets. I've never seen it produce meaningful actual added gameplay for longer than what it takes to transition for starter experience to organisation member. At that point things do become of importance, but they're out of game mechanisms.

It seems to me the debate in itself comes from gameplay expectations / desires from certain types of players. Part of the spectrum of human behaviour is to want safety, isolation, the ability to plant a flag and not relocate after building the house. From these types of perspectives it's only logical that a desire for resource regeneration would follow. But yeah, the volume of useable space and thus resources DU is to present at launch is staggering. Furthermore, the entire foundation is the idea to build up to going out there, something the game is set to not just cater, but stimulate. I don't see how people are going to get in trouble with predatory / normal human behaviour for quite a while. But I've seen in other games how strong the desire of player types can be to just carve out a niche and sit there until the end of days. Resource depletion is a fundamental requirement of any environment that seeks meaningful emergent gameplay. It's part of entropy concepts. Obvious comparison is EVE Online, which has no entropy concepts applied through game design. As a result, in terms of social psychology it remains a village in terms of demographics and geo-economics. Everything is a feeding system. When food gets scarce, people innovate, adapt, move or die. What I've read, seen and heard thusfar from DU/NQ appears to indicate that they get this challenge. The starter system isn't a place to call home, it's a kickstarter environment. Something to experiment, plunder and pillage, essentially until it either through growth becomes a pressure cooker or through entropy pushes people towards greener pastures. Combined with the lure and lore of prospects, obviously. Sure, people will end up stripping systems to the bone. Welcome to human nature. It's that which makes a sandbox real. Who knows, some people might carve out a territory and be resource/eco conscious. Others might set aside strategic deposits. Others might see others as resource reservoirs. For the most part people won't really care as long as there's triggers to explore, puzzle, build, team up, compete. That's game design. While DU thusfar is in an alpha state, what's visible currently does provide reasonable trust in vision on that game design to be inline with what it takes to make things, choices and actions have meaning. Resource regeneration? It's a seriously bad idea.

Matter of perspective. I find it easier, and more constructive, to follow a topic and the evolution of any discussion within, by using the quote function as provided by the forum itself. If you ever wanted another example of why any pursuit of virtual governance for individual perception is arbitrary, now you've got one.

quoting does have a purpose, besides that it's a matter of individual perspective. On top of that, it's handy for when people edit their posts ...

Bonobos impose taxes - it didn't start with homo sapiens

This thing strikes me as a classic case of "but I want to drive around / wear my captain's hat" versus technology paths in game. Considering the baseline tech available within DU any kind of planetary transportation is by default more efficient by air unless there is a treshold in regards to volume, and even that is theoretical. Why build a road when you can land anywhere. Why build a railroad when you can land anywhere. Why build a port when you can land anywhere. At each location of hub logistics there's an advantage in combining said hub with air/space based capabilities. One might argue that moving stupid amounts of resources would require a mechanism capable of moving such large volumes, traditionally the domain of sea / rail networks. Still nothing that can't just as easily go by air though. I'd say that land/sea elements are not needed. But people may want them and thus should be able to build them. I'd also say that efficiency arguments lean towards air elements. But people may want to rely on afk mechanisms we currently know nothing about so those might provide for land/sea options.

But you get quite a bit in return for that There's a causal relation between taxes and both economic and social development We often overlook that, primarily because taxes tend to be piled up constructs which become overly complicated turning things into a twisted game. In our out of game, there's a wide range of interesting correlations. I don't doubt there will be corporations which make use of taxation mechanisms. Ideology is nothing but another church after all, and ultimately there's bills. A corporation which focuses on defense or offense will end up with SRP mechanisms (ship replacement payout), money has to come from somewhere, and economies of scale are a factor. Contract payment, ransoms, ventures, tons of options. But it still comes down to governance of internal economics. DU is a petri dish of human behaviour, individual and organised. The more advanced the activity, the more complex the dependancies, the more important internal economics become. Whether we like it or not, hierarchy in organisation becomes a requirement. Social psychology dictates that this will be one of the lines of divide between types of corporations as players organisate them.

Script the pets, as in train them. Or build a repair bot. Even so, it's likely that any such thing can only do so much. The human element is a requirement.

Yes, we will see all sorts of human behaviour. Good and bad. Things will happen, people and organisations rise and fall, adapt and prosper or fall prey to themselves or others. The point of the sandbox is that this is exactly what is supposed to happen. But there is no correlation between sandbox gaming and product succes or failure. There's entirely different correlations at play there, for example developer or publisher not being in tune with state of gameplay, state of competition, making bad calls on advertising targets, screwing up in iteration cycles - etcetera. You can actually find a lot of research on these things. The sandbox is not focused on supremacy. As I said, it doesn't judge or secure or push. It just provides the arena. Inside that arena is where we get to want things. It's a lot like real life, where you have things you want, and thus things you need to do for it. For all of this you have dependencies. You share those with others. Together people make group decisions. In interaction with other groups they make decisions based on shared interests. Nothing secures any of this in any magical way. It just is what people make of it. I get the idea you are looking for something which isn't compatible with the sandbox concept. A gaming environment where a player can choose a type of gameplay and be secure in it because the game provides a top level security and freedom of choice mechanism. This is possible in games. But these are not sandbox games. You actually can get a lot, if not everything, of what you seem to want in a sandbox game. But it will require being part of a group construct where the same values and awareness of requirements for choice/safety are shared. A well organised group like that can provide a secured choice of gameplay, but it will always carry an activity based cost because in a sandbox the developer does not provide for this. Look on the bright side: exactly because the above means that any group is always at risk of at minimum competition - with groups who may not share the same values or awareness - any activity in such a group is going to be a lot more meaningful than in a non-sandbox game. When there is risk of cost people behave differently and appreciate activity and shared concepts a lot more. Look, it is perfectly human to want for some kind of status quo blanket. But that is by design not going to be the case in DU. But DU will provide you the means to make your own status quo blanket. At a cost, in competition. But because of that it becomes a lot more real. And DU provides a lot more room and opportunity to do these things. More so than other sandbox games.

It seems you're still trying to find some sort of non-sandbox mechanism to provide safety and security for a chosen type of gameplay under a flag of governance protecting said chosen type of gameplay. I am sorry, but I have tried to get the point across. It is not going to happen. That simply is not a debate. We do not get any choice in this. NovaQuark is not going to provide this for you - or anyone with any chosen type of gameplay. Here's your reality check: whether you like it or not in any sandbox game you have to deal with your own and other people's behaviour. Regardless of whether it is good, bad, happy or sad. The sandbox requires the full spectrum of human behaviour in order to provide opportunity for any type of human behaviour. There are going to be people who want to do good things. There are people who are going to want to bad things. Some will want to reap tears. Some will want to use you. Some will tempt you to use them. Others will build just because that makes them happy. Others will try to destroy just because that makes them happy. The sandbox is just like real life in terms of emergent gameplay. It doesn't protect or constrain. It's the choices and actions of people inside the sandbox which determine matters. Look, in some sandbox games I've built organisations from the ground up. Systems of governance, economics, logistics, diplomacy, strategy & tactics training to kill, teamwork to help starting players. In others I've built up teams to prey on the innocent by means of metagaming. In another I've done pretty much everything one could imagine, from replicating democracy among pixels turning it into tyranny (or vice versa) and harvesting the tears from those who just wanted to be left alone. The sandbox doesn't judge, protect or secure. It just provides the arena. Anything goes in it, only the developer sets any rules. I will agree that "corporation" as the default type of organisation sets limits. But I have already explained why that makes sense. This however does not prevent you from running a corporation or group of corporations the way you want it, the way that works best for you and likeminded people. But yes, in a sandbox you are always in potential competition and interaction.

Thing is, DU provides one organisation type, corporation. This is a form of organised economic activity and interaction. If DU were to provide a more generic type of player organisation it would be simpler to follow along your exploration. Now it is still possible within a corporation, even between corporations. But it will require a degree of roleplay, so to speak. DU puts a lot of emphasis on economics. Primarily because in terms of game constructs without some sort of guiding concept it is hard to kickstart a meaningful array of human interactions. In an ideal virtual world you wouldn't need that based on emergent gameplay, but a game is also a product so it has to make a profit. Also, it's very close to the most common / median average type of behaviour people are familiar with. Everybody's got to feed, every system is an exchange of energy, thus economics. Once this is established, room becomes available for different types of organisation, different forms, different goals. In a way it's a little bit of a catch22, since it doesn't fully match with human social psychology. But as I said, it's still a game and a product. From what you've written here, two types of mechanisms can be observed which independant of type, form or focus of organisation have merit to translate into game features & mechanisms because these are things which are commonly shared across at minimum the types of organisation. Voting Jobs We don't yet know how NQ will approach these things, but it is good to point out that there will be a demand among players for a mechanism which facilitates decision processes in a meaningful in game manner, and a mechanism players can use to assign/exchange tasks. Maybe they have already put this kind of thing on an internal roadmap. Maybe not. Part of me wonders whether the Lua scripting features will be restricted to voxel tech, or whether it'll allow or enable customisation of in game mechanisms. But it's all still within player organisations. There's no magic government or oversight construct other than NQ that would not break the sandbox. Here's a thought: what happens when people from one country find new land and are stimulated to explore it? Look at human history. They leave the old place, carve out their own niche, create their own systems. The old is marginalised, supplanted, ignored, and so forth. It'll take a bit of time, but the moment people start to build beyond their starting points is the moment those starting points, and anything connected with them (be it magical governance or anything else) becomes pretty much powerless. The people who stay in the old world end up equally powerless in the long run. In a sandbox construct the baseline is a selection of very very basic mechanisms. Because a sandbox doesn't provide meaningful gameplay unless the customers build up and organise the place Or choose to burn it down, this also works. Key concept: activity. Organisation isn't magic or self sustaining either Civilisation building? Let's look at human history on that as well. Civilisations are built on the ashes of previous iterations. By people. Not by a deus ex machina. No matter from what angle we approach the topic, it keeps coming back to the sandbox concept. Sandbox games succeed or fail by the activity of its players - introduce said deus ex machina and you undermine the impuls to be human in the sandbox.