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Salvaging - Nerfed as a casualty or by intention?


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Hey everybody!

 

This post is about the sad state of the "Scavenging" "Profession" in DU currently - resulting from the gimped status of salvaging gameplay. Even though not documented, salvaging gameplay changed drastically in the last few days/couple weeks. While we, the players exploring and salvaging crashed ships and left alone static cores, were able to make somewhat of a living from exploring and salvaging until about a couple weeks ago, now, with the undocumented and unannounced changes to salvaging gameplay, we are no longer able to sustain this lifestyle.

 

Previously, when a gold digger on Lacobus overloaded their ship and crashed back down on the planet trying to make their way out of the atmosphere, we were able to benefit from that. We were able to find, locate and salvage the ship as well as reap in the rewards. Now though, there is neither a risk for ignorant players overloading their ships or carelessly flying and crashing into everything anymore. We cannot claim cores anymore that were destroyed (only in the sad, completely avoidable, tiny bit of pvp space we have left) - only cores that were abandoned by the owner by intention.

 

Here's the story unfolding pieced together from the DU Discord (just search for salvaging and get an impression of the confusion and frustration due to these unannounced and undocumented changes) :

 

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Scavenging used to be a viable way of living. And a nice way to combine flying, exploring and making some money to pay for the fuel and upkeep. We are now forced into digging in mines underground instead of flying about and exploring this world you created for us to explore and conquer.

 

I'd like to end this post with a proposal and at the same time ask for feedback from the fellow DU player base:

  • Constructs which core get destroyed should be salvageable by anybody in general (on planets/moons and in space) - with the only exceptions being:
    • On Sanctuary - cause it's the "safe zone" by definition and a place were no bad things should ever happen to you
    • Within the wider "safe zone" (as announced by JC in recent interviews) - namely Alioth, Thades and Madis - but only on market tiles or your own/your org tiles - your destroyed construct should be salvageable by anybody on tiles of others (not yours or your orgs) and unclaimed tiles

 

There should be no need for the owner to abandon a destroyed core/construct in order to make it salvageable by others taking above proposal into account. This mechanic takes scavenging/salvaging out of the game as a "profession". It takes the primarily reason to play the game away from me and a whole lot of others.

 

"Please fix" - as they say....

 

Best regards - former scavenger,

Bobbylord

 

 

 

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I hope they bring salvaging back to the way it was or make it better. People who make dumb mistakes like loading a ship too much and crashing should be punished for it. Now it’s pretty much safe haven anywhere and there is no risk involved at all it seems, I enjoyed finding random cores that have been lost/abandoned or crashed due to people’s mistakes. It was an exciting experience to find ships and being able to claim them for keeps or parts/salvage/money. Please bring back this mechanic to the game that I’m sure more than just a few people enjoy

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I think the changes are good. At least in the safe zone you should be able to crash without having to fear that someone will steal your ship. 

A compromise would be to have at least a few hours to repair after a crash before everyone can repair it, at least in the safe zone.

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3 hours ago, merihim said:

I think the changes are good. At least in the safe zone you should be able to crash without having to fear that someone will steal your ship. 

A compromise would be to have at least a few hours to repair after a crash before everyone can repair it, at least in the safe zone.

I think the 3 planet safe zone should just be safe from being shot at, a crashed ship should be claimable. But I like the idea of a compromise in the 3 planet safe zone, say a 2 hour hour window to reclaim then any one can attempt to salvage it.

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This is a fiddly topic, as there are issues with things like people throwing walls of glass up (there are trolls out there than think it a good use of 7$ to greif until they get banned) or the terrain on Ion spontaneously loading mountains in to the same space you are currently flying through as you try to land. 

Sanctuary and Alioth should retain ownership for a large period as these are the starting areas for new players, perhaps two weeks, as it easily permits time to recover, but allows salvage on things when people crash and then quit or for some other reason dont come to re-collect it. Thadies and Madis probably need the same as it provides time for new players doing their first interplanetary run in the safe zone time to get back to their stuff after probably slamming in to a planet at top speed with their only interplanetary ship.

Other planets in the system should give you a few hours so you have time to contact an admin to deal with griefers, with the caveats that this grace-period be removed when the safe-zones are taken from those planets as it will officially be open pvp, and that there be a universal 24hr grace-period after any patch deployment to deal with bugs.

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Although it is understandable the beta status of the game and NQ trying to retain as many users (that cannot fly properly) as possible, it is a really discouraging change and more discouraging is the fact that the changes were not in any patch notes.

 

Salvaging was a profession for a few and a nice cherry on top of flying for two hours to opposite side of the planet, you never know what you might see and get, that's the thrill! And now, salvaging is pretty much picking up after devs who cannot clean the space from the constructs that were abandoned because you know, deal with it, we got a few more things to retro-break.

 

This game of hours long mining and "creativity" needs a bit of thrill, of adrenaline, and boxes of voxels pew-pewing each other isn't that much of PvP as one would expect. That treasure hunt was one of a few alternatives even for planet dwellers, we need it back!

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Update from Discord:

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Don't let the topic die on discord, streams and social media. We need an official statement from NQ that this will be addressed.

 

Thanks,

Bobbylord

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I enjoyed coming across wrecked or abandoned cores and stuff. It made 'exploring' worth a piece of salt in the 'safe zones' (namely alioth and sanctuary). Granted most the salvage I got in sanctuary was by newbs who had no idea how to either A: fix their broken ship, or B: remove their static cores. So I was just doing them a service by cleaning it up for them.

 

Not a fan of the pansy-assed silent nerf to salvaging.

 

Bring it back, I like the proposal in the OP (to compromise for the newb-moon).

 

I'd like to add: Wrecked ships at markets will become free range in an hour or two. All that smoke and debris needs to get cleaned up, and no one should be allowed to just leave junk there.... in any kind of zone.

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To me this says there is no risk to test flying a ship, flying a risky heavy load or even just going around the planet casually. The owner might endure time sinks to repair their ship, build a new one to fly to the crash, having to walk to it, etc.... and thats sort of content, I guess. Unfortunately, not being able to salvage a crashed ship is Anti-Emergent Gameplay. I strongly disagree with this. A salvager has to HOPE that someone gets so upset they abandon their crash or that its worth so little they dont care and abandon. The frequency of that happening is a tiny fraction of the frequency of crashes in general and so I view it as Anti-Emergent Gameplay. NQ consciously chose to significantly reduce the opportunities to salvage ships and that is in conflict with the things they say on stream... stream after stream. I mean, even if someone crashes they have an opportunity to go try and beat salvagers which they will likely win every time except crashes at markets. It's not like its a lopsided "fight".

 

I don't like to throw stones at NQ on the regular outside of satirical meme'ing .... but this one is really frustrating.

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I'm guessing it's because people were building terrain walls and players wouldn't load them in fast enough before crashing into them. So I don't disagree with NQ for now, but outside of any safe zone it should be possible to salvage ships damaged by crash, or maybe even after a grace period if it happens in a safe zone.

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I agree that we want more salvage/scavenge as a gameplay mechanic and that it needs to be more interesting than the current state of affairs.

 

However.. the game still has a number of bugs, frame rate issues, slow load-in issues, and other things which can result in an "undeserved" crash.  Until these are resolved, at least to the point where they are very infrequent, then I don't think we can expand the salvage/scavenge mechanic.

 

However, once we reach that point...

 

Sanctuary should not allow salvage of anything that hasn't been intentionally abandoned - or abandoned due to the player cancelling their account.  If a player goes idle, their tile etc remains theirs indefinitely.  If they crash, they are the only one who can repair it.

 

I don't think we need "special case" rules for salvage inside or outside the safe zone - however as you read the ideas below you will see that simply by being a safe zone these "special" rules will fall out of the general rules outlined below.

 

I think constructs (static or dynamic) on a claimed tile should not be salvageable.
However.. in the future when we have ground warfare a claimed tile should transition between claimed (original owner) -> contested (all) -> claimed (new owner) and salvage rights would be with the owner, or free-for-all once the tile is contested.  So, as you attack the defenders can salvage/repair and you cannot until you do sufficient damage to reach contested, then they, you, and any other vultures/crows on the edges of the contest can salvage, until you take full control - at which point everything that remains is yours.

 

On unclaimed tiles there should be a grace period of 1-3 hours during which no salvage is possible. 
After this, it's free-for-all.  This makes your first long distance slow-boat trip to a new planet a risk, and exciting, and gives salvagers a reason to hang out on these destinations just waiting for fresh meat.  During the 15 minute claim timer the tile would be considered claimed for the purposes of this rule - so taking a TCU with you means that if you survive the crash you can claim the (probably rubbish) tile to secure your ship.

 

I would like to see new radar indicators for "wrecked" constructs which have exceeded this 1-3 hour grace period, so we can scout for them, write lua to help, etc etc.

 

I think that if a player has been idle from the game for too long, their assets should be calculated and their account credited with this quanta - then their in game tiles and constructs left in game but "abandoned".  This will provide a steady supply of things to salvage.

 

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This game has too many care bear builder types to have any hardcore aspect, I only imagine the amount of crying NQ had to tolerate from idiots who crashed and thought they should be safe from their own stupidity even on Sanctuary... sometimes I have the urge to start a game dev company and just say "fuck you guys, I am building a hardcore game that I would like to play" and just do it, NQ is just not cut out for it.

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This is a real shame, I had no idea this had been *changed*. 

 

Smashed cores on Sanctuary and Alioth should have a timer of maybe 1 or 2 days before they're salvageable, everywhere else maybe instant maybe an hour.

 

The problem is griefers will build invisible glass walls for us all to crash into. In which case, make static cores non-collidable like trees, unless you own it/have landing/docking permissions, until Atmo PvP is ready. Once we can shoot all the grief walls, collision can go back in. It'll be weird, but it's better to have the salvaging mechanic than not. 

 

Salvaging should be a tent pole feature in a game like this.

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23 minutes ago, MalphasWats said:

The problem is griefers will build invisible glass walls for us all to crash into. In which case, make static cores non-collidable like trees

If they did this for anything over 100-200m in height, that would work quite well I think.

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Something that I don't think that NQ considered when making this change is the ease at which players can now circumvent the core number limits. just abandon any cores you aren't using on your own terri and the repair them when you need them.

 

thus having unlimited cores deployed with only the need to repair them to use.

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Completely agree. Safe zone or no - it should be up to players to design their ships around their flying capabilities or accept the risk vs. reward if they overload their ship. If your game crashes, your ship stops anyway. To date I have yet to salvage a single ship, so I am by far biased in this assessment as this was never a source of income for me - but removing such features and basic elements of risk is a major step backwards in the game.

As for "griefers building invisible walls" - you guys do realise that radars exist and you can set them to show you static cores right? Removing features and limiting gameplay should never be an option or a consideration in my humble opinion. As long as players have reasonable means to circumvent it - which in this case there is - NQ needs to let us players figure out how to interact with each other and stop trying to micro-manage and social engineer the community. I would far rather deal with griefers in the game than the developers neutering the gameplay or setting arbitrary rules around how the griefers grief me. 

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I've posted an upvote suggestion regarding the Scavenging/Salvaging suggestion in this thread. This is the second time I post this (I posted it on Friday, 6th of November the first time) on upvote - the first post was deleted without comment (even though I left a proper Email address I received no feedback or reasoning at all).

 

Let's see if it will be approved this time and if NQ allows us to at least vote for our future in DU.

 

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3 hours ago, Bobbylord said:

I hope this is a joke and not meant to compensate for crippling the Scavenging "profession"... sad times....

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Yeah,  it sounds ridiculous to spawn shipwrecks if there are real player shipwrecks lying around. It goes against their catchphrase. "A persistent single-server universe, Entirely built and driven by players"

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On 11/9/2020 at 8:31 AM, Cheval said:

Yeah,  it sounds ridiculous to spawn shipwrecks if there are real player shipwrecks lying around. It goes against their catchphrase. "A persistent single-server universe, Entirely built and driven by players"

Exactly.

 

While its 'nice' to have some game provided massive shipwrecks that are half buried in the ground and all for better atmosphere ... but so few, and like ores, finite... they will all vanish in short order, and that 'feature' will be null and void again.

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