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So you want players to specialise? How about this...


bleakcon

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A long time ago in a galaxy far far away was a game called Star Wars galaxies and it was epic, the crafting was just amazing.

 

What I am reminded of by a comment in another thread is this fact and how it could be the answer to the want by devs for players to specialise.

 

Here is how it worked

 

1. at the beginning of your journey if you want resources you had to scan for them, but that wasn't all, let's take iron as an example.

Let's say you wanted to make an engine, well if you wanted that engine to handle a high amount of thrust you could put crafting points into thrust, now the gain on that statistic was linked to the quality of the components, those components qualities were linked to where the crafting points were put into and the qualities of the materials they were made out of.

 

You ended up with something like this : 

 

base type: inorganic

type: mineral
name: Hematite

sub-type: Ion Axidite Hematite

Cold resistance: 100

Conductivity: 200

Durability: 566

Heat resistance: 1000

Malleability: 23

Overall quality: 599

Unit toughness: 300

 

 

There were a bunch of other stats that I don't remember depending on the type of resource. Some resources had a tendency towards having higher stats, such as copper having generally a high conductivity rating.

 

rating was from 1 - 1000 

 

How was this iron obtained? Well a bunch of intrepid miners scoured the galaxy and happened upon a hex that once scanned gave a scanner result with 30k iron with the above stats, great they thought some crafters will be interested in this, in fact one of them knew someone who wanted to build some engines and they figured this iron was pretty good for that. As the miners were able to triangulate the location of this vein they decided to hand mine it, mining units would take far too much time to set up and cost a ton of power.

 

These miners sold the iron to an intrepid crafter who happened to have stockpiled other similar resources with the intention of making some very specialised engines.....

 

Looking at our iron here we notice it has a high heat resistance, looks good for using for engines, maybe that gives us a good chance of producing engines with superior thrust! Only trouble is the unit toughness looks pretty bad, might mean if they get shot at the might pop pretty quickly eek.

 

Ok so you decide to use this hematite to make some engines, first you make the parts, perhaps engines consist of pipes, screws, combustion chamber or something.

You build each of these components and put points into maximising their resistance to heat, suddenly you find yourself with components which very high levels of heat resistance, great!

Next you move on to building the actual engine, you click start crafting and you decide this engine is going to be a monster of thrust, to hell with durability, if you get caught then you weren't thrusting hard enough...yikes.

 

So you put your first point into it and hit assign or whatever, the point is assigned and you get a message 'your attempt was ok', ok not bad thrust is at 400/1000, you put another point in, you get a message saying 'your attempt was a massive failure' oh dear your thrust just went went down to 390 because you got a little unlucky maybe or perhaps your crafting skills and implants weren't so great :(. To hell with it you try to assign all your points at once on thrust and you rolled big, 'your attempt was perfection itself' and you find your thrust is at 600/1000. Nice its slightly above average, wait though shouldn't that have turned out better?

You look around and you notice one of the components you worked with actually has a really low level of heat resistance and unit toughness, perhaps that unit toughness is required as it is the pipe and needs to deal with all the combustion (I don't know just roll with me here I am no rl engineer).

 

So you try again and this time your engine pops out at a whooping 800/1000 thrust but the other stats suck so this is a highly specialised engine.

 

You still think you can do better, you look at your exosuit and notice there are these nodes you can place skill implants in, some off the include +10 to crafting of engines, wow these give you more points and increase your chances of bette results, they are hugely expensive though (turns out they are found in ship wrecks across DU) and taking them out destroys them.

 

well now you have managed to pull a masterpiece out of your hat, a 900/1000 thrust engine, now the question is do you create it or do you use a blank schematic (currently sold by the bots but hopefully not for long) and write your prototype to this schematic, you decide to write it to the schematic, you then put the schematic into your machine. 

Of course the limitation is that you need the exact materials and components to continue using this schematic, if they are different by even a point or the resource has a different origin you are out of luck and you are back to the drawing boards, fortunately though the crafter had made enough quanta to afford to buy a new manual that was again looted from a ship wreck somewhere in the galaxy.......they bought the Advanced Military Engine, with this they could collect resources in the same manner through purchase or exploration and build an even thruster engine because it turns out the multiplier on thrust is 1.5 on this type of engine.


In this kind of system your resources are not just 'Hematite' but specialised forms of it, some items would need specifically named forms of hematite to craft, yes, this means that crafting isn't an easy thing to get into as you go up the higher tiers, but it stops it from being a case of stick x amount of stuff in to get y item out of it.

 

Instead players can play about with different attributes, perhaps one person specialises in fast, low yield lasers whilst another specialises in slow, powerful lasers, which one is better? Depends on what kind of radar you have on your ship, does it have a long range but a very slow refresh speed? better go for the repeating laser then, sure its going to cost you more power but at least you are likely to hit your target.

 

Finally mining becomes a little more fun, suddenly it becomes a bit of a hunt not just for megas but maybe even for that 10k hematite that has the 1000 unit toughness, it's not going to make an awful lot of voxels but damn the voxels it does make are going to be impressive armour-wise.

Also why not have hexes refresh their ores periodically, suddenly claiming a tile isn't so valuable just because it has a mega because it might be gone the next time the ores are updated, realistic? no but then this is a game so let's let it slide, obviously players will resort to claiming as many tiles as they can in order to be able to prevent others' from getting to decent resources but then that is where territory upkeep and warfare come in and need to be punishing to prevent this kind of choke hold.


 

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I played SWG but didn't do crafting. But shopping and buying for the shit you wanted to min/max was fun. Everyone I've ever talked to that was an industry type person that also played swg, says that even today it is hands down the best there has ever been. So I'd be down with it for sure. NQ doesn't have the ability to pull off anything even remotely close to SWG so dont get your Hope's up.

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2 hours ago, JohnnyTazer said:

I played SWG but didn't do crafting. But shopping and buying for the shit you wanted to min/max was fun. Everyone I've ever talked to that was an industry type person that also played swg, says that even today it is hands down the best there has ever been. So I'd be down with it for sure. NQ doesn't have the ability to pull off anything even remotely close to SWG so dont get your Hope's up.

 

My hopes were probably way above the mark when i mentioned stats on materials and random seeding of resources over time.

I just think that this change, whilst being a change that is absolutely a change for industry and miners will have a net positivie effect on seemingly dispirate things like PvP, after all if Ion has a great spawn of hematite for engines or weapons or whatever, it will need to be transported, opening up the type of emergent, player-driven gameplay we all want.

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Sounds really fun, but how does it fit into a market orientated game?  It's easy to make a market where you have things like 'basic engine', 'advanced engine', etc, but when all the engines are different, do I sell 'basic engine 800' and someone else sells 'basic engine 802'?  How does the game manage the sell orders for all these things sensibly?

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59 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

Sounds really fun, but how does it fit into a market orientated game?  It's easy to make a market where you have things like 'basic engine', 'advanced engine', etc, but when all the engines are different, do I sell 'basic engine 800' and someone else sells 'basic engine 802'?  How does the game manage the sell orders for all these things sensibly?

 

ya there was more "searching" in the Bazaar in SWG.  But thats fine, putting together your builds, with the stats you wanted with, and how good they were, for what you could afford was fun, and made things unique. talking about armors and weapons and stats with it.  Had multiple armors, like leggings, shoes, chest, helmet, etc. 

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1 hour ago, JohnnyTazer said:

 

ya there was more "searching" in the Bazaar in SWG.  But thats fine, putting together your builds, with the stats you wanted with, and how good they were, for what you could afford was fun, and made things unique. talking about armors and weapons and stats with it.  Had multiple armors, like leggings, shoes, chest, helmet, etc. 

It's probably fine until you try to do it at scale.  Trying to make 500 ships from a blueprint might be really annoying if you have to try to get 500 of the same parts or have a way to switch out the parts for what you have, etc.  Perhaps that's the way it should be though, I do like the idea that my ship would be unique and become more so over time as things break and get replaced, even compared with other people who bought the same ship as me.

 

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The issue with doing something like that is that it will be nearly impossible to implement with the markets, as you now have thousands of different types of items in the place of one, so it becomes super complex, and placing elements will become a hassle as you have to go into your inventory each time you place a slightly different element. It would also add a lot more memory usage, as you now would have to either have an huge item index that would take a while to run or a lot more memory per element. It would be very expensive to try implement this, and adding stuff for the developers is probably not the best idea at the moment 

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4 hours ago, _Kiwi_ said:

The issue with doing something like that is that it will be nearly impossible to implement with the markets, as you now have thousands of different types of items in the place of one,

At least not with this complexity. But it could be possible with a simplified system. Just allow for a limited number of qualifiers for each item type that are shown in the search results. The item type would still be a Basic Space Engine L (for example) but the result would not only show the prices and locations but also the individual stats like maximum thrust, fuel cosuption and so on and you could sort the result by these qualifiers. That should be possible without fundamental changes to the current market system.

 

4 hours ago, _Kiwi_ said:

so it becomes super complex, and placing elements will become a hassle as you have to go into your inventory each time you place a slightly different element.

That could be a bit easier with the possibility to group items of the same type in the inventory and to select the group instead of the element type.

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4 hours ago, _Kiwi_ said:

The issue with doing something like that is that it will be nearly impossible to implement with the markets, as you now have thousands of different types of items in the place of one, so it becomes super complex, and placing elements will become a hassle as you have to go into your inventory each time you place a slightly different element. It would also add a lot more memory usage, as you now would have to either have an huge item index that would take a while to run or a lot more memory per element. It would be very expensive to try implement this, and adding stuff for the developers is probably not the best idea at the moment 


Agreed it's not a trivial change and there are a large number of technical considerations that might not be easily implemented, no doubt about that.

Market wise - SWG is about 20+ years old and they had a better set of filters than this game does, I can see it being quite simple to implement a filter for certain stats ( > 800 thrust ).

As for the hassle in inventory, yeah that would get extremely annoying - important to note we have this very same issue already when it comes to items with different dynamic data so this is a problem they should solve anyway, I'd suggest a way to auto switch to using an item of similar type with a message popping up letting you know (with the option to disable this message, message should probably be more of a passing message on the screen rather than something you need to click ok on every time).

 

As for memory, yes it is going to take more space up in a database for sure and the extra joining on the tables may end up being problematic in some cases, really depends on how they have gone about structuring their DB and how often they access data in certain scenarios.

Currently we have similar issues, especially on L cores where we have had to resort to layering multiple wing M's (stupid amounts of at that) and engines are just incredibly ridiculous in terms of the amount required for large haulers.

There are multiple issues with this: 

1. lag, not scaleable if the server has to recalculate a ships lift every time a wing is destroyed or its thrust every time a engine is destroyed when talking amount a large number of ships containing a large number of components.

2. design of ships becomes a real pain as functionality dominates form (big walls of engines that no one wants to see)

 

What if this change also changed the way in which people deal with ship design? 

What if players would need fewer components for ships?
What if a 900 thrust Basic Atmos engine L was equivalent to say 9 engines in its current iteration, what if the 300 Unit toughness meant that each time it was shot it would lose unit toughness, let's say that if you lose 100 points in a battle you just lost 33% of your engines effectiveness until repaired as the durability of the final product was 300/300, if it had been crafted with durability in mind then losing 100 points given it had 1000 durability would equate to a 10 percent loss in effectiveness.

Perhaps this has a nice side effect of improving ship design and due to the idea that you can't just stockpile 10k engines 20k wings and whatever else is needed to build that ship what instead happens is ship builders look for the next supply of newer parts from specialised crafters that they can use to replace stock they are running low on or to create different variants on their initial design.

Sure this idea to reduce component numbers doesn't outright solve the problem of increased memory usage, it just mitigates it but also has the benefit of providing some more depth of gameplay - hell what do I know about what they have under the hood? Nothing, this could be a non-starter but I honestly believe SWG had the most engaging resource gathering / crafting system every seen in an MMORPG or in any game I know of tbh and it seems like for all the potential problems and challenges it will cause it might very well be an answer to a plethora of issues too.

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People are over complicating it. 
 

I don’t see why you wouldn’t just have a blueprint that has 3 x L engines and four types of voxels and you fulfill your order with whatever you want. 
 

3 L atmos? Ok. I’m going to use advanced manouvre engines. 
4 types of voxel? Ok i’m going to use ultra-lithium, this carbon fibre with boosted heat resistance, advanced duralumin and some highly electrically resistant pink plastic. 
 

Basically, the blueprint would not have any ranks or stats associated with it. You would just build the blueprint with whatever grade part you want/have. 
 

I always wondered why tf you needed to specify the grade of parts in the bloop itself. 
or even just skip the bits you don’t have. Like. Nah... I don’t need the windows or.   I’ll just build the bloop without the warp drive and put that in when I can afford it. 
 

god damn it! I’ve gone and given suggestions when I said I wasn’t going to bother any more!! 

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58 minutes ago, GraXXoR said:

People are over complicating it. 
 

I don’t see why you wouldn’t just have a blueprint that has 3 x L engines and four types of voxels and you fulfill your order with whatever you want. 
 

3 L atmos? Ok. I’m going to use advanced manouvre engines. 
4 types of voxel? Ok i’m going to use ultra-lithium, this carbon fibre with boosted heat resistance, advanced duralumin and some highly electrically resistant pink plastic. 
 

Basically, the blueprint would not have any ranks or stats associated with it. You would just build the blueprint with whatever grade part you want/have. 
 

I always wondered why tf you needed to specify the grade of parts in the bloop itself. 
or even just skip the bits you don’t have. Like. Nah... I don’t need the windows or.   I’ll just build the bloop without the warp drive and put that in when I can afford it. 
 

god damn it! I’ve gone and given suggestions when I said I wasn’t going to bother any more!! 

can you expand on this, my brain is tiny and I would like to understand your idea.

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14 hours ago, Zeddrick said:

Sounds really fun, but how does it fit into a market orientated game?  It's easy to make a market where you have things like 'basic engine', 'advanced engine', etc, but when all the engines are different, do I sell 'basic engine 800' and someone else sells 'basic engine 802'?  How does the game manage the sell orders for all these things sensibly?

I replied to someone else with an answer of sorts to this and really for me it boils down to a 20 year old game managed to achieve a similar market structure with 1000s of players on a server...the technology to make the market work in a user friendly way is there for sure, this is a deeper concern of the UI itself not exactly being very user-friendly.

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1 hour ago, GraXXoR said:

People are over complicating it. 
 

I don’t see why you wouldn’t just have a blueprint that has 3 x L engines and four types of voxels and you fulfill your order with whatever you want. 
 

3 L atmos? Ok. I’m going to use advanced manouvre engines. 
4 types of voxel? Ok i’m going to use ultra-lithium, this carbon fibre with boosted heat resistance, advanced duralumin and some highly electrically resistant pink plastic. 
 

Basically, the blueprint would not have any ranks or stats associated with it. You would just build the blueprint with whatever grade part you want/have. 
 

I always wondered why tf you needed to specify the grade of parts in the bloop itself. 
or even just skip the bits you don’t have. Like. Nah... I don’t need the windows or.   I’ll just build the bloop without the warp drive and put that in when I can afford it. 
 

god damn it! I’ve gone and given suggestions when I said I wasn’t going to bother any more!! 

Reading is hard, I get you now; yeah why not, I mean why they don't allow you to do this I don't know only thing I can think of is the placement of things after the fact can be a real pain but then maybe you should be able to just be able to redeploy the blueprint with the inclusion of the new part without having to free place it or something.

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It would be nice to be able to enhance elements, rather than just stacking dozens of them. As for database, what would take up more, a ship with one hundred stacked wings, or a ship with four or six wings which have had a lot of work done on them to make them preform the same as the 100. 

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10 hours ago, CoyoteNZ said:

It would be nice to be able to enhance elements, rather than just stacking dozens of them. As for database, what would take up more, a ship with one hundred stacked wings, or a ship with four or six wings which have had a lot of work done on them to make them preform the same as the 100. 

Sure, you are right, 100 elements would take up more data than a few of the other elements. One normal element should take about 14 or 15 bytes and an enhanced one would take about 20 bytes if you assume 5 new characteristics with less than 255 different values. But one assumption you make is wrong. People won’t jus use ships with less engines, but rather they will make more powerful ships with a similar number of engines as before. People will always want make things easier on themselves, so making things easier will just make them push the boundaries of easy

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On 4/23/2021 at 10:48 AM, _Kiwi_ said:

Sure, you are right, 100 elements would take up more data than a few of the other elements. One normal element should take about 14 or 15 bytes and an enhanced one would take about 20 bytes if you assume 5 new characteristics with less than 255 different values. But one assumption you make is wrong. People won’t jus use ships with less engines, but rather they will make more powerful ships with a similar number of engines as before. People will always want make things easier on themselves, so making things easier will just make them push the boundaries of easy


I agree I think my assumption was based on the fact that engines would require a little more effort to make but that itself doesn't solve the issue, I guess that is where things like power consumption and other limiting factors yet in the game play a part?

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I dont know op...

 

I go to the grocery store several days a week and i dont really feel the need or the joy to socialize. 

 

Ppl already buy engines via market without even knowing who is the seller. How would it be different from your extra buffed materials? 

 

Also, how good is socialization if it is forced this way? 

Will it be more than? :

- Got 100l of iron at level of quality X? 

- Sure, its 20000k

- Tnx cya

 

To me the solution is NPCs. 

The best socialization is the one that ppl opt in. 

Groups of players planing to take out a NPC fortress would be opting in. And would willingly socialize. 

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