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The Big Red Arrow


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8. Will asteroid mechanics still put a huge red arrow over your head by broadcasting the position through the universe, removing any need for PvPers to put effort into finding those who go out and find asteroids?

To clarify, some asteroids will be in the PvP zone and some won’t. Asteroids in the PvP zone will have higher chances of including higher-tier ore and, as such, will be more valuable. But asteroids in safe zones should be worth your while, too. 

 

There will be a countdown between the time an asteroid is discovered by a player and the moment when its location is broadcast to other players. (Currently, the gap is four hours but this may change once we get feedback from players.) It shouldn’t be enough to completely deplete an asteroid of all its ore, but it should be enough to mine all the good stuff first. Once the location is publicized, it’s up to you if you want to stick around to finish mining the asteroid or move away before the pirates show up. 

 

We think this will provide interesting collaboration mechanics (mining while others protect the miners, for example) and, yes, additional PvP opportunities. We don’t think it will become an easy targeting system for pirates, though, as there’s no guarantee miners will still be on site by the time they arrive after learning of an asteroid location. 

 

Just answering YES would have been sufficient here.. No need for putting is so many words to try and hide the actual answer.

 

I am wondering WHY this choice is made, what makes you think it is needed for PVP players to be handed potential targets without the need for effort or investment? It makes no sense at all. What this means is that PVP players can just sit and wait until an asteroid location is "broadcast" and then go there to maroon anyone still mining and possibly catch anyone coming to see is there is any left overs.. No skill or investment required to shoot a stationary miner's ship to bits while they are mining and leave them stranded.

 

I know it will be dead easy to work around this mechanic. The point is though that it is just so ill conceived to hand potential targets to players with no requirement to put in any effort. This feels like an attempt to force feed content.

 

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@NQ-Deckard .. Some additional questions ..

 

1. Will asteroid voxels be destructible or if not,  would weapons pass through them (no LoS requirement for targeting)?

2. Will it be possible to place a static construct on asteroids?

3. Can constructs placed on an asteroid be weaponised?

4. Do asteroids despawn once mined?

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2 hours ago, Jake Arver said:

@NQ-Deckard .. Some additional questions ..

 

1. Will asteroid voxels be destructible or if not,  would weapons pass through them (no LoS requirement for targeting)?

2. Will it be possible to place a static construct on asteroids?

3. Can constructs placed on an asteroid be weaponised?

4. Do asteroids despawn once mined?

well, we actually already know the answer to some of these questions.

2) The asteroids around thades need space cores to build on them, because although they are technically moons they have no territories, so you can probably assume the same rules apply to the asteroids that will be deep in space.

3) yes, not just on asteroids but on any construct in general. You can test this out in game if you place gunner chairs and weapons onto a space territory. they can lock onto targets and everything. (although, there isn't much of a point in doing this anyway since dynamic cores do the same thing with the huge advantage of being able to move)

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Yeah i don't think i'm a fan of this idea.

 

It seems like they are trying to force some kind of battle royale situation where all the people who want to shoot at each other get dumped into the same area and blast the crap out of each other.  Honestly that's fine, i just don't think it should be lumped in with asteroid mining.

 

Usually i'm the first person to say that good gameplay is more important then "realism", but i'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this one.  Who is broadcasting the location?  is your own ship ratting you out? is the asteroid trying to defend itself?  Is Aphelia just bored and trying to make us kill each other?

 

What if instead of every single asteroid that gets discovered, being broadcast to ever player in the game.  Maybe once a day or once every few hours Aphelia broadcasts the location of a high value asteroid, that's somewhere in PVP space.  And then everyone can go all crazy trying to get there first and fight over it.

 

 

 

 

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The "red arrow" is in typical NQ fashion a poor mans version of territory war.

Quick and easy to implement, but riddled with balancing issues. Just the kind of solution NQ loves..

 

A: You are going to have to use resources finding and scanning the asteroids, mine the resources within a time limit and then transport ore while protecting yourself from attacks.

B: Just sit back and wait for the notification on where you should attack.

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broad casting asteroids sounds like a bad idea in general

scanning system with a mix of real live skills ( know how to) and ingame character skills would be great to get a hint on an asteroids position.

maybe even with deviation, so that finding them could lead to an actual challenge for both miners and hunters, where the hunters have no guarantee that there is something to shoot and loot.

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The first version will be terrible. 

 

They will I’ll put something in the test server to play with, but they won’t put everything in as they want a surprise on patch day

 

People will give lots of feedback, none of it will be taken into account for the first version as it’s already pretty much set by the time it makes it to test server

 

some causal with only two or three hours of game a session will find one an hour before he is finished. Figures well at least I’ll get one hour to mine

 

he will get there and find that either the scanner range is way to large, five other people are already there and it has been mined out, or a pirate found it and is shooting miners from 2km away as they approach 

 

NQ will spawn one astroid a day and give themselves a tick on the front page for new feature....

 

 

 

 

.... or they could do it great; but I’m guessing quite a few patch’s before they get it right

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While the whole "broadcast the position throughout he universe"  is a terrible idea in itself, it is not hard to work around. You can just fly to the asteroid with material for an XS construct, including storage, in your pocket, exit your cheap ship in space in case you get locked up and "fall/walk" to the asteroid without the risk of being shot, once on the asteroid dig a hole and set up the "base" underground.. scan and start mining. Wait for the hype to blow over and pirates to move to the next location to then bring in an alt with a ship to transport the ore to and be on your way. There is no AvA combat and no fall damage so as soon as you are out of your ship, you are basically untouchable.

 

The point here, I guess, is that NQ is still building a game on a broken core with lots of holes and incomplete loops.

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I also support the above said and think it should be a fair race. So miners should have to search for asteroids so pirates should too. I also assume finding the asteroids won't be too hard and scanning and mining should take long enough for even the laziest pirate to arrive or camp the most likeable exit routes. If they want to strenghten PvP they could also introduce a special occasion and not make the future of mining the (most profitable and seemingly easiest) occasion for piracy

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Oof.

 

“Phase one.  Placeholder. Early version.” 
 

these phrases scare me. Elite dangerous, for example still has dozens of “Phase one, Placeholder, Early version” mechanics in the game that were introduced 5 or more years ago and we’re never updated.

 

wings, multicrew, powerplay, surface mining, SRV driving.  Just some underdeveloped features I picked off the top of my head. 

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Even though it may be a wobbly mechanic, let's give it a chance. We are starting from scratch for the moment.

 

Then the 4 hour delay is a deceptively safe delay, the goal of PvP players will be to attack you before the end of this timer. Of course they will take a look once the red arrow is in place, but the interest is to catch players before the game tells them "be careful we must leave I give everyone the position" when they are in full extraction job and full pocket.

 

Overall I don't worry too much about our PvE friends, it will certainly have the ability to warp inexpensively to the nearest planet.

 

For the moment the situation and the question will rather be: "you find it normal that a PvE player can escape effortlessly from a confrontation in a PvP zone?"

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On 7/11/2021 at 4:25 PM, Jake Arver said:

I know it will be dead easy to work around this mechanic. The point is though that it is just so ill conceived to hand potential targets to players with no requirement to put in any effort. This feels like an attempt to force feed content.


There is important context here.

 

In ideal word we can imagine asteroid mining happening in some sort of asteroid field, where thousands of them floating, waiting to be found, scanned, minded, contested etc organic way, probably with some sort of respawn.

 

Yet, NQ on course to minimize any voxel-changing mining (cost cutting), so they absolutly not want people doing a lot of such mining (that will totaly happen with actual huge asteroid belt, especialy, god forbid, with any ship-based mining tools). So they squezeed whole feature to this, where they can conrollably drop minimum ammount of entities, and activity with them produce minimum money leaking.

 

So, yeah, its even whithout any pun, as said above, poor man solution. But I guess this will be now standard mode of desicion making. 

 

 

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On 7/13/2021 at 8:53 PM, le_souriceau said:

In ideal word we can imagine asteroid mining happening in some sort of asteroid field, where thousands of them floating, waiting to be found, scanned, minded, contested etc organic way, probably with some sort of respawn.

To do that system they could let you mine any asteroids you feel like, but 24hrs after people put holes in an asteroid, it collided with a different one and destroys itself and all its tunnels from the database. If the field ever got depleted they could have a game event of a small stray moon drifting towards the field, and after a week it collides, kills any bases left on it and respawns the field of asteroids ?

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