DEVBLOG: TRA$H TO TREASURE

[NQ-Wanderer]

Wallet feeling a little light lately? Get ready to remedy that when the Panacea update hits, bringing with it two lucrative, quanta-producing possibilities: space wrecks and inactive asset requisitioning (IAR).

 

SPACE WRECKS

 

You’re going about your business, flying through space from one market to another or heading out to join some friends when your radar unexpectedly reveals something. Curious, you move closer to investigate and find wreckage. There’s no indication of who left it behind or why. Finders keepers, right? It’s yours now. And you’ve got some choices to make.

 

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

Will you: 

• salvage the ship for materials and elements?
• tokenize and sell the whole ship?
• sell the information about where the wreck is located?
• create a mission to get someone else to salvage it?

The decision is all up to you.

 

RADAR AND RARITY

No special equipment is needed to locate these space wrecks, your standard radar is enough to detect them.

They will spawn randomly throughout Helios. There are five tiers of rarity, with lower-tier wrecks with low-value contents spawning at a higher frequency. The highest-tier wrecks will be harder to find; those who discover and harvest them will be rewarded with high-value materials and elements.

 

INACTIVE ASSET REQUISITIONING

 

This system is being introduced to address one of the chief complaints we’ve heard from Noveans, namely abandoned constructs cluttering up the universe, especially in public markets.

 

The purpose of IAR is to:

• create salvaging opportunities for players around the game world.
• ensure cleanliness and performance around markets and other Aphelia zone hot spots.
• clean up older, unowned constructs.

 

In other words, IAR has the potential to create a less cluttered environment for everyone and a fatter wallet for you.

 

ABANDONED CONSTRUCTS DEFINED

Players with a subscription, even if they have not logged in for a while, are in no danger of having their constructs flagged as “abandoned”, with the exception of constructs parked in Aphelia territory as noted below.

 

In effect, constructs belonging to unsubscribed users and not on their owners’ sanctuary zones will eventually lose their ownership, putting them in an abandoned state and making them vulnerable to be salvaged by other players. Likewise, constructs owned by an organization will lose their ownership when the org’s last remaining legate ends their subscription.

 

During the unsubscribe process, players will be reminded that their constructs will be in danger of becoming abandoned. When the constructs lose ownership, a blueprint will be placed in the owner’s inventory should they choose to return to Helios at a later date.

 

TIME’S TICKING 

When an account becomes inactive due to a canceled subscription, a countdown will begin on all constructs belonging to that account. After a period of time, those constructs will lose their ownership and other players will be able to salvage or capture them.

 

Then, all unowned constructs will have a countdown timer and it will count down from the moment it is unowned, regardless of why they are unowned (PvP destruction, IAR, abandonment, etc.) At the end of this timer, the construct will simply be removed from the game world.

 

The ‘ownership’ timer for unsubscribed players’ constructs is three months (90 days/2160 hours). The timer is the same for organization-owned constructs and begins when the last active legate of the owning organization’s subscription expires.

 

Each time a construct is unclaimed, whether due to an owner’s inactive game account or if abandoned via PvP, a one-month countdown to decay is set and is visible to everyone. If no one salvages the construct, it will be permanently removed from the game.

 

As with most newly introduced systems, this is subject to change in the future depending on the metrics we see as time passes.

 

SPECIAL RULES FOR MARKETS 

A modified version of IAR will be used on Aphelia territories, including all market zones.

Regardless of whether or not the owner is an active subscriber, all constructs on Aphelia territories are subject to IAR. As soon as a player exits their construct in Aphelia territory, a 168-hour (seven-day) abandonment countdown will begin for that construct. This is considerably shorter than the default IAR timer. Once that countdown reaches 0, the construct will lose its ownership. A new countdown timer of 48-hours (two days) before deletion will start ticking.

 

HAPPY HUNTING

 

Will you be among the happy scavengers scouring the skyways and byways for wrecked ships and abandoned constructs? Join the conversation about this devblog here.