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The split personality of DU game design


Carnegie

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It seems to me that many of the issues with gameplay arise from a root cause: A split in philosophy in how players are supposed to act.  (Open vs. Guardrails)

 

Movement:


Open world claim:  Go anywhere, fly anywhere

Guardrail philosophy: Limit speed to 30k to promote a feeling of "vastness"

Natural philosophy: If you go too fast, you can't slow down and miss your destination or make a crater

 

By using a guardrail, a whole new set of side effects come into play for PvP, which then requires a whole new round of guardrails (top speed per core size)

Also the original reason for having the 30K limit pretty much went out the window with introduction of warp drives.

 

Mining:

Open World claim:  Mine on any planet or asteroid

Guardrail: You have to maintain your mining units every few days with calibration to force people to participate regularly

Natural:  Land based territory warfare. If you can't defend it you lose it.

 

Side effect of guardrail: Requires an all-in effort, which is a commitment of personal time. It is an ultimatum of sorts, and ultimatums more often fail than succeed or, at the least, lowers morale.

 

 

Economics:

 

Open world claim: There is a player economy

Guardrails: bots and schematics

Natural: prices move according to real supply and demand

 

The reason that the natural approach didn't work is that there wasn't a natural supply or demand curve supporting it at the time. If PvP ever becomes a real thing with territory warfare, then the demand curve will take care of itself.

 

The original concept of schematics was to force people to rely on other people to buy parts or elements. The problem with that approach in 0.23 was the idea of "force the players" to act a certain way.

 

 

Territory

Open world claim:  land warfare to control tiles

Guardrail: everything is in a safe zone and taxed

Natural: fight for what is yours

 

The problems with the current situation:

a.   There is not much difference between one tile and the next. The mineral extraction values are tightly controlled to be within a certain range.

b.   The tax on tiles make it so expensive to maintain, it really isn't worth fighting for compared to just moving to another tile (with the exception of T4/T5 but those are too rare for generalized war)

c.   Once you own a tile, the extraction rates for T4 are almost the same as T1.  I have collected 800 kilotons of T4 ore in just a few weeks once I found a set of tiles and got rare mining units. And you wonder why prices for high tier ores are so low. This was not the original intent of having different tiers at all. My scrap needs are satisfied for a while.

d.  There is is only one weak  strategic value to a tile and that is distance to a market. A strategic value is the control of or access to something larger than itself.  ( A river, a deep water port,  safe passage to somewhere else, railroad endpoint, recharge point, repair depot, bonus nexus, etc.)

 

 

again, guardrails on top of guardrails.  It is a patchwork of limits with officially sanctioned exceptions.

 

 

Bottom Line:
Open world games need to use incentives to encourage behaviors, not guardrails and hard rules.  People who are attracted to the open world concept are inherently turned off by guardrails.

 

 

Edited by Carnegie
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I do not agree with what you describe as guardrails above for most objects,

The 30K speed cap is a technical limit which is needed to keep stuff in sync. What are guardrails is actually the speed cap based on Mass NQ is about to introduce.

 

The calibration mechanic on mining units is not really a guardrail. It is a very rudimentary implementation of a potentially good part of this system

 

For markets, bots are really needed but they need to be used in a smarter way. Schematics are to Industry what calibration is to mining units, they are a good idea implemented in a very basic manner and by not having any sort of tie in from other mechanics it becomes a very bland system, 

 

The whole territory system is just a weak and useless implementation. 

 

In general, DU is not yet a game, it has some of the components which may eventually make it a game. And a lot of what is in game is still the "this is our first version, and we will iterate and tweak it over time". Problems is that pretty much in all instances, things are still at their "first iteration" and never saw any refinement at all. And that is true for mechanics, elements, the blueprint system and more in game. Even now, the DU really has all the signs of being very much alpha in development stage, maybe even pre-alpha.

 

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13 hours ago, blazemonger said:

The 30K speed cap is a technical limit which is needed to keep stuff in sync.

 

I did think of that, but then I thought of the warp speed reduction. If the new lower speed of warp was sufficient to keep you from flying through a planet,  wouldn't it be the real top limit? 

I am not railing against warp here, as I can make plenty of cells for myself with even a surplus, but just saying the devs need to be really careful about applying new rules without a full analysis of its effects and their effects. 

Fundamentally, each new rule should create two potential gameplay decisions for every decision it takes away.  Too many restrictive rules lead to the creation of  one or two "metas".   We see that now with voxel-less ships.  Voxel armor is mostly obsolete due to ratio of damage absorptions. The reduction of hit points per material was strange, it should have been the opposite.

If there was a problem with massive ships being invulnerable, then improve the largest weapon damage yields instead of nerfing armor. That seemed odd to me.

Edited by Carnegie
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