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Element Limits


Anauine

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I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this... but... What's your thoughts on having limits on the number of elements you can have? The number of elements you can have are talent based and you can only have/produce x amount of elements. This helps with the amount of data/cost in the game one person can rack up, and also helps a healthy economy where people are forced into producing only selective items and giving others the ability to sell in the markets without mega factories being an issue... or give us wear, tear, and decay for industry.

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Capping how many parts people can own is a terrible idea. Items in a container are functionally just a few numbers representing the type of item, volume, stack-size, and weight, probably taking no more than a few bytes of data per item-stack. I'd be willing to guess that the sum of the data for the collective inventory-contents of every single container in game would probably easily fit on an external hard-drive, if not a thumb-drive. If NQ can't afford to keep track of a few numbers in boxes... well, we'd probably all get an e-mail amounting to "sorry, we're broke, hope you had fun, we're not liable". 

 

As for the economy, this would probably kill it by removing the ability of more well off players to stockpile materials beyond their needs. Many players collect ships or structures they don't actually use just for the sake of collecting them, others pile up things to give away to friends/newbs, or to have on hand for replacement or to follow inspiration without needing a market trip first, and others still like to amass elements and materials just for the sake of having them. If there was an element-ownership cap, then people would just collect the best things up to their cap, and then they'd stop. Wanting something new would entail getting rid of stuff they already have, so they'd have to tear down something else and would subsequently use the parts from that instead of buying new parts. Sure, they may need something new here or there, but that would be largely limited to temporarily setting up a single industry line to produce that thing in exact numbers. 

 

If you want to nerf mega-factories out of existence... well you really can't short of destroying people's ability to play cooperatively. Most if not all megas are owned by sizeable groups of people, if you cap the number of elements on a construct or owned by an entity, they can just divide the factory across multiple cores/players and use RDMS to allow the factory-specialists to still have access to everything. It may disrupt their flow a bit, but there are people can and will compensate.

 

Relating to factory wear and tear... No. There are probably dozens threads where people have asked for this in some for or another, usually to either "counter megas" or get people to buy more stuff, and most of them end with some variant of "most people will quit if DU stops being a game and becomes a job, and adding in some arbitrary maintenance requirement to constructs will make it a job". 

 

 

 

Now on the other hand, a deployed element-cap on a single construct makes sense, as it would theoretically help reduce the loading required for any single construct, and deployed elements are generally much harder on the game than the contents of someone's pocket. As an arbitrary hard-cap would just be annoying and immersion-breaking, such a cap would be best achieved via the inclusion of a power-system, probably involving a variety of different sized power supplies for different kinds of constructs. Factories/bases would make use of very large and powerful supplies that would probably not be well suited to mobile constructs, while ships would have much smaller and more weight-efficient power supplies that would probably double as a pvp balance mechanic.

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