pvp Improving PvE gameplay as basis for putting more rewards in the Risk&Reward of PvP

[vylqun]

A while ago there was a discussion in the discord about limiting access to certain resources to the PvP space as well as the importance of PvE-players for PvP-players and vice versa. My conclusion to improve this interaction, is to improve the PvE aspect, because only if PvE-players hold a value to PvP players (besides target practice), a meaningful interaction can exist. Currently PvP-orgs require barely any purely PvE-players, because everything from resource acquisition to crafting can be more or less automated. The solution is a more active and specialized PvE gameplay.

 

1. Mining

Pre-MU planetary mining was in a pretty good state if you ignore its lack of excitement (which could be introduced with rare minerals/gems as random encounters). It required active play and every successful org had at least some dedicated miners to supply them with ore. With MUs now that completely changed. Ore can be acquired passively, and especially the yield for higher tier ores (T3+), which you mostly need in smaller quantities, can easily support a large org. No active input besides the calibration by an alt once every 5 days is required.

 

For miners to be valuable again, mining has to consume active playtime. For that i suggest a few changes:

• significantly reduce the MU output, especially for higher tier ores. Without indepth calculations, i'd suggest to reduce the yields to 50%/40%/20%/10%/5% for T1/T2/T3/T4/T5, respectively.
• randomize the spawn time and increase the spawn rate of the current asteroids in the safe zone, make the ore node size more variable (no meganodes necessary, but the occasional supernode would be a nice find)
• place a few copies of Thades moonlets (or moonlets generated similarly) at a region outside the safe-zone and have a significantly increased spawn rate for asteroids in that region to create a more or less dense asteroid belt for mining and PvP base building
• randomly (time and location) spawn large amounts of surface rocks of a single ore (5000%+ of MU-mini-game generated ones) on the surface of planets (T1-T2 in safe-zone, T1-T4 in PvP space), with a rarity of the spawn relative to the tier of the ore. This enables repeated scouting of planet surfaces for surface rock deposits, gives new players the ability to start mining without neglect able initial costs and adds to the importance of surface rock picking talents.

 

These changes require nearly no new mechanic that isn't already in game, but would improve the value of active mining and thus the value of dedicated miners for orgs immensely.

 

 

2. Industry

Industry is a bit harder to tackle, because its automated by definition. The schematics update is a step into the correct direction, even tho i would prefer to have a proper CPU/Power system which would have similar and more effects. One way to increase the importance of active game time in industry (as well as other aspects of PvE) could be the introduction of a job system that is based on a players ingame activity and provides boni to cores or elements. Each job has an activity bar, which fills whenever a player does certain ingame activities. The amount of actions to fill the bar should be relatively low (fill-able with 2-4h standard game time) and reduces over time (exponentially dependent on the fill status, very slow when its full, faster when nearly empty, from full to 50% without any actions it should take a week). The maximum job bonus should be kept as long as the bar is over 50%. In addition you can only have a single job active at any given time, and changing jobs will reset the job-bar to 0. Let me give four examples:

 

Job: Miner

• Actions to fill job bar : calibrate MUs, mine/harvest any ore

• Effects : Increased mining efficiency with hand tool and calibrated MUs (0-30% depending on job-bar)

 

Job: Industry Manager

• Actions to fill job bar : interact with any industry unit (limited to once per day and unit)

• Effects : decreased ore, pures and product consumption (0-10%) and craft time (0-20%) (applied to a core, not to individual elements, limited to a low number of cores)

 

Job: Pilot

• Actions to fill job bar: fly any mobile core

• Effects: improved handling of flight elements (0-20%)

 

Job: Soldier

• Actions to fill job bar: shoot&hit other mobile constructs

• Effects: improved hit chance, improved radar range (not a PvP guy, so no values suggested)

 

With this system we could encourage specialized and especially active game play. As a bonus the impact of alts on industry would be reduced as well. Due to the core-limitations for the Industry Manager boost, every org with several factories would require several players that focus on doing industry related activities ingame to have an efficient production that can compete with market prices. If we get a CPU&Power system that would limit the maximum amount of industry units per core, so you can't place 5 or 6 large production lines on the same L-Core, in the future the effects of the job system would be even better.

 

 

With the following increase of importance for PvE-centric gameplay, DU could then start to put up higher incentives or stakes for PvP-space, like adding exclusive resources that you can't get in the safe-zone. Bcause the new incentive for trade between the safe-zone inhabitants and the PvP-space occupants, a good and enjoyable interaction between those two pillars of gameplay should be possible.

[Hirnsausen]

🙂

[Taelessael]

Plenty of orgs keep a sizeable chunk of pve players in their ranks. PvP players like action, big risks, and big rewards, and find precisely none of that in scanning hundreds of tiles to look for good MU spots, managing supply-lines, or pulling hours/days-long cargo-loops. They'll help to be sure, calibrating MU, scouting ahead of cargo-ships that need to slow-boat until they are safely clear of the pipes, and bringing back their loot for the indy-guys to turn in to more ships and bullets, but it is the PvE guys that usually keep the PvP players' engines fueled and guns loaded in larger PvP orgs.

 

-Mining-

I like everything there except for the reduced ore yields on MU. I'd agree that the upper-level stuff could use a nerf, but NQ had a lot of issues with tax vs mining output because newer players and players that didn't have a large enough quanta-buffer to take advantage of scale-economics couldn't keep up with the costs. It is supposed to be a thing for casuals to make some cash to play with on their weekends, but if you nerf the output that hard then you'd need to re-balance a lot of other stuff to avoid either inadvertently crippling them, or accidentally rolling someone else in economic power.

 

-Industry-

Limiting how much you can put on one core will only annoy people here. Most large industrial complexes will be owned by large groups of players that can afford to drop a couple dozen cores if they want that amount of indy going. As for the rest of it... the goal is to not turn the game in to a job, and while your proposed requirements are all quite easily met, they would still be pushing precisely toward that.

 

People want fun, but that is a different thing to different people. Industry tends to cater to people that like to do a lot of setup-work followed by relatively little aside from supply/sales runs. Trying to force them to crawl through the factory playing with everything on a regular basis is just going to annoy them.

 

-PvP space rewards-
I am all for giving pvp players a better reward as compensation for risking their stuff in pvp space and as an an encouragement to get pve people out there, but care needs to be taken here. All of DU sits in a tiny solar-system at present, and if the loot in pvp space is too big you risk rolling the biggest pvp faction in enough material that others can't compete with them should they manage to hold it all (as Legion has done in the beta server with the alien cores' t5 output).

[Wyndle]

14 hours ago, Taelessael said:

People want fun, but that is a different thing to different people. Industry tends to cater to people that like to do a lot of setup-work followed by relatively little aside from supply/sales runs. Trying to force them to crawl through the factory playing with everything on a regular basis is just going to annoy them.

Pick any episode of any season of Discovery Channel's Gold Rush series and you have better than 80% odds of getting at least a few minutes of break/repair footage and dialogue.  A well tuned factory is the opposite end of the spectrum from that example but even a well tuned machine requires tons of preventative maintenance on the regular.

[Taelessael]

Just now, Wyndle said:

Pick any episode of any season of Discovery Channel's Gold Rush series and you have better than 80% odds of getting at least a few minutes of break/repair footage and dialogue.  A well tuned factory is the opposite end of the spectrum from that example but even a well tuned machine requires tons of preventative maintenance on the regular.

If your point of reference is a reality-tv show... 

 

Trying to pay as little as possible for mass-producing something is a fairly major business so far as factories are concerned. A lot of stuff isn't perfect yet, but it is getting there. Also, again, the goal is to not turn the game in to a job. We've thrown realism out the window for other things, let the indy-players have their maintenance-free factories.

[Wyndle]

4 minutes ago, Taelessael said:

If your point of reference is a reality-tv show... 

As opposed to telling someone to get a job at a plant or factory to see it for themselves?  It doesn't matter which stripe of industry you are in, stuff wears out and breaks.  Having video footage to point to for an example is lazy, yet effective, for my point.

[Taelessael]

12 minutes ago, Wyndle said:

As opposed to telling someone to get a job at a plant or factory to see it for themselves?  It doesn't matter which stripe of industry you are in, stuff wears out and breaks.  Having video footage to point to for an example is lazy, yet effective, for my point.

Who needs a job at a factory? People already have the job of providing those stats to anyone that will listen, just don't use reality tv as a reference. But now we're off topic.

 

I can get behind the pvp stuff and the high-tier ore-output modifications as long as it's done carefully, but I think industry should be left alone for the moment. We want people to play DU as a game, not a job.

[Hirnsausen]

On 8/30/2022 at 4:32 AM, vylqun said:

(...) significantly reduce the MU output, especially for higher tier ores. Without indepth calculations, i'd suggest to reduce the yields to 50%/40%/20%/10%/5% for T1/T2/T3/T4/T5, respectively.

Then I and many, many other players could not pay the property taxes anymore, nor could we build anymore ships in time, to venture into PVP space. Your suggestion is contra-effective as it reduces the ships you can unprovokedly attack. Also, ships won't fly that often anymore to transport ore as it takes then so much longer to get enough ore to make sense to come with a transporter. So you PBP guys will have much more time to spin your thumbs around each other and feel bored. Just saying.........

[vylqun]

On 9/4/2022 at 5:14 AM, Taelessael said:

-Mining-

I like everything there except for the reduced ore yields on MU. I'd agree that the upper-level stuff could use a nerf, but NQ had a lot of issues with tax vs mining output because newer players and players that didn't have a large enough quanta-buffer to take advantage of scale-economics couldn't keep up with the costs. It is supposed to be a thing for casuals to make some cash to play with on their weekends, but if you nerf the output that hard then you'd need to re-balance a lot of other stuff to avoid either inadvertently crippling them, or accidentally rolling someone else in economic power.

 

-Industry-

Limiting how much you can put on one core will only annoy people here. Most large industrial complexes will be owned by large groups of players that can afford to drop a couple dozen cores if they want that amount of indy going. As for the rest of it... the goal is to not turn the game in to a job, and while your proposed requirements are all quite easily met, they would still be pushing precisely toward that.

 

Yes, taxes probably would have to be adjusted, But in the current state of the game, T1 will be worthless one or two months after the start of the game again, because MUs just produce to much. That problem would (probably) be solved if we get a proper wear&tear system, which would require regular replacement elements and thus bolster T1 element sales.

 

Concerning the industry, i never said anything about limiting what we currently have. What i want is jobs that work similar to talent boosting, that give additional benefits to the running industries. Just that its not completely afk-able, but needs a semi active player to keep it going (which is why the job level is bound to 2-4h playtime per week)

 

 

49 minutes ago, Hirnsausen said:

Then I and many, many other players could not pay the property taxes anymore, nor could we build anymore ships in time, to venture into PVP space. Your suggestion is contra-effective as it reduces the ships you can unprovokedly attack. Also, ships won't fly that often anymore to transport ore as it takes then so much longer to get enough ore to make sense to come with a transporter. So you PBP guys will have much more time to spin your thumbs around each other and feel bored. Just saying.........

 

people only wont be bale to pay their taxes anymore, if t1 becomes worthless, but in that case i'd consider reducing the taxes per hex or similar. But currently there is no need for asteroids, because after a while MUs will completly satiate the ore market. (And i never pvp'ed in the past 1,5 years, so i'm not saying it because i need targets, but because the economy and the game needs it)

[Taelessael]

5 hours ago, vylqun said:

Yes, taxes probably would have to be adjusted, But in the current state of the game, T1 will be worthless one or two months after the start of the game again, because MUs just produce to much. That problem would (probably) be solved if we get a proper wear&tear system, which would require regular replacement elements and thus bolster T1 element sales.

Usage-based wear and tear systems just annoy people, and in ship-building games like DU they have this bad habit of not helping the economy much as the maintenance requirement tends to either drive people to smaller and more efficient designs that don't pull much from the market, or it just drives them from the game. If you want to boost sales it tends to work far better if you come up with something that has people losing things to pvp or environmental hazards (like a mission to go save a destroyed ship's cargo from the middle of a meteorite storm in an asteroid thicket).

As for adjusting taxes, they are kind of important to keep people from doing stupid stuff, like buying an entire moon, so you'd have to adjust the payout for a lot of other stuff too if you change taxes. At the end of the day we'd probably end up right back where we are now, just with less stuff in the world...

 

I understand the desire to get mining to be a more active thing, to make dedicated miners a more functional play-style again. Unfortunately t1 auto-mining is supposed to be the quanta-supply for new players and casuals, the only way to keep the market from being flooded would be to make it not a viable source of quanta for most people, and that would negate its purpose.

 

You can move more of the t3/4/5 stuff to asteroids and/or require more of them to make things if you want to encourage more active mining, but t1 and t2 probably need to stay more or less where they are.