"The game world itself is too big, too empty and too boring", and other stories about how sieges and capitals themselves ain't the saving grace.

[Kap]

I have written this post about 5 times, each time deleting it and starting over. This is how I feel FB should proceed with Starbase.
It is to my belief that capitals and sieges each will bring content for a good 2-3 weeks before user count falls to near-nothing again.
The following suggestions will try to give sieges a reason for happening, provide PVP opportunities and player-interaction, and generally just more things to interact with.

Let's first recap what the game world currently contains:
- An endless sea of roids in different sizes, with a very lazy implementation of material spread.
- The occasional player ship wreck if you're either lucky or close to the safe zone edge.
- The occasional player station, that is only explorable from afar due to safezones.
- A few developer stations to visit.

Let's, for good measure, also recap what kind of activities is currently possible in the game:
- Ship building
- Station Building
- Mining
- Salvaging
- PVP

A few game concerns many users have stated before:
- Time to do X activity is too long, they don't want to travel for 5 hours for a mining trip etc.
- PVP is only happening around the Elysium warp gate, where well-off users are seal-clubbing mostly lesser informed newbies.
- It's too hard to find other players outside the safe-zone. Like a needle in a haystack.
- Ore Hotspots were promised, but are way, way too weak to notice.


Let's try to imagine a different game-world where real estate was important and player retention was higher, and how it would look:

1. Spread of Materials
Materials are not uniformly spread into the Zone 1 thru Zone 5 that we know today, where the player simply have to fly in a linear distance for X KM to get to an area where the material they're seeking exists.
Instead, we can re-use the Zone 1 - Zone 5 material compositions, but spread the zones randomly into very large zones (3D voronoi perhaps, of course jacketed due to the nature of the 5x5x5 km zone tech.).
Doing so, allows players to travel much less to get to Zone 5 materials for example, however, such a zone must be located first by exploration players.
It is also highly likely that the closest hotspots of good ore are known by the pirate players, making it a risk versus reward. Less travel time versus potential pirates.

2. Ore Hotspots
Simply have some of these above zones be MUCH RICHER. More high-class asteroids, More of the rare material, perhaps re-introduce C11's
Perhaps some of these zones are super-rare, but contain materials that are otherwise only available on moon surfaces. This gives the player more choices.
It should be obvious that this enables a new form of gameplay that we have not really seen for some time, exploration/prospecting.
A player could fly out and prospect/find these lucrative areas, and either use them with their company, or sell off the coordinates.
If you are feeling fancy: You could make a device similar to the nav. chip saver, that can give you the material composition of all asteroids in a 1km radi or so.

3. New Types of mining
Some of the zones could contain different mining opportunities.
Perhaps Crystals that grow on asteroids that must be carefully laser-cut with the handheld tool and transported in cargo lock frames, used in recipes or sold to the station. Perhaps Gas clouds that must be sucked up and stored in tanks, used in alloying perhaps.
Will provide more content, mechanics and opportunities for ship builders as well.

4. Radiation Technology
I don't understand why we don't have this yet..
The ability to scan for other spaceships and track them down. A way to find other players and create PVP.
PVP shouldn't only be happening at the moon warp-gate, or in planned sieges/events.
You are way too safe outside the safezone at the moment, primarily due to the sheer scale of the asteroid belts.
It should be a danger to leave that safezone, it creates thrill.


As you can imagine - Implementing the above will create lucrative areas that will funnel the playerbase together, be it thru pvp, trade opportunities or the like.
I don't know why sieges would happen if not to fight over real estate, and this real estate doesn't exist today.

We are far too spread out, and adding easy travel or mining opportunities to the remaining moons will only spread us out even further.
I like that we are getting moon mining and all that, but I think we would all appreciate it if the asteroid belts received some major love. Lord knows it needs it, and these suggestions seem like low hanging fruits.

 

[Cavilier210]

They need some form of ship based high speed travel that doesn't require caps. As well as alternative means to take territory. Otherwise, its just an expensive gatekeeping mechanic to lock people out of content, and force them into larger groups.

 

[Fryke]

I like your belt ideas. Adding some kind of 'geography' to the belt would be a fantastic way of increasing player interest in it. Mix in some environmental effects and mapping out the belt could become a seriously useful skill.

Though, how accessible the rarer materials are needs to take progression into consideration. Right now 'progression' is pretty loosely defined, but I have no doubt the devs have an idea of how they want progression to work later in development. If they devise a system that is not dependant on materials, then I see no issue giving easier access to the rarer kinds of ores. But if they choose to guide progression via accessibility of rare materials, then I'm not sure making them more accessible is an option.

And then agreed on the radiation. The only reason PVP is so centered on the warp gate right now is because finding players in open space is nearly impossible. Starbase has the PVP Space Engineers problem. Good news is we already know they have radiation on the roadmap, and I think they are working on it now? Don't quote me on that. But once ship tracking is working and other PVP opportunities arise, the gate camping will die down.

 

[IronGremlin]

I have written this post about 5 times, each time deleting it and starting over. This is how I feel FB should proceed with Starbase.
It is to my belief that capitals and sieges each will bring content for a good 2-3 weeks before user count falls to near-nothing again.
The following suggestions will try to give sieges a reason for happening, provide PVP opportunities and player-interaction, and generally just more things to interact with.

Let's first recap what the game world currently contains:
- An endless sea of roids in different sizes, with a very lazy implementation of material spread.
- The occasional player ship wreck if you're either lucky or close to the safe zone edge.
- The occasional player station, that is only explorable from afar due to safezones.
- A few developer stations to visit.

Let's, for good measure, also recap what kind of activities is currently possible in the game:
- Ship building
- Station Building
- Mining
- Salvaging
- PVP

A few game concerns many users have stated before:
- Time to do X activity is too long, they don't want to travel for 5 hours for a mining trip etc.
- PVP is only happening around the Elysium warp gate, where well-off users are seal-clubbing mostly lesser informed newbies.
- It's too hard to find other players outside the safe-zone. Like a needle in a haystack.
- Ore Hotspots were promised, but are way, way too weak to notice.


Let's try to imagine a different game-world where real estate was important and player retention was higher, and how it would look:

1. Spread of Materials
Materials are not uniformly spread into the Zone 1 thru Zone 5 that we know today, where the player simply have to fly in a linear distance for X KM to get to an area where the material they're seeking exists.
Instead, we can re-use the Zone 1 - Zone 5 material compositions, but spread the zones randomly into very large zones (3D voronoi perhaps, of course jacketed due to the nature of the 5x5x5 km zone tech.).
Doing so, allows players to travel much less to get to Zone 5 materials for example, however, such a zone must be located first by exploration players.
It is also highly likely that the closest hotspots of good ore are known by the pirate players, making it a risk versus reward. Less travel time versus potential pirates.

2. Ore Hotspots
Simply have some of these above zones be MUCH RICHER. More high-class asteroids, More of the rare material, perhaps re-introduce C11's
Perhaps some of these zones are super-rare, but contain materials that are otherwise only available on moon surfaces. This gives the player more choices.
It should be obvious that this enables a new form of gameplay that we have not really seen for some time, exploration/prospecting.
A player could fly out and prospect/find these lucrative areas, and either use them with their company, or sell off the coordinates.
If you are feeling fancy: You could make a device similar to the nav. chip saver, that can give you the material composition of all asteroids in a 1km radi or so.

3. New Types of mining
Some of the zones could contain different mining opportunities.
Perhaps Crystals that grow on asteroids that must be carefully laser-cut with the handheld tool and transported in cargo lock frames, used in recipes or sold to the station. Perhaps Gas clouds that must be sucked up and stored in tanks, used in alloying perhaps.
Will provide more content, mechanics and opportunities for ship builders as well.

4. Radiation Technology
I don't understand why we don't have this yet..
The ability to scan for other spaceships and track them down. A way to find other players and create PVP.
PVP shouldn't only be happening at the moon warp-gate, or in planned sieges/events.
You are way too safe outside the safezone at the moment, primarily due to the sheer scale of the asteroid belts.
It should be a danger to leave that safezone, it creates thrill.


As you can imagine - Implementing the above will create lucrative areas that will funnel the playerbase together, be it thru pvp, trade opportunities or the like.
I don't know why sieges would happen if not to fight over real estate, and this real estate doesn't exist today.

We are far too spread out, and adding easy travel or mining opportunities to the remaining moons will only spread us out even further.
I like that we are getting moon mining and all that, but I think we would all appreciate it if the asteroid belts received some major love. Lord knows it needs it, and these suggestions seem like low hanging fruits.

Regarding Mining concerns (#1-3) :

Lauri's discussed resource distribution a few times, and something like 'hotspots' in the belt is definitely on the TODO, though it's not clear really what form this is supposed to take, or where on the priority list it lives (somewhere after sieges, ostensibly).

Titan asteroids also seem like they could solve for some of these concerns, they concentrate large amounts of resources in one place and they will work similarly to moon mining (we have confirmation that they'll use the same underlying terrain deformation tech). It's been stated that this will be coming "soon after" moon mining.


So it seems that it is at least intended that the distribution concern will be addressed. I don't know whether or not the devs feel that we need variety in mining technique or not - Moon / Titan mining is a bit different than asteroid mining, so that's at least SOME variety, but I get the impression that you'd probably want more.

I don't know that I'd really agree - I don't know that we want so much content development focus around mining or, at least, not right now. Before we get really fancy mining I feel like we should be getting other viable career paths - stuff like getting part smelting and towing for salvagers, ship insurance so that combat isn't so high-risk low reward, etc. But as a long term kind of goal I don't have anything against these sorts of ideas.

Regarding #4 -

IMHO this game is going to live or die on the backs of large player factions. Basically if we don't have happy corps with plenty of shit to do and some long term goals, we don't have content, full stop.

So given that, I think the positioning of sieges before radiation tracking makes a lot of sense - get stations, reasons to build stations, reasons to want someone else's stations, and the means to take them by force. That will give the big hitters reasons to play, which will pull in a lot of other people to scoot around in their shadows.

I think radiation tracking is still really important, and in the long run, it may prove to be just as important, but I still think it was the smart play to feed the group activity first and cater to smaller interactions later. I am frustrated that we still have so little clarity on what such a pivotal system is going to look like though, as I get the distinct impression that radiation is basically going to shit all over the ship construction meta as soon as it hits the PTU.

 

[Seat-Weld]

Otherwise, its just an expensive gatekeeping mechanic to lock people out of content, and force them into larger groups.

I'd argue that isn't necessarily a bad thing. It'd be very easy for Starbase to turn into a single player game with a chatbox tacked on. Obviously you can push group play TOO much (Solo players should definitely still have a decent amount of agency), but I definitely think there should be things that'd reasonably require at least some token cooperation with a group to do. It being easier to just hunker down into your personal solo station versus forming a larger community would kind of defeat the point of it being an MMO in the first place.

 

[Seat-Weld]

IMHO this game is going to live or die on the backs of large player factions. Basically if we don't have happy corps with plenty of shit to do and some long term goals, we don't have content, full stop.

I definitely feel like this dynamic is something a lot of people aren't considering. The ideal is for Starbase to develop into a larger community one is able to exist passively within, versus a bunch of insular factions that exist in a perpetual state of cold war with each other. At that point the game is just Rust, but on a larger scale.

 

[Cavilier210]

I definitely feel like this dynamic is something a lot of people aren't considering. The ideal is for Starbase to develop into a larger community one is able to exist passively within, versus a bunch of insular factions that exist in a perpetual state of cold war with each other. At that point the game is just Rust, but on a larger scale.

Conflict, and investment in that conflict. drives retention.

Really, speed of movement is just as good a way to "Shrink the world" as actually shrinking the world. Which iirc, was the idea behind this thread. I mean, you kinda quoted me from over a month ago lol.

 

[Seat-Weld]

Really, speed of movement is just as good a way to "Shrink the world" as actually shrinking the world.

Oh no I definitely agree with you up to a point (I could've elaborated a little more). What I mean is that if it's TOO easy for anyone to reach anywhere on demand, you can create what's functionally the same issue. It kind of defeats the point of having such an enormous space if you're able to easily bypass most of it, after all.

I was suggesting that the middle ground be something like player warp gates, for example (Obviously the same concept can apply to other things). Some sort of player built infrastructure that requires a degree of collaborative effort to build, but which afterwards can then be used by the community at large to make travel more manageable. It's not quite so on-demand as to trivialize travel/distance, but still allows even a new player in a laborer access to the wider world. Almost like the space equivalent of connecting two sides of the continent by railroad.

Conflict, and investment in that conflict. drives retention

Encouraging players to develop/rely on player created infrastructure would contribute to that. If the warp gate your faction built is the difference between a steady supply chain and six hours of space travel, I'd imagine you'd be very invested in any conflict it attracts. Conversely, crippling an enemy force by blowing up something unrelated parties also rely on could risk drawing more enemies into a conflict that wouldn't have joined in otherwise.

(Also sorry about the "month later" thing, didn't pay attention to the date. Whoopsie.)

 

[Cavilier210]

A player named Calenloki has proposed a warp drive system that I would support. I think it performs the function well.

 

[IronGremlin]

Encouraging players to develop/rely on player created infrastructure would contribute to that. If the warp gate your faction built is the difference between a steady supply chain and six hours of space travel, I'd imagine you'd be very invested in any conflict it attracts. Conversely, crippling an enemy force by blowing up something unrelated parties also rely on could risk drawing more enemies into a conflict that wouldn't have joined in otherwise.

I've always just assumed that the origin warp gate was a placeholder for player built warp gates.


Like it's unavoidable really, you cannot have cap ships be the only way to move players / ships between moons.

Maybe there will be some third option at some point but honestly I don't see the need for it.

 

[Seat-Weld]

I've always just assumed that the origin warp gate was a placeholder for player built warp gates.

Hasn't it been mentioned that player built warp gates are planned? Or at the very least that the devs are interested in exploring the idea? I could be misremembering.

It's the best alternative to capitals in my opinion, at least. Caps offer freedom of movement at the cost of needing to build and maintain a capital ship, and the teleporting not being instant. Warp gates are instant and can be used by anyone in the area, but are limited to a single predetermined location. They both fill similar enough niches to give players options, but have distinct enough advantages/disadvantage for one to not be objectively better than the other.

Maybe there will be some third option at some point but honestly I don't see the need for it.

Realistically I think warping/fast traveling is the only reasonable way to travel such a massive distance. I'm not sure what a third option would even be. In theory you might could come up with a clever solution like some sort of auto-pilot system or set up some sort of space highway with refueling stations, but when you're talking literal days of travel time anything non-instantaneous is way more trouble than it's worth. At least for consistent routes.

 

[ChaosRifle]

Hasn't it been mentioned that player built warp gates are planned?

Player made gates were stated to have an upkeep, and taxable for their use. Their construction and maintainance was also stated to be a company level project, not for solo players.

My personal opinion on the existing one is that it was simply a nessesity to test the technology, and offered a means to use a moon+belt, also more tech testing. So probably a stand-in, if not just a one-off test.

 

[Cavilier210]

The warp gates aren't instant.The current one is a 15 minute ride.

 

[Zarenno]

At least for #4, it looks like they are preparing what is required cooling technology wise for us to have the radiation tracking capabilities. With the upcoming changes to heat on thrusters, weapons and internal systems. The inclusion of heat sinks as well for that with radiators turning into passive cooling.

 

[Seat-Weld]

My personal opinion on the existing one is that it was simply a nessesity to test the technology, and offered a means to use a moon+belt, also more tech testing. So probably a stand-in, if not just a one-off test.

Oh if they've directly said that they're planned to be player constructible, that's 100% the case. Considering we don't currently have most of the company related stuff (or any real reason to go somewhere else but the moon) it wouldn't really make sense to give us the option at this point, even if they could.

The warp gates aren't instant.The current one is a 15 minute ride.

Comparatively "Instant" in the sense that the only requirement is to physically enter the gate. Whereas they've stated that capitals could potentially take days of charging before warping to the new location.

 

[Cavilier210]

Comparatively "Instant" in the sense that the only requirement is to physically enter the gate. Whereas they've stated that capitals could potentially take days of charging before warping to the new location.

A charge of that length requires a huge distance. Like... why would anyone be that far away distance.

 

[Seat-Weld]

A charge of that length requires a huge distance.

I believe they said the exact charge time will vary depending on things like distance traveled and similar variables (So more "up to" several days versus it will several days).

Honestly a longer charge time makes sense when you consider the fact that capitals are essentially mobile stations/are what initiates sieges. I assume when you warp a capital, you'll probably do it with the intention of staying in the new location for an extended period of time (like a kind of forward base). A capital would also be capable of moving much more cargo/multiple smaller ships in a single trip, whereas regular ships have a limited storage capacity and must be manually piloted to their destination (using a warp gate or otherwise).

There's also the fact you're instantly teleporting to your exact destination , whereas a warp gate is obviously limited to a predetermined point A and point B. It could be the case that there's no readily accessible warp gate to use for your trip, or there might be some other reason getting to your exact end point justifies an extended wait (avoiding being followed/your movements not being as noticeable, transporting a lot of valuable cargo without risk of being intercepted en route, etc.)

 

[Cavilier210]

I believe they said the exact charge time will vary depending on things like distance traveled and similar variables (So more "up to" several days versus it will several days).

Honestly a longer charge time makes sense when you consider the fact that capitals are essentially mobile stations/are what initiates sieges. I assume when you warp a capital, you'll probably do it with the intention of staying in the new location for an extended period of time (like a kind of forward base). A capital would also be capable of moving much more cargo/multiple smaller ships in a single trip, whereas regular ships have a limited storage capacity and must be manually piloted to their destination (using a warp gate or otherwise).

There's also the fact you're instantly teleporting to your exact destination , whereas a warp gate is obviously limited to a predetermined point A and point B. It could be the case that there's no readily accessible warp gate to use for your trip, or there might be some other reason getting to your exact end point justifies an extended wait (avoiding being followed/your movements not being as noticeable, transporting a lot of valuable cargo without risk of being intercepted en route, etc.)

I'll be honest. I don't support the caps at all. In any form they are currently featured, and discussed to feature as. They make many things obsolete, and its seems the devs intend to make them feature as much as they possibly can. Which I don't personally agree with. Really shrinking the game world far more than they really should.

 

[Seat-Weld]

They make many things obsolete.

Agree to disagree, I guess. As they've been described I think the main trade off will be consistency/safety at the cost of being restricted by limited movement. Sure it's safer and easier to warp back and forth from the moon to deliver ore, but it might be more profitable to manually haul it with a conventional ship (despite the obvious risks) rather than wait on the warp charge twice per round trip. There still should be enough pros and cons involved to allow other niches to exist.

I see them as more a means to make activities involving larger groups of players more convenient, versus purely existing to negate alternative means of travel. For example: If you're a mining company that's made up of many players it makes sense to park a capital near your chosen mining location, spend however long a period it takes to stock up on ore, and then warping back to a station to sell for a single large payoff. Whereas if you're a handful of friends playing together it probably makes more sense to just carpool in a regular ship, and bring back many smaller amounts over a longer period of time.

Enabling larger groups of people to play together over extended periods is honestly their main appeal to me, since you won't have to worry as much over someone being left behind because their schedule is different from everyone else (The only real date you have to coordinate over is when the ship warps). Much like the other example this might be easy enough to manage between a group of <10 that a capital becomes less necessary. It's easy enough to fly around with your buddies in separate ships, but when you get upwards of twenty people together I can see why you'd prefer everyone take the capital for extended trips.

Of course this is all idle theorizing on my part until we actually see them in action. If anything I expect them to be slightly underwhelming at first (The state of stations is holding a lot of stuff back, in my opinion).

 

[Cavilier210]

How I see them being implemented now is that they'll make stations and tramp freighters obsolete. Unless they make the charge time obnoxious, or the fuel requirements larger than the smaller ships by proportion, its just plain cheaper to do everything with a cap. And they're linking every major feature to cap use.

So guys like me who want to fly their ship, not ride along as the game plays itself (imo) are made less viable in playtime.