Clarification about dev faction blueprint sharing (don't do it)

[JoelFB]

We have a clarification regarding dev faction blueprints. This is a simple rule:

• Do not share dev blueprints without explicit permission!

For further clarification:

• In Empire, devs will share the blueprints to designated members. Non-dev members are not allowed to share any Empire ship blueprints with any other user, even if they are a member of Empire. This applies to all ships, including the Spatha. (Please see Empire's internal channels for further information or any changes to this rule, including rules for using Empire ship plates.)
• In Kingdom, the Knight ship blueprint can be shared among members but not to anybody outside the faction. For other Kingdom ships, the general rule of not sharing applies until a written permission is given by devs or the decision of the Assembly.

If you are in doubt, ask your factions' devs for more info. The purpose of this rule is to prevent blueprint sharing or sharing of any substantial part of a dev faction ship. Creating your own ship that uses one or a few plates from an Empire/Kingdom ship (e.g. a blown up one) is not considered blueprint sharing. (Do not use Empire or Kingdom logos however.)

We also have a rare retroactive request: Those who have obtained dev blueprints illegally must delete them.

Violations of this rule will be handled on a case-by-case basis but may result in a timed ban or even in the revoking of the Alpha key.

Player factions/companies can handle their own (player-designed) blueprints as they wish.

 

[Dommy]

...written permission is given by devs or the Councellor.

Correction: Kingdom has 7 councillors.

 

[Dommy]

For other ships, the general rule of not sharing applies...

'Other ships' as in other dev-created ships or any other Kingdom ships?

 

[Geronimo553]

Makes perfect sense after a particular individual leaked them a few months back trying to ruin the game lore.

 

[NikofrankoV]

'Other ships' as in other dev-created ships or any other Kingdom ships?

Kingdom has other ships?

 

[JoelFB]

I've fixed the issues in the post. We're following the general feedback and will see if further clarifications or changes are needed, looks like this stirred up some feedback that we'll have to address.

 

[Dommy]

Kingdom has other ships?

 

[Archduke]

There are clearly a few larger competitive companies/alliances in Starbase already that don't want to share their company/alliance specific designs to non-members, yet they still need to distribute the blueprints to as many of their members as possible for the BP to be of any use to anyone. Any member could leak the BP and it will be out forever.

This puts espionage and infiltration, more toxic and unpleasant sides of MMOs, in a painfully important position as stealing BPs from more well-established companies and then simply distribute the BP to their own members or the whole community is relatively easy. Large companies either only distribute their BPs to a few trusted members, leaving most of their members without good ships and a much harder time playing the game, or they distribute them as widely as possible, making the game more enjoyable, likely leaking the BP in the process.

Since there is no BP protection yet, how should the more competitive companies handle this? Someone could impersonate another company that has standard ships with logos on them by using the stolen BP, causing diplomatic drama. There has already been a lot of drama out of claims of companies pirating others when they really haven't. Pirates using stolen company ships will only escalate this. Is there any estimate of when BP protection becomes part of CA?

I understand how subjective and difficult allowing special rights for player groups would be, but if there is no hope for getting BP protection soon, would it at the very least be possible that the biggest companies/alliances with clearly more than 100 CA members be given some temporary respite and allowed to submit a limited amount of protected blueprints though some out of game rules such as Empire and Kingdom have now? Tie this right to finishing a big enough player station and you've truly motivated the big groups to work harder as they're getting protected blueprints out of it.

I can get why companies are incentivized to post their ships for everyone through the ship shops in CA, but many players partake in SB to play it competitively and won't ever publicly share their designs. Now with a much higher CA population, it's harder to justify keeping company-only ships out of the hands of more members. Blueprints will leak. Are they permanently available to the whole community after that? Is this intended? Designers must spend dozens of hours creating a single ship. Creating something that gives their company advantage is often a big motivator in pulling through this.

Smaller more tightly knit competitive groups have a much better time in Starbase right now as they can safely use their custom ships without having them leak. Bigger companies are almost guaranteed to leak them. From the competitive mindset, what's the point of designing ships if only a few company members can use them or the whole community can, including the company enemies like pirates? Making a good ship gives the rival competitive groups this very same ship and they could have even more members that would put it to better use, practically giving the competition the tools to beat you with.

 

[CalenLoki]

@Archduke there is one active, large and competitive faction in CA, so you can just name it

I believe that soon we'll get ship ownership mechanics, which allows keeping the design while sharing/selling just assembled ship.
Should be enough for now, until we get some really fancy BP stuff.

 

[Zaff]

@Archduke there is one active, large and competitive faction in CA, so you can just name it

Not everyone need to make CA feedback about themselves. This whole rule declaration was due to someone uploading ship files from Empire and Kingdom, and hurts every ship designer. Even if they don't care about "being competitive", the lack of control on BP mechanics enables anyone to lie and cheat their way into official ship shops. It rewards toxicity and discourages cooperation, no matter the size.

Anyways, I thought of some ways this issue can be solved, ordered by assumed development time:

1. Allow us to transfer ship ownership.
2. Allow ships to be transferred to a company inventory where those with the right role can withdraw it.
3. Allow ship blueprints to be transferred to a company inventory, whereas anyone with the right role can construct it, but not edit it.
4. Introduce a "blueprint copy" item. This item can only be produced be the owners of the original. Having a BP copy item in your inventory will allow you to produce a single ship of its type using raw materials, after which the item is consumed. The BP copy is only used for construction and cannot be replicated or used to edit the ship.

 

[JoelFB]

Thanks for the feedback all. We should have an update on this later today and I'll provide some comments after that.

 

[ChaosRifle]

A faction rank system that can have 'roles' dynamically assigned to members (and created/removed with all traits to the role modifiable) that allows faction leaders to also assign specific blueprints to be 'available' to anyone in a specific role.


so as an example of how id like to see top level actions work:
So i could create a role of 'recruit', yyyyyyyyrename it to 'new member', modify that roles permissions to access exterior doors to our stations but not interior ones (a number of security clearance, greater than or equal to required clearance level allows usage), then add/remove available ships to the role, adding simply uploading the BP of a ship selected to automatically be usable by anyone in that role but can not be shared (ie no local copy of the BP is ever stored just because your in the role, its always on the server)

How to handle captured in combat ships or defectors I dont know, but in theory they can have a metadata flag on the ship that says its an factionBP making it uncopyable but people could rip it to parts to study it, so they only have once copy of that ship.. Not too sure here but this part is important to securing the ships designs.

 

[Atreties]

Why exactly do you care about empire ship blueprints? Seems fishy.

 

[JoelFB]

We have an update

We will add the separate decal pieces from Spatha and Knight to the game directly. This should remove most of the need for the current Spatha and Knight blueprints for ship builders. Here's a preview of the decal plates that will be added in the next patch:

Sharing of the blueprints themselves will be prohibited however.

The decals in general are a work-in-progress and at some point we will have a more freeform decal tool that allows ship builders to use decals more freely in their own designs. In the meantime the provided decal plates will hopefully help. (Thanks Max for the suggestion!)

We have also decided that blueprint sharing applies to player blueprints in the following way:

• Do not share blueprints unless you are the original creator/author of the blueprint
• This also applies to factions. Ex-members releasing faction blueprints is strictly forbidden.

These rules will most likely change once we bring the blueprint access controls features to the game properly, which will allow factions and authors better control over their blueprints. After this change factions will be more or less responsible for their blueprints themselves.

However the rule of not posting blueprints unless you're the author will still apply to ANY blueprint. The only exception is if the sharing is within a faction's own Discord/community and the faction rules allow sharing of faction blueprints in such way. Any sharing of any faction blueprint outside of said faction's Discord/community is forbidden however.

Some general Q&A about these:

• Do I have to delete/update the ships that use decal plates from Spatha/Knight/other ships?

No, you don't need to make any changes to any ships. This rule is more to clarify that blueprint sharing is not allowed unless you're the author (or without the express permission of the author but because that's extremely hard for us to track, the general rule is to not share a blueprint unless you're the author - exceptions can be asked from us beforehand).

• Do I have to delete my Knight/Spatha blueprint that I've obtained somewhere?

Generally speaking yes. This is for your own protection as well so you don't accidentally share it later. If you are a member of Empire (Spatha) or Kingdom (Knight), please refer to their own rules.

I will be updating the main post a bit later after some feedback.

 

[Zijkhal]

Do not share blueprints publicly unless you are the original creator/author of the blueprint

By public we mean the official Starbase Discord or any other Discord or community that is free for anybody to join.

So, one can create, for example, a private discord server, and invite arbitrarily many ppl to it and freely share any BP there? Is that intended?

 

[JoelFB]

The wording is a bit tricky to get right, the intention is to allow factions to come up with their own rules without it being in conflict with our general rules.

I've edited the post a little bit; removed the publicly part and added a specific "if within faction community" part. Once blueprint access control is in the game we'll have to revisit these rules to account for faction-vs-faction war/espionage, which is generally speaking something we want to allow and will need a modification of these rules that match whatever gameplay systems we have in place.

 

[MoneylooJr]

First the social engineering policies, now this? I'm noticing a pattern here, and I'm not sure I like it.
Alright, so right off the bat this poses a pretty big dilemma; Kingdom and Empire now have clear advantages over all other factions. They're potentially immune to espionage for one thing, since now using their ships without being a part of their faction is a bannable offense. They also don't have to worry about designs leaking either. If I manage to get a Collective ship blueprint, I can use that as much as I want. Build the ship outright, modify it, reverse-engineer it for use in my own ships. If Collective wants to stop me, they have to do so in-game via combat. If I do this with a dev-faction ship, I get banned. Collective can't do that to me; they have to deal with problems like this. Kingdom and Empire can completely revoke anyone who tries to do this.

Beyond this, what classifies as a dev-faction ship? Obviously the official ships like the Knight and Spatha fit in here. What about community made ships made for the dev factions? If Dynastar makes a ship for Kingdom, does it also fall under these same rules? Can Dynastar sell it? Can Dynastar members use it themselves? If someone else takes the blueprint from Dynastar, not Kingdom, does these rules still apply? Does Dynastar get the ability to punish players for stealing blueprints via timed bans or other out-of-game mechanics so long as they themselves use the ships they produce for Kingdom?

What about using parts from dev ships? You already announced releasing the decal parts, so that much is clear (thanks for that btw), but what about colored plates? I remember a few days back there was a discussion/argument on the Discord about players being hunted down by Empire for using plates with the Empire Orange color. Does this also apply? You mentioned how players can use "one or a few plates from an Empire/Kingdom ship (e.g. a blown up one.)" What constitutes as "a few plates?" How many plates is too many, and can players using ships deemed to have too many plates receive the same punishments as players using dev faction blueprints?

Much like the social engineering policies, these new rules seem too complicated and and too far-reaching to be effective. At best, Kingdom and Empire ships will be actively hunted down for special parts and ship designers lose out on some colors. At worst, people will find new ways to abuse these rules for their own gain and get people in trouble. A member of Empire/Kingdom could go around leaking blueprints to new ship designers and encourage them to use the parts, getting them in trouble. And what's to stop someone from attaching a bunch of dev-ship parts to ships belonging to their enemies to frame them? As long as no clear evidence exists, can you really prove they didn't attach the parts themselves? And thats just what I could come up with. These points might sound ridiculous, but games like this have a history of players finding ways to abuse mechanics if it means getting an advantage over or getting rid of the competition. These rules do nothing but hurt the sandbox you are building. I know it's not much right now, but this wouldn't be the first time I've seen a game start implementing a few odd mechanics and/or rules and then start sliding faster and faster down that slippery slope. You're already doing so well with the game end of the mmo; don't fall short at the community end.

 

[JoelFB]

Right now there is no way to obtain a blueprint ingame. We will revise the rules once that is possible and the ingame blueprint access control systems are done. We do want to allow the espionage kind of gameplay (at least that's the current thinking, not a direct promise).

Same goes for selling blueprints etc - these are not possible ingame yet. The other Dynastar/Kingdom questions are very good points and we'll need to think about them a bit more.

Parts of dev ships the line will be "substantial part", which is not yet clearly defined. I don't think we generally care that much about the parts themselves, it's more about the blueprint as a whole. If violations occur, we'll start with warnings and only proceed to timed bans upon repeated behavior. The same goes for clear evidence, hearsay will not lead to bans.

Colors we are still discussing but there is a sentiment internally that they should remain perks of dev factions.

I'll have to return to these next week. I personally believe rules are necessary to provide a common understanding of what is and what is not allowed, and I am willing to keep honing the rules as much as needed. Without rules we are at the mercy of whim decisions and uncertainty, and I can't see how that would be better - that's where the danger for real dev/mod abuse lies. By establishing rules players will know what is allowed and what is not, and we as developers will have a baseline for moderation actions if needed.

Right now we are still just forming the guidelines for everything, and as new features get added in we'll keep revising them. Anyhow I'll return to these next week, thanks for the feedback in the meantime!

 

[Quevin]

Colors we are still discussing but there is a sentiment internally that they should remain perks of dev factions.

I understand we have the first iteration of the paint tool, meaning we would get more features / colors available to us at a later date. However locking colors is which I have an issue with.

No other faction has their own color and shouldn't ever get a locked color.

From an outside perspective it looks more like Empire doesn't like other people made ships with "their" colors. This announcement happened mere days after I shared a picture of a fighter in empire colors.

And if you decide to lock colors, please do elaborate on why are DEV factions allowed to have colors no one else can use?

 

[dusty]

This doesn't sit well with me, either. I can sort of understand that Empire and Kingdom need some extra considerations (though I don't like it) since they're intended to provide some measure of balance to the universe, and help to induct new players into the game. I can completely understand that it is frustrating to see these faction ships being distributed openly, and I agree that blueprints in general need some measure of protection to encourage ship builders and general cooperation. However, implementing a rule to sweep up after the mistakes made in trusting the wrong people with blueprints - during the alpha, and with the threat of a ban to back it up - is absurd, and is one that - coming off the back of a previous discussion in the Discord about certain factions wanting to ".. shoot anyone using [their color] on sight," - reeks of territorial passive aggressiveness from a vocal minority within these groups. It's not even like protecting these blueprints nets those factions a real, tangible benefit: the ships in question are outdated, and not even those factions use them, and I have yet to see anyone using ship colors to identify a faction, much less to disguise themselves as part of one.