- Joined
- Mar 7, 2022
- Messages
- 40
All the way back in Article 2, I argued that the game should enable cooperative play, and in the articles since then, I have continued to highlight fields where cooperative play is beneficial or even necessary. In my opinion, this has started to take center field with the new concept for Stations in Article 10, where maintenance means that the largest stations with the most modules may be out of reach for solo players. Now, encouraging collaborative play to accomplish endgame content is certainly permissible in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, but the game needs to enable collaborative play in an intuitive manner. The technical issues with getting lots of players in one area at a time are out of scope of these articles, but the UI interface for working with players and managing social relationships (including corporations) can use some polish.
Forming a group can be made easier by being able to select multiple players at once from a list. Whether it’s being able to select multiple friends or multiple people on a station at once, this greatly speeds up sending invites to a group.
Once a group is formed, it should be easy to grant access to ships and stations. Currently, ships can have group operators added only by switching to the group tab and clicking “Add operator” one by one. An improvement would be the aforementioned multiple user selection, but being able to add a “Group access” permission to the ship, so that when the ship owner is in a group any group member can operate the ship, would be very useful. Stations are very slightly better off in this area, as a group tag exists for transponder access, but this should be expanded to include the gamut of new and existing station permissions.
With the increased scale from solo or intermittent group gameplay, Company social tools would benefit from being able to create folders for Station Property to help logically group property with similar purposes together and make navigating the lists easier. Active Directory has provided me a lot of inspiration on organizing players and property.
Company Property permissions should make use of an expanded and reworked Tags and Jobs system. Right now, Jobs and Tags seem to address similar issues of categorization, but Tags only add an icon after members’ names, and only one Job can be held at a time. Both of these should be replaced with an organizational feature tentatively called “Jobs” but acts more like an Active Directory Group, with sets of permissions tied to each Job and company members potentially possessing multiple Jobs. In this way, Company Property can have permissions tied to Job membership instead of directly to users. Company Gas Refinery Station #3 can have permissions set so that any company member of Job “Refiners” can enter the station safe zone and interact with the refineries, while any company member of Job “Refinery Builders” can perform the above actions but can also add/remove modules to the station. As members join and are promoted, they can simply be added/removed from the above roles to simultaneously gain access to all the Company Property tied to these Jobs at once.
Company Stations should support more fine-grained permissions than is currently available. The currently existing “Modify Production” permission is simply too flexible to cover all the new modules proposed for stations. While it may be desirable to institute permissions for each individual module, I think that instead permissions should instead be for each type of module. Instead of managing permissions for Gas Refinery #1, #2, etc. on a station, all the Gas Refineries on a given station would share permissions. The permission assignment interface would of course support options to add multiple permissions at once to Jobs and a “Select All” option for top-ranking Jobs that should be able to do anything on a Company Station.
Lastly, Company Auditing should be expanded. Bank transactions have no option to directly associate a note with the transaction, but adding the option to add notes and adding the option to enforce adding a note helps Company Officers to track why deposits and withdrawals are being made. If Bob withdraws 1 million credits from the company account claiming that it’s for the new Capital Ship and then never works on the Capital Ship, a Company Treasurer auditing bank transactions can note this and ask where the money went. Furthermore, actions like adding new Company Property, resigning Company Property, adding members, adjusting Jobs, and any other management activity would generate logs that can be reviewed by Company Officers with the appropriate permissions similarly to how the Discord Audit Log works on servers.
Alliances range from only a loose association of companies to a tight framework of companies with a shared leadership and purpose. This can be reflected in game by allowing company users with a certain Job permission to expose/hide data from Alliance Officers and all other Alliance Members. At a minimum though, all Company Members should be able to access a complete Alliance Directory listing which Companies are in an Alliance. Company Officers can choose to expose their membership to the alliance, Company Property, and grant Company Property permissions to other companies in the Alliance. Depending on the Alliance’s structure, it may or may not directly hold property that can be used by all members.
Through these changes, Alliances become something that’s formalized in-game rather than a third-party communication arrangement. Companies can choose to share map data and more with each other to collaborate on the widest possible scale. This helps bring in the largest possible social interactions with hundreds or more players working, fighting, and more together.
Group Management
Currently, it’s difficult to collaborate quickly and easily with a group. Groups should be strongly supported, as they’re useful in a company setting and they’re the only way for normally solo players to formally collaborate. Sadly, they’re poorly integrated with permissions management. Furthermore, players cannot tell if their friends are online unless they’re at the same station or a private message is sent, which should be changed.Forming a group can be made easier by being able to select multiple players at once from a list. Whether it’s being able to select multiple friends or multiple people on a station at once, this greatly speeds up sending invites to a group.
Once a group is formed, it should be easy to grant access to ships and stations. Currently, ships can have group operators added only by switching to the group tab and clicking “Add operator” one by one. An improvement would be the aforementioned multiple user selection, but being able to add a “Group access” permission to the ship, so that when the ship owner is in a group any group member can operate the ship, would be very useful. Stations are very slightly better off in this area, as a group tag exists for transponder access, but this should be expanded to include the gamut of new and existing station permissions.
Company Management
Companies are the biggest drivers of collaboration in Starbase, but the interface for managing them is sadly lacking. After talking to multiple company leaders and studying the interface, I’ve come up with some ideas besides those discussed in the first section of this article. A good way to start is with Company Stations. Company Stations would have the same concept as Station Ships, and they would replace the existing awkward system where station owners have to continuously add and remove permissions as players leave and join the company. Instead, permissions can be evaluated based on an expanded Group/Tag system. The same permissions systems would be used for Company Ships and Company Stations, collectively known as Company Property, and this will be detailed below.With the increased scale from solo or intermittent group gameplay, Company social tools would benefit from being able to create folders for Station Property to help logically group property with similar purposes together and make navigating the lists easier. Active Directory has provided me a lot of inspiration on organizing players and property.
Company Property permissions should make use of an expanded and reworked Tags and Jobs system. Right now, Jobs and Tags seem to address similar issues of categorization, but Tags only add an icon after members’ names, and only one Job can be held at a time. Both of these should be replaced with an organizational feature tentatively called “Jobs” but acts more like an Active Directory Group, with sets of permissions tied to each Job and company members potentially possessing multiple Jobs. In this way, Company Property can have permissions tied to Job membership instead of directly to users. Company Gas Refinery Station #3 can have permissions set so that any company member of Job “Refiners” can enter the station safe zone and interact with the refineries, while any company member of Job “Refinery Builders” can perform the above actions but can also add/remove modules to the station. As members join and are promoted, they can simply be added/removed from the above roles to simultaneously gain access to all the Company Property tied to these Jobs at once.
Company Stations should support more fine-grained permissions than is currently available. The currently existing “Modify Production” permission is simply too flexible to cover all the new modules proposed for stations. While it may be desirable to institute permissions for each individual module, I think that instead permissions should instead be for each type of module. Instead of managing permissions for Gas Refinery #1, #2, etc. on a station, all the Gas Refineries on a given station would share permissions. The permission assignment interface would of course support options to add multiple permissions at once to Jobs and a “Select All” option for top-ranking Jobs that should be able to do anything on a Company Station.
Lastly, Company Auditing should be expanded. Bank transactions have no option to directly associate a note with the transaction, but adding the option to add notes and adding the option to enforce adding a note helps Company Officers to track why deposits and withdrawals are being made. If Bob withdraws 1 million credits from the company account claiming that it’s for the new Capital Ship and then never works on the Capital Ship, a Company Treasurer auditing bank transactions can note this and ask where the money went. Furthermore, actions like adding new Company Property, resigning Company Property, adding members, adjusting Jobs, and any other management activity would generate logs that can be reviewed by Company Officers with the appropriate permissions similarly to how the Discord Audit Log works on servers.
Alliance Management
The last type of social interacting that I want to cover is Alliances. Currently, all Companies have the “Allegiance” box, but for almost all companies in the game this Allegiance is set to Neutral (presumably only Kingdom and Empire are different). I’d like to propose that this be tied into an Alliance system. Companies can prove to declare their membership in an Alliance publicly or privately, but the Allegiance box would be used for this purpose.Alliances range from only a loose association of companies to a tight framework of companies with a shared leadership and purpose. This can be reflected in game by allowing company users with a certain Job permission to expose/hide data from Alliance Officers and all other Alliance Members. At a minimum though, all Company Members should be able to access a complete Alliance Directory listing which Companies are in an Alliance. Company Officers can choose to expose their membership to the alliance, Company Property, and grant Company Property permissions to other companies in the Alliance. Depending on the Alliance’s structure, it may or may not directly hold property that can be used by all members.
Through these changes, Alliances become something that’s formalized in-game rather than a third-party communication arrangement. Companies can choose to share map data and more with each other to collaborate on the widest possible scale. This helps bring in the largest possible social interactions with hundreds or more players working, fighting, and more together.
Closing Thoughts
Starbase is marketed as a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, but with the level of social tools available it is hard to feel the Massively part of that title. By making Social Tools more uniform, flexible, and powerful, Frozenbyte can encourage a migration away from the “solo players should be able to do everything” attitude that can be corrosive to enabling large-scale projects in a rewarding manner. With Groups, Companies, and Alliances taking to the field to make their mark on the game world, Starbase can see the growth of something truly impressive. From Mega Stations making the Origin Stations look small, to Territory Control backed by the might of dozens of ships, to Capital Ships hosting the hangars and players necessary to mine out swathes of asteroid belts, Social Tools are necessary for making all of these things happen.