Dev Question - What, Exactly, does "Safe Zone" Mean?

[Quinc]

The mechanics by which you disable a player made safe zone will probably be controversial regardless of how they handle it; however from the perspective of making the game actually fun, you want to design it so that the maximum number of players, who have a stake in the fight, can participate in the fight. Ideally the attackers and defenders would agree to a time for battle, though of course they will not agree. The attackers inevitably will be the ones who initiate the process and thus will inevitably have some influence over when the battle for the fate of the station occurs.

Personally I think the process should favor the defender, and I think we should take EVE online as an example. The defender sets multiple "vulnerability periods" each week. To start the attacker destroys a specific structure that must exist at the edge of the defender's safe zone. Then during the next vulnerability period (that happens to start more than 24 hours later) the safe zone falls and the station becomes vulnerable to damage.

Disabling all damage in a safe zone seems heavy handed, but I can't think of a reason against it.

 

[Recatek]

Personally I think the process should favor the defender, and I think we should take EVE online as an example. The defender sets multiple "vulnerability periods" each week. To start the attacker destroys a specific structure that must exist at the edge of the defender's safe zone. Then during the next vulnerability period (that happens to start more than 24 hours later) the safe zone falls and the station becomes vulnerable to damage.

Shadowbane and other games have similar systems. IIRC Shadowbane's system worked such that in that in order to render a city vulnerable to attack you had to construct and deploy a "bane stone" and place it outside the target city. Once the bane stone was deployed the attackers set a wide vulnerability window (say, 18 hours), and the defenders selected a narrower vulnerability window (say, 2 hours) within the attacker's wider one. Once that window came around either the attackers destroyed the city or the defenders destroyed the bane stone to end the vulnerability window. This resulted in nice big castle sieges rather than overnight raids and always struck me as a pretty good approach to ensuring big siege events were player-vs-player and not player-vs-door.

Importantly though, the game also had other smaller objectives to fight over on a day-to-day basis where the stakes weren't as high. Things like capturable mines that yielded useful crafting resources, or valuable spots to level up characters. Something as big as a city (or station) siege is a major gameplay event that didn't, and shouldn't happen every day, and so these smaller sub-objectives gave people purposeful PvP activities to fill that time with other interesting things to do.

 

[butt_useless]

There will be three fairly obvious early strategies employed by players.

1. Make blueprints of anything that works.
2. Store resources safely, secretly and in abundance to rebuild quickly after decimation
3. Handy phone numbers for ordering takeaway and drip fed liquids. No one will want to leave their computers, ships, base and building for just one second.

I see from all the video clips and forum info base areas will have safe zones.