Incorporating an in-game Ship design element into the real-time MMO, and abolishing a separate Creative mode

Jetthetank

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I'm not terribly sympathetic to the notion that having an offline mode obligates you to use it. You still would need to build your actual ship online regardless. Even then, if the sandbox itself is co-op (as the devs have stated), is it that so terrible an imposition to simply switch over, with your friends, to experimentation/sandbox mode and continue working on things together? Sounds like the exact same experience to me, just faster and without barriers to trial and error. It's strange to me that you who would want optimal ships would want to make the process of testing and experimenting take an order of magnitude more time to figure out.
I dont see where you are drawing your argument over whether it is "faster and without barriers" versus "trial and error" ???
Your comparing one existing mechanic "sandbox mode" to a mechanic you are concocting as inferior, clunky, slower, and non-intuitive.
What makes you remotely believe that the devs would go through the trouble of adding a feature that is worse than the existing sandbox?
I dont see how it would be a faster process in the sandbox, if you are comparing it to a non-existent possible feature.
 

Jetthetank

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Lol, Neither of us know how the shipbuilder actually works.
So that should not be the argument here, it isnt supposed to be.
 

NoName

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To the people saying it's going to kill interaction: no it won't. Not in any way. Especially when most people will be building in their shipyards anyway so you wouldn't see them regardless when most of the game retreats to sov space.
But it would add interactions to the universe and also increase current interactions. It seems that rather than seeing the other side of the argument you kind of just refuse to acknowledge its points. Whereas even a game dev concedes that having it be ingame would have advantages and add interaction.
 

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Vampiricdust

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I still have yet to see a compelling reason in this thread to remove sandbox mode that doesn't boil down to "force other players to spend more time doing things tediously so they can be a decorative backdrop for me while I play the game and probably don't even interact with them anyway".
Try reading them again...

  • Working on a sandbox mode means labor time spent making it, maintaining, QA will have to go through it, and they won't be working on the online game
  • People in a sandbox are not part of the community and thus the community is smaller than it could have been.
  • A sandbox mode will drive players from the online game to design, test, and build their ships instead of being part of the community
  • A sandbox mode can always be added later, but removing it once released will be bad PR
  • Gaming the sandbox mode will cut a lot of economic activity from the game as people will already have their ship designs ready
  • The sandbox mode won't have any saving, so no progression, which means starting from scratch every time unless they allow importing blueprints
  • A minority of players would be offline only at the expense of the majority
  • Most successful MMOs do not have any offline content available
  • Having a sandbox mode may lead to poor player retention as sandbox mode won't be a game in of itself and fail to hook them into playing long term
 

NoName

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It's strange to me that you who would want optimal ships would want to make the process of testing and experimenting take an order of magnitude more time to figure out.
There's so much gameplay involved in that time that if the time gets dumped into an offline sandbox, the game world might never come alive. I could be a ship designer, and I would indeed have fun in a sandbox designing ships with free reign over every material and have no cost and so on. I just acknowledge it would not be an MMO. It would be like Robocraft... build your ship offline away from everyone and then take it into battle. Ok; that design did ok in battle, now make a new one or an upgrade and do it again. As such, the game would be Robocraft, not an MMO, at least, not reach the full potential of what an MMO offers.



Compounding the hours and hours spent trying to develop workable blueprints in game where everything is a resource sink sounds awful.
This sounds like a lot of games that are fun to be honest. Lots of time spent to accomplish goals; pretty much a staple of all the space games I can think of. Ship building is not the only feature of the game; something to keep in mind. The game's videos are not positioning Starbase to be the next-best spaceship CAD designer. The devs are already telling us what they want the game to be - a space opera of wild combat, risky trades, immense building and more. Also... I'm not sure the perspective. Everything in Starbase can be disassembled down to the base components and reused. So at worst, the argument could be you have to take everything apart, but that would be the exact same in an offline sandbox. You don't even save on any ability to "Create New" because in the live game you can do the same thing essentially and just simply start from scratch a few meters away. The main difference is the time interacting with the game world to acquire resources, which again, if the devs handled factions and incentivized the creation of things, this alleviates a lot of the concern.
 

Recatek

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This is just going in circles at this point. I don't think there's anything new to add to the discussion that isn't just rephrasing what's already been said. However, I hope whoever reads this from Frozenbyte (namely @LauriFB) recognizes that this isn't exactly a one-sided or decided topic. At least a portion of the game's audience is looking forward to the sandbox mode for full creative freedom in experimenting with creating cool designs for ships in the game at one's own pace.
 

Vloshko

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I still have yet to see a compelling reason in this thread to remove sandbox mode that doesn't boil down to "force other players to spend more time doing things tediously so they can be a decorative backdrop for me while I play the game and probably don't even interact with them anyway".
see:
...As we haven't put much work to sandbox yet it would be smart development-wise to postpone sandbox and see if people could live without it....
A wise man once said:

"Developer time is not infinite and everything comes at the cost of something else"
 
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NoName

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see:


A wise man once said:

"Developer time is not infinite and everything comes at the cost of something else"
Pretend I used your Like gif for you.




This is just going in circles at this point. I don't think there's anything new to add to the discussion that isn't just rephrasing what's already been said. However, I hope whoever reads this from Frozenbyte (namely @LauriFB) recognizes that this isn't exactly a one-sided or decided topic. At least a portion of the game's audience is looking forward to the sandbox mode for full creative freedom in experimenting with creating cool designs for ships in the game at one's own pace.
 

Atreties

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This is just going in circles at this point. I don't think there's anything new to add to the discussion that isn't just rephrasing what's already been said.
Well yeah, that's kinda what happens when you avoid actually attempting to address or counter any of the opposing points and keep responding with what amounts to "nuh-uh, you're wrong".
 
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There's so much gameplay involved in that time that if the time gets dumped into an offline sandbox, the game world might never come alive. I could be a ship designer, and I would indeed have fun in a sandbox designing ships with free reign over every material and have no cost and so on. I just acknowledge it would not be an MMO. It would be like Robocraft... build your ship offline away from everyone and then take it into battle. Ok; that design did ok in battle, now make a new one or an upgrade and do it again. As such, the game would be Robocraft, not an MMO, at least, not reach the full potential of what an MMO offers.


This sounds like a lot of games that are fun to be honest. Lots of time spent to accomplish goals; pretty much a staple of all the space games I can think of. Ship building is not the only feature of the game; something to keep in mind. The game's videos are not positioning Starbase to be the next-best spaceship CAD designer. The devs are already telling us what they want the game to be - a space opera of wild combat, risky trades, immense building and more. Also... I'm not sure the perspective. Everything in Starbase can be disassembled down to the base components and reused. So at worst, the argument could be you have to take everything apart, but that would be the exact same in an offline sandbox. You don't even save on any ability to "Create New" because in the live game you can do the same thing essentially and just simply start from scratch a few meters away. The main difference is the time interacting with the game world to acquire resources, which again, if the devs handled factions and incentivized the creation of things, this alleviates a lot of the concern.
I think NoName makes some excellent points here and I agree with them all. If there was a "like" button, I would have pressed it.

As one can imagine, the ship building process, in a game such as this one, is core part of the game. The development of a ship should be viewed as an investment. It should require not only the time the ship designer puts into it but, also, the time the crews put into farming the materials to build prototypes, the time crews put into farming the materials to test stats, the time put into providing security for your ship builder to build and test different materials and ideas, the time it takes to move those materials to a secluded island far away from the prying eyes of your competitors. When you remove that element of the game, you remove a large part of what makes these types of games exciting and fun.
 
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Kimsemus

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I'm enjoying seeing a lot of names from AO which had a universally reviled in-game and non-sandbox ship designer, ardently defending the same bad system here.

FYI a "sandbox" doesn't have to be separate. It can be an instanced or blueprint mode at a starbase that doesn't require resources and allows players to do a mock up that can be filled in, if you're overly concerned with some kind of artificial background interaction on the server you will almost never see. The tedium of however many man-hours spend designing and building a ship versus the blink of an eye that ship will get blown up will cause pretty much every more casual player to quit after the first interaction. There are more people who couldn't care less about tedious ship designing than those who do.

Recatek is right, this convo is going in circles now, but save this post: Enough people are going to complain about not having a buildmode that are a lot more casual than the players ardent enough to make accounts on a game forum with no release date, and you're going to be damaging your product in the long run.
 
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Generally I'm against completely removing the offline sandbox, and a very simplified version of it is acceptable.
I'm not going to repost my reply under another topic (https://forum.starbasegame.com/threads/concerns-with-single-player.142/) to here since all its points have already been covered by other replies here. Here are some additional thoughts.
This may not be a problem for most of us. But there are players that can't have high-quality connection to game servers whenever they want (like players physically far from game servers and/or have poor Internet connection), and the stable online time they have may not be enough to carefully design and test their creations. I don't think we should just tell them to buy some VPN stuff or to play another game. Thus even a very simple offline sandbox (like no moons, no NPC stations, no multiplayer capability and just a space to build ships, with physical rules and some asteroids) can be good.
Or maybe it shouldn't be a reason for keeping the offline sandbox because we can't take care of every single person, they need to find their own way out (i.e. fly pre-made ships, join a clan, ask their friends for help). And the only thing we can do is to feel sorry to this, maybe to set up more servers around the world in the future.

---------- Edit ----------

A good example of a multiplayer online game with an offline designer is Rust and Fortify. Fortify is an unofficial base designer for Rust. Players can quickly plan their base with lots of helpful tools and up to 3 other friends, see the stability, blow it up with C4/rockets/satchels and get the resource count and upkeep. But they still need to spend time collecting resources, fighting against rival players and environmental hazards to build and test out their bases in real game. A Fortify-like offline sandbox for Starbase can be good.
FORTIFY on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/505040/FORTIFY/
 
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Vexus

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But there are players that can't have high-quality connection to game servers whenever they want (like players physically far from game servers and/or have poor Internet connection), and the stable online time they have may not be enough to carefully design and test their creations. I don't think we should just tell them to buy some VPN stuff or to play another game.
This is, however, what every single successful MMO tends to tell players. "If you don't like certain features of our MMO, we can't force you to play. If you don't have a good internet connection; nothing we can do to help you." As such, if the desire is to have an offline mode for those players, the argument is that such a mode devalues the online gameplay component of the MMO. They cannot please everyone. In addition, those players who would stay offline, and those who would want to test efficiently, would all seek this offline mode, and the MMO component would not have the best chance for success. There is value in forcing your players to connect and play the game through as you the developer see is necessary to maintain the MMO component. If everyone could be satisfied, there would be value in satisfying anyone.

"Not everyone can form a 40-man raid for WoW raids," does not seem like a valid argument for making WoW have an offline component. The whole feature of the MMO is that you're playing with a lot of other people. That is the main value of the game - not any individual feature otherwise. "Sandbox" by itself does have value, don't get me wrong - building and creating in your own offline space is a tried and true successful model that many games have already done.

The reason I'm posting a lot about this is because all evidence shown to us so far from the devs points to their desire to make this game an MMO. If this looked to be another Space Engineers just better... I wouldn't see the value in trying to expand on the reasons other successful MMOs succeed; it wouldn't be one. Starbase is at a point where it does have to choose what it wants to be. The Steam page shows Single-player and people are expecting things. Mods on Discord are saying there will be single player creative mode still. The game needs to define itself going forward. And it could indeed just have an offline creative mode and individual servers - this is totally a possibility and I don't think any of us who are already emotionally invested in Starbase would not buy the game from it. It just wouldn't reach that full potential of an MMO. It wouldn't have the chance become equal to EVE. It wouldn't have the chance to surpass StarCitizen in gameplay and delivery. It would be a pretty good game. That could be good enough; to make a game that tries to satisfy everyone. For an MMO, there's lots of evidence showing trying to satisfy everyone is just not a very successful option. I see a lot of lost potential if the average path is taken, when they've done so much groundbreaking technical work to get to this point. They need to see what could be, and that it is in reach - in fact from what I see, it already exists - it just needs to be committed to in their minds, one way or the other.

There was a ~40 minute video from Anna from Frozenbyte showing some of Starbase development history. It was really good information. The beginning of the game development was nothing like what exists today. They didn't have this specific end-goal in mind at the beginning of development and I think they're still shaping what the game is supposed to be. The initial idea was far less ambitious, and it was through taking calculated risks - and devs delivering on those risks - over the development time that led them to this large space-MMO position. I feel they are poised to achieve more success being "The truly great space MMO" than "Another spaceship builder."

No Man's Sky was sold as being a multiplayer single infinite universe and delivered just a bunch of people working in offline servers but connected to a discovery server, with nothing you did in your game actually affecting anyone else, and even then, there were billions of planets so it didn't even matter. With all that, they sold over a million copies with some deception and a lie. There was no 'one universe' in NMS, so nothing players did impacted another player. Although NMS has made some amends, and plenty of people still play it, the push that got them all the sales initially was for that shared open universe MMO experience. Compared to initial hype, there's few playing it and few who come back to it for unique gameplay, not because the game isn't good, but because there's no one else there. Because it's empty of the things that matter - people.

I do see what Starbase has in front of itself and I think with the right drive to make a proper MMO, Starbase will capture a huge part of the space-MMO market, which is massive. If they commit to that, there's more value in reaching for that holy gail of MMO development, than offering individual offline servers to test build spaceships. The game is much more than that even in its current state. Many of the arguments here are pointing out how devaluing the online component doesn't do the main game any good.

As far as third party tools and simulators - those are almost always created well after a game's launch. Some basic tools have already been created for Starbase. Those tools will pull players out of the game itself, into a third-party tool, similarly to an offline sandbox. If the argument is that people will develop ship building simulators, then that is work the devs didn't have to do, and the devs maintain control of their online game experience and all the potential that brings. With no other outlet than the online component, the initial social-chain-reaction of people in a brand new MMO working together and interacting together is the critical-mass to success. If most of the players instead dipped away to an offline mode because it was available day 1, the live game world has little chance of being something great... and the devs relinquish the value that comes in scarcity of gameplay where the only place to get Starbase gameplay is inside the one fully connected online MMO universe that actually works.
 

Kimsemus

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I like how you are hinging the success of the game and the MMO aspect on whether players have to sit in their base building a ship or just importing it lol

If that is going to determine the quality of the MMO universe in Starbase the game has way bigger problems. All I'm saying is that not allowing people to sandbox build their ships is going to concentrate power into orgs that have the time/resources/poopsockers to build in a live setting, marginalizing solo and small group players.

I'm also laughing at the WoW example because their response to people not being able to assemble 40 man raids was to do what FrozenByte SHOULD be doing: They made accessing raid content trivially easy via LFR and dumbed down mechanics, and eliminated almost all raid support activities outside of mythics.

It's the MOST valid argument because if you're going to gate design behind grind mechanics you're going to end up with a lot less innovation, experimentation, and development, which ironically will kill interaction way more than having a buildmode will lol.
 

Vexus

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@Kimsemus Yeah - if people can just import ships, the game loses a lot of value as players shortcut what would otherwise be a lengthy building process (similar amount of time to an offline environment, just done online with a bit slower due to a potential need to acquire resources). If you don't want to build, buy a pre-made or player-made ship. If you want to build - your final creation will truly matter.

All MMOs do indeed marginalize solo and small group players. That's kind of the point; devs should not be trying to cater to everyone's wishes.

As for WoW, their needing to tone down the raid numbers was only well after the game was a mega-success, and after they made critical mistakes devaluing player gameplay. This is why WoW Classic is coming back in a couple weeks, because many people saw enough value in that difficult, hard to obtain gameplay, that they demanded it back. I paid $15 to Blizzard just to secure my name! They're geniuses! I might not even play it! This is a critical point because unlike games where everyone can have the same Name#1234, in WoW Classic your name mattered since no one else could have it! Scarcity creates value.

Basically what I'm trying to say is, the reason people couldn't fill 40 man raids in WoW was years after launch when they began devaluing gameplay. For many years, the game was extremely successful due to meaningful, online only gameplay that didn't cater to everyone. They are still successful due to being meaningful online only gameplay that does not cater to everyone. The introduction of LFR and dumbed down mechanics and so on was what drove people away, among other things. There was little value in being a tank when anyone could just enter queue and find a tank. It used to matter when you found a tank or a healer in WoW, and you friend-listed them and played with them for years afterwards. Now, that interaction was so convenient, it didn't matter, and the game lost meaning and value. WoW Classic is successful. Queue on one server was over 10,000, just to secure their name. People value that rare, difficult and online only gameplay. The argument from you it seems is WoW should just give players offline mode, not WoW Classic; let people raid however they want, even if they do it solo. This is wrong.
 

Vampiricdust

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I like how you are hinging the success of the game and the MMO aspect on whether players have to sit in their base building a ship or just importing it lol
I think he's saying it'll weaken the MMO aspect, not be a 1 shot 1 kill fail point.

If that is going to determine the quality of the MMO universe in Starbase the game has way bigger problems. All I'm saying is that not allowing people to sandbox build their ships is going to concentrate power into orgs that have the time/resources/poopsockers to build in a live setting, marginalizing solo and small group players.
It's not determination of it, it's just a waste of development time. Why not spend more time on the game than making a sandbox with no saving and no progression? It's like going to a Italian restaurant that serves egg rolls. Yeah, egg rolls are delicious and probably won't kill the restaurant, but that's not the kind of business they're saying they want to be.

I'm also laughing at the WoW example because their response to people not being able to assemble 40 man raids was to do what FrozenByte SHOULD be doing: They made accessing raid content trivially easy via LFR and dumbed down mechanics, and eliminated almost all raid support activities outside of mythics.
I quit playing because guilds fell apart. Everyone split up and played in small groups after that. Our guilds died, there was just no point when LFG fills all the spots. We went from over 200 members, to 40, and then to 10. Then we just stopped doing guilds as it was like 4 of us with 3-4 old friends occasionally and the rest LFG. It was boring and the community was gone.

It's the MOST valid argument because if you're going to gate design behind grind mechanics you're going to end up with a lot less innovation, experimentation, and development, which ironically will kill interaction way more than having a buildmode will lol.
What grind mechanics? There's no leveling system, you can build anything anyone else can day 1. All you need is the resources or the credits to buy them. Yeah, you have go get those resources... I guess that's a grind? But that's the game. Join a group, help out, save up, and build along the way. You're able to buy a ship after a couple hours, then you can fly off to do whatever you want to do. The game seems to be focused around players having a social experience together. Being alone in a sandbox doesn't fit their goals.
 
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