My thoughts on the current direction of the game.

[mrchip]

- disclaimer -
I've ranted about this a couple times in Discord, and nobody ever reacted. So it might just be my garbage wrong opinion. (I never went into this much detail, but who knows.)
But I still feel convinced. So i'm making this thread to see if anyone has something to say.
___

TLDR

The game is undoubtedly in a very suboptimal state right now, for a lot of reasons.
We assume that it's because the game is incomplete. And while that's obviously a prerequisite factor, I think there's a fundamental issue with the direction of the game.
By that, I mean that: if we had a time machine, hopped... 1.5 years ahead? Or, whenever the roadmap gets completed...
...The game we would find might still be heavily flawed.

My conclusions boil down to:

• Any time spent AFK should be removed from the game entirely, and there is currently a TON of it.
• The grind might have an alternative. Or not. That part is pure theory. Or, the game could find a way to make all/most grind heavily favor co-op playstyles, so that the grind part of the game gets to be a multiplayer activity.
• The current direction of the game, when fully executed, will make it very hard to "reactively" change the game to what i'm suggesting. It would essentially be like making a building, demolishing it, and starting over, wasting precious years of development for a game that is already percieved as behind schedule by the public. So what's more likely is, the devs will have to stick to it, even if they dont like it. "It's not a flaw, it's a feature now"

___

1) Can I finally play the game?
This is a very fundamental, but basic concern.
The downtime is ENORMOUS for ALMOST EVERYTHING. Time spent AFK, or just waiting.

• Want to go mine asteroids? You need to fly out 5-50 minutes. And back.
• Pirate with a radiation scanner (upcoming feature) looking for a prey? Not sure. Maybe that's quick. But the rad scanner will probably just give you an intensity value, not a distance. So to know if a potential target is close enough to even bother, will probably take a while of fiddling with your radar. And then you have to fly to the target. And odds are it's a hauler going full speed in a line, so 50/50 chance of it going away from you.
• Pirate without a radiation scanner? All you do is sit in a spot and wait.
• Want to be an escort? Unless you're flying into a warzone, you're lucky if you get 1 encounter half of the missions you fly. [THIS IS INCREDIBLY OPTIMISTIC considering capital ships and stations will spread the playerbase thin in the universe] So basically, escort is "formation flying, oh and sometimes you might get to do combat".
• Crafting things takes a long time. You might be crafting for the parts themselves, or just for progression tree points. Either way that's just spam clicking some items, and walking away from your computer.
• Want to move your capital ship, along with all of your squad with it? Changing mining spot? Well, that literally takes days due to spool time.
  "Just plan ahead" is not a solution, it's a patch. When for any reason you know there's no point in doing activities where you currently are, you won't do it, you'll just close the game / not launch it, waiting for the cap you're on to land to the new destination.

I want to play the game. The game is almost entirely made up of waiting. Waiting is not playing. Let me play the real game.

Let's make a comparison with an established genre: Battle Royales.
You might complain about the downtime there, and yet you can see how compared to Starbase, it's nothing.
An important thing is, that the downtime of a BR is different from most of Starbase's downtime:
in a BR, "downtime" are moments where there is no action. But you are still doing things:

• Looting
• Traversing the map (yes, still more involved than SB, you're walking around a twisting level, instead of setting throttle to max and walking away from your computer)
• Scanning your surroundings (looking for cues, listening for sounds)
• Deciding how to proceed (go here, go there? hide, or push? go to that other loot place first? avoid a particular place?)
• Depending on the game, there might be abilities you use, or objects placed in the level that you can interact with.

Starbase's downtime is often straight up uninterrupted AFK for many minutes, or in the case of spools/siege timers, even waiting outside the game.
There might be things that you technically could do, but aren't worth bothering. (Checking for unknown ships/hostiles, you could do that literally anytime all the time, but unless you're expecting them, you most likely will meet nobody anyways. It would waste time, effort, and get you carpal tunnel syndrome.)

My solution (but you should also think of one yourself) :

Downtime should just vanish as much as possible.
This is where the current direction isn't just not solving problems, but actually harmful.

The whole cap spool/siege timer system has massive inherent downtime, but that might be a necessary evil for timezones / offline raiding.

I suggest giving EVERY ship a quickly (5-20 seconds) charging warpdrive. Yep.
This is a radical change, but i see no other solution.
Problem is, if we add ship warpdrives, what's the point of capitals? Maybe leaving them as just siege machines is OK. Maybe not. And then the game would be filled with these million ton, billion credits paperweights.
Sieges would be disrupted too, since you can ship warp to the battle... Adding an exclusion zone might be enough to fix that.

Warpgates can still fill the niche of making travel through super frequent routes more cheap/efficient. But it's a niche, and they look really expensive to build.

But wait... It's not that simple
The massive downtime that players have to spend to do literally anything absolutely matters in the value that anything has.
A stack of ore would be worth less if you can just *hop* *mine a couple minutes* *hop* *done* .

So, reducing wait = reducing time needed = reducing value. The next paragraph goes into this in more detail.

Counterbalancing the value or cost might be enough. Or not. It's cursed, I can't predict it.



2) The cursed problem.
Starbase wants to make a fully player driven universe. The purpose is to promote, and make it routine, to have meaningful and complex player interactions of many kinds:

• War
• Small scale / opportunistic PVP
• Trade
• Alliances
• Industry
• Logistics

If we had endless resources and a creative mode, none of this would happen.
Necessity is the spark that motivates every goal in this, and goals can create subgoals (for instance, logistics can support combat, or mining operations; mining itself might be considered an instrumental goal to acquire resources, which themselves are an instrument for... anything, really)

So the obvious question is:

How should necessity be designed in the entire game?

Make it a very light grind for anything, and there a possibility that it has the same issues as the "creative mode" hypothetical.
Make it a very heavy grind, and... Nobody likes that. Get it out of here.

But if there is no grind, there is no necessity. If there is no necessity, nothing has a reason to be done anymore.

Necessity and grind are 2 ends of the same spectrum, and they each want something completely opposite.
Necessity wants to hit you as hard as possible, to motivate all of those rich player interactions.
But the grind is time spent not in these interactions. So you'd want it to be as low as possible.

It's a cursed problem. It has no true solution.
The only thing you can hope for, is that eventually, with iterations, feedback, and appropriate changes, if everything goes right, the end result will be ok-ish, somewhere in the middle.
This is nothing new, and a lot of online videogames have to deal with something like this in some form.

The first point here is, anytime "reducing the grind" comes up, you can't "just do it". Balancing or features may be enough to make it work. Or not. Who knows. 1) is affected by this.

Crazy theory
I don't really have a solution for this, so instead I have a question for you.
Could there be something else that (partially?) replaces the role of grind, time and cost as a motivator for the game? Do you have any ideas? Are there any games out there that already did this?

Because right now the game fundamentally relies on grind, which is... Not the player interactions, the core that the game promises.
(Or, maybe there's a way to change things so that all/most grind should be done as a co-op activity? Would that be enough of an improvement?)

The current plan for the game is a Jenga tower, where if you try to remove 1 piece, the whole thing falls.
Ships exist because they let you mine, fight, travel...
You need resources for ships, stations, capitals.
You mine because you need resources.
You fight because that lets you take resources and assets.
You build a civ capital ship because you want a secure place to store your resources.
You build a mil capital ship because you either want to use it as a traveling mining outpost (because you need to mine, because you need resources)
You build a station or outpost because that lets you use gas extractors. Which give you resources passively.

Basically, the entire game relies on resources and time.
VERY THEORETICALLY, if the current plans can be abandoned, nothing says it has to be like that. Because at the end, all it needs to do is somehow provide motivation for activities in the game, so if something else can do that, it may be an alternative.



3) Miscellaneous concerns

Gate camping
AFAIK, Nothing in the upcoming features adresses this.
If you are a gate camper, I'd like to hear if you think it's healthy for the game to keep it.

Capital ship/station camping
Especially with radiation scanners, I have no doubt that spotting caps and station is not hard. Then we might even get a beacon putting a name on everyone's HUDs, maybe. Or maybe not.
If the cap/station isn't directly spottable, it might be visible anyways on rad scanner due to high concentrated activity of ships.
If you want to camp, and find a target, you'll be able to camp. Sure, you'll get spotted when you open fire, and eventually the defenders will be more than you, but especially considering that I believe most of the times, there won't be many people around, a camper will be able to do way more damage than they recieve before they're out of the fight.
It might be so effective that it could be a legitimate tactic used in war against outpost that are known to be weak.

Multiplayer, sometimes. (Or, "The vast lonely universe")
Players are dangerous, and you can choose where to place yourself in the universe, thanks to capitals and stations.
So naturally you want to choose a spot that gives you the protection of not being found. Away from other players.
The playerbase could increase 20x, and you won't notice, because you only see your few clanmates that happen to be in the same place as you at the same time, for the most part.
Different reasons, but similar-ish outcome to what Elite: Dangerous ended up with.



So, what do you think?

-thanks for coming to my Ted talk xdddd

 

[TGess]

Way too much afk. I am saying this for 1.5 years now

 

[Distuth]

These are good points, overall. Some are addressed by various mechanics down the line (Atmosphere pumps removing the grind of mining as long as you can defend them, Item printers remove the grind of crafting 500 parts for your ship before you can make it, etc) but there definitely is an argument to be made that downtime is too high even with those.

That said, I don't think a sub capital warp drive is the answer here. Perhaps a secondary short range warp system that activates immediately on the cap ship (with a cooldown to prevent someone from just daisy chaining jump points) would be more like what you're looking for.

As for defeating grind, the only thing I've ever seen work is tying grind to higher risk ways to avoid that grind.

A miner willing to go deep enough into the belt and hide from all human contact is very difficult to find, just because the odds of running across them are low. A station pulling in atmospheric gas to compress into ore is a lot easier to find, because it doesn't move.

Still. This layer only really works on an opportunistic level. Pirates versus merchants and miners. We have no reason to cross the solar system to kick someone's teeth in when we can just make our own stuff just as well.

We need a reason for big organized groups to clash. Perhaps an area of space that whoever controls it at X date gets an in game monument to their faction?

I don't have good answers for this one.

 

[Paralen]

I think a fast travel network is a better option than warp travel for everyone. We already have the tech here, we just need to give it to ordinary people. If we had the ability of setting up gates on stations or even on military capital ships, it would solve some of the issues presented here. Miners could reach rich asteroid fields faster, it would create hotspots for pirates and hostile factions could try to sabotage the mining operation by attacking the gate or setting up a blockade. Fast travel gate should be ofc so expensive that setting it up will require significant effort even for a big company (thus it will become a juicy target and it will be defended in case it's attacked).
I can also imagine some long range detection tech for such bases, it would provide some security in the region for its owners as long as he's ready to respond to threats (practically creating high-sec sector near allied bases and another target for their opponents if they wanted better control in the sector).

As for the crafting, it should take a reasonable amount of time to craft something, but yes it should be reworked so that it makes a bit more sense, spamming parts just for research point is just bad. I understand why it is like this though, there aren't many options for exping in Starbase, it's practically this or research/exp per time spent (or no research at all ofc).

 

[CalenLoki]

While I agree that AFK time is bad, I don't think that personal warp drive is the answer. By introducing it, you'd remove a lot of aspects of the game:
-No more trading, as resources are pretty much globalised
-People are spread even more, as settling far away looses it's natural downside (being far from others)
-Station loose their function as outpost (both mining and military), warp gate hubs, gas stations and local trade hubs, and serve only as storage/factory (all in safe zone) and gas farms (bare bones, visited only to pick up goods or during siege).
-Pirates can't even guess where people will go, since there are no POI for miners or traders outside of SZ


Getting fully functional stations cut the time needed to get to asteroids to almost nothing.
Transporting those resources out of the station to trade will take time, if you don't want to loose all mentioned things due to resource globalisation. So I'd rather focus on making that part of the game fun and engaging, rather than throwing it out of the game.
Possible solutions:

-Change asteroid and cloud distribution in the belt to create clear, narrow and curvy paths to follow, and densely packed clusters to avoid.
It would change the flight from AFK-friendly straight line to a path you need to actively navigate. And remove the need for RF walls, since the space is either clean or straight up unflyable. It would also distinguish between big bulky freighters and small mining ships. Together with changing drag formula to make big ships more drifty and thrust efficient, tight corners would make catching up to them a bit easier.

-Add AI dangers in the wild, so taking escort/crew is necessity, and they have things to shoot at on every single convoy run. Their spawn algorithm would take distance from stations, convoy speed and size into account, to further discourage avoiding civilisation.
AI doesn't need to be extremely smart or complex. We're in space, so pathfinding and positioning doesn't matter that much. Predictive aiming (for linear motion) is easy as well. It would also force all ships to be at least lightly plated, since they'd be sprayed with low-damage hits.

-Background crafting is coming, together with all the offline station functionality. It won't work in a physical way (due to nobody to host it), but i can just retroactively calculate how much stuff got crafted since last time it got hosted. And that can require Factorio/Satisfactory kind of setup of crafting machines and conveyor belts.

-Warp warm up for station sieges is necessity to prevent night capping. Although alternatively mil cap could warp instantly, but the safe zones (both station and mil cap) could have timer before they drop. It would allow attackers to easier prevent defenders from evacuating all the goods, since they now have FOB right at their doorstep.
Non-combat warping could be indeed instant, as long as there is nobody with active warp disruptor within certain distance (read: can't warp cap to avoid being sieged or raided). That disruptor should also prevent placing station block to drop quick safe zone - better than timers.

-Teleporting your endo should be instant, free and long range. As long as you leave all your equipment and old body behind (for later use) and "posses" new one at the destination point. That would cut all the time needed to just get players to the action zone, and would remove the need for multiple accounts.


TBH I see no problem with gate/station/cap camping. Radiation detection works both ways, so if campers show up nearby, just blast them away.
If you're offline, they have nothing to do there, and they'll leave.
If they are stronger than what you can deploy, you've been outplayed. Either negotiate peace (for a price), or teleport to some other station to do other things. Or try to fight, if you think you have a chance.
And let's call it a raid. Camping has unnecessary negative connotations.

And personally I'd remove the possibility to defend by hiding far away. I.e. by making rad detection more precise the less signals it has around. I.e. it can detect up to 10 stations and 20 ships, and it doesn't matter if they are 10 or 1000km away. So you can't find what's behind enemy lines, even when they are in the neighbourhood, but you can find that single easternmost station without any issues.

 

[LoPing]

- disclaimer -
I've ranted about this a couple times in Discord, and nobody ever reacted. So it might just be my garbage wrong opinion. (I never went into this much detail, but who knows.)
But I still feel convinced. So i'm making this thread to see if anyone has something to say.
___

TLDR

The game is undoubtedly in a very suboptimal state right now, for a lot of reasons.
We assume that it's because the game is incomplete. And while that's obviously a prerequisite factor, I think there's a fundamental issue with the direction of the game.
By that, I mean that: if we had a time machine, hopped... 1.5 years ahead? Or, whenever the roadmap gets completed...
...The game we would find might still be heavily flawed.

My conclusions boil down to:

• Any time spent AFK should be removed from the game entirely, and there is currently a TON of it.
• The grind might have an alternative. Or not. That part is pure theory. Or, the game could find a way to make all/most grind heavily favor co-op playstyles, so that the grind part of the game gets to be a multiplayer activity.
• The current direction of the game, when fully executed, will make it very hard to "reactively" change the game to what i'm suggesting. It would essentially be like making a building, demolishing it, and starting over, wasting precious years of development for a game that is already percieved as behind schedule by the public. So what's more likely is, the devs will have to stick to it, even if they dont like it. "It's not a flaw, it's a feature now"

___

1) Can I finally play the game?
This is a very fundamental, but basic concern.
The downtime is ENORMOUS for ALMOST EVERYTHING. Time spent AFK, or just waiting.

• Want to go mine asteroids? You need to fly out 5-50 minutes. And back.
• Pirate with a radiation scanner (upcoming feature) looking for a prey? Not sure. Maybe that's quick. But the rad scanner will probably just give you an intensity value, not a distance. So to know if a potential target is close enough to even bother, will probably take a while of fiddling with your radar. And then you have to fly to the target. And odds are it's a hauler going full speed in a line, so 50/50 chance of it going away from you.
• Pirate without a radiation scanner? All you do is sit in a spot and wait.
• Want to be an escort? Unless you're flying into a warzone, you're lucky if you get 1 encounter half of the missions you fly. [THIS IS INCREDIBLY OPTIMISTIC considering capital ships and stations will spread the playerbase thin in the universe] So basically, escort is "formation flying, oh and sometimes you might get to do combat".
• Crafting things takes a long time. You might be crafting for the parts themselves, or just for progression tree points. Either way that's just spam clicking some items, and walking away from your computer.
• Want to move your capital ship, along with all of your squad with it? Changing mining spot? Well, that literally takes days due to spool time.
  "Just plan ahead" is not a solution, it's a patch. When for any reason you know there's no point in doing activities where you currently are, you won't do it, you'll just close the game / not launch it, waiting for the cap you're on to land to the new destination.

I want to play the game. The game is almost entirely made up of waiting. Waiting is not playing. Let me play the real game.

Let's make a comparison with an established genre: Battle Royales.
You might complain about the downtime there, and yet you can see how compared to Starbase, it's nothing.
An important thing is, that the downtime of a BR is different from most of Starbase's downtime:
in a BR, "downtime" are moments where there is no action. But you are still doing things:

• Looting
• Traversing the map (yes, still more involved than SB, you're walking around a twisting level, instead of setting throttle to max and walking away from your computer)
• Scanning your surroundings (looking for cues, listening for sounds)
• Deciding how to proceed (go here, go there? hide, or push? go to that other loot place first? avoid a particular place?)
• Depending on the game, there might be abilities you use, or objects placed in the level that you can interact with.

Starbase's downtime is often straight up uninterrupted AFK for many minutes, or in the case of spools/siege timers, even waiting outside the game.
There might be things that you technically could do, but aren't worth bothering. (Checking for unknown ships/hostiles, you could do that literally anytime all the time, but unless you're expecting them, you most likely will meet nobody anyways. It would waste time, effort, and get you carpal tunnel syndrome.)

My solution (but you should also think of one yourself) :

Downtime should just vanish as much as possible.
This is where the current direction isn't just not solving problems, but actually harmful.

The whole cap spool/siege timer system has massive inherent downtime, but that might be a necessary evil for timezones / offline raiding.

I suggest giving EVERY ship a quickly (5-20 seconds) charging warpdrive. Yep.
This is a radical change, but i see no other solution.
Problem is, if we add ship warpdrives, what's the point of capitals? Maybe leaving them as just siege machines is OK. Maybe not. And then the game would be filled with these million ton, billion credits paperweights.
Sieges would be disrupted too, since you can ship warp to the battle... Adding an exclusion zone might be enough to fix that.

Warpgates can still fill the niche of making travel through super frequent routes more cheap/efficient. But it's a niche, and they look really expensive to build.

But wait... It's not that simple
The massive downtime that players have to spend to do literally anything absolutely matters in the value that anything has.
A stack of ore would be worth less if you can just *hop* *mine a couple minutes* *hop* *done* .

So, reducing wait = reducing time needed = reducing value. The next paragraph goes into this in more detail.

Counterbalancing the value or cost might be enough. Or not. It's cursed, I can't predict it.



2) The cursed problem.
Starbase wants to make a fully player driven universe. The purpose is to promote, and make it routine, to have meaningful and complex player interactions of many kinds:

• War
• Small scale / opportunistic PVP
• Trade
• Alliances
• Industry
• Logistics

If we had endless resources and a creative mode, none of this would happen.
Necessity is the spark that motivates every goal in this, and goals can create subgoals (for instance, logistics can support combat, or mining operations; mining itself might be considered an instrumental goal to acquire resources, which themselves are an instrument for... anything, really)

So the obvious question is:

How should necessity be designed in the entire game?

Make it a very light grind for anything, and there a possibility that it has the same issues as the "creative mode" hypothetical.
Make it a very heavy grind, and... Nobody likes that. Get it out of here.

But if there is no grind, there is no necessity. If there is no necessity, nothing has a reason to be done anymore.

Necessity and grind are 2 ends of the same spectrum, and they each want something completely opposite.
Necessity wants to hit you as hard as possible, to motivate all of those rich player interactions.
But the grind is time spent not in these interactions. So you'd want it to be as low as possible.

It's a cursed problem. It has no true solution.
The only thing you can hope for, is that eventually, with iterations, feedback, and appropriate changes, if everything goes right, the end result will be ok-ish, somewhere in the middle.
This is nothing new, and a lot of online videogames have to deal with something like this in some form.

The first point here is, anytime "reducing the grind" comes up, you can't "just do it". Balancing or features may be enough to make it work. Or not. Who knows. 1) is affected by this.

Crazy theory
I don't really have a solution for this, so instead I have a question for you.
Could there be something else that (partially?) replaces the role of grind, time and cost as a motivator for the game? Do you have any ideas? Are there any games out there that already did this?

Because right now the game fundamentally relies on grind, which is... Not the player interactions, the core that the game promises.
(Or, maybe there's a way to change things so that all/most grind should be done as a co-op activity? Would that be enough of an improvement?)

The current plan for the game is a Jenga tower, where if you try to remove 1 piece, the whole thing falls.
Ships exist because they let you mine, fight, travel...
You need resources for ships, stations, capitals.
You mine because you need resources.
You fight because that lets you take resources and assets.
You build a civ capital ship because you want a secure place to store your resources.
You build a mil capital ship because you either want to use it as a traveling mining outpost (because you need to mine, because you need resources)
You build a station or outpost because that lets you use gas extractors. Which give you resources passively.

Basically, the entire game relies on resources and time.
VERY THEORETICALLY, if the current plans can be abandoned, nothing says it has to be like that. Because at the end, all it needs to do is somehow provide motivation for activities in the game, so if something else can do that, it may be an alternative.



3) Miscellaneous concerns

Gate camping
AFAIK, Nothing in the upcoming features adresses this.
If you are a gate camper, I'd like to hear if you think it's healthy for the game to keep it.

Capital ship/station camping
Especially with radiation scanners, I have no doubt that spotting caps and station is not hard. Then we might even get a beacon putting a name on everyone's HUDs, maybe. Or maybe not.
If the cap/station isn't directly spottable, it might be visible anyways on rad scanner due to high concentrated activity of ships.
If you want to camp, and find a target, you'll be able to camp. Sure, you'll get spotted when you open fire, and eventually the defenders will be more than you, but especially considering that I believe most of the times, there won't be many people around, a camper will be able to do way more damage than they recieve before they're out of the fight.
It might be so effective that it could be a legitimate tactic used in war against outpost that are known to be weak.

Multiplayer, sometimes. (Or, "The vast lonely universe")
Players are dangerous, and you can choose where to place yourself in the universe, thanks to capitals and stations.
So naturally you want to choose a spot that gives you the protection of not being found. Away from other players.
The playerbase could increase 20x, and you won't notice, because you only see your few clanmates that happen to be in the same place as you at the same time, for the most part.
Different reasons, but similar-ish outcome to what Elite: Dangerous ended up with.



So, what do you think?

-thanks for coming to my Ted talk xdddd

No the grind is what I am looking for, 98% of games out there are tailored for people who want nothing but pvp(greifing other players) or a game they can complete on a weekend. You want a platform that holds your hand and gives you a IWIN button when you finish all development day? Go play World of Warcrap. Player development should be tough so when you get to that goal and people see the next gear/ship they know it was earned and not given. Having limited time to play isn't a issue for developer's people need to set realistic goals and have a game plan.

 

[LauriFB]

Thanks for a well thought out summary of the current issues, I couldn't agree more.

The good news is that I believe we have solutions for all the major issues lined up in the roadmap (and even to a few issues not listed here). I'll give some examples:

• Crafting will be possible via factories, which enables automation for crafting and advanced factory output. Larger factory does the job faster. End products will require creative factories, not just more devices.
• Capital ships, especially combined with stations with docks, will remove much of the AFK. Even the odd ten minutes spent on travel can be used to do stuff on board the capital ship. Large player-secured station chains and protected areas may offer docks for anyone who is willing to trade and pay small taxes to the owners of the area, thus allowing mining right outside the capital ship without massive travel times.
• Most sieges are publicly known beforehand, meaning that action-hungry or thrill seekers may just go to sieges and see if they can make it out in one piece. Thrill seekers park their capitals a bit further away and risk only the ship they fly in with.
• There's repair halls, and much improved bluerpint filler repair systems coming, allowing to repair small or major damages with just the cost of the materials. Repair system also allows to create insurance system to mitigate risks.
• Moon mining will open up new scarcity for resources, which will end up people wanting to control areas in space or pieces of land, and others wanting to take that away, which will lead to conflict
• Scarcity of resources will also boost trade, which will boost piracy, and so forth
• Owning a station will provide ways of passive income (atmo pumps), and ways for semi-passive income (taxation of others). Both features benefit greatly from massive areas claimed by a chain of stations, which will create large targets for wars.
• Large player-owned dynamic safe zones will provide safety for miners, usually for a small fee, but at the same time if the area is sieged that same safety will turn into chaos and fight for survival

These are just examples, not the complete list of everything planned. We will update roadmap with more of the new stuff, and also create better explanations of everything at some point in the near future.

 

[Venombrew]

@LauriFB when these features drop will there be plans to release armor value for endo armor? right now it seems a single bullet is all it takes to drop a player. basically features that help preserve a endo's life during combat.

 

[mrchip]

Oh wow, I didn't expect to summon the Almighty...
The clear trend i can tell from these replies is that, surprise surprise, different people want different things...
So maybe it was just me for part of this.

 

[LauriFB]

@LauriFB when these features drop will there be plans to release armor value for endo armor? right now it seems a single bullet is all it takes to drop a player. basically features that help preserve a endo's life during combat.

I think it falls under combat balance, which currently is non-existent due to not enough test cases (ie. needs proper sieges to see what we'll need).

What I can already tell is that there's the support to build defences (ie. to weld stuff to stations under siege), and the deathbox/lootbox mechanic will also allow resurrection mechanics in teams.

 

[Difficultylevel]

Thanks for a well thought out summary of the current issues, I couldn't agree more.

The good news is that I believe we have solutions for all the major issues lined up in the roadmap (and even to a few issues not listed here). I'll give some examples:

• Crafting will be possible via factories, which enables automation for crafting and advanced factory output. Larger factory does the job faster. End products will require creative factories, not just more devices.
• Capital ships, especially combined with stations with docks, will remove much of the AFK. Even the odd ten minutes spent on travel can be used to do stuff on board the capital ship. Large player-secured station chains and protected areas may offer docks for anyone who is willing to trade and pay small taxes to the owners of the area, thus allowing mining right outside the capital ship without massive travel times.
• Most sieges are publicly known beforehand, meaning that action-hungry or thrill seekers may just go to sieges and see if they can make it out in one piece. Thrill seekers park their capitals a bit further away and risk only the ship they fly in with.
• There's repair halls, and much improved bluerpint filler repair systems coming, allowing to repair small or major damages with just the cost of the materials. Repair system also allows to create insurance system to mitigate risks.
• Moon mining will open up new scarcity for resources, which will end up people wanting to control areas in space or pieces of land, and others wanting to take that away, which will lead to conflict
• Scarcity of resources will also boost trade, which will boost piracy, and so forth
• Owning a station will provide ways of passive income (atmo pumps), and ways for semi-passive income (taxation of others). Both features benefit greatly from massive areas claimed by a chain of stations, which will create large targets for wars.
• Large player-owned dynamic safe zones will provide safety for miners, usually for a small fee, but at the same time if the area is sieged that same safety will turn into chaos and fight for survival

These are just examples, not the complete list of everything planned. We will update roadmap with more of the new stuff, and also create better explanations of everything at some point in the near future.

ETA on Flexible welds? Station and Capitalship Designer? Please?

 

[Difficultylevel]

No the grind is what I am looking for, 98% of games out there are tailored for people who want nothing but pvp(greifing other players) or a game they can complete on a weekend. You want a platform that holds your hand and gives you a IWIN button when you finish all development day? Go play World of Warcrap. Player development should be tough so when you get to that goal and people see the next gear/ship they know it was earned and not given. Having limited time to play isn't a issue for developer's people need to set realistic goals and have a game plan.

But there aren't enough of you to support the rest of the playerbase. It's a fallacy inherent in a lot of games and they all wither when they cling to the idea that grind is a replacement for gameplay.

 

[Aha]

Thanks for a well thought out summary of the current issues, I couldn't agree more.

The good news is that I believe we have solutions for all the major issues lined up in the roadmap (and even to a few issues not listed here). I'll give some examples:

• Crafting will be possible via factories, which enables automation for crafting and advanced factory output. Larger factory does the job faster. End products will require creative factories, not just more devices.
• Capital ships, especially combined with stations with docks, will remove much of the AFK. Even the odd ten minutes spent on travel can be used to do stuff on board the capital ship. Large player-secured station chains and protected areas may offer docks for anyone who is willing to trade and pay small taxes to the owners of the area, thus allowing mining right outside the capital ship without massive travel times.
• Most sieges are publicly known beforehand, meaning that action-hungry or thrill seekers may just go to sieges and see if they can make it out in one piece. Thrill seekers park their capitals a bit further away and risk only the ship they fly in with.
• There's repair halls, and much improved bluerpint filler repair systems coming, allowing to repair small or major damages with just the cost of the materials. Repair system also allows to create insurance system to mitigate risks.
• Moon mining will open up new scarcity for resources, which will end up people wanting to control areas in space or pieces of land, and others wanting to take that away, which will lead to conflict
• Scarcity of resources will also boost trade, which will boost piracy, and so forth
• Owning a station will provide ways of passive income (atmo pumps), and ways for semi-passive income (taxation of others). Both features benefit greatly from massive areas claimed by a chain of stations, which will create large targets for wars.
• Large player-owned dynamic safe zones will provide safety for miners, usually for a small fee, but at the same time if the area is sieged that same safety will turn into chaos and fight for survival

These are just examples, not the complete list of everything planned. We will update roadmap with more of the new stuff, and also create better explanations of everything at some point in the near future.

These all sound nice however non of these really answer the greatest problem at all. That is the way too big world. I really wish that the game would become very successful and it would have 1 000 000 players online at all times! Then the population would have to be only 10x (10 000 000) more to START to feel like a proper MMO with this world with even newer planets and whatnot. If EOS and its belt would be something like 3x the size of the moon and its belt we would have a playable MMO world. (and the moon and its belt like half of what it is right now) This downscaling will happen sooner or later. (unless game gets abandoned)
With all the things you listed it's still too much travel, you aren't making a reality where we transfer all our consciousness into avatars and literally live there, you are making a game! Please stop with the "transfer all our consciousness into avatars and literally live there" way of the road! We have only 150 m/s!!! Keep the world size but then give us 1 500 m/s of normal speed not warp. (Not possible, so smaller world it is!)

I'd like to repeat @CalenLoki 's suggestion.

-Change asteroid and cloud distribution in the belt to create clear, narrow and curvy paths to follow, and densely packed clusters to avoid.
It would change the flight from AFK-friendly straight line to a path you need to actively navigate. And remove the need for RF walls, since the space is either clean or straight up unflyable. It would also distinguish between big bulky freighters and small mining ships. Together with changing drag formula to make big ships more drifty and thrust efficient, tight corners would make catching up to them a bit easier.

Now that we drastically downscaled the world to the optimal we could have something like these, even as huge asteroid clusters, and deep within these precious ores, people would need to clear roids to make roads like going through a jungle with a machete. These roads would mean chokepoint-hotspots again. Many of these roids could be just shell materials too.

Downscaling the world is inevitable, the sooner you do it the better. We have only 150 m/s!!! (no, warp features especially as you are making it solve this problem only partially)

 

[LauriFB]

The core need is interaction. For interaction we need reasons and places. Size of the world is a common method to achieve this, but it's not the only option.

We need to encourage trade, cooperation and wars, with everything being reachable for everyone in both time distance and progression. And that is what all we are now working on aims to achieve.

While we have things sorted out at our end, we are still working with the explanations to the players. This will include a roadmap with new elements as well as some mechanics opened up even more.

 

[Sirisian]

Want to be an escort? Unless you're flying into a warzone, you're lucky if you get 1 encounter half of the missions you fly.

A module like a warp beacon could facilitate this. Essentially when active it would allow friendlies to target and jump vast distances to the beacon. This beacon could be placed on stations, ships, etc. Variations of the module could exist with different ranges. If required it could function as a conduit which charges/drains energy when activated to limit the number of ships that can jump to the beacon. Really any limitation could be made depending on the goal/cost.

Should point out others have discussed warpdrives and jumping with materials. There's a lot of mechanics that could be used for "volatile" resources. Like requiring smaller jumps or higher energy cost. The main worry appears to be miners jumping back and forth from stations for cheap. Or players jumping away from PvP easily, but that can be handled by more ship modules to disrupt outgoing warps (or push incoming warps further away to stop people from jumping right next to you).

Could there be something else that (partially?) replaces the role of grind, time and cost as a motivator for the game? Do you have any ideas? Are there any games out there that already did this?

Create a lot of modules and upgrades for ships such that basic ships are super cheap and that armor, weapons, features, are upgradeable. A basic fighter might take 30 minutes to get, but one with radar, warp drive, afterburner, missiles (with loaders), etc takes more resources. Others have already suggested a wide range of upgrades like auto-turrets (with AI computer modules that take various space within a ship), repair/mining bots, shields, resource scanners, stealth modules, etc. People have also suggested breaking up thrusters into actual modular pieces that can be made longer or modules that go in other directions branching out from the thruster body. The same is true for weapons that could be made much more modular allowing various projectile changes.

The big picture would be having a very wide spectrum of ships with various capabilities. Requiring factories to produce certain modules and alloys is an obvious direction for this that's inline with the game's current direction. As a very simple example right now there is one battery in the game. A battery could be given more properties like charge-rate (or curve), discharge-rate (or curve), heat produced, overloadable (produces heat to increase charge/discharge), etc. A tree of battery types could be created with various materials/alloys/gasses and factory features. Different auxiliary modules could be created to augment batteries while requiring more space in a ship.

In this setup one could build a ship with just the best resource scanner and nothing else. It could have a dozen modules that improve scanning long distances through different fogs. It could then relay this information to other ships through communication systems and utilize an expensive jump system to keep itself safe. (One that can jump through a fighter's weak jump jammer without upgrades).

I'm picturing under this system that during PvP one could spawn small fighters easily and jump into skirmishes. They might not have much ammo or slow reload, but they'd be able to damage systems. A large expensive ship would be able to tank a lot of damage and utilize various abilities to protect itself like using flak cannons to intercept cheap missiles from basic fighters fired from long range. The small fighters might need the assistance of larger ships to jump far distances. (Using that conduit idea mentioned before). More expensive fighters with upgrades would be able to make the jump themselves. Could have a number of warp drive modules that determine how close to asteroids one can jump also. So warp drive computers to compute jumps. A small ship flying into asteroids might be enough to stop a fighter from jumping in front/or behind them during combat. I digress, there would be a lot more interactions between modules with benefits/trade-offs.

The downtime is ENORMOUS for ALMOST EVERYTHING.

The ship building downtime is something I've harped on a lot. A lot of this is because of part limitations causing frustration, but the bolting issue is still present. The time to frame a ship with beams and then plate it needs to be brought down by like 100x. EBM's box approach is a symptom of this. I remember when I first used the editor I was expecting to be able to drop a beam in and then click on a face and drag out another beam or extend a beam intuitively. Instead I realized their system was much more searching for beam sizes and plate sizes to play Tetris. This whole philosophy toward ship framing/plating is so time consuming that it made me take long breaks when working on ship ideas. I'm really hoping they have time in a year or two to come back and solve this since it makes ship building a chore rather than fun. (People asking for plate welding in general is a symptom of this same issue of not being able to create arbitrary plates). The same applies for wiring up ships which needs a lot of work. I've written about being able paint ducts in beams and plates to effortlessly connect things. The confusion about wiring in the discord or how even engines work is very telling. Needs streamlining to be much more intuitive/fast.

 

[CalenLoki]

A module like a warp beacon could facilitate this. Essentially when active it would allow friendlies to target and jump vast distances to the beacon. This beacon could be placed on stations, ships, etc. Variations of the module could exist with different ranges. If required it could function as a conduit which charges/drains energy when activated to limit the number of ships that can jump to the beacon. Really any limitation could be made depending on the goal/cost.

Should point out others have discussed warpdrives and jumping with materials. There's a lot of mechanics that could be used for "volatile" resources. Like requiring smaller jumps or higher energy cost. The main worry appears to be miners jumping back and forth from stations for cheap. Or players jumping away from PvP easily, but that can be handled by more ship modules to disrupt outgoing warps (or push incoming warps further away to stop people from jumping right next to you).


Create a lot of modules and upgrades for ships such that basic ships are super cheap and that armor, weapons, features, are upgradeable. A basic fighter might take 30 minutes to get, but one with radar, warp drive, afterburner, missiles (with loaders), etc takes more resources. Others have already suggested a wide range of upgrades like auto-turrets (with AI computer modules that take various space within a ship), repair/mining bots, shields, resource scanners, stealth modules, etc. People have also suggested breaking up thrusters into actual modular pieces that can be made longer or modules that go in other directions branching out from the thruster body. The same is true for weapons that could be made much more modular allowing various projectile changes.

The big picture would be having a very wide spectrum of ships with various capabilities. Requiring factories to produce certain modules and alloys is an obvious direction for this that's inline with the game's current direction. As a very simple example right now there is one battery in the game. A battery could be given more properties like charge-rate (or curve), discharge-rate (or curve), heat produced, overloadable (produces heat to increase charge/discharge), etc. A tree of battery types could be created with various materials/alloys/gasses and factory features. Different auxiliary modules could be created to augment batteries while requiring more space in a ship.

In this setup one could build a ship with just the best resource scanner and nothing else. It could have a dozen modules that improve scanning long distances through different fogs. It could then relay this information to other ships through communication systems and utilize an expensive jump system to keep itself safe. (One that can jump through a fighter's weak jump jammer without upgrades).

I'm picturing under this system that during PvP one could spawn small fighters easily and jump into skirmishes. They might not have much ammo or slow reload, but they'd be able to damage systems. A large expensive ship would be able to tank a lot of damage and utilize various abilities to protect itself like using flak cannons to intercept cheap missiles from basic fighters fired from long range. The small fighters might need the assistance of larger ships to jump far distances. (Using that conduit idea mentioned before). More expensive fighters with upgrades would be able to make the jump themselves. Could have a number of warp drive modules that determine how close to asteroids one can jump also. So warp drive computers to compute jumps. A small ship flying into asteroids might be enough to stop a fighter from jumping in front/or behind them during combat. I digress, there would be a lot more interactions between modules with benefits/trade-offs.


The ship building downtime is something I've harped on a lot. A lot of this is because of part limitations causing frustration, but the bolting issue is still present. The time to frame a ship with beams and then plate it needs to be brought down by like 100x. EBM's box approach is a symptom of this. I remember when I first used the editor I was expecting to be able to drop a beam in and then click on a face and drag out another beam or extend a beam intuitively. Instead I realized their system was much more searching for beam sizes and plate sizes to play Tetris. This whole philosophy toward ship framing/plating is so time consuming that it made me take long breaks when working on ship ideas. I'm really hoping they have time in a year or two to come back and solve this since it makes ship building a chore rather than fun. (People asking for plate welding in general is a symptom of this same issue of not being able to create arbitrary plates). The same applies for wiring up ships which needs a lot of work. I've written about being able paint ducts in beams and plates to effortlessly connect things. The confusion about wiring in the discord or how even engines work is very telling. Needs streamlining to be much more intuitive/fast.

I've read through your entire post, and I have to say that 3/5 of it isn't on topic (entire middle section is about increasing complexity, not cutting grind) and the last part is about QOL features to speed up active parts of the game (so neither downtime, nor grind).

The first part (ship teleporting) would IMO lead to removing tons of gameplay from the game.

 

[Sirisian]

entire middle section is about increasing complexity, not cutting grind

OP asked for alternatives to grind:

The grind might have an alternative. Or not. That part is pure theory. Or, the game could find a way to make all/most grind heavily favor co-op playstyles, so that the grind part of the game gets to be a multiplayer activity.

Referring to it just as "complexity" doesn't capture the goal which is progression which can remove grind. This was mentioned early on during alpha that you start with a pick axe then basically immediately get mining lasers. (Which aren't upgradable and work everywhere for anything which is an issue). Complexity in this case means that rather than flying around aimlessly for an hour playing asteroid lottery you unlock mechanics to scan for asteroids. Or with my co-op example you get someone else to transfer you coordinates of asteroids that you need. (The scanning station or ship might not be equipped mine and transport them so this complexity creates roles). Right now it's like we're at only pick axes, so players only use pick axes and complain about the grind. More tools and features means players can rapidly progress and remove repetitive/random tasks.

The first part (ship teleporting) would IMO lead to removing tons of gameplay from the game.

Isn't that the question OP raises? That flying 10+ minutes AFK using collision detectors isn't useful gameplay, but downtime? I also mentioned having resources in cargo can change how jumping works. Also there's a whole fuel/energy cost. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what gameplay you're referring to.

The way I imagine this is people build stations and refine ore locally. So if an ore or resource is volatile one can't easily (or just can't) jump with it in cargo. So you need to say build refineries close by deposits to make them stable. This goes back toward co-op gameplay mechanics. You might not be able to say mine/refine everything, but gathering specific resources and selling those to get other components would be the goal. This creates large trade routes and associated mechanics. If you did want to do everything yourself it would be a grind, but I don't think anyone is asking to solo everything in an MMO.

Also one thing I noticed is when people talk about warp drives they think about one warp drive. As in it's a small module and you jump everywhere instantly. So OP's poll reads rather confusing. Like I don't think a small ship should be able to jump 500 km instantly. Jumping 10 km with a small cheap module (cobbled together mostly from Bastium) I think is fine. That's why I like the highly modular direction. A medium sized ship with a module to extend its warp that can fly next to a small ship and jump both of them 300 km seems neat. There's a lot of upgrades that would create co-op options. This strict black or white view toward a lot of possible game mechanics I think hurts these discussions.

 

[LauriFB]

Possible solutions to the grind

• Stations outside permanent safe zone can have atmo pumps. Leave the pump on, build large enough docks to it, and fly capital ship straight in to collect your ore. Build more of these stations, collect more ore. Just remember to fight off any sieges trying to destroy or capture your station.
• Automation: it's been coming for a long time, but one day it's there. Find a way to drive your capital very close to the asteroids (like, station & docks inside the belt, or someone else offering this service, or just a great spot next to some belt). Then collect full asteroids and mine them on your onboard factory.
• Trade and other new professions.

Travel times to asteroids

• Station inside belt with capital ship docks
• Civilian capital ships being able to travel anywhere outside the belt means there will be a lot of belts and belt edges which have never been visited, so there's plenty of easy access asteroids just outside the belts. And not just EOS belt, many moon belts have those ores you need right at the edge of the belt.
• Companies can establish station hubs, which can have very large safe zones. These safe zones can be taxed. So those companies most likely want to attract miners by building parking lots and/or via other easy access methods. Miners get a safe zone with rich asteroids, companies collect tax, and maybe only occasionally such rich hub gets attacked by someone who doesn't like it.

 

[CalenLoki]

Companies can establish station hubs, which can have very large safe zones. These safe zones can be taxed. So those companies most likely want to attract miners by building parking lots and/or via other easy access methods. Miners get a safe zone with rich asteroids, companies collect tax, and maybe only occasionally such rich hub gets attacked by someone who doesn't like it.

Please don't.
Safe zones are great way of protecting noobs (around origin) and preventing offline raiding.
They shouldn't get in the way of normal, high reward active gameplay (i.e. mining in rich asteroid zones).

Instead focus on taxation through the market system, and on-station services (repair/refuel)

 

[LauriFB]

Please don't.
Safe zones are great way of protecting noobs (around origin) and preventing offline raiding.
They shouldn't get in the way of normal, high reward active gameplay (i.e. mining in rich asteroid zones).

Instead focus on taxation through the market system, and on-station services (repair/refuel)

Some hotspots will be more rare than others, but regardless how the rare hotspots are guarded some of them will be conflict drivers.

It's not like we are forcing people to go after very minimal amount of places, there will be room for everyone. But some aress will attract more people and drive conflict.