Poll: Repair Options

[Asirmoth]

In another thread linked here i discussed posibilities of ship repair and how should it be done.
Due to diverse opinons, i decided to make a poll wich would show what does the community think about the topic.

In depth explanation:

Repair component - Proposed by TGess it's a ship component which would drain energy and resources in order to repair ship it's a part of, essentialy it's auto repair as long as you have required resources and energy.

Repair module - Proposed by me it's an expensive to build, station only module, using it wouldn't cost resources, only credits, but it could function only if station has resources in it's cargo bay, also all credits spent on repair would be transfered to station owner/fund. The repair would take certain amount of time (probably slower than manual repair). In short it's a repair yard.

Manual only - doesn't need explanation.

If you have any other ideas feel free to post them here.

 

[Vexus]

Any "automatic" process devalues the player. If your ship automatically repairs, then you don't need other people around you. If it is manual, you need and want and are thankful for the players who help repair. Any idea revolving around automatic anything - that is not at least at first put in place by players creating said automation through in-game tools - should be thrown out the window.

I can compare this to WoW, where imagine if after every mob or pull in a dungeon, your character automagically healed to full health and mana. Instead, it was hard, and it mattered to have a healer, or a mage to make food and water, or anyone else to help out in those situations - everyone was thankful to have someone from another class around because each player brought something extra to the table that the individual could not do themselves. This brought people together and generated a lot of activity as groups and guilds formed around shared success.

Repair in Starbase does not seem too difficult. Bring out repair tool. Have materials in your backpack. Left click damaged areas. Outside of players developing more efficient ways or using YOLOL and robots and factory components to build repair stations, the devs don't need to add in any module or automatic anything. It might sound like a good idea, but the cost is devaluing every player: it's not worth it.

A side note: One balance thing that will need to be considered is since Starbase will have automation through players, it will be important for them to make sure this isn't a runaway mechanic that begins to eat away at the value of the game. If, for example, ships get automatically produced after a large guild sets up shop in a safe zone, and pumps out 100 ships per day, this is problematic in the long run as the automation never ends, and as such the only way of 'attacking' or stopping this safe-zone living enemy is by economic warfare, which may take much longer or may be impossible depending on certain things. As long as it takes more time to go out and mine resources - because they don't respawn, and players need to continue venturing out further and further to get raw materials - it could balance out. But it could go wild if balance isn't hit from the beginning.

 

[Burnside]

To the Main topic: complete agreement with Vexus, it actively harms the balance behind jobs and careers and promotes loner playstyles without any significant drawback whereas nomad systems, like fuel refining, create an inferior product that degrades your ship when you use it- the devs are expressing a clear imposition of cost on your ship's performance for abandoning the larger social network.

To the Tangent: a safezone factory could really upset economic balances by being immune to reprisal, just clearing all the asteroids from the safezones is going to be a feat- alternatively, the reprisal could be a war on the supporters of their product, meaning those ships are shoot-on-sight outside of a safezone, maybe even with a reward for supplying identifiably unique killcam footage of less than the market cost of the bounty'd ship, making them only worthwhile if you plan on keeping them in the safezone, ruining the carebear company's market saturation

 

[CalenLoki]

As posted in the suggestion thread. If every automatic repair makes part permanently and noticeable weaker, I wouldn't mind.
It would make casual player's life easier, but loss of efficiency would be unacceptable for hardcore players, who seek every little advantage. They'd use manual fixes instead.

And I'm talking about 1% permanent efficiency loss for every 2% of automatically fixed damage.
Maybe every 3-4% for station module.

Maybe manual fixing should do the same, but at much slower rate (-1% per 10-30% fixed).
Both realistic (you can't fix stuff endlessly) and stimulating to game economy (need for new ships/parts).

 

[TGess]

Sounds good actually

 

[Burnside]

Same, a degradation/aging simulation changes how designs are approached as well, good designs would need to account for the aging caused by repairs, so optimal designs are no longer calculated down to decimal points to always assume optimal framework support, but need wiggle room if the hull is going to last past the first engagement that puts her/him (preved) down for repairs in addition to hosting reinforced trusswork to sustain that battle damage in the first place.

 

[Vexus]

Manual repair covers all these issues - if you can repair with any material. You might create a nice armor plate with the best material, but patch it up with nearby material you can find out in space; sub-par material that is at least available - carrying heavy repair material everywhere is not efficient. There's no need for some artificial degradation on materials. It does depend if the game is complex enough (voxel-wise) to account for this. Even if not, there's no need for artificial logic to make this work, and lead to balance issues down the line, because it's arbitrary numbers applied on top of existing systems for the sake of material degradation with no other function. Not worth the dev time.

 

[Oobfiche]

well since the robot arms are getting the builder/repair tools its a strange poll to me. but manual is rather better in away that it gets the rough spots..

 

[TGess]

strange poll to me

Its about what people think about repairs and ways how to do them. We just have been currious cause it a was a heated theme. And as you can see its 50/50

 

[PopeUrban]

Its about what people think about repairs and ways how to do them. We just have been currious cause it a was a heated theme. And as you can see its 50/50

updated poll num are overwhlemingly against the ship module and majority against the station module. I'm assuming you had a 50/50 vote on feb 3 but a larger sample size tells a very different story.

As of this post its overwhelmingly against automatic component attached to the ship, with zero votes for this component alone, and only 15% of the vote for the combination of this component and the station based module.

Your actual numbers, broken down in to tiered voting in stead of single option would be:

15.8% in favor of a ship module
42.1% in favor of a station module
57.9% in favor of neither.

However, this is a sample size of 19 votes, so the results are meaningless anyway.

 

[Asirmoth]

Come to think of it there's hardly any purpose for automatic repair, if repairing by hand is so easy.
Automatic repair would be viable only for realy big ships.
However frigate size ships already require a sizeable crew to run, so even then the need for automatic repair is questionable.
I'm afraid that, with how current repair works, automatic repair wouldn't be OP, it would simply be useless.
I'm closing this poll, because after giving this idea some thought, Frozenbyte will be better of concentrating on other aspects of Starbase, and it seems that majority already gave the opinion on this topic.