Starbase's Top Issues #9: The Death of a Dream - The SSC

[Vexus]

If you are in a group, you can join another in the SSC and work on a ship together.

As you noted, it really doesn't work, and even if it did, it's not really helpful when you have a vision and someone else is standing by watching as a ghost. It's not a "fun" experience - even if it did work. It would be fun, however, to hear your friend say he needs 30 of some type of object and you help bring them that quantity of objects. It's a small difference, but because your actions matter - bringing the parts to your friend - you both interact and have fun.

If it takes ages to get a ship working... why would people ever make a new ship after they have a good one? With the SSC at least there is always progress, always the option of trying out a new design, without first spending a month at least getting the frame right, the components, then the frame again, the cabling, the piping, the device fields, the YOLOL...
You say you want the SSC to cease to be the only place to spend the creative energy by removing essentially the only place where one can be (with reasonable effort for a game) creative in the first place. I don't think that's it chief.

People would just make smaller ships that they can manage and handle. It wouldn't take ages, and good ships would become standardized and mass-produced by companies who have those kinds of people working for them. But the main point is that ships would be smaller based upon what a player or small number of players could achieve with what they have on hand or what they are capable of producing, and their skill in creating ships. Ships in the game of the SSC are too precise - making ships in the live game world, you wouldn't care so much how many cables spiderweb around your ship because everyone would operate under the same understanding that no ship could be made perfect. But with the game of the SSC we can perfectly (for the most part) balance ships and achieve things completely impossible to do in the live game world.

People would only build as big as they could handle, or as big as they are willing to risk, which allows a natural progression and the desire to have friends and companies around to help support larger and larger ships. This means the 1000-crate hauler will almost be guaranteed to have an escort, which means more chance for player interaction. As it stands, because you can print off 1000-crate haulers at will, there's no reason to protect them. There's no real risk in loss. You just make a new one. The value is extremely high compared to any risk of loss. It's better that everyone in your company has a 1000-crate hauler, vs. defending a single one. But if the single one took 100 real-life man-hours to make, it may not be practical to mass produce right away. It depends on many factors but... in general people will only build as big as they are willing to lose. And thus, we'd see more smaller ships, more movement around the game world, and more interaction as people will want to protect their costly (time) builds with escorts and so on.

Now, incentives.
Have you tried building a ship from scratch?
Have you tried making a ship specifically for the purpose of tinkering with it in world? Placing Ore Crates? Plating?
Have you tried expanding a ship?
Have you tried upgrading thrusters? Generators?
I have done all and I can say I am not impressed.
Lets go backwards: changing generators. I have a ship, where I wanted to switch from Nhurgite to Exorium for the efficiency. I have 18 generators and 12 fuelchambers, setup in 6 groups, with plenty of walk space inbetween. Since I have the blueprint, a new design with them would take 5 minutes, but it would take quite a few resources, so I got to work. It is very dull work, loosening the bolts, replacing the generators and fuelchambers and autobolting them, and then going back to bolt them again so they behave with durability. I have switched a generator set once, and already don't want to do that again.
Thrusters: same ship, after the generators. I wanted to change 16 box thrusters and 4 blocks of 32 (4x4x2) triangle thrusters. I managed the Box thrusters and around 1.5 blocks (48) before I gave up. And will never want to upgrade a thruster pack by hand again.

Indeed. I have built from scratch. It's quite fun. All I will say about your experiences with upgrades is - if you have friends help, all these tasks become much easier and a lot of fun, since your friends' presence now matters. You appreciate their help, the work is cut down dramatically for each individual person, you bond with your friend more by accomplishing a difficult task together, and you're much more invested in the success of this newly upgraded ship.

Imagine there were 10 layers of upgrades in the future, being progressively more costly and rare to find materials and parts for upgrades - you'd want more people around to help any time you came across a rare upgrade opportunity. Anyway... your issue is not due to the hassle of manual upgrading, but instead because you were able to design the base ship with ease inside the SSC and print it with zero effort. Had you built the entire thing by hand, you'd understand the upgrade process is a fraction of the time you spent initially making the ship, so you would have no complaint regarding how long it took to upgrade!

point is, the ssc and the repair hall allows for a lot of exploits that wouldnt otherwise be allowed within the game

Yes. I think many people don't realize that advanced "game of the SSC gamers" have been producing insane exploit-riddled ships since very early on. Thanks for making a good point about it. The fact you can do so much crazy stuff by messing around in the SSC, things that aren't possible in the live game world, is a huge reason why the SSC should be a dev-tool and not a player tool. Even seasoned ship designers won't know all the tricks, and the few who do know all the tricks aren't revealing everything, so a new player realizing all these meta ships are exploit-based ships now has to spend even more time in the SSC learning how to reproduce exploits. It's just messy.

 

[Askannon]

As you noted, it really doesn't work, and even if it did, it's not really helpful when you have a vision and someone else is standing by watching as a ghost. It's not a "fun" experience - even if it did work. It would be fun, however, to hear your friend say he needs 30 of some type of object and you help bring them that quantity of objects. It's a small difference, but because your actions matter - bringing the parts to your friend - you both interact and have fun.

I'll ask you this: how often did you know what you need for a ship well enough to order them in advance of you installing them? Probably a few times.
Now, how close were they in terms of occurance? Probably a bit spaced apart
And now, how often did you have a person, one you would ask to craft those things without having to negotiate (e.g. ore or labour cost), closeby? Not that often I would say.
Even the few times I worked with people, I had the parts already printed out and the only thing to do was install them either where the previous generator/fuelchamber were (upgrading T1 to T2) or to place the cargo crates such that they work. What I'm saying is, people may plan ahead, know what they need. People probably do so in large batches of a single change. But the main point of contention is this: having someone closeby to help, who doesn't have better things to do than to help you bolt crates, plates, generators, or to craft things with no argueing about costs. That is rare. Especially if it is for a personal project and not something for collective use.
If it worked, it would be a pretty sight, but I don't think it will work.

Meanwhile, group design as the alternative... I see it mostly as a teaching tool, but I have also used it for collaborative efforts, where not a single person has all the power of decision making.

Indeed. I have built from scratch. It's quite fun. All I will say about your experiences with upgrades is - if you have friends help, all these tasks become much easier and a lot of fun, since your friends' presence now matters. You appreciate their help, the work is cut down dramatically for each individual person, you bond with your friend more by accomplishing a difficult task together, and you're much more invested in the success of this newly upgraded ship.

Imagine there were 10 layers of upgrades in the future, being progressively more costly and rare to find materials and parts for upgrades - you'd want more people around to help any time you came across a rare upgrade opportunity. Anyway... your issue is not due to the hassle of manual upgrading, but instead because you were able to design the base ship with ease inside the SSC and print it with zero effort. Had you built the entire thing by hand, you'd understand the upgrade process is a fraction of the time you spent initially making the ship, so you would have no complaint regarding how long it took to upgrade!

There is some truth to what you're saying here. I would value the ship differently if I had put in the effort of designing it by hand. But by that measure, I would also be long gone.
My first ship, I only printed a minimum viable frame with a little bit extra because I didn't know that precrafting reduced the credit cost back in August '21. I worked on that thing a bit to build it up into a slow box. I even had some others help. But if I had to do every beam every thruster, every pipe, every cable of that ship in world, I would probably not have bothered of making it, of experimenting with levers for reactor control. But lets say I would have. That I would have bothered with welding each and every beam in a simple square shape. Probably ensuing micro-gaps and all. And then lost the ship after a few weeks or months of adventure and a host of upgrades. Because that is what happened, I lost that ship to piracy. And I almost quit Starbase even when the time investment was in comparison relatively minimal and the fault of losing the ship laid plainly at my feet for keeping transponder active close by the origin safezone.

Remember, the game is geared towards combat, so if every ship requires either a full on manufacturing line or lots of manual labour, you WILL lose players to such simple things as piracy, if you haven't lost them already to them trying to build a ship in world because it is just that time intensive and errors are costly.

Yes. I think many people don't realize that advanced "game of the SSC gamers" have been producing insane exploit-riddled ships since very early on. Thanks for making a good point about it. The fact you can do so much crazy stuff by messing around in the SSC, things that aren't possible in the live game world, is a huge reason why the SSC should be a dev-tool and not a player tool. Even seasoned ship designers won't know all the tricks, and the few who do know all the tricks aren't revealing everything, so a new player realizing all these meta ships are exploit-based ships now has to spend even more time in the SSC learning how to reproduce exploits. It's just messy.

And that is why you talk with people. Why EosCon is such a useful event. Because by talking with people you can pickup those tricks. And by asking questions, a new player can learn to make his first ship and from there can talk with people himself.
You say that ships should be worked by hand because that gives people cause to spend time together, but in the same line of thinking you want to limit the amount of stuff people can talk about by limiting what they can do to just in-world.
Starbase is interesting because of the high ceiling, because interesting interactions are found to this day, even without an update to ship building in 2 years.
And since you say meta ships, I can reasonably tell that you are bothered by fighter design in particular since I can't recall a meta for other ship types since there is no competition to be had, only fun. So since that came up: if fighter design is the main reason for doing away with the SSC because exploits are easy with it... what hinders those designers from finding a new exploit in world? Only time and resources, since testing now became expensive. And since you propose removing the PTU as well... well, who then can still test: established companies or wealthy players, meaning a new player either has to join a company or have a REALLY LONG GRIND ahead to learn about fighter design. Because Metas will always develop. The only thing this will change is how easy someone new can find either the way into the meta or an alternative to the meta. And companies will probably not release their designs, by your own admission. I would also say since making a ship is much more involved that not even free designs will be readily available, hence even more hurdles for capable fighter access outside of PvP companies.