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.

 

[Vexus]

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.

Because everyone is in the SSC. But otherwise, my crew and every company has teamwork happening all the time, especially someone sitting around who is doing nothing except crafting while they chill out after their work day. That's the thing with MMOs - it's a big social network for dudes to come hang out and chill at the end of the day. Some sweaty bros are going to be hammering away at the latest task, but there's lots of people who are content with doing a little.

So, without the SSC I'd have someone around 99% of the time (as would nearly anyone in a reasonable-size company), and if not, you would then be able to use the marketplace, which is nearly useless to use when it comes to buying actual parts (for other reasons and so on).

That is rare.

In an MMO, having friends/guild/company members is not rare. Starbase made it rare, because it's more efficient and fun for everyone to escape into the game of the SSC in the PTU with unlimited free resources and so on.

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.

The claim that "you will lose players" nearly always comes from the PvE-player mentality. But PvP games which embrace their PvP succeed, where those which cater to an "easy" experience tend to fizzle out quickly. The key point here has nothing to do with Starbase - it has everything to do with psychology. If your actions do not matter, you will not play the game. Once you beat a story-mode game, you rarely replay it, because there's nothing new to experience - your actions don't matter and you know the ending. So developers add multiple endings and so on to keep players enticed.

When errors are costly, it matters that you avoid errors, which keeps players invested into the game. It seems so clear, and is modeled in real-life, that because mistakes can be costly, it matters that you avoid mistakes. But for some reason when it comes to MMO PvP games, there's always a loud minority of players who say things like this, which makes no logical sense - but does make psychological sense. This player has suffered in the real world's ruleset where mistakes are costly, and wants an arena where their mistakes cost nothing to offset their real-world suffering. This is fine; single-player games fit this role perfectly. But when it comes to PvP MMO games, the developers who capitalize on the rest of the world population who do not suffer this psychological trait seem to succeed - the devs who embrace PvP and make every choice very costly end up succeeding, because the majority of players understand the real-life ruleset and embrace the game's ruleset that mistakes matter, that you will be punished, and thus: get good.

(none of this is directed at you; I'm enjoying pointing out the psychology behind the issue so you and others might see that the issue has nothing to do with the specifics of a game, instead has everything to do with how the developers either embrace or reject reality.)

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.

If your solution to massive exploits is that everyone should slowly learn of them over time... ehhh...... it's not good. Well, it can be good, sometimes. In the game Atlas for example, the crews which found out you could stack the "drunk" debuff/buff multiple times and then maintain it ended up slaughtering enemies 10, 20, 50:1 odds, and often becoming unkillable because the standard player had no infrastructure to maintain the buff, little discipline to refresh the buff every 30 minutes, and was unskilled at the game in general compared to the advanced crews. The YouTube content from these crews, including my own, was exceptional, but it wasn't great. Many more exploits were used and... it's just not great to expect everyone to learn to exploit inside a separate 3D editor to be competitive inside the game of Starbase.

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?

Not entirely correct. It's not just fighter design, but you can get away with impossible-in-Starbase builds for any size ship. Mainly because you can place bolts inside objects and in places you could never get to otherwise and so on. Where you are correct is that meta, in general, applies to PvP/combat scenarios, because that's what matters. Even if all the weapons were removed from the game, players could "compete" on things like how many resources hauled, or credits earned - it all becomes PvP eventually - and the meta for those ships would emerge. Thankfully, fighter ship combat (and the specific, funny, orbiting tactics involved) is the concern for meta because it has the most impact against another player, currently.

The new updates perhaps will push the meta into nation-building and economics and so on, but, unfortunately for Starbase, this is not fun for the extreme majority of the playerbase.

Exploits in the game of Starbase would generally be easier to solve. As it stands, because the game of the SSC allows such control over how a ship is put together, the time it would take to "solve" all the issues is not worth it. For example, in the SSC you can bolt from inside a cargo crate outwards towards something, like beams. So if you're bolting cargo crates from the normal auto-bolt positions or something, you're wasting bolts and weight and so on. You cannot bolt from inside a crate under "normal" conditions in the game of Starbase. This little "exploit" means SSC ships, even cargo-hauler-miner ones, are far ahead of anything that can be made in the game universe.

And ok, sure, everyone has access to the same tools and so on, so what does it matter. Well, I'd rather just bring it back to my main point, that the players are split into two different games, the playerbase is split, and there's a lot of fun to be had tinkering around in a 3D editor-game compared to playing the game of Starbase.

The only long-term solution I can see which keeps the SSC is if somehow the playerbase expands enough, and where access to ships is easy enough (some hints on that in the latest update) where most players say, "Bro just buy (the latest meta combat ship)!" whenever someone thinks of designing their own ship for the first time - in other words, making the SSC such an insignificant part of the game because everything under the sun has been tried already and there's no reason for a new player to ever touch the SSC. This is... so far off, and such a small chance of happening, and requires many other things solved like PTU/free resources and so on.

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.

Great example! This is perfect, and right to the point! The new player has to join a company! That's the whole point!

The incentive will be to join established groups, who both need you and want you around, who you show up with every day, who you become friends with, who you talk with day to day and learn about their real-life situation and begin to care about them as people well beyond the game. This builds immersion within the game and something no game can directly give - the meaning of friendship and playing with friends. The games you get to play with your friends in matter more based on that fact alone.

The new player who joins the big company, who is mentored by the random person who was there at the time to mentor them, who forms a friendship bond, who leaves at the end of the night with, "See you tomorrow!" -- this grows the playerbase.

Instead, what we have is everyone disappearing into the game of the SSC, and there's no reason not to even if you are a new player, because it's the easiest, most "fun" experience we are currently given. A brand new player gets little from any mentor when they can just tinker around in the SSC and figure it all out on their own, perhaps watching YouTube videos and so on. No player interaction. No friends. No need for anyone else. No MMO. No game.

 

[Kenetor]

holy hell what have you folks been smoking, i know multiple people that would never touch this game without the SSC, including myself, to say these people dont exist shows a complete lack of understanding to the playerbase, as well as the work that goes into getting a working, well designed ship, how this would be nigh impossible outside of the SSC. the game would simply not have any good ships for people to use


In your original post you show a video about someone building by hand a ship in SE, then claim you have never played it is hilarious, yes you can make ships by hand, its 1000% easier than in SB AND you generally do this to get going at the start, but as any veteran player will tell you, they also use blueprinted ships, where do you think these were made? CREATIVE MODE!

The SSC isnt for everyone, but thats the beauty of it, you have people that love to design ships, they just need a way to profit off them in game rather than some 3rd party site and then it becomes a better part of the games ecosystem

 

[Colonkin]

I already answered a similar thesis in another similar topic. I'll try to be more detailed.

SSC doesn't kill the game. On the contrary, it makes it deeper. Especially for those who know how, want and can produce first-class projects. And there are people who want to own cool ships like this instead of making stupid crafts themselves. They are willing to pay with their time/money for this (and other people's) work.

However, problems still exist. But not in the design system itself. And in game design around it.

The first problem is the mechanics of production from ores. The solution is quite simple. Ban on printing from ores. Buy or produce components and print a ship. Due to the limited speed of component production, you can no longer accelerate.

The second problem is related to the first - instant assembly of ships (or at least fast). Similar solution. Enter the dependence of production time on the number of components. And as soon as it takes hours to assemble large ships, a market for assembly services will immediately appear.
As a logical consequence of solving this issue, you can get a market for ready-made ships. It is natural to first think about the issue of transferring ownership rights in an adequate way. (for example, like in another game through the owner’s token key). Naturally, we again come up against the infrastructure of transferring these keys and parking the ships (where?). I think that this can be resolved through an auction/contract and parking at the station (for starters, even Origin).

Third question. Exploits. This is a problem with all construction games. It can be solved by periodically adjusting construction rules. For example, a ban on bolted connections from inside structures. Naturally, this is a serious issue and requires high competence of those people who will be involved in this in support and development. People will always find some interesting and innovative solutions. There is interest in this too.

Fourth question. This does not depend on SSC but rather a game problem. Disposal of accumulated ores and resources. It can be solved in different ways, but you can still do it this way. As one of the options, a weapon improvement system in an MMO RPG. This may concern the cooling system, engines, reactors, guns. And a large amount of resources can be spent on these grades (the higher the grade, the lower the probability and the higher the cost). Moreover, the resulting item will already be unique and can only be installed manually in place of the standard one. Again, at the end we can get unique ships in a single copy. If the element is destroyed, then even after repair we will get a standard element, not an improved one.

I have many more crazy ideas.
The main thing is that the developers finally get down to business. May God give them strength and patience!! And money.

 

[Brian Peppers]

Blaming the SSC for a dwindling playerbase and lack of interaction is survivorship bias. The only gameplay that retains players is the SSC, and most players don't want to use the SSC, ergo low player numbers.

I was sold on a game with huge space battles, industry, trading, and fun group activites such as mining and hauling. I think I speak for a lot of players who bought this game, that I did NOT buy it for the clunky CAD spaceship maker. EDIT (that I am now addicted to).