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

Vexus · Apr 22, 2024

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.

Askannon said:

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.

Askannon said:

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!

Fruitkek said:

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 · Apr 23, 2024

Vexus said:

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.

Vexus said:

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.

Vexus said:

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 · Apr 27, 2024

Askannon said:

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).

Askannon said:

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.

Askannon said:

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.)

Askannon said:

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.

Askannon said:

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.

Askannon said:

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 · Apr 28, 2024

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 · Apr 30, 2024

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 · Apr 30, 2024

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).

J.D. · May 18, 2024

I’ll have to say, even though I can understand where you are coming from about having people play together, I don’t think removing ssc is a good option. Because it’s already hard enough as it is to build a ship, especially a nice one. If we all built them in the live world, we couldn’t delete and add and delete without losing a lot of materials. SSC makes it much quicker to come up with a design we are satisfied with. Otherwise, all of us will build cubes. Starbox. lol I for one want to get far far far away from anything cube like. I wish we had more shapes. But, the heresy is one thing I really agree with, as far as how you were describing it. Ssc should reflect the real world, and not allow players to do weird stuff just like in the live world. Ssc should only be for making those builds quicker, without wasting materials when editing by deleting and re adding. I do think some mechanics that are coming will add some group play though. Nations are coming, inventory 2.0 will make everything have to have a physical container, so the economy will exist. Not only that but they are changing the way the belt works. So player interaction will most definitely come in all sorts of ways, both friendly, and competitively. The game is pretty much heavily encouraging you to be a part of a nation. Kinda like how in eve, the way to really play it is joining a faction/alliance to live in null sec. Strength in numbers, and more safety in your side of space.

neona · May 24, 2024

I want to chime in as another voice of reality check here

While I definitely agree that a Starbase that had no SSC might have been interesting, that is not the SB we got. To support such a vision would require things that are currently simply not on the table for development resource reasons such as properly working factory halls with all the working devices needed to build ship factories. I'd love to see that, but that's not happening, or at least not happening anytime soon.

The SSC is not what killed SB initially, what killed it was a lack of support for player-built infrastructure, and related incentives to cause game-resource incentivized conflict that made sense. Without those things most combat is basically just for fun, which is not enough to build an MMO on. Thankfully they seem to be on the way now, and it may well have the possibility to revive the game, though time will tell.

The SSC is generally the most polished and well-liked feature in the game and though it is not without downsides, history is pretty clear that removing well-liked load bearing features from games (even for good reasons!) is how you kill games, and I think this case is no different. Even if abstractly removing the SSC might be good for the game, the real outcome would be certain death. If it had never been there we'd be having a different conversation, but that is not the world we live in.

Now, I do think that the game currently actively disincentivizes working on ships in-world, and the game is worse for it! But there are more incremental measures that would improve this state of affairs, such as drive-in-designer or some other ability to generate a reusable blueprint from an existing ship. Insurance arguably counts here too. These things would at least mean those who choose to build in-world are not quite as actively disadvantaged, so I hope to see them. Obviously these wouldn't have as far-reaching implications, but they also wouldn't be shooting a game that's already limping along straight in the leg.

As for some more exploit-y SSC building practices, I do hope that in time they consider deeming some of them bugs and fixing them, as I do think in some cases they're worse for the meta. But even without the SSC people would do things like this, that's simply how players (and metas) behave. It does make it easier though.

Colonkin · May 24, 2024

neona said:

I completely agree.
Moreover, if you look at the most viable space MMO projects, there aren’t that many of them.
Or rather one. This is EVE online.
Naturally there is more casualness there than in SB. No. SB has more simulation. But we saw how such projects died long before such a venerable age. And if you think about what exactly ensured such vitality and popularity. I think it's diversity. The game has a bunch of professions and specialties where everyone will find something to do in a huge team. From miners to builders. From scouts to titan pilots. Lots of roles, lots of life, lots of variety.

I do not criticize the SB because All the same, the guys set the bar very high. And we know that development was stopped for 2 years. I hope that from a gameplay point of view, game designers have more understanding, a better vision and they will pleasantly surprise us. As for the designer, he is simply the most ready-made part in the entire life chain of ships.

Which I see like this:

Design->Extraction->Processing->Construction->Sell->Use->Recharge->Repair->Destruction->Disposal.

For each of these points in the game, you can assign a role (which the player himself will play).
We just need to provide the infrastructure.
So SSC provides the first point. And the rest must wait. And this is just the cycle of the ship. And then there are social interactions. Companies, countries, wars, spies, etc. You just need to give people the conditions and tools.

Kenetor · May 26, 2024

Colonkin said:

This is absolutely right, printing from ores ignores a whole crafting/factory side tot he game!
I know its been talked about before too, and the best people came up with were to increase the "charge" for making the parts from ore.
This charge is not even that obvious to the player too but now were seeing a more accepting view towards changing SB's core design, maybe just maybe @LauriFB could consider this and the impact it has.

However there would need to be an easier way for players to set up a self service shop, not just the trading of a ship deed, we cant be online 24/7, so it needs an automated process.

This is partly what got me excited in CA, with the old (better) stations, if we could have rented out plots, that would be a way of earning, then the plots could be shops to buy things from, that could be a money earner, then we could have community trade hubs away from origin, and a much stronger in game economy. FB needs to bring those features to life to reinvigorate the game. (as well as all the other the issues)

Colonkin · May 27, 2024

Kenetor said:

We are already seeing clear signals that developers are moving in this direction.

Placing purchase orders.

Possibility to trade at stations. And we need more stations themselves. And a mechanism, if not rent, then at least taxes if a player trades at the station of another player / faction.

Containers in which you can transport items (by the way, this is one of the main obstacles to trade. Transporting items such as capital ship modules is simply impossible. Which kills their market and the market for many other devices.

This was announced in the new PTU update. I think that the team simply did not have time to implement this before the project was frozen in 2022.
By the way. I would like to see printing not made from ore, but from at least purified materials and alloys. This would move the industry to trade on the moons and belts.

pavvvel · May 29, 2024

Delete the SSC?? How could anyone even think of such a thing..? Yes, there is no point in playing Starbase at all if there is no SSC. Or do you want to fly ships from stores to Origin? What is the meaning of the statement "without SSC, players would play with each other more"? No one prevents you from playing the way you want. Then why are you talking about depriving other players of their favorite gameplay? I suppose someone who is unable to make a good ship on his own is just jealous of those who can and is haunted by the superiority of good shipbuilders. This game is completely meaningless if you remove the SSC. Don't want to play SSC? - Don't play. But do not interfere with other players either. Don't stop them from developing this game. SSC needs to be developed and encouraged. Add a lot of new parts and tools there. It's beautiful

DivineEvil · Jun 13, 2024

I generally agree with the overarching claim. On top of that, I just want to commend the sheer amount of time, thought and passion the OP laid into this topic.

The problem with the SSC is not exactly its mere existence - its that its a feature available to everyone from the start, that trivializes every single "low-tech" element, that constitutes the associated game loops. It isn't something that you can only have on a custom station with a large amount of preloaded costs, that requires you to refine the ores, produce the parts and fuel the process of ship production. You can just enter the editor, build the ship as you see fit, load some raw ores, pay for production of parts, and voila. Everything you can ever do except for combat is replaced entirely by SSC, and available from the step one. SSC is so good, that it makes the rest of the game meaningless, and so it puts into the question why have the game in the first place.

The whole experience revolves around SSC, and making it work. Ores are mined to be used in SSC, items are crafted to minimize SSC manufacturing costs, refining doesn't exist, manual assembly is only used for emergency repairs (otherwise just sell the ship and regenerate it). There's no manufacture specialization to keep stations stocked with parts, there's no trade, there's no scarcity, there's no variable ore deposits to scan for and exploit, there's no renting rooms to sell items or ships. There's literally nothing but all the players mining to feed the ferocious hunger of the SSC to make larger ships to better mine to do the same.

So yeah, SSC may be necessary to remain in place, but it must not be used to build the ships. SSC should only be used to produce blueprints, which then can be used for manual or player-station-based automated construction/restoration.

Colonkin · Jun 13, 2024

DivineEvil said:

I agree.

SSC must be in the game.
But its role must be reduced only to design.
There must be furnaces for purifying ores
There must be production complexes for the production of modules, products, and armor. Moreover, with a developed queue and offline production.
There must be good market and auction infrastructure. With a convenient interface and search. What we have now is extremely inconvenient. At a minimum, orders should be combined into a single price field. And it should be possible to buy not all 100 stacks, but 98 if necessary.
There is no normal inventory. Many ships will exceed the storage limit in terms of the number of items. Considering that the ore should also be stored there.
The list goes on. Here I have outlined the main points.

Therefore, we all need to treat SSC as a necessary evil due to the lack of necessary infrastructure and game mechanics. I hope that they will be introduced and SSC will only design ships.

DivineEvil · Jun 13, 2024

Colonkin said:

I wouldn't say that SSC should remain as necessary evil due to lack of something. For example, we have EBM, that can work as a low-end substitute for SSC. The problem with EBM, apart from multitude of bugs associated with its persistent interaction with the ship built with its use, is that it is heavily reliant on plate-oriented module design. As far as I see it, EBM should work as an early-game ship production method.

By their very nature ships are just lumps of functional devices held together withing a single framework. EBM modular design should reflect that and have modules designed not around the roomy plated interiors, but on the framework clusters, that hold certain devices and integrate them together. Plates can of course can be an optional addition, but they should be a dedicated category of hull segments. Overall, most if not all devices should not be horizontal-plane oriented (like reactors or computers, that have fixtures only for bolting to the floor/shelf), but instead omnidirectional units (more like thrusters are), that can fit and match in any orientation. EBM modules should be more function-oriented, and if players want to add walkable surfaces and protective plating, they may as well add that manually.

The point is, SSC design freedom is something I'd personally see as a goal achievable by dedicated player teams, that can manage to establish their own shipyard, whether they choose to mine ores, process into ingots/filament, produce parts, and automate the assembly using factory floors or not. That would make SSC-designed and marketed ships as something absolutely remarkable in the game world, as opposed to kitbash EBM industrial rigs, or hand-crafted unique personal vessels - a true endgame achievement for successful corporations.

To get there, a player has to start just like in a survival game - with a campfire and stone axe. Complete the tutorial, get the basic ship, mine some ores, sell them for profit or refine with a hefty tax. Earn some money, learn some crafting, rent a small plot on one of the NPC stations to build offline refining/manufacturing or item/ship storage modules. Build a personal handmade ship or a mightier EBM ship, complete some tasks to haul cargo between NPC stations or even to the player stations, fulfill buy orders on the auction. Then make your own station and stock it with materials and power generation for upkeep. Get enough production and maintenance modules on it to construct and maintain the shipyard module with various robotic arms installed to automate the assembly...

and only THEN you get the full functionality of the SSC. Only then you can exploit the cursed geometry, build a ship from the custom blueprint, sell blueprints to others and have a faction-exclusive ship pool. Players could still use EBM to build functional ships with limited choice of devices and no access to more high-end analogues, and modify/restore them using the modular system. Players can still build their own ships (including discarding the link to EBM system and tailoring the ship to their own desires), safe their integrated blueprints and use them to repair the ship if needed, and even sell them to individual players. BUT! SSC should not be the core feature of the game - it should be a height of player's dedication and commemorable achievement.

If lack of SSC functionality makes the game meaningless, that simply means that's the game is all about. It is true for any game in any genre. If SSC is more important than any of the underlying features like mining, refining, manufacture, firearm and ship combat, trading and asset management, then that means the game is in fact broken in great part because of the SSC. So no, SSC should not be developed and encouraged - it have already have been to the extreme fault. All the outside aspects and interaction cycles must be addressed before any hope for meaningful gameplay can be established. Right now the game must be developed with a perspective, in which SSC does not exist at all. Until the game works well enough from that perspective, it is an objective failure.

As a compromise, SSC on the NPC stations may only allow to design ship blueprints of limited total volume, have the same limit on ships it can house, and only allow to use T1 devices and no macroscopic machinery. An SSC of medium grade would allow more advanced devices on a larger ship, but has to be built on a rented station plot with a corresponding increase in maintenance tax and having a rather limited (1/4) capacity to house robotic arms for automated assembly. A fully-operational SSC would only be possible to build on a player-owned station, that requires several fission reactor modules of power upkeep to have it working.

Colonkin · Jun 14, 2024

DivineEvil said:

Generally true except for 2 points.
1. EBM is generally a very ineffective tool. Primarily due to the limited number of blocks. And a strong overexpenditure of elements. It is almost impossible to build even a medium ship using this tool. The designer will quickly reach the limits of the constraints. But for beginners it will do.
And as you correctly noted, this is a tool for quickly making at least something out of at least something.
2. The most important thing. Everything you say does not apply to designs and tools like SSC and EBM. The path and adaptation of a beginner depends on the game design. This is the problem at the moment. This is because SB is a flawed "give players the tools and they'll figure out what to do" concept. The experience of failures of games of this type has shown that this is not so. The game still needs to be filled with global meanings and global design (factions, lore, world features, initial politics, NPCs).
Let's take an MMORPG for example. Even with open worlds, where they give enormous freedom. At the beginning of the game, the newcomer is still led by the hand. Gradually increasing complexity and involvement. Missions and all sorts of one-time teleporations are created so that the newcomer can see the beauty of the world and be imbued with initial impressions.
In space MMOs, with the possible exception of EVE, everything is not like that.
Let’s even take conditional MMOs like SE, etc. Which have advanced sandbox functionality. We see that only creative people can keep themselves busy without the proper infrastructure (plot, quests). Designers, builders. The rest get bored quickly. Considering that SB was frozen for almost 2 years, only such enthusiasts remained.

DivineEvil · Jun 14, 2024

Colonkin said:

1. That's what I mean. EBM modules are designed on the basis of the standardized hull design - full plate, framework with conduit, full plate. Anything that doesn't correlate to the standard module dimension (192m^2? I can't remember now) has to me mounted on that same plate. This introduces an excess of dead weight, which makes ships inherently inefficient. I think that the modules must be designed with bare framework as the base, so that the mass inflation won't occur. Plate modules for both interior and exterior should be a separate category, that a player may or may not use as desired. You can still imagine having some minimal plates, for example for reactor cover or occasional beam casing for aesthetics or minimal protection for essentials. And, EBM should work with the EBM ship as is, meaning that it will dump any modifications and damaged modules into inventory upon entering the field, and to make any permanent changes to such a ship will require converting it to a custom ship, which will no longer interact with EBM modules. That should keep the implementation mostly bug-free.

2. Well, yes and no. I don't think the problem is as broad as you seem to imply. SB fared fine in the beginning too, so that makes me think that its not that players need a plot. Players just need stuff to do and achieve. SB withered primarily because there were nothing to do, unless you just like fiddling with the SSC. People with stable connections in the community have participated in the events, and people interested in PvP collaborated to fight in the arena. For most others, the progression is too shallow, and options are to few. It comes down to lack of complexity and scarcity.

Lack of refining and trivial manufacturing means its easy to acquire parts and items. Ease of acquisition feeds into the ease of use of SSC. Use of SSC makes mining massive amounts of ores pretty easy. Thus, the vicious cycle is closed. Basically, if you get enough money at the start, you can get whatever you want. There's no need to progress in any other way than in raw value. That's why I mentioned plots on NPC stations to facilitate more efficient refining, offline manufacturing, and extended storage space. That's why I mentioned player stations for optimal production rates and shipyard functionality, etc. If everything you can do is trivial, then it has little entertainment value, and the results always come back to SSC.

I will completely agree on the angle of quests, tho. Without those, there's no way to diversify the various ship functions apart from mining and fighting. I think that the easiest "quest" feature to implement is transportation. Lets say that we have 6 origin stations around Eos (I don't see any reason to have more), and players sell a lot of certain items or ore chunks to the station. The station then can generate missions to haul those items or ores to adjacent stations if their stock is lacking to balance the local supply. A player can run a transport ship with a cargo frame or fitting modular crates and move items around for a reward.

Origin stations are connected with small gatesso that you could meet up with people and perform transport missions in reasonable times. But hey, sometimes these gates can decay out of order, so now you have another type of a quest - to bring a specified amount of ingots and repair damaged modules along the given gate's ring to reactivate it. The same emergent principles can be used to give quests for recovery of disowned ships, or for selling salvage markers for a fraction of the ship's total value and relative to distance.

Introducing NPCs is a whole other can of worms, that I don't need to elaborate on - there are so many options like intercepting a drone-guarded cargo packages or assaulting a turret-protected installation on a moon surface for retrieving information, etc. Regardless, I think that even before that, there's opportunities to give players some objectives to work towards and choices to make. They can be brought up and make the game playable, even if you remove SSC entirely. I still hold cherished memories of manually attaching additional thrusters to my underperforming ship, or welding the station plot buildings, or just whacking at asteroids in the job center while my parts are being crafted.

Case and point is, too much effort was put into making the SSC itself and the ships produced by it to work, that everything else was neglected. Its that lack of a strong feature core, that makes SB look more like a game built around the editor, rather than the editor being part of a game. It's like a MMORPG, where you have an elaborate crafting system with exclusive decorative elements, alloys, bells and whistles, but the rest of the game is jank.

Askannon · Jun 14, 2024

DivineEvil said:

I think what we're seeing is more the game being in alpha state rather than anything else.
The SSC is a bandaid that holds this all together, but is really at fault for the rest of the game being barebones. It's just what makes it work.
So my perspective would more be: introduce new systems, like for example refinement of ores, and then phase out the function of the SSC for that.
The SSC will probably always be a pillar of the game, which is why I don't think "don't develop or encourage" should ever apply, but developing new pillars to stand next to the SSC should be the definite focus. Slowly easing the SSC to a place where it fits better is just a natural development of that.

DivineEvil · Jun 15, 2024

Askannon said:

That's kinda my point - if hypothetically you remove SSC capability from the game, then its looks totally Alpha-state. The SSC, the number of features and refinements that were brought into it, the number of devices that were available in SSC before they could be traded on the auction or even crafted, and the features/functions that were attached to ships, which in turn are best acquired through the SSC, rather than advertised manual assembly with half-a-dozen tools, or using EBM, that haven't been vetted and delienated from custom ships for reliability - all of that leaves are very different impression.

Again, its like the game was built around the editor, and the most proficient developer resource were directed at the editor, while the most basic things like resource management, inventory and character profile were slapped on top to make it look like a game, and it look even worse on the chronology in the open alpha. SSC is waaay too good and valuable part of the game, but if its capabilities as seen from the player's perspective are the same as now, then it will inevitably drain the player's participation again, so I personally believe it has to be toned down a notch before any "revival" total-reset relaunches are planned, and all attention should be pointed to the very basics - not on the small ship ability to warp, or station sieges, or capital ships etc. Focusing on these kind of features won't even put the horse in front of the art - it would put the cart on top of the horse expecting it to carry the whole thing with wheels in the air.

Public release and wildfires caused by the unannounced and unrefined EBM brings painful memories. I certainly hope Frozenbyte can avoid this kind of situation coming up again.

Askannon · Jun 15, 2024

DivineEvil said:

From what they said, they don't plan on doing wipes. They are not 100% out of the picture (e.g. reset due to tech thing requiring it or last try at revival), but as long as the game can proceed the current world will remain.

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