Discussion: ways to encourage players to pvp.

[pod11]

Game right now is pretty much only about building.

At some point its "shooter" part has to kick in.

How do you think devs ccould encourage players to undock their fancy 500m ships and start meeting somewhere outside bases and shooting eachother?
How are players going to find eachother in this vast space at all?

 

[Lecic]

The economy is going to be rebalanced, meaning players will probably end up fighting for resources. One of the reasons players don't fight is that sector size is too small to fight in, which is now fixed by the ability for server owners to set custom sector sizes. Also, players will need to build more than one base when faction points are implemented, so players will clash over non-homebases, and you will even be able to destroy player home bases if you kill enough of them and make the lose faction points.

 

[pod11]

The thing with economy is that.. how do you imagine they can make resources remanded thing realy?

I mean, you get everything you need to build ships from salavaging stations/ pirate ships.
There is so much resources coming form 1:1 salvaging that recepes and crafting is not likely to be to-go thing.

How do you thing its going to be worked around?
And how are players going to be forced into building multiple bases? what for?

 

[Lecic]

The thing with economy is that.. how do you imagine they can make resources remanded thing realy?

I mean, you get everything you need to build ships from salavaging stations/ pirate ships.
There is so much resources coming form 1:1 salvaging that recepes and crafting is not likely to be to-go thing.

How do you thing its going to be worked around?
And how are players going to be forced into building multiple bases? what for?

You probably won't be able to just waltz up to a station and harvest it in the future. They'll be rarer and most likely owned by an NPC faction who will defend them, and attacking them would make the faction hostile. I'm sure abandoned stations will still exist, of course.

A planned way to make money in the future will be farming, which would require open spaces to grow lots of plants to make lots of money, so people will probably need to make multiple bases to house all of it.

We're getting a faction point system. Depending on the K/D, member size, ect, of your faction, you'll gain more faction points. Faction points are needed for home base size (including docked ships and turrets) and claiming additional bases. Larger factions won't have enough points to maintain all of their farms and factories on their home base, so they'll need to make more bases.

EDIT- Also, we're getting build block changes so people can't just plonk one down and harvest all of its ore, stone, trees, and crystals.

 

[karkinosz]

If one makes it so catalogue purchases require you to use blocks then excluding pirates there will be a decreasing amount of resources within a universe. Since blocks are destroyed whenever ships die this means as time goes on less blocks will exist. While crafting will also increase usable block counts when it is changed we will probably not see our infinite loops of today and even ores and dirt runs out eventually. Of course as you fly further from spawn more stuff will generate but that also makes you further from the epicentre of the player base and ultimately consumes time so players will fight for more readily available resources and turf nearby spawn.

Now that's just an ugly block of text, to condense my words into simple bullet points.
- Having blocks poof in out of no where is harmful to the star made economy
- Infinite loops are harmful to the economy since they add more blocks to the system.
- Causing a limited scarcity of resources to cause conflict. (think it more a diminishing returns of more effort for the same rewards as time goes on a la bit coin mining)
- Players will slowly expand from spawn and nearby space, since why would you be playing multi player star made to hide 200 sectors away from everyone else. The centre of contention will be the near spawn sectors where 90% of the player base is probably hanging out.
- Stations will be either owned by AI factions or eaten pretty soon.

Needs moar thought. Will think later. Much sleep needed.

 

[pod11]

In order to make pirates and npc factions a challenge these wil require big ships, and stations defenses are also made of blocks, which means after a fight these will provide blocks.
How do you think this can be prevented?

As for my idea of encouraging combat:
PErhaps there could be FINITE ( like 5) spawns of something that is desirable by players, and that zone would require building a base, but preventing a home base in that area.
That would create hotspots for wars to break out.
Just dont know what that valuable spawned resouce could be.

 

[Ultraviolet Dugong]

Resource scarcity isn't a bad thought. The only thing is, what sort of resource would be worth fighting over in the current system? I could see maybe if fuel became a thing in a future update, than planets with fuel reserves (I kind of picture it as a slow, long lasting or infinite trickle) might work, but then that would change the dynamic of the game quite a bit.

I also think that, at some point, PvE might be worth adding to. Some kind of huge, distant threat that would take several factions banding together to overcome. Might be better as a mod, though, as not everyone would want that in single player.

 

[omelet]

Either it will cause more fighting, or resource scarcity will end up pushing people further and further away from each other.

I don't like the idea that we just pillage the planets near spawn and just have to migrate out into space eating up all resources as we go, leaving a bunch of garbage in our wakes.

I'd like to think that a better philosophy would be that we would have to take care of the universe we live in, and it would be beneficial to our goals. Some mechanism like terraforming would fit with that. Another idea is that there are waste products to our crafting or mining efforts that we have to deal with.

The main driver for fighting should not be resources. Rather it should be the faction power to control bases and sectors of space.

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

But why would you want to control those sectors if not for ressources or other things that fuel your war efforts, give you more power, strenghten your ability to produce more and bigger ships?

EDIT:
Ressources should probably just regrow, especially in asteroid fields and belts to make them very valuable.
I'm also not sure if I like the planned faction base changes, I mean, what if your homebase is too small to host your ships? It would suck to just have them destroyed over night simply because you weren't there.

 

[Keptick]

Apart from BDLS (which is awesome) I have to PAY! that's right, PAY most players to fight me. I think that it's just sad to be honest.

Things to be done: game optimization, making combat smoother. I don't think we'll see this until beta. Also, special and rare planets that can allow the production of certain goods to replace the current infinite loop factory system would be worth fighting for!

 

[pod11]

So : we basically need 2 things :
1)Desired resource scarcity.
2) incentive for players to search in same place and compete in that packed place for rare things.
What could be the desired thing for players to fight over, and how to bring them in same place , rather than move away form crowd.

 

[BDLS]

Apart from BDLS (which is awesome) I have to PAY! that's right, PAY most players to fight me. I think that it's just sad to be honest.

Things to be done: game optimization, making combat smoother. I don't think we'll see this until beta. Also, special and rare planets that can allow the production of certain goods to replace the current infinite loop factory system would be worth fighting for!

Indeed. Smoothness is the biggest issue for me currently. Running v.153, sector and skybox transitions have become extremely abrupt and rough. I'll fly through a sector, then the enemy ship(s) around me will be in a completely different area, appearing to teleport around. Also, projectiles in a different sector have their heading and point of origin displayed incorrectly. Combat seemed smoother a few months ago, the current state reminds me of how rough it was 8-10 months ago or so, with the same flaws. It gets REALLY rough if you're fighting in a solar system and a nearby planet is loading in. I really have no idea how schema is gonna optimize the new planets to load in a decent amount of time.

 

[Stakhanov]

There's a very simple solution to increase player interaction : quadrant-based resource distribution. Each one would have resources needed to manufacture certain weapon systems , so that someone farming the same corner of space 100 sectors away could only fit a lot of missiles to his capital ships. Luxuries such as effect modules could require ingredients from opposite quadrants.

Convenience would make the center much more attractive and populated ; defending territory spread over several quadrants would be difficult.
Trading with other players would be worth considering. Trusted neutral factions could host protected markets , outside of which piracy would be a constant threat.

 

[pod11]

The thing is noone will bother fighting for scarce resources,and crafting if finished blocks for building ships are avaible in big amounts thru salvaging pirates / stations and form shops.

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

That's why people kind of suggested to make that less viable? To buy stuff or to salvage it from pirates and stations.

 

[Lecic]

The thing is noone will bother fighting for scarce resources,and crafting if finished blocks for building ships are avaible in big amounts thru salvaging pirates / stations and form shops.

Well, with the upcoming HP system, it'll take more damage to put an isanth down than just breaking the shields and the front glass. Stations won't be as easily salvageable, and you need money to get things from shops.

Anyway, can you imagine how long it would take to build a battle ship from salvaging isanth parts? Ages.

 

[pod11]

Pirates are not limited to isanths.
Im sure pirates and other Ai factions are planned to be a challenge, which means they will have bigger ships - not just isanths.
And this means more parts to salvage.

And secondly, i'd say getting resources for big ships SHOULD take ages.

Its not good when players can hit server/pc limits so fast.

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

For which you will have to fight for harder.

 

[pod11]

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have ships blow up completely after being destroyed, to create resource sink.

 

[Hanspeter Schnitzel]

But that would remove the whole gameplay mechanic of salvaging. Salvaging SHOULD be a thing, it should be an important way of getting ressources, so there's more to gain from battles against enemies than just sector control and ressource-sources-control.