What happened to the PvP scene?

[Matt_Bradock]

The PvP scene in the game is dead. Nothing happens. No events, no wars (unless you count the flamewars going down on the forums), no battle mode servers... nothing.

Why?

That's a good question with a complicated answer. I'd like to ask the cummunity, those who also noticed this, to add to my reasons or hell, contradict me.

Reasons I found so far that killed the PvP in Starmade:
1. No wars, because there is no enemy to fight. When I was in Odium, we always had something going on - but we were portraid as the villains and eventually, I couldn't stand the hate and villainy, and left.
However, the new Eurocorp is a lot less militant, so no one is there to fight.

2. Buy with blocks made obtaining ships a lot harder.
To spawn a ship and take it to battle, you used to need only the credits, which were easy to obtain, and you had your ship, and you could fight. If you lost it, no biggie.
Now, you need hours to manufacture the correct amount of blocks for your ship. The more detailed the ship, the more different blocks you'll need. Ships are a lot harder to create now, and they are a lot less expendable. No one wants to spend 2 hours filling the BP and then risk losing the ship in 10 minutes.

3. Resources are hard to come by.
Processing raw resources can prove tedious enough. You either need to wait for the factory or spend a lot of resources to build up one producing blocks you need fast enough.
But mining just got even more painful.
In fact, so painful, survival mode servers had to boost the resource multiplier to make it liveable. And people still don't do anything other than going on mining runs, building ships they'll never use in a battle and sitting in their invulnerable homebases.
And in the middle of this, hit the new feature of asteroids no longer respawning. Some of them (like larimar asteroids holding the crucial resources for shield caps) were already extremely rare and required special conditions to spawn at all (like, one out of 16 systems were eligible), now they became even harder to obtain.
Combined, you spend a week even to get a capital ship, irreversibly draining systems dry, of course you're not willing to actually risk losing that ship.

All these combined make sure no one's willing to risk their fleets in a battle, and this kinda removes the option of any war or pre-arranged battle between factions in a survival environment.

There would be alternatives, like Battle Mode. Problem is, there are absolutely 0 servers running battle mode, and neither are there servers open to the public hosting regular battle events, where people could show off both building and piloting skills.


So, I ask all players, Council members and Schine staff members, how would you solve, or at least improved on, this situation?

 

[Edymnion]

You already hit the main problem square on the head.

Ships are too costly to build in a universe of limited resources. Until there is a way to build without strip mining entire systems, nobody is going to want to fight willy nilly, it will be purely the domain of griefers.

On my server, I've been trying to talk the admin into having arena style duels where they spawn in copies of each ship using admin commands simply so that people will participate, knowing that they aren't going to lose their ship they spent so much time on making. So far the biggest reward/bribe for participation seems to simply be keeping whats left of the spawned ship if you win.

Games like World of Warcraft or Call of Duty work well for pvp purely because of the fact that the loser doesn't actually lose anything. If your orc dies or your guy gets BOOM! HEADSHOT! 'ed, all you suffer is the sting of defeat, you don't get your lvl 80 character deleted and have to spend 2-3 weeks building up a new one.

I think wars will be more viable if/when renewable resources become a thing. Right now though, I only field a ship that I'm 100% sure will walk all over the other guy, simply because finding Rammet for the shields alone is too damned hard. If its a fair fight, there's no way in hell I'm going to risk losing my stuff.

 

[Sha3es]

We definitely need a better way to harvest/ collect the precious minerals we require to make star ships. It does in fact seem like no one is willing to risk losing their ships after it took considerable time to prepare them for combat... That is without considering the time it would take to get a decent factory up and running, along with a good mining ship to process all of the material for the job.

We need a better way to broker and control fights, because fighting on the forums seems kind of worthless if we have no motivation to actually take the field to fight enemies.

 

[Edymnion]

Its been said that they're looking at ways to store designs in the cores of ships.

If we could store the ship's design in it's core, and have the core survive so that we could take it back to our shipyard and then have it rebuilt using nothing but time and energy, that would help.

I wouldn't mind taking a ship out to fight and having it destroyed if it just meant I had to put it in the shipyard for a few hours to be slowly rebuilt without costing me half a planet's worth of resources to do so.

 

[lilheartless]

Its been said that they're looking at ways to store designs in the cores of ships.

If we could store the ship's design in it's core, and have the core survive so that we could take it back to our shipyard and then have it rebuilt using nothing but time and energy, that would help.

I wouldn't mind taking a ship out to fight and having it destroyed if it just meant I had to put it in the shipyard for a few hours to be slowly rebuilt without costing me half a planet's worth of resources to do so.

something about "if your ships only take half a planets worth of resources to rebuild" "really small mumble" "mumble mumble" something

 

[Visitor]

I guess I'll join the contradicting side. I am actually surprised people say PvP is dead given that from what I recall people talking about, most of faction politics still sooner or later turns into warfare. The difference is, I suspect, that people still think of it and build up to what was before changes.

Of course that ships are hard to make and require resources if every pilot of your faction and their dog expects to get their personal dreadnought. That's actually fair and reasonable, since now the time when one built ships en masse, being limited only by pilots are gone. That's the problem right now - there are no "weight categories" and everyone goes for the biggest since it's nearly always the best - and if that's what they want to, fine, but it's also them who should pay up for it.

I've done some small PvP with current shipyards and resource demands being on and I had absolutely no problem with building small fleets of fighters with artillery support. I expect there's no dead PvP, people just need to change expectations. Every fight shouldn't be a fight of battlecruisers unless all participants are able to afford them - and affording them should be a challenge.

 

[Sha3es]

I guess I'll join the contradicting side. I am actually surprised people say PvP is dead given that from what I recall people talking about, most of faction politics still sooner or later turns into warfare. The difference is, I suspect, that people still think of it and build up to what was before changes.

Of course that ships are hard to make and require resources if every pilot of your faction and their dog expects to get their personal dreadnought. That's actually fair and reasonable, since now the time when one built ships en masse, being limited only by pilots are gone. That's the problem right now - there are no "weight categories" and everyone goes for the biggest since it's nearly always the best - and if that's what they want to, fine, but it's also them who should pay up for it.

I've done some small PvP with current shipyards and resource demands being on and I had absolutely no problem with building small fleets of fighters with artillery support. I expect there's no dead PvP, people just need to change expectations. Every fight shouldn't be a fight of battlecruisers unless all participants are able to afford them - and affording them should be a challenge.

From this, would it be fair to suppose that there should be an accord of sorts within the community? An accord that would perhaps set the standards for acceptable the sizes of ships... while limiting this would perhaps help factions and servers support actual fleet combat. However, I do not see factions agreeing to any sort of accord concerning the acceptable sizes of ships.

 

[Keptick]

You guys might remember that mantle extractor thread I made a while back. It pretty much fixes every problem listed here.

Unfortunately, I don't think the devs really understood it or read it properly, since the sum of the response was "we have stuff planned".

 

[Kenshkrix]

I guess I'll join the contradicting side. I am actually surprised people say PvP is dead given that from what I recall people talking about, most of faction politics still sooner or later turns into warfare. The difference is, I suspect, that people still think of it and build up to what was before changes.

Of course that ships are hard to make and require resources if every pilot of your faction and their dog expects to get their personal dreadnought. That's actually fair and reasonable, since now the time when one built ships en masse, being limited only by pilots are gone. That's the problem right now - there are no "weight categories" and everyone goes for the biggest since it's nearly always the best - and if that's what they want to, fine, but it's also them who should pay up for it.

I've done some small PvP with current shipyards and resource demands being on and I had absolutely no problem with building small fleets of fighters with artillery support. I expect there's no dead PvP, people just need to change expectations. Every fight shouldn't be a fight of battlecruisers unless all participants are able to afford them - and affording them should be a challenge.

I agree that giant battles should be costly, but renewable resources definitely need to be possible somehow.

Empty and dead systems aren't interesting, and the older a server is the more areas would have been completely mined out if there's no way to sustain conflict.

 

[Matt_Bradock]

I guess I'll join the contradicting side. I am actually surprised people say PvP is dead given that from what I recall people talking about, most of faction politics still sooner or later turns into warfare. The difference is, I suspect, that people still think of it and build up to what was before changes.

Of course that ships are hard to make and require resources if every pilot of your faction and their dog expects to get their personal dreadnought. That's actually fair and reasonable, since now the time when one built ships en masse, being limited only by pilots are gone. That's the problem right now - there are no "weight categories" and everyone goes for the biggest since it's nearly always the best - and if that's what they want to, fine, but it's also them who should pay up for it.

I've done some small PvP with current shipyards and resource demands being on and I had absolutely no problem with building small fleets of fighters with artillery support. I expect there's no dead PvP, people just need to change expectations. Every fight shouldn't be a fight of battlecruisers unless all participants are able to afford them - and affording them should be a challenge.

Faction politics won't turn into warfare. Just into keyboard warriors because with the now very finite resources no one wants to risk losing ships, so they never leave homebase unless they are going for pirate hunting. As it has been the last what, 6 months? Just worse.

 

[BDLS]

Linking shipyards to factories to crafting resources would go a long way, so that you don't have to manually go make the 4 server pipe decorations and 1 small cactus etc that you use for decorations on your ship.....the shipyard will tell the factories to automatically make those things you need.

 

[Winterhome]

Faction politics won't turn into warfare. Just into keyboard warriors because with the now very finite resources no one wants to risk losing ships, so they never leave homebase unless they are going for pirate hunting. As it has been the last what, 6 months? Just worse.

It's closer to being the other way around.
Warfare inevitably leads to faction politics bullshit, which in turn drives people away from combat.

Whether you win or you lose a fight, someone always starts screaming about it in a most immature fashion after the fact, and won't shut up about it for months on end. Facts get twisted around, people start ignoring the reality of what happened and start making shit up as to why whatever happened happened, and it turns into yet another stupid shitstorm.

People are willing to fight when they know the opposition isn't going to start attacking them out of game. I've noticed that the small, serverside factions that don't exist on the forums and such generally have a LOT more combat going on, because their spirits haven't been broken down by silly politics and shit like everybody who pays attention to the "major" faction scene.


It's not about people not wanting to lose ships. I personally fight all the time with no regard for my block count - I actively refuse to jump out of a fight if there was ever a chance I could win it right off the bat, and I tend to get rather irritable if my opponent jumps out for whatever reason. I can't help but imagine that it's similar for other people. It's more about people wanting to avoid the stupid shit that comes with the combat.

I think that this is, at least partially, due to players having to actively seek eachother out to fight. You never just run into people out of chance, so when someone gets shot to death, they're guaranteed to take it personally - because let's face it, it is personal if you have to hunt them down the hard way.

 

[Edymnion]

Every fight shouldn't be a fight of battlecruisers unless all participants are able to afford them - and affording them should be a challenge.

You seem to think all wars are fair and evenly balanced. Usually if you are at war with someone, you don't decide to leave your big ships at home just because the other guy doesn't have them. You bring them out to steamroller over the guy.

If one side has a battlecruiser and the other side has a handful of small fighters, the battlecruiser is going to win. The other guy can either lose all of his fighters, or try to field a cruiser of his own.

Way the game is now, he who has the biggest toys wins, as while you could take it down with multiple smaller craft, pretty much any faction that could field that many pilots could field a cruiser of their own of equal size.

 

[Keptick]

You seem to think all wars are fair and evenly balanced. Usually if you are at war with someone, you don't decide to leave your big ships at home just because the other guy doesn't have them. You bring them out to steamroller over the guy.

If one side has a battlecruiser and the other side has a handful of small fighters, the battlecruiser is going to win. The other guy can either lose all of his fighters, or try to field a cruiser of his own.

Way the game is now, he who has the biggest toys wins, as while you could take it down with multiple smaller craft, pretty much any faction that could field that many pilots could field a cruiser of their own of equal size.

That's not true, specialized ships can take out other ships many times their mass if used properly (and if the other ship isn't the counter to the first one's specialty).

 

[doubleminus0]

The problem is no faction really wants to be the bad guy.

 

[Edymnion]

That's not true, specialized ships can take out other ships many times their mass if used properly (and if the other ship isn't the counter to the first one's specialty).

You are assuming that the small side is more skilled/knowledgeable than the larger side. For every counter there is a cross-counter. If one side is good enough to be able to special build a ship that punches above it's weight class, you must also assume that the other side is good enough to be able to counter it. And all things being equal, the guy in the bigger ship has a decidedly larger advantage.

For there to be any meaningful discussion, both sides must be assumed to be equally skilled at making and piloting their ships.

 

[Winterhome]

The problem is no faction really wants to be the bad guy.

It has absolutely nothing to do with "wanting to be the bad guy"
Big forum factions go out and shoot up servers all the time. There are just no major conflicts between major factions lately, because again, it gets too personal and people get upset over the shit flinging that inevitably ensues.

 

[doubleminus0]

It has absolutely nothing to do with "wanting to be the bad guy"
Big forum factions go out and shoot up servers all the time. There are just no major conflicts between major factions lately, because again, it gets too personal and people get upset over the shit flinging that inevitably ensues.

No faction really wants to be the faction that started that shit flinging war.

Except Odium.

 

[Winterhome]

No faction really wants to be the faction that started that shit flinging war.

Except Odium.

Any time a shit flinging war starts, the game loses players.

 

[doubleminus0]

Any time a shit flinging war starts, the game loses players.

Exactly! The game loses enough players as it is because of the learning cliff, I doubt any major faction wants the game to lose more players, or in there eyes more possible members.