Is slow travel a contributing factor to the decline of PvP?

[nightrune]

I think that PvP is viable and well balanced in the game, but it's not the kind of PvP the OP wants to engage in from the sound of it. PvP as it currently exists is meant to be used for real political gain. When you want to capture the systems of another faction, or stop them from doing the same to you, as a prime example. In such a situation, the loss of ships is the price for stripping away an enemy faction's control of a sector.

For players who just want to go around shooting other players, this likely isn't very satisfying. In reality, however, this game simply doesn't work on that level, as I think other replies in this thread have touched upon. Mainly, PvP devolves into a question of who has the most time and opportunity to build the baddest ship. Only a few players are interested in that arms race (rat race?) When the majority of the players aren't willing to, or cannot, compete with these players, it's just some guy running around bullying everyone else and thinking it's soooo funny.

For that bully to then complain that it takes too long to run around collecting lunch money...how small do they make violins?

I'm not sure op is a bully and its not great form to go calling people names in the forum. I can agree with the pvp being mainly political right now. It doesn't help that our universe feels so empty, and I don't think just players can fill that gap yet. The player base needs to get larger and the game needs to scale better.

Right now we are all feeling the emptiness that exists due to no environmental problems or political. There doesn't seem to be any progression right now versus building. Granted building has gotten awesome, and its only going to get better. The lack of standard progression has many gamers feeling odd. Even in minecraft you could feel the progression, but there was also something to do. I think its the reason you see many people asking for hunger, and other upkeep sytle problems.

OP still has a valid point that it takes a long time to get to his friend to help. I think just being able to hide the warpgates would be a good thing. You should also be able to take over a warpgate and not have it disconnected so that its very strategic target.

 

[KiloZulu]

I certainly didn't mean to infer that Lecic is a bully. I can see how the progression of logic within the thread could lead one to believe that my final statement refers back to my starting statement, but it wasn't the intent. I had no idea as to how my thread was going to end when I started. I just kept pulling stuff out my but until I got to the end. :P
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OP still has a valid point that it takes a long time to get to his friend to help. I think just being able to hide the warpgates would be a good thing. You should also be able to take over a warpgate and not have it disconnected so that its very strategic target.

I won't argue about the validity of his point, because I really don't have the experience or data to draw any conclusions as to whether or not PvP is even declining. Being too far away to help a friend who is engaged in PvP, however, seems like more of a personal issue. If you choose to build or travel so far away from your friends that you can't support them, it sounds like bad planning, not bad game development. If you increase the speed or distance at which players travel, as others have pointed out, players are going to just increase their distance from one another as befits their preference.

I would agree with you that the game lacks content, but Schine's development diary should give everyone hope for a brighter future in that regard. As for the visibility of jump gates, I'm sure I've seen some good suggestion posts regarding them. I don't know of any player that likes how jump gates currently draw attention to their infrastructure. I personally would like them to have permissions set up similar to the transporters, where their visibility can be set depending on who you want to broadcast the information to.

 

[Lecic]

I won't argue about the validity of his point, because I really don't have the experience or data to draw any conclusions as to whether or not PvP is even declining. Being too far away to help a friend who is engaged in PvP, however, seems like more of a personal issue. If you choose to build or travel so far away from your friends that you can't support them, it sounds like bad planning, not bad game development. If you increase the speed or distance at which players travel, as others have pointed out, players are going to just increase their distance from one another as befits their preference.

For context- this happened on shattered skies. They regularly have 20 players online. There are very few restrictions on PvP. Yet this was the only combat on the server in quite some time. It's the same on nearly every other server. The PvP scene is very, very dead.

Also- what about when we develop friendships after we've both already set up? Should my faction be expected to just pick everything up and move closer to someone we only need to help once every other month?

I don't really know where you get the idea that PvP in the current game is some sort of complex political landscape, and that people like myself are a bully for not wanting to spend half an hour of my life just flying to a friendly base to shoot at a swarmer boat for a few minutes, then spend another half an hour going back. Having been involved in a time when faction PvP was a complex mess of alliances, war decs, and constant raids- this is not nearly as complex.
To summarize the PvP game at the moment- Everyone sets up somewhere in the spawn galaxy, except for a handful of jerks, who live in another galaxy or in void space. These jerks will then slap together some shitty brick, usually with an edgy black with red highlights color-scheme, that rarely uses anything but swarm missiles. Then, about once or twice a month, the jerks spend a day going around the spawn galaxy, camping homebases in an attempt to try and get someone to undock to fight, or just spamming swarmers to crash people with less powerful computer's games. Then, when they get bored, they either return to their base, dump the ship in the sun, or if they're particularly large assholes, set the ship to AI and let it continue to harass people.

There are no great territorial conquests in the current game. There's just homebases and raiding jerks that you don't feel like spending an hour of holding the left and right mouse buttons to go and do the same to them.

 

[StormWing0]

Lecic the jerks you are mentioning are the one's my station's are usually designed to murder if they get any bright ideas. XD

 

[alterintel]

Right now the only way to play without being harassed by "jerks" is to build far enough away that, for the jerk, it's too tedious to fly out that far to get any enjoyment out of harassing other players.

Solution?:
1) Hiding: The Universe is a big place. It shouldn't be that easy to find people who don't want to be found.
2) Insurance: not sure how this would work (idea just popped in my head just now)

For Hiding: I think it would require a total re-work of how players are detected on the nav or radar screen.
Re-think: Sensors, Cloaking, and Jamming. Perhaps add a running silent option or something.

There have been allot of ideas thrown around to this end.
My favorite is the one where detection range is based on the radar cross section or detectability of the entity. There being multiple ways to adjust your cross section, and multiple ways adjust your sensor range/power.

Just a quick thought: what if each entity had a Cross Section or Detectability value just like a shield value, or a e/sec value.
Every active system, or block would contribute to your Cross Section value. So for example: firing weapons, activating shields, and bigger hulls would be ways of possibly increasing this value. activating a radar jammer, a cloaker, or running silent are all ways that you could possibly reduce your radar cross-section.

 

[NeonSturm]

Just a quick thought: what if each entity had a Cross Section or Detectability value just like a shield value, or a e/sec value.
Every active system, or block would contribute to your Cross Section value. So for example: firing weapons, activating shields, and bigger hulls would be ways of possibly increasing this value. activating a radar jammer, a cloaker, or running silent are all ways that you could possibly reduce your radar cross-section.

This. suggested over and over in many different ways.

But while stationary mines could be invisible until they hit a ship, even slow moving special op ships shouldn't be able to go to point-blank range and fire massive-pulses to outright kill the enemy ship.
The special-ops ability "low cross-section" should prevent that much firepower in an instant.

 

[jorgekorke]

Also, "using the very few server capacity we have" so you're the person who owns all the servers? lol sorry couldn't resist poking fun at this fallacy.

It doesn't matter how expensive and advanced the server's hardware is, get around twenty players online and ping issues will appear, making any kind of combat unsettling.

 

[Dellexe]

My two cents to cut down on the dreaded grind:

When Crew/Better AI come, allow them to harvest resources.
When Crew/Better AI come, have a "Go to defend attacked bases" option.
Don't make 50k mass ships just disappear into the void upon death. Let them be salvaged by either party. That way there's a motivation to attack (Loot the wreckage!) and it makes losing random fights, especially near your base, less punishing.

Fleet AI could add a big increase to the tactics/strategy used in galactic conflict. Bait the enemy into jumping to defend one base, then destroy their mining station. Or vice versa. Or bait the enemy fleet into a trap, then use Interdictors to stop escape.

Linking shipyards to factories would also be sweet, so that the shipyard could just tell the factory what to build. I know that I get annoyed by how annoying it is to link up factories and tell them exactly what to build.

 

[godmars]

I think fleet implementation would definitely help. Right now you need to bring in the biggest baddest ship you can in PVP since you only "get" one, which sometimes leads to losing something you can't really afford to. I'd assume with fleets people would start to deviate towards stuff that's easily produced in quantitites and replaceable if it does get wrecked

 

[StormWing0]

I think fleet implementation would definitely help. Right now you need to bring in the biggest baddest ship you can in PVP since you only "get" one, which sometimes leads to losing something you can't really afford to. I'd assume with fleets people would start to deviate towards stuff that's easily produced in quantitites and replaceable if it does get wrecked

lol Already doing that. I've got more interest in small things I can replace very easily than some huge one time ship.

 

[MacThule]

Is slow travel a contributing factor to the decline of PvP?

YES.

 

[MacThule]

There are a lot of issues hindering PvP, but travel tedium is what always comes to my mind first.

Vanilla jump & warp values are absurd. The entire point of a tech like jumping is inter-stellar travel, but in Starmade it takes the form of a feeble, intra-stellar limp.

Either the universe is too vast, or travel is too pathetic. Whichever - the result is that ALL Starmade players, even on the busiest multiplayer servers, play mostly in isolation other than chat and the 3-4 people who may be active in their faction. It's lonely, it's slow, and interaction for ANY purpose is f-ing tedious.

 

[Harbinger_OF_Cthulhu]

It doesn't matter how expensive and advanced the server's hardware is, get around twenty players online and ping issues will appear, making any kind of combat unsettling.

Yeah totally, I'm not disagreeing with that at all. just poking fun cheers man.

 

[MacThule]

It doesn't matter how expensive and advanced the server's hardware is, get around twenty players online and ping issues will appear, making any kind of combat unsettling.

agreed. it would be less problematic if the dynamics favored smaller, more economical ships more. everyone on server would be generating less lag most of the time. this is one of the reason i believe that adding a fuel dynamic that makes size cost will improve overall game performance.

 

[NeonSturm]

agreed. it would be less problematic if the dynamics favored smaller, more economical ships more. everyone on server would be generating less lag most of the time. this is one of the reason i believe that adding a fuel dynamic that makes size cost will improve overall game performance.

Agree, but you would take away 1 strength of SM over SE : HUGE STRUCTURES.

I would prefer a rendering optimization where parts that weren't visible last frame are inaccurate similar to the perception of the human vision on moving parts - you mostly adjust expectations of what you recognized.

Parts rendered last frame can be cached (block face position and orientation) to speed up ray-casting on adjacent not-occupied parts of the screen via ray-tracing.

 

[jorgekorke]

agreed. it would be less problematic if the dynamics favored smaller, more economical ships more. everyone on server would be generating less lag most of the time. this is one of the reason i believe that adding a fuel dynamic that makes size cost will improve overall game performance.

Unfortunately, this theory was already proven that doesn't work.

GenXNova had a very restrictive ship size on its rules, and even with that, the server was pretty much unplayable thanks to it moderately high population.

 

[alterintel]

I'd like to reiterate the following point:
it doesn't matter how fast you can travel. People who don't want to be bothered by greifing will always build 10 to 20 minutes away from spawn.

if there was a method to travel even faster, then people would just build further out.

 

[badmojo]

I think a large part of the problem is giving players far too much information on every level of the game.

Let's say for example a faction built themselves up far away from other factions, a logical strategy would be for an attacking faction to build either an outpost near to them, or build a series of warpgates leading to them, pushing up the front of your warmachine, while leaving a supply line for logistics. Except in starmade, that would paint huge blue lines across the map, which is a red flag warning for the victims, and a huge crosshair on that front line outpost/wargate. Which is fine, if they locate the enemies front line, they should have a nice juicy target to aim at, except they didn't find anything themselves, the game told them where to look, they didn't even have to leave the safety of their base, they didn't have to scout the system or sector, they didn't even have to run a scan, it's just vital information that gets handed to them by the games design.

This type of thing is all over this game and I think it ruins the potential for interesting play. Everything from knowing which ship the player is inside, to knowing which systems are owned, and even little things like letting players fly into enemy structures using build mode, or having "XXXX player was killed" messages, or even the factions tab itself, these things all have major consequences on player behavior, and the resulting gameplay.

Everything in a game like this should be an unknown, players should have to make contact with other factions in order to even learn about them, players should see ship wreckage and wonder if the pilot ejected at the last second, or if he's indeed dead. They should be forced to at the very least scan a new system to see if it's owned or not, and they should have to use a warpgate before they know the path it takes.

Stealth shouldn't be reserved only for the jamming/cloaking ship builds, it should be a part of everything in this game. But, currently the game mechanics remove all doubt.

 

[Lecic]

I'd like to reiterate the following point:
it doesn't matter how fast you can travel. People who don't want to be bothered by greifing will always build 10 to 20 minutes away from spawn.

if there was a method to travel even faster, then people would just build further out.

The solution to that is to make building that far out a bad idea, because you'll be under constant assault from strong pirates, and there won't be any good materials to mine.

 

[Valck]

The solution to that is to make building that far out a bad idea, because you'll be under constant assault from strong pirates, and there won't be any good materials to mine.

If it solely comes down to a choice between AI pirates and human griefers, I know where I'd prefer to be.
If you take away that choice, chances are you're deterring players from joining up at the same time, and even if you may never have met those players, I don't think that's a wise design decision to make.

I'm still of the opinion that the only viable option is to have pure PvP, restricted PvP, and pure PvE servers, with mandatory explanation of rules and requiring consent upon joining, and strict policing of infractions.
Sad, but that's the way human psychology works in my experience when they have no common goal.

If people on a server agree they do want to PvP, then what's the point in them separating (beyond a few systems of course)? And if people on another server consent to non-aggression, where's the need to separate (again, more than a few systems)?