This suggestion is not about what variables *I* personally want to play under in a server; I play on 3 different servers right now and have played on over a dozen over the past two years. They're all slightly different and I like that.
This suggestion is not about how many pretend credits
one pretend toon
one player on
one server has.
If it was, I wouldn't be dumping billions of credits each and every week into subsidizing a shop within limping distance of spawn (hell if I needed setting changes to make money I wouldn't have billions to invest every week in the first place). I wouldn't be handing out free ships to everyone who asks for one
regardless of faction. If it was I'd be keeping it all for myself. Or to be more precise, I wouldn't bother with worthless, broken credits (as I don't in most other servers) because my mining ship with the 50K-block salvage array melts enough material in an hour to supply me for days of building and testing. I certainly wouldn't have spent days building a giant public docking array and public factories in attractive packaging or even attempt to finagle sustained viability out of the PUBLIC faction option.
Brieries is just where I have been testing player shops, public factions, and the trade & social metas of this game (having "tested" manufacturing for hundreds of hours now over 2 years and being well satisfied that factories generally work
as intended. as do cannon, salvagers, scanners, thrusters, and basically everything except player shops). The most recent in a series of test grounds, actually. Personally, I'm all about that PvP... but there isn't enough organic PvP in MP for my taste. There are never enough players, and those that are camp their HBs 90% of the time. Starmade has more potential than any game I've seen in almost 3 decades of gaming. It's almost the only thing I play anymore. It's failing to realize its potential though because of major shortcomings in terms of accommodating new players, and there are ways to fix this without at all curbing the scope and complexity that give Starmade its robust character.
When all players must be all things to themselves in order to survive in the game and cannot sustainably specialize, every new player is being forced to take the entire massive learning curve for this game on the nose within hours of spawning in for the first time. It's not viable (in MP) to simply spawn in and spend a few hours flying, getting used to how ships and our byzantine map system work; you'll end up shot down and back at 2 2 2 broke and inviable, forced to make a whole new character (kiss any emotional attachment this player had 'goodbye' at this point) to try again, still with very little clue as to what to do (certainly not start a shop, be a miner, or take up trading/exploration, because those are all broken except as chatroom RP conceits). Do this to most new players a few times and they are done for good.
This suggestion is about Starmade's overall MP player base. It's about the game's social meta (which is heavily derived from its economic meta).
It's about looking at the MP server list and seeing more than 100-150 players combined from all servers online during peak hours.
Currently the Starmade MP experience for completely new players must often feel a bit like "OK, this game is super-complex, and you have to learn a little about all of it before you can effectively do any of it... but at least once you kind of get the hang of it you
can't be a miner, trader/explorer, pirate, pirate-hunter, mercenary, merchant or industrialist so just found an "empire," spawn a station, HB it, and hunker down for the long campout. Someone will be along shortly either to troll you or insist that you follow them around looking at every cubic voxel of their decorative Star Trek/Wars ship replica. Welcome to Starmade Multiplayer!"
Money I have. Resources I have. These are gotten on any server in very short amounts of time -
by a veteran player - and there is nothing anywhere in this suggestion about making resources easier to get in general (in fact I'd readily support reduced mining bonuses). I've spent my resources all, for months, on social experiments, the results of which indicate that many times more first-time Starmade players stay longer and are more likely to remain in the game long-term when they can quickly and easily access useful facilities on their first spawn (not just a creepy, robotic stick-shop drifting in the middle of nowhere), safe docking, attractive surroundings, and a
reliable source of income from mining and/or trading.
This result could be achieved through automation and implementing a better spawn shop, but
why?
Why, when Schine has
already invested so many of their man-hours into coding player-based trade features and player-owned shops and clearly wants the galactic economies of servers to generally be player inclusive, not player exclusive?
There are players out there who would not only provide new players this access to facilities and work, but would enjoy doing it if it didn't mean a career of grinding just to prevent new players from being instantly overwhelmed and quitting. Insisting on retaining an incidentally broken economy is literally telling every potential new Starmade player who might want to play a specialist role in MP that this is not the game for them.
Want to play as a miner? No one can afford to buy your wares.
Want to play as a trader, and explore new systems seeking new shops and markets? NPC shops are all cleaned out of credits by computer dumping and Player shops are broken - don't bother.
Want to be a pirate? There's no one mining or trading for you to hunt other than a handful of veteran players in titanic "miners" that rival the firepower and durability of a super star destroyer.
Want to hunt pirates? Nope - no pirates to hunt.
What makes this a frakking tragedy is that
ALL the functionality for these specializations has already been implemented. Schine has already coded the support for specialized player roles, but the NPC shops (which were originally implemented to improve easy access to small amounts of materials to ease player startup) are currently breaking the economy and thereby breaking all potential for specialization and actually hurting player startup in most MP servers where said NPC shops are typically cleaned of credits by veteran computer dumping (an exploit which doesn't work well at player-run shops, BTW, since the computer sell prices can now be set 1/100th of their market values to prevent it).
Currency in the real world exists to liquefy value for easier exchanges. A currency that deters exchange by overtly sinking value has no purpose. Starmade currency is a dunsail, as is every game feature based on it, Even systems like jump inhibitors are damaged by this farce of an economy, since these are essentially pirate gear and piracy cannot exist without a functioning economy upon which to prey.
Without currency, without exchange, without markets, without the potential for specialization and interdependence, there is no foundation for social complexity in Starmade beyond the level of a loose collection of small private teams of non-casual players sharing a chatroom and occasionally occasionally engaging in ritualized combat or flower wars. I think it's a damn shame. Dozens of new players visit every major MP server each day, and 90% of them are simply overwhelmed and drop the game like it's hot. Some of the remainder struggle on for a few days or a week or two before giving up in frustration. This is not a foregone outcome if we invest even a fraction of our attention to the social and economic metas of Starmade MP.
Variable shop prices determined by stock levels and market values would be great, as would several of the other suggestions for fixing the economy. My suggestion requires no coding. It requires less than 5 total minutes of Schine's time, and until they decide to invest in more far-reaching changes to the market, it would go a long ways towards fixing the interim economic meta. If you want a working economy and agree that ending the NPC shop credit sink would improve the game, please support this suggestion for now, and suggest other improvements that require code-changes in their own suggestion threads
Many people are afraid of
any change - no matter how positive. Still... I've
yet to read what the downside of my suggestion could be in game terms. Fixing the economy would only help Starmade's social meta and this entire community. There is no imbalance, no damage, no loss.
Personally, I want to see Starmade grow. Most players here do. I also want to continue to explore the social meta and make suggestions for improvement based on my experiences. I know the Schine team wants to see value (preferably in the form of currency:D) for their work as well. Therefore I think that - somehow (whether by simply lowering ore/shard prices next update, or by re-pricing the entire finished goods side of the economy or completely re-working/eliminating NPC shops; I am not attached to means in this matter, only to ends) - fixing the economy to make player-run shops profitable and sustainable
without a subsidy grind so that shop owners can also enjoy their play time while continuing to engage in behavior that improves the game for an entire server (i.e. offering goods to the public and buying resources) instead of outright
punishing public service is a fantastic little idea that will improve gameplay for all and has great potential to improve total Starmade player numbers over time by improving the experience of new joins and offering a broader scope of potential careers to players.
This suggestion does not even relate to the topic of server-specific settings, as its scope includes every Starmade MP server that makes up the Starmade MP Multiverse. Just like the slew of suggestions about fixing vanilla armor values before that happened.