Doing a little survey here to help with station design...
Everyone needs an invulnerable station (currently). Typically no more than 2-3 players are willing to share a single station though. For some of us it's about size (either not enough, or so much that it lags some people), lack of features, decor/style, lack of docking or manufacturing capacity. For others of us it's simply that they can't trust a station owner not to screw up and lose the station along with our own assets or deliberately seize our assets.
What are the top 3 reasons why you have trouble sharing a station owned by someone else?
If these could be addressed, would you be more inclined to live & work on a station run by someone else?
1. Control freakery: DONT TOUCH ANYTHING AND PUT THE SHOCK COLLAR ON!!!
2. Stupid build style: like locating the resource drop on the opposite end of the station to the crafting stations.
3. Attention hound: Being constantly asked to come see this, test this out, come over here, meet me here to the point where you have no time to do anything that you want.
I don't mind sharing, in fact I like to have separation of duties where one player manages the homebase, another player concentrates on mining, another on defense, etc. Only problem is my friends don't play often so I'm always in a one-man faction.
I don't mind sharing, in fact I like to have separation of duties where one player manages the homebase, another player concentrates on mining, another on defense, etc. Only problem is my friends don't play often so I'm always in a one-man faction.
1. I don't want to be a tourist on someone else's station.
2. I have absolutely zero interest in being an underling someone can lord over. Nor am I interested in being the guy on top.
3. I have no use for most people's overindulgence in greebles and useless decorations, that do nothing but slow down my framerate.
4. I have no desire to spend hours and hours mining for materials only to deposit them in some public bank for others to use.
5. I have little patience for having to constantly debug or otherwise "come see" other people's creations. I am doing my own thing.
6. I want to be able to work on my own creations. Sometimes this might mean having two or three partially constructed items parked somewhere or even free floating. Working in and around someone else's station would prove to be far more of an inconvenience. And let's not mention weapon testing...
7. Most people's stations are complete jokes with respect to their ability to do damage to a griefer drone fleet or a griefer newbie cube titan. My own station is secure.
8. Pursuant to the previous, I have an AI defense fleet nearby. It drops my framerate from over 100, to ~55, and that's with the fleet in the next sector over. Doing something similar in a station frequented by other players who also wish to do their thing is out of the question.
9. Fitting with all the above, I know nothing about how to manage faction permissions and have zero incentive to learn.
There are probably more reasons I play solo, but those are the ones that sprang forth as immediately obvious to me.
1. I don't want to be a tourist on someone else's station.
2. I have absolutely zero interest in being an underling someone can lord over. Nor am I interested in being the guy on top.
3. I have no use for most people's overindulgence in greebles and useless decorations, that do nothing but slow down my framerate.
4. I have no desire to spend hours and hours mining for materials only to deposit them in some public bank for others to use.
5. I have little patience for having to constantly debug or otherwise "come see" other people's creations. I am doing my own thing.
6. I want to be able to work on my own creations. Sometimes this might mean having two or three partially constructed items parked somewhere or even free floating. Working in and around someone else's station would prove to be far more of an inconvenience. And let's not mention weapon testing...
7. Most people's stations are complete jokes with respect to their ability to do damage to a griefer drone fleet or a griefer newbie cube titan. My own station is secure.
This pretty much encapsulates my thoughts on the OP's questions.
I have no trouble with people visiting my station. I have public docks, and a public area where people can stay, even public access to cargo, a (soon to be) factory floor, and a shop. But these are things that I alone have ultimate authority over, and generally people can't mess with my stuff, nor can they go anywhere I don't want them too.
I'm perfectly happy to share my designs, but my station is my kingdom, and you can only have it if you can take it from my cold, dead hands. :p
On server resets. Odds are iv already set up a base, and working on spawning everything in. taking that down and moving to share a base with someone else is a lot of work.. i then have to trust the founder is not going to blow the rail docks to my cargo ship. that the factory system is set up to be individualized. and then the framerate drop of everyones ships... im also not happy that faction members locations can be found, so cant really chill at a back up void station much.
I typically play with a group of friends when I'm on a public server. Sometimes we join up in a faction, other times we want to do our own thing. That, pretty much sums up station sharing, too. When we share a station, we look at what aspects of building we're good at, and focus on adding it to our station. One guy likes to design the station's overall appearance, another likes to focus on the resource management, I'm usually the logic guy who automates the crafting. Where there is cross over, we try to make sure we design to accommodate each other's needs. There comes a time when we want have our own vision of how things should work and look, however, and that's when we splinter off to do that.
This pairs well with other forum threads I've seen lately, too. When we are working as a group, we may all put our input into the home base, but it provides incentive for us to grow our faction so that we can build new bases. These new bases are often done by one faction member who wants to do his own build but prefers the company of the others.
As being a Station Owner I can say the problems I have had are
1. People are always taking resources and never refilling the stockpile, or they just take all the Grey Hull (Or whatever) for their build project and then don't put it back before they leave.
2. If people try and help you build something they will have a different style and it can clash with your style and wind up making the thing look ugly.
3. I just don't like sharing xD but I also don't like playing alone
Doing a little survey here to help with station design...
Everyone needs an invulnerable station (currently). Typically no more than 2-3 players are willing to share a single station though. For some of us it's about size (either not enough, or so much that it lags some people), lack of features, decor/style, lack of docking or manufacturing capacity. For others of us it's simply that they can't trust a station owner not to screw up and lose the station along with our own assets or deliberately seize our assets.
What are the top 3 reasons why you have trouble sharing a station owned by someone else?
If these could be addressed, would you be more inclined to live & work on a station run by someone else?
As someone who has himself placed over 30 stations and the leader of a faction with over 300 bases currently maintained, I can say that there are factors which vary depending greatly on the server facilities, defensive facilities, officers in charge, time players can afford to play etc. etc.
Most OOB Homebases have cut off docked containers separately for Councillors, separately from that for Officers and separately from that for all other ranks. I also have a personal storage on the greater storage where my share goes in. For some scale, on a server with default settings, each of mass storages would be at least 20mill volume capacity, the 'whole faction available' storage would be at least 50million volume capacity and in both cases, they would be kept at minimum 50% full at all times.
Councillors are very trusted members so there is no risk there between councillors. Most councillors and officers are experienced enough in the game to usually get their own resources and or small outposts, which means that the storages for councillors and officer do not require as regular 're-filling'.
Construction of facilities on OOB outposts is allowed for Veterans and higher in rank, whilst in most cases construction of facilities on OOB homebases is allowed for officers and higher in rank, due to a risk-loss calculation with homebases calculated to be significantly more at risk of a spy damaging the faction by destroying/removing something than if the same happened on an outpost.
Most OOB outposts are managed by officers, councillors or governors. In all of these cases, these people are encouraged to set the facilities to personal access, which yet again decreases chance of spies within faction or disruptive players causing damage.
As the OOB has a large variety of players with different building styles, in general it is encouraged for players to build something if they believe the base lacks facilities. Note: All bases before release are prepared with quarters to house over a hundred member with each member having his/her own room (s), storages, offices, docking areas (or in some cases 'warehouses').
A questionnaire from September (so 1 month old, but this isn't done often ~once every 4 month basis) which analysed satisfaction with faction by questioning 40 odd members showed that a majority liked to have readily accessible storages where they could dump resources into and to have the storages then sort these into containers. There were multiple replies in line with the fact that there being no restriction on what you can take from within the storage (as long as you leave a bit of each individual resource left and do deposit in your rank-related storage now and then) was actually a positive factor, which led to greater trust between members and higher satisfaction with life within faction.
Note: Our faction is not militaristic, which, if it were the case, would undoubtedly reflect greatly on satisfaction with aspects of faction life.
I noticed you said 'you' in bold and underlined. If you wish to be petty and mention that I did not speak for myself....I live & work on stations run by combination of myself and someone else as well as some totally managed by others across multiple servers every day and have done so for an extensive period of time.
I don't want to be a tourist on someone else's station.
2. I have absolutely zero interest in being an underling someone can lord over. Nor am I interested in being the guy on top.
3. I have no use for most people's overindulgence in greebles and useless decorations, that do nothing but slow down my framerate.
4. I have no desire to spend hours and hours mining for materials only to deposit them in some public bank for others to use.
5. I have little patience for having to constantly debug or otherwise "come see" other people's creations. I am doing my own thing.
6. I want to be able to work on my own creations. Sometimes this might mean having two or three partially constructed items parked somewhere or even free floating. Working in and around someone else's station would prove to be far more of an inconvenience. And let's not mention weapon testing...
7. Most people's stations are complete jokes with respect to their ability to do damage to a griefer drone fleet or a griefer newbie cube titan. My own station is secure.
8. Pursuant to the previous, I have an AI defense fleet nearby. It drops my framerate from over 100, to ~55, and that's with the fleet in the next sector over. Doing something similar in a station frequented by other players who also wish to do their thing is out of the question.
9. Fitting with all the above, I know nothing about how to manage faction permissions and have zero incentive to learn.
There are probably more reasons I play solo, but those are the ones that sprang forth as immediately obvious to me.
I am answering this reply with a reply of my own. As a representative (the leader) of a relatively large starmade faction, and someone who has had a lot of experience of dealing with other factions I hope these 'answers' to your posts would serve to enlighten Panpiper or anyone else who would also be skeptical about sharing permissions (which is of course reasonable). If I have somehow caused offense, please do say and I will seek to present information in a way as to not cause offense.
1) Many of our members, vassals and allies are pleasantly pleased by our practice training areas, cities, restaurants, bars, barracks, quarters and many other facilities. As 'playstyle' within our faction is one of casual gaming without fixed activity, people know they can always come on and see a nice base built by a community they are proud to be part of.
2) This is a very subjective factor, so not much I can say about that. Most factions are not democratic, however what sounds to me would suit you would be something along the lines of Trinova Technologies, where there is pseudo-democratic, quasi-anarchical system of rule, with members-representatives-leaders being very interdependent.
3) Taking example of a larger faction who can afford to do this: If there are multiple outposts you can go to of all sizes and many of completely different designs, you can be subject to less decoration and more practicality without too much lag from 'greebles and useless decorations'.
4) Not all players are self-serving. Often you might have mined and decide you do not need all your materials. Many factions such as ours encourage players to keep whatever they have mined/raided/received through trade and to only deposit those materials into faction storages which they think they do not need in the short term or have leftover.
5) This may sound by now like an advertisement of our faction, but I know we are not the only faction by far where your independence in construction, activity etc., is not discouraged...but is encouraged! Our faction for example constantly provides subsidies for individuals outposts and helps people who wish to do so to set up their own stations wherever they wish to do on the server. To be more relevant to the thread in question, would you not be willing to share even with 1 other member your station? It is encouraged to work in pairs or to at least share a base so that if one is away other can still 'tidy up' or keep things in check, whilst it also prevents over-crowding in outposts.
6) See 5.
7) So make your own outpost to share with others so they can share in the benefit. OR help others to make their stations 'secure' so then in future you would not have to worry about going to their stations and living/building/working there.
8) This is assuming everyone has same computer and it is true if each member keeps their own fleet nearby this would be a problem. On average however in larger factions, especially non militaristic ones, less than every 10th member would keep a personal fleet of more than 2 ships. There is simply no need. This means that even if you did keep an AI fleet of 80 Frigates with 50 turrets on each and your frame rate dropped from say 110 to 55, it might drop to 52 with the extra 2 ships, but would probably not be affected
9) This is why, if you are part of bigger organisation, someone else does it. Officers set up permissions in an easy to understand format. If a player can read the relevant display modules they don't need to do anything themselves other than drop items or take items.
Never really had problems sharing myself, although I guess I am guilty of just holding onto stuff when I log off instead of putting it in storage. I am horrible I know.
As direct answers, the biggest concerns I have are:
Somebody I don't know well joining and then running off with some of our stuff
We can all have our own independent home bases and become allies, we don't HAVE to share.
Faction members are rarely online at the same time anyway, so there's often little point.
On servers I've played, my faction members were people I knew elsewhere and trusted, and we made important decisions usually as a group (even when that meant yelling the founding member into submission.) We did share resources, and rarely had serious shortages that couldn't be corrected by finding some more, and as far as I'm aware we all participated in mining and trading for goods.
The worst issues we had were with the founding member setting their ship for personal use only and then I went and deleted the rail it was docked to, he didnt log on for a couple weeks or something, it was just floating in a cube. And our original base being on a planet, on a server where the admins would delete your ship if something fell into the gravity well and touched the planet. (It was an awesome planet, and actually I really liked it, but one little accident and somebody's pride and joy gets deleted without compensation and possibly our entire faction forcibly evicted by the admins for simply building on a planet)
The station was very basic, because we were really quite lazy, halls were basically just square tubes, and it had a couple revisions to expand outwards and provide more better docking. There were no personal quarters, and for the longest time there werent even doors on the halls
Sharing wasn't a big problem, but even though we shared that one home base we basically worked independently on our projects, or on basic facilities for the station, and used those facilities when we needed to.
Before that, when we had oreo planets, I found an ice world that was perfectly flat and turned it into my home base by digging into it. Although it was technically my faction and my base, and there was only one other guy in the faction who was rarely around at the same time, it did have a few public quarters, insofar as the game made possible at the time, and I got quite a few visits. I only ever walled off like one section for administrative use, there werent public factories or docks because you couldnt make those back then, but I tried to make one by putting a neutral station inside the planet.
Had one fellow that decided to make mischief and ended up with all my turrets firing at him, running around on the surface and wedging a ship into one of my hallways. That was frustrating, but hilarious overall. He lost his ship in the end. IIRC he shot at one of my unshielded bits of ship lying around and war was automatically declared.
Oh and this one time in my early Starmade days This guy got me build a warship for him, it was the first real battle capable vessel I had ever built the guy did absolutely nothing to help me build the thing and when I finished it he tried to walk off with it, So I hoped in my totally awesome Stealth ship and blew a hole in the thing needless to say that ship was not as battle ready as I thought it was lol
Currently i want to expand my faction to about 20 players.
1. trust, need every player to go mining, not join the faction and make a giant ship out of other players resources so they have none.
2. security, cant easily protect players from others that wish to go joyriding in others ships or take resources that they havent contributed to. another issue is splitting factories up so ranks recruit/member/officer feel safe from stealing. (currently can only protect officer as you just dont put permission blocks on their stuff)
3. i think others dont want to join as they have already started there 1man faction and like the ability to do there own thing without worrying about stealing. they usually are open to alliance as if it ment something.
I'm a big fan of what is called "advanced city planning". I tend to follow a specific pattern when building a base and I find that there aren't many players with a build style that is compatible or complimentary to my own. As nice looking and complex as other builders' creations may be, our stuff usually doesn't match in appearance or function. As such, I'd rather retain total control of the physical layout of a station so that I can squeeze as much efficiency out of it as I can and still make it look good.
As much of a control freak as I may be with regard to my bases, I tend to build under the assumption that there will be friendlies operating in the area. Knowing this, I always provide accommodations for visitors; plenty of docking space and public facilities; including hospitals, factories, warp gates and respawns. While I don't allow modification of the base itself, I may take requests, with regard to structures that my visitors may want to see built.
In short; while I don't share the capability to build my base. I do share what I build.
I truly relish the opportunity to co-build with a creative builder. I find it much easier to do in creative mode because it avoids all the 'sharing' resources issues. Usually I am interested in projects on a case by case basis. It is rare to have to have total equality on a build; one or the other party will generally be the team-leader and will want veto-rights. I am happy to work for someone as long as I respect their skills but this is rare.
I am not looking for a long-term relationship where I have to like everything they do and for reasons that others have mentioned co-habitation may not be desirable. The main reason I like to operate as a faction-of-one is that I have total creative control and, like most, I'm loath to give it up. Trust is the other issue. It takes time to develop.
This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
