Ships on Loan

    jayman38

    Precentor-Primus, pro-tempore
    Joined
    Jul 13, 2014
    Messages
    2,518
    Reaction score
    787
    • Purchased!
    • Thinking Positive
    • Legacy Citizen 4
    Summary:
    Starmade should probably have a way to "rent" or loan out a ship to any given player for a specific purpose. For example, for a mining tutorial, the neophyte player should receive a temporary ship that is not his to keep or modify, but only he can enter the core/pilot's seat.

    Enforce player behavior:
    The game should set several parameters on the ship at the time it spawns or is "entered" for piloting, including maximum time, maximum distance from a coordinate, hostility, mission-critical nav points in the nav computer, and minimum and maximum block counts. The ship should be build-mode blocked, so that it can be repaired or replaced (with the same rental rules and parameters), but not deconstructed, built up into a different ship, or otherwise modified from its core purpose.

    Behavior violation:
    If the ship violates parameters, it should explode immediately. E.g. If you try to shoot the tutorial NPC, a trade station, or some other friendly or neutral target; if you try to leave the immediate area (leaving the maximum distance from some point), take too long to do the mission (exceed maximum time), or some other in-game mis-behavior, the ship explodes out from under you. This explosion should probably not be harmful to any other entities (to avoid a griefer carefully timing his explosion next to a griefing target at just the right opportunity). It should also go away at the end of the mission, which should include the player flying back to the origin point of the mission.



    Player reset:
    The game should have a mission spawn point saved when the loaner is built/spawned/offered. Then when the ship explodes after violating the parameters of the mission, WHOOSH, the player finds themselves at this mission spawn point, or in a holding pattern, waiting for the mission spawn point to clear of obstruction. This temporary spawn point is an easy way to restart the mission if something goes sideways, and will generally reduce frustration in new players who aren't paying attention and get themselves blown up for violating the mission rules, get stuck, or simply want to start over.

    Reset failure:
    Problem: if a spawn point is blocked on purpose, this could cause the player to be stuck, so after some sort of timeout, they should simply spawn at the regular spawn point, the starter station, or their selected respawn point. If they want to retry the tutorial mission, or whatever mission it was, they'll just have to retrace their steps to get to the mission giver.



    Unpiloted rentals:
    Similarly, the game should be able to spawn un-pilot-able and un-build-able drones for target practice/teaching new players how to use weapons/generally populate a mission that simply needs more ships. These drones should have a timeout parameter, after which, they disappear or fade away. Also, they should go away at the end of their associated mission. (E.g. "This training mission is failed. Removing computer-generated opponents from the field...." or "Primary target disabled. The escort ships are bugging out....")
     

    Non

    Joined
    Nov 17, 2013
    Messages
    296
    Reaction score
    157
    Add blueprinting to the list of violations, to prevent highly specialized ship designs from being stolen. I like this idea, makes ship building a more directly profitable trade.
     

    Asvarduil

    Builder of Very Small Ships
    Joined
    Apr 17, 2015
    Messages
    272
    Reaction score
    133
    • Community Content - Bronze 1
    • Purchased!
    Add blueprinting to the list of violations, to prevent highly specialized ship designs from being stolen. I like this idea, makes ship building a more directly profitable trade.
    I totally disagree, on the grounds that if you like a ship, why shouldn't you be motivated to go farm the materials to build another one?

    Right now, farming materials is one of the major things you can actually do in this game. Giving players decent "Pre-made" ship options is actually not a bad idea at all, and is of great value to newcomers who are unfamiliar with game systems.

    There's a lot of merit in this idea...
     
    Joined
    Feb 27, 2014
    Messages
    1,074
    Reaction score
    502
    • Purchased!
    • Legacy Citizen 4
    • Top Forum Contributor
    More so why not just make various blueprints be purchaseable at various NPC stations:? That way if a player likes the ship, they can save up and purchase the design for themselves :3

    Back to the OP, really solid idea, and sounds like it could be of a lot of use to server admins as well when making events.

    You can also have things like hiring a shuttle at a npc station with a set loan time, with your deposit payed off if you drop it off at another npc staion for example.
     

    Non

    Joined
    Nov 17, 2013
    Messages
    296
    Reaction score
    157
    I totally disagree, on the grounds that if you like a ship, why shouldn't you be motivated to go farm the materials to build another one?

    Right now, farming materials is one of the major things you can actually do in this game. Giving players decent "Pre-made" ship options is actually not a bad idea at all, and is of great value to newcomers who are unfamiliar with game systems.

    There's a lot of merit in this idea...
    I get what you are saying, but as a pvp builder, if I loan my best ships out, and they get blueprinted, I'm out of business.
     

    Calhoun

    Part-time God
    Joined
    May 26, 2015
    Messages
    872
    Reaction score
    237
    • Purchased!
    • Legacy Citizen 3
    • Thinking Positive
    This is an awful idea, because it would be impossible to regulate.
     
    Joined
    Oct 12, 2015
    Messages
    321
    Reaction score
    257
    • Legacy Citizen 4
    • Community Content - Bronze 2
    • Purchased!
    Being able to copyright and license blueprints would be cool, but there would need to be some heavy duty changes to fundamental aspects of the game to make that viable. I don't see it becoming a reality given the developer's current priorities.
     

    Asvarduil

    Builder of Very Small Ships
    Joined
    Apr 17, 2015
    Messages
    272
    Reaction score
    133
    • Community Content - Bronze 1
    • Purchased!
    I get what you are saying, but as a pvp builder, if I loan my best ships out, and they get blueprinted, I'm out of business.
    This might sound weird...but I agree with your disagreement of me; it came about due to poor communication. I was thinking of a totally different application for this idea. I obviously don't think that player ships should be eligible to a loaner program, except by a player opting a particular ship into the feature (and, even then, I'm not sure about that being a good idea. Maybe it should just be a server owner's perogative what ships can be loaned.)

    The way I read the idea was thus: A server owner can set up some ships for loaning - they can be default faction ships, or special things - it doesn't really matter. In this way, even if a player has everything blasted out from under them, they have a means by which to stage a comeback. There is a limiting factor to this - you can't just 'borrow' ships endlessly, something has to stop you, whether it's a hard duration on the /borrow_ship command, or something like the Personal Value system I'm implementing in my server wrapper, where you're in essence buying a starship through non-standard means. Heck, borrowing a starship could trigger a quest, where you have to turn in certain materials, otherwise 'loan sharks' are spawned that try to shoot you down.

    Obviously, having a PvP builder have their own work used against them is a terrible idea - why build PvP ships in that case?
     
    Last edited: