no artificial mechanic to control behavior ! action = consequence...
would need additional tracking of who/what is declaring war perhaps, or perhaps have AI 'war declared' not be quite same as player initiated (that might be useful as a feature on its own, AI defends, but does create war on its own...)
Its because of the problems with deeper mechanics (eg upkeep resources fuel etc etc) that i think faction points might be useful as they don't rely on core game/universe setup. .. what i imagine is a steer rather than a barrier, without restrictive barriers/numbers; ie it is still possible to to be a complete Dick (for example killing everyone encountered), but harder for an low skill/low strategy player to be that Dick, without developing some other aspects of the game at least...(and consequently creating a few more possible vulnerabilities for them)
Not sure about most of this, but I do like the idea of partial ownership; having players actually establish a presence in a system to gain benefits is nice.
However, how do you deal with station spam? Having a space station in each sector in a system should not be desirable. :P
Not sure about most of this, but I do like the idea of partial ownership; having players actually establish a presence in a system to gain benefits is nice.
However, how do you deal with station spam? Having a space station in each sector in a system should not be desirable. :P
Yes, but spamming vulnerable stations would be a viable tactic as well. Systems have A LOT of sectors in them, and maxing out your influence that way would be viable. If someone went and blew up 30 or 40 of the stations, who cares?
Yes, but spamming vulnerable stations would be a viable tactic as well. Systems have A LOT of sectors in them, and maxing out your influence that way would be viable. If someone went and blew up 30 or 40 of the stations, who cares?
That's equally silly. If I set up my homebase, I should not have to wait two days to build a mining outpost or a warp interdictor buoy.
[doublepost=1511031995,1511031827][/doublepost]Also you run into the problem of "godsdammit, a new recruit put down a random station for the lols, and now I can't place down this critical infrastructure for another two days!"
Yes, but spamming vulnerable stations would be a viable tactic as well. Systems have A LOT of sectors in them, and maxing out your influence that way would be viable. If someone went and blew up 30 or 40 of the stations, who cares?
Factions, as they currently function ingame, have a lot of problems - When you enter a new server, just set up a new (one-man) faction, make a Homebase somewhere (mostly a place to dock), claim the system, start mining there. Nothing more is needed to survive. The ease of owning an invulnerable station means there is widespread creation of one-man factions. This is a problem. This suggestion is aimed at fixing issues that the current faction system has. Namely, the homebase invulnerability topic, the one-man factions and (seemingly useless) faction points, system ownership issues, instigation to explore and fight.
There is no one man faction problem. The only problem are people who are against one man factions.
A one man faction gives me the freedom to ignore. Some call that Turteling.
People who are being ignored might get upset and then rally against one man factions.
A great portion of the StarMade players do not even want to play with other people in a faction.
That is called choice.
To them other people are the enemy or just something to ignore if you are a builder or pve player.
What does a faction give to a player?
One invulnerable Home Base and one system to claim with the default faction point setting. Only with more people in the faction can you maintain more then one claimed system. Given the size of the galaxy map the fact that one player can have this is no issue at all. You need a place to park when you sleep and you need a claimed system for the mining bonus. Most important of all is the info when someone enters your system when you own it. Combined with a greater scan range to find or hunt your enemies. It also limits your enemies scan range and helps against surprise attacks.
Some people argue that a servers faction list becomes to long. What a pitiful excuse. The list can be sorted by alphabet, allies or enemies. I have been admin on a few StarMade servers never did I find that the faction list is to long to be usable.
What about Alt factions you say? Well what about them. The server admin maintains the server. He or she sets all the rules. If and only if an admin had a problem with this then it is his job to cleanup the list. StarMade has many tools and great logging to help in this endeavor.
Stop telling people how they should play the game. There is no set way to play StarMade. You just enter a server and do what ever you want within the rules of that server. And everyone else on the server has the right to ignore you for whatever reason from within there perfectly pristine invulnerable Home Base.
I happen to be a very aggressive pvp player that will take everything from someone given the chance. But I am very okay with that fact that other players have at least one save place to call there own. It does not hinder my play style in any way.
Have a problem with this? Then set up your own server and disable the Home Base or change the way faction points work. Your server your rules.
ithi has good points. weve both played on servers with inverse fp and spamming claim stations is SUPER easy to do. almost all of this stuff can be "countered" with limitations but then you have an ever growing list of "you cant do thats" that creep into other areas of gameplay, just to fend off people working around the mechanic you may not have needed in the first place if you produced more natural means of saying "this is generally a bad idea"
Good discusion overall.
I would be intersted in hearing more about how the reverse FP system went.
I don't think 1 point factions are nessacerily a real issue, even just having players on a server is a win in my book.
And I think larger factions should simply have more options avalible to them (e.g more inate diplomatic options with npc factions)
I'd be a fan of stations having chamber effects, e.g militry sector (+ship speed, reduced jump cooldowns etc), mining sector (obvious) etc. I think ownership of systems could be more versitile as well. Maybe claiming an area of space takes time before all the system is consided your territory? Maybe the ammount of territory your station claims is related to it's mass? E.g small stations can't claim space from larger stations?
I kind of like to roll as my own faction even though I play with a large faction. I just like having my own space, my own ships, not fucking up other people's good aesthetics. Also, I like having my own resource pool and building whatever the hell I want where I want without hearing [AESTHETIC] nazis cry constantly. The big faction bases get so huge with so much docked shit on the 15+ member factions it can grind the game to a halt, and can choke a server whenever someone from that faction logs into their base.
Hmmm, would it be too cancerous if each faction member could have their own invulnerable station in a separate system and still remain as the same faction?
There is no one man faction problem. The only problem are people who are against one man factions.
A one man faction gives me the freedom to ignore. Some call that Turteling.
People who are being ignored might get upset and then rally against one man factions.
A great portion of the StarMade players do not even want to play with other people in a faction.
That is called choice.
To them other people are the enemy or just something to ignore if you are a builder or pve player.
What does a faction give to a player?
One invulnerable Home Base and one system to claim with the default faction point setting. Only with more people in the faction can you maintain more then one claimed system. Given the size of the galaxy map the fact that one player can have this is no issue at all. You need a place to park when you sleep and you need a claimed system for the mining bonus. Most important of all is the info when someone enters your system when you own it. Combined with a greater scan range to find or hunt your enemies. It also limits your enemies scan range and helps against surprise attacks.
Some people argue that a servers faction list becomes to long. What a pitiful excuse. The list can be sorted by alphabet, allies or enemies. I have been admin on a few StarMade servers never did I find that the faction list is to long to be usable.
What about Alt factions you say? Well what about them. The server admin maintains the server. He or she sets all the rules. If and only if an admin had a problem with this then it is his job to cleanup the list. StarMade has many tools and great logging to help in this endeavor.
Stop telling people how they should play the game. There is no set way to play StarMade. You just enter a server and do what ever you want within the rules of that server. And everyone else on the server has the right to ignore you for whatever reason from within there perfectly pristine invulnerable Home Base.
I happen to be a very aggressive pvp player that will take everything from someone given the chance. But I am very okay with that fact that other players have at least one save place to call there own. It does not hinder my play style in any way.
Have a problem with this? Then set up your own server and disable the Home Base or change the way faction points work. Your server your rules.
One man factions make zero sense gameplay wise (A single human being controlling an entire empire, economy etc etc) and this "right to ignore" BS you are promoting is killing player interaction in PvP servers.
If people want to ignore everyone and do nothing, then they can go player singleplayer or join a PvE server.
But for PvP servers, turtling NEEDS to go and better ways to kill turtling need to be made avaliable to server admins.
Solo factions need to be replaced with "solo content" and turtling for PvP servers need to be something that the admins can get rid off.
Also, to call yourself an agressive PvPer is laughable, I seem to remember you being one of the biggest cowards on Brierie when I was there with Vaygr and my alt faction.
One man factions make zero sense gameplay wise (A single human being controlling an entire empire, economy etc etc) and this "right to ignore" BS you are promoting is killing player interaction in PvP servers.
If people want to ignore everyone and do nothing, then they can go player singleplayer or join a PvE server.
But for PvP servers, turtling NEEDS to go and better ways to kill turtling need to be made avaliable to server admins.
Solo factions need to be replaced with "solo content" and turtling for PvP servers need to be something that the admins can get rid off.
Also, to call yourself an agressive PvPer is laughable, I seem to remember you being one of the biggest cowards on Brierie when I was there with Vaygr and my alt faction.
if the game ever gets more popular, im all for incentivizing larger factions and penalizing 1 man factions because i think itd be good for gameplay... but a "faction" isnt necessarily an empire or a government (in fact they almost never are), and could certainly be a 1 person entity, using objects to qualify as a group. (drones etc)
I wonder why people wanted to ignor you or Vaygr ?
Batavium (and others) choose to ignore some people, because 'playing' with them is no fun.
there is no challenge - i myself, just let them smash up the place a bit until they get bored and go away...the main tedium is all the chat and alerts as they do the same to others.
Its too boring to try and match-up to the somewhat-exploity ship that has just randomly blown up the neighboring planet, or all the unarmed drones, or other random anti-social/sociopathic behavior etc .
Eventually when they log off/give-up, i am sure Batavium and others can go out and enjoy the game just fine.
I wonder why people wanted to ignor you or Vaygr ?
Batavium (and others) choose to ignore some people, because 'playing' with them is no fun.
there is no challenge - i myself, just let them smash up the place a bit until they get bored and go away...the main tedium is all the chat and alerts as they do the same to others.
Its too boring to try and match-up to the uber-exploity ship that has just randomly blown up the neighboring planet, or all the unarmed drones etc .
Eventually when they log off/give-up, i am sure Batavium and others can go out and enjoy the game just fine.
no; you are right i suppose - not too exploity, just ugly and used in situations lacking fun (except for that pilot) - on you go then, what could possibly be problematic about that ... :/
no; you are right i suppose - not too exploity, just ugly and used in situations lacking fun (except for that pilot) - on you go then, what could possibly be problematic about that ... :/
personally i have no issue with this scenario at all. i dont think theres anything wrong with encountering problems, adversity, etc, in my games. i enjoy it. i can understand why some people think otherwise.
i see youve correlated ugly with problematic again. interesting how you do that all the time.
I like a lot of the ideas proposed here, but I'm not a fan of the whole faction points mechanic.
I especially like the idea of a base set of points to start and they decrease and increase while playing, but remain static while not playing along with the station remaining invulnerable.
My personal preference is to use credit and resource based controls over factions. It makes no sense having a mystical counter control the strength and value of a faction. It allows additional control and options through purchase and trading. It would generate a more dynamic economic system. If you wanted to, you could change the faction points to faction credit, but this would then introduce the need to banks, treasury, exchange rates and a whole bunch of other complicated economic mechanics. That people may very well like to use.
The invulnerability debate is something that could be controlled using the same mechanic that controls who owns a particular entity.
Just add a tick box next to the owner tick box for the player to chooses the entity to be invulnerable, limited to only 1. Or perhaps have a server control to change this limit. Then the player could have a home base no matter what faction they're in. Giving a player a home they can come back to no matter how long they have been offline.
Everything or anything else can be purchased using credit. I wouldn't have invulnerability as something to purchase, but you could maybe purchase HP or maybe a Faction HP or something. This would allow you to build stations that are kinda invulnerable until the purchased HP has dropped to nothing and then regular rules apply where you can then reduce the standard HP and destroy the station.
Reader of this thread, at least vote if nothing else :\ - I need to know whether this idea is worth spending time upon
Introduction:
Factions, as they currently function ingame, have a lot of problems - When you enter a new server, you just need to set up a new (one-man) faction, make a Homebase somewhere (mostly a place to dock), claim the system, start mining there. Nothing more is needed to survive. The ease of owning an invulnerable station means there is widespread creation of one-man factions. This is a problem (Citation needed). This suggestion is aimed at fixing issues that the current faction system has. Namely, the homebase invulnerability topic, the one-man factions and (seemingly useless) faction points, system ownership issues, instigation to explore and fight.
The conclusion (and idea): Factions have to be altered to instigate exploration and battles.
First, delete your current understanding of factions, homebases, system ownerships and faction points. All is about to be redefined -
Players can create a "Faction" from the menu. (Same as current).
Ships and Stations can be "owned" by placing a "Faction" block (same as current).
Faction ranks remain as they are currently. So does the Faction permission module.
On creation, the faction has a set number of "Faction Points" (say "x").
Fixed number of faction points are added for every player that joins the faction. (Actually, remove this to prevent spamming and alt accounting)
BUT, faction points deplete at a rate proportional to the time a player(s) (of the faction) is online. (Online time is already measure by the server) Yes, you read that correctly. Herin lies the beauty of the suggestion! Nothing happens if a player is not online - you can go for a vacation and not worry about your homebase getting invulnerable beacause of that. This also means that having inactive players will do nothing apart from the initial FP gain when they joined (which may be removed).
Faction Points are gained every time a player attacks enemy factions, attacks pirates or does a decent amount of mining. (Values will have to balanced here, see heading "Implementation")
A set number of Faction Points corresponds to one invulnerable station(say "y"). This means that if you have those many Faction Points, the Faction leader can set any one of the stations owned by the Faction as invulnerable. This will render it, and all docked entities invulnerable too. If a faction owns twice the amount of Faction Points, it can set two stations as invulnerable. (Ideally, it should be made very difficult to have the FPs required to keep more than one station invulnerable- I say difficult, not impossible. A very active faction with a decent amount of players should be able to have 2 (3, even) such stations). The stations themselves do not change Faction Points though. There will also be a need for a priority order menu here (not unlike the power priority). This will determine which station becomes vulnerable, in case the faction loses FP to sustain those many invulnerable stations.
System ownerships: No longer does one faction have 100% ownership of the system. Any faction can make any number of stations in any system and claim partial ownership. The ratio of stations owned in the system will determine the % ownership (Invulnerable and Vulnerable count the same here). For Eg, let’s say there are 4 stations in a system. 2 are owned by Faction A, 1 by Faction B and 1 by Faction C. The Galaxy Map will show ownership as 50%A, 25%B, 25%C.
Mining Bonuses: Higher the partial ownership in a system, higher the mining bonuses (And so, more the FP gained for mining, making the already strong Faction even stronger (unintended))
Keep x > y !!! -(See below for reason)
What this will do:
One man factions will no longer be a thing. A single player will not be able to sustain even one invulnerable homebase for long.This does *not* mean it will not be possible to create a faction to find a safe place to dock for the night! (See below)
System ownerships will be better balanced. No longer will one faction own a whole system with just their homebase now.
Faction wars will be instigated.
Exploration will be a thing - Factions will try to get away from the crowded central region and claim 100% ownership of a distant system (by using just one station).
Lot more stuff that I am unable to recollect now, or just too tired to jot down here.
It just occurred to me that this would *not* encourage very few super factions. More the players in a faction, FP would increase faster (more stuff being done) BUT even the FP depletion would increase as overall playtime would increase.This would mean there would be a sweet spot, where having 5 to 12 players would give max net increase in FP.
What I want to stress: You need to W O R K to keep your station(s) invulnerable. This is the ONLY WAY gameplay can be built. You don't just give players an option to have a (free) Homebase. It simply isn't. That kind of option will only lead to a (self catalyzed) collapse (The kind of issues StarMade has, for EG)
I assume you mean a safe place to dock for the night, eh?
This is why I said keep x greater than y. That is still going to be possible - create a new faction and make an invulnerable station and quickly logout. It will remain like that till the next time you login (whenever that may be). After some time of playing. your FP will decrease (to a value below "y"), forcing you to delete that faction. You can do this all the time. But it is obvious a good long term solution will be to settle with a big enough faction.
No. Creative servers and people who want to chill out a bit can set their FP depletion values to 0. That will make it work pretty much like the current system.
The implementation:
All of this is easier said than done. How will the game judge FP gains in battles? How will proxy factions and alt player accounts not be a thing?
Servers already measure online time. It will be a simple task to multiply that time by a constant (configurable) and get FP decrease.
Mining FP gains are pretty straightforward. One ore mined would mean a set FP increase.
Maintaining a factory on stations should also give FP gain. Again, this would be calculated similar to mining gains.
Attacks on Pirate stations and ships: The current game calls waves over waves of pirate ships in case of a conflict, depending upon the intensity of the battle. It would be a simple task to measure how many waves of ships have been called over. Scale FP gains exponentially with number of waves called over. This would also be an effective dissuading against fight and flight mechanics aimed just to increase FP.
Fights again enemy player factions: The system will find this difficult to judge. What I suggest is simple - Measure damage done to the enemy ships and stations. This is already calculated :P it would be a simple thing to read this damage value. Each amount of damage done gives a proportional FP increase. Simple. Also, take note I said DAMAGE. I mean damage to BLOCKS. This would automatically mean ships which don't lose shields throughout the battle, (which means 0 block damage to them) or those docked to an invulnerable station would register 0 damage done to them, warding off potential exploits too.
A note on alt accounts and factions.: Creation of alt accounts which players may make to join their factions will be useless apart from the (to be removed) initial FP gain. No activity means no FP creation. Proxy faction creation for FP mining will not be a thing. (See the above point)
The only real obstacle as I see it:
To me, this seems - simple, straight, to the point and it does its job well.
This seems like a well thought out idea but as it stands, I cannot support it as it disproportionately favors PvPers who group up in large numbers at the expense of anyone who is unwilling or unable to group up.
One-man factions are not "a problem" but rather a symptom of a much larger issue with StarMade multi-player. The real problem is and always has been that factions are broken. The rank system doesn't hold and one little screw up on your permisions will allow a dishonest player to bleed your resources dry, steal blueprints and ships and otherwise ruin your faction from within.
As such, this suggestion forces faction founders (solo or otherwise) to choose between two options.
1) Run the risk that your faction mates will steal, sabotage, be incompetent or otherwise, betray the faction.
While there is no shortage of well established multi-player factions, not everyone has trusted allies who can join their faction; therefor, not every experienced player is going to want to deal with having a bunch of un-proven rookies running around in their base doing who knows what. On the other hand, some players may not feel comfortable joining another unfamiliar faction; lest they get overly restricted or hung out to dry by their recruiters. Lastly, some people just want to call their own shots or simply operate better solo than with others around.
2) Get pushed off the server (probably through force) for failing to come up with enough quality teammates to maintain home base invulnerability.
It would be wise to consider what may happen when too many quality players quit when they can't find any good faction mates or simply opt out of having to extensively vet new players so they don't get screwed. You may end up with one giant server-wide faction with no enemies to fight because everyone else either quit or is too weak to offer a challenge.
I know this idea is an attempt to fix a long standing multi-player problem but it's basically telling everyone that you want O.M.F.s, gone game-wide, without ever addressing the issues that cause people to create O.M.F.s in the first place. Unless you're suggesting a server config setting that can be turned on or off, this is neither an effective nor reasonable way to handle the problem.
A true solution; fix factions (specifically the rank/permissions system) so that people are more inclined to trust each other and cooperate. Once factions work as intended, we should focus on adding incentives for players to explore,expand and fight rather than punish them for failure or refusal to do so. You know the deal; Flies, honey, vinegar and all that jazz...
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.
