Incentives to Expansion (Anti-Turtling)

[AtraUnam]

When was the last time any of you actually saw a titan on a server? or are you just repeating the 2 year old rhetoric?

 

[Panpiper]

When was the last time any of you actually saw a titan on a server? or are you just repeating the 2 year old rhetoric?

A ten million block newbie brick doom cube showed up at my homebase just the other day and sat there for five minutes disgorging swarmers and occasionally four, I am sure quite powerful missiles. (He "rulz" because he has figured out that piling ten to twenty five million blocks together is the way to 'win' the game and the rest of us "newbs" are idiots as he loves to boast.) He actually destroyed something I was working on. (Just experimenting with a power structure and had it undocked so I could see it's stats independent of the station.)

Then of course there is the standard quandry of defining a titan. I am right now working on a new miner. It is designed to crack planets, which requires a major weapon, and has an enormous, maximum intensity salvage array and can store an ungodly amount of cargo. It also has no less than 100 turrets, as I live in a hostile universe complete with said griefers who fly newbie brick doom cubes. When kitted out, it will likely mass closer to 500K than it's current half empty hull at 200K. It is built with all the tricks, but is still 'far' from what I would consider a titan. It will have far too much mass devoted to quality of life for me the player as I mine, such as adequate thrust for such a beast (much of which will be put to turn rate) and a great jump recharge speed, two luxuries no actual combat titan would ever waste the space for.

Is this a titan? It is certainly on the titanic side.

And if anyone has any advice on what to do with those god awful engines, I would love to hear it. Clearly I have used too many light rods behind the ice. (I am good with systems, not so good with the artistry.)

 

[Edymnion]

When was the last time any of you actually saw a titan on a server? or are you just repeating the 2 year old rhetoric?

I've built 2 on servers before, and I'm building a third one in single player that I will be importing and blueprint filling on my current server when it is done. All three being at least a kilometer long.

Last server I was on, my home base included a shipyard that was 1,000m x 600m x 400m for the express purpose of using it to create and house said titans.

 

[kurosawa]

The games in alpha stage, i am responsible for keeping my server running and populated. a hard limit and server rules keeps the server online and stops those players from trying to ruin it for others.

The numbers above were only an idea, not set in stone.

There is no need for hard rules, this 5 simple guide lines is all that is needed.

1. Do not build space stations within x sector of the spawn location
2. No docking ships on planets, please dock them in space
3. Mining planets creates server lag, please blow them up before mining
4. Be reasonable and use common sense when building things, try not to cause server lag
5. Objects that cause server lag will be removed after 3 warnings

this allows people to do what ever they want, and has a loop hole to remove any offending stuff
[doublepost=1479233468,1479233398][/doublepost]when is something a newbie brick ?

just another relative term based on the observers ideas or ?

 

[JinM]

My history teacher once said: If the smallest group within a society doesn't work, the society as a whole doesn't work, and reffered to problems between husband and wifes that arise if they allways have to work but the school wants them to carry their kids over long trips to the school 50km away because the local one got closed and no busses drive, and also reffered between broken relationships where the husband only dominates the woman and they allways fight.

And now as refference to Starmade: Where are the smallest groups of ships working together in Starmade? You don't need any bigger ships than 100k blocks if there are not enough people on a server to use the small ships. I never see fights where you have 4 fighters and one flagship 5 or 10 times the fighters size on each battling fleet. Nope, the battles are allways equally sized ships and the biggest possible size. And that is, because no one gets an agreement for how fights can look like, and people are not playing on servers, because the gameplay on servers is totally lame. If it were interesting you had more players on the Starmade servers.

So you can try to excuse and defend the existing pvp standards on servers as much as you like. We don't have enough players and that's enough proof to tell that it doesn't work the way it is now.

 

[Panpiper]

when is something a newbie brick ?

just another relative term based on the observers ideas or ?

When something resembles more a shoe box than a ship, it's a newbie brick. When any effort made to give it the slightest shred of non-rectangle shape is unwedged grey armor, it's a newbie brick. When such a ship's weapon systems appear to be utterly uninspired other than pile on more bricks, it's a newbie brick. When such a someone thinks they've mastered the game because they've discerned that the key to winning the game is to break the server with ships that measure in kilometers, that theirs is the penultimate mastery of play, they are a noob, and anything they build, by definition, a newbie brick.
[doublepost=1479234800,1479234156][/doublepost]

My history teacher once said: If the smallest group within a society doesn't work, the society as a whole doesn't work...

Your history teacher was wrong. Imagine that possibility.

You are looking at a game that is 'Not Finished"! They have spent years getting the fundamentals of ship building and combat working to the point it is. They needed to do that before introducing other things. They needed ship building and fighting 'before' they gave us reasons to build ships and fight. Just imagine how insane it would be to give us a game that required ship building and combat, but in which you could not effectively build ships or fight. They are only now, with the impending faction update, just starting to flesh out the part of the game that will start to give us the reasons of 'why' we build and 'why' we fight. IT IS NOT IN THE GAME YET!

The developers are 100% aware of what they need to do to make this an absolutely fantastic game, and what they are building WILL address all the problems. But they cannot wave a magic wand and cause five more years of development time to appear in an instant because someone noticed that their unfinished alpha test game is missing stuff.

 

[MacThule]

Should our strategy really be "force every servad to police their server constantly for violations of (sometimes counter-intuitive) rules" rather than to build safeguards into the game itself?

In a game where there are basically ships, stations, planets and roids, it's counter-intuitive that one of those categories should be avoided at all costs except when mining which must be done in a very specific, counter-intuitive way (destroying something you want to harvest for resources is NOT intuitive).

Not basing near spawn/the core is also not an intuitive assumption.

Saying that all servers need rules to prevent the problems seems a recipe to discourage people from wanting to admin servers since the job basically entails daily repitious text-splaining of all these weird rules to every new player that shows up and reads them but has a million questions or doesn't read the posting language well enough. Then actually policing the server for accidental and deliberate violations is a time consuming, un-fun chore to saddle sysads with when they are actually unpaid, uncompensated, and paying out of pocket for hosting servers to subsidize alpha play for the dev team.

The core game (vanilla release) must work without every servad needing to jump through a bunch of pointless hoops and perform extensive, daily chores in order to compensate for a game engine that fails to prevent players from far too many game-breaking activities.

Imagine if you WoW or Diablo had hundreds of quests and locations you just had to know to avoid or risk crashing the server for everyone on it unless someone 1-on-1 explains it all to you. Imagine if putting too many things in your inventory caused hideous lag. Such games would be unplayable. Our servads already work their asses off to make their servers playable, and again they are paying out of pocket, not because they want to buy a giant laundry list of chores and police duties, not because they stand to profit financially in any way.

If the game is to succeed, the strategy cannot be "just fix it in server settings / have admins do stuff." Eventually the core game must prevent game-breaking activities like building too large and objects you shouldn't be around (i.e. planets).



Personally, I object to style discrimination of blaming problems on how ships are designed (i.e. noob cubes, doom cubes, doom bricks, etc). What the ship looks like is not what breaks the game - it's the size/mass and number of attached entities plus linkages, rails, logic, etc. Some players just want to play and fight, and they should NOT be attacked for that any more than should players who just want to design and build and not fight. We don't force designers to fight, we shouldn't force fighters to design (or failing that treat them like pariahs). Not only is visual style irrelevant to server load, trying to systematically ban players for bad style opens the door to all kinds of drama and witch-hunting bullshit on MP servers. I've already seen it several times. I once subdued a larger ship I encountered while hunting in a small, rod-shaped corvette with nacelle engines, 1/2 hull, a cockpit and semi-exposed weapons - it looked like crap because I'm not a designer, but it wasn't a wad of blocks - only to have my victim start screaming bloody murder to the servads about me being in a brick and not playing fair and I should be banned as a troll, etc. I know the ship I was flying is not what people mean by brick/cube, BUT..... once you say that style is officially a fair play issue, you've opened the door for anyone to cry foul against any opponent based on nothing but complaining that their ship looks bad.

Appearance does not break the game, permitting players to overload servers does - regardless of how good or bad they look as they do it.

 

[Shaker]

this 5 simple guide lines

We have these rules, it doesnt stop anyone from trying to break the server. even block hard limits dont stop anyone from going over them(blueprint past it).

Panpiper sounds like you need some very large ion turrets, 100 small turrets just start to go into the laggy section of the game, we had a nighogger battleship on our server with 150 turrets... you dont wanna see it in combat or lose a combat, which is far worse...

 

[Lukwan]

To no one in particular: (...I have a nose for more Carrot...got lots of stick already thx.)

The discussions on this board often go into bashing unpopular ideas and opinions of minorities. I mean who in the world is willed to participate in discussions when the majority finds it good to bash minorities instead of just accepting another view.

This forum is here to help the developers find out what are popular ideas and what are not. The people making the decisions need to know what the majority of players think so they can make the game appeal to the maximum number of players. This may seem unfair if you hold an opinion in the minority, oh well, c'est la vie. [Proper criticism should directed at the ideas not the individual who proposes those ideas.] If the debate does not result in some form of consensus, or majority view then it would not be useful for guiding development.
[doublepost=1479243012,1479242319][/doublepost]

Some players just want to play and fight, and they should NOT be attacked for that any more than should players who just want to design and build and not fight. We don't force designers to fight, we shouldn't force fighters to design (or failing that treat them like pariahs).

I agree with you in principal on most of your points. I have a perspective that I think is valid regarding build aesthetics. This relates to role-play.
A server that is focused on combat & faction wars should tolerate a very minimal design aesthetic for the hard-core style of the server. On the other hand if a server is advertised as a role play server and wants to specify a theme that is their prerogative. They may want to run a Star Trek universe for example and ask players to design & import ships accordingly. I don't think it is unreasonable to ask your players to honor the spirit of the server. Sometimes the context makes a difference.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(I also have a carrot for a nose.)

 

[Panpiper]

Panpiper sounds like you need some very large ion turrets, 100 small turrets just start to go into the laggy section of the game, we had a nighogger battleship on our server with 150 turrets... you dont wanna see it in combat or lose a combat, which is far worse...

I wouldn't call the 24 main offensive turrets on this thing 'small'. Technically their blueprint names refer to them as 'medium'. If they were bigger in fact, they would occlude each other's firing arcs. As it is, they can 'all' bear on a target to it's fore, and if they uncork, will together hit with an alpha strike of 120 million damage. The 56 tiny turrets are obviously point defense turrets. I consider this to be a barely adequate quantity of point defense. The inbetween turrets (20 of them) are 'dakka' turrets, which I would classify as small. However each of them puts out 20K damage per second in rapid cannon/cannon/punch fire, along with 150 modules of cannon/cannon/stop. They are there for shooting down drones and torpedoes.

 

[JinM]

Can you please understand guys: If someone wants to play this game he should be able to do pvp after one to five hours of gameplay. But on every bloddy server there are ships bigger than 200k the daily bread. Do you know how long I need to build a ship of 1k mass with enough details after 30 hours of gameplay? I need 4 to 10 hours. I am talking about a cool ship, with interiour and a unique hull design. Now even if some better man than me only needs 2 hours to design a 1k sized ship - how long would he need to do this into the 100k mass size? Lets say 20 hours.

And the point I am trying to make: with a limit of 100k mass you allready have an incredibly big ammount of creative possibilities in design and tactics. This size limit is enough to do pvp. This whole thread is not dedicated to the creative builders. This thread is dedicated to the guys who want to play rp and pvp. Keep that in mind when you defend any bigger size limit.

I like seeing big ships, but not for pvp. I admire your big buildings, dedication and work you put into them. But here we need to talk about what we can do to improve the pvp with the tools we have right now. Not in one year or six months. We want more players now. And we could also think flexible and not bind ourself to the maximum possible size of ships (actually over 500k mass and bigger) given by the server speed.

Your history teacher was wrong. Imagine that possibility.

Call me weak or beanpicking, but I see where this leads and its not based on mutual understanding. I dont enjoy talking like that.

I see that you disagree with me, but the reasons are totally different from what I told and I don't understand how it is important for the arguments I made to even adress the history teachers opinion. I try to repeat myself and hope you adress whole argument next time, and not the part it's easiest to pick on. Until I am not understood I don't try to reply to your arguments.

The story about him was an introducing example. And my argument - what I hope gets read from someone here - was:
There are no working relationships between small ships in fights, because the actual server pvp (not how it could be - how it is right now on every server played on) is laid out to ignore small ships in favour of turtling, until you have a big enough ship to come out of your shell. There are just no fights between small ships on any servers out there, and so there aren't any working battle mechanics between fighters - because they are not used. I mean if small ships would work, they would be used in fights. And until they are not usefull in the pvp of servers the pvp is simple broken I say. And also to adress the turtling my suggestion is to lower the size to 100k so everyone comes out of his shell earlier.

Imho I would even use 50k and 100k should be earned with some special game rule...Remember: This limit is stated, because there are not enough people playing pvp. And the limit can ofc be bigger for servers who want big ship pvp. Sadly you can't set the ship size limit for different sectors, so you could have a battle zone with scaled difficulty of ship sizes.

Also keep again in mind: You need at least 10 hours to design a 100k mass ship. If you want a bigger audience playing this game, you need to allow pvp for people with small ships who only can spend 5 to 10 hours a week playing a game and want to have pvp non the less. I think the most people writing here have spent very long in this game and are dedicated players, but we are not the people. We are one part of the audience, but we also need to think about the big majority and their ability to have pvp withing 5 to 10 hours of gameplay.

 

[Drakkart]

i would like to point out that some of the topics scratched in this thread actually might totally change as soon as other aspects of the game change.
For example do i not know a single person which actually loves the crafting system. Now a lot of people complain about people just sticking to their one invunerable homebase while they wish for more action and hate such behaviour.
Maybe that would totally change as soon as we get something intuitive as crafting system that actually also is rewarding.
Other changes like specialised stations and a possible need for food could also have positive effects on turteling.
Decay to battle gigantism is so cheap that it does not even deserve being considered a "solution" for it does not solve anything.
What starmade has to tackle in the future is getting out of the niche and becoming a real game. Gamedesign actual mechanics will have to adapt again for NOBODY new is ever going to accept why some stuff should not workthey know from TV series to work in a certain way.
This includes docking a ship from it's extended gangway entitys camera to a station. NOBODY CARES that performance or any other resoon would speak against this.
Same goes for ai. An ai trying to fire through it's docked entity is stupid thus the game is crap, period, deleted
also schine has to streamline lots of other processes regarding logics i.e. having to put tons of activation modules somewhere to adjust a setting is a no go. rail speed ... that stuff makes a difference if placed next to a module or further away but connected all such stuff needs to become intuitive -> big load of work a head.
Finally when it comes to actually haveing stuff to do ... do not rely on a quest system. instead focus on building an economy and then just make factions generate quests based on real calculated need each game tick. if the player blows up farming stations in a system well everyone better become hungry quickly and food being a top priority as quests...

Then when the game actually has become a game. i'd say look at gigantism again and probably it won't be an issue anymore for people are actually playing the game more than just being foccused on building bigger and bigger because there is nothing more to do.

 

[Drakkart]

Can you please understand guys: If someone wants to play this game he should be able to do pvp after one to five hours of gameplay. But on every bloddy server there are ships bigger than 200k the daily bread. Do you know how long I need to build a ship of 1k mass with enough details after 30 hours of gameplay? I need 4 to 10 hours. I am talking about a cool ship, with interiour and a unique hull design. Now even if some better man than me only needs 2 hours to design a 1k sized ship - how long would he need to do this into the 100k mass size? Lets say 20 hours.

And the point I am trying to make: with a limit of 100k mass you allready have an incredibly big ammount of creative possibilities in design and tactics. This size limit is enough to do pvp. This whole thread is not dedicated to the creative builders. This thread is dedicated to the guys who want to play rp and pvp. Keep that in mind when you defend any bigger size limit.

I like seeing big ships, but not for pvp. I admire your big buildings, dedication and work you put into them. But here we need to talk about what we can do to improve the pvp with the tools we have right now. Not in one year or six months. We want more players now. And we could also think flexible and not bind ourself to the maximum possible size of ships (actually over 500k mass and bigger) given by the server speed.



Call me weak or beanpicking, but I see where this leads and its not based on mutual understanding. I dont enjoy talking like that.

I see that you disagree with me, but the reasons are totally different from what I told and I don't understand how it is important for the arguments I made to even adress the history teachers opinion. I try to repeat myself and hope you adress whole argument next time, and not the part it's easiest to pick on. Until I am not understood I don't try to reply to your arguments.

The story about him was an introducing example. And my argument - what I hope gets read from someone here - was:
There are no working relationships between small ships in fights, because the actual server pvp (not how it could be - how it is right now on every server played on) is laid out to ignore small ships in favour of turtling, until you have a big enough ship to come out of your shell. There are just no fights between small ships on any servers out there, and so there aren't any working battle mechanics between fighters - because they are not used. I mean if small ships would work, they would be used in fights. And until they are not usefull in the pvp of servers the pvp is simple broken I say. And also to adress the turtling my suggestion is to lower the size to 100k so everyone comes out of his shell earlier.

Imho I would even use 50k and 100k should be earned with some special game rule...Remember: This limit is stated, because there are not enough people playing pvp. And the limit can ofc be bigger for servers who want big ship pvp. Sadly you can't set the ship size limit for different sectors, so you could have a battle zone with scaled difficulty of ship sizes.

Also keep again in mind: You need at least 10 hours to design a 100k mass ship. If you want a bigger audience playing this game, you need to allow pvp for people with small ships who only can spend 5 to 10 hours a week playing a game and want to have pvp non the less. I think the most people writing here have spent very long in this game and are dedicated players, but we are not the people. We are one part of the audience, but we also need to think about the big majority and their ability to have pvp withing 5 to 10 hours of gameplay.

I never found a game able to manage that people investing less time are as well off as people playing a lot more. How would that be fair to those putting more time into it? But we have this thing called shipyard, great mechanic you can build and even testfly stuff without any ressource cost so technically you could build along as you want before leaving the shell. or just put in a blueprint and spawn something to pew pew right away. the thing i figured is less that people spend more time in the game and more that people do more testing upfront to know how to really play which gives their stuff an advantage.

 

[33Cav]

I wouldn't call the 24 main offensive turrets on this thing 'small'.

How does that quote go... "Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake, it's impolite"
Making suggestions here to fix your ship would be off topic so I won't do that here.

Now for some carrot and stick (stick first).
Add fuel mechanics. Fueling a larger ship is naturally more expensive (with jump drives using the most fuel on activation, of course). Now keeping a large fleet supplied should provide sufficient stick to soft-cap ship sizes along the lines of the size of the faction that owns said ship,
Now for the carrot. Supplying ships is a mission and has rewards. In addition to regular rewards supplying a ship could give XP to the crew of the supplying ship or both ships (receiving the fuel takes some work).

 

[Raisinbat]

This includes docking a ship from it's extended gangway entitys camera to a station. NOBODY CARES that performance or any other resoon would speak against this.
Same goes for ai. An ai trying to fire through it's docked entity is stupid thus the game is crap, period, deleted
also schine has to streamline lots of other processes regarding logics i.e. having to put tons of activation modules somewhere to adjust a setting is a no go. rail speed ... that stuff makes a difference if placed next to a module or further away but connected all such stuff needs to become intuitive -> big load of work a head.
Finally when it comes to actually haveing stuff to do ... do not rely on a quest system. instead focus on building an economy and then just make factions generate quests based on real calculated need each game tick. if the player blows up farming stations in a system well everyone better become hungry quickly and food being a top priority as quests...

Give this man a medal.

I have to parrot the quest point; it's like adding a collectible card game to starmade. It's pretty much just it's own thing that's slapped on, rather than having the actual game give you a reason to play. I don't mind missions being in the game at all, but they won't keep a bad game afloat. Lots of bad games have missions, they wont fix anything on their own.

I never found a game able to manage that people investing less time are as well off as people playing a lot more. How would that be fair to those putting more time into it? But we have this thing called shipyard, great mechanic you can build and even testfly stuff without any ressource cost so technically you could build along as you want before leaving the shell. or just put in a blueprint and spawn something to pew pew right away. the thing i figured is less that people spend more time in the game and more that people do more testing upfront to know how to really play which gives their stuff an advantage.

Fuck it, give him two.

As for carrots, i think a large portion of the problem stems from the fact that you sink hundreds of hours into building these things and then, being sufficiently stupid, you can lose them in a few minutes. It doesn't make any sense for pure combat to reward resources equal to the investment so it's just a net sink of your time. Look at eve, what is it 95% of players never leaving the high sec?

It's completely opposite to starmade's current operation but you could adopt a Techwars approach where only shipyards cost resources, but produces ships for free, up until a certain amount are around. (IE: fighter shipyard takes 4 hours to make a fighter and can support up to 10 of them) This eliminates the cost sink for taking ships out, losses are gradually replaced and there's no benefit to them sitting around collecting dust. It's probably a bit too arcady, but really you're just taking out the mining and refining resources into ship components step, and that's automated anyway.

 

[StarWars1981]

Give this man a medal.

I have to parrot the quest point; it's like adding a collectible card game to starmade. It's pretty much just it's own thing that's slapped on, rather than having the actual game give you a reason to play. I don't mind missions being in the game at all, but they won't keep a bad game afloat. Lots of bad games have missions, they wont fix anything on their own.



Fuck it, give him two.

As for carrots, i think a large portion of the problem stems from the fact that you sink hundreds of hours into building these things and then, being sufficiently stupid, you can lose them in a few minutes. It doesn't make any sense for pure combat to reward resources equal to the investment so it's just a net sink of your time. Look at eve, what is it 95% of players never leaving the high sec?

It's completely opposite to starmade's current operation but you could adopt a Techwars approach where only shipyards cost resources, but produces ships for free, up until a certain amount are around. (IE: fighter shipyard takes 4 hours to make a fighter and can support up to 10 of them) This eliminates the cost sink for taking ships out, losses are gradually replaced and there's no benefit to them sitting around collecting dust. It's probably a bit too arcady, but really you're just taking out the mining and refining resources into ship components step, and that's automated anyway.

Focusing on the Techwars comment:
Well, that's interesting, and potentially useful automation. No, it should not produce ships for free: as you said, it's automatic resource gathering anyways, so set it in a sector, assign a mining fleet to it, and assign it a ship design to produce and maintain, and how many. No multi-type shipyards, unless Schine really wants to, because it's more complicated. Make more shipyards - it's just one per design type, anyways.

Now, the way it works - it has X number of vessels assigned to it, and they receive a "Shipyard Tag" - basically, Reaper MkII SXno13 (SX being Station X, can be a number/letter, and no13 referring to which vessel it is in the "fleet" built by the shipyard). Note they do not have to be in the same fleet, they can be in different ones. Replacements should be autoassigned to the right fleet for the destroyed vessel, but perhaps that can be left to the player, as a sort of command structure management. Numbers should be limited according to the inverse size of the shipyard. Smaller designs (from smaller shipyards) incur larger limits, larger designs, smaller limits. Not necessarily a hard limit - perhaps the number of ships a yard is "supporting" cause "clutter" and increase resource cost. Could be based off vessel mass - the soft cap is equal to the size of the shipyard (Some function thingy here) the mass of ships it is supporting. This soft cap is increasing build costs as more crap clutters the yard to allow it to maintain the ships. Virtual crap, of course, no random boxes unless you really want them. It makes sense, too, given that if a yard is maintaining more stations, it will need more materiel available to do so, and will have more trouble producing new ships.

Note the resources CAN in fact be FP or credits, or similar, not just resources, because no honest shipyard is going to lose large amounts of hull plating due to clutter, lol.

Repair shipyards could be shipyards designated solely to maintaining vessels, taking maintenance "costs" off of other designated stations, or just a general reduction across all shipyards. This means that the maintenance station incurs a time-based repeating penalty for doing its job (can be shut down through faction menu or some such, to save points/creds), but keeps the other shipyards more efficient in their construction of vessels. Dedicated repair stations can also have resource costs, speeding up the repair of damaged vessels that return to its sector. This necessitates long-term patrol designations (station A for 2 time units, then travel here and patrol sectors XYZ for seven units, return to maintenance yard 1 for 12 units, return to station B for 3 units, return to A and repeat route, etc.) for ease of use, although forcing closer management has its potential for benefits.

 

[aRottenKomquat]

I wouldn't worry too much about spending hundreds of hours building something and then losing it. Most of that time is spent designing it. If it's worth that much to you, it should be blueprinted or saved to a shipyard design anyway, so that time is only spent once and any replacements only cost the time spent mining and crafting.

Unless it takes hundreds of hours of gathering resources to build the design...in that case...

 

[MacThule]

Unless it takes hundreds of hours of gathering resources to build the design...in that case...

In that case don't build it. Given a long enough timeline, every ship dies regardless of specs. Never bother with anything you're not comfortable replacing. Repeatedly.

I see so many players fresh out of SP get on a new MP server, spend the entire first week or two grinding to build a huge star-destroyer, launch it and fly around crowing about it for a bit, lose it within 72 hours, then rage quit because their MP gameplay experience sucked. You can't convince them not to make their first building project an epic undertaking and start with something small.

Sometimes the context makes a difference.

Context goes a long way. I enjoy light RP servers, actually. No objection to server-based style standards, but those will still result in much fighting over the details of the issue. Their funeral.

 

[Edymnion]

Context goes a long way. I enjoy light RP servers, actually. No objection to server-based style standards, but those will still result in much fighting over the details of the issue. Their funeral.

Oh yeah, there is a certain enforced style server that I'm sure we've all seen but I won't name that looked great until I saw "All ships and stations have to be in X style".

Did not give one rat's ass about how awesome the rest of the server might have been, I logged out of it and put it on my list of "never go here again" servers.

 

[kurosawa]

1 simple solution to get people out of homebases on servers where this is a must because of reasons, is a simple true/false options in server config which can disable homebases.

problem solved, everyone can go pvp....