PVP focused gameplay is the majority over all the other playstyles

[JinM]

Ok even though to most of the people it might be obvious, the following observation came to my mind just right now:

As long as Starmade focuses its gameplay around weapon mechanics and ship engineering, the majority of the playerbase will be PVPers.

(Please bear in mind, that I mean added content that is in the game right now, not the overall future direction. I am talking about the dominance in numbers of pvpers as playerbase since 3 years and presumably for the next year as well.)

Why is this something special for me?

Well I am admitedly not mainly playing the PVP part of the game. I build and play around trading, producing and managing ressources within a faction/station, roleplay oriented building, small pvp ships that are more about how they fight and how they are laid out inside rather than about efficiency and strength.

And I was allways confused why I am a really small minority.

It's not like I am belonging to around 30% of the players on the server. No. The main server population consists only of around 10% non-pvp oriented playstyles. And I am not meaning rp-building only as non-pvp playstyle, I also mean stuff like trading, pirate hunting, mining oriented players (that guy that only builds a huge ass miner, fills up 100m³ cargo areas and then leaves the game again when his station is finally only a big cargo block of 300x300x300 meter).

But when I look on the game from an feature and gameplay perspective, I came to realise, that you can't do that much jet, besides pvp.

All the following features are not working correctly and are way inferiour in fun, compared to the pvp that works overall since 5 years: PVE, Trading, Managing a build oriented faction within one station (as soon as you give build right to homebase you give them 100% access), Setting up any sort of mission, relations with the NPCs, any sort of animal or mob that you can have in your base, astronaut oriented content like modding your astronaut suit, money that can be depositted into cargo instead of being transferred via commands exclusively....

So if Schine or someone else some day wants a game that also is attractive to (or feedback that aims for) non-pvp oriented players, for example for roleplayers or traders, or pve players, or anything that is not just exclusively "build good pew pew gun and kill all the other players", then we should first look, if there is any gameplay even existent that let those non-pvp players even join the game in the first case.

Right now it's not and I have to accept, that Starmade is just about pvp (and accumulating ressources for pvp ships) and it will stay like that for more than one year. I have to accept that making a build- and rp-oriented faction for example is just a waste of time.

 

[Comradecolonel]

The only thing that provides any sort of challenge is playing against another player. There is nothing interesting to discover and no fun to be had unless you fight another player. It's funny to me though, because even pvp doesn't work too well. The lag and bugginess of the game makes the battles seem painful a lot of the time.

 

[dwwojcik]

You won't always have to build your own ships. Once the devs start adding content to the universe, you won't even have to design your ships if you don't want to. You can just fly to an NPC (or even player-run I suppose, if in multiplayer) shipyard and order a ship, maybe even a production license if you've got the dough.

On the official Starmade stream, Saber has talked a lot about how they plan to add options for playstyles other than fighting and ship building. Industrialist and Trader are definitely happening. Eventually.

 

[GnomeKing]

battles seem painful a lot of the time.

This is very true and indeed more so (not less).

You won't always have to build your own ships.

At that stage StarMade is (IMHO) losing its way - the very basis and inspiration to play should be the need to RESEARCH it,BUILD it, BREAK it, FIX it ...

Without that key motivator and central ethos, other RTS/FPS aspects of the game (that do not/probably can never directly compete with dedicated RTS/FPS space-sims) will truly shine through in their limitations and failings

 

[Comradecolonel]

the very basis and inspiration to play should be the need to RESEARCH it,BUILD it, BREAK it, FIX it

Right and squandering people research so "new" players can get into the game shows where the priorities are. Instead of spending countless hours developing ways to do something, now you just pick it out of a menu. Without there being a goal for the industries and challenge seeking players, they will lose interest.

 

[Coyote27]

On the official Starmade stream, Saber has talked a lot about how they plan to add options for playstyles other than fighting and ship building. Industrialist and Trader are definitely happening. Eventually.

This is just as good for the PvP community as it is for the pacifists, because some kind of profit and trade would mean more reason to fight.

 

[JinM]

The only thing that provides any sort of challenge is playing against another player. There is nothing interesting to discover and no fun to be had unless you fight another player. It's funny to me though, because even pvp doesn't work too well. The lag and bugginess of the game makes the battles seem painful a lot of the time.

The confusing part for me was, and still is, that there could be other parts in the game worth playing, if the players would build them: Interesting stations with some mini lore, Minigames (chess, jump'n run, races, riddles), manually trading, roleplay between player driven faction kingdoms. And I was confused why others don't build such stuff just like in Minecraft, why I am the only one like that on servers? Same goes for my faction, its overall goal doesn't comply with 95% of the players.

But all this sort of player built gameplay is complicated for the any player to build, so we only have a few who do it. If we take Minecraft for comparission we can see, that there are only around 1% of the players who build very evolved stuff. I mean on Bdubs level in detailing, or very good minigames and maps with missions and story.

But as long as Starmade doesn't have (add) non-pvp content (as mentioned in the second half of OP), those content creating players (besides pretty pvp ship builders) will not be attracted and will never start playing the game, and in return we will not have such player built game content. And we will not have many feedback in the community that wants or discusses non-pvp mechanics.

 

[Nosajimiki]

The only thing that provides any sort of challenge is playing against another player. There is nothing interesting to discover and no fun to be had unless you fight another player. It's funny to me though, because even pvp doesn't work too well. The lag and bugginess of the game makes the battles seem painful a lot of the time.

One of the most often overlooked challenges in starmade is optimizing your ships to the system For example, optimizing weapon output count to prevent weapon phasing, finding ways to create more weapon spread with fewer turrets to you have less collisions, optimizing exploit tech to create less lag such rail zeroing, etc. What I often saw was that it was intermediate player base that caused the most lag. They learned some trick like missile spamming AMS and decided the best approach would be 1000+ missiles only to learn that they then did less damage than before because 90% of their missiles phased. So such players then did one of two things, built smaller exploit ships or optimised so that they could build bigger. As much as I am for a system that more naturally limits laggy behavior, it did make for an interesting end game.

You won't always have to build your own ships. Once the devs start adding content to the universe, you won't even have to design your ships if you don't want to. You can just fly to an NPC (or even player-run I suppose, if in multiplayer) shipyard and order a ship, maybe even a production license if you've got the dough.

On the official Starmade stream, Saber has talked a lot about how they plan to add options for playstyles other than fighting and ship building. Industrialist and Trader are definitely happening. Eventually.

This is a really tricky balance since the goal of such ships on any server is to balance the new player against the average player base, but where this lies is very different depending on what server you play on. For example, Nastral built all those LiCorp ships for LvD so that new players had something to fight with. They were not as good as many of the major factioned ships, but you could throw a noob into a Seraphim and still have a worthwhile wingman... however, people started taking those designs on to FRU and Brierie where none of the local factions were prepared to compete with them. A single rogue with a LiCorp cruiser could devastate entire factions, yet, by mid-2017 most LvD players were complaining about LiCorp ships being too weak. LvD also had pirate events that included ships in the 80-400k mass range which I don't think would have gone over well for most other servers. I just hope that they provide a wide range of faction and player ships that admins can turn on/off so that servers can grow with their players.

The confusing part for me was, and still is, that there could be other parts in the game worth playing, if the players would build them: Interesting stations with some mini lore, Minigames (chess, jump'n run, races, riddles), manually trading, roleplay between player driven faction kingdoms. And I was confused why others don't build such stuff just like in Minecraft, why I am the only one like that on servers? Same goes for my faction, its overall goal doesn't comply with 95% of the players.

But all this sort of player built gameplay is complicated for the any player to build, so we only have a few who do it. If we take Minecraft for comparission we can see, that there are only around 1% of the players who build very evolved stuff. I mean on Bdubs level in detailing, or very good minigames and maps with missions and story.

But as long as Starmade doesn't have (add) non-pvp content (as mentioned in the second half of OP), those content creating players (besides pretty pvp ship builders) will not be attracted and will never start playing the game, and in return we will not have such player built game content. And we will not have many feedback in the community that wants or discusses non-pvp mechanics.

Interesting that you bring this up, because I feel like they did. The top dome on my homebase was once the home of the Lightside Technical convention where members of other lightside factions could come to learn about ship building. Using logic I created exhibits that could be turned on and off so that allies could learn about things like complex armor patterns, optimal turret designs, etc. in game, but darksiders spectating my base could not see anything if they were off. It also has one of the most expansive and diverse RP interiors you will ever see, new faction members often spend 30-45 minutes just walking all the hallways to see everything.

Asterion-class

There are players that design casinos where people can gamble with in-game resources, there are functional arcade games made with logic and display regex, auto-factories, quests, etc. but as you mentioned, that is a 1% sort of thing. You don't see it much anymore because we only have ~100 players *looks around for the one guy who still does it*. The logic system is actually quite deep once you delve into it, but does not warrant a lot of discussion on the dock because it mostly works and is easier to learn on Youtube than the dock.

Faction driven role-play was also a big thing about a year or two ago when we had the players for it. The whole UIS/Odium conflict raged on for years across many servers. Some servers even had it more-or-less institutionalized: I believe it was Shattered Skies which was 75% dominated for a while by the two Starwars factions (Rebel Alliance and the Empire).

Frankly, if you could get PvP working well enough again to get people back into the game and staying with it long enough, you would naturally see these things return as people need things to do while they wait around on servers for allies and enemies to log in.

 

[MacThule]

The only thing that provides any sort of challenge is playing against another player. There is nothing interesting to discover and no fun to be had unless you fight another player. It's funny to me though, because even pvp doesn't work too well. The lag and bugginess of the game makes the battles seem painful a lot of the time.

I share this feeling - fighting humans is the most fun. That's a general PvPer mentality, and I also enjoy Starcraft I/II, DoTA I/II, etc. It's not universal though, and JinM makes a good observation, one that is compounded by your observation. Starmade is all about that PvP, but even under optimal conditions it doesn't really facilitate smooth PvP.

Really hoping that once Galaxy 2.0 is out - and stable - they fix the shipyards, fix the economy, fix NPCs, and implement a quest/mission engine or something. Not because I plan to do a lot of questing... too grind-y. But for many it would make this game infinitely more playable. For me, it would mean more players online to try to seduce into some hot player on player violence.
[doublepost=1527104616,1527103132][/doublepost]

At that stage StarMade is (IMHO) losing its way - the very basis and inspiration to play should be the need to RESEARCH it,BUILD it, BREAK it, FIX it ...

I think that all the Starmade players right now are all about the design, test, research, build, break, fix, repeat process, but that's because that's the only thing available here - not because that's all that Starmade can or should or was meant to do, but no one who doesn't enjoy that aspect sticks around. Basing development purely on the current player base would be a little like starting to build a scyscraper, realizing at some point that all the people in your building are construction workers, and deciding to scrap installing all the features you originally designed into the building that appeal to people who don't do manual labor. Screw that fancy cafe on the ground floor, right? Builders don't want that. Gym? They don't need it - they get plenty of exercise building the building they're in. They don't even seem to mind the building not having carpet...

So revising the goals of a work in progress based on the preferences of players who enjoy works in progress means that you paint yourself into a corner of designing a game that can only ever be a work in progress and never a (even relatively) finished product.

The consensus of the present community on many issues is purely a function of the developmental state of the game. Not proof of what the game's final goal should be.

Which is precisely why sometimes Schine is going to ignore community consensus.

Adding additional elements will not 'remove' the central elements. I don't think it's anything to fear. Allowing players to quickly and conveniently buy ships you've designed or production licenses for ship models to use in RTS/FPS/RPG activity on your server doesn't mean you have to stop designing. It doesn't remove the current elements of the game, it contextualizes them and your faction would be able to profit in-game, directly from selling the ships you design, test and improve over time. It rewards you for doing extensive R&D on new entities if that's your thing because you've now become the artist of the basic unit of gameplay for everyone else on server who wants to just blast stuff, grind quests, and conquer star systems for their empire. That seems to be the intent, anyway.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

All in all, I feel that development happened in the wrong order. It should've gone planet revamp -> weapons revamp -> NPC stuff -> power revamp, not power revamp -> weapons revamp -> ???

 

[MacThule]

All in all, I feel that development happened in the wrong order. It should've gone planet revamp -> weapons revamp -> NPC stuff -> power revamp, not power revamp -> weapons revamp -> ???

I actually agree that really should have come first. I'm baffled that it didn't, but we will probably understand more about why when they final release them. Really power had to precede weapons though - weapon performance is based on power. Shield power draw is as well. Until you know what power numbers will look like for ships at certain sizes, you can only make guesses at what kind of power weapons should be drawing. Especially within such an, uh... 'abstract' power dynamic as we have now.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

I actually agree that really should have come first. I'm baffled that it didn't, but we will probably understand more about why when they final release them. Really power had to precede weapons though - weapon performance is based on power. Shield power draw is as well. Until you know what power numbers will look like for ships at certain sizes, you can only make guesses at what kind of power weapons should be drawing. Especially within such an, uh... 'abstract' power dynamic as we have now.

Most of what the weapon update is doing has nothing to do with changes to power. It mostly changes how missiles, beams, and block adjacency in damage work. These changes could've come while power 1.0 was in place, with later changes happening with power 2.0.

 

[Agame3]

I share this feeling - fighting humans is the most fun. That's a general PvPer mentality, and I also enjoy Starcraft I/II, DoTA I/II, etc. It's not universal though, and JinM makes a good observation, one that is compounded by your observation. Starmade is all about that PvP, but even under optimal conditions it doesn't really facilitate smooth PvP.

Really hoping that once Galaxy 2.0 is out - and stable - they fix the shipyards, fix the economy, fix NPCs, and implement a quest/mission engine or something. Not because I plan to do a lot of questing... too grind-y. But for many it would make this game infinitely more playable. For me, it would mean more players online to try to seduce into some hot player on player violence.
[doublepost=1527104616,1527103132][/doublepost]

I think that all the Starmade players right now are all about the design, test, research, build, break, fix, repeat process, but that's because that's the only thing available here - not because that's all that Starmade can or should or was meant to do, but no one who doesn't enjoy that aspect sticks around. Basing development purely on the current player base would be a little like starting to build a scyscraper, realizing at some point that all the people in your building are construction workers, and deciding to scrap installing all the features you originally designed into the building that appeal to people who don't do manual labor. Screw that fancy cafe on the ground floor, right? Builders don't want that. Gym? They don't need it - they get plenty of exercise building the building they're in. They don't even seem to mind the building not having carpet...

So revising the goals of a work in progress based on the preferences of players who enjoy works in progress means that you paint yourself into a corner of designing a game that can only ever be a work in progress and never a (even relatively) finished product.

The consensus of the present community on many issues is purely a function of the developmental state of the game. Not proof of what the game's final goal should be.

Which is precisely why sometimes Schine is going to ignore community consensus.

Adding additional elements will not 'remove' the central elements. I don't think it's anything to fear. Allowing players to quickly and conveniently buy ships you've designed or production licenses for ship models to use in RTS/FPS/RPG activity on your server doesn't mean you have to stop designing. It doesn't remove the current elements of the game, it contextualizes them and your faction would be able to profit in-game, directly from selling the ships you design, test and improve over time. It rewards you for doing extensive R&D on new entities if that's your thing because you've now become the artist of the basic unit of gameplay for everyone else on server who wants to just blast stuff, grind quests, and conquer star systems for their empire. That seems to be the intent, anyway.

I do think that exactly like MC, this game's development can never be finished. The basic idea has almost infinite possibilities to enhance the gameplay. One day, when Schine gets really tired of development of StarMade, they will make a final bug-smashing patch and say "This is the game, please pay 40 bucks for it, have a nice day!"

MC has a very good and easy to use modding API. SM doesn't have one. Remember "Tekkit" in MC? In SM, that had to be coded by Schema. All the working mods right now are called "game versions". All of them made by Schema or Schine.

TlDr: The game can and probably will evolve forever and the "final" version is just the point where Schine resigns. I hope someone else will continue from there on.

 

[MacThule]

Most of what the weapon update is doing has nothing to do with changes to power. It mostly changes how missiles, beams, and block adjacency in damage work. These changes could've come while power 1.0 was in place, with later changes happening with power 2.0.

Good points! The power draws would still probably have needed reworking, which could have broken other things about the weapons though, so I definitely thought the priority was correct. It's arguable though. There are many good ways to skin cats...

 

[JinM]

Good points! The power draws would still probably have needed reworking, which could have broken other things about the weapons though, so I definitely thought the priority was correct. It's arguable though. There are many good ways to skin cats...

On, the other hand, if we assume that the majority of the players are pvpers, it would make sense to first satisfy their need for...fleshed out weapons...your guess?

 

[Scypio]

You don't need much to please a pvper. Performance with deep and simple mechanics that are balanced. While the first point cannot be done without the cat, the rest is easily feasible if everything was accessible via modding or config files. Like being allowed to change the way blocs scale and such, the competitive community would have balanced the game for Schine.

 

[Nosajimiki]

All in all, I feel that development happened in the wrong order. It should've gone planet revamp -> weapons revamp -> NPC stuff -> power revamp, not power revamp -> weapons revamp -> ???

I actually agree that really should have come first. I'm baffled that it didn't, but we will probably understand more about why when they final release them. Really power had to precede weapons though - weapon performance is based on power. Shield power draw is as well. Until you know what power numbers will look like for ships at certain sizes, you can only make guesses at what kind of power weapons should be drawing. Especially within such an, uh... 'abstract' power dynamic as we have now.

This is because you are thinking like a player and not a programmer. When you program, you need to build the modules that other dependant modules call on first. If you do it in the wrong order, then you have to go back and fix the primitives which will the break some of the new stuff that you just got working and you wind up in a storm of going back and forth between everything in your whole darn program that interconnects until it all works together, but once it does all work, your code is now a jumbled mess of exceptions and workarounds that is very difficult to work on, much less optimize. Schine is going in this order because they learned from their past mistakes.

Why your idea would cause issues:

• The resources you could possibly get from much larger planets need to work and be balanced with the final economics system, which will first need all the final resources and blocks to exist to determine how to balance that. There are also updates with planets that will involve collision and gravity optimizations which will require a final physics model which itself is dependant on a final ship systems model.
• Weapons draw on power functions. You are not just balancing them first for old power and then again for new power, you are literally rewriting half of what they do twice to make this happen.
• NPC stuff needs final values for systems before your can add any advanced AI that can actually rely on the accuracy of such things. If you write an advanced AI, and latter remove something from the game that it tries to interact with, you are now fighting with null pointer errors. While you can insulate against this with try/catches everywhere, it makes your source code way more verbose, takes longer to write, and can cause performance issues.

Why they did it this way:

• All systems tie into power functions; so, it is the most fundamental component in the game. Starting anywhere else would be a waste of time.
• The economy, shipyards, and AI are reliant on what systems exist in the game. So any and all blocks that they plan to add other than aesthetics changes need to happen first.
• The economy, shipyards, and AI can more or less happen in any order after that, thus they are all lumped into the same stage 3 update; although, realistically, they could release them one at a time in smaller updates.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

This is because you are thinking like a player and not a programmer. When you program, you need to build the modules that other dependant modules call on first. If you do it in the wrong order, then you have to go back and fix the primitives which will the break some of the new stuff that you just got working and you wind up in a storm of going back and forth between everything in your whole darn program that interconnects until it all works together, but once it does all work, your code is now a jumbled mess of exceptions and workarounds that is very difficult to work on, much less optimize. Schine is going in this order because they learned from their past mistakes.

Why your idea would cause issues:

• The resources you could possibly get from much larger planets need to work and be balanced with the final economics system, which will first need all the final resources and blocks to exist to determine how to balance that. There are also updates with planets that will involve collision and gravity optimizations which will require a final physics model which itself is dependant on a final ship systems model.
• Weapons draw on power functions. You are not just balancing them first for old power and then again for new power, you are literally rewriting half of what they do twice to make this happen.
• NPC stuff needs final values for systems before your can add any advanced AI that can actually rely on the accuracy of such things. If you write an advanced AI, and latter remove something from the game that it tries to interact with, you are now fighting with null pointer errors. While you can insulate against this with try/catches everywhere, it makes your source code way more verbose, takes longer to write, and can cause performance issues.

Why they did it this way:

• All systems tie into power functions; so, it is the most fundamental component in the game. Starting anywhere else would be a waste of time.
• The economy, shipyards, and AI are reliant on what systems exist in the game. So any and all blocks that they plan to add other than aesthetics changes need to happen first.
• The economy, shipyards, and AI can more or less happen in any order after that, thus they are all lumped into the same stage 3 update; although, realistically, they could release them one at a time in smaller updates.

Well-designed code at a high level (mainly following the Liskov Substitution Principle and Dependency Inversion Principles of SOLID) wouldn't have that many issues with this, especially the NPC one (that'd be a massive violation of DIP). Of course, StarMade's code might not be well-designed at a high level, and that would explain just about everything wrong with the game...

 

[Comradecolonel]

if the players would build them: Interesting stations with some mini lore, Minigames (chess, jump'n run, races, riddles), manually trading, roleplay between player driven faction kingdoms. And I was confused why others don't build such stuff just like in Minecraft, why I am the only one like that on servers? Same goes for my faction, its overall goal doesn't comply with 95% of the players.

I see that you only have the badge for playing about 1 year. I think you just might have missed all the people that would play like this. Shattered skies and mushroom fleet were two servers that specifically facilited these types of things. I also used to play with people on the genxnova server that built things like this. They got tired of the stagnant development and what they felt was the devs just not working to improve this part of the game. There were so many game breaking bugs in the past that most people lost interest in these things before they actually could fully enjoy them.

Things like the repulsor block should have come out with race gates for instance. Skid racing was a fun and cool concept but terrain clipping made it frustrating at times. Also needing a planets gravity to function made it hard to import tracks to a world unless you're an admin. All these little mini games always fell through in the end because there were few game mechanics to aid them along.

As much as I am for a system that more naturally limits laggy behavior, it did make for an interesting end game

For me personally designing my ships around the lagginess and bugginess of a game isn't a thrilling end game. Especially when the structure of the game is constantly changing. I might spend months developing something that functions a certain way only to have it change completely on me. That sort of development grind just isn't rewarding for most players.

By the time you've reached that level of play, you've long ago left the game mechanics that you're actually meant to interact with. Your not really designing weapons to have a specific impact, just designing them around the tick rate of the server or the limitations of the game engine. Again not that appealing to me, whereas I find thinking about the core game mechanics to be far more enjoyable.

That's a general PvPer mentality, and I also enjoy Starcraft I/II, DoTA I/II, etc. It's not universal though, and JinM makes a good observation, one that is compounded by your observation. Starmade is all about that PvP, but even under optimal conditions it doesn't really facilitate smooth PvP

When compared to other online PvP games starmade lacks two qualities. First of all it is not really competitive. There always the opportunity for players to have an unfair advantage and there is no way in the stock game to face off against players of similar skill. You just get thrown into the lions den if you try to play online. It is totally possible to just join up with a major faction and learn from them. This makes it hard for new players, and doesn't create a truly competitive environment.

The second quality is some sort of limit for players and factions. I don't advocate this but for it to truly be a fair type of game, you need some sort of weakness for growing and expanding infinitely. There is nothing stopping a faction from growing to a size and power level that is totally unbeatable for others. There is no sort of resistance to growth, aside from player made changes and settings. This again creates an unfair advantage to the no-lifers of the game that just sit around a mine resources to build a monster fleet.

I'm not familiar with Eve Online but I realize that it has these qualities to some degree. I imagine though that their are ways to make it more difficult for factions to completely dominate the world. In starmade no matter how good your ships may be, the power of your faction seems more dependent on how many resources you have and how many warm bodies you can recruit.

 

[JinM]

Shattered skies and mushroom fleet were two servers that specifically facilited these types of things. I also used to play with people on the genxnova server that built things like this. They got tired of the stagnant development and what they felt was the devs just not working to improve this part of the game.

That's exactly what I said: The parts of the game that encourage non-pvp stuff didn't got developed but the pvp part is very focused on. And this leads to more pvp focused players, and non-pvp players leaving.