PvP Improvements (must-have)

ne3zy · Jul 6, 2013

First of all why a faction home can't be attacked ? This system prevent any faction war and promotes solo player factions which have no sence (yay free invincibility!).

Make all your constructions (space stations/ships/etc) indestructible 5-10 minutes after you disconnect (so you can't disconnect to stop a fight you're losing) and all your ships only usable by yourself even without faction modules. If you want to protect your base just use shields and turrets.

The new faction module will allow you to create a faction and use every friendly structure equipped with one of these blocks, this way you can have your personal ships even if you are in a faction.

When it's destroyed by another faction it could give faction points which could be used to, purchase blocks giving your faction different privileges, or just to have a faction ranking (this way you encourage FvF).

From there we already improved a lot the multiplayer gameplay. What's needed next are improvements to player meetings.

- Give players a reason to fight, this can be done by fixing the economy system so once they win a fight they will be able to recycle the enemy ships (If you make weapons, shields, etc... more expensive this will be very interesting to do), giving the killer the victim's lost money, etc...

- Remove blocks from the shop or make them a lot more expensive, so you must craft them, this way you'll stay more time at base giving other players the oportunity to attack it. We also could introduce power dependent machines (like the feed the beast minecraft mod) instead of factories to craft advanced blocks, for the same purpose.

- Add a expensive sonar-like block which must be placed in your base (planet/space station) and which gives you information on where you can find people, the more energy you give to the sonar the further you will be able to see and the more precise it will be, you'll still be able to hide yourself using intercepters but if you are to close to the sonar it'll be useless, however you can give them a lot of power so you can counter a powerful sonar.

This means remove faction hub positions.

Now we can find players more easily we need to give beginner protections, so server veterans don't destroy every newbie.

Make players (/factions) earn points depending on their belongings (they can also lose the points), this way they reach different tiers and are only able to fight against same tier people. I suggest making it like this :

- Tier 1 : Played the game for 3-6 hours, pretty weak.

- Tier 2 : Beginning to have some nice ships, have now a medium level.

- Tier 3 : Have atleast one big ship (10k-20k blocks) or equivalent.

- Eventually tier 4 on big servers, when people have 200k + blocks ships

I think this system would be perfect, feel free to add your ideas this is just the main one, pardon my english ^^ !

Sylvine · Jul 6, 2013

Totally agree with the fact that invincible base is a nonsens.
Even after disconnecting, your base should be always vulnerable and should be only protected by shield and turret (and players of course).

On top of that enhancing (or rather adding) combat on the ground like an average FPS will take this game to another level.
Imagine attacking a ground base with transport ships dropping soldier and destroyer covering them from space.
The final objective should be to hack the faction module or something like a central IA core to get the control of all the system of the base.

ne3zy · Jul 6, 2013

If players attack your base you must have atleast a chance to defend it, otherwise people will just wait 4 am to attack you and loot your base.

KuramaFox · Jul 6, 2013

Making a blanket change to make bases vulnerable is bad. Too easy to abuse, especially since EVERYONE can see where your home is. And turrets only help so much.

Making it an option that server owners can change would be a good idea though. Particularly since they could make them immune most of the time, but turn the option off temporarily for an event when a lot of people are on.

The only blanet-change I would support would be making it such that turrets on a home base can be destroyed. Not docked ships, just docked turrets.

Sylvine · Jul 6, 2013

Well, there is a simple solution, remove the feature that tell everyone where the base is.

I understand that some people spend a lot of time on their ship or their base but if they don\'t want people to attack them they just have to join a non-PVP server.
By making the base a no-combat zone the game misses a lot of great opportunities. And simply making the bases invincible when every member of the faction is disconnect will open the doors for a lot of abuse.

It will anyway be unfair to be attacked when you\'re far far away from your base or when 50 players will attack your base at the same time. It\'s the core of Starmade to be unfair, it\'s a game about the wild west !

And we can imagine that the game send you an email or a message on facebook or wathever to warn you when your base is attacked.

To defend your base you have to have a strong defence line with a lot of turrets (removing the need to have one faction node per turret can help), lot of shield generators and some good old fortress building with deep underground bunkers.
And having big factions with players connected 24h/24h is a plus. Now one player can be a one man faction if he\'s got enough money to buy one faction core.

As the game is now, yes it would be too easy to destroy a base. Basically you would just have to spam big missiles from the orbit.
But you can imagine special devices that are too big for ships and can only be placed on planets (stronger shield or weapon). You can also imagine giving the AI the ability to evacuate ships on emergency situations.

It will require a lot of tweaking but now base are just a cheap way to be invincible.

And for players who really don\'t want to get their ship destroyed, they just dock it at the main shop where players can\'t shoot each other.

ne3zy · Jul 6, 2013

This :

\"Well, there is a simple solution, remove the feature that tell everyone where the base is.\"

and this :

\"if they don\'t want people to attack them they just have to join a non-PVP server.\"

MindSpark · Jul 6, 2013

Sure you can remove the broadcasting of your faction home but still what if some lone guy in a titan class ship stumbles upon your base ar 4am and decides to troll.

ne3zy · Jul 7, 2013

did you read ? -_-

Trinova · Jul 7, 2013

I see the same problem as invincibility is always a bad solution in every game that is PvP based. The dilemma is as following:

Players want to build a base. And most want to defend it. But getting your stuff shot to crumbs just because you have to sleep at least some hours is extremly frustrating. You just CAN\'T be online all day long.
Players want to attack others. Just flying around with nothing to do but gather ressources suck after some time when you want to test your ZomfgLol-Ultra-Ship.

Invincible bases screw with Players who want to attack someone/something. Vulnurable bases make it impossible to build a base because every time you login after a nap nothing is left.

For your argument: \"If you want to protect your base just use shields and turrets.\"

Realy? Are you such a bad pilot that turrets and shields could stop you from destroying a planet? We both know you are not. So don\'t try to fool neither me nor yourself. You can kill turrets from far before they even detect you and kill them. And penetrating shields is peanuts for ships that are designed to attack a planet.

I like your idea with the 5-10min timing after logout. It still could be abused (by people camping until you log off) but the time frame would be much smaller. Although i think this should be limited to a small amount of ships/stations e.g. 4 per player.

In addition we need some kind of serious defense systems. Turrets which could defend a base against enemies instead of just beeing some extra salvage which forces you to start firing from 800m instead of 250m.

As much as i don\'t think your suggestion would solve the problem, i\'m glad im not the only one who thinks invincible bases are heavily cutting on PvP. I still have no satisfying solution... let\'s work on one.

D-Car · Jul 7, 2013

All player bases can be destroyed unless they\'re marked as an HQ base. The HQ base is both indestructible and has its location marked for all to see. If you REALLY want to limit yourself to one starbase, then ... yeah ... you can\'t lose your territory, but you\'ll also be bottled up in one little location because your enemies are hovering outside ... or something.

The concept of having one last bastion-like safe spot isn\'t a bad thing. If you really happen to disagree, then get a spy into the other faction and remove their faction block. I don\'t see the problem here.

ne3zy · Jul 7, 2013

this is just the main idea, of course it needs some tweaks on defences, etc... I said it on the post, and yes you\'ll be able to create your base because of the tier system.

TDude · Jul 7, 2013

This is currently Alpha making it were people can be attacked at a home base, would cause issues since there are to many ways to abuse bugs giving players doing so to have a unfair advantage, so as of right now I rather wait for the game to become better before them adding in something to the Server Config that will allow disable Faction home protection.

Sylvine · Jul 7, 2013

The concept of having one last bastion-like safe spot isn\'t a bad thing. If you really happen to disagree, then get a spy into the other faction and remove their faction block. I don\'t see the problem here.

The problem is that there\'s no point of having more than one base since it\'s mainly to store your ships and things.

As the game is now there is absolutetly no chance at all to see a base attack.

This is currently Alpha making it were people can be attacked at a home base, would cause issues since there are to many ways to abuse bugs giving players doing so to have a unfair advantage, so as of right now I rather wait for the game to become better before them adding in something to the Server Config that will allow disable Factionhome protection.

Sure, as we have said the game is not ready yet for this feature as shield do not work on planet and turret are pretty much useless since you can burn a planet to the ground from space.

I just hope that in the futur the game will evolve with more ground based combat.

Kippeth · Jul 13, 2013

One soloution is the implimentation of an \"Aggro timer\" once attacked your ship/base/ect remains online for 15 seconds.
You might think thats short, but enter a server, buy a ship and tell me if you can kill it in 15 seconds.
You might not be able to kill the larger ships, but what about a ship thats allready been in a fight. There are lots of situational things here you have to take into account.

As for \"ground based combat\"
There is a gargantuan list of things that will need to be completed before such a thing will ever be viable (it might be in the game sooner but it wont be useful) Boarding parties / Boarding devices are something that could be very valuable.

The key issue with ground based combat is that there is currently no strategic objective that cannot be completed outside of the space war (orbital strikes).

As the game is now there is absolutetly no chance at all to see a base attack.

The larger older servers are full of this. base assaults, spies and general espionage.

Turrets which could defend a base

Well said, this is certainly an issue that im backing.

The OP also mentioned several suggestions which though poorly thoughout were born of good-will and follow the same sort of things as several other suggestion threads (better/re-invisioned sensors, Economy fix)

One issue is the \"veteran protection\" this should not, and should never exist. its a nice \"idea\" i spose, but what you have said there is a huge exploitable mess. What we should do is focus on the community to promote \"welcomming factions in faction v faction combat\" so new players are introduced to a faction who will help them out.

ne3zy · Jul 13, 2013

I don\'t get your timer thing

Visitor · Jul 13, 2013

I have to agree with earlier comment. Blanket change to make faction constructions vulnerable would be horrible. There are people who just want to make lil, nifty stuff but cannot spend time, effort nor hire others to watch over it all the time - this suggestion would drive them all out. I\'d rather have some sort of types of constructions, with admins being able to manually set their vulnerability settings.

Alternative would be also setting starcharts where people could check different sectors having different building/faction priviledges. In some nothing can be build but the smallest ships. Others could be completely protected - up to the point that NPC forces of law enforcers would intervene if a player shoots whatever NPC/player-owned object more than a few times. Yet others allow protected building of stations but only really small, new and relatively poor factions can enjoy such protection and their constructions are also limited in size. In many it\'s free for all - in every way.

Warring factions, galactic conquers and the like sound all great but let\'s be frank here - there are enough of immature bastards in such type of games, than for every mature and responsible player fighting in some faction war there would be several trolls wrecking stuff of others for shit and giggles and shields or turrets cannot prevent them in a longer go unless unbalanced and exploited to a degree that they\'d be invulnerability in their own right, defeating the purpose. Thus, some sort of mechanism (or a crew of guys vigilantly keeping order) to keep fighting in check has to be in place, otherwise nearly every server wouldn\'t be just PvP server, but general cluster**ck \'I want so I shoot\'.

ne3zy · Jul 13, 2013

\"There are people who just want to make lil, nifty stuff but cannot spend time, effort nor hire others to watch over it all the time\"

Why play PVP then ?

Other \"problems\" you\'re talking about are about server management.

Ludovsky · Jul 13, 2013

Personally, before ruling over stations, I\'d rather try to fix stuff such as how missiles can destroy an \"abandonned\" station in only three shots under the current weapon system lead to massive weapons feeling grossly overpowered sometimes.

Archer6621 · Jul 13, 2013

What about my idea: http://star-made.org/content/node-based-claiming-and-home-planet-core#comment-26017

I think it would make faction play much more interesting.

Ludovsky · Jul 13, 2013

Interesting, though like said I\'d rather see focus on the balancing of weapons(at elast in regard to PVP) so things don\'t scale to such drastic levels with bigger weapons/ships that make it almost pointless to design \"small\" if not literally irrelevant, than see \"balancing\" on things which in my opinion doesn\'t seem critical yet and would require additional layers of coding to the level of new features rather than mere balancing.

Mostly just my opinion. As said, currently it\'s not only possible but almost easy to make weaponry able to annihilate not just ships but entire planets. Until that is balanced to more \"normal\" levels, I\'d rather not see changes which would probably not only just add currently uneeded complexity to the code(though I\'m no programmer so it\'s hard to judge) but take aw one of the few protections players have to protect \"their\" stuff, PVP server or not(since everyone knows that even on non-PVP server \"Griefers happens\" sometimes).