Schema and Dev crew, this game has great MMO potential

[para-bellum]

First off, congrats and thanks to Schema and the Devs on this game. I was a minecraft fan from the get go. When I heard about this game, I was intrigued. I bought it almost immediately after trying it.

I played for a while single player, then decided to try it online. After seeing a few servers and the custom pirates, I started to feel that there was some potential for a more PVE MMO game here.

First - restricting custom pirates to certain zones: I ran into some pirates on one server that would blow through a frigate in a couple seconds. It took a long time to build a ship to tackle those. While this was a great challenge, the spawn was random and new players got frustrated. If you could include a server/blueprint setting that restricted certain builds to certain zones, that would make it much easier to tier zones. For example 0,0,0 - 10,10,10 could be NO pirate spawn. 10s-to-25s could be easy pirates, 25s-to-50s could be intermediates and anything beyond 50,50,50 could spawn some uber pirate blueprints.

Second - quantities. If you could also set some zones to spawn only 2 or 3 at a time, other zones can spawn 4-8, and the harder zones could spawn 10-15.

Third - PvP restricted setting. Possibly certain sectors prevent pvp... I've been on servers where some players delight in griefing new players. This is fine in the name of gaming freedom, but if we have certain zone ranges that prevent pvp damage, that would be less frustrating for new and/or younger players. People can PvP in the harder zones, but they will have to worry about pirates as well.

Fourth - Loot settings so that loot drops would scale with the size of the pirate.

Finally, Pirate bases on planets. These would be the ultimate challenge. Turrets, ships, and hopefully lots of loot. It would require a group of people to team up to take on these bases.

Anyways, again, love the work so far.

Para-Bellum

 

[Cirdanoth]

But, what would be the goal of this...? Beside chopping through pirate fleet after pirate fleet, or demolishing their home-planets? People like rewards, to go with their "grinding", and big rewards to go with their 'boss-mobs' of sort.

I'm not sure whether specifically running the game toward a more PVE MMO feel's the right thing for it.. But I'm sure some people might actually be able to make it so, through modding. It's probably just a matter of time.

 

[Zedrackis]

In order to really give this game an MMO feel you would need four things

• A bigger feeling universe: The current scale is very small by most standards due to everything being just a few sectors apart
• A more functional economy:
  • Shop blocks need to be more functional, configurable, and less buggy. Id like a way to only list items I want to buy and sell, and the quanities I want to buy and sell. Also the block seems to reset buy prices to sell prices at times.
    
  • Recipes need to be less absurdly random, Getting plants in recipes is way to common, recipe that uses the recipes output as an input is not unheard of.
    
  • Blueprints need to be more focused on acquiring resources instead of credits, and need to cost a little less to acquire be default.
    
  • Salvage cannons need to work with AI blocks if follow mode, and scale in range and power usage. Currently range is fixed at 100m, and power usage is non-existant
    
  • Credits needs to broken up into denominations, and banking needs to be put in place. As it is its much better and safer to trade in L5 minerals than actual credits.
  • In an ideal scenario the shops would only do the following:
    • give out free ship cores
      
    • let you trade any random stack of materials of a given size for any items recipe.
      
    • Let you list buy requests or sales entries for items at a price, quantity, and minimal increment of buy/sell quantity of your choosing and make the requests
• The NPC system needs revamp.
  • The pirate and trading guild factions should be done away with in favor of fully configurable NPC factions with various options of auto-generated stations/ships. Allowing admins to set a variety of features like random spawns.
    
  • A mission/quest system for each these factions that generates mission targets, and pays out rewards when you return on completion.
• A Solar system control mechanic
  • Allow only one faction home per solar system.
  • Allow players to claim star-systems, there by preventing others from entering their faction into stations/planets in that star system until the control is broken. Allow control to be made or broken by means of a faction-home structure.

 

[Syzygy]

This is a sandbox game. It doesn't need to be MMO-ized. Everything you are suggesting though, other than the star system control, are things that don't make this game more like an mmo. Pirate changes I believe were announced, due to the constant "Pirates are WAY too hard" and "Pirates are WAY too easy" constantly being posted, something to do with being harder the further out you go. Most likely, servers will be able to categorize pirate blueprints based on sector distance.

Servers can already customize pirate loot percentages, pirate blueprints, and safe sectors.

 

[para-bellum]

Zed, I like your suggestions. I don't know how complicated they would be to implement. I think the sector/spawn restrictions wouldn't be too hard, but I'm not a dev.

To the other guys, if you don't see value, you don't have to enable the features... I'm not suggesting that the game itself becomes and MMO... I'm suggesting there are some tools that could support that style server..

There are a LOT of players who prefer PvE to PvP. Yes, it's sandbox. If there were more tools and settings available, then you could use them or not use them. If you don't want to play on a server that is set up like an MMO, then find another. I'm just suggesting that some creative admins can make a PVE/MMO centric server to play on.

Ignite has tried this with what little they had to work with. A guy called Ronatobe tried making a server for his kid to play on and found that there just weren't quite enough tools to do what he had in mind and took the server down.

Anyways... it's a suggestion.

 

[Visitor]

I am not sure if it's a good time for such suggestion, no matter how (whether) viable it would appear to be. Lots of core features are yet to be added or changed so making an idea based on what possibly may not be there in the future, or be changed is of questionable use. I'd rather wait till the game is relatively finished, first.

 

[Miow22]

I dont know. I believe competitive players are gonna ruin others experience.

 

[Eelviny]

Servers just need to be given as much customisation as possible, in my opinion. Much more control over specific sectors, like whether pvp and other things are allowed, will allow server owners to create unique MMO experiences.
One thing I don't want to see is MMO features being hard-coded into the game. Just give server administrators ways to create an MMO experience, and it would encourage a wider range of servers. If someone wanted to just mess around and build, they can find a server that caters to this. If they wish to have a full-on MMO experience, they can find a different server that caters to this.