Server Sustainability

[War Dog]

So after playing on a block-purchase BP server for awhile; I'm a bit disconcerted.

Most recipes require planet blocks; recipes that require manufacturing items also use planet blocks since manufacturing items require planet blocks. The only way to acquire enough planet blocks to use in a decently sized factory is to, of course, strip planets (And maybe small amounts can be acquired in pirate loot and asteroids).

Planets do not reform, and the only way to get more is to move farther away. And once those are gone, move even farther away. Eventually leaving a massive hole of worthless space possibly hundreds of sectors wide around spawn.

Compounding this is the faction claiming of planets making them inaccessable and greedy players mining entire planets. And the god-awful re-rolling recipe system which wastes even more blocks (And removing the block loss just makes it a continous buy/sell until you get the recipe you want).

And forget any form of player interaction with each other, especially on servers with a low speed cap. Who's going to spend 30 minutes getting from point a to point b just to see someone's ships?

Thus, every server that doesn't use blueprints or requires block-based blueprints is doomed to an eventual block-death of the universe where players eventually quit due to lack of interaction and new players face a barren landscape driving away nearly all of them eventually forcing a server reset or some massive admin intervention. The more players on a server, the faster their inevitable doom approaches.

Even on servers with credit-purchased BPs allowed, shops will fill up with blocks; forcing players to fly further and further away just to sell their blocks. A much slower version of the above. The trading guild's impact is negligible as they only appear in sectors with active players near them (And immediately go into a time-frozen state when they leave).

I know the recipe system is flawed and will be changed, but until then is there a way to make servers more sustainable?

 

[Wade]

I agree



I was jus tthinking the other day that maybe not making planets salvageable and instead have asteroids and comets you have to chase and salvage that randomly spawn as sources for materials and possibly wrecked ships that can be salvaged that also randomly spawn

 

[omelet]

bigger planets

slower salvage capability

this would slow the effect at least

 

[z1967]

You have a very good point, evantually, all the shops will be overstocked or all the easy acess resources will be gone. I know first hand how OP the factory system is (several trillion L1 ores and 40 million shield blocks) so it should be one of the next things to be balanced. Another temporary solution too the servers-with-credit-BP, is an option to renable shops haveing infinite money. Although this also creates a few new balance issues, at least new players will have a place to sell their ores. having a \"restock_shops_all\" command would be an alternate and it would stock all shops that are in active sectors or something like that. IDK, I am not a clever man but I have a feeling that quite a few of you are.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

Currently it\'s possible to create infinite item generators. For example, you might get a recipe for lava that uses ice as its only ingredient, and a recipe for ice that uses lava as its only ingredient, and set them up in a loop to produce infinite lava and ice from nothing.

With enough luck (buying and selling recipes) you can set up many of these infinite item generators and get tons of free blocks of many different types. Once this is done you can use the free blocks as ingredients for other recipes.

For an example; here\'s a picture of my factory/station (on NASS main server):



This factory produces almost every block in the game (I didn\'t bother with normal hulls).

Once anyone has a factory like this the server is sustainable, as all blocks can be created from nothing.

The main problem is getting enough blocks for the initial recipes (I used a few short-cuts, destroyed several planets and visited several hundred shops). However; one player can create something like this in about 1 week, and a faction of 10 players might be able to do it in 1 day.

Of course I\'m not suggesting that any of it is sane or logical; I\'m only saying that it\'s possible to have a sustainable server.

In the longer term, the game is alpha and will need to be fixed/improved; and sooner or later Schema will have to make fixes/improvements that aren\'t compatible with the current game. When this happens (and I\'m guessing it\'ll have to happen several times before the game reaches \"beta\") we will all have to discard all our ships and/or all our universes to update the game. There just isn\'t any point caring about sustainability at this stage.

 

[omelet]

nice picture!

i dont know that it is a question of sustainability or just that people are destroying the universe in that server.

It is not necessary to mine close to an entire planet\'s worth of stuff to get a factory like that, but that doesn\'t mean that people won\'t strip the universe completely with salvagers anyway..