The way I understand it is thus: Ships uploaded to Starmade Shipyards can be used in these competitions, whereas those only uploaded to the community content site cannot. Now in order to address your concerns how about:Everything looks pretty cool, I especially like the cards but.
I can't get behind 'buying' ships.
I usually play single player with spurts of activity between friends. I play StarMade for the building experience. I regularly download ships to learn first hand how people achieved certain aesthetics or systems. Something which can be difficult to grasp in pictures (especially a one sided trading card).
Now you're saying I have to 'pay' or 'buy' blueprints in order to do this? I have to fiddle around with some sort of Metagame by putting my own ships for sale? That doesn't sound fun that sounds tedious.
And if I don't play by these rules I need to host my ships on a third-party sight and find other people who are willing to take the extra step to do the same on top of not being able to download ships on the site. Fun for everyone am I right?
Then there's the pure logistics of it, do you think that the creator of a super popular ship (ie Minotaur) downloads ships? Heck does he even play the game anymore? We'll see a few (possibly inactive) players sitting on MASSIVE stockpiles of these metacredits every once in a while downloading and equally big ship, but everyone else hangs at zero unless they themselves build a ship on par with the master builders.
Furthermore, this means that people won't download ships out of curiosity, they'll download ships they need. No one is going to download a 100 mass fighter, or a flying pickle, or a 1:1 Enterprise; they're going to download the ten thousand mass death machines because that's what they would use. That's what will get them the money. This will hurt hobbyists and new builders because how is someone whose spent a week in StarMade supposed to sell a flying brick? and how is he supposed to get better if he can't download a super good ship to see first-hand how to do it right?
Now if you want to give the creator a 'kickback' of ingame credits for someone downloading their ships be my guest. But adding a barrier of entry for anyone with simple curiosity of a ship's design is a serious step backwards.
I agree with you for the most part. The only potential interesting thing that I think should definitely be implemented is the faction shipyard thing. Having a more formal recognition of factions on the dock would be nice, and being able to transfer faction blueprints confidentially would be much easier if it didn't have to be done either serverside or in a PM, as server ship catalogs tend to get messy when you are looking for a specific ship. So maybe instead of this, have a factions section, which can be linked to the appropriate forum page, a shipyard page (with the cards, but none of the character stuff or the weird credit or level system. Just a way to look at ships at a glance to see if they are the right blueprints.) a home page, media (videos, screenshots), and a member list. Maybe, if you want to make it even more useful, have it so that you can have registries for factions similar to those for players. Then, a faction leader could add a registered faction with all its members etc. to a server, and manage ranks, membership, and blueprints from the dock.While a cool sounding concept, I see it as being detrimental when we already have a system of free information in place.
As somebody who likes to offer my ships freely and doesn't like the idea of a metagame that breeds elitism I really can't support this idea. I already find it a hassle when browsing the community content section and I want to download a ship that is only posted on a third party site. It would be incredibly inconvenient and disparaging to find a nice ship on the forums only to find out it is linked to "Starmade Shipyards" and I would have to "buy" it. It would be disadvantageous for anybody wanting to use the system to post the ships on the starmade dock as those ships are available freely and they won't make "money". I already feel there is too much "secret" and "exclusive" designs, while I understand it in context to faction wars I really don't want to see having to buy and trade added to it.
That'd be pretty awesomeAs long as we can make some sort of competition for Hearthstone i'm in!
Oops, let me clarify. This thread is about Bench's side project. Its all in the OP. Its not actually about the upcoming shipyard update. Anyway, a thread titled 'possible ways to repair your ship without paying' would draw a lot more attention on its own, anyway. I for one have been toying with ideas all dayWell, given that this is shipyard discussion it seems relevant. What I want to know is if there is a stopgap planned between now and implementation of the shipyard feature to help make ships easier to repair. No need to start a new thread and clutter things up imo