What ways can we mitigate the losing factor so that people don't rage quit. Station invulnerability does this somewhat, but it creates a very weird dynamic in the game in a PvP sense where you can't be conquered.
1. Make it 110% clear to every new player that they must do their designing in SP Creative, and then spawn their creations into MP.
2.
Turn off invulnerability & x12 mining bonus in MP, have each player spawn at a random shop instead of always at 2 2 2, and make losing a part of life - if you can't lose, it isn't a game.
I like this thread, BTW, so don't take my curtness wrongly please. I've never played a game where people didn't rage quit - even games where no one dies ever, so I think the goal might be better set at QQ reduction rather than elimination. I've played
over ten thousand of rounds of SC2 and watched my base completely wrekt in almost half of those, and 90% of the times when I QQ'd it was about me and my emotional state, not SC2 (although occasionally, rarely, I was legitimately pissed about some aspect of the meta).
In a game where losing is
guaranteed as a frequent outcome, losing won't cause excessive QQ. Because it's expected.
The QQ issue we face in MP here is, I believe, about player expectations of relative degrees of "safety" being shattered by the game's real inability to assure that even with insane HB invulnerability.
Your second suggestion could work very well as a specific game mode intended for those who faint at the sight of blood with invulnerability turned on. Capture the flag mode or something.
And I 100% agree that shipyards need to be made to work extremely quickly and easily both at spawning AND repairing ships. That is completely on point.
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We are supposed to have five: Evasion by size, effect-hardening of shields/armour, outranging/running.
"Supposed to" being a key issue here.
Evasion & range are hopelessly crippled by lag at combat sizes (ie, the sizes players in MP actually want their ships at before agreeing to leave their perma-safe HBs). If there were intelligent size caps, they would be powerful balances; I've flown microships repeatedly around hostile bases and ships bristling with turrets while missiles uselessly chased me, so
it's in the meta for sure, but only so long as you aren't near any planets or any large fleets or titans or overdocked giant HBs, because then the lag makes it so you only THOUGHT you were evading, and range is hopeless because you can't even pretend to lead a target that stutters into and out of reality.