Personally I always thought of sand boxes as a place you give people a set of tools to create with and it is up to that individual to think and solve problems and do what they can and come up with.
The server community is not ready for this thought. They will allways opt for the bigger ships when it comes to the typcial "anarachy" pvp servers out there.
It's just like in Minecraft: People could make a great pvp game out of it, if they wouldn't push all limits to its max and have less then less fun but more grind. But just like in Minecraft, the guys allways opt for full diamond armor (or mass>100k sized bad looking ships on servers like Brierie), and then they complain about this or that game mechanic that's broken. You know the only pvp ships I see looking for pvp on Brierie are doom cubes. I am not even willing to fight those because first of all they are too ugly to even get shoot at, and secondly I am pretty sure the little kid behind the cube is going to hate me for it (I am not the guy who is proud or happy when he lets others feel bad - just saying
).
Why don't they use 50k size limits on ships for pvp on servers??? Why this ridiculous gigantism? (rethorical question) There are like 10% of the playerbase who even have the time and the ability to design a ship bigger than 50k mass! Thats my first point. If we had a size limit on pvp we actually would shoot each other with our
own carefully designed ships and not this >100k low-"I slap many systems in my ship and its only effective because of its size and not because I know whats happening" tactic.
Get this straight: Just because 10% of the people understand how to design a 100k ship doesn't mean the other guys are able to do so as well. And why, WHY, should I play with this 90% of noobs and run around in their "ships" that took them 1 or 2 weeks to design but are only good because of its size instead of its carefull design. I despise a fight like that: Seeing: ok the enemy dude has a 100k ship; my ship is only 50k; his ship will win the fight not because he spend more time in designing its exterior or inner systems, but because he just slapped more and more onto it. We need that size limit - or we just fight each other in biger and bigger ships until the servers melt.
You know it would take me ages to build a 100k ship that I would be proud of. And also I am totally sure that we would never have a nice fight with those 500k sized things without lag or crashes:
Any person (with exepctions, but I mean the majority of the casual players here, so over 80% give or take!) who tells me, that he knows what he is doing when he designs any ship over 100k mass, should consider his sanity. Neither is there enough time to build so many systems into a ship, nor are there enough combatants to proof that this ship is good, and lastly: Do you know the blood and steel turnatement? There the most dedicated ships designers tried to combat each other in 10k mass sized ships. You know what happend? The server lagged really strong so it was barely playble. So if those ships, who are effciently and (supposedly) perfectly designed, allready lag the server if they are below 10k mass - why do you guys think that any bigger ship can be usefull for pvp if it is actually the fact, that the most efficiently designed competetive ships allready bug the server out at 10k?
The only pvp servers with size caps are small ones with not many visitors (Genxova and Sunworld imo). And even there is a ridiculous high cap of 500k mass. So yes: Imo we could have an incredible amount of fun in Starmade. But not with any ship bigger than 50k.
But the majority of the pvp players will never agree with me on that. They rather have no depth "fun" with 100k mass ships instead of having real tactical depth (and actually playable fights) with ships below 10k mass.
That doesn't mean I don't like big ships or blowing stuff up with big ship. I am just trying to say, that pvp would have more tactical depth in lower size limits. If a ship is big its ofcourse fun to destroy it - but then it's not about complexity but about size and action, but not about carefull design. Because carefully designed big ships take ages to build and there are not many builders out there (lets say not more than 50) that are able to.