• JOKE
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Topic: Make Perpetuum great again

Inda asked me to write what I think, although god knows I don’t think you will do any of it.



But .. a way to bring the game back. All of this isn’t perfect solutions but in theory is stuff you can do pretty quickly before having a proper fix list later. You may consider this a lot of steps backward but when you have walked in to a field of landmines and lost 99% of your troops it’s the only way to get out alive.



Balance:



1)      Remove Gamma. Until your population recovers its just empty space or unassailable places to create wealth
2)      Bring back the old ore mechanics with static massive red spots on beta and less beneficial ones on alpha. The dynamic spawns made beta industry harder and alpha industry easier. And never ending spawns of the same ore type is a recipe for disaster (as eve found out recently).
3)      Revert the recycling nerf and revert plasma. Both these changes made you not bother to sell your loot and made you nic independent. It was market breaking and caused the emptiness you see today. You also don’t need plasma with the new missions and its just a cause of a lot of botting / beacon pit crazyness as well as people having millions of old modules they don’t sell because they are worthless.
4)      Revert all mech / balance changes including diminishing returns until we are back before the horrific imbalance that created undemobable bots. It was really well balanced before. Its just got steadily worse since.
5)      Bring the syndicate bots back to the drawing board. As a rough rule of thumb new mechs and content should be awesome and then nerfed a couple of times back to sanity until the new awesome thing comes. That’s what gets people interested, makes a fotm that’s exciting and causes them ice sales.


Make Beta great again!

The aim is to reduce risk





6)      Make Beta 1 stations unlocked (but still able to be taken). Yes that dead horse. Review it once the population rises perhaps but for now lets go back to post release mechanics.
7)      Remove detectors from the game and nerf the view range of the smaller bots and mechs. No more seeing an island in thirty seconds. Make roaming great again.
8)      Increase the undock vulnerability. All those undock and look guys can get bent.
9)      Restrict missions to station owners. Give a reason for ownership.
10)   Increase the loot drop rate for PvP to 100%
11)   Allow jumping with a PvP flag only from beta to beta, not beta to alpha




Market



12)   NPC sell orders for all Mechs and bots (not heavies or gliders) at a price that’s above mineral cost
13)   NPC sell orders for weaponry up to tech 3 (until the market is back)

PVE



14)   Bring back the old squad mission money. Changing this was the worst act of seppuku I’ve seen in this game. People loved it and you *** it up despite us all begging.
15)   Mining and harvesting missions should put the equivalent amount of material in the local station on an NPC sell order
16)   The new beacons are fine but the pay out is horrible, make them in line with squad missions
17)   The chance based tickets for items are fine as a concept but they should be decent pay out instead of useless. Start a thread asking for pay out ideas.
18)   Bring back red spawns and decent observers everywhere


That will do for now. Most of this is just removing the terrible mess you have made with balance and risk / reward. Some of it people won’t like and in a mature game they will be right but you need it to be easy to grow and play and engage right from the beginning when your game is empty.



Once all that is done (and only after its done) you can do a wipe of assets, skillpoints and wallets (leave the tech tree for corps and individuals) and make the game FTP. You can make money through skillpoint starter packs and ice.

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns us, “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags."
  • ETHOS
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

I agree with a lot of this, but I think a few things are overlooked in the balance rollback, and a few things we can do as players that can solve some of the other problems.


-------Balancing-----------
Overall, I think dev-time is better spent on other features and game world issues.  But if this truly would bring old players back too, then this is a close 2nd in priority

I think there are some good balancing changes that are worth keeping.
+The speed increase (and subsequent HM reduction, but higher than original) is good to let players spend more time doing things, less time walking.
+Mass increase to plates: awesome.  If you want to be demob resistant, you also got to be slow.
+Surface size/hit dispersion increase on medium weapons: also great.  Hard to hit small targets, can't one shot demob bots; good!

-The tuning changes are not good, and have catastrophic effects on the pvp landscape, and will tank the PVE/material market if there was enough player density to exploit it.  The metis outperforms a riv mk2 in mining simply because of an additional high slot.  Most use T2 smalls for mining and harvesting, instead of T4 mediums to take advantage of the exponential bonus explosion and to cut down the accum cost.   The gropho has the best alpha and dps, sustainable dps at that because of the low accum cost on the base weapon.  Its just all silly.  Now green fits are not about variety, but about max-dps.  Thats the opposite of what the tuning change was supposed to do!

I agree with the syndicate buff.  However they should be the best in-their-role, but not better than a mk2 in another role (like the metis miner/harvester fit I describe).  And to an extent they do this, and serve unique roles.  I would advocate creating a real niche for syndicate bots.  The ewar syndicates should get unique bonuses to demob or... something..
Surface size and slightly better signal doesn't really catch anyone's attention as a worthwhile consideration over mk2s.

----------Game world/PVE------------
Red spawns on Alpha 2's = good.  Static or isolated areas so movement is possible, but where some mining and assignments would be disrupted or at least require combat support (what?! cross-profession cooperative play?!).

Agreed: squad missions need to be brought back.  I routinely advise new players to drop squad when they run assignments because it benefits no one.  It cuts their earnings, they take on more difficulty, and 9/10 of the payout disappears.  Even if we participated: it takes longer, the payout is less, in nic, tokens, rep, everything.
If you are worried about inflation from assignments, id look at how quickly I grind 1 bil nic harvesting with a Metis, or how fast a DPS gropho wipes a combat spawn.


---------Things we can do: player initiatives------------
For things like opening beta outposts, and market.  Players can do this!
Hell I'll open Initia.
Red vs Blue also introduces opportunities for new players to get onto Beta and have some guarantee of reasonable access and fights.  RvB could go NRDS, who knows!

The market, this too is easily combated with players that login and play the game.  I've already begun to seed non NPC supplied goods (T2-T4 and bots), and Jasdemi's donations have radically increased these volumes now on the general markets and brought down prices.

The reason I advocate for the community taking these things on is:
A) it makes you *** log on and play-- I know how awful...
B) Dev-time can then be more focused on things players can't do (like seed Red spawns)

  • RAD
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

Thought I'd disagree with Jita as his suggested actions seemed a bit extreme, but the only thing I can really disagree on with him is 100% drop in loot.

I'd like more red spawns, and especially more observers. Observers are about the only big challenge in PvE in this game and they are REALLY hard to find, unless your gamma outpost is right on their route.

Removing gamma (and even closing beta 2 for a while?) will bring back more pvp, as well as all his other suggestions.

In my opinion one of the biggest issues was unlimited epriton respawn with random locations. Fixed locations gave you a hunting ground. Not sure if you need to put a limit on the epriton amount, if you limit it to certain locations it will increase risk already and you will have to defend miners again.

Also yes, please remove the balance patch. While I personally am a BIG fan of diminishing returns and love to see diverse fitting ideas, having to drive a gropho because it dominates in DPS, alpha, range and accumulator efficiency is just.. very irritating!

Take your time, ask for our input and work on it.

Also please let us know about financial needs and think about crowdfunding ideas. I'd be happy to throw in extra €€ if I see communication+results

  • ETHOS
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

Khetar wrote:

Also please let us know about financial needs and think about crowdfunding ideas. I'd be happy to throw in extra €€ if I see communication+results

Devs, people like this game.  If you say there is a way to keep it alive, chances are people will rally to support that.

  • BKK
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

Writing my part in colors into the quote (with propper formating big_smile)

Jita wrote:

Balance:

  1. Remove Gamma. Until your population recovers its just empty space or unassailable places to create wealth
    agreed

  2. Bring back the old ore mechanics with static massive red spots on beta and less beneficial ones on alpha. The dynamic spawns made beta industry harder and alpha industry easier. And never ending spawns of the same ore type is a recipe for disaster (as eve found out recently)
    agreed about the instant respawn. the implemented system does by definition not work (a new deposit is generated as soon as the total falls below a certain threshold. this means, it always generates a new deposit after one is mined out.
    the dynamic spawn system is perfectely fine. the distribution of the minerals in stuff that is produced is what makes beta so pointless - there is only epriton to mine

  3. Revert the recycling nerf and revert plasma. Both these changes made you not bother to sell your loot and made you nic independent. It was market breaking and caused the emptiness you see today. You also don’t need plasma with the new missions and its just a cause of a lot of botting / beacon pit crazyness as well as people having millions of old modules they don’t sell because they are worthless.
    agreed partially. plasma is crap - a per kill bounty payout would have been the right thing.
    Loot tables are crap to begin with. fragments, "tier0" items and rare higher tier drops should have been the thing to do. having tier1 drops as default has always been a bad idea.
    recycling of fragments and tier 0 modules should be the job of "scavangers"

  4. Revert all mech / balance changes including diminishing returns until we are back before the horrific imbalance that created undemobable bots. It was really well balanced before. Its just got steadily worse since.
    maybe. balance was never good, and got worse with every step that removed rock/paper/scissors. aka when long range weapons got their accumulator usage reduced, and all the different weapons got their traits equalized.
    ontop of that, PVP ammo introduction and injector ammo nerf put the nail into the faction balance

  5. Bring the syndicate bots back to the drawing board. As a rough rule of thumb new mechs and content should be awesome and then nerfed a couple of times back to sanity until the new awesome thing comes. That’s what gets people interested, makes a fotm that’s exciting and causes them ice sales.
    disagree


Make Beta great again!
The aim is to reduce risk

  1. Make Beta 1 stations unlocked (but still able to be taken). Yes that dead horse. Review it once the population rises perhaps but for now lets go back to post release mechanics.
    disagree. just the intrusion system is crap

  2. Remove detectors from the game and nerf the view range of the smaller bots and mechs. No more seeing an island in thirty seconds. Make roaming great again.
    agreed. detection system needs only be there to counter masking. not increasing viewing range. the game was great with max 1km viewing range, and ~800m combat range MAX. even the robot speed made more sense that time

  3. Increase the undock vulnerability. All those undock and look guys can get bent.
    disagreed - the vulnerability and such is just a baindaid to the unnecessary system to dock in the first place.

  4. Restrict missions to station owners. Give a reason for ownership.
    disagreed - after all i am for docking restrictions

  5. Increase the loot drop rate for PvP to 100%
    actually, i would forbid the ability to destroy cargo completely. IMHO cargo you "destroy" should simply drop into a container. give it two options - "abandon" and "drop". one would drop it into an open fieldcontainer, the other one in a 5 minute protected
    suddenly, "piracy" would be a thing. if you shoot someone, his cargo mostly explodes. if you want his cargo, you can give him the option to survive and drop. and last but least, you would remove the artifical need for the infinite black-hole fieldcontainer on the market

  6. Allow jumping with a PvP flag only from beta to beta, not beta to alpha
    no need to, if they would get back to a crime&punishment system, instead of the bandaid-crap-alpha/beta system to begin with?

Market

  1. NPC sell orders for all Mechs and bots (not heavies or gliders) at a price that’s above mineral cost

  2. NPC sell orders for weaponry up to tech 3 (until the market is back)


don't see how that would even create a market or help the game
PVE

  1. Bring back the old squad mission money. Changing this was the worst act of seppuku I’ve seen in this game. People loved it and you *** it up despite us all begging.
    meh, maybe they should actually make squads squads first. but agree - the incentives to do stuff together are -100% (yes, negative)

  2. Mining and harvesting missions should put the equivalent amount of material in the local station on an NPC sell order
    you think to small here. but a relation between the missions and the NPC market would be great

  3. The new beacons are fine but the pay out is horrible, make them in line with squad missions
    already covered by the requeste to change loot-tables

  4. The chance based tickets for items are fine as a concept but they should be decent pay out instead of useless. Start a thread asking for pay out ideas.

  5. Bring back red spawns and decent observers everywhere
    agreed. non-agression ENEMY NPCs are plain stupid

*Disclaimer: This post can contain strong sarcasm or cynical remarks. keep that in mind!
Whining - It's amazing how fast your trivial concerns will disappear

6 Reply by Inda (edited by Inda 2017-06-02 19:07:20)

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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

FIRST: Thank you Jita! I really appreciate your writes!


I would start from where we are now, you have many ideas seems like a bit impossible now, so my suggestion is to take what we have now and use that as a basic.

One idea I really like, and we can implenet just right now I think:

"10)   Increase the loot drop rate for PvP to 100%"

Energy to Earth!

18.01.2014. [12:57:58] <BeastmodeGuNs> after that i remembered all those warning about 1v1 you lol, and i found out why xD
  • JOKE
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

I think you misunderstood Inda. If you do all of those things I'd give the game a 1 in 10 chance of building the thirty or so concurrent users you would need to even consider going ftp. Anything that isn't sweeping and noticeable would never get people logging in.

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns us, “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags."
  • JOKE
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

The biggest thing I agree with, and the only thing I really give credence to actually working to bring anyone back to the game, and get new players to go again would be a complete wipe with free to play. You could even work it into a b2p wall at some point, but the biggest thing would be a complete wipe and fresh restart. Anything else is slapping a bandaid on a sinking ship with only the propeller above water.

  • CIR
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

I remember back in 2010-2011 the Devs were saying they were developing Perp for ~10 years. I could be wrong but whatever. Do you think after ~20 years of working on the same game, having it crash & burn 6-7 times, they still feel like working on it? Personally I feel like they've given up and the new bots were the "last hurrah".

10 Reply by Rowboat (edited by Rowboat 2017-06-02 22:24:49)

  • CIR
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

More to the point has anyone heard a word from zoom?

I think the only way to salvage this game is to shut it down.  upgrade the graphics , repackage it, add a *** load of content and start over.  It is a great game, but lets face the fact boys its over.  I personally had a lot of fun met a lot of great people and a few bad ones, however as the game currently stands its not worth going back to.

P.S. I'd like to thank all the cry-babies that forces the devs into making the game even worse. 

P.P.S. Keep doing what ur doing zoom i think its working.

  • ETHOS
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

Even CIR came back 2nd time, ehy not 3rd ?

well Reset and F2P could do something I  think, but before they change the latest Balance.

Energy to Earth!

18.01.2014. [12:57:58] <BeastmodeGuNs> after that i remembered all those warning about 1v1 you lol, and i found out why xD
  • OTHERS
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

I tend to agreed with Jita on his change plan. There is a universal recognition that the reversal of the awful balance patches would go a long way to set up good pvp.

Good PVE content is also vital.

A lot of Dev energy went into syndicate bots that were in fact marginally better  than tech 1. Make them worth buying.

Later let the story add that the Nian's have captured and re-engineered them into tech 3 invasion npcs that can have a chance to drop a CT that makes 2 bots and so on.

Anyway the game is loved and people are wanting and willing for it to grow, but have some frustration at gameplay decisions that sucked the life out of playing.

13 Reply by Lobo (edited by Lobo 2017-06-03 15:41:07)

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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

I think Rowboat is on the right path..... Shut it down upgrade the graphics and engine.... Come on tiles dictate robot size. Bla bla bla its always the engine's fault with the devs. The list of horrible horrible patches goes on for as long as I've played the game. I remember when perp was a fun smaller alternative to EVE. Now its a dumpster dive outdated game with good mechanics. GL,.

Shut the server off update the graphics and Engine. Go with a kick-starter for PERP 2 and get some backers and some $$$$$ (not hard names in game like mods or mechs names for backers). Make some good decisions with ADVERTISEMENT. Hire some kids from University that need to have programming and coding  projects on their Resumes. If it was hard there wouldn't be so many *** games on steam. greenlite! on Steam go for a big Release date with lots of ADVERTISEMENT on EVE based sites, RPS and a few other gaming sites would be perfect.

They could if they really recommitted to it they could have a Perp 2 server with a new engine and tons of money from backers in 2 years easy.

Anonymous: lobo is the only hero left in this god foresaken game / :also, Lobo is god among men
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

I vote for perp 2

just chalk perp 1 up as an epic failure learn from your mistakes and try again

15 Reply by Inda (edited by Inda 2017-06-04 15:44:10)

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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

Well, I think also
Perpetuum 2.0
is a valid option, the preoblem what the DEVs want, I dont think they have an intention to make that.

So I think we can have 1-2 more years easily with some smart changes and advertisement.

Energy to Earth!

18.01.2014. [12:57:58] <BeastmodeGuNs> after that i remembered all those warning about 1v1 you lol, and i found out why xD

16 Reply by Jita (edited by Jita 2017-06-04 19:37:30)

  • JOKE
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

I don't know why people want a reboot. The problem isn't the game they have. It started great, well balanced the best PvP in a game I've played, the only lacking thing this game ever had was in its decision making.

Perpetuum since release has made decision after decision designed to balance or release content that is just poor. It's not the content that sucks, it's the decision making. A reboot wouldn't help if the decisions were the same.

Just imagine if the graphics were amazing and we could play underground and Vs multi tile mechs .. if the balance is this horrific would it be fun? If the PVE encouraged solo play and the only way to make money was with havesting missions would that be fun? If the basis of warfare encouraged two sided conflict which inevitably led to one sided hegemony would that be fun?

It's NOT the game. It's the decisions.

And let's be real about this, the Devs have known some decisions are universally wrong for a long time. They don't act. They are so scared to admit an error they press on and amend that error rather than backtrack and move forward from stable ground.

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns us, “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags."
  • CIR
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

Seriously though, with the current game do you think history wouldn't repeat itself?  How many great suggestions came from people desperately trying to keep the game alive?  A reboot would wipe the slate and allow them to start over.  They already have a great foundation.  All they would have to do is tweak it here and there.  I think we can all agree something drastic needs to change, however i believe the current game doesn't warrant fighting for.  Since i didn't like it when soldiers complain and dont have any corrections to help the situation here are mine:

1) Missions, holy *** *** you made one of the only group activities obsolete which made me play by myself.
2) Beacons, Zoom if you actually went out and ran enough beacons to unlock anything on the corp tree you're a lying
                  *** piece of ***.  The new system is pure cancer.
3) Lock Beta missions(Field Terminals) to station owners, but allow people to run missions out of Terminals i.e. ICSB. 
4) Gives people a reason to live on gamma you buffed beta so much its not worth living in gamma.
5) Diminishing returns: Great idea, however poor execution take this out until you can find a true balance. 
6) More PvE. I think we can all agree PvE keeps noobs and vets into the game while not pvping.

  • ETHOS
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

If there was a rollback of the balancing, a small boost to the new bots, and a lot more PVE content, I believe the game could really pick up. Give nice carebear content on alpha, beta and gamma, and PVP will follow!
Too much focus has been on changing balance, or developing/tweaking for example gamma content, rather than focusing on provising content for the more casual players.

If there is just a reset/wipe, what would that help? I would for sure just uninstall the game and move on with my life.

  • OTHERS
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

Again, all the last 3 posts are spot on. But alas, this has all been said many times to deaf ears. I so want this to succeed, but there seems a fundamental stubbornness around recognizing the above, esp the balance changes. Sigh!!!!

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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

is all pointless until DEVs are answering

everyone is so "hey let's do this or that and that will help for sure"

forums are full of your proposals, one more wouldn't change anything

I would rather see Zoom saying "hey I'm still alive working on %change%

I would rather see at least any word from any DEV

weekly, monthly, whatever, but on regular basis

even if it's just "oh look there is a cat behind our window oh wow lol"

Have a productive day, runner!
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  • ETHOS
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

So back to the original topic, one thing that was suggested was make static ore spawns so people could just sit there and wait for a miner to show up and put reds on alpha 2, I strongly disagree with that for the industrials sake. I have 6 characters running around 4 of which I have them drive mk2 scarabs loaded with mk2 rivelers and symbionts with their fits. If those changes were implemented idk about other industrials, but I like to not have to worry of being blown up so I would just say bye to the rare ore and mine on alpha 1, I would not care.

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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

^same

  • RAD
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

ADFormer wrote:

So back to the original topic, one thing that was suggested was make static ore spawns so people could just sit there and wait for a miner to show up and put reds on alpha 2, I strongly disagree with that for the industrials sake. I have 6 characters running around 4 of which I have them drive mk2 scarabs loaded with mk2 rivelers and symbionts with their fits. If those changes were implemented idk about other industrials, but I like to not have to worry of being blown up so I would just say bye to the rare ore and mine on alpha 1, I would not care.

And this is exactly what's wrong with the current system. The way you explain it is how it should be. There should be a LOT more risk on beta and you should not be able to afk mine anywhere once you figured out the NPC routes.

I have 10 riv mk2 - able characters and would rather only see 2 in the field than play with the hello kitty world that it is now, rendering any kind of material worthless.

Back then epriton actually meant something to our new corp, now it means 2 hours of play for 2 days of production - especially with the insane tuning boost and small miner abuse.

  • BKK
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

Khetar wrote:
ADFormer wrote:

So back to the original topic, one thing that was suggested was make static ore spawns so people could just sit there and wait for a miner to show up and put reds on alpha 2, I strongly disagree with that for the industrials sake. I have 6 characters running around 4 of which I have them drive mk2 scarabs loaded with mk2 rivelers and symbionts with their fits. If those changes were implemented idk about other industrials, but I like to not have to worry of being blown up so I would just say bye to the rare ore and mine on alpha 1, I would not care.

And this is exactly what's wrong with the current system. The way you explain it is how it should be. There should be a LOT more risk on beta and you should not be able to afk mine anywhere once you figured out the NPC routes.

I have 10 riv mk2 - able characters and would rather only see 2 in the field than play with the hello kitty world that it is now, rendering any kind of material worthless.

Back then epriton actually meant something to our new corp, now it means 2 hours of play for 2 days of production - especially with the insane tuning boost and small miner abuse.

QFT.
the ingame market was DEAD because nothing exploded in PvE.
I still have the VERY same MK2 Seth with the same lasers and tunings in my hanger for PVE that i have aquired a few month after release. And i have farmed 5th star npcs countless hours,
and loved to hunt down the grand observers on alpha1 with it - not for the stupid loot*, but in response to an alpha miners call for help.

The scarab is missing a rebalance patch anway... that thing is only so fragile because they didn't wanted to have another imba shield tanked hauler like the lithus. But what do you expect when pvp rules are made by dedicated griefers?

*Disclaimer: This post can contain strong sarcasm or cynical remarks. keep that in mind!
Whining - It's amazing how fast your trivial concerns will disappear
  • JOKE
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Re: Make Perpetuum great again

Scarabs are a cancer that I would remove. Smaller cargo means more trips and bigger risk. If also encourages people to live on beta as to hell with moving all the stuff back and forth.

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns us, “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags."