I like the idea and mechanics look interesting but devs should not put any more work into beta. Right now, things are very low scale because of the population and therefore, really hard to see what is going to happen when more people show up and want beta access.

The real problem lie in the fact that many "so called sandbox" players consider sandbox as a synonym of:

*hardcore pvp
*full loot ffa
*more generally griefer and rpk heaven....

You guys are totally wrong. Sandbox is not that. Some are arguing they dont want their game to become a Wowlike, that why you see go back to wow/swtor/whatever "themepark" game.

A TRUE sandbox can exist without a single pvp option, only pve. Again the balance between creation and destruction is off in this game and other so called sandboxes.

What majority of "so called carebears" wants is NOT being held by the hand and taught what to do like in a themepark game. They want to CREATE something, be it robots, structures, empires, wars, a STORY.  They would accept the fact that all they build can be destructed, if only the ONLY purpose of the majority of players was not ONLY destroy their stuff, for no particular reason.

Some like to build, some like to destroy. Its in the big scheme of sandbox mmos. But the truth is the "creators" get bored if what they do has no meaning except be a target or a "prey" as some like to say.

The peoples that say "advertise the game!!!" so we have many players. You guys are completely wrong. We had at a time a good 800 concurrent players at peak. Where are they?

The real problem is that the interesting zones of the game aka beta, where everything can and will happen, are empty. And the alpha is made less and less attractive in comparison, to protect the "risk VS reward" that some like to defend.  So the alpha dwellers are less and less, and a new player see an empty world ect...

So i will just say this for the "hardcore pvp crowd"  REMOVE THE *** OF YOUR EYES!!

The games dying, no PBS can save it if a fresh and positive base of "carebears" cant feel happy and participating actively in the STORY of the sandbox.  Mining or farming in poor alpha ressources is not enough.

What will happen with PBS guys? We all know it, certain peoples already said what they will do: GRIEF.  All they can, because thats how they enjoy the videogames. Who will build them? Not much, the strongest of the strongest.

Nobody asks himself why theres a new corp made of many strong and known old vets appearing? (eHarm)  IMO its a very very bad sign for the current playerbase health, understand who can.

TERRORIST WINS!  Flashes across 250 screens.

There's already a lot of information on how gamma outpost defense is going to work, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this type of mechanism, but it doesn't seem like the direction the devs are likely to go.

Saps need to be scattered throughout out the island with 12 on each island. Active saps change every hour, the open sap closes if not completed and one sap randomly opens up elsewhere on the island there is no way of knowing that a specific sap is open unless you actively roam the island visiting each one or each sector.

to get a can from the sap it has to be completed (ie no sit for an hour to get a can anymore). Sap Cans no longer drop loot instead they drop island specific terminal stability tokens. a terminal's stability can be decreased by depositing the tokens into a station stability terminal (attack) or similarly can be increased by droping tokens into a terminal stability terminal (defence). the terminals are similar to those you find in missions requiring you to drop an item in to fulfil an objective. however there is a limit at how much a terminal can be increased / decreased within a 24 hour period, per direction eg. it can be increased by 25 and decreased by 25 withing a 24hours period based on a timer rather than server time.

The tokens can also be turned in for packages (similar to the Aids over the christmas period) there would be different tiered packages requiring more tokens with better loot the hire the tier. The packages would also be themed eg. "Industrial" would contain a random allocation of ores / Industrial mods, "Scientific" would contain CTs (which might including possibly a ct for probes / walls / wall maint. ) and or Kernals, "Mobility" might contain  a random selection of teleporters , "Weapons" have weapon mods, "Armour" has armour mods, Engineering has engineering mods etc.

These packages would be obtainable from any syndicate store of the same colour as the island the token was recieved from (eg. Alsbale and Norhoop stability tokens can be turned in at any alsbale / norhoop terminal / outpost but also at NV and Hersh Outposts and terminals)

+1 to the OP for making a suggestion of how to improve intrusions although i don't like the merging of pvp and Pve on beta. maybe that is an idea for gamma instead?

SAPs changed from about every 3 days, to about every 10 hours, this would move it to every hour.

I'm not sure faster SAPs, even with a token system, is the answer to making outpost owners more active on their islands.

The issue will always be the same, changing the mechanic isn't going to help. If the defender doesn't have the players online to counter the attacker, they won't undock. If that means they can't keep an outpost, then they'll lose it, but with beta outposts, there's no game mechanic that will 'force' players to come out to play.

What needs to happen, is the formation of larger corps, either by consolidation or introduction of a large number of new players, and of course, an actual 'reason' to hold a beta outpost.

We did indeed anni, but even fixing the 'reason' to hold an outpost won't make the reality of holding one change.

Our discussion also touched on the population, distribution of players, and the concept of a 'corporation'.

In many aspects, its much too easy to create a corporation. Fundamentally there's a difference between a 50 player corporation and 50 player alliance of (5) corporations.

Having our player resources divided amoung too many corporations is weakening the game. The arguement could be made that many corps promotes smaller PVP play, and while that may be true to some extent, there also needs to be large (measured in active players) 'anchor' corps.

There's no costs associated with creating a corp, the folder costs are minimal, and wholly optional. There's also no lower limit to how many players a corp can have.

With a greater population, having more corps provides diversity and options. With a low server population, too many corps dilutes the available manpower.

I certainly am not promoting a situation where there are only 5 or 6 player corps on the whole server, or trying to artificically create 500 man corps, as small corps certainly have niches to fill also. But, looking forward to the next expansion of Gamma islands, we're already looking at trying to game around smaller corps with defenses to cover short-falls. Even alliances, with numerous small corps, will still have a lot of trouble taking advantage of the expansion.

There's also the danger of any single corp becoming too large of course, but at this point it seems less of an issue then dilution.

The issue about sandbox mmos is it almost never plays out the way it's favourable to the game play, specially with such a small player base.

Back on topic now ,and the reason I came up with this idea, is that gamma will most likely take the reign on territorial warfare, my idea for the  Pve aspect is to make it somewhat a complete different system to gamma with some changes form my original idea it would just entail gaining faction standings  to gain access to OP and all it's facilities using current stability system, with no mechanic for the 'enemy' to take over. Somewhat similar to faction null sec in stEVE.

Again, simply changing mechanics can't generate players out of thin-air to undock to do this 'patrolling'.

It's simple PVP math.

If I have enough power (players/experience/equipment) to counter the attacking threat, then we'll undock and defend. If not, there's no reason to undock, because we'll lose the bots/modules AND STILL lose the SAP. If we're out 'patrolling' and an overwhelming force shows up, then we'll make for the outpost, because again throwing away bots and still losing the sap makes no sense.

The only 'winner' here are the attackers, if they have a blob, that either get the SAP's without a fight or get a lot of free kills AND the SAPs.

I don't think its 'no need to fight', my impression is that many players WANT to fight, it's simply that the small active player bases of each corporation doesn't provide enough man-power to accomplish it.

All this talk about changing mechanics is simply entertainment at this point, with no real value. The game keeps pushing toward small scale pvp, which is all well and good, but there's also much less ... "margin of error"?? in group sizes. By this I mean, if groups of 6 are out roaming, and there is a (5) player difference, that's significant (1 vs 6 or 6 vs 11), but if the relative group size is 25 then with +/- 5 either side still has a fighting chance.

I'm not promoting the need for groups of 1000, but the mindset here for 'small' needs to shift from under 10 to around 50 being 'small'.

There are enough players to form bigger battles, they're just spread out over 50 corps 'doing their own thing'.

Alliances of 'many' small corps are doomed to fail, because thier all still going to be doing thier own thing, just in an alliance that doesn't operate.