1 Reply by The Major

(68 replies, posted in General discussion)

Egil wrote:
The Major wrote:

Gamma islands will not solve either of these problems. They will be lawless territories controlled by powerful corporations that can afford the structures. They are not going to attract Billy Mission Runner into the game and off of Alpha. It's adding end-game content when there is barely and early or mid-game content to speak of.

When gamma-islands appear make the current beta-islands into alpha islands? hmm

I think you underestimate how much bigger the population needs to get to support a real economy.

We don't need double the number of islands. We need ten times the number of islands.

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2 Reply by The Major

(68 replies, posted in General discussion)

There are two very basic problems with this game that stunt it's ability to grow:

1: Not enough players that join will keep playing beyond the trial.
2: Even if the player base was ten times larger there is not enough physical space to support them.

The game NEEDS Carebears. I know some people hate them for whatever reason but to have a strong basis for an economy you need people living on Alpha in safety doing solo content. The majority of economic activity in Eve Online comes from this part of the game - Mission runners lose ships and equipment and need to replace it or upgrade what they have. In exchange they inject money and other non-manufacturable resources into the economy which other players buy and turn into stuff to sell back to them.

Right now if you are an industrial player then it's very likely that you have to mine and gather 90% of your own resources to make anything. Buying off the market isn't viable because the supply for resources isn't there from random solo miners and the demand for your goods isn't there from random solo mission runners.

The above can be solved by somehow retaining more players and giving them things to do an Alpha. If you solve this though we have problem 2...

One person can farm a good spawn. There are maybe a dozen non-mission spawns per alpha island and competition for the best spawns is currently quite low (it's very rare that I go to my favoured spawn and find somebody else there). More players massively increases competition for these spawns. See also missions: Each mission has spawns that are public access. With an increased population large enough to support a decent economy we would see queues for mission spawns that would rival an Apple product launch. A sizeable population would also completely exhaust the existing alpha island ore and plant resources in no time. The amount of physical space available has to increase significantly to enable a larger population.

Gamma islands will not solve either of these problems. They will be lawless territories controlled by powerful corporations that can afford the structures. They are not going to attract Billy Mission Runner into the game and off of Alpha. It's adding end-game content when there is barely and early or mid-game content to speak of.

One final fact that CCP have learnt at last in Eve: If people do not want to PvP there is no incentive large enough to tempt them into non-consensual combat. You can't force people to leave Empire in Eve and you can't force people to leave Alpha here. This means that if Alpha gets boring people don't move to Beta - they move to a different game entirely.

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3 Reply by The Major

(7 replies, posted in General discussion)

You can have this wall redesign for free:

Step the first: Remove all walls from the game. Don't really care how you handle the inevitable cries from people wanting their NIC back but this implementation cannot persist into the age of PBS.

Now we lay down a very basic framework for PBS.

Influence:
Outposts give influence/control in a radius around them. This area increases with the level of the outpost. Structures can be built within this area.

Structure Footprint and Slope Tolerance:
No structure can be built within 3 tiles of another structure. Structures have a slope tolerance. If any one tile that the structure occupies exceeds this tolerance then the structure cannot be placed. Basically large buildings need very flat areas. Small ones can be built on fairly steep slopes etc.

Power:
Power Generators are structures that must be built. They are solar powered (anything else doesn't make sense and I'm sick of refuelling from managing POS in Eve) and generate an amount of power relative to their physical size. All power is distributed via Nanotechnology (nanotechnology is like saying magic) to any structures that need it within the influence area. All structures except Power Generators consume Power.

CPU:
All structures consume CPU except for SuperComputers. Supercomputers generate Terraflops. I think you can see where this is going.

Barrier Nodes:
These are the new walls. They use a small amount of CPU and a moderate amount of Power (Something like automated turrets might use a lot of CPU and Mining rigs may need lots of both). A Barrier Node is a 1 tile targetable structure with the same slope tolerance as a light bot. Basically they can be placed almost anywhere and be shot by everybody.

Each Barrier Node will emit a plasma barrier that prevents bots from passing through it. This barrier can only be connected to one other Node so no T-Junctions can be formed just lines. You can ring them around if you want.

When a Barrier node is destroyed then that section of "wall" will disappear. If there is not enough power or cpu to run all the structures then structures will offline (either in order of largest consumption to least or at random if there is a stalemate).

Security:
If any structure starts to take damage then all members of the owning corporation will be notified via a ping on their radar.

The structures can be "built" using the plant growth system (IE progressing in stages and can be accelerated) but I'd say that's as far as the similarities with plants should go.

Naturally you can fit a great many different structure types into that framework including gates, turrets, mining rigs, harvesters, factories etc.

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