Below I will list things of desire, necessity, and all around randomness that has come to my head recently! I would like these ideas to be further elaborated by the players who are roaming the forums.
#1 :
Packet Loss % shown next to the Ping at the bottom right! As many of you have learned recently you can have a beautiful ping and get booted from the server due to packet loss, but it doesn't show in your ping because its not latency it's straight loss of data!
#2 :
Terraforming Anchors! As it stands now, terraforming is supposed to not degrade around a gamma station in a certain range (when it works that way). But what about wanting to create a cool shape on the island? Well you are *** out of luck unless you carefully place stations to hold it up, which can be a problem as well as a waste of resources. Enter stage left, a terraforming anchor. Plug one of these puppys down and your terraforming wont degrade with in a 1,000m radius! Are they destructable? Of course! As long as you can make it past those turrets that guard them. Now this can take some tuning but I think would be viable, useful as a building tool, setting up perimiters and highways, or even making a pretty little bunker spot for the children to play. Heck can even make it have to be connected to a base or command relay to work so that it requires a little gas to maintain!
#3 :
Probes probes everywhere! Probes are awesome, everyone should have one, or ten. But their cost makes them prohibitive to use in quick temporary excursions (at least for the younger smaller groups.). Give the new guys a hand up, make 1 hour expiry probes that are tied to the player that drops them (max 5 per island at a time) and does not require skills to deploy! This can increase the amount of people venturing on to beta and heck even artifacters hitting gamma! And for those with a few extra bucks, we don't mind using the more permanent variety already in place for at home, so hand those kids some toys and send them off into the sand box to kick up dirt!
#4 :
Bacon!.... I mean Beacons. As it stands right now beacons are happily done in relative safety of Alpha, meaning there is no reason to really PvE on beta or gamma right? You are absolutely right! Alpha is a one stop shop! Well, lets mix this up a bit, what if we take those pesky Tier 4 and up mech and above (leave the smaller High Tech mobs up there so rookies can get a foot hold on their trees) and move them scaling to Beta and Gamma. This goes for beacons as well. Small beacons can be deployed on any island. 1 Stripe mech, on Alpha that's cool. 2 Striped mech, well that's HT Mechs that needs to be on Beta or Gamma, 3 striped Mechs, send those puppys to gamma too. Granted the issue of the cascading booms destroying loot is a problem, but this can be easily remedied. Beacon rats are immune to explody friends, and loot containers are immune to explodys too. This means that you can's one shot cascade a beacon wave like in the past, but at the same time beacons can be done in Beta and Gamma again properly! Now this doesn't mean you will be immune to explody things near you, far from it, if you beacon in pew pew land you need to be able to use some tactics to not die in a horrible fire! (Or do as long as I'm watching, I bought some more popcorn this week and need a reason to pop it.)
#5 :
Tool Tips! We all know tool tips are out dated, and many are not shown properly (Yes Zoom the shield question is what brought this to mind), I know the devs time is limited, hell MY time is limited! But there are a lot of players with time on their hands! Release the rest of the formulas to the Wiki, then allow players to submit via ticket (hell make a new category for it) their fixes to the tooltips rewritten to reflect the way things actually are.
#6 :
Hey, you know those tokens that just pile up everywhere? Yeah those ones in the "Liquid Beacons" folder in corp! How about we give them some use! I propose we put some ROTATING things up on the token market to make it more useful! How about a section of the market that (racially) choses at random some things to put on the market. Doesn't have to be fancy MK2 crap or anything, how about ohhhh maybe random (racially chosen by token) T4 gear, or some basic CT's etc. Heck you can even expand on this and have the Alpha shops CT choices go to Tier 2, Beta Tier 3, and PLAYER CONTROLLED BETA tier 4 CTs! (Granted 50P or less to make the mass builder still more profitable in the long run.) This gives yet more incentive to people venturing forth into the explody yonder lands, as well as giving a reason to log in each week to check the roulette wheel of prizes for all those hard earned tokens. Oh not to mention getting certain things into rookies hands that normally they would have to wait for 3-5 months to get their sticky fingers on so they can compete in the wild hills of yore!
#7 :
Hey you know that paint your bot thing you got sitting on the back burner? How about once you get this server thing worked out (and please to God move it from that horrid data center its in now) you can possibly make it usable! Oh schnap I know! How about we make it so BASIC colors can be purchased via tokens, and those really cool CUSTOM SHADED colors are purchasable via credits! (One of the most common rookie questions is what are credits useful for!) This can get a few extra bucks in your hands to help out your own cappuccino habits, and hell maybe keeping the server going in a better data center? I know if its priced right at least a dozen of my dudes would happily paint their bots AND RISK THEM ON THE BATTLE FIELD! I see disposable income coming in through this naughty pipe! Got it? Good, NEXT!
#8 :
Hey that Colixium stuff, yeah that junk in the ground of Gamma. It's useful for Scarab MK2's, buildings, and well... buildings! How about we do something with it! I know, how about we make up some T2+, T3-, and T4+ CT's that use it! We can even make them rare drops on officer beacons, and paired with the beacon idea above, will make them used more often and cause even more territorial warfare! Heck let's take this one step furthur, how about some fancy FACTION bot CT's in those there token markets? We can make them use some Collixium, and they can be a nice imbetween MK2 and MK1 bot (kind of like your shiny Vangaurd Mesmur that is out whack a moled by its MK2 cousin!). This give young pilots MORE REASONS TO MISSION! This gives older pilots REASONS TO SELL COLLIXUM. This gives beta and gamma crews REASONS TO OPEN TRADE AGREEMENTS! There ya go, new toys which can be naught but carbon copied, and tweaked a bit from something that already exists. New reason to mission. New reason to go to beta. New reason to go to gamma. New avenues for rookies to get in the game! Win-Win, oh and add that paint job thing with this, and we got more reason to BUY PAINT! Chaching!
#9 :
Volunteers. 99% of MMO's have em, you should too! You devs are cool and all, Zoom gettin in there and stirring the proverbial pot, CRM kickin' some data center sleeping tech's *** into gear, gargaj for.... well gargaj has some cool charts that I love to troll, would like to chatter him up a bit more though. This is cool and all, but hey lets face it, we need some volunteerism around these parts. If they have to sign some NDA's what ever, I've personally signed a few dozen of those things in the past and it was hella worth it even though I worked for free on a lot of those projects. I propose, that we get some people that are willing to do so to volunteer on some things like say, answer simple mechanics tickets! Or actively help (and moderate) the HELP channel in game! Or even, God help me, do some in game scheduled events! Lots of *** is doable here, and can spark some more interest, and not a dime would EVER have to come out of pocket.
#10 :
Last but not least in my forum rantage (mainly due to not being able to stay logged in at all), how about some PROPER access control mechanics for corporations. I have NEVER seen a corporation, real OR virtual use a single account EVER (at least not ones that are actual corps and not some idiot that filed SCorp because they thought it wise when they should have done an LLC). Break that *** up, doesn't need to be fancy, one general *** dumps into here wallet, one assignable wallet, and one 'savings' wallet with high access control. And on this note, I don't know any corporation that makes their employees take *** home to sell it online, so lets do a little bit of touching here so we can sell from our corp storage's! And finally on this rant, how about building? I don't expect those shiny new cabinets I ordered to be built in some employees garage, no I expect it to be done in the warehouse and shop of the corp I bought the damned things from! Why should that not be the same for corp jobs in game? If its corp materials, and corp CT, then it should be able to be done from, and delivered to the CORP STORAGE don't ya think?
This has been the Feature Discussion rant for February by yours truely, Amano/Ambe/Jade. Please feel free to go further into these ideas in discussion (AND THIS MEANS YOU TO MASTER DEVS!). These ideas are meant for the betterment of the Perpetuum project (granted once the servers stop wonking out). Keep it civil, and enjoy the irony I added to this months suggestion thread.
Peace,
Ambe
