Kroth wrote:

Adding more islands wont stop the blob it'll just spread out the small number of Beta island living players even more and make fights and conflict even less likely.

When EVE started, there were MANY more systems than players and yet players managed to interact. How? There were vast areas of unused space with some concentrated hubs of people living together.

Why was this important? Because if you wanted to take the risk, there always was some corner of pvp space that you had the chance to claim as your own. It might not have been the best one out there, but it was definitely a step up from empire space.

The way EVE is today is a natural evolution of how the players kept moving around that same universe, always adepting to the changing environment and politics. They did not add any meaningful number of systems to that game since launch.. maybe 10-15% increase at most, while the PCU went from 2000ish to 60k+ so believe me when i tell you, that the majority of the issues the game is facing and will be facing in the immediate future comes from its small scale game world.

You do not have to do what EVE does of course.. god forbid someone might compare perp to the game that has been growing steadily through the past 7 years.. but it is still a fact, that eve kept growing all these years.

Expanding the game world on demand is just not the same as having the game world being there from the start. The world will not have the same natural demographic patterns and that WILL cause problems on the long run.

You are holding the gun at the wrong end.

Blobbling is not the root of the problem you have to fix, it is a symptom.

First of all, blobbing is inevitable. Ever since humanity started to wage wars, they always tried to bring more force than what the enemy had, simply to increase chances of victory. You might be able to forge arbitrary limitations that reduce / discourage blobbing, but it will always feel artificial and it will be very hard to come up with a system that works fair under all circumstances or even just in the majority of cases.

Why is blobbing so appearent in this game? Because of its size. I will draw some EVE analogies, so if you do not like those, then stop reading. I use EVE as an example, as it is pretty much what perp aims to be when it comes to open world pvp.

What we have in perp right now, 3 alpha and 3 beta islands is ridiculously small and way too big at the same time. Small, as the number of access points to/from each island is about the same than the average number of jump gates in a system from eve, except that in EVE, you have 8-10 times the systems in a single region, then you have islands in perp, and theres plenty of regions, not to mention, that the regions im talking about are 100% pvp zones, while perp is only 50% pvp right now, with 3 islands being pve only.

There is a lack of choke points in the game, which makes it hard to set up ambushes and absurdly easy to set up blockades (be it for attack or defense)

On the other hand however, the islands seem large, mostly because the lack of fast travel and the difficulties of getting around the various plants / elevation. In EVE, systems are huge, but you travel from point to point using a fast travel mechanism called warping. This means that you:
- Do not have to press W, or use auto move AND
- Do not have to actively dodge the grass that keeps growing everywhere and that you can't even clear out of the way in most cases.

So I spend comparable time travelling in perp, as i spend in eve when i try to get from point A to point B, except that in the case of EVE, travel itself is lengthy but does not require active attention, not to mention the presence of an autopilot. In PERP on the other hand travel takes just as long, but it is also tiring and requires me actively focusing on it if i do not want to get stuck on a tree. (or have auto move turn off because of a lag spike)

Another effect of the low number of islands is corporation dominance. In EVE, you have many many small groups or even single persons out in 0.0, because it is vast and even though territory might be claimed, it is large enough so it can't be effeciently patrolled all the time. With mere 3 islands, that is impossible here. If you - as a single person, or even just a small group - would want to go out there to do something, you would inside an hour bump into one of the entities claiming that island, that is, if you manage to get past the people usually guarding the teleporters leading onto the island. If you do not want to see blobs, you first have to see small groups making their way into beta, which you will simply not see in the current setup.

Yet another problem of beta as it is now.. uniformity. The three beta islands are more or less the same, except for the missions and the primary faction of NPCs you encounter there. There is no good beta and better beta, or bad beta and worse beta. There is just beta numero uno, two, and drei. Thats about the only difference you have between the current beta islands. There should be islands that are richer than others, islands that have no outposts at all, islands that have good spawns and islands that just suck (but are still better than alpha islands.

To sum it up:
1) More beta islands would be needed, each with only one type of outpost and no freakin terminals.
2) Add islands without outposts or terminals, but generally being a lot better than stadard beta islands. Let's call them gamma islands. These should only be accessible from beta islands.
3) Introduce a fast travel network that allows you to move from teleporter to teleporter without having to run through half the island in the process. The distance between the main teleporters and the terminals on alpha stations would be a decent mean distance to travel between each 'jump', allowing for some decent fights around teleport gates, but still allowing travel at a decent speed inbetween teleports. This option only really works out, if you increase the number of teleport nodes to go through by quite a lot.

Generally speaking, you have to increase the size of the world A LOT. By a lot i mean a lot.. EVE was the size you see today (minus 2-3 regions or so, but thats only about 10-15% of the map size) even when the PCU was less than 3000, and guess what.. we still managed to bump into eachother quite regularly.. If you want an epic game, you have to present an epic world first, and perp's just is not big enough for that right now. Not by a long shot.

Compared to EVE, Perp is as if we would be constrained to 6 adjoining star systems out of the few thousand that are in that game. I hope you realize how pathetic that looks in scale.

3

(8 replies, posted in Services and Discussion)

You obviously failed to grasp the philosophy behind a lottery, but i can't say im sad for that.

Lemme know if your lottery has anything meaningful to offer. Like something joe casual can't get after 3 hours of grinding for NIC.

I'm looking for people or groups who can produce / mine large amounts of commodities and/or raw materials, who can complete requests i have and deliver on a timely fashion.

Prices and quantity are agreed upon in advance and based on mineral / commodity prices at the time of making an order. Payment is on delivery. Exact terms and conditions are up for discussion and negotiation.

Whats in it for you? A guaranteed regular sale of large volume orders at a fair price.
Whats in it for me? Well.. for starters, the fact that i do not have to market pvp for such trivial things as titan ore or titanium smile Also hopefully reliability and the resulting ease of mind.

Right now, i need suppliers for:
Titan Ore,
Stremonit,
Imentium,
HDT,
Liquizit,
Helioptris
----
Titanium,
Metachropin,
Prilumium,
Isopropentol,
Plasteosine
----
Epriton is a bonus, but not really required right now.

If you are interested, get in touch with me either here, or in game.

1) You do not restart in the middle of the day, unless
   a) it fixes something that might potentially break the game - eg critical update - or
   b) it has been announced at least 24 hours in advance

Why? Because at the moment it is impossible to really plan ahead with the server admin having the tendency to announce DT 35!! freaking minutes in advance.
Why? Because if you cannot plan at least a day ahead and do the patches in batches, then you probably picked the wrong profession and should hire someone who can.

2) You do not use message boxes like the way you do right now.
   a) It is broken and if one is open, another one will not be opened, leaving you with just one notification that might be just as misleading to someone who comes back from being AFK as it is helpful to someone who is at the PC when it happens.
   b) In addition to (A) relative time is extremely useless compared to giving an absolute one, like restart at 13:00GMT.
   c) Constantly poppint up popups is annoying and not helpful at all. The person who was not at his PC will not get these because of bug (a) anyway, and those who saw the first one will just get pissed by the additional distraction.
   d) Message boxes are a sloppy and lazy design choice. They are an important tool for notification, but quickly lose their significance, when you abuse them for 'hi mom' like messages. You use message boxes for way too many things.
   e) If you insist on having a countdown, then effin code one.. its not that hard, especially since you already have the pointless yellow text in the center of the screen feature, move that text to some corner, give it a more noticeable color (like red) and have it count down.
   f) and for effs sake, stop posting the 'hi mom' style 'personal' messages. Especially in popups. This isnt some 15y/o kiddo's CS server. Whoever thinks its a nice touch, hes wrong. Those popups are annoying enough when they convey something at least semi-important. The last thing i want is pleasantries from developers.

3) What is with logging back in 10 minutes before a DT? Why not? What if it is important to me that i can log in to a diff character of mine, or get dropped while going home? I think you should forget about that restriction ASAP. I can see how with the current notification mechanism, newly logged in players might not be aware of the fact that a restart is imminent (even though you tent to send a popup about that every minute or so for the last five minutes, so only a blind person can miss it), but that only means that your notification mechanisms are fauly by design and that you should try to improve those.

Last, but not least, here is a fine example of how things roll atm:
[14:04:14] <Peach> oh yea.. server down in 7 minutes
[14:04:23] <Peach> could we get another warning at 6.40 as well please?
[14:04:32] <Peach> then one every 5 seconds preferably, so we do not forget about it
(clear sarcasm there, yet, lo and behold a warning about server going down in 6:40 a few seconds after my line in that chat. Suffice to say, they werent even accurate, as more than 20 seconds have passed, but hey.. who cares about time.. it is for losers)

Some might say, they were funny and it is good to have such a direct bunch of devs. I would even say they are right in a sense. It is better to have devs that listen and can be talked to, than devs that only see you as the database records you are.

HOWEVER, and this is important. There is a fine line between being cool, being funny and being annoying. perp devs are borderlining between funny and annoying in my eyes right now and quite frankly, none of those two are all that good of an opinion when you think about it. If i wanna see clowns, i go to a circus. I do not need to play an MMO for that. When i play an MMO, i wanna see competent, caring and responsible developers, that do not abuse even such trivial systems as in-game message boxes for personal or community entertainment.

6

(49 replies, posted in Balancing)

DEV Zoom wrote:

I'd like to have some "missiles are useless" people in here smile

On a slightly more serious note, if one half is saying that missiles are the weakest weapon and the other half is saying that they are too powerful... I think that indicates that it's just right.

Missiles are useless.

Well.. even though i do not mean that, i hope it qualifies me as a "missiles are usless" person, and as such allows me to be of assistance. smile

I do not believe that missiles have a problem. Not from what i have seen so far. They are a decent weapon, but nowhere near best.

- They have average range: longer than magnetics, but shorter than lasers from what i have seen.
- They have maybe the lowest damage over time of all the weapons.
- Guns require clear LOS when firing and so do missiles. Except that you do not realize that, as there is a delay between the firing of the launchers and the actual damage. If you fire your missiles while the target is "hidden", then the missiles will hit the obstacle even if the target moves out from behind it in the meantime.
- Delayed damage means that the target has time to activate countermeasures, like shields, resist modules and the like..

The big advantage of missiles right now is that it is less effected by the LOS bugs. Other than that, it is inferior to most direct damage weapons, especially so in PvP.

actually, they shouldnt. What they should do however is change scaling so that lvl1 missions fade out after you reach about 1.5 standing, forcing you to move on to lvl2 if you want to further increase your standing.

I made 3+ standings from nothing more than grinding lvl1 transport missions and quite frankly, i havent done that many of those either.. Sure the lvl1 missions start to fade out around 3.0 standing.. so it took an eternity to get from 2.7-2.8 to 3.0, but we are talking about lvl1 missions here, so that fade-out should have happened a whole two and a half points earlier, around the 1.2-1.3 mark.

How it should be in my opinion:
-> Missions give you their full relation increase while you are in their relation range. That is 0-1 for lvl1 missions, 1-2 for lvl2 and so on.
-> relation increases start to diminish once you cross into the treshold for the next level and reach 0 about halfway through to the next level.

Also the rewards (both money AND items) should be properly scaled, so it is actually worth doing higher level missions, as sometimes the rewards of those are not in line with the increase in difficulty and travel time, when compared to lower level variants.

To illustrate: let's say i can choose between lvl1 transport missions and lvl3 bounty missions. Which one should i choose?
- The bounty mission requires me to go to a remote location, kill 5-10 bots, gather their cargo and return home. This will pay somewhere around 60-120k depending on the mission, but let's assume 120k for now. It takes me 5-6 minutes to get there, 5-6 minutes to get back and say 10 minutes on average to get enough kills. So what did i accomplish?
In 20-25 minutes i earned 120k NIC, 5-10 kernels, some fragments and loot and some relationship increases. That assuming nothing went wrong.. we are talking about a lvl3 mission after all, and soloing those - while easy if done with care - is prone to hickups resulting in catastrophic results.

Let's take a look at my alternative, the measy level 1 transport mission.
- It requires me to take 3U worth of cargo and move it to the station next door. Sounds simple, is simple. You can do it in about 5 minutes or less. But wait, you can do more transport missions at once and you don't even need fancy gear for that, just a simple industrial bot that has 7.5 cargo. Then you can do TWO missions in those 5 minutes. Each such rune gives you about 22k NIC, 2*35 = 70 ammo and standing increases from two missions. You can do 4-5 runs in the time it takes you to do one bounty mission, which nets you a whopping 100-110k NIC, 350 ammo and 10 standing increases of similar magnitude as the single bounty mission gave.

So at the end, you get more stuff from doing the simpliest level1 mission, than from doing a level 3 one. Now THAT is a problem i would say.. the level 3 rewards should be waaaaay ahead here.. hell it should not even be a question, if its more viable to run lvl1 missions than level 2 ones, let alone level 3.

Okay, here is a list of what i think should be changed, added, removed, etc.:

1) Abort button for deploying. Quite often i find myself clicking deploy only to realize that i forgot something. Deploy should take a minimum of 3 seconds, during which you would have the option to abort it.

2) Mission UI: When you complete a mission inside a station through delivery, there should be no popups about completeion, unless it actually has something important to tell you: like you are missing some mission items, or objectives, etc..
2/a) Messageboxes are generally poor UI design. You should find someplace else for that information and forgo using boxes that are also associated with critical error messages. You do no really have to show mission objectives in such an into-your-face aggressive manner. After all, there is an assignment log that you can open and use to keep track of assignment progress

3) Assignment log: it should be a tree style list showing all assignments with expandable objectives, so you can have a quick overview of all the assignments you have taken and their progress, while also get in-depth information about the one you do at any given moment.

4) When finishing assignments, the reward items you receive are not stacked against those already in your storage space. This results in N stacks of 35 ammo for each mission you did. Minor issue really, but it should also be fairly trivial to fix.

5) We should have the ability to move items between bot equip screen, private storage, bot cargo, corp stores / folders. Its fairly annoying when i try to equip my bot from corp store, only to realize i have to move the item into my own store first, or bot cargo for it to work.

6) Market: im not even sure where to begin. The cheap way would be: take a look at EVE's market and aim to have at least half the features that one has smile What would be really useful:
6/a) Market history: see a graph of what happened to an item over time: hourly/daily/weekly bar chart showing min/max trading price and trade volume for the item.
6/b) Clarify the UI a little: Place order button should be moved to a less prominent position as its wording/position now suggests that it actually initiates trade, while in reality all it does is open up more options. It should be renamed to custom order or something along those lines. I was afraid to press it at first, thinking that it would cause me to sell my stuff at the ridiculous prices offered by some smile Yes i know its ridiculous, but it actually happened and is a good illustration on how bad wording / button position can mislead people.

7) Corp management UI: Lots of things there.
7/A) Corp Storage: The close button for corp storages has to go somewhere else. I think i actually clicked that once right after creating a storage unit, to close the window. Not sure which genius did put a button with the caption 'close xxx' to the top right of the window, but it is a sure way to cause headache. Also since i got no confirmation dialog before losing my storage unit, there is two possibilities:
7/A/a) In case the close storage button has no confirmation before closing the storage unit, add one quickly.
7/A/b) In case it has a confirmation, then there is a weird but, in which you 'lose' a storage unit right after opening it...
7/A/c) The corp storage history could use a search/filter function to filter on specific items or specific people and also to filter between a given time frame.

7/B) Member management: when trying to set storage access rights for people, the list keeps refreshing itself, which would not be a problem, but whenever such a refresh happens, the boxes you ticked to set rights (thats the 8 boxes, 4 for in, 4 for out) get reset to defaults. Also once you set delegate right on someone, you cannot remove it, which is just bad practice.
7/B/a) There also needs to be some sort of help/info about the various rights either as links to the ingame help, or as a short tooltip, as for the newbie CEO, most of the titles mean nothing.

7/C) Storage again.. i understand how you can have multiple storage units and those go into the big corp storage window, but this also means that you have to go through one more window to get to the actual storage space. Also dislike the 4 levels of storage access.. For small groups, 1 levels with maybe a protected sotrage area is enough. Those groups do not need extra windows to get their little sotrage space. For large groups however, the 4 levels are a joke. Sure you can work around the limitations or try to work out a system inside this, but lets face it.. its just an arbitrary limitation.
7/C/a) Suggestion: Have just one corp storage and use the folder system you already have, which is a lot nicer. You should be able to set up any number of groups / divisions inside your corp and then grant access to folders based on these groups and the available rights: view/take/add. The storage system could be reworked to impose a limit based on capacity, so say the base storage unit can hold 50U, and you can expand that if you need to for additional money.
7/C/b) The above suggestion kinda requires that you can create subfolders inside of folders. Also the color coded access right display is a good idea and it could be reworked to fit nicely with the 7/C/a version of right management.

8) Movement: Issues related to automatic movement.
8/A) When auto moving (say approach, or just plain auto move with WW or numlock) i often find myself in the need to avoid an obstacle and would press A or D to stray a little from my course. This on the other hand ends the auto movement. It should not really. The only thing that should end auto move is W or S for forward and backwards movement. All other movement actions should just be added on top of the automatic one, as if i would be the one pressing W whiele strafing.
8/B) When you auto move and then press W, the bot first stops completely, before it starts again. Suffice to say, the bot should not stop, when you tap the forward key in an auto-move scenario, only when you release that key.

9) Target locking: Issues related to target locking and pew-pew.
9/A) When you doulbe click a target in the landmark list, it starts locking and sets the target as primary, which is sort of okay. When you have a target locked and set as primary and you double click to target, it starts locking and sets target focus onto the new  target (that is not yet locked). This is horrible, as you stop shooting whatever you were shooting. It should work like this:
double click on an unlocked target, when you have no targets locked: lock and focus.
double click on an unlocked target, when you have a target locked, but no focus: lock and focus
double click on an unlcoked target, when you have a locked and focused target: lock but do not focus
double click on an already locked target: focus
9/B) The should be different displays for when someone is:
- in the process of locking you - say: yellow blinking rectangle
- already locked you - yellow rectangle
- is actually attacking you - red rectangle
- has you set as focus target (separate indicator from the above three) - some other visual added on top of the lock indicator rectangle..

10) Some issues related to reloading:
- You should not be able to reload a weapon, if it is already being reloaded. Right now it just restarts the reload.
- You should be notified about the lack of ammo BEFORE the weapon starts reloading
- You should be able to toggle the active / inactive state of a module while it is reloaded. Right now, if a gun is firing and is reloaded during that, you cant turn it off and if the target still lives, you will fire another volley before as soon as the weapon has reloaded.
- You should not be able to reload while the weapon is cycling.
- Changing ammo works dodgy at best.. when i had multiple charges in my cargo, i changed ammo type, then reloaded only to see the item default to a different charge. This was scanners or miners i think, but it might just be reproducible with weapons considering the reloading logic seems kinda similar.

11) Landmark list vs radar vs map vs main display: Again, the cheap answer would be - take a look at EVE for inspiration. But let's elaborate a little on that. when i go out to the field, i have 3 things i'm looking at:
- 1) the radar to gain positional information about my surroundings (disance / their relation to my position and to the terrain)
- 2) the landmark list to gain a quick overview of whats in my vicinity
- 3) the main view to do whatever i do.
As you can see, the 3 interface elements are used for drastically different things and as such would require quite different settings for optimal usage. For example:
On the radar, i do not want to see other players that i have good standings with, or even neutral / hostile players when im not in a pvp zone. Reason? I dont care what they do and where they are most of the time. What i need to know is where my targets and where my enemies are, so i would limit the radar to only show those, or show those with different colors: -> we have to be able to set the color of the radar blips based on various parameters and also we have to be able to specify what items we want to show up on the radar.
On the landmark list, i most probably would want to go with settings similar to that of the radar, but not neccessarily.
On the main view, i would want to see a lot more than on the radar.
11/A) Suggestion: Give us the ability to create specific display profiles where you can specicy all sorts of options,  including what to show in which color / icon. Then allow us to pick which one of our display profiles we want to use for radar, main view or landmark list separately.

The above list is by no means complete, but thats all i can remember from the top of my head. An interesting game you have here, hats off for that, but i'm also sure you realize that the bulk of the work is just beginning.

Azhuire wrote:

But they're not doing an assignment or they would leave after a few minutes.  No, they're farming loot or kernals for research. Bots and mechs have a limit on targets locked, but they can rather easily keep that many targets tagged while they slowly destroy them.

I agree, that the locking speed bonus on castels makes racing for kills a very one sided game, as they will lock 20-25% faster given similar skill levels. Limiting the number of tagged targets is not the answer however. I do not think however, that this mens the number of max tagged targets should go down. You should merely stop trying to think solo. If castels are a problem, group up with someone that has one and start running missions with him. In my little group for example, i sit in a castel. I can't really hurt the stuff we are fighting, as they have strong resists against my damage type, but i can make sure, that whereever we go, we get the kills we want. As a group. That's called teamplay.

Azhuire wrote:

Two farmers at one spawn in Arkhes can lock it down due to the maximum spawned bots at a time.  It's worse in something bigger, or especially worse when they are using something like a Castel that further enhances their locking speed.  It took me 40 minutes with these same two jerks (http://www.evilgreven.net/images/perpet … agonly.jpg) farming kernals to finally finish my assignment.

While i understand your frustration, you should really refrain from calling people you do not even know jerks, just because they made your life harder. You have to understand this:
1) they dont care about your feelings, why should they? you are a complete stranger to them.
2) you need 100s /1000s of kernels of a given level and color so its not like they were farming because they had noplace better to go, but most likely because they needed that specific color / level.
3) there are lots of missions you can do, not just one. If one spot is camped, just abandon and pick a different one.

Azhuire wrote:

As for the bizarre AI structure, if you want to fight higher level enemies - do it in a squad.  This is an MMO.  Soloing difficult things by kiting them is your own damn risk.

Its sort of cute, how you tell people to do things in a squad, yet you whine about squads of people grabbing all kills away from you smile Take some of your own medicine.