Spark Teleport: how balanced will be an ability to bring half of assets to an enemy beta terminal while keeping aonther half at your home base and then quickly teleport here and there for attacking/defence? I mean, beta terminals have no access restriction, that will make beta-1 islands more harder to defend.

You still have to transport your robots, weapons and everything to the “enemy beta terminal”. And once those are used up you still have to do it again and again if you intend to use spark teleports like this. Correct me if I’m wrong but the only issue I see with this is more fights on beta, and robots getting destroyed. (IF this will really turn out as a viable strategy.)

Obi Wan Kenobi wrote:

Balance in terms of nic doesnt always work as intended. IMO it should come down to the timer. You want the timer long enough that it stops ppl from jumping all over the game every few mins to taking so long they just hardly use it.

The other thing you could do is you can spark TP as much as you want that way market traders are not stuffed over. BUT there is a cool down timer on getting in a bot IF you TP more than once in the space of say ... an hour.
^ just an idea.

No no no this should be like a teleporter.  That away if a fight breaks out on the other side of the world people can get there.

Syndic wrote:

From my 1 month experience on Novaya Trava, roaming NPC caravans were only consistently spawning on the South teleport where they would just sit for days because the teleport was walled off. The rest of the island was completely NPC-free.

you must been on another instance of that island them me then... I always found a NPC group on Trava, in several areas on the island, and stuck on open passable terrain.
Ask Plato/Ghandi - he was kinda the only one who reacted on TS when i said "Observer in sight"

Suggestion:
Remove infinite NPC-seeds for construction blocks, not just building foundations. Let the players set their own price and build their own market.

We can’t remove the NPC-seeds for construction blocks, because they require colixum to build, so new corporations setting foot on gamma wouldn’t be able to build a mining outpost.

After the awesome update that everyone said WOOHOO the caravans are moving on gamma!

1) I went into a Kain to kill some 5th star assaults and 2 5th start Kains. The caravan at that time was 2km from the terminal.
2) Took me about 20 mins (with a mech moving >70kph, doing about 500dmg every 5 seconds, with some downtime for travel)
3) I received some std mods, 1.5k plasma.
4) I can't "go to another caravan and not waste time on killing these guys", because I have to kill the caravan for a better one (potentially) to spawn in 10 mins.

End result - Unless the caravan is on your terminal, it's a time waster. Waiting for sparks.

syndic:

a, npcs are an opposing force to the player - as a gameplay element. why do you think of them as income? do you farm noob corps on beta for income too?
Yes, it's called M2S and Co when they came to our island

b, http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/8977/stucknpcs.jpg <- not an observer, not an artifact spawn, right behind your terminal
Thats right and when they died they exploded and damaged the buildings
c, Turrets also do not shoot at interference beacons, nor do they shoot at bombs, teleport beacons or other buildings placed right infront of them. its a general flaw in perp-AI that AI cannot shoot at non-player things (or have you ever seen a blue npcs shooting a green one, while they are supposed to hate each other?)
They are an AI, they are suppossed to be limited in mental capacity, ones that are fully functional and competitive turn then game into a ...cough cough Themepark?

Mongolia Jones wrote:

Making terraforming cheaper is a BAD idea.  If whole islands get completely terraformed (because it's cheaper) then say bye bye to small gang roaming of gamma.

It seems you guys green-lighted any idea that was thrown out there during that meeting, DON'T DO THAT!!

Currently, with a small population just a few people can completely cut off a teleport in just a couple weeks time.  With terraforming costing less, then those same few players can terraform that much more, which would be VERY bad indeed, especially if it's more than a few people doing it over a couple months.

Small gang roams are the basic unit of pvp in PO.  Every time you guys introduce a barrier to small roams, you lose players.  Terraforming is a basic obstruction to small gang roams.  Please reconsider this and consider making terraforming MORE costly than it is now.  Terraforming should take many weeks if not months or years to affect whole islands.

What have you terraformed or build I dont think you understand the current cost of gamma with the cost now it is limited to only corps/alliances that have multi billions of nic