Annoyed by the latest AtD

Game Development Star Citizen
1

Note, this is not a PvP conversation, it also applies to PvE

This specific question: https://youtu.be/QJgzlnUkrbw?t=365

Mining for a long time is “boring” without the “thrill” of combat. Really? If mining is boring, then mining is boring and that’s a mining system problem. Not everyone enjoys the thrill of constant combat, some of us like to quietly mine.

And this video confirms that nothing worth mining or finding through exploration is in civilized space, so just like Eve, anything worth having is in lawless space. Joy.

My concern here, and what has me annoyed, is that this implies that CIG has, as an expectation, anyone who has gone x minutes doing a non-combat profession and hasn’t fought anyone is bored and a fight needs to be brought to them. This is very similar to CR saying that we’ll never QT for 40 min, we’ll be yanked out at least 8 times in that period for combat.

So I’m out in deep space, exploring, engines off, low EM sig, just using my scope on the sky. The servers decide “He must be bored!” and simply spawn enemies on me, or some NPC that doesn’t exists “tips off” some players who are elsewhere in the system with where I am, just to entertain me and keep me from being bored. This is exactly like Eve’s /local, where everyone everywhere knows you’re there, even if there’s no physical way they could have known. I flew into the system a week ago and logged out in deep space, I’m gone. A week later I log in, engines off, and use my scope. Ships 100’ away from me can’t see me, my EM sig is so low, yet poof, someone finds me so I’m not “bored”.

God I hope this isn’t what they’re doing.

2

I agree, bad mechanic. Combat for combat’s sake when you aren’t even looking for it. I don’t mind it being random, preferably on a long timer, but constant isn’t in my description of fun.

3

Can’t watch the video right now, but based on your comment all I can say is OH GOD I HOPE NOT.

If any dev thinks that combat is the only exciting mechanic in the game then that dev doesn’t belong on the CIG team.

Period.

4

Watch the video, I’d appreciate your input. For me it harkens back to the early days where CR would say things like “PvP is the only risk”, which makes my teeth ache. But this isn’t just about PvP, this is about combat in general vs non-combat professions.

What I’m hoping is that the game rewards diligence. If I put in the time to find a quiet spot and am watchful, I should be able to be uninterrupted and alone for however long I want to be.

5

That would be a crap thing to implement and if they do implement anything resembling that at all there better be an option to turn it off. If I want to go explore or mine the game better not be deciding for me that I need combat all of a sudden.

6

“But what is reward without risk?”

7

Reward is whatever is rewarding to you. Something a lot of developers don’t appear to understand.

8

OK so I got a chance to watch it.
I can see where you might have interpreted things a certain way, especially if that is already a concern you have.
However, I think part of the issue here is a language barrier. Obviously English is not this guy’s primary language and he had trouble finding the right words more than once.

My impression: they want EVERYONE to be able to play the game their own way. When he said if you mine for hours and nobody attacks you then it is boring, I think he meant specifically for people who want to have that type of interaction when mining.

I do not think that they intend to rule out the option or opportunity for players to explore and seek out some out of the way place to engage in their profession, like mining, with very little chance of interaction from others. IF that is what you want, then spending the time to find that spot would reward you with exactly that kind of experience.

I DO think that the most valuable resources are going to be in the most dangerous places. That is just MMOs and there is no reason to expect it to be any different. I also think that the devs plan to encourage interaction between players much more than the typical MMO today. Solo players are going to find it more and more difficult to play completely solo. Hiring an escort for mining is going to be a necessity most of the time.

The comments in that video do not appear to be anything new or different from what they have been planning openly all along. Group play is going to be strongly encouraged. Risk vs reward is going to be the standard MMO style of loot in dangerous places. Greifers will be dealt with harshly and with extreme prejudice.

IF you were to pose this question to the devs, “Will we be able to spend the time and resources to find out of the way places to mine where there is minimal chance of being engaged by NPCs or other players?” then I think the answer would be yes. IF you are willing to put in the time and resources to accomplish any type of game play then you will find it available.

But time will tell.

9

I want to clarify, my problem isn’t “interaction with others”. My concern is that they think combat is the only way to be entertained and will simply spawn NPC pirates on my ass for no reason because I MUST be bored, all I’m doing is mining. I can avoid players, as we say frequently, space is big, it shouldn’t be hard, unless CIG is cruel and puts cheats in like CCP did for Eve, which I have to assume they won’t, unless the pirates whine and complain that they can’t find anyone and CIG caves to the pressure…I hope not.

I’m talking philosophically, in general, CIG seems to believe that the only risk, the only entertainment, is fighting. That’s my underlying concern. CR’s “the only risk is PvP” is years ago and I’m certain still part of his makeup, but this is much broader, “the only risk is combat”. The rock I’m mining could explode, kill me and destroy my ship. The fusion plant or ordnance in this ship I’m salvage could blow. There’s risk without spawning 'rats on me to “entertain” me.

10

I viewed the video. Granted I wasn’t paying attention to the exact wording but I think what they are saying is that the protected areas will have been mined out with the rare minerals depleted and that the way to get to where there are still rare metals to be mined would be to go to the areas less traveled/less occupied which, in turn, means less protected by the UEE. I kind of think that is simplistic. I mean the UEE never expands into new systems? I would think it would expand militarily pushing back the frontier and then the settlers, miners, tinkers, tailors, etc. would follow. So, dumb mechanic to get people to journey into the frontier to cause grouping… I also hope that they don’t think that only “fun” in game is pew pew.

11

RIght I get what you are saying.
IF I am mining for too long without combat breaking it up then I must be getting bored - that is your concern.
I got that. Replace interaction with others as combat with others in my above comment if that makes it easier to understand.

My point is that I do not think that is the case. Already we see the danger in mining certain rocks that can explode and damage your ship. If you are multiple jumps away from the nearest civilized location to fix your ship then that in itself is quite dangerous.
I think the comment from the dev was an answer specific to the idea of griefing. SO in context it makes more sense for him to give that answer. Out of context it can sound like the wrong kind of game design.

We have to look at the context of these dev comments or we can take anything they say as confirmation that the game will be any number of things we do or do not want it to be.
The question asked was about piracy vs griefing. So the answer was given to demonstrate the extremes that could be applied from the designer point of view. It would be boring for someone (WHO WAS EXPECTING ENGAGEMENT IN COMBAT WHILE MINING) to mine for hours and not see any combat at all, that would be boring, and in the same way they would not want to be constantly attacked by pirates every minute. The dev speaking immediately goes on to compare piracy to griefing and how piracy is about making money at someone else’s expense where griefing is deliberately ruining their gameplay experience for no other reason than to ruin it.

It is all about context

12

I hope you’re right. The griefing discussion was silly and showed they have no clue how to handle it, but I expected no less. The only way it will be handled is when 50% of the population leaves because of griefing and Ben’s “let CS handle it” philosophy turns out to be wrong. They won’t see it any other way, even the alpha is pretty much nothing BUT griefing right now.

13

Yeah, it gets nasty around PO which is another reason I always immediately move myself to GH when a patch comes out. If i want to spawn anything too big for GH I head to Levsky.

They do seem to have a disconnect with reality about griefing. If they think they will be able to have someone mitigate every issue directly, they better have a HUGE CS staff on hand.
But to be fair, I do not know of any better way to handle it.

I really think they are banking on the reputation system to be the feature that helps curtail most of the problems. And that may help, a lot even.

If their current morality system is any indication, they have a LONG way to go.

14

I’ve mentioned it in other threads, the best way to deal with it is hierarchical.

  1. Design the game such that most of the mechanics that are easily griefable are simply not possible, mechanically. Wherever possible, make the game mechanics prevent it. Examples are things like the bounty hunter change and TZ’s comment about people being flagged as griefers being shunted to other, griefer-dedicated instances. And start that flagging right now because I guarantee you, if they’re a douchebag in alpha, they’ll be a douchebag in release. Catch linked accounts and connect behaviour to accounts, starting now, and include the forums. Griefers can’t get bounties for normal players (but bounties can be gotten for them), can’t catch, find, randomly encounter, or ambush normal players. Everything that is caught in the design is a thousand CS tickets avoided.

  2. Use the slider or other mechanics to further separate the carebears from the predators. No one whines like a carebear, and they’re the ones that will just ghost the game if they’re ganked, hurting revenue. Keep the carebears safe (from grief, not combat) to keep the money coming in. When a PvP0 meets a PvP10 player, griefing is happening, no matter how you define it because the PvP0 player wants 0 PvP, so bumping him in space is grief, and that’s thousands more tickets avoided. Examples of this (bad ones) are the Eve COSMO missions for PvE players that literally lead you by the nose into low sec to be ganked by other players. Avoid that. When you’re giving PvP0 players missions, keep them in PvP0 areas. In fact, look at the “podkills” stats of the area you might send them to and if it’s bad, send them elsewhere. Dynamically, intelligently, control the population to keep them in areas they want to play in.

  3. Lastly, use CS. It’s not scaleable and it’s money down the drain because you’re paying for a team of people whose sole purpose is to keep players happy and revenue coming in. As someone who ran a CS organization for a big MMO, it’s a no-win scenario, you lose when you start, everything is your fault, and you’re one bad ticket from being fired because Sr Mgmt will believe the customer over you every time. The fewer tickets that come in, the less people you need to pay, etc.

It’s possible, but it takes a commitment to making it work, vs “Oh, we’ll just let CS work it out”, not including the design elements in, then having a hot dumpster fire of a situation when it’s too late to fix it.

15

I like your notions 1 & 2 where you use douchebaggery and preference for PVP as a way to set the affinity to place you in the same instance with others of a like profile. Mostly because they are transparent and would seem to be technically feasible to implement.

16

I like the ideas too, however I think there needs to be some mechanic employed that looks at overall behavior not just certain behavior. For example: one or maybe even ten incidences of attacking other players doesn’t necessarily make you a griefer, however say 5 occurrences in the last hour and especially against the same player would indicate that mentality. I can see “regular Joes” occasionally hitting other players just because they get in the way while you are fighting an NPC. Now that means an occurrence isn’t each hit on a player but that you hit a player within a certain time frame, not amount of hits. So yeah that could be exploited initially, but over a pretty short amount of time you would separate the wheat from the chaff.

I think your wording on the CS item isn’t worded correctly. I think you meant to say “3. Lastly, DON’T use CS.” Caps are my add.

17

Not using CS isn’t really an option, sadly. It’s the net that catches all of the 'tards who have to call for the stupidest things. There’s a reason that “The IT Crowd” is so funny, because it’s real :stuck_out_tongue: No matter what, no matter how “perfect” SC is, people will call and flip their shit if they can’t. But, IMHO, it is possible to reduce those calls to only the stupid ones, which are a lot easier to manage.

And of course I agree brohawk that more behaviour needs to be looked at, I was just spit balling on examples.

For example, if they kill someone and take literally nothing for doing it, that’s noteworthy. It’s not part of a mission, they don’t loot the body or salvage the ship, it’s not a bounty, they just arbitrarily killed the person with no traceable in-game reason, flag that activity. If it happens “often”, even to different people, then note it, the person is a sociopath and needs to only be facing PvP players.

Or they always headshot/podkill. It’s not enough to defeat the person, they have to assassinate them, and again not part of a bounty. Bottom line, violence for its own sake should be flagged. Not bad, not judged, not banned, just flagged, and the game should make sure that players that enjoy that should be pitted against other players that enjoy that.

The goal is to keep social predators away from vulnerable victims. Kind of like a zoo. The Antelope have their watering hole, the lions have theirs. If the lions want to start some shit, they’re starting it with other lions.

And this must happen invisibly, inside the game engine. I can’t stress this enough. If the PvP guys find out they’re being denied prey, they will lose their minds and set the forums on fire. Anything done in this arena must be done invisibly. “Space is Big” - Chris Roberts.

18

In the end it will come down to the community CIG wants playing their game/giving them money. The biggest obstacle they have in this arena is that the game didn’t exist when they started taking money, so they have a population of every type of player because we didn’t have a game to “filter” out folks.

For example, I don’t own PUBG. I never will. Over 100 million copies sold, and I’m not one of them. Why? Because I know better. The game is unapologetic in what it is, making it very easy to decide. I played H1Z1 a little, but will never play DayZ because of what I learned in H1Z1. I also don’t play EuroTrucker. Over 20 million copies sold, and I’m not one of them. Or FIFA. All of these games are self-evidently not my playstyle, and I know that, so they don’t get my money and both of us are happier for it.

SC doesn’t have that luxury. From PvP0 to PvP99, people have backed SC, which means that it is going to be HUGELY disappointing, no matter what it is. It’s like a restaurant that says “we’re going to serve food!” and we all line up. They show us the kitchen, the tables, the linens, the silverware, it’s all amazing…then 6 years later they open and we find out they’re serving gluten-free Vietnamese food. Bleah :stuck_out_tongue:

I don’t envy them, but I’m self aware enough to know that it’s quite possible I will hate the game. C’est le vie, I accepted that back in '12 when I first signed up. The problem is, if more than half of us hate it, that’s going to a shitstorm of class action lawsuits for millions of dollars and a press debacle that CIG will likely never recover from. That’s the downside to being vague. Heck, look at the press Fallout 76 is getting for changing their own IP to a battleground when they made no commitment one way or the other and didn’t accept money until after the announcement.

CIG can make this work and please most of the people, they just have to decide now (well, 3 years ago) to do it. They need to formally acknowledge the PvP “issue” is real vs sweeping it under the rug that “it will work out in the end”, because it won’t. PvP “issues” working themselves out always look the same: PvP players killing PvE players, PvE players leaving, and the game distilling down to Lord of the Flies. DayZ and H1Z1 started with PvE content and a high population of PvE players…that lasted 2 months. Now the populations are tiny by comparison and savage mobs of guys who hunt newbies for fun.

CIG must look at the state of the people in the alpha, not just the “good” ones but all of them, and learn from them.

19

the other option would be to have a PvE PU and a PVP PU. that would make me happy.

20

Yeah, but we all know that won’t happen. The PvP guys would absolutely hate it, the carebears would absolutely love it, and there are far more of the latter, but CIG vetoed that long ago. They want “one big happy world”. And it’s possible, but they have to be realistic about it. The problem with PvP is that it’s a “baby/bathwater” problem. Some % of PvP players are great guys, competitive role players who want to make the game a better place, RP pirates, Grr, Argh, all that rot. But that % is not very large, most PvP players are COD/PUBG jerks who just like to shoot virtual people, which gives PvP a bad name and ends up getting the entire playstyle damaged by anything that tries to curb it.

Just like any security measure, it inconveniences the “good” people far more than the bad ones. Because people like to steal your stuff, you are forced to unlock/lock your house and car every time you come and go. Meanwhile guys who really want to get in can get in faster than it takes you to legitimately unlock it :stuck_out_tongue: