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Remove their Augmenter Tweaking

@Vorp

FWIW I'm not intentionally cherry-picking your arguments. You have said an awful lot of words on this subject, and so it is helpful for me to periodically attempt to summarize your points so that I can keep things straight. If I do that, it's an invitation for you to weigh in on whether the summary's accurate.

I like where you are going with the D3 RM Auction House argument. I agree that in the D3 case, the nature of the auction house was that the very top tier items were unobtainable for the average player, unless they were willing to pay real money. This was indeed frustrating. However, I think we're in a different situation in SS, for the following main reason:

While the Auction House existed, D3 drop rates were such that it was basically impossible to obtain any truly endgame item yourself. Contrast that with SS, where it's not only possible but straightforward to obtain most endgame items. Want a Prawn? Grind for Prawn Pieces and do Captain Kidd a bunch or just buy a Prawn BP (aren't they pretty cheap now?). Want a T22 Alien Ship? Just tag along with someone for P22, grab a Pristine Alien Egg while you're there, and you're already well along the way.

In short, I'm not convinced that the SS economy looks anything like the D3 AH economy. We do have hilariously expensive items floating around, but almost all of them have a direct acquisition path. In SS, the cost of an item reflects the perceived cost of an endgame player's time to grind for it. Since a newer player has a much lower perceived cost of time spent, this is not a priori a problem at all. The only exception I can think of is Midas Touch, but PPS Clenches have made that less of a problem.

@Hober

You are citing a much older post, which would get us to argue in circles. If you click back to page 4 of this thread, you will see the following basic discussion.

Hober: old players make new players feel bad if they don't have endgame gear right away
enk: Why is this a problem?
Hober: Players can't progress without joining endgame teams and playing in ways that may not conform to their gaming interests.
enk: Not all strats are equally effective but you can get plenty far in this game even doing nonstandard stuff, as long as you are prepared to make incremental progress over a longer period of time.
Hober: I'm talking about low level players–they can't make good progress as Seer etc etc.

which brings us to…



Care to pick it up from here?

As always your input is appreciated Enk, from my experience your knowledge of the games subsystems is nigh on unmatched outside the devs and your ability to speak authoritatively on economic issues is just as good so anything you have to say is always worth consideration. Hopefully we are on the same page argument wise going forward

The Prawn is a great example of a grind-able item as well as pricing based on incremental time investment (I wish more ships where like it). All the prawns ive made ive DGed for pieces and brought the BP for comparative cents the dollar to PP time costs. Ill happily grant you its the exception to my argument.

I have changed the wording of my argument somewhat from the outset so ill try and summarize myself. Players with allot of cash are not in themselves an issue, they generally tend to spend faster and with more abandon and thus their money is naturally distributed away to other players. My critique is more to do with how they make that money to begin with and the fact that is in effect, an unlimited supply.

Colonies and to a lesser degree Ext Y's (Industrial Cmods may alleviate or worsen this situation) are a totally different economic system to the "grind-it-out" game-play the rest of the game goes through. Old guard players are perfectly valid in their use of these systems (I have/will as well). Its about if the two speed econ should exist in its current format at all. The point is that its in some cases physically impossible for a player to grind enough content to receive the same cash reward as some old guard players receive just from existing in the game world, there just isn't enough hours in the day.

The reason this can occur is that old guard players, due to their wealth and power in the meta-game, can hold a veritable monopoly on the colo economy as they are the only ones able to reach the economies of scale necessary to make money off it and other entrants are hammered by pirates/greifers/attackers and the like which does not concern the old guard or at worst the old guard teams simply annihilate the smaller fish because they stand in the way of profit. Since they can just out-spend any competitor they can maintain that advantage indefinitely.

To drag in Marxist concepts I believe the economy of a game should specifically align at a basic level to time (labour) spent obtaining an item vs the value another player receives from it. When these match up we have a sale and the world keeps spinning. When you decouple the concept of labour vs income you produce a distorted system and discourage entrants into it which we have here.

I used the D3 AH because its a good example of a 2-leveled economy that was massively broken. Whilst not an exact comparison ill argue its a good one none the less. Your argument, whilst valid in itself, ignores that fact that the econ should not be out of reach of anyone but the top earners. You suggest that people shouldn't need to be a player in the market for end game gear at all and thus distorted prices are not relevant to them. I disagree, based on that precept the games economy is not functional in itself as it discourages market participation. If you need to do away with large swaths of the player bases participating in the market to explain it then how is that any different to the D3 example?

The secondary problem is that whilst yes newer players can tag along on the goodwill of older players for runs and drops is that really the game we want? So anyone needing to get a run has to beg/pay for it rather than enjoy the experience. Its rare to find players willing to simply give away drops to others because its nice (since they are giving away in their mind much, much more than the new player can afford or earn from it) and again if we get allot of new players coming on board that goodwill will dry up faster and faster. Alien content is actually quite good in this regard, its feasible for players to get some skills/ships without being in direct competition with more powerful players on runs but all content would need to be adjusted to the same system for that to work and even then its just masking the problem. Even then gear for the ships is back to the same problem.

Basically it means normal players can never afford to buy top leveled items because it would never be worth the time investment vs the value they revive until all old guard players have more items than they need and the market gluts since old guard don't care at all about time spent.

Perceived cost as you mentioned is behind all of this, my problem with the game economy is that old guard players face a very, very different perceived cost/benefit function than players with equal lvl and individual power. Even an end game individual can do all the right things but unless they are part of a very small number of old guard teams or run a hoard of MCed chars to make their own team they are left unable to compete in the old guard economy. Thus they will feel frustrated and that's assuming they got past the early and mid game which appears to be the winnowing point for the vast majority.

All of these are structural problems and wont be fixed by a new server alone. The issues is should we get a boost from steam online we will squander a huge chance for game growth by pushing players into a broken and bottlenecked system at the entry level due to influence of old guard players and their money. Ive written at length on this and wont repeat myself but a new server in conjunction with restrictions on how much can be made via the colo/base economy would go leagues towards making the game more welcoming and reduce long term power/wealth stratification between the old and new guard.

Vorp

That is just a matter of choosing the right team. Traders only invites people that are at the footstep of end game, while teams like SRX & RF are helping people towards T21 & T22 and are assisting you. I have no idea how far DSF goes into helping people into mid/end game.

People have kept promoting SRX & DSF to newer players because we know from experience they tend to help people get to mid/end game.

There are some people in SRX that are rolling on their own right now after we helped them. I don't actually see the problem with the mid game players. Doing content on your own is just a matter of getting the people online to do the content. People have done Olympus in T20 ships, they have done UZ in T20 ships, maybe not solo, but they've done it. They have died a billion times trying to figure out how the boss works.

People see other people doing it like it's easy, and this yearning, to be able to also do it as easy, fast & efficient as the end game players is what makes them quit. They aren't patient enough to get content done. They make the progression curve steep for themselves, nothing to do with end gamers.
Sure I agree that the early & mid game should be tweaked, but not because end gamers influence the early & mid gamers. As far as I know the end gamers keep on contesting with each other to get the commodities, this is the first uni I've actively tweaked my buying prices to get said commodities; I don't see this a bad influence for the early & mid gamers.

What will happen when they enter end game? They'll see that end game is just about bindo-ing a shit ton of items to get 2 decent mods. Then you still realise that people have equipment with 8 mods, which you can't get (you can though but need to be really lucky). What will then happen?
I don't care if people have the 8 modded items, just bindo'ing a shit ton of items to get the 3 really needed mods is what is the most important part. If you get 199k DPS or 200k DPS, there is indeed some difference but you aren't worthless or bad because you got 1k DPS less then the ones with 8 modded items (and I don't have 8 modded items).

This. If I show an aspiring endgamer what I can do, he immediately wants to do exactly what I just did. And then once I explain how I got to this point, he becomes hilariously discouraged and is a 50/50 shot at quitting or starting to grind his way up.

I think if the game were a bit more balanced, as in, not so top heavy. There would be more middling players for people to compare to. Not ONLY endgamers who've been around for years. Our playerbase is a bit stratified into noobs and wise ones. Not so many in between.

I will admit I dident see that coming=)

Lemon's growth was unorthodox anyways so a method without SP trade/store work like his would be even more than 50/50 dangerous to the newbies.

KOS Lemon for killing player-base?!? hehe

He is right though....

Vorp

My shop's been famous since C1 . My growth into a wise one was a slow process.

At this point I just want SS to stop being such a hole in the wall game. I personally feel like a large portion of our problems would just be solved by more players. And while that's not an easy issue to fix, the last month or so of progress has done a hell of a lot to helping my cynicism about SS's future.

Here's to hoping it keeps going.

Oh no question, I was just pointing out that for someone who wasn't such a known fixture of the game it would have been an even longer road. Give or take the 236 times you changed your class along the way =)

Pixel/all new efforts in last little while for emp!

Vorp

I'd say a lot of the problem when it comes to early-mid is that it's too easy. I'm not saying that everything has to be hard, but rather that there is just very little to group up for. As an example, I made a new character and ran through many of the new zones without any material help(I guess knowledge matters though). I did Nexus, Arctia, Vulcan, Mira and Jungle.
Although there were occasionally annoying parts(stupid respawn mechanics in vulcan; aveksaka level in jungle) I was able to do it fairly smoothly with just 1 engineer and progressed through all that in just a couple weeks. A new player will undoubtedly do it slower, but the way is definitely there.
However, for me as an old-time player there just isn't a reason to take newer players along. There is so far nothing that I've not been able to do at the appropriate power level with that character.
A lot of the reason why this is a problem is that if I encountered something too hard, I would be able to simply outlevel it faster than I could gear up enough to do it.
Getting people to endgame ASAP should not be a priority, because it makes the game shallow. Why even have an earlygame if it's not supposed to matter.

Having leveled characters of every class I can confirm that slaves are very strong on any class, even on seers that have a natural weakness due to their slaves being bad at using class mechanics. (they don't use the stutter-thrusting technique to stay invisible, don't wait for invis before shots, don't try to stay behind target, etc).
Drones actually suck unless you aug for drone ops and/or play as engineer, which is too high of a commitment for anyone except engineers.
Missiles I've never used beyond trying them out because they are just OP to the point of making most content obsolete. Thus, I only have 1 gunner and even that's a low level because I don't want to abuse missiles and because slave deathblossoms are bugged(continue to drain elec even while off).
Fighters are not a problem except if you're talking about locusts/lice. They are energy-efficient, but never very strong.