Truth. Just look at goett and The Legion.

Methinks if you wanted to do this 'right' you would simply generate a whole new server, transfer the names of each char over and run it along side the old one.

Whole new fresh start for everyone who wished to. No more random 7x bindos, no insane war chests for the end game players, no more *insert in/valid gripe here* ect ect.

Old server runs as normal, the lords of dominion can rule over whatever empires they so please and everyone who considers the gap insurmountable (and lets face it from a new player perspective, it is) can jump onto the new server.

Do this at steam launch time and who knows, might make the whole entry level thing more fun =)

Vorp

Can you offer any convincing evidence that, for example, the wealth of Traders adversely affects the enjoyment of a new player? People like to yak about how the presence of the old guard prevents this game from growing, but with a few exceptions I would say that the veteran players actually facilitate game growth, by providing a civilizing effect on the universe. Do you really think it would benefit the game if there were suddenly no EFDNs in production? No AI bases stocked with prom? No market for Dementium?

What happens when someone buys all the accounts on the new server?

Buying and Selling accounts is not allowed i heard from some devs.

Ok sure, ill take you on that one.
Simply put, to my mind anyways, its a question of how people perceive their relative growth.

Whilst the old guard does have massive positive effects on market stability and arbitrage ect ect they have a far more pervasive effect on market levels. Simply put there exists a dislocation between the two economies that exist in SS. Primarily the player-2-player econ and the player-2-ai. Its a freekin huge question so ill try and dot point it.

The player-2-player econ is also 3 tiered. The items old guard players still have a use for, the items they can mass produce and the items they care for not at all. This is an interesting system because only old guard can afford the barrier to entry price tags of either the 'valued' tier or the P2AI tiers.

Old guard has great positive effect on the middle tier, the items they can mass produce, like EFDNs and Drones ect ect. Thats good for a mid level player because it pushes down prices.

Old guard players push the price of valuable tier items to stratospheric levels because they can and because their demand settings are really wacky. Many players dont see a big issue with hoarding ships and items the value of which would stagger a mid level player. They dont see any real need to sell since their idea of value is predicated not upon the P2P econ but the P2AI.

When you built up the systems you have today, the weps the mods the ships ect ect you faced a very different price level. When you traded you dealt with how much a player could MAKE from having that ship, that wep, that whatever. So having a new HM might make your farming runs 20% more efficient so you would pay based on that. Its basic economics you know backwards. Thats all changed now...

The prices an old guard paid when they were growing as player were by and large based off the P2P econ, ergo what the average player valued an item at. Now however you dont face same price system, new players pay based on how much enjoyment an older player gets from a new toy or how it affects the meta game. When you buy a new ship you dont give a fig if it makes you more able to earn cash, thats over. You're buying to make sure your fleet/char/team is more powerful than the other fleet/char/team or to just in general as a power projection. Again thats fine if we tied it to how much cash the other team could make from the P2P econ, ergo how much they can farm using the items they buy.

This is where the dislocation between the P2P and P2AI econs bites. Since your cash flow is not connected to the items you are buying in terms of their intrinsic value how the old guard perceives value is massively, irreconcilably divergent to how a new player perceives it. Effectively you have decoupled price and value. You see it as protecting/enhancing a different system to what a newer player sees. You talk in terms of bases and colos, billions and trillions, new players talk in terms of DGs and bosses. Millions and billions.

The impact on new players is thus, they enter into the game. Some items like the minor aug conds are so valuable to older players they have bidded up the price to the point where a new player can accelerate their growth to artificial levels in terms of money. They hit a brick wall however when they actually need those items and cant afford the buy back. So they sprint out the gate, miss big chunks of the content, hit a brick wall and get board. Then they scrabble around in level ranges they are not really geared for, get to mid level if they CBA. Then they face artificially lower prices, good good their progress begins to accelerate again. They have the more stable part of the game.

This stability lasts about as long as it takes for them to want items the old guard want...then they run directly into the next, unimaginably big wall. You go from 1b for a EFDN to 300-500b for a t21 ship. Thats because old guard are pushing prices around without reference to how 'normal' players make money. The old guard leverages their massive wealth and status to push into colos, bases and the usual suspects. They make awe inspiring amts of money and have a tendency to crush anyone who threatens that function. Im not pointing fingers just making very general observations there, newer teams tend to get hurt before they become big teams. Big teams can take the punches again by relying of the old guard systems/networks.

Our New-ish player is now unable to get into the P2AI econ in a meaningful way without support from those old guard as the buy in is measured in tens of billions and the reward very, very uncertin untill you understand the game and can defend your holdins. These new players cant hope to compete with the cash making enterprise the old guard have geared up. They face a week/months long slog using farming techniques and the game becomes....meh. No growth and no movement.

Assuming they do reach the point of getting into the t21 'end game' they will now face bigger and bigger buy-in barriers as the demand from the seriously cashed up flows around. And btw since its only the biggest/richest teams/players that can afford the drops/infrastructure to make enough end game items to sell onward that cash really only swirls around the top echelons of the game with prices going up on every pass. Only very rarely does it drop into the lesser new players hands in any real amount. The end result is a haphazard trajectory that defies any dev attempts to smooth the ride and will invariable screw with new player perceptions of how fast they should be progressing and how work is rewarded. It goes from 'too easy man' to @$%* when did the difficulty curve go vertical?

Thats my take, very basic I could go on for awhile about how various bits affect people but ill leave it at this. Monster post already

Vorp

Obviously I've glossed over the need to have *some* arbitrage/stability in the system. The problem isn't with some players having more than others, that's good sense and game play. Problem is with a small group of players controlling (and in some cases fighting over) very shallow markets and causing down-stream issues by controlling excessive amounts of wealth/power/influence however you want to measure it.

It will end up causing new players issues and produce moving gap between them. The SS class system made literal lol

Vorp

Two points come to mind that seem to totally undercut your argument.

1) You say that veterans obtained their endgame items in a different economy, an economy in which the market price on these items was not inflated as much. But actually, most veterans obtained things like Heph Machines by doing Olympus and building them ourselves. It wasn't the case in 2011 that SP did all the Oly runs and sold every other team their HMs for 50b per. This is a perfect example of the P2AI economy you are talking about. Mid-level players are just as well equipped to grind Olympus for T21 ships and gear as veterans were in years gone by. In fact, mid-level players today are BETTER equipped because the price on T20 gear has only dropped as the years have dragged on. So, even if the market price of HMs doesn't reflect the build cost or expected value, mid-level players have no obligation to play that price game in the first place.

2) Even if you start a new server, you will soon enough encounter the same echelon problem (if it even is a problem). The pricing behavior of players in SS is determined not by the fact that there are old players and new players, but by the fact that the power curve is completely off the hook in this game. If everyone started from zero, you might see a different set of players in ascendance, but you can mark my words that there would be the same sort of hierarchy that there is today.

Ill just add in some very quick forecasts for what happens presuming im correct in the above posts.

In the situation where the majority of players ARE put off by the gap between old and new- guard one of 2 things will happen.

One: the old guard will reach critical mass, utilize all available resources and begin to cannibalize each other. End result is a 'true' emperor who controls all the available resources in the game. Lives long life and dies at age 42. Given that a single team cant actual use all the W-Space area this is not gaona happen. I mean look at the W-Space map as it stands. Not any real need to fight is there?

Option two is a death by isolation. With no need to combat each other all the old guard will grow without cease, push out all but themselves and die due to entropy. As players slowly leave by natural process the power and money centralizes more and more exacerbating the problem. No new blood entering the system results in no changes and thus atrophy.

After awhile there is literally no point to playing the game as the only person you can compare yourself to is the same person....over and over and over again. Since your not really competing for space or resources there is not more reason to exist other than to replicate....its a game so that's out.

It will devolve into a 'mines bigger' contest. This will get old, all but the most die-hard will leave...and the game will officially die.

My forecast
Vorp

In your first point you presume there are a large quantity of equivalently leveled, like minded players all willing to do the same content, repetitively and consistently until all members have equal gear...quick poll....how many people fit that bill for each tech level from 20-22?

Oh and trying to say that because you dident buy each item all value arguments are void is just a cop-out. Im not trying to 'blame' the old guard any more than you can blame a tree root for breaking up the road base. Its the road builders (read: Devs) job to ensure the tree is pruned and the issue dealt with. If they generate a 2 speed econ that distorts value between player classes then thats their problem to solve. You defend the system purely because your benefit from it, thats not wrong, its human nature but I do wish the old guard would step outside themselves once in a while.

To be clear. I'm not saying in any way a flash reset would permanently fix the problem but it WILL produce a far more viable system in the medium term. As of now even if steam is a raging success and dumps bucketloads of players into SS the points I made WILL cull their numbers at an accelerated rate. We can argue as to how much but I don't think you can argue my logic just tear at the fringes of it. Thus the total cohort we get after the various stages I described in above will be winnowed drastically.

If the server was reset at time of steam greenlight the result would be a much, much higher retention rate overall. Presuming this influx can be maintained the churn would produce something equated to a stable progression. Newer players do new player things and then move to mid, then end game player things. Not the jerk-n-stop progression we 'enjoy' today. The problem would rear its head but not for some time.

Obviously removing the P2AI system would 'fix' this but I doubt that is politically viable in any event though a wipe/reset would be the perfect time if it were to happen.

Vorp

dont they realize they have to sink all that glitched money out of the game?


what is a carrot anyway

Enough to do Heph, especially if they can get a little help from some endgame players. The fact that every mid-range team of the past few years has had a fair number of T21 ships goes to show that this is not the obstacle.



On the contrary, I remain unconvinced that you have demonstrated anything that applies to the actual game. If players aren't sticking around, it's because the game is boring to them, not because they experience existential angst due to the existence of someone higher up the ladder.

Missing the point enk, pick a item pick a method the result is the same. You cant point at a thing and say "well you can build that yourself, market price is not relevant". If that were the case the computer you are working on right now would be worth millions. Market price is 100% relevent because if its not then you may as well throw in the towel on the whole market economy and move to a no trading system.

Players are not islands, they are ment to buy and sell whats needed and not. Old guard distort the system dramatically and cause issues by doing it.

At no point did I require a player to have any form of angst about the state of other players. In fact I argue the opposite if questioned, giving players something to aspire to is beneficial in keeping them long term.

ALL of my arguments have been related to how the progression speed/system is broken by end game players unintentional meddling in the system by flooding some areas with money from outside the P2P econ. Im not invoking a single emotional argument, its all boredom vs desire to play and cost/benefit. I dont understand where your getting that from

Vorp

Allowing glitches is just shallow incentive and poor writing. Lack of intellectual stimuli will drive people away to greener pastures.


Like, what is a carrot anyway? Its as easy as that


edit* typo

And I'm saying that even in cases where the P2P economy isn't a viable method, there's always the do-it-yourself option. Most veterans are very familiar with that second option, since we didn't have a P2P economy to rely on at the bleeding edge of the endgame. So from a veteran perspective, I am bound to say that if we did it, I don't see why a mid-game player can't.



Maybe you should stick to your 3D modeling.