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Post The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
There are a lot of things that I feel are wrong in the game economy, some that can be fixed (much of the damage done, actually). I have talked numerous times with some developers about this and they seem to reject my thoughts on the matter.

I thought I would sprinkle a bit of salt in the suggestion tab.

Clearly there is a misunderstanding of how supply/demand works in a lot of cases when content is developed, but what is very very hurtful to an economy is when the rule-makers make a fundamental change in that ecosystem that favours a party, in this case, the entire player-base.

High Amounts of Drops
Some runs, like RP, Kidd, MS, and Olympus have had their drop tables completely changed and are now dropping very high amounts of zone-unique items. To me, this is just the development team responding to the player-base asking for easier content, which is an absolute no-no when it comes to certain things like economic balance.

There is so much accumulated wealth in this game, that you do not even need to trade anymore. Join a team, old player gives you everything. I do it, everyone does it. It is an absolute joke. Or just buy it for peanuts on the market because there is so many and such a high influx for a small player population.

EXPLOITS
There are always going to be exploits, and the damage done by these is fucking huge, and you generally do not to anything about this at all. The most recent, being the BG BS exploit, got a bunch of people banned. But they had pumped so many credits in the economy, trillions. This is just one of many exploits that have debalanced the economy, one of many that the damages had not been wiped or fixed. There are 2017-game start years worth of exploits that have poisoned our economy. This is probably my largest argument for a clean wipe of SS, or the creation of a new server, which I would gladly move to if it was created.

Bindomite
Are you kidding me. You can make the best items in the game even better using a 300m market price commodity. Plus you can get 40-80 per hour if you know where to look. This has killed of a good section of the market for high quality gear. Bindomite and high loot content now makes it an absolute joke to make full gear setups with the exact multiple mods you want.
I think this content should exist (bindomite), but holy fuck, the next step to make modding easier is just to let players choose what mods they want for a cost.

Credits
You need credits? get a sing sphere, or buy it with USD from some random dude, and move ICs around, make 400b in a few days.

Levels
You need levels? Subspace alien invasion gets you to level 500 in some stupid amount of time, then farm PSpace DGs like a boss with an engineer, then do all the 2x level mission in sol with xp tweaks and strontium general boost (which has gone to more than 500% for an hour, mind you... on a double xp weekend)

PvP
PvP is dead as fuck. You start PvPing and suddenly 2-3 teams come and start steamrolling your galaxies, nothing you can do about it. Or a pirate roams around like he owns the place and no one even. The issue is not the mechanics. The issue is that proper player dynamics has died off because of a bunch of carebear changes that made old players comfortable in their thrones. Power curve likely being one of the culprits.

Social Interactions
All chat trolls seem to still be alive, LFG channel is a VERY VERY yummy improvement. Other than that, there is almost no pulse left in the game, in relative terms. I was told our player base was healthy, social interactions show otherwise. Something needs to be done about this.

Balancing
I do not say this to disrespect the devmin team, who do a lot of good work for the game, but PUT IN PLACE A PROPER STANDARDISED BALANCING ALGORITHM OR FORMULA. This goes for amount reward, overall power of a ship, power of an aug, power of a weapon, whatever. The game has gone down to specialty build to win setups. There is absolutely no fucking balance to the game at all. You just put on the highest DPS shit you can find and plough through EVERYTHING.

Do you not realise how much harm you are doing to the game when you introduce something unbalanced, either in reward output or how fucking broken it is (ahem HM and Prawn for like 3-4 years, then to realise, yeah, shouldn't have happened), let players milk the game forever, the take it away.
Example: When the Subspace Monthlies were introduced, I got the gunner Pax ship and 2 Grand Offensive augs IN UNDER 1 HOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Conclusion
Make the game too easy and players will lose interest. You can contest this as much as you want, there are very clear indicators that prove the player base has lost interest in the game. Player interactions is non-existent compared to the golden years of SS. The trade channel is hardly ever used, even at peak times. Trade forum is no longer used. Teams are now AFK for the most part once their galaxies are built. Players do not need to work as a group to do content because it has become so easy. New player input in game is negligible and there is an eroding sense of competition in the game.

PS
I have looked up some games that have gone through the same problems (ie Maplestory). Making a game too fucking easy will kill it.

I wrote this post not because I am a hater, but because I believe this is likely the greatest game to hit the MMO market. Ever since t21 was introduced in the game, there have been very fundamentally unbalanced things happening.

A clean wipe of some sort, would give the devmin team the breathing room to go back to the drawing tables and recreate and rebalance content. It would also be the ultimate test for low-mid level content.

Devmin seems to be doing a good job, I hope you do not take this post as an attack. It is simply a remark from one of your paying customers.

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Fri Apr 14, 2017 9:36 am
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
What's the suggestion?


Sat Apr 15, 2017 7:55 am
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
Test stuff before introducing it, standard balancing formula, wipe the server/make a new serve, watch the direction of content.


Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:32 am
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
We have an ever-improving QA workflow, a dev who is dedicated to improving balance formulas (long process), we will not be wiping anything, and the drop rates you were complaining about were increased in exchange for a dramatically longer lockout timer.

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Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:48 am
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
More comments:

Bindomite: We are currently drafting a revamp to the item modification system that would resolve a lot of the issues introduce by Bindomite. It's still in the early stages but look out for more information soon.

Credits (from manual IC movement): I have no idea if 400b in a few days is a realistic number, but I want to point out that none of those credits are being sourced by the game in the same way that colonies source credits. Instead, those are all credits that are obtained by arbitrage against the inefficiencies of the big IC movers. I would contend that this is actually a great improvement to the game's economy, since people who don't have the interest or means to build a lot of infrastructure in Wild Space are still able to get a slice of the pie through active playing.

Levels: I'm not sure it's a bad thing that people can grind levels quite fast.

PvP: I don't agree with your assessment that piracy activities leads to stomping by several large teams. That information seems several years out of date. I don't believe many people care that much about being PvPed anymore. The locus of conflict has shifted to Wild Space, which was an intentional development direction.

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Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:55 am
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
The item_modification issue has nothing really to do with Bindomite. It has everything to do with passive mods and player brains...y'know, the brain that is in your human head.

From what I understand, Bindomite was created (afaik, from Jeff) as a way for people to get item_mods on items and remove said item from the market. If you didn't get the mods you wanted, you can try again with a new item.

The problem is that passive, global mods provide so much help to a player's setup, so people don't Bindo expensive high end items as much as Jeff would have liked. The bulk of Bindo'd items are small cheap easy to get items..stuff you can get for 1b credits or under. Occasionally you will get a very high end player Bindoing an item like a RNF Lincin, but that's a drop; you don't go to the effort of actually spending resources to obtain it. Very very few of those new high end Discharge weapons will be Bindo'd, because of the simple fact you have to go to *significant effort* to build them.

How do you solve this then? How do you get people to build items to Bindo them instead of using stuff like Titanium Shredders, of which you can buy from an AI base? How do you get people from abusing high Weapon Hold setups to call a hypertank setup "glass cannon DPS"?

From what I heard, there's a change coming down the pipe about making the active weapon the only weapon whose mods are in effect. Hober recently started to talk about specific mods that follow the theme of an item (eg radar bonuses on a *radar*).

There is no single end all change that solves these problems. It has to be a multi-step overhaul. I believe a solution will run similar to this: First, no more global mods. Second, mods are thematically in line with the item_type of the item. Third, mods are additive like aug_mods. Fourth, mod *power* is scaled to item tier; a mod on an exotic item is more powerful then a mod on an uncommon item. And fifth, Artifacts/Ruins need to stop coming with mods when extracted, or otherwise we get a "I will extract this for the mod potential because Ruins are automatically equivalent to Exotic items."

A player choice item modding gem system is a great addition, but ultimately optional in face of the greater overhaul. Obviously, player choice for mods will have to have greater costs than random mods.


Sat Apr 15, 2017 7:33 pm
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
@Enkelin

Yipper, Cow, and I are sourcing roughly 6 accounts worth of characters, bases, and slaves across three galaxies. The amount of resources we're pulling in that can be converted into IC is roughly valued at 20b/day. About 66% of that is being used up to fund various builds, so about 7b/day is actually being profited with.

To get "100b" levels of income per day and STILL holding down serious builds, we would need at least 30 accounts humming. If some single person is pulling that level of income, my hat is off to him because that is an absurd level of base and slave management. And at that point, you would not actually be MCing much if at all beyond braking transport spheres around.

For perspective, that is 250 colonies worth of income. Trevor and bills together held the record of 200. You would need to hold a space *by yourself* of 30 to 50 galaxies.

@PVP

Piracy activities do not lead to large teams going on stomping campaigns unless the team being attacked by the pirates is a true newbie team, and by then you'd have admins already involved. I'm speaking of a situation like Evo vs Zero Gravity, but replace Evo with iWin douchebags. Attacking a team that is so low level only two of twenty people are in your normal level range and going to the point of making uber noob alts to strike at them left right and center.

Yeah, the admins would be on that like white on rice.

The other day a fully geared out T22 player found a low level T20 player that was trying to help even lower level teammates get T20 skills. He chose that day was the day he was going to kill that T20 FC and sit in the area until the guy towed or logged off.

If this scenario was replicated many times over with full support of the T22 player's team against that team's low level players, you can bet there would be serious repercussions from the admins. Harassing people ...especially those who can't fight back to begin with, for the sake of harassing them, is a surefire way to get your team banned.


Sat Apr 15, 2017 7:55 pm
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
Check your facts man. Trev and bills had 125 at max and I hold the record with 157.


Sun Apr 16, 2017 4:52 am
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
They held 100 each from what I understood from Leonard.


Sun Apr 16, 2017 5:41 am
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
Antilzah wrote:
Check your facts man. Trev and bills had 125 at max and I hold the record with 157.



They had between 120 and 150 on average. I used to build their colonies for 150-200b at the start of the uni.

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Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:42 am
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
anilv wrote:
More comments:

Bindomite: We are currently drafting a revamp to the item modification system that would resolve a lot of the issues introduce by Bindomite. It's still in the early stages but look out for more information soon.

Credits (from manual IC movement): I have no idea if 400b in a few days is a realistic number, but I want to point out that none of those credits are being sourced by the game in the same way that colonies source credits. Instead, those are all credits that are obtained by arbitrage against the inefficiencies of the big IC movers. I would contend that this is actually a great improvement to the game's economy, since people who don't have the interest or means to build a lot of infrastructure in Wild Space are still able to get a slice of the pie through active playing.

Levels: I'm not sure it's a bad thing that people can grind levels quite fast.

PvP: I don't agree with your assessment that piracy activities leads to stomping by several large teams. That information seems several years out of date. I don't believe many people care that much about being PvPed anymore. The locus of conflict has shifted to Wild Space, which was an intentional development direction.


Before wild space was made smaller, I made 200-400b per day once every few dayss (had to let the ai bases eat through the IC commods). I did this by taking my sing sphere and buying everyone's IC's at half the MC price, or buying at maxed out ai bases and selling at empty bases.

Now, I make 50-90b in about an hour or two of selling my own ICs. I usually stop because I get bored. (that was last uni)


PVP - My brother killed someone on Traders while they were doing a run, they got butthurt and rolled over some of their gals.

RE were pirating last uni, SRX, RF, Traders and whoever else rolled through their gals laying waste in their path.

Ada Souls being little pests, and I absolutely love pvping them in uz/pspace. We rolled through their gals.

PVP is dead and current player attitude is keeping it dead. There is no incentive to PVP. Limitation to how PvP can be performed have been introduced to the game (you need to have bases/an HQ in order to engage in PvB), Cannot aggro galaxies anymore, cannot PvP in EF space, cannot PvP in Lyceum, cannot PvP in EF protected gals even though fuzz would kill you, instances took away a good chunk of content contesting. I could go on. Not saying they were bad changes or not, but those changes did considerably hurt PvP in the game.

SS is a sandbox game, any changes that limits a player to freely decide to take an action in the game drives the game away from this genre.

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Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:46 am
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
reyjalrmm wrote:
anilv wrote:
More comments:

Bindomite: We are currently drafting a revamp to the item modification system that would resolve a lot of the issues introduce by Bindomite. It's still in the early stages but look out for more information soon.

Credits (from manual IC movement): I have no idea if 400b in a few days is a realistic number, but I want to point out that none of those credits are being sourced by the game in the same way that colonies source credits. Instead, those are all credits that are obtained by arbitrage against the inefficiencies of the big IC movers. I would contend that this is actually a great improvement to the game's economy, since people who don't have the interest or means to build a lot of infrastructure in Wild Space are still able to get a slice of the pie through active playing.

Levels: I'm not sure it's a bad thing that people can grind levels quite fast.

PvP: I don't agree with your assessment that piracy activities leads to stomping by several large teams. That information seems several years out of date. I don't believe many people care that much about being PvPed anymore. The locus of conflict has shifted to Wild Space, which was an intentional development direction.


Before wild space was made smaller, I made 200-400b per day once every few dayss (had to let the ai bases eat through the IC commods). I did this by taking my sing sphere and buying everyone's IC's at half the MC price, or buying at maxed out ai bases and selling at empty bases.

Now, I make 50-90b in about an hour or two of selling my own ICs. I usually stop because I get bored. (that was last uni)


PVP - My brother killed someone on Traders while they were doing a run, they got butthurt and rolled over some of their gals.

RE were pirating last uni, SRX, RF, Traders and whoever else rolled through their gals laying waste in their path.

Ada Souls being little pests, and I absolutely love pvping them in uz/pspace. We rolled through their gals.

PVP is dead and current player attitude is keeping it dead. There is no incentive to PVP. Limitation to how PvP can be performed have been introduced to the game (you need to have bases/an HQ in order to engage in PvB), Cannot aggro galaxies anymore, cannot PvP in EF space, cannot PvP in Lyceum, cannot PvP in EF protected gals even though fuzz would kill you, instances took away a good chunk of content contesting. I could go on. Not saying they were bad changes or not, but those changes did considerably hurt PvP in the game.

SS is a sandbox game, any changes that limits a player to freely decide to take an action in the game drives the game away from this genre.


Trying to emphasize PvP without a very solid system is a waste of time. All of the largest MMOs on the planet right now (WoW, SWTOR, LotRO, etc...) have all reported that PvPers make up at most 20-30% of their playerbase, with the vast majority of players being solely engaged in PvE. Instances exist for exactly this reason, if you allow 20% of your income to chase 80% away you're in bad shape. That's honestly why I think this whole cargo slot thing is going to fail hardcore, especially if the playerbase gets much larger before it comes in. For most people, dropping a Hantr Psu, or Vaidya Bhava is a good enough reason to quit. What you're going to see following implementation is people farming the entrances to zones since you can't TW out of them, and no amount of, "Your squad should be able to defend itself" is going to stop people from ragequitting.

World PvP incentives are almost always geared toward top-end players and those top-end players almost always decide to farm much lower end players for the negligible risk it entails (risk vs reward is a real bitch). That is why most MMOs have moved over to no-loss PvP systems, and instanced dungeons, because if 80% of your playerbase has no interest in PvP, then forcing them to do it is financially stupid. Granted, if you have a really solid PvP system that is legitimately fun, and attracts players by its own virtue, that's different, but SS has a competely shit system for PvP so the only people that benefit from emphasizing it are the people who can just farm low levels all day without fear of losing any time or gear.


Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:33 pm
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
I'd say the main problem SS has right now, is mostly just a lack of demand coupled with an overwhelming supply. PvP doesn't really factor into this. The issue is arising from the fact that the SS playerbase is extremely top heavy, and most low level players are alts that are not engaged in low to mid level markets. This leaves the vast majority of items completely without value, and to Hober's credit, he has taken some steps toward fixing that with some of the new weapons. I personally hope to see more content implemented along the lines of building demand at the high end for low end gear so that virtually all items and gear out of low level DGs and content command a reasonable (but not excessive) value, due to demand from high level players. This would give us more effective item sinks in the game and allow for equipment prices to self regulate, which is a much better model than the overflowing stagnant pond that SS currently models its economy after.

That coupled with enkelin's proposed system of "bindo-ing" gear with other similar tier pieces to create item sinks at the high end would do wonders for the game, though the benefits may not be immediately visible due to the already staggering supply of items ingame.


Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:43 pm
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
I'm a player; I only need one set of each particular weapon. I would like to have good modded weapon sets, but as long as they're not horrible, I can dig just getting Composite. However, why should I bother getting perfect mods on endgame weapons? These weapons cost a lot of resources to build/obtain. Instead, I'm going to bindo cheap easy to get weapons solely for the mods, because +3% damage on one Evil mod is great.

That's the problem with Bindomite. It doesn't encourage building new sets of endgame gear to bindo, as the premise Jeff came up with. Instead, it encourages bindoing very cheap and easy to get items.

The cost of 30 endgame...but small weapons to bindo is like 3tril.
The cost of 30 lategame, but not endgame small weapons is like 30b.
You do the math.
The benefit of having 30 perfect lategame weapons is only something like 3% less bonus damage, 3% less bonus elect, and or 3% less crit chance.

This may be critical omg I must have on an endgame player, but the cost is so extreme why bother? Only 10 people will attempt this, out of 1000. And only for one character each.


Mon Apr 17, 2017 11:12 pm
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Post Re: The SS Economy/Game is Suffering (ranting)
People would do more bindoing of expensive stuff but the markets jacked so you cant get any, theres nobody playing, so no farming items for sale.What little really good end game gear is being scooped is being kept for bindo them selves as what are you going to swap it for? a bunch of useless money (bils) you cant do anything with cos the markets jacked.

Supply is still too low and demand too high, too much money floating round. The demographics is off, its top heavy also for the low n there is.

game needs players bad...


Tue Apr 18, 2017 2:23 am
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