Player Features and Ideas Discussion

How does a computer program have an ounce of thought?

Sounds flippant, but it's not. When you seriously think about all of the possible accidental and deliberate bumping situations how does a program decide that one bump is hostile while another isn't.

If, for example I park a ship so that a freighter will bump me, how does the program decide the intent of either player, which don't exist as game objects?

This is a discussion that has been had many, many times and it only takes an ounce of thought to realise how difficult an issue it really is.

Or CODE. People coming along and ganking them because they are AFK.

And increasing mining profitability is easier said than done.

Who said we need a single player organization.

This is a sandbox PvP game. Things should be driven by players as opposed to NPCs. The fact that CODE. exists is an example of what people can do in a sandbox PvP game.

Here, let us try a few things to raise mining profits:

• Fewer asteroid belts.
• Less ore in each asteroid.
• No more loot drops.
• Nerf refining.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we.

The more I think about this the more I find it to be a really horrible point. We have a sandbox MMO, one of the few out there. The basic idea is that there is a relatively short list of rules and other than that it is "do what thou will".

Game content is not centered around NPCs like other games that many of us here curl our lips and sneer at. Something like CODE. is a prime example of this. You don't have to love James315 (personally I think he is a self absorbed gas bag who loves the sound of his own voice and it even carries over into his writing). However, I find that CODE. and other ganking organizations fascinating examples of emergent game play. Another example? Guys like Chribba who build up an unblemished reputation in game and act as a financial intermediary, the dude is his own House of Rothschild. Coalitions are yet another example. There is very little in the way in game mechanisms to create coalitions, but none-the-less they exist. These coalitions wage all sorts of wars. Economic wars (the ice interdiction, burn Jita/Amarr, wars against their neighbors, even cold wars). I was not at all surprised when OTEC formed a few years ago either, yet for it to happen in a game was kind of interesting. Not to mention spying. And when looking at the last one I was a fairly new member of the GBC when the Mittani and Goonswarm brought BoB to its knees and killed them (for awhile). I was in lots of fleets doing all kinds of stuff during that time.

And so what that player organizations are not a constant factor. That means the game can change and can be interesting. When I first started ganking was very different. Guys in T1 battleships and it was very, very rarely done just because. Now it has changed and you can't just ensure your safety by keeping the cargo value low and setting your autopilot and going to do the dishes.

There is lots of game content driven by players, big and small. To imply that game design should not be based around player driven content makes me wonder...do you and I even play the same game?

The idea is that in NS you get bigger bounties for bigger rats and increased risks/issues. For example, nobody in HS gives a crap if a guy is cloaked in a system all day. People do care in NS. You have to take extra effort to either determine if he is AFK and/or rat with a group of people. Then there are roaming gangs and players who are almost universally hostile. Does a HS mission runner dock up every time some guy enters system? No. Plus we also have to periodically go out and, you know, defend our systems. And we don't have the luxury of having major trade hubs right next door where we can autopilot there and autopilot back.

And no, we don't rat for fun. We rat for the ISK and/or help pump up defense indices. Ratting in general sucks. It is predictable and boring.

You also seem to have completely missed the point. We do NOT need another isk source in the game. To be quite honest, I'd love to get rid of anomalies in NS and replace them with missions, even in sov null with LP payouts being the dominant reward. That would curtail the inflow of ISK into the economy and increase an existing ISK sink. There is another benefit as well, with missions and agents, they would scale with the system population. The need for "sprawl" in NS would be greatly reduced--i.e. you would not need to hold 50 systems to get 5 really good systems, 10 decent systems, and 10 more average systems with the rest being kind of crap for 2,500 players. Now a system with a good agent could support dozens if not a hundred players/pilots. And if existing NS empires reduced their sprawl even more there could be even more room in NS for additional entities. Plus, you'd have more people out in space and even moving between systems.

So, your posts indicate a level of both ignorance of the game economy and a level of entitlement.