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LOCKED 7/11/2012 2:35:50 PM, Old PRE-ALPHA topic

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77 months ago by
Scuderia
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Hi all,

Without over complicating what is a pretty simple yet pressing question, going on the stated wish of many for a fully player driven economy, this requires that almost all resources and items in the game are player mined and created (aside from loot drops of course). To me personally this is very important and I believe to others as well. When the MMO launches, there will obviously have to be some NPC vendors to kick things along, but I dont expect them to be required for very long. However a player driven economy and item base has major implications on gameplay as we all know. Most of those actually create additional gameplay aspects (hauling, trading, which many of us want to see), but it also has other major affects. For example eve online, you dont have to worry about an oxygen, electricity or fuel supply. With MW you do. And if these are all player driven resources and items then that means every single player must dedicate a portion of their MW gaming time (indefinately) to support themselves in terms of basic life support and ship operation in terms of oxygen, fuel and electricity requirements.

But what is an acceptable amount of your time to be spent on these tasks? IMO, I would say something around the area of 10-15% would be acceptable. I, as somsone who loves fast paced action, racing, combat and strategy dont have much interest in sitting around mining for hours and hours on end, regularly. Fleet mining operations however, where I can provide an escort, are of course a different story.

But I would not want to have to spend even 20% of my game time just mining to ensure I have enough power and oxygen and so forth to get by. But then there is also the point that I might not have to. When you have dedicated mining guilds that are not pvp-focused, I can trade my skills and combat excellence to them in return for said vital resources.

That is one variable from many that I'm not going to list here that make the next question very difficult to answer in terms of applying a real value to the game.

So: The big question, deciding on resource production multiplyers. Production multiplyers refer to how much of a bonus you get when you refine a base resource (ice asteroid) into a level 1 item (water). An example would be a 5.0 base multiplyer. Say, 4 hours of mining ice to get water, with a multiplayer of 5, equates to (when refined) 20 total hours of water supply obtained in the 4 hour mining period.

Another major, major variable is balancing the multiplyer between solo and group mining operations. I'm not even going to try and explain this as its pretty straight forward for regular MMO players to get what I mean here, but its more food for thought.

Now, there are two particularly easy ways to balance resources/production and a bunch of more difficult ones. You can change how hard it is to get a particular resource, or you can change how much of said resource is required for a production operation (as mentioned there are also plenty of side alleys like having a super rare item required to complete production for balance purposes or making said resource next to impossible to haul back to a production site safely - but they really are secondary things so i'm not going down that road now)

So, trying to strike the balance between solo mining, group mining, or buying all your running resourecs (oxy/water etc) from a third party miner faction, what do you feel is a balanced, fair number?

Thanks

Scud

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77 months ago by
SailorBacon

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I just got done with a 2 year stint of EVE online. I absolutely loved it's player driven economy. However, I was mainly into PVP. I never once built my own ammo, guns, or ships. Instead of course, I bought them using the money I made from missioning. It turned out, four hours of grinding missions would sustain my pvp completely, and I played in average of 20 hours a week. (2 hours a day, more on the weekends)

So as you can see, that comes to exactly 20% of my gameplay was "work". So I completely agree with your 10-15%.

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77 months ago by
mrcalhou

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First adopter award

I don't think that it has to be an all-or-nothing thing. Oxygen and fuel COULD just be refreshed automatically upon docking with players able to purchase additional fuel straight from the station (which imho, would be a good way of getting money out of the game, helping to curb inflation).

Having NPCs that sell some basic commodities wouldn't actually be all that bad of a thing, since chances are the MMO will feature NPC missions that give out monetary rewards. So having an NPC way of getting money out of the game wouldn't be bad for the previously stated reason of keeping inflation from running rampant.

I also don't see a player-driven economy working if items don't get destroyed and must be replaced. Yes, we all hate the feeling of losing time and hard-work when we permenately lose something, but it WOULD help to keep things active.

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77 months ago by
muggsbud
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i think as long as you have fuel and your ship's engine is on you shouldn't run out of energy. (try pressing t, :) ) That is, unless you're using an energy weapon of some sort.

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77 months ago by
TiberiuS

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+1 for mugg:
as long as your engine is running it should recharge battery (if needed). This system is commonly used, like in cars, ships or planes (a running engine doesn't need a battery, because it produces the energy used for ignition or controls through its generator... you could remove battery actually while the engine in ON).

This may be different for systems that use a lot of energy. But nontheless they would need to charge a capacitor to reach the needed energy output / time... this could also made by the generator.

Edit:
What you need a battery for in your ship is because you will travel great distances with your engine turned OFF. You need energy to maintain your electronic systems and you need energy to start your engines.

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77 months ago by
Dakayras

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I think the questition isn´t answerable, because:

When you have 10 haulers, miners, traders and only 1 fighting pilot you don´t need so much stuff. As writen further up the essential thing on a market is the request. If there is no one who needs anything it´s senseless to produce anything. So you will need NPC´s which requests goods also.

But this is realy simple, the guys on the spacestation will need water to drink, water do make things grow, water to produce oxygen. So water will be an essential level 1 item. If there is no water on station, this station will die. It will not possible to produce anything on the station, no armor, no rockets, no enginge simply nothing.

So you need a greater multiplyer on basic stuff, but this also only if you have not enough miners on the server.

The next problem which I see in mining is the destroyable of the roids. When you have to fly more and more miles to see an roid it will need more and more time. So you will need something like notes, the ship flyes into it and lands on a new claim. Thos claims have to refresh everyday. Perhaps : "The government is leading exploration and harvesting of spaceressources in outerspaceregions, because there is not enough material in the inner sphere anymore." I don´t think that those claims have to be instanced but they have to refresh every day if there are enough miners. Anyway even two miners can clear sector by sector if those two guys will spend enough time. Otherwise I don´t bevlieve that you can roleback the hole universe esealie. Espacilie if there are player owned facilities or stuff like this.

Thos facilities will solve the problem of emtiness also.

So long.
Dak

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77 months ago by
mrcalhou

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Miner Wars doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. Eve-online already has many good systems in place to keep a player-driven economy active. Some of which are:

--All types and tiers of ships and equipment are useful because they fill a certain niche (which makes demand more consistent relative to supply across the board)

--Asteroids take minutes, and sectors take hours even when groups of players strip-mine them.

--Asteroids respawn to prevent the game from being resourceless.

@muggsbud and Tiberius:

The word "energy" is usually used in the same context that "fuel" would be used for. Since "fuel" provides "energy" this wouldn't be entirely inaccurate or unreasonable.

Now in the vacuum of space, even without fuel and an active engine, you could still have energy--kinetic energy. If you were moving when you ran out of fuel then you would continue to move until you hit something with a great enough mass that it would cause your velocity to become zero.

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77 months ago by
Scuderia
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So, what a long ass post this is going to be.

Firstly, thank you to everyone who has posted here so far - there really has been awesome feedback and a few things have even been mentioned that relate to a few other threads have gone around which ultimately all tie back to the finished product, so thanks for the comments its been good to see. However with my opening statement in mind I am going to keep everything short and "blunt" to save everyone from death-by-forum-post

I want to start by pointing out that Miner Wars does not have levelling or experience points. I truly hope that this does not ever change, including for the MMO, but I guess we will see. However with that in mind, you need to consider that "money drains" required in typical MMO economies do not apply as much to MW. This is becuase you dont have people pointlessly wasting their time making Level 1 bullet type, Level 2 bullet type, etc etc until they finally get to the "good type" that every single developed player uses. That does not happen in Miner Wars, there are set items as listed in the wiki everyone has access to that can be used. All have individiual merits, pros and cons to be used and unlike alot of other games Miner Wars wont be clutted with junk items that nobody ever uses accept for when they level up. Traders, DONT freak out, becuase that means every single commodity you deal in is a high turnover item. There will always be demand. And this is one of many reasons I hope that, to the maximum extend possible, every single item that is in the MMO is player manufactured, aside from of course loot drops and other special faction items or what have you

"Oxygen and fuel COULD just be refreshed automatically upon docking"
-The game already states oxygen is obtained from mining ice that has trapped oxygen inside and is a requirement to be managed by the player.

Regarding electricity being automatically recharged from the engines, although this is logical to assume, i'm pretty sure the game will not work that way (intentionally). I base this on a module being available to fit to your ship (solar panel) that recharges electricity when activated, and energy being stated as something that is consumed and must be player managed.

Also consider stations. Stations and their modules (refineries etc) should need to be powered and have either preset load requirements or dynamic load requirements (based on how much the module is utilised at the time). And lets not forget, I dont think its going to be very hard at all to obtain electricity, the problem will be moving it. We can build stations, loaded up to the brim with solar panels and nuclear reactors. Assuming you can defend it, i'm pretty sure most factions will have an endless source of electricity, assuming they can store the reserves (I'm hoping the battery prefab will be used to store a certain amount of KW that can be used or transferred - but thats just hope)

Regarding not re-inventing the wheel and the eve-online economy, I truly think it is absolutely fair to say, whether you love eve or hate it (personally a lover converted to a hater after a long year and a bit), that CCP with Eve Online created the most complete and best ever player driven sandbox economy and manufacturing system in history to date and that is largely the reason for the games success. There is just no comeback for that one, they nailed it. Frankly if I could copy paste their entire ecnonomic and manufacturing system with a Miner Wars spin into MW MMO tomorrow, i'd do it. But I envision a more simple system being applicable to Miner Wars.

Probably the most thought provoking gaming-related conversation i've had in the past few months was one I had with Marek just a week or so ago, which is directly related to how this post came about. Regarding this comment

"The next problem which I see in mining is the destroyable of the roids. When you have to fly more and more miles to see an roid it will need more and more time."

Basically the question was, do asteroids respawn. In every MMO, the main base resources are always in static locations, that is to say, they can generally always be farmed from the same place.

WHAT IF:

Asteroids dont respawn. This would force the entire population to be ever expanding outwards into the unknown. This would cause faction areas and claimed territory to be constantly shifting. It would create a significant gameplay aspect, it would change everything.

Now, this is actually a really interesting topic to think about just becuase of the amount of implications it has on long term and short term gameplay. I'll give you a few minutes to think about that one before reading on.

So basically, I thought this through for a while, and after about 20 minutes came up with this response. Ultimately, planets and moons were shattered to bits and pieces and showered across the solar system. Thanks to our friend gravity it doesnt matter where they went, they would all eventually yield to gravitational pull (as clearly seen in the sector map) and be constantly rotating around the sun. This is to say that asteroids should ultimately respawn, becuase it is logical to assume if you go to an area, mine the whole sector entirely, eventually new rocks would come floating on by. Some areas should be significantly denser than others at certain times, and maybe the extremely low dense areas can contain some super rare rocks to encourage exploration.

Now I thought about this for quite some time and ultimately if asteroids and level 0/1 resources are not respawning this creates far too many problems. The most significant being in one way or another you would need to ensure that the entire player base is migrating in the same or at least a very similar direction. You would have to assume the MMO map is not going to be nearly as big as the current map, but even still. In a straight line between the sun and earth on the sector map, there are 6 million sectors alone. If you are forcing players to constantly move and migrate to find more resources, without controlling exactly where people are going everyone would soon just become, simply, lost and divided. If you are "telling" players where to go, you are not really in a sandbox anymore. Thoughts on this topic?

I just saw how long this post was, and just deleted a further six paragraphs, lol.

Looking forward to more comments :)

Scud

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77 months ago by
outfctrl

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On another note. If you are mining for long periods of time in the dark, maybe a quick escape to outside of the asteroid would recharge your batteries through solar exposure for a short period of time. Once recharged, enter the asteroid again.

As far as oxygen goes, well this is 2081 and I am sure we have found some way to recycle carbon dioxide into oxygen by now.

Replacing your drill bits or sharpening, ammo (unless it is lasers) and other expendables would make sense.

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77 months ago by
SailorBacon

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QUOTE: If you are forcing players to constantly move and migrate to find more resources, without controlling exactly where people are going everyone would soon just become, simply, lost and divided. If you are "telling" players where to go, you are not really in a sandbox anymore. Thoughts on this topic?

I think asteroids should respawn. Forcing people to constantly move would be a nightmare. I don't believe however, that mineral rich blobs of money should be sitting right on every players doorstep every morning. (shameless self plug time!) If my idea of Sector Claim Towers gets implemented, a great way to balance the mining would be to set up sectors like a chess board. Black spaces are claimable and whites are not. Now that splits the possible claimable sectors in half. If you start with 10,000 sectors 5,000 can be player owned. If you take EVE online's daily peak member population which is around 50,000, you get can cram around 5,000 10 man clans into Miner Wars. I think that is a very good starting place.

Now, these unclaimable sectors are where the good ore is. If you look at a chess board you can see that every claimable sectors has 4 sectors (6 on a 3d map) around them that they can go to mine. You might say "Wow four to six sectors for people to mine in on any given day! Way too easy.", but keep in mind that each unclaimable sector also has 4 to 6 possible clans bordering them. These Clans must now choose to battle it out for the ore or create peace treaties to mine in them safely.

I believe this idea is sound in both logic and roleplay. Sectors where pre-fabs can't be placed won't be taxed cpu-wise when plenty of voxel asteroids are added. Also, who would build a space station in an asteroid field?

NOTE: I typed this just before work and did not have time to check grammar or punctuation. (I apologize ahead of time.)

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77 months ago by
TiberiuS

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@ mrcalhou: You're right with the "energy"-thing. But it was kind of obvious we both refered to electric energy to power the ship's systems. So, electric energy shouldn't run out as long you have fuel (or solar panels that recharge your battery). ;)

@ respawn of asteroids:
If asteroids respawn the same resource shouldn't respawn in the same asteroid. This should be a random thing. Sure there can be zones where you have a bigger chance of finding a specific ore or ice.
Otherwise clans will sit on asteroids with valuable resources and the freelance player doesn't have a chance to get hands on one. Plus waiting for a res asteroid to respawn is boring!

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77 months ago by
Scuderia
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bump to keep this thread on the first page

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LOCKED 7/11/2012 2:35:50 PM, Old PRE-ALPHA topic

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