The Glade 4.0

There has also been allusion to being able to set PVP preferences which may be able to lessen your chances at encountering PC hostiles, however fighting against PC targets gets you more prestige.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Thanks Kaffis. I'm hoping you are right.

Any chance they may reconsider the player death thing?

I really don't care for the idea of my character being a disposable part of my experience.

It seems unlikely. Chris is really big on immersion and verisimilitude, and they didn't really want to use cloning or something as an in-universe out.

I doubt there will be anything to stop you from just duplicating your old character, though, and writing off the hits to reputation and the like as a death penalty of sorts, if that makes it easier to roleplay around.

It's actually my hope that a side effect of the Death of a Spaceman philosophy is that treating your character's life as something important to be preserved becomes less.. condescended upon? .. compared to other MMOs. I'd love a game whose community views retreating from a losing battle as a valid tactical action to be applauded and congratulated upon its success.

Permadeath obviously achieves that end, too, but that's way more hardcore than I can be at this stage in my life.

The other thing to remember is that it sounds like escape pod killing won't be the norm by any means. NPCs probably won't do it, and the reputation of being somebody who shoots pods sounds like it's something the developers want you to actively try to avoid.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This is fantastic news, and I hope they can pull it off, although I predict plenty of griefers claiming to have been "falsely accused" of insurance fraud, no matter how fairly i'ts done.



I think that's a little inaccurate - there's a great deal of profit in highsec if you know how to make it. Incursions in highsec are very profitable (albeit not as much as low/null) and base mineral mining, such as Veldspar can be profitable, done in sufficient volume. Ice mining in highsec is also profitable given how important ice is to large alliances. There's also plenty of money to be made with trading via the player economy; the 4 major trade hubs are all highsec.

That said, in a sense you're correct - outside of incursions, most highsec pve is not very profitable in highsec, but it is low risk, so the profit is generally predictable. As for the lack of interest, the large nullsec alliances and lowsec dwellers aren't interested in highsec that much except to whine about highsec dwellers supposedly ruining the game, but there's a large highsec population, just not one with a cohesive voice in the way large nullsec alliances, especially GoonSwarm/**** Coalition have.



I hope that this works out without being either too heavy-handed, or too ineffective (or worse, being easily manipulated to work against people the system is trying to protect).



I agree with this completely; I'm sure that changing the nature of the fighting to one more driven by player skill rther than leveraging mechanics, that will at least make the fights more even. In EVE, small fights do tend to rely on player skill to a great degree since paper numbers don't take engagement geometry into account (which is huge) but large fleet battles rapidly fall victim to Lanchester's Laws. Then again, I don't predict battles in Star Citizen involving thousands of ships.



I'm sure that will be true to some degree, although there will certainly always be places that tend to attract players - and gankers. I'm not quite sure what you mean on the matchmaking thing though.



I hope this is the case. For me, the biggest issue I have with griefers isn't that they grief, but rather their sense of entitlement to do so, and desire to remove any element that might give their target a chance of escape or victory.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Given this some more thought. You are going to have those kind of people no matter where you go and what you do. Ultimately they are going to find ways to "game the system" I think the "Difference" is you have an passionate lead team who are going to make the changes necessary and hopefully encourage the playerbase to be "nice pirates" by their attitude and envolvement.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Well, EVE and Star Citizen take two different approaches to creating a single "server" for everybody.

EVE breaks the universe into systems to partition load between one place and another, but they're not instanced in duplicates. Instead, when the hardware gets overloaded for a system, it uses a game mechanic called time dilation (and the exposition here is meant for onlookers like me, DE, not you and other EVE players, who are quite familiar with it, I'm sure) that essentially slows down game time to accommodate increasing latency and processing times for the battles with thousands of participants.

Star Citizen instead will be instancing space so that there can be instance caps of a maximum number of users able to interact with each other in an area at a time. Their plans for "persistent" spaces like planets and space stations are a bit less clear, but the primary engagement areas will work like this: when you decide to travel from one location to another and engage your autopilot, the server will look for other people autopiloting in the same area, and will randomly select from among those people to drop out of autopilot and encounter each other in a battle instance. Whether they actually come into conflict or not is completely up to the players' and NPC AI's behavior, but they cross paths and something may or may not come of it.

In that sense, it's matchmaking between players and NPCs based on location in the galaxy. As you autopilot around, you have the chance to run into pirate ambushes, other traders passing by, bounty hunters who are tracking you, sensor anomalies, and/or drifting derelicts. If you do, your autopilot disengages and you end up in an instance with them. Whether other factors, such as group numbers, relative quality of equipment, etc. factor into this matchmaking is as yet unpublished, if design has finalized any plans for it yet at all.

Finally, there are a few ways around matchmaking. If you activate a distress beacon, your friends (or strangers?) nearby can come to your aid, and be given preferential entry to your specific instance so they may do so. Likewise, if you're pursuing a bounty, there will be ways to flag them as a person of interest for you, and you'll be more likely to be matched to instances with each other if you're travelling within similar regions of space. Groups obviously have preference to match together, and so on.


Oh, and I thought of another two factors that will probably dissuade ganking from operating as a mirror to EVE -- the Star Citizen universe utilizes a stealth aspect that is all about managing your sensor signatures by selecting low-output equipment and the like, but there is NO visual cloaking and no "zero emissions" equipment that would be undetectable to sensors. So that's different from EVE, to my understanding. In addition, jump points will be difficult to camp, because your position when exiting a jump point will vary within a relatively broad range.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yeah, it sounds like the true design is that your ship is going to be your character. It's going to be what continues, what improves, what advances. Your pilot character will just be one of the family line/clan along your ship's adventure. While it's strange to lose a character after spending time with them, I'm kind of intrigued, as I typically ended up being someone that would level and switch characters at expansions anyway, to keep the game fresh. Also, the idea of each character having a set of achievements that marked their time in the universe sounds kind of fun.

I will admit, my play of Crusader Kings II has probably anesthetized me to the shock of that part of Death of a Spaceman. In it, you play a house in medieval Europe through the death of several characters.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Thanks for the description; that cleared it up for me. The "time dialation" thing is a neat effect, and necessary for the large battles EVE has sometimes (a new record was set recently; I think over 7,000 pilots on one grid), but I like the idea of instancing and that this might keep the numbers on one side or the other to more reasonable levels; there's nothing like jumping through a gate and discovering a fleet of 35 cruisers camping it on the other side.

I like the "managing your radar cross-section" stealth idea a lot; reminds me of F-19 Stealth Fighter back in the day! (Yeah, it's emissions, not radar, but same idea). EVE stealth is awkward; there really are no counter-stealth measures other than the limitations on cloaking device functionality itself, and for dedicated stealth ships those are not much. The only other thing you can do is just get lucky and get close enough to decloak them, or lock them before they cloak. I like the idea that it has aspects of needing to manage it, which also points to an opportunity for getting technology and learning techniques to more accurately localize stealthier opponents. Aspects of the aforementioned Stealth Fighter and possibly similarities to submarine simulation in that regard, no?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah, I'm hoping there are some limited ECM and Sensor-scout roles. Things that will hopefully not end up being straight-up "equipment counters" but that will involve learning to process signal data would be a neat angle for non-pilot skills that players could pick up.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

That would be nice. I hope there's opportunities for larger battles (as in, a few dozen on each side, not hundreds or thousands), and electronic warfare has a definite place in games about futuristic combat. That said, EWAR is rather overpowered in EVE because EWAR ships are dedicated platforms with hefty bonuses, while ECCM never has bonuses and its not often used because it takes up precious slots when opponents may or may not have ECM. Generally the only solution is EWAR of your own or simply having more ships than they have jammers, and I hope Star Citizen does it in a more skill-oriented manner.

As an aside, EWAR IS one of the only ways to stop a suicide gank in progress before CONCORD arrives since they usually rely on a very high single, double, maybe triple alpha strike. If you have EWAR modules, you can lock the gank ship before it fires. As soon as it does, it goes "criminal" status and can be attacked. Normally, that's moot as CONCORD will show up moments later and WTFPWN it in about 5 seconds, but in the meantime, the alphstrike kills the gankee. If you jam the target as soon as it fires the first salvo, though, it won't get off a second. This is of no help if it can kill in one hit, but smaller gankers like destroyers usually can't; they rely on a few quick hits from very fast-cycling guns. The problem with this approach is that no one wants to sit around a mining belt for hours watching miners and wondering if a suicide ganker will show up. It could be done though; lately there's some group of idiots running around suicide ganking hisec miners thinking they're somehow "defending the game against carebears" or some ****.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

And this is why PvP has a bad name, lol. The solution isn't to drive PvE interested players out of the game, it's to make PvP accessible enough and interesting enough that you can entice them to try and enjoy it.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

That's a great goal, and I hope they can do it, although I've found that there are some people that simply want all pvp to be something the opt-in to (mainly because they just don't want PVP). I hope that they're seriously about letting actual piracy work, while also reducing the incentive and ability to attack defenseless ships over and over and running and hiding when competent opposition shows up - or more accurately, I hope they can really pull it off.

Interestingly, the suicide gankers get a certain amount of flak from lowsec and nullsec dwellers for referring to themselves as PvPers or worse, elite PvPers (basing it on their endless kills of noncombat ships that are also often poorly fit). The best analogy I saw was that "it's pvp in the same way that racing minivans would technically be automobile racing". Suicide ganking, protestations of the practitioners to the contrary, takes little skill, since right after talking about how much skill it takes they admit that their targets are almost exclusively people not taking serious self-defense measures and having no situational awareness at all.

That's where the "saving the game from carebears" comes from. Some people are simply offended that someone can go AFK, or even just tab out to YouTube while their ship mines asteroids... ignoring the fact that while the ship is mining, there's essentially nothing for the pilot to do until its full.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Those kind of people are why I hate PvP.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I hate them too, but more in the sense of "I want to go troll these people now". I have a minig ship designed for very high defense (although it mines even slower as a result) with combat drones and over 41,000 effective hitpoints - as much as a tough cruiser or so-so battlecruiser. It would take at least 4, possibly as many as 8 suicide gankers to kill before CONCORD killed them. I find their arguments silly - they claim AFK miners ruin the game because when they return from being AFK and find their ship ganked, they go to the forums, whine, and after enough of it, CCP makes it harder to gank, and this makes the game more dumbed-down, wowlike, and carebearish.

The stupid part is, then they turn around and say "but we can still gank you, and you can't stop us!" EVE is supposed to be hard and punish stupid play, and CCP has never banned suicide ganks, nor taken steps to prevent regular ganking in null or lowsec. Furthermore, suicide gank ships are cheap, so the ganker is risking almost nothing. Yet somehow, they need to suicide gank people in order to deter them from going to the forums to whine to nerf ganking, which the suicide gankers claim they will be able to do anyhow, and in some cases claim the anti-ganking measures actually make it easier. Essentially, their argument is that they are protecting the game from being more wowlike in order to stop people from making arguments that end up in ineffectual or counterproductive ganking prevention measures.

If that was confusing and convoluted, I apologize, but the lengths to which the griefer will go to justify both doing what they do and protecting their sense of entitlement to easy targets is enormous, and if Roberts is taking a stand against this nonsense, then I'm behind him 100%. Ganking doesn't offend me; the hypocrisy and doublethink does.

The actual pvp fights where both sides are going for the other are heart-pounding exciting, though. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but if you remember not to fly what you can't afford to lose, it's not that bad.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This was the conclusion I came to during my tenure in Pirates of the Burning Sea. I didn't mind fighting (and losing as often as not) in PvP there, because ships were affordable with a reasonable time investment. That's not to say I was prepared to PvP a LOT, but I realized that participating a few times a month in the big PvP battles was doable.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

$19 million was hit today, securing the Jane's style ship manuals in PDF (sweet!) at launch and player-controlled space stations (sigh).

The $21 million stretch goal was announced, and it's probably my most anticipated one since the low teens -- Salvage gameplay.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Wow, the concepts are great! Might be the first sci-fi girl I've ever seen that might actually survive zero-g.


Also, the salvage mechanic is pretty exciting, but all it's really doing right now is giving me mass effect flashbacks. Scanning.....scanning....

What's wrong with player-controlled space stations?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Well.. I generally roll my eyes at content and gameplay that's targeted at an oligarchically small portion of the player-base. Especially when that content just serves as a driving motivation to skew guild sizes to the monstrosity end of the spectrum in order to participate. So most limited-quantity persistent control mechanics get eyerolls from me and silent wishes that the development time was spent on something more of the players would actually interact with meaningfully.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I'm a bit concerned about the salvage mechanics, in the sense that, for a lack of a better way to describe it, a "salvage node" is no different than a "mining node" except in the mechanism for obtaining the resource. This is fine with respect to exploratory salvage--finding wreckage from long lost battles and civilizations. But I was also hoping for a pvp/pve battlefield scrounging mechanism, like crows picking over the carrion. Granted I understand at least some of the challenges of this, especially preventing insurance fraud, but I was looking forward to being in the pack of hungry jackals just licking my lips waiting for the battle to end and then race to get my meal--while fighting off other jackals.

I don't know that player stations are necessarily like that. They can be, in some ways, but in other ways they can be an effective method for even small guilds or groups to pool their resources into something useful.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Bold mine. I don't see small guilds or groups to pool their resources to compete for a limited number when there are big guilds out there. I could be wrong. The limited number could be, say, 10,000 or something.

But that's okay. One of the reasons I was eager to direct some of my pledging towards an Idris was to provide a base of operations of sorts (with LTI) for whatever group of folks we scrape together or join, in lieu of an actual persistent universe, limited availability thing like a space station or a Bengal carrier.

Lonedar, I agree -- I hope that salvaging can include picking through wreckage generated by battles. The way I figure it, the "mining nodes" and the "battle remnants" might be linked.. systems with a lot of hostilities could spawn salvage nodes in greater quantities and with greater frequency, making it profitable for those jackals to prowl around the systems that already see a lot of piracy or other conflict...

It could well also be that the salvaging mechanic isn't completely supplanting the notion of sifting through the wreckage of stuff you shoot down yourself.

In any case, I'm eager to wait and see more as these things get designed. I'd very much enjoy a career as a salvage expert, I think. A little bit of exploration, a little bit of guarding our spoils while we recover them, a little bit of fencing them off to interested parties... Sounds like it's a great way to hit up my diverse interests.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Ahh, I see. I didn't realize there would be a limit on total player stations. That does make things a bit different.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

In case somebody was interested, the Caterpillar add-on ship is back available for pledge through Monday.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades