The voice message commands could use a few additions/removals:
Look, Flavien I even took the time to story board this for you, okay. Look here you go dude, I present to you:
Tell me this doesnt look way, way, way, more compelling than blowing up random stations or random cargo ships? Please tell me you see that it is, right?
Nope, there’s also attacking and defending stations and ground bases, or generally flying around and eliminating enemy players. Corvettes are already capable of resupply, and there has been mention of scavenging too (though we don’t quite know how far this will go yet).
I do agree with this to a certain extent. There’s little or no time to respond to an attacker, especially in a large battle. But we know weapon balance still needs work, so I would definitely advocate a slight nerf to weapon power, including missiles, just so everyone stays alive a little longer.
Yeah, but WHY, what incentive does a player have to do these things? if every base is the same and no installation has an effect on the other installations except in resource gain then none of it matters. its just random conflicts for no reason. we need compelling REASONS to fight. nobody goes to war for the hell of it.
A pseduo lane system gives the player a reason to take that military outpost, because they NEED it to spawn there. They NEED to take that logistics station to secure fast and timely travel between planets instead of relying on their ships warp drive. They NEED those cities and mines to secure resources for big ships. Everything has a REASON.
Because it helps your team win? Because it earns you credits which you can spend on flying new ships? You may be thinking too hard about this. 
However, I do understand your point about strategically linking stations or giving different stations different functions. It’s a possibilty.
That isnt what I mean. Winning the game is the end goal, sure but what steps do you take to do that, if its not structured in some way where each installation gives a player a next target, then what you are left with is 1000 potential targets, and 500 chefs all trying to cook. Those 500 players all need to be working towards a common goal and the goal cant be “win” it needs to be " do thing A, so you can do thing B, which lets you do C, which wins you the game"
That isn’t correct, there are thin HUD lines in 3D in the direction of your motion. I’ve made them pretty subtle on purpose, otherwise they were distracting.
I mentionned it a couple times earlier, but there will be space debris once we have time to spend time on polishing. It’s a pure visual effect, so it hasn’t been very high on the todo list. Originally it was planned for the polishing phase after beta, but since it might help to figure out how your ship moves / for spectators, maybe we can reprioritize it sooner.
Please no, why would anybody want to be limited to fighting the same fight al the time? Limiting the battle to one location would also introduce stallmate situations very fast were it just ends up beeing a neverending zerg. Outplaying the other team by switching targets, distracting battlegroups etc. will also be impossible.
We will get carriers that act as mobile spawns, they will also enable deeper tactical gameplay.
The game already gives players the next target, in the missions window the ai commander tells you were to fight. Once the system map comes into play it will probably much clearer what is going on in the battlescape.
Audio is only part of it, and it already has its challenges. How do you audio record the names of the installations / planets when those can change every game ? And even assuming audio does not mention the names explicitely ( in which case its interest would be more limited ), you’d still need some little animations with the commander giving orders.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like it’d cost millions to implement… but we’re running out of money…
The keyboard helper screen says “Toggle Zoom” for MMB. It also says Z is “Press + Hold Zoom”. Personally I don’t really see any issue there. Post-processing zooms make all the pixels bigger and ugly, it is not an option for content creators. Now we can ask SpaceJay, Playbenni and others ( who produce fan videos regularly ) if they’d miss the hold-zoom feature. If not, we can remove it. It’s also possible to make it optionnal ( just an event binding in the input profile, but by default no key is bound to it, so new players don’t get confused ).
Well, the game barely entered alpha. Of course it’s missing a lot of feedback and information for new players. We don’t have tutorials or anything, so new players have to figure out the game the hard way. This is why we want to introduce a solo sandbox mode, including some “tutorial flight missions”, to teach players the basics of the game. But we have to focus on the core gameplay for now.
Yeah I see. So you did manually override the safe automatic warp speed. Combine that with the damage rampup which is far too abrupt and you got a recipe for instant death upon approaching a planet, which I agree shouldn’t happen.
If there are 500 players on a server, there will be zero bots, period.
All these bots talk are for compensating players count in low population scenarios.
It’s all about player retention, really. I agree bots are far less fun then other players, but at the same time, playing against bots is more fun than playing alone, don’t you agree ?
If you log in and see no other players and no bots, you’re going to disconnect within minutes. At least if there are bots around, you might stick a little bit longer, which increases the chance of having other players log in. Players attract players, so it’s all a mean to increase player interactions ( by making players stay longer on the server ), which itself leads to a chance of snowballing into higher player counts.
Player retention is an absolutely critical thing for a multiplayer game, especially when we have zero marketing budget and can’t expect millions of sales on day #1. Anything that increases player retention ( how long they play the game and stay connected on the server ) is a good thing for all players.
Maybe “main” objective was the wrong way to put it. I’ll rephrase it by saying that it’s one of the primary objectives for gameplay, but there will be many others.
I do not think you ( and I’m talking in general to everybody here, not just you Trevise ), fully realize the vision we have for the game. And of course that’s fine, you’re the players, not the developers Case in point: the haulers system. Some players from a team are going to get an “Escort this hauler, starting from Factory NX-24 to Starbase ZW-81 in 5 minutes” mission, while other players in the enemy team are going to get a “Scout this lane and destroy the hauler” opposite mission. The mission has consequences on the team, whether you win or lose, but in the end it’s a tool to force players into the same area with a conflicting objective. There will be more of these in the future.
Of course, you’re not going to randomly encounter a hauler and solo-attack its AI bot. There would be no interest in that. I mean, it could happen accidentely, outside the missions system, but the purpose of the AI commander / mission system is to make players fight each other over various objectives.
I haven’t responded to that yet, because it probably needs more brainstorming and feedback from everybody else. My initial impression is that it’s probably out of scope for the first release. We haven’t planned capture mechanics any time soon and our plate is full of stuff to do already. The idea seems to have some merit, and I’m all for adding tactical depth to the game, but you have to understand that we have a $350K budget, not Star Citizen’s or Elite: Dangerous. A more fair comparison would be Everspace ( which isn’t exactly a game with a lot of depth and had the double of our budget ), or House of the Dying Sun, or similar space games.
That being said, I totally agree that massive fleet battles should be organized somehow - and well before the full release. There are going to be mechanics for that, but we need time to shape up the game to our vision. What there is currently in alpha isn’t mature yet and lots of things are missing. Hell, right now, you don’t even know when one of your bases is under attack. It should be no surprise that players are ignoring what the other team is doing, since they have no way to know what the other team is doing 
We’ll debate and revisit your idea of lanes at a later stage, especially if we can get more revenue in the mean time. And thanks for the feedback, it’s definitely appreciated.
@LyskTrevise many things you mentioned and suggested haven been before, it’s not like the devs are not considering ideas from the community. Like Flavien said, many times there are other priorities and I think they did choose the right ones for alpha, we wouldn’t have “any” goal if they didn’t, even if the UI would be better or the flight, weapons would work a little better. We can’t really test if any of these really work without some form of match to play trough.
See this for Instance …
Also related:
As for “Absolute directional Movement Information”. I agree that it’s currently hard to tell but the two things already ingame were sufficient to me, problem being that it takes to long to find them.
Prograde and retrograte indicators are the fastest one in my oppinion, but they are quite faint and sometimes not even in view.
Hud directional lines work well but you have to watch them for a second to see how they move. I think they work well. One suggestion would be to make them more visible arround the periphery vision and less in the center view. That would be a compromise.
As for “space debris/stripes”. Why? We already have the indicator lines that mimic them as part of the hud and they can be switched off (thanks). You could put little points on the edge traveling towards the player vision to make their direction isntantly identifiable.
And if Space Debris is the solution, wouldn’t it have the same problem of being to distracting?
Please add an option to change audio settings in game so I can hear hutchings die over the music.
Also please tell us which team is which color. Havok and Scoria is not a color!
There should be a raycast from the player to the current target (or all available targets) to determine if the target is currently occluded by another object. For instance, if an enemy interceptor is 5km away but hidden behind a station, currently the player has no way to tell if the target is actually available to be fired upon or if friendlies are in the way. It would be nice if the targeting triangle changed to like a dashed line or something if the target was occluded by an obstacle.
