Too bad that we cannot read up on the old forums.
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âTake it or leave itâ did not mean âYou better like it or you better get out of this thread.â It simply mean that you can like the system or dislike it as you prefer. Nobody is obliged to play a game using such a system. Itâs just an intellectual exercise. Nothing more. I donât understand why more people canât just join in and play the game of What If. I-Novae Studios is just going to go with whatever gameplay they think is going to work, so none of this is of any consequence.
There are a lot of discussions there that Iâd like to be able to read again.
It would be nice to be able to read some of the discussions, yes, but I have to admit that I have probably changed my opinion on some things since those discussions took placeâŚ
For instance, I might have been too harsh on pirates and other illegal in-game activities, yet it doesnât even come close to your stance on the matter.
Iâm fine with pirating basically being the opening to Star Wars IV. 
I may be picky, but I think youâre incoherent with your own arguments. How can you decide that relations between alliances, and thus the individuals composing them, shouldnât be regulated and instead be given free reign, will at the same time hitting hard those who play a particuliar role?
If you want to get a âone-lifeâ system, then let it be the same for all. If that long-time escaping villain goes down, you wonât be seeing him for some time. But so should it also be for the knight in shining armor if he gets too cocky.
Why not work on the ships / material prices? People going on mining should get an easier time rebuilding their lost asset, while warrior likes, either militaries or pirates, should invest much more energy to get back to their previous level.
Now what worries me more is the lore definition and the contextual definition of what it means to be a pirate in I:B.
Eventually, youâll have 3 factions, so I guess you start as one of these guys : SFC, Deltan or Centaurian. If I understand correctly, relations betweens the three factions are a fragile cease-fire at best, open war at worst. What brings a regular guy to fall into piracy? Easy money could be one of them. Over-zealous protectionnism also. Whatever the cause, they end up hurting their own faction more than helping them.
The nastier his deeds, the stronger his ban gets until the guy becomes a painted target and unwelcome even in the most remote station of his own faction.
So the new-found pirate ends up bartering his stolen goods in shady harbors, notorious for their complete absence of law. It has some perks: he does whatever he wants and is not subject to some dull mining operation or military duty. But he doesnât have access to the strongest and latest technology of his faction, must hunt / extort to get fundings and is constantly being stalked when outside the âlawless territoryâ. His new home is not really a faction, more of a patchwork of individualist thugs with similar desires.
If my description is close enough to what you have in mind, @JB47394, then a pirate system may work out, mostly any system I guess.
But if youâre making the âpirate slotâ for a given account automatically spawning at the pirate haven at the beginning, then this means youâre eluding all the steps that defined how the pirate came to be in the first place. And make the pirates a faction of their own.
I really donât see that last suggestion happening.
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Of course ultimately the guys will decide what gameplay mechanics to implement, but we are certainly providing them with food for thought.
Having a bunch of people thrash out ideas on the forum and develop really well fleshed out concepts that have withstood a lot of challenges and questioning is something the developers will surely benefit from.
@Tjafaas, I totally agree.
Wait, what?
So in order to prevent random attacks of piracy from being too infuriating, youâre going to set up a system to actually reward pirates for spending half an hour* pounding away at an already crippled ship until killing it?
Sounds like great fun. Especially for the victim. Not at all ragequit inducing.
*) Could be more (but thatâd cause even more ragequits), could be less (but thatâd further reduce your chances of getting help in time).
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Non-pirates are certainly regulated. The gameplay governing non-pirates is delicately balanced. Pirates are regulated as they are because they dip into dangerous waters - random attacks. Because we donât want everyone attacking everyone else at random, piracy has different rules.
[quote=âTjafaas, post:25, topic:951â]
Why not work on the ships / material prices? People going on mining should get an easier time rebuilding their lost asset, while warrior likes, either militaries or pirates, should invest much more energy to get back to their previous level.[/quote]
Work up a design and present it.
Personally, I donât go near anything related to money for balance. Players will max/min money and then use it however they like. Then warriors will complain about how they are forced to grind mining in order to get better combat gear.
If you were to say that miners mine to get better mining gear and that they can do that faster than warriors who wage war to get better warrior gear, then I might think you had something.
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Theyâre pirates. Theyâre supposed to be really nasty. But theyâre also supposed to be rare.
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Ships may be crippled, but they arenât stopped. So thatâs half an hour of running across the galaxy without ever finding a safe port, friends or NPC police. Not gonna happen.
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Pirates donât follow the rules of non-pirates. Thatâs the point of this stuff. So if we want, pirates can have gear and techniques to one-shot a ship and destroy it. Gear and techniques that right-thinking people donât use. Perhaps they have nukes, lending particular weight to their threats. Getting to the point of being able to use a nuke may be very tough. It may require some serious black market connections.
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Pirates can become the salvagers of the game. If a ship is destroyed, pirates will be very interested in it because they donât care whose ship it is. It could also be a great place to set up an ambush on the ownerâs salvagers.
If you want that fiction, thatâs fine by me.
Whatâs the difference in gameplay terms?
Itâs both design and gameplay. Proposing a pirate faction from the start means you have to get the ship designs, for all categories, plus the harbors, plus the lore, etc.
Having to make 3 faction distinct between themselves is already quite a job. And we can see that Centauran faction is already a stretch goal.
If you start as one of the 3 faction and make your own âwayâ to piracy, this means youâre still somehow connected to your starting home. One way of doing that would be that you keep the shipâs design of your original faction, with maybe small variations because some parts are harder to smuggle out or you had to work with the available junk.
Because of that, thereâs no real âpirateâ identity, nor hierarchy.
On the contrary, making a faction often means you have a hierarchy, even if itâs by means of blood, poison or scheming. Something like raiders in âMad Max 3â, or even better, Dark Eldars of WarHammer 40K if that rings any bell.
The story fiction justifies the gameplay this way. Anyone can become a pirate and has access to the âpiracyâ actions. Making a faction mainly means no one except them sould be able to make âpiracyâ actions.
I will certainly think of something. Not necessarly with a âone-lifeâ system, though this has a great advantage of being a natural gold-sinker in an economy where products and money are ever-growing.
I think those were all design differences. The gameplay is not affected. The playerâs perceptions of a pirate will certainly be affected by the stuff that youâre talking about, but the gameplay can work either for creating a distinct faction or for drawing from existing factions.
I never seriously considered pirates as a peer of the three that Flavien originally planned. Pirates are people taken from those factions who have ships and gear taken from those factions and who continue to take stuff from those factions. I consider them to be so isolated from the other factions that they are almost a cult, a group like Fireflyâs Reavers. Iâd love it if a pirate shipâs engines kicked out great gouts of smoke when in atmosphere and their ships were badly maintained.
Just a quick remark about the cargo going poof due to warp tech stuff. In your gunnery challenges thread, you proposed that projectiles are stabilized in a 20*ship radius area. That area can overlap so that a small fighter can use bullets that travel 10km to a 1km long ship, even though the small fighter doesnât have a stability field that reaches those 10km. I do assume that this stability âfieldâ is involuntarily made, or else those huge ships could just go 'meh screw âem, Iâll deactivate mah bubble and wait for dem fighters to get reeeeal close.â - Wouldnât the cargo be also stabilized by that type of field?
If you want it stabilized, it is stabilized. If you donât want it stabilized, it isnât.
Sending ammunition through a weapon to do damage to another ship is a different set of conditions from sending cargo through a port on the hull to be picked up by another ship. Because the sets are different, the fiction can work differently for each.
Feel free to elaborate on the difference between the conditions.
Do you mean that the one who shoots/jetisson decides if stuff is stabilized by the field?
It is an axiom of gameplay design that when two gameplay conditions are different, a fiction can be invented to allow them to operate under very different rules, even if they seem to be the same basic situation.
For example, firing weapons versus ejecting cargo. Both seem to be the same fiction - matter entering that field that surrounds the ship to stabilize it. But one is firing weapons and the other is ejecting cargo. Firing vs. Ejecting. Weapons vs. Cargo.
Say that weapon turrets improve the stability of ammunition because of what theyâre made out of, or the way they work. One reason that weapon turrets are so expensive is that they must stabilize the ammo long enough to hit a target, while a port on the ship doesnât normally stabilize anything; it just lets stuff pass through when the ship is in atmosphere.
Say that ammunition is manufactured to be stable in the field, like a ship. Thatâs why ammunition is so expensive. So why not eject my cargo of ammunition? Well, it has to be ejected at high velocity for the effect to work. Or maybe it doesnât, and ammunition can be ejected.
And so on. âFiring weaponsâ is not âejecting cargoâ and so they can operate as wildly different as you care to make them.
It could be reversed just as arbitrarily; ejected cargo survives, but fired weapons do not. So ships could drop cargo for pirates to pick up while running, but there could be no fighting except when out of warp. So pirates would need a way to tackle ships. Note how that is essentially the opposite of the gamplay presented in the base post, which only makes sense.
Emphasis added.
Yes. You can add arbitrary rules to a game. As a developer, you are literally the God Creator of your own little universe. Doesnât mean you should, just for the sake of doing it.
This is just my personal opinion, but I believe that if good gameplay can be achieved with an internally consistent system - not just in terms of lore, but in terms of game rules - that provides a vastly superior experience to invisible walls and weapons that wont even shoot at âfriendliesâ. So yeah, Iâm a fan of Dark Souls and EVE Online.
Infinity (in itâs MMO form) already have built in ways to prevent rampant piracy. Reduce the range of interstellar sensors. Put a hint on the loading screen that taking the fastest route from A to B is rarely the safest thing to do.
Set up the markets so the best way to make profit is with a mix of cargo on each trip - some high value low mass, some unprocessed ore in bulk amounts - and if a hauler does get caught by pirates? He dumps the ore and speeds off because F=m*a, and his entire ship is designed around having a lot of force coming from his engines.
A significant loss of profits, sure, but then the pirate will have to spend the next hour travelling back and forth from his base to actually pick up all the ore. Suddenly pirates would have to outnumber traders more than 4 to 1 for them to be a consistent issue (and if that does happen, just stop filling your cargo holds completely and theyâll be left entirely without loot).
Oh yeah, and the best idea⌠Iâm not sure who suggested this, back on the old forums, butâŚ
Donât reward players for blowing each other up. Ever. In any way. No kill-mails. No leader-boards. No steadily growing, publicly viewable bounties. Certainly no loot. Theyâll still do it! Donât get me wrong, Iâm all for fragging noobs for the sake of fragging noobs, but take away the K/D counter, make it a serious investment of time to do, and suddenly full destruction of a ship becomes the rare exception, not the rule.
This gives the power back to the victim. Gives them options. How much cargo will you drop to get to safety faster? Will you hold on to everything and simply taunt the pirates, because help is on itâs way? Because help is nowhere near, youâre just bluffing?
Even if Iâm more likely to end up a pirate than a trader, Iâd like the victims to have options. No point making a massively multiplayer sandbox if thereâs a bunch of arbitrary rule making the gameplay deterministic. But even if I do end up a trader, Iâll want options, my choice to matter, not invisible walls protecting me.
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Itâs part of Durable Ships. Along with about a dozen other effects that are important to avoiding players randomly ganking each other. You might imagine why I spent the time to come up with the Durable Ships stuff.
If you canât blow up a ship because itâs durable, you canât just take stuff from the remains. This pirate system is just another variation on not allowing players to take stuff from one another. You suggest that it relies on invisible walls, and I say that it just doesnât implement the things that facilitate random piracy. There are also no nukes, no overloading of power stations in cities, no biological weapons, no spies on crews and myriad other things that would very naturally happen in such a world.
Including the idea that in a casually-spacefaring society, there will be so much stuff available that nobody would fight over anything unless they were a sociopath - and that particular illness would have been eradicated.
I also suggested another way to encourage piracy to specific instances - implied consent. If players have the option of transporting stuff like diamonds, then that can become a cargo that can be freely pirated. Other cargos could not be. So use any pirate system you want, but say that only diamonds can be pirated. Theyâre perfect for players who have lots of money and want to gain access to certain gameplay, but they can be taken away. So anyone who wants to get into that part of the game is getting into a world of random threats. If youâre carrying diamonds, youâd never know if that escort ship you hired was going to turn on you⌠If you wanted to know that he wouldnât, then donât carry anything provocative, like diamonds.
If Iâm a pirate and some hauler drops cargo per the f=ma system, heâs going to drop the heaviest, most useless stuff heâs got. I donât actually subscribe to the f=ma notion for spaceships that accelerate at thousands of gees, so heâs perhaps even more likely to drop empty cargo containers or anything else that might distract a novice pirate. As an experienced pirate, Iâm going to go after the ship, scan him to see what he has, and insist on something small and valuable. I want his diamonds, not his coal.
Of course, there remains the problem of extortion with every ship, even when ships are durable. I approach that iron ore hauler, tell him to enrich my account by X credits or I start making holes. Everyone is a pirate again. So to prevent every ship from being a potential target, one solution is to not implement in-space transfers of money. I donât remember if I included that in the original Durable Ships system.