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Sklex

A Complete Redesign

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TLDR: There's a pretty picture at the bottom... shiny!

  • This is designed to appeal to multiple types of players in order to booster player numbers to maximum potential. 
  • The objective of this game is to experience life within this environment. Not to drive others to stop playing. 
  • The concept is designed to give people goals and objectives which will in turn create player interaction and game-play opportunities. 
  • I'm pretty sure the Dev's are fighting internally so this is really just a conversation piece at this stage. 
  • This idea will not appeal to everyone. But remember, there are always unofficial servers. 
  • Not a new idea, just rehashing it on paper. 

So with these things in mind. Why not scrap the PvP large tribe servers, scrap the PvP small tribe servers, scrap the PvE servers. Anyone can still setup one of those servers unofficially. However no one can afford to run an official size server cluster. So put it to maximum use. 

Basic Premise

2x PvE Colonies surrounded by PvE squares. 

This represents the land that has been colonised and is properly governed. These areas are under the defence of a governing force. Thus they are PvE. Players are limited to one claim flag. This lets them build what they like and maximises room for others to build also. Experience is capped at 1x. With low risk comes low reward.

The flags represent the primary player hubs of the area. The Devs should make these places feel alive. It should house a Faction Controlled Auction House. Prices and content should obviously be controlled by the players. 

There should be an option for players to speak to a Captain of the local army here and sign up as militia. That would unlock a faction warfare game to encourage the PvE players to participate in PvP. They would gain faction points for killing players of the opposite faction. Perhaps a significant goal/reward could include the ability to drop an additional claim flag. 

Between the two factions is squares dedicated to ship PvP primarily. It supports raid PvP but uses the Raid Warfare system. This is for your casual PvP players who want to participate but also have to maintain a job and family life. 

2x PvP Pirate Colonies. 

These two squares represent NPC controlled Pirate villages. Each one would be lead by a fearsome pirate band. It would offer a similar quest to the one above except they would obtain faction points by destroying members of any other faction. 

These squares would have a NPC run Trade House and form a player hub for the Pirates of the world. Player Hubs create community and are necessary in an MMO. 

These squares also offer a Dungeon Experience for other players. There is the option to raid these NPC towns. Incredibly difficult. But with great risk should come great reward. Perhaps once taken the successful company takes control of a tax bank on this island and they get a cut of all profits made via the Trade House. 

Outer Skulls

These represent perfect islands. They have everything a fearsome PvP pirate warband could want including a juicy 5x XP. These are open PvP and designed to house the hard-core Mega-Company-PvP crowd. For living in constant danger they are rewarded with much higher XP. This lets them rebuild quicker and also entices them to live and play in the area. The 5x will also entice visitors.

Holding one of the four skull islands needs to come with rewards. I'd like to see a rank system where players of the controlling company collect points for destroying members of the other 3x PvP Mega-Tibes. Have a live web board for displaying the top companies and even top pirates. This encourages the mega tribes to fight each other. Everyone around gets to hear about the epic fights and aim to one day participate. 

The surrounding areas should have a UNIQUE trade item that is necessary for high-end crafting. It will encourage people to seek out the items or trade for them. It doesn't matter which. For the people that seek it themselves it will generate PvP. For those that trade it will generate PvP and a Market. Markets will get people moving around the map move which will in turn generate for game-play opportunities. 

Ghost Ships - Replace them with..

  • If you must have Ghost ships. They should be incredibly rare and be incredibly difficult PvE Raid Content with amazing loot. 
  • British/French Navy ships who sail within their realm of control. They target players with enemy faction points. These ships should be encountered in the Raid PvP waters and offer a PvE Ship Battle challenge. 
  • NPC Pirate Ships should sail the waters all over the place. These are PvE Ship Battle Challenges. Various scales of reward. 

Resources and Skill Points

Resources requirements and availability need to be overhauled. It should be possible to build low level things relatively easy. It needs to be challenging to gather the resources required for high level things. The resources need to be positioned strategically around the map in order to encourage players to have to go and get them. This will force movement around the map which will create play opportunities. It will also create the need for trade which will create a market. Again this will create play opportunities. Biome positioning will play a part in this. 

Skill Points need to be limited to ensure that no single person can achieve absolutely everything. You are not going to create a world where players create the content of the game if they don't need to interact with each other in order to achieve their goals. Players should need to specialise into skills making them valuable to their companies and assisting with the creation of a skill market.  

What Will This Do

It's simple really. A game of this size needs players in order for other players to play with them. The content is largely player driven. This idea maintains that concept. The players will still largely drive the content for the game. It will still be a game focused on resource gathering, building, fighting and stealing each others shit. This however brings everyone into a single game. Allowing us all to play how we like to play while encouraging styles of play that will encourage player interaction. 

BpBNCYY.png

Edited by Sklex
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This does not even need to be done.  Also there are MANY unofficials that do just this.

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The unofficials can't compete with the scale needed to pull this off properly. 

The unofficials however can certainly offer enough space to maintain 100% PvP or PvE clusters. 

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But they do not need to. The population will grow with the new launch. There is no reason to do this, and mixing all 3 populations together is not a good design for the game, there is a reason it was not done to begin with and a reason it was not done for the relaunch. 

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I disagree. Completely. The current design of the game has every single camp upset. The game itself is lacking long term objectives and direction for the players. There's a huge chunk of people who stopped playing simply because there was nothing to aim for. There's lots of other reasons as well, but this game is lacking long term game play and that is not going to be healthy for the game. 

Gotta remember there is a significant different between this and Ark. The cost to run the server cluster. Without long term players this game won't last. 

Edited by Sklex

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31 minutes ago, Sklex said:

I disagree. Completely. The current design of the game has every single camp upset. The game itself is lacking long term objectives and direction for the players. There's a huge chunk of people who stopped playing simply because there was nothing to aim for. There's lots of other reasons as well, but this game is lacking long term game play and that is not going to be healthy for the game. 

Gotta remember there is a significant different between this and Ark. The cost to run the server cluster. Without long term players this game won't last. 

I disagree completely as well. In your design you want to shoehorn in all three camps into one place. How is that better? Now you have all three camps in the same place at each others throats and now you have to balance all three together. Would never work.

 

The cost to run the server is not much for a game company that is fully funded and has straight said so in a twitter post. Money to run more than one server is not a big deal. 

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3 minutes ago, SIEGEGUN said:

I disagree completely as well. In your design you want to shoehorn in all three camps into one place. How is that better? Now you have all three camps in the same place at each others throats and now you have to balance all three together. Would never work.

In eve, everyone is in the same server and it's been working since 2003, i don't know why it would be so different here.

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Just now, znasser said:

In eve, everyone is in the same server and it's been working since 2003, i don't know why it would be so different here.

Because this is not eve, the mechanics are completely different, the way the game has been designed is different. Not much is the same mechanically actually. Also Eve was designed from the start to be the way it is. This game was designed from the start with two totally separate rule and play pipelines. Now they are adding a 3rd. The rulesets for each mode are not the same. This is not eve. That's why it would be different here. 

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4 hours ago, SIEGEGUN said:

Because this is not eve, the mechanics are completely different, the way the game has been designed is different. Not much is the same mechanically actually. Also Eve was designed from the start to be the way it is. This game was designed from the start with two totally separate rule and play pipelines. Now they are adding a 3rd. The rulesets for each mode are not the same. This is not eve. That's why it would be different here. 

They still want this to be an MMO, as marketed. Why not run it like a proper MMO and make ONE world for all? This would be so sick. You can apply the "rulesets" for PVE and PVP respectively per server grid, so that would NOT be a problem.

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I was hoping they would do this like Eve from the get go.  Everyone lives in the same world and has the choice to go where they choose and live how they want to live.  More options this way.  I can play PvE and dabble in PvP.  I can PvP and if I get burned out a little I can go do the PvE thing awhile.  Now its all or nothing and people have asked about transferring characters.  In an Eve like world you don't need to. 

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50 minutes ago, Rhaden said:

They still want this to be an MMO, as marketed. Why not run it like a proper MMO and make ONE world for all? This would be so sick. You can apply the "rulesets" for PVE and PVP respectively per server grid, so that would NOT be a problem.

This would not be sick. It would be a nightmare to make and balance. The griefing potential is way higher with this idea. It is not a good idea. You all realize they could have built it this way easily? And that as I said above this is already done on unofficials. Anyone thinking this is a good idea has not thought it through. Yes applying it separately IS a problem. You have not thought about how easy it would be to abuse something like this. It only works on unofficial because they have moderators. We don't have that on official. People cried about the PvP servers then left they definitely couldn't handle a non balanced system like this. 

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for this to be EVE you'd need to wall off each grid, with a single gate between squares where people can just sit all day and shoot weapons that automatically drop your anchor so you can't move.  You'd also need to set harvest rates to 0.000001 in safe areas and x40 in the unsafe areas... then sit back with popcorn at the amount of PvErs rage quitting until it becomes like Elite Dangerous in OPEN mode  😄

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Let me clarify something I realize I did not say.  I personally would love for atlas to be eve like. That's what I would want and how I would have approached it. Since it is not that I think the concept here is bad, it that it would need to be completely redesigned and rebalanced from the ground up. The way this games "modes" are and the way the game works mechanically makes trying to do this type of idea NOW, with what we have, makes it not a good idea. The devs would have to redo everything to make this happen. The game at its core the way it plays out now in each mode makes each mode completely incompatible with each other. It only works on the unofficials because they have active moderators and administrators. I actually have mod ideas that makes it more eve like, but it needs to be balanced differently from the main game. I know you can mix PvE and PvP very successfully if done right. This game is not done right out of the box for it as a combination of the two. Obviously all this is all just my opinion.

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7 hours ago, Sklex said:

BpBNCYY.png

I must say you put a ton of effort into this, and good for you. On one scale it would work for un official with rules. Since official does not have any rules this would never work. We would have pve system intertwined with pvp rule sets. I would recommend this system to work with other server owners and hive it together. If you asked us to join? sure man this would be awesome. But sadly this would never work in official. There is too many exploits that would ruin the fun for those on pve, and vis versa.

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I would love to see an EU and NA option like this.  With so many zones, there's plenty of room for both PvE and PvP zones on the same world/map.  [A1] unofficial mixes the two and it's pretty awesome.

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You are confusing PVE players with PvPvE players.  They are not the same player base.   Basically punishing PVE players with less skills and less mats because they do not want to engage (in)directly with any PVP is not a good PVE game design.   It is a very good PvPvE design and why a number of unofficials have adopted this model.   But those proposing it for officials need to recognize you just told PVE players to take a hike as they do not want to play in that structure.   PvPvE is different from PvE is different from PvP.

As far as NA/EU combined server there are already unofficials that do this, it is technically possible todo.   The only issue is the ping to the redis database but the servers themselves could be regional mix.

 

Edited by krazmuze
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16 minutes ago, CazzT said:

I would love to see an EU and NA option like this.  With so many zones, there's plenty of room for both PvE and PvP zones on the same world/map.  [A1] unofficial mixes the two and it's pretty awesome.

It is only awesome because it is an unofficial. This could never work out as things stand now. As I explained above. More than once. The concept is great, the game would need to be totally rebalanced for it. The numbers of exploits and griefing possibilities as things stand now are endless.

 

4 minutes ago, krazmuze said:

You are confusing PVE players with PvPvE players.  They are not the same player base.   Basically punishing PVE players with less skills and less mats because they do not want to engage (in)directly with any PVP is not a good PVE game design.   It is a very good PvPvE design and why a number of unofficials have adopted this model.   But those proposing it for officials need to recognize you just told PVE players to take a hike as they do not want to play in that structure.

 

Here is a point brought up from the PvE base. Now try and mix the Zerg Mega players AND PvP people that dislike the old system. What a recipe for disaster. 

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When the game first went live, the main pve complaint was that there wasn't enough land for everyone to have a claim.

Now the pve grid has been reduced from 225 tiles to 50 tiles.  Claims are limited, which helps, but you've also put the pvp players in there, and nothing in your design says they can't have a pve claim as well.  There's not enough room. 

From a pve point of view, it's pvp getting all the goodies again.  You've reduced the claimable area  for pve and then put important skills and mats and additional claim space behind a pvp firewall.  At this rate I'm expecting someone to come up with a solution that pve servers will only be online from 1:00-3:00 PM on Tuesdays and you can only tame chickens.

There are a number of problems that can be caused by allowing a pvp player to run back to a safe zone and a safe base as well.    

I would be against the idea anyway because of the culture clash.  That's one of the reasons some pve people play pve,  But I'm not sure the idea is workable in the first place the way it's set out.

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2 hours ago, Vorxius said:

for this to be EVE you'd need to wall off each grid, with a single gate between squares where people can just sit all day and shoot weapons that automatically drop your anchor so you can't move.  You'd also need to set harvest rates to 0.000001 in safe areas and x40 in the unsafe areas... then sit back with popcorn at the amount of PvErs rage quitting until it becomes like Elite Dangerous in OPEN mode  😄

Lol. This is one aspect where Atlas design is actually better designed for the concept. There is no gates that can be camped. Players can migrate between servers anywhere along the edges. An improvement imo. 

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46 minutes ago, SIEGEGUN said:

It is only awesome because it is an unofficial. This could never work out as things stand now.

I'm not seeing why it wouldn't work for official.  Only thing [A1] really changed are the rates and flagged specific zones for PvE/PvP and the zones STOD spawn in.  Other than that, they didn't really change anything.  They use all the same/current patches as official.  If it can work on unofficial, why would it not work on official?

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Just now, CazzT said:

I'm not seeing why it wouldn't work for official.  Only thing [A1] really changed are the rates and flagged specific zones for PvE/PvP and the zones STOD spawn in.  Other than that, they didn't really change anything.  They use all the same/current patches as official.  If it can work on unofficial, why would it not work on official?

Have you seriously played NA PvP? I have 600 ish hours on NA PvP. Unofficials vs Official is like night and day. Believe there would be exploits of the systems just being mashed together. From the PvP perspective there would be a lot of running to the PvE sections avoiding fights. Companies would mass fleets in the PvE sections all safe and cozy with no threat, then mass sail to a PvP tile, giving them unfair setup advantages. No threats, in the current and new systems that cannot be done. That's just two things right off the top of my head. Have fun being PvE and sailing to the kracken or the golden age ruins. Some people do not want to be blown up while doing a PvE main quest of the game. If I sat and really thought about it I could come up with an extensive list. And that's just me. I do not even get into the PvO type of play. Others I am sure would have a ton more ideas on how to make this concept unfun quickly.

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3 hours ago, SIEGEGUN said:

This would not be sick. It would be a nightmare to make and balance. The griefing potential is way higher with this idea. It is not a good idea. You all realize they could have built it this way easily? And that as I said above this is already done on unofficials. Anyone thinking this is a good idea has not thought it through. Yes applying it separately IS a problem. You have not thought about how easy it would be to abuse something like this. It only works on unofficial because they have moderators. We don't have that on official. People cried about the PvP servers then left they definitely couldn't handle a non balanced system like this. 

From what I hear it's working well on unofficials, hell, it's working well in EVE. An easy way to have people steer clear of griefing in PVE zones is with "police" like CONOCRD, where you die almost instantly to them. I dunno man, if it becomes more like ARK then I'm starting to believe the people that were screaming "ARK DLC" at launch. And it's sad.

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I thought we were testing this game to help improve it before release almost 2 years from now?  As to the fears of massing fleets in PvE areas as a safe haven, controls can be put in place to prevent this as this would be for sure a huge issue.  Eve its easier due to the size and capital ship restrictions. 

It already has been the last several weeks.  Companies were amassing a dozen plus ships in freeports and then hitting us at night when our numbers were low.  We returned the favor and wiped them. 

If we were to combine the worlds then the grid being used as an example here would be 2x larger if not more.  10x would be more ideal.  Want to keep ships safe in Freeport for a strike?  Ok good luck and have fun sailing through 10 zones to get to my base. 

Edited by DocHolliday

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1 minute ago, Rhaden said:

From what I hear it's working well on unofficials, hell, it's working well in EVE. An easy way to have people steer clear of griefing in PVE zones is with "police" like CONOCRD, where you die almost instantly to them. I dunno man, if it becomes more like ARK then I'm starting to believe the people that were screaming "ARK DLC" at launch. And it's sad.

You keep saying the same thing as everyone else. Read my responses. Just because it works on a moderated administrated server on a small scale does NOT mean it would work in official. At least not with how it is designed. As I said above this is not eve. The concept could work here but not as things are designed right now.

 

1 minute ago, DocHolliday said:

I thought we were testing this game to help improve it before release almost 2 years from now?  As to the fears of massing fleets in PvE areas as a safe haven, controls can be put in place to prevent this as this would be for sure a huge issue.  It already has been the last several weeks.  Companies were amassing a dozen plus ships in freeports and then hitting us at night when our numbers were low.  We returned the favor and wiped them. 

We are. I am not opposed to a system like this. I am though to one with how everything is designed right now. Those two things are just things I just thought instantly. I can come up with ALOT more. and again I do not PvO, someone who is into that would make it worse somehow. They always do. As for the massed fleets, look at his map. The freeports do not number nor border territory like that on unofficial. It is not the same. 

This is of course simply my opinion, and I am just some new forum person. I really do not think anyone promoting this suggestion has really thought it through. 

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29 minutes ago, SIEGEGUN said:

Have you seriously played NA PvP?

Yes, I have.

29 minutes ago, SIEGEGUN said:

Unofficials vs Official is like night and day.

Some are.  Many are not.  You're lumping all unofficials together.  There's too variety in unofficials to do be able to compare them like that.  You have to compare unofficials that are similar to official.  Which is what I was doing with [A1], which I played on in addition to NA PVP.

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