A long journey it has been so far

I don’t see why we have to do it?
Isn’t the purpose of things like OCD that we don’t have to reset constantly?

yes one day the team will have to go through and revamp everything in the idea of fairness and stability to all. it is constantly forced down our throats that this game is in a forever-alpha limbo state. there is nothing saying the current system will be able to function properly with any major future changes the devs may decide on a whim. we have seen many times in the past that they have implement major HWS hurting changes. remember Mordred? or what about The Raider? both ruined with the introduction of the wonderful CPU mechanic. how many more of our toys will be taken away by the overlords that dictate how we should play their game? just be prepared…

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Hey Bob!

I didn’t realise you had left the HWS Discord until recently! I’m very sorry to see you go as you have been an absolute titan of the community Bob and myself and everyone owe you a huge debt for your service to the HWS Community.

Please know that you will be welcomed with open arms should you return! I will pop out the Akula 1901 berry Champagne which has been finally kept cool in the core of my T2 warpdrive just for you my friend!

But in all seriousness, please let me know either here or via PM on this to let me know if there’s anything us HWS helpers can do/could have done to prevent you from leaving or whether it was just fatigue with the game.

Cheers again and wishing you all the best now and forever mate!
Best regards,
Wise.

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difference is it’s not needed atm, where as you just wanna do it “for reasons above”
it’s a different story if HWS absolutely had to, that’d be a recovery request from rex. He would ask us to recover from something like a corrupted database and that would be acceptable.

So what i gather from what you wrote is that your bored. And your solution is to wipe all our ocd’s and hard work over the years because of that. And this will make it more interesting and fun for you? What? Thats pretty selfish on your part actually. I myself am bored and annoyed with this ever changing empyrion pvp meta and this cpu abomination and my ideas and solutions aren’t to just wipe everybody’s ocd. I’v been a veteran in this game and server for years now and i’v seen this type of doll and uncreative suggestion being thrown around as a solution when they get bored. Its selfish and by no means a solution.

A solution is not having things that give so much expensive devices like the website npc/player trader. At the same time i don’t see the balance there to get rid of these resources on a regular day with pvp or dangerous pve attacks by the AI that puts you at a higher risk of losing your resources. So the gameplay difficulty to warrant all these expensive devices is not there neither on pvp or pve.

Right now the loss of resources isn’t being lost as much at it could be. My suggestion for ocd to have a take out only resources in pvp area isn’t implemented which will increase the chances of your losing resources in pvp battles; if you can take your resources out in pvp but not put them back in until you get to a safe pve area or zone this massively increases you chances of not only increasing the chances of someone engaging you in pvp for the possible resources you may have; you also have a higher incentive to take out resources from your ocd because of this higher chance of a battle which also at the same time increases massively increases your chances of loosing and using up more of your resources.

But in general i’v noticed that there is not enough pvp to increase the chances of you losing a large amount of resources at the time in part because many players stopped pvping as much because they left because of cpu or stopped pvping because of it and the ever changing and changes to pvp meta which are still not complete. But having this only take out resources in pvp will help in that direction.

As usual the point was completely missed. This is not a selfish suggestion for my own game play. I am far from bored. I have noticed a trend and offering suggestions to prevent the usual cycle of staleness that I have witnessed for many seasons. To bad most go deaf to suggestions that would require sacrifice. Shutting down the discussion is not the answer.

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I get what your saying here, yes alot of the action has left from the older days because of changes like the cpu abomination, but i don’t see how wiping everyone ocd’s will bring more action. The problem is the lack of action which means barely any resources used or lost.

I remember in the olden pvp days you could loss half or maybe more of your ocd from living in pvp and the constant action you get in just a few days. I remember an old battle when in just a matter of hours ton of resources where lost by both sides. Remember, this was just in a matter of hours of gameplay not even a whole day. I remember PKA having to leave tons of resources behind when they got expelled from homeworld. They left so much stuff oh my goodness! Ask @BigRed he was there.

This was the battle: Homeworld 8-9 Hour WAR

wow. still missing the point. cpu is not the topic of this discussion. Nor is the lack of PvP action.

the structure of the entire HWS advanced feature system needs to be looked into and potentially revamped. not many of us have a clear idea how rough it is for newcomers joining HWS. i have personally assisted many to get their various EGS levels and endured their struggles over and over. as long time players, we quickly forget it is not as easy to those that are unfamiliar with our universe and how it works. sure it’s easy to say “just join a big faction and u will be fine.” not all newcomers like the idea of being absorbed into existing zerg armadas. some like to play with their existing groups of friends.

we need to remember, this is all fake currency and materials in an unfinished video game. digital hording like it’s a social status is just plain silly. this discussion is for the growth of the community. just a shame some always feel there is an ulterior motive.

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Well I appear to be somewhere in the middle here as it seems there are actually two things:

  1. That it is very hard for newbies to upgrade OCD etc.
  2. Changing the features and how they work, maybe wiping OCD

CPU and pvp malarkey is extraneous.

  1. Compared to when I started, this has actually become more difficult or, at least more time consuming in terms of both resource gathering and getting money.
    Resources have become more difficult due to the removal of some key missions. I started a few days before the end of a season in October 2019. Then I learned there were something called “seasons” and that it was about to end. Thankfully there were missions available to quickly get a lot of key resources- the HQ missions which gave 10,000 of every ingot and the factory hack missions which give a lot more additional stuff. I then did these the start of the next season and so was immediately bootstrapped to be able to build lots of things and have reserves to recover from. The teleport heist missions for resources currently don’t work. The new resource collector missions are good ways to do this for new players, although if you could stick and extra few drills on the ship (just by using a Garage ship) you could both promote the Garage to new players and make the drilling faster. OAMs are excellent, but the capacity for the non-rare ones really needs to be tripled to make it less microintensive.
    Money There are four main routes to money. Flogging to NPCs, HWS Marketplace, Trading and mining gold.
    Flogging to NPCs is actually easier as there are loads of trading stations. This means there is an early HWS game way to build up credits and elemental bank levels- this is fine. I understand the optronics trade was somehow being abused so that potential big earner has disappeared. The marketplace has become more difficult with lots of things that players can get early (epic weapons, Xeno) having become greatly decreased in value. This makes it a little harder for new players to make money from hitting POIs. You can make hundreds of thousands at a Racom simply selling basic stuff to traders. Almost no-one does this though.
    Mining gold is probably equivalent- phoenix lost gold but the wider universe has it. GG is there as always. Doro has gold like Jupidor and Cebo used to.
    Trading is currently massively reduced with most trade goods and Racoms not being worth visiting. In the universe when I started there were 4 viable trading routes- the Cebo route (gathering T3 autominers, robotics and drones) the Jupidor route (weapons), the HW route (tribal, fertiliser, containers), the Donare route (Diamonds, optronics). I haven’t checked HW this season but that aside there is only 1 route and new players can no longer use diamonds to make money like I could. Trading also has the issue where players (including me in partiuclar) can monopolise the routes.
    Missions These are another way to make money. The hacking missions should give 1 million credits which would be a huge boost. The rewards for missions should be made clearer though (perhaps using the thingy outside each teleporter). Also this and a lot of other missions don’t seem to be working as intended yet this season. Even despite that, you can pick up 1.5 million worth in heavy and medium armour doing the mission. Nice.

To help new players I would suggest:

  1. Re-instituting some kind of early game mission to get resources (say 5k or 10k of each ingot) this could trigger on reaching a HQ planet and could point them to a POI or teleporter mission on ECC. Early game bootstrap to make things more possible.
  2. Epic weapons not allowed in OCD at all to boost the value of them and/or improving the hidden traders on ECC to give 20k or 30k for the weapons rather than 5-9k
  3. Increasing efficiency/length of mining of autominers. At the minute they are very high maintenance. Ideally they should run for 2-3 days on a full load of fusion cells.
  4. trading should make all Racoms useful or relevant to some extent but also should be limited in what you can choose to trade so only a few players cannot monopolise all trading.

Knowledge There are a lot of things that older players know that newer ones don’t. Sadly, this is often because new players simply don’t read the guides (including mynameisdavid’s money guide) or use the pda missions. The community already helps such players by pointing things out in GC. If people refuse to read then on their own heads be it. While the forums are a morass to get through, the guides are clearly put together. Perhaps having a discord “advice for newbies” channel might be a good idea to help people out.

Exploration HWS already gives benefits for those who explore (especially the core systems). The Racoms, giant asteroids and other POIs that give special benefits. This is great and good. Those who do explore should reap the benefits. There could be more hidden special POIs and traders about the place but these things should not simply be given out. The star fragments are a good example of this this season. Even simpler things (like a common NPC trader but who buys up to 100 rocker launchers or EVA boosts) would be something well worth finding. Some of these things could be token based (finders keepers) in which case there would need to be more of them. The exploration rewards this season, despite making my RP much more awkward to gain, put old and new players on the same playing field for gaining RP. Its just a shame the randomly generated universe lacks much to do.

Expectations Billy Bob mentioned the need to get OCD7 for pvp in one season. I don’t think this should be viable because:
i) you don;t need OCD7 for pvp. You don’t need OCD anything in fact apart from cb:sethome and cb:gohome and enough resources to recover… Recycle 5 and OCD5 make your life a lot easier for pvp and that shuld be the bar for what someone who puts ina lot of work should get to in a season. A small alliance only needs one player even with this to go fight as a faction. You don’t need and should not have the same resources and perks that people have got over many seasons through working for them. Adding a put for OCD 5 with a 12 hour cooldown in pvp was suggested once and is still a good idea though to make mining on GG more viable for relatively new players. Or make it a patreon feature that you get one OCD put regardless of level per day so people supporting the server get the bonus.
ii) Making things too easy would detract from one key advantage of HWS over SP. HWS has an end game, things that are difficult and take a long time to get- OCD being the key one. Compare this to the SP game which you can basically win in 24 hours of playtime and then its simply a question of how long you want to run through random systems with randomly placed pois with nothing special to do killing everything laughably easily in your T4 stuff. If you get everything you want this season, what will you do next season? Especially if you are not purely pvp focused.

  1. wiping OCD. I don;t agree with this or think it will make it easier for new players. If anthing it would make it harder as established players would quickly monopolise every way to get resources/credits and new players would not have these options. New players who start season a few weeks later would be even further disadvantaged. Selective wiping of the ability of OCD to hold things (Epic weapons, Xeno, extenders, NPC cores) might work to provide a boost for the HWS marketplace for new players. The pvp mega alliances who only want pvp will then have to buy these things from new players if they dont want to bother with POIs themselves.

  2. Free stargates. I don’t really agree with the addition of RP and credit cost to SGs. To established players it is a trivial amount of credits and RP, to new players it is substantial and only really serves to reduce their mobility and make it harder for them to get into pvp areas and scout about.do pois in a cheap SV. When I first startd, stargates and my 100 blocks CV allowed me to get into pvp areas easily, with minimal loss when killed.

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thank you @FionnMacCumhaill for understanding what i am trying to do here and offering possible solutions to the many issues at hand.

agreed the OCD lvl7 seems to be a driving force to increase the desire to venture into PvP zones and it should not be. the suggestion of put commands in PvP should help with this tremendously.

another side note on the OCD, the levels 1-4 are a bit of a tire spinning adventure as well. the rush to get to level 5 is a small grind for those that can’t pay $ for upgrades. the zones were a good idea but need to be more frequent in the core universe. i still stand by the idea that all of ECC sector should be an OCD zone and have relay stations spread throughout the galaxy.

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Though, I my self work to get ocd7 on NA this season, I would not stress my back off if I was not hwp. I can’t remember using ocd:put on eu in pvp yet, but most likely I have :smirk:

For me, ocd lvl’s should be about storage capacity and what you can store… and everyone would need ocd zones to take out stuff… (a storage for your stuff) but hey, we can teleport, so I see the way we teleport our stuff also… I just like it when people actually must fly and pick up stuff, or store it. Maybe we could buy a zone somehow also…
But thats me :wink:

Also, a wipe of lvls and inventory, yes, when empyrion goes beta or live. But then comes the big one… some people did actually buy the lvls they have (up to lvl 5 on both bank and ocd) with real money.
Not sure there is a disclaimer for something like this?

But, as unstable as empyrion is now, and most likely will be for some time forward, we need ocd and bank as it is…

dQ

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@FionnMacCumhaill What I meant is that going from OCD 6 to OCD 7 in one season is difficult not going from one to seven in a season. It is a lot of money, the rp not such a big deal with the implementation of the star fragments. The star fragments for me have been a blast and all the new players with our faction have enjoyed them. OCD is a driving factor to go into PVP for the main reason that players needing rare resources for their builds to even get to pvp are found in pvp. The ability to dump resources every so often so that you dont lose 30 min - 3 hours of work is a big deal, especially for casual gamers that only play for an hour or two a day. I have beenfinding ways to get around that now though with the implementation of the larger star system new people can find areas with rare resources that have little to no foot traffic.

I will say for a new player this game is way more overwhelming than most other survival games. I have 7k hours in ark and the community there is horrendous. The learning curve is rough but not like this game at all. An easy mission for new people that gives them rare resources enough to build a decent sized cv or starter pvp ship I’m sure would drive more people in if they arnt afraid to lose what they have gained quickly. I know OZ put some starter pvp builds on the marketplace that certainly helps. ABN has been extremely nice in PVP allowing miners to collect their bags and cb go home without trouble. I think the issue for people going into pvp is the time dump. I never played without cpu so that is no part of the equation for me personally.

I am certainly on board with everything your saying Fionn, thats all the issues wrapped up with a nice bow on top.

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The other thing: What makes some people think ocd 10 is all its cracked up to be? I still have ocd 6 and thats my only ocd that i use. Not sure why some people make a big deal about the higher tier ocd’s; you only need enough to store really. To me ocd 6 is high enough to store all i need and the higher tier is just extra bonus to store more.

I too was once in your place Israel, I didn’t have the resources to fill up one OCD, not making enough money to be able to achieve OCD7, never thinking I would make it to 8,9, or 10. Being able to pull Base Turrets, Resources, Speed Ups, or medical supplies out at any given time is a wonderful addition. I can pull ammo at any given time for any given battle, without having to go to PvE and risk being killed.

Once you get to a higher OCD level, you’ll see the benefits it has.

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I am there by choice, and probably sense before you even started playing on HWS. :smiley: I could get to 7 but i don’t feel the need to get it. OCD 6 serves me just fine. I’m more interested in finding better and new ways of using up those resources in a fun pvp or dangerous AI attack then grinding just to get another tier of OCD which lets be honest we don’t need.

Seasons are made to refresh the content of the game.
For example Diablo 3 it has classic mode or seasonal mode.
In classic mode you keep your gear indefinetly. In season mode you start fresh with nothing.
People keep coming back for starting from scratch.
At the end of the season all the gear/money/levels are ported/added into the classic mode. (You choose what to bring)
Could be a nice idea having a Season server where all player every season start from zero and at the end of the season you can put what you earned into normal hws.
I bet will be always full.

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