An apology for my survey post

HWS Community
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To @Reverendmeat @Snowman and the other 5+ Ex-HWS-Patrons who tried to deliver me a message with cancelling their Patronage / Support. I’ve heard you.

After I got couple of private messages from different players and discussed it with some nice guys I see more and more a reaction from you based on a misunderstanding or language barrier.

I also know that some other concerns came up recently like EB lvl 10 and Commodity Trading for example, but I’m currently under a big pressure of moving to a new home + Alpha 10 = HWS 10.
Yes, I said I don’t want to make major changes in HWS 10 but since Shields will force ship redesigns (which is especially heavy for Garage ships) I thought to ask in the Survey what about the other 2 big changes - surprisingly well accepted by the majority.

So what triggered was also the meaning “I can do what I want” based on my words

Let me reword it:

So I’m not saying I ignore such feedback but presenting it as a threat is not something I like or helps make a change. If someone threatens to leave over a change, someone else will threaten to leave if that change isn’t made. There is no way to please everyone in that case. But if suggestions are made instead of threats I can explore ways that we can meet in the middle.

I apologize for the way I worded this and am saddened you took it that way.

If that would be true, HWS would not be alive after 3+ years, trust me.

I DO care about my Community. Ironically all that came because of a Survey: the best way for you to tell me your honest opinion.

Some feedback just made me sad because the overall response where quite positive (the subsets aside Yes/No were mostly “yes, let’s try, if”.

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It’s not that I force my decision upon you. I always try to go for the wishes / feedback of the Community. And even if there are constructive negative points, I try to handle them as good as possible. For example increasing the PvP Size Class to 2 if open thrusters would be implemented. Or Volume stacks set to high.
All that can be handled easily.
And again: everything except the Shields are options. On/Off settings. I would go here just by the Survey which was indeed not that helpful cause you just didn’t know the details. I won’t make this mistake again to have important questions premature in there.

Just be sure that IF we turn it on, it would be heavily customized, considering tons of feedback to make it fun and not bad!

But as I wrote above the point is that you also feel upset about the Elemental Bank level 10, the high real money cost to keep stuff per season, the missing 30 days for the current season, the Commodity Traders who are not that lucrative anymore than before.

Hands down: All of that is known to me and changes will be coming, but I’m only one person. I welcome any constructive feedback on features to help mold HWS into your server and allow you to play empyrion the way you want to on HWS.

Sometimes I can answer in a rush or too much from my perspective (Commodity Traders are especially complex now). So sorry about that but just bear with me please.
After 7 years I’m moving to a new home 700km away. I have to handle tons of stuff right now and Alpha 10 is just the finisher move.
I thought about asking for support for that in Patreon, cause I saw some Patreon Creator doing this, but I didn’t want to bother you with it.

So I’m burned out right now cause I want to make everything right.

That being said I hope you understand better now and just be sure I created HWS to provide a cool server to play on. A place I can get put infinite hours in it to improve it. An idea, I never thought that I would get money out of it in the first place.
But so it happened and I’m more than grateful for that!

RexXxuS

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I’d be interested to see the amount of those in the survey who have more than 100hrs on the server, or who are PvP based/focused, and see how it changes the results… Especially with the folks I’ve spoken with, Exposed Thrusters is an unanimous no. The same goes for Mass and Volume, as a good bit of those same folks are pack-rats, much like myself.

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Good thing it was from nice guys.

Abrum

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Something I am wondering about with the results of your survey, how many of those who voted one way are detonators and or Patronage players?

How many of those who voted one way or another are PVP or PVE players?

Some of these changes are fundamental to PVP, or perhaps are new players to the game and thus doesn’t see the problem with exposed thrusters or such weight and volume limitations?

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Taking bad wordings and misunderstandings aside I got a feeling most of people opposed to changes are the ones heavily involved in PVP and since these changes are huge for PVP they have a right to be concerned.

1)In case of mass/volume I think (given the config changes) the effect would be minimal as PVP ships are not intended to carry a lot of cargo anyway, in worst case we might need few more thrusters for additional mass. Overall I think it’s something we can easily try since even if something goes wrong you can always adjust the config.

2)Thrusters are a different case since pvp ships would basically have to be reinvented from scratch because of this, for now noone has an idea how to build pvp ship with exposed thrusters and it would take some time. Overall I support this change, but since we got like 3-4 weeks to season 10, I think we should delay this to next season while thinking how to make it work so PVP ship design wouldn’t be dead.

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Filter:

  • 500-3000+ playhours
  • Interested in PvP scale 5-7

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The text based feedback in the chart: leans towards more yes than no.
Overall: about 50-50

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Yes… this is a heavily PVP topic! And i am sad to see the behavior of so pvp players!
As i told Dark earlier, in my survey i went all in for pvp and benefits for them! Not because i play PVP, and not because i am police and i spend 1 hour a day chatting with pvp players/factions, but because you deserve it… Not only in HWS, but also in Empyrion in general!

Can we all just sit back and wait for A10 before making anymore out of this?

For the record, i voted no to the thruster thing… Not because of pvp, but because i like beautiful ships!

I Hope everyone, news and spes vets read @RexXxuS words here! The whole last tread went way out of line! From both sides! He listen to every feedback he get… EVERY one of them, but when people start to complain before the survey date is even finnished, he got a bit out of line. I would do the same!

We all have the same wish! Make HWS the best server possible, thereby making empyrion the best game ever!

As a police, i can only say that everything in my survey, and my eleon feedback is focused on PVP!

dQ

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I think largely and from a global perspective, apologies no longer matter to people. I know as a computer graphic artist, as a professional laborer, as a Security guard, as an adult worker, my employer would smile and accept my apology, and then tell me to clean out my desk, the pink slip is on its way anyway.

I did not take part in the threats because largely they are useless. After the changes to OCD, I did not return for a year. In that time, what I saw was that the type of combat became more like what I saw in Ark and 7 Days to Die. Toxic. Desperation for resources, yielding an increased level of toxicity.

Combine everything together, with the vast number of changes coming with experimental 10, and the presser cooker lid popped.

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You do realize that no one would have said a word or cancelled their Patreon support today if a preliminary post wasn’t made about the results before the survey date was finished and if those who “threatened” weren’t called out and in return called his bluff. I’ve only been here for about 3 months now, but even I could have guessed what responses he would have gotten from some players. Perhaps spending the the 10 hours crafting a response with the “nice guys” should have been done before his initial comments thumbing his nose at his Patreons’ concerns.

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I have just been informed of this post and wanted to chime in.

First let me state that this really has nothing to do with rexxxus. This is more a eleon issue with their proposed mechanics. This topic covers that. This apology isn’t required. Community contributors shouldn’t have behaved so rashly when the usual breakdown in phrasing occurs. People forget rexxxus & the HWS team are not natively english!

  1. Doesn’t matter what rexxxus wants, eventually the option to turn off exposed thrusters or mass will be removed by eleon. This is eleon’s mechanics.
  2. Throwing a tantrum and saying you’ll stop supporting the server is childish.
  3. The survey is not the final say on how A10 will look. It’s for wild ideas that might work or might not work. Often these surveys are the converstation starter, not the ender.

The way I see it, the survey question about exposed thrusters is a bit miss-leading. In the photo you have but a single thruster poking out on a thin backside of a v-wing. In reailty, most pvp designs utilize upwards of 160 thrusters. it’s more likely it would look something like this:

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Aesthetically, it’s very unappealing. it’s also incredibly vulnerable and doesn’t change much other then all our ships being covered in thruster plumes. Some people have pointed out that class size would need to go up to accommodate thrusters like this. That’s false. Since devices do not contribute to triangle counts, having them on the outside only removes a surface from the design. Making it less triangle intensive.

Don’t forget this is going to be on CVs as well. No more attractive hulls like the iron duke

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that’s all going to be consumed by thruster plumes too. And since on CVs we usually use T3 thrusters, which are too big of a target to put on the outside of the ship, it’s very likely we’ll see a shift to T2 thrusters instead. This will require more classsize obviously, and create more framerate issues. That’s assuming CV designers will bother respecting the game mechanics at all, more on this later.

The benefits? Exposed thrusters will mean SVs will simply perform slower & be overall more likely to lose thrusters, but from a durability standpoint they’ll still be bricks. Even more so now that devices aren’t being protected. CV fights might start targetting thrusters and last a lot shorter in duration, because as soon as someone loses thrust in a certain direction it’s likely they’ll warp out immediately due to the glitchy nature of losing a thrust direction (25m/s speed caps, sudden stops, power failures from the game being buggy, and odd controls)

So overall:
Pros:
More realism
Design challange (for the first week or two*)
Fits with eleon’s general vision of this being a survival game, not a pvp/pve game.
Further leads to an even bigger skill-gap as veteran designers will no doubt know all the tricks in hiding thrusters.
Gets us slightly closer to mimicing space engineers, a common rival for eleon.

Cons:
All ships pre A10 will be made irrelevant. Requiring weeks if not months of repair. For some, this will be the end of the line in terms of enjoyment. The PVE community is likely to take the fall here.
Lag will go up as more and more people figure out more thrust = better. Cubes are likely to see a boost in popularity, as they are really good with this type of mechanic
HWS will likely need to change even more stats to prevent thrusters from simply being stripped off the moment they enter combat (More health, more armor, more changing the base game)
PvP ships will ironically be even more durable when all the armor-reduction blocks are forced to be stupidly placed on the outside of the ship, meaning the core will have even more blocks to protect it. Who cares if you lose a thruster when you’ve got 60? There’s only one core…

It’s not going to change anything major in PvP, all it’s going to do is force people to give up protecting their thrusters. In reailty, since there’s so many thrusters on any pvp build, losing upwards of 75% of them doesn’t really matter. It will just be overall more unenjoyable as ships lose their ability to move in certain directions.

One of the biggest problems this mechanic is going to have is that CVs are large enough to create large empty volumes, thus tricking the game into believing the thrusters are mounted externally. This is a common issue in space engineers pvp, where ships simply ignore the developers and put thrusters inside anyways. This obviously creates more lag, but who cares about that anyway when the PVErs get more immersion. Knowing the general lack of foresight eleon has with this game’s balance, it’s very unlikely they’ll think of this and instead are likely to just put a simple "25 block radius check’ to see if anything is in it’s way, like in the case with turrets. Obviously, you could just make a tiny little hole one block wide and have the rest be armor.

This change is more of a why question. Why do we need external thrusters, why does anyone think eleon cares about pvp or actually wants to balance this? Why does everyone insist that shield mechanics are going to be more then just a 2x2x2 block that takes pentaxid and gives your armor more health? As usual, it’s going to be up to rexxxus to balance this, and i’m overall not a fan of thrusters on the outside of ships.

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I’m 50/50 on ‘trying’ anything new, really. If there’s a notice ahead of time that something is going to go into place, then a time in which it is active before evaluating whether or not it was extremely detrimental to gameplay… then that’s where I’d be on board with trying just about anything. It sounds like an experimental thing, but since it’s an Alpha game after all, why not, if that’s something Eleon is leaning toward.

But there is a point where the ‘realism’ of some of the features will get a bit too much (3rd person view isn’t realistic for instance) and over-impact things, so that’s one of the things I wouldn’t learn toward trying. :slight_smile:

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Probably my biggest pet peeves in games are modifications which, on the surface, are more “realistic” but ultimately do nothing but make the game more cumbersome to play. Some people are really into that sorta thing though, thus why there’s so many thriving Skyrim survival mods and the like. Folks who like that sorta thing obviously thrive on this server, as, while I can see where exposed thrusters might add something to PVP, I never imagined anyone would ever vote for mass/volume. (Kinda boggles my mind that it’s even an option, but Eleon seems to be of this mindset as well.)

I don’t PVP, so all the thruster thing would do is force me to make even uglier ships… Mass/volume would probably force me to make them entirely out of cargo boxes. Cargo takes up far too much room and is nigh impossible to sort as it is in this game, so that’d probably make me bail (I nearly rage quit on SP, without mass/volume, before I realized I could dock a little SV made up of cargo boxes to sort crap). However, I’m fairly new to the server, which clearly leans PVP, so I shouldn’t get a vote in this, really, and wouldn’t be much of a loss. So… Just making a case for the underdog here. :cry:

( I suppose next up in A11 will be vitamin requirements in foods, so you’ll have to eat a certain balance of fruits, vegetables, meats, and grains, to stay regular and avoid scurvy. :stuck_out_tongue: )

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To clarify my action of removing the role that was showing that I donated was due to your attitude towards us whether real or perceived by miscommunication. To suggest that we will just follow and agree because we keep paying and playing when a call is made that we disagree with is what I was acting on.

I was letting you know that I would still pay and play but I didn’t want to be seen paying if that was the attitude that was portrayed. This is what I did not agree with and was trying to make that clear. It had nothing to do with the implementation of the features that had to and that could be implemented. Nor was it a push for people to remove their support though I did encourage 1 member of my faction to remove his role as well.

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People are being far too sensitive over your wording Rexxus.

You were essentially saying that those who have threatened to leave over changes before are still playing and enjoying HWS.

Normally I’m suspicious of survey results as people can respond without qualifying their reasons why. However, as someone has already said, these surveys serve as conversation starters, providing people with the opportunity to discuss the big changes that Eleon are pushing for in addition to us deciding how much we want to keep pace with those changes.

It’s quite clear from the results that a large number of people are interested in trying out exposed thrusters, and I think that this could make the game and PVP very interesting. People will most likely have a greater number of thrusters on their ships in response to this new META, thus inflating the class sizes and reducing the number of blocks on their ships.

However, further discussion would certainly be welcome on this topic. Everyone who is on the forums should try and get players on the server to come in and chime their opinions.

I certainly think it worth testing sooner rather than later as it may well become an inevitability by Eleon soon enough despite the on/off nature of them now.

And finally onto some needless hostility from some: In Europe, the customer is always right mentality doesn’t apply as strongly as say the United States and other countries. If you have an issue and feel you have been wronged then feel free to PM Rexxus. But grandstanding and leveraging your financial support in the public forum is not a good way to implement change. There are far smarter methods of communicating with Rexxus.

This forum should be a democracy and a ‘marketplace of ideas’. Inclusive to PVPers and PVErs, inclusive to new players and old, inclusive to players who pay and players who do not pay.

That.Is.All.
Best regards,
Wiseman738.

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Exposed thrusters are a terrible idea for PvP gameplay. Let me elaborate why…

  1. In their current state, thrusters are targetable and can be solely targeted to quickly immobilise a ship. This WILL happen as the thrusters are exposed and will pop like balloons once they start taking fire. In firefights where players are outnumbered, this will become a quick and unfair advantage to larger factions, thus effectively disempowering smaller factions and damaging the PvP community.

  2. PvP vessels require redundancies. Most successful designs will have multiple small thrusters incorporated into their decoy devices strategically placed in the front hull behind multiple layers of combat steel and lag shot armour. Forcing them to the outside of the ship will look very unappealing, even worse eliminating the redundant devices altogether will bring us back to my first point.

  3. Redundant templates. This will render everyone’s current blueprint useless. Many PvP’ers have spent many hours designing and testing their ships. The thought of having to reinvest all that time again will drive away a portion of the PvP community. I have seen this happen on other games like StarMade with the power 2.0 update, and it has killed the game imo.

Compromise: Perhaps no longer having the thrusters being targetable would solve the first 2 points i make, but will still however have a very negative effect as described in point 3.

On a final note, I believe that anyone who is willing to remove their patronage is within their right to do so. They have a right to protest as they see fit.

Mars

Edit: It makes no sense and players will spam shutters. This achieves nothing imo but uglier ships and upsetting a lot of people.

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Hey Valium, firstly a very warm welcome to the forums. And secondly, great post with great points!

I disagree with most of them but I see where you’re coming from. For me, number 1 is just an unfortunate reality. Empyrion has never been much of a game in terms of fairness and factions will always zerg if they can.

For point 2 you are correct that redundancies are key and this raises the idea that most likely there will be more thrusters on ships to make up for their new-found vulnerability. Moreover, both these thrusters AND shutters will dramatically increase the class count, therefore meaning that those players who try harder to defend their thrusters will have to sacrifice layers of armour.

In regards to point 3, that’s always happened and simply becomes an inevitable byproduct of ship design in Empy.

I also agree that those who are unhappy are welcome to remove their financial support. They just shouldn’t try to leverage it or grandstand. That’s what frustrates me personally. (This is coming from a former supporter who no longer donates due to both lack of cash AND the fact that i’m studying.)

However, i’m an AFK player. So it’s important for you active players to decide on this! I just feel it would a mistake not to test it.

Best regards, and once again, a very warm welcome!
Wiseman

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There is a big flaw in this survey. I could compile the survey thousand times.
Surely someone can do it over and over again to move the vote from one side to the other.
Could it be that someone did it to implement mass and exposed thrusters. Honestly i couldnt believe that so much people voted for mass at least.
If you want a true poll you need to implement something tied to forum account.
Could be interesting to see how much people have compiled their steam id and how much are blank.
Anyway just my opinion.

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I voted for mass this time, because by now i think it might be fun to try. Probably many others have same opinion.

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