Cost of Pentaxit needed to warp

HWS General Discussion
1

I believe that the current cost of 25 Pentaxit a warp jump is currently too high and I would like to see what other players think. With the current setup you have to gather up 100 PE just to make a round trip from one side of the map to the other, and that is only going from your home planet, to the core worlds, to your destination, and back. As pointed out in other posts, traders can not make money by selling their items to other players due to the amount of PE it would cost to bounce around. PVP is also being held back as well because it can take hours, or even real life days depending on your play time, to be able to farm up enough PE to go check out another planet. And the likelihood of factions coming to help others that are stranded without enough PE is unlikely because of how much the player helping would have to give up.

Over the past few days I have saved up enough PE to warp to another planet to check and see if it would work for a good spot for a home base. I get there and see that there are only 3 resources on the planet, so I head back to the starter planet I was on. I did that a couple of times to find myself sitting around waiting for the blue crystals to respawn so I could harvest more. I know I could have been out mining for more resources to sell off for PE but seems like a counter productive feature. While it is nice that I can buy and sell items and be able to get what I need or sell off extra, it does not counter that it seems the easiest way to see the different planets is to spend countless hours mining so that I can afford a round trip to another planet. Plus, if planets don’t have a good number of different types of resources then I am going to have to planet hop, or again, grind for ore to sell to buy what I need. While the economy is amazing it shouldn’t be the end all/borderline required system to be able to travel between planets.

I went back and loaded up a single player game and saw that the farthest warp was a around 5 and a half AU, where as ours are 25 at the minimum. I recommend that either the AU is dropped between planets, the ratio of PE to AU is adjusted so that 1 PE = more than 1 AU, or the price to buy PE comes down drastically. Keeping the AU high, as well as the cost to buy high, with a 1 to 1 ratio seems to limit players and keeps them from being able to enjoy the sandbox nature of this game.

2

The cost used to actually be a lot more back before the wipe, something the tune of 200+ pent to travel from one end to the other. While 100 pent seems more reasonable, but I’m open to lowering it potentially. We do need more people gather and stockpiling blue crystal for selling to other players (hint traders). I’d wait and see how the economy develops before committing to this.

Also would be nice to sell pent on the market so the demand doesn’t get too high.

3

The problem I see with stockpiling is the only way to sell them is going to be burning another large amount of them just to get them to another player that is not on your planet. And as for the economy I don’t know if there will be a time when it will make travel easy unless that is when players have amassed a fortune from selling off ingots and then pentaxit becomes a money sink. That setup still doesn’t help to promote travel for the newer players or for people that don’t have a lot of time to play or time to play daily. My mind goes to thinking about new players on starter worlds that are trying to get all their stuff together before a wipe hits them. It could be a struggle to collect 50 shards to be able to make a one way trip to a planet that they might not be able to survive on due to the unknown mineral deposits.

4

Hey Devis,

thanks for your feedback.
I admit that I made the universe a lot harder now due the fact I had to reduce the overall size of it. I don’t want that player can travel like playing Pokemon. I don’t want that they are lazy from other servers where 5 AU is even too much. I want that the universe is a story as itself. I want that they need to earn their way through the universe. Kind of lategame. Travelling through an universe should never be easy.
But we have the economy system and today - I reduced the Pentaxit price by 500! That is a lot. I did that because I want to encourage people to fight more for the center and travel more often to the Elemental Marketplace to store their EC in the EB.
But all of this is a first iteration of more and more coming later. More ways to store EC, more ways to trade and more integration of faction benefits (like Trader have special trade conditions for example).

I know that there a lot of casual players out there - with family and so on. At the moment it is sad that they got punished by a crap Offline Protection feature. I hope the next patch will finally fix every exploit so you can just logout in a PvP zone and do not be worried about your stuff.

I hope I could clearify my intentions a bit and again: right now everything is kind of “proof of concept”. We will polish everything more and more to make HWS nearly another game or at least the most advanced gameplay you can get out there :wink:

5

The cost coming down 500 sounds great. I’m not wanting everything to be too easy, but all not stupid hard, and a price drop seems like a step in the right direction. =)

I did check both the NA and EU servers though when I got on tonight and saw the price is still over 1500. Will the new price take some time or a reset to come into play?

6

Yeah, you also need to fix the planets, Z and E economy is broken because Uranus is an amazing planet where Z and E rains 24/7 with absolutely no consequence or loss.

7

I appreciate that you want the traveling the universe to be difficult/costly. And normally I would agree, in a storyline, it’s not simple to ‘teleport’ that distance (because in Empyrion, it basically is an instant teleport). However, you must also consider game mechanics and balance issues, player interaction facilitation.

There is only a handful of people on the server, and they kind of came here to interact with other players. It’s not like in a storyline where there might be a settlement of 100 to 9billion people to deal with, kill, help, trade, whatever. There’s no one at all, except you, the hostile aliens, and another player who maybe around. Restricting travel means LESS interaction, not more.

The way you have player economy setup requires that you travel a VERY long way to a Marketplace to sell items, or bank your money. (The distance you must go is a whole other debate). At a cost of 150 pentaxit round trip to get there, it’s completely unfeasible for most players to even consider. At current pentaxit price, that’s over 200k EC. Thus, player trade/economy is killed. Or players must manually trade using the honesty system, you drop that, i drop this, deal done. No regulations or rules/laws regarding this, so people can scam and get away with it. (That’s what a pirate does right? hehe)

Rescuing other players stuck in space with no pentaxit, or coming to the aid of allies being attacked, or assisting in an attack, becomes VERY expensive, and thus players wanting to help probably will not, as the cost is simply too high (that’s hours of labor for the rescuer to recover their costs).

WHY exactly must traveling the universe be limited? What is the reason behind it, other than because in reality it would be… Empyrion isn’t really based on realism, it’s generally designed as a fast action game. Instant level 20, build a massive Capital Vessel in 2 days, then spend another 2 days looking for crystals to fly the ship somewhere? Are you trying to make people stay in one system more, build huge fortress, a fleet of ships, and then sit around? Or are they supposed to travel everywhere after grinding for a few hours getting crystals? I’m honestly not sure of the reasoning behind costly travel.

8

I tend to agree with Scruffy as to the point of this game should encourage space travel mechanically to drive interaction and conflict, especially on a heavy PvP server.

How the price of Pent fits into that is up to those that have the database and perhaps analytics to adjust that price as well. But with a limited number of players on the server (NA server here) and an even fewer number on at any one time (I think I saw 20 as the max in the 2 weeks I have been on this server, norm is 5 to 10) it is rare I even run into another player or ship, let alone one I can shoot or be shot by. Perhaps the EU server is much different with a different perspective and dynamic as I understand there is a large Pirate faction that more than likely wants and does move about much more often? Something for us on the US server to consider, that perhaps we are just more friendly and less “piratey” so the price seems high as we mostly just fly to harvest and trade?

I also understand that RexXxus is trying to thing LONG TERM and END GAME, as well as keeping in mind that game is alpha with new mechanics and resources etc constantly coming into play. I think the developers have also seen this as an issue as I believe the 1.7.0 patch now allows two warp drives and chambers?

My point I guess is that it will be a challenge to find the right balance between people hoarding Pentaxit and “controlling the skies” vs. people that cant get enough and just turn their capital ships into permanent bases as they are too costly to fly in space. I do know RexXxus appreciates all our feedback and ideas on things.