Most of the most successful stories barrow from the basics, rather than using needless complexity which fails due to continuity errors which appears as a result of complex stories.
Alliance = Trader and Guardian’s on one planet, either having their factions auto allied, or (quasi) force them to ally with each other on their planet.
Freelancers = trusted by no one, as they can support either team. They are gray, they stand where shadow meets the light. (see barrowed Babylon 5 reference).
bad guys = Pirate and Hunters, who ever thought that bounty hunters were good guys? I always saw bounty hunters as being the kind of people who did whatever they wanted, just were a little better at leaving no witnesses, because they were former military, police, or otherwise professionally trained, but could not handle being that much of a good guy or were betrayed by their commanding officers when following illegal orders. In this way, you could merge hunters and freelancers, given that the freelancers are gray and not black or white.
Love this idea, the structure itself is the capital for each origin, can be put to siege, but not destroyed. Each origin can store goods in a sv/cv/hv like vessel to rebuild (with the historical precedent of storing resources away in underground tunnels when one expected their city to be sacked.).
There is master plan, its just attacked and destroyed by problems with base game.
6.0 a lot of work put in just to be wasted…too much performance needed.
Logical step another server Sanctuary…just to be misunderstood by players and got bad name due to notfinished csw at launch (o2, fuel, groups) and server problems (harddisk, overheating, disconects)
Class change…necessary step finaly made, now it cant be worse and beside all the problems, i had smothest combat so far on planet, sadly since 6.7 game is not playable.
And so on, so my opinion is that Rexxx is doing whatever is necessary to improve our experience and those steps are good to do and logical, but theres always something to set him back, i forgot new expensive server…must have been hard to chew to see its not helping. Still he fights on, i call it dedication. Thanks for that.
So Rexxx do major changes now, all of them, turn it whole upside down if necessary, playerbase dont like to many changes and there wont be better time to do it. Once done make it permanent foundation since now. Players will start to come back one by one as always if they will see changes are finished and they can trust all is stable. Stability was always reason for me to play (includes OCD and server being online for nerly 2 years now)
Make it minimal so it can grow once game is ready for that. Make it 3 Origins.
Simplicity, stability, trustworthiness for better pew pew!
P.S: I love this transparency and us being informed and asked for our opinions so we all can participate on HWS future
Thanks for your thoughts @eckso. It is always hard to decide what direction is good or not.
But I agree with some opinions that we added to much features lately and did not fix older problems or are bound to them.
So doing the change to 3 origins is basically a fix.
At least I see more benefits than problems with it in the long run.
Only thing I agree is that 5 Origins are always better to difference stuff than 3 of course. And taking away existent code and adding it later back, even with Git history, is still a pain.
I will make sure that the step to 3 isn’t an easy no brainer decision. We had 5 Origins for 1,5 year now. I have a kind of reference here.
In the end it is coming down to 1. maintenance (guide, balancement, features) and 2. performance for the server.
We had this discussion already @Lokiet. I don’t know why Tesla and you are so persistent pains sometimes or like to force me to repeat myself although I said I hate it. Logical sense: you want to anger me - with quite success so do not wonder my reactions.
The HWS “master plan” is available in the Guide. Let me quote it for you:
Now you come up with your weird real life analogies or what ever why there stand philosophy and not “master plan” but deal with it.
Other than that this game and server is still in active development. You won’t get a roadmap from us and damn if you can’t live with that, please go.
Obviously our goal / plan is to improve non-stop and we won’t stop only for few people hugging the “no-change” policy.
I mentioned the reasons for 3 Origins in simple, plain english without your real life analogy - hopefully still understandable.
Last but not least your own words are your own downfall.
You see? You wrote “I”. “YOU”. But you go ahead and generalize it to
Stop thinking that everyone ticking your way and spread hate speeches all the time against HWS or me.
I do not attack anyone with bringing studies and analyzes that smartphone games changed the way people play, communicate and live. That is a fact.
We called it season, default is called full wipe. It doesn’t matter. That is the circumvent an alpha game has to go. Again you are free to go and play a stable game.
If you can’t live with that and understand why we changed it please go also. Really crazy how you still persistent on that change even though the whole world understood why it was needed.
So that was my last time responding to you with all the needed words for it.
I see zero relations to the initial Poll from you in that post so I have to remove all coming unrelated content.
You have sometimes good suggestions but sometimes it goes too wild.
Last but not least: please if you don’t like me (what you have confirmed now) and don’t like how things are running here you are free to leave.
The reason why Origins could be nice:
Roleplay, story telling, Diverse play styles, Encouraging players to compete & collaborate, resulting in an enrichment of gameplay (this is basically why people join multiplayer), better server performance (through different starting planets).
The basic problem with origins is that collaboration & competition between members of a certain origin and even between Origins cannot be forced technically at the moment through:
Forcing alliances between traders and guardians (example)
Disable friendly fire within an origin or between origins
No reliable way available to quickly identify a player’s origin (factions can contain different origins, so you can’t be sure which origin you are facing in PvP)
So the only way to compensate this, is to give certain origins high rewards or high penaltys for collaboration or competition, encouraging people to ally or fight each other.
At the moment HWS offers some of these:
There is a high penalty for guardians and traders, if they kill each other. So HWS is forcing them into alliances a bit (collaboration).
There is also a reward for guardians when killing a pirate, provoking competition between Guardians and pirates. But that’s pretty much it.
There is not a single “global reward” for origins, if they follow their role. Let me give an example to explain what I mean:
There could be a kill counter for guardians and pirates that is reset every day. If pirates kill more guardians than guardians kill pirates, every pirate would get +1 Bonus RP for that day and vice versa. I am just giving a very unfinished example here, but I hope you get my message:
Collaborative and competitive gameplay needs to be more rewarding. If you want origins to be more than an RP element, implement global origin rewards for achieving common goals. This will give people much more reasons to work together.
At the moment origins are only a diverse set of RP bonuses with a different story and different types of starter planets. That’s already a lot and reason enough to like it, but it is still lacking huge potential.
As long as the technical means are not there to make origins work flawlessly I would not put more efforts into it. We cannot test right now, how player would behave if there were forced alliances for example. Or Origin tags in the player name. This would drastically change things.
The Origin idea is great and it’s potential is huge, but it’s too early for the current state of the alpha.
This is a very good reason why I would decide for 3 origins.
What you call negativity, is what most people call criticism, which is not a negative thing, it is part of the creative process. If all you want is platitudes and safe places, then I advise that you go to one of the US universities. I am a computer graphics artist, writer, and content creator (an actual 3d modeler), and know first hand that the best way to improve something, is to speak about what is wrong and offer suggestions to fix it. I’ve done that in every post… Which is why they are so long. It is not my fault that you stop reading.
If major changes are to be made with this new build, then I agree. Make them the bedrock, and make small changes from here on out.
To put it into terms that I use in my computer graphic career. You build the base model, and then make small, minor changes, and upgrades. But from the first to the last iteration, you can see that the final product, is born from the first, the bedrock. This is how I work with Lightwave 3d, and this is how I work with Zbrush, photoshop, and Indesign.
I mean, I’d love a master plan that we can all read and know exactly what Eleon/HWS will end up being at full release… But that’s a pipe dream. How can HWS put together a master plan as detailed as you seem to want when every month something changes in the base game that completely throws off what you want to do? All these mystical references to architecture you keep making don’t really make any sense. When you build a house, or as you put it “rearrange the internal beams” (?), you typically know what building material you’re working with. In this case, they don’t. A roadmap would just piss people off because there is, essentially, no way they could reliably adhere to it at this point. Eleon, on the other hand, should be a bit more forthcoming about their game, perhaps.
Now I see the problem a little clearer. You’re making these posts from a standpoint of superiority over people with differing opinions.You start dropping these, frankly, ridiculous references to your career or some absurd architecture analogy to talk down to the many people that disagree with you, then say “time will prove me right”.
You’re being pompous. I’m not trying to be dramatic, it’s just how I see your posts. Constructive or not.
Hate speech? No one on these forums have spread hate speech. Strongly worded opinions? Sure, hate? no.
Nothing I have stated, states that I have a problem with you personally, nothing has been a personal attack. What I have criticized is the direction, or directionlessness of the server. You are not the server, I don’t know you outside of a random name you chose for yourself, and speaking as a professional from the creative fields… I would strongly advise that as you continue with your development of HWS, you install some form of emotional barrier between you as a person and the work which you preform.
Case in point, my work as a content creator in the 3d modeling world, writing, and advertising, do not represent me as a person, and despite harsh (which I have yet to even speak) criticism of my work in the before mentioned fields, I and my critics can sit back and enjoy each other’s company. Why? because we know that our criticism’s of each other’s work, improve our work and as time has progressed, our works sold better. Why else do you think that I can spend so much of my life playing a video game on your server when most people must work 50 plus hours a week just to eat?
I haven’t been trying to destroy you, I have been trying to help convince you to build stability in the server. Stability that attracts a player base that will stay, rather than the instability that shakes players away.
It’s true in generally, but players who choose a game like empyrion generally likes deeper content. I voted for 5 origin with more differences.
What do you think to create a topic how players imagine origins?
For example I imagine hunters like Boba Fett from Star Wars or a Predator.
I imagine freelancer like pirates in Guardians of Galaxy.
I imagine pirates like in the old Freelancer game who hunts you on trading routes.
By having a plan which doesn’t depend upon Eleon or their changes. After nearly 2 years, there is absolutely been zero changes by Eleon which precluded a master plan for the server.
Let me try and draw up a simplified plan. A plan that the Origin introduction came closest to altering, but not really.
When I first came to this server, the server already had the backbone for the Origin system in place (HWS3). The player base rejected this concept then, as they do now. The player base who play Guardian (which essentially existed then), rarely did anything to protect the Traders (my faction had to become both traders and guardians for ourselves). So what does this mean? It means that the Origin system totally fails both the Traders (who as of HWS 6) were not meant to be an origin who conducted offensive operations… Yet they must, if they are to keep the wolves away, and the guardians are not dependent upon the Traders, for their daily bread, as is the case in a real world comparison. Guardians being the guardians of the stable empire built upon trade and economics, whose soldiers are paid thanks to that stable economic system.
How is this fixed? largely until you make the Guardian’s dependent upon the Trade Origins, you cannot.
Pirates/Hunters/Freelancers are all groups living outside or on the edge of the stable empire. As such, they should not prosper from the Traders, and nor should they really be able to enjoy the fruits of stability. Their lives are either spent to create conflict (pirates) or to exploit said conflict (Freelancers/Hunters).
Hunters specifically should have been hunting rouge Freelancers, and every Pirate (a automatic bounty for when hunters kill any pirate (limitation being 1 kill every 2 minutes when killing the same person, as to eliminate griefing)).
Freelancers specifically should profit from running missions, and gathering rare ores like Gold, Zac, and Est. which is no longer available in the stable empire.
Now if we go to a 3 origin system as the poll appears the server wants, we effectively eliminate Guaridan and traders / hunter and pirate. Merging both into a single group. This eliminates the dependency issue for the guardians and empowers the traders to go on the offense, while pushing hunters into the darkside of things, with the freelancers standing between.
This renders the Freelancers largely as redundant force with no meaningful direction, but isn’t that what their namesake is meant to be? Opportunist who can work for either side? In truth, the guilty rating should most directly hurt Freelancers, should they choose to side with the Pirates, as both of the extreme sides can kill the guilty freelancer then. The merged Pirates and hunters should not be allowed to gather bounties from the guilty system as they kill just to kill, freelancers however can, and to do so, is to work for the Guardians.
Do you see the roadmap in this? It incorporates what the Server had back in 3, and evolves along side, but not in direct opposition to Elion.
To make the Claim that time will prove me right, is to some extent being pompous, and I can accept criticism over it. But it isn’t a matter of superiority, there is only one person with the Superiority stick, Rex. That however comes with being the owner of HWS, and his right. Which if you have read my post, never once have I told Rex he has no right to do (insert), only that I advise against most of his changes (some things I have been proven wrong on), because they do not seem to be in line with any actual roadmap, plot, or story.
As it stands each origin name means nothing because at the time each origin has no common pvp planet to defend so its just an empty name.
Each origin should have one large indestructible base as their capital so as to confirm that this is indeed their planet! “This is called a strong foundation.” Naturally this is an ideal setting for the origin to get to know and become familiar with their fellow kinsman through battle in which communication, cooperation, and common purpose will be applied into action.
I hope this next season doesn’t feel like alot of half-sorted rolled up ideas were accidentally flushed down the toilet.
