HWS NA Admin | Gameplay Changes Part 1

[RexXxuS]

Hi HWS Community,

a little but important announcement - more to come.

New HWS NA Admin

Our Public Official NA Application form were more or less successful! Since only one slot was open for a position we decided and want to welcome

@h1myname1sdav1d !

Thank you a lot for deciding in helping us!

He applied for a Full Admin position, which in general means, he will stop playing Empyrion on HWS as a regular player.
Every single PvP is gone - in case you associate him with it.
He is very motivated and has ambitious to help balancing and/or supporting us in general with Support Tickest etc.

We are excited and hope for the best - since NA Admins are very hard to get.
@JUNIPER stays a Full Admin on NA but is rather “on duty” available so far and David will progress in permissions along the way (no Full Admin capabilities yet)

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Chatbot in Global Chat

The Chat rework in Alpha 10 were not 100% cool. That you only have one key for the chat (dot . ) has brought back a massive inflation of chatbot commands in Global Chat.

Why?

Because players do not know that they can just press

CTRL + Left/Right Arrow

To change the Chat channel to Faction Chat for example.
It is broadcasting since weeks but since it does not seem to have an effect yet, we are forcing chatbot commands in Faction or Server Channel again.

Spread the word to others, that CTRL + or is the way to go!
Once the brains got adapted to it, we might allow Chatbot commands in global again - it has some good incentives overall to allow it there. (free advertisement of our features like OCD)

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HWS Config Changes aka Performance

The recent performance issues on EU and the result of massive Drama I have to deal with in private messages about PvP accusations were brought to Eleon.
The result:

Profiling / Benchmark on Wednesday

We will do another big benchmark to see what is going on. I’ll announce it on Discord at given time again but would be cool to get another 30 Player PvP action somewhere.

HWS Config Modifications

The gab we have to take between fun and performance is always big or at least difficult.
Still, in the end performance should always win, because without performance there can’t be fun in the first place.
That means Eleon checked some changed values and identified issues with them.
Example
HV T2 Drill.
I changed the Range and Damage in the HWS Config a lot in comparison to Vanilla.
Why? Because the Rate of Fire got nerfed massively in Alpha 10 and I wanted to compensate it with the other values.
Overall: neither the Garage ships nor such Config changes are really known or calculated by Eleon.

That means there will be some dramatic changes over time now to bring back the focus on Performance!
The recent Server restart was the start for the Large Drill Attachment for example.

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HWS Inflation

A very dark and negative topic for me. And something which gets bigger and bigger we can’t ignore for long anymore.
2 Years ago 100k credits were a highlight on HWS. Nowadays it’s almost expected as Daily Loot.
The Inflation kills economy - always. And with that, the fun as well. Yes it might feel fun to swim in money but in long term fun I made some analyze and saw a dramatic fluctuation of good players on HWS, once they reached the status “rich”. It starts fast for them to be boring and imbalanced.

The drill changes and coming other changes in the future will have impact on that and I hope and wish for your logical and constructive feedback, how to drastically stop Inflation in the economy / HWS!
Please try to think of a big picture where everything plays together.
For example reduced Garage ship prices, less Gold resources in the universe, changed Connect rewards, loot distribution, NPC Trader prices, etc.
I rely on your feedback here!

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That being said I take issues on HWS very serious. Maybe too serious. It’s just a game.
But since ever I see it somehow as “my” game. I always wanted to be a Game Designer. And I hate people who blunder. I hate incompetence. The world is getting more and more of them. So I really want to make everything right. But it’s very hard to do alone.
HWS grew over the years to an own game within a game indeed. So please let me know your feedback about issues which are bigger than yourself — or just saying: welcome in my world

Thanks!

Your HWS Team

[Chaotic]

Congrats David. Sad to see ya go but as long as Rex doesnt overwork you, Im happy. Rex, you’ve gained one helluva hard worker and a damn good mate with David.

And I’m sure we can get a big fight going in the next few days

[h1myname1sdav1d]

Big thanks to @RexXxuS and @Jascha for giving me the chance to help give back to this community I’ve come to like so much in recent months.

As Rex stated, I am completely removing myself from all PvP, competition, and any other competitive sense of the game. In the past as a player I’ve tried hard to compete and have a point of view on the game; as an Admin I set those things aside and will do my best to openly and impartially do the work needed for all players on the server.

I’m very proud of the NA community. As recently as last night players from many factions were in the English lounge on discord having a good time and helping new players. I hope these things continue and I’ll do my best to support the good vibes however I can.

I’m looking forward to taking this step with all of you and can’t wait to see how we can keep building HWS together.

[Dr.Dark]

First of all congratulations @h1myname1sdav1d.

@RexXxuS

HWS Inflation

A very dark and negative topic for me. And something which gets bigger and bigger we can’t ignore for long anymore.
2 Years ago 100k credits were a highlight on HWS. Nowadays it’s always expected as Daily Loot.
The Inflation kills economy - always. And with that, the fun as well. Yes it might feel fun to swim in money but in long term fun I made some analyze and saw a dramatic fluctuation of good players on HWS, once they reached the status “rich”. It starts fast for them to be boring and imbalanced.

About this part.
Inflation is indeed an issue, but i think one of the reasons inflation comes, is because of the way some/most play, of the rich at least.
Some start by getting everything max level(EB, OAM whatever), and then end up with only OCD left. Since OCD is so expensive, in the higher levels, it forces people to save their cash up. This period of saving cash up for OCD is really long, and consists mostly of mining gold, or maybe commodity trading for some.

I’m myself in this period, and i have nothing to do ingame anymore. I have no other goals than OCD. I tried PvP for a while as something to keep me playing, but i was only doing that for so long, then that got boring as well.
With only 1 goal, and a so far away goal, i don’t see what to do ingame anymore.
So i’d say when rich people begin going for OCD, then this inflation gets worse, and people starts to get bored.

We could just do that, we lower all prices and stuff, and make it harder to earn cash, but in the end, most rich veterans already have all maxed out, and it’s hard to “unrich” them.
So i don’t see exactly how this would be solved completely.

Like you said yourself once, you can’t buy survival.

Archilles also mentioned it recently. Veterans already have ton of experience, and even if you remove their cash, they still know how to earn it back, and survival just doesn’t become the same.

[DarthMyrten]

Keep in mind that inflation this season is largely caused by one time carbon money injection, it should drop in some time.

[WhizZLe]

@Dr.Dark

With only 1 goal, and a so far away goal, i don’t see what to do ingame anymore.
So i’d say when rich people begin going for OCD, then this inflation gets worse, and people starts to get bored.

We could just do that, we lower all prices and stuff, and make it harder to earn cash, but in the end, most rich veterans already have all maxed out, and it’s hard to “unrich” them.
So i don’t see exactly how this would be solved completely.

One way to unrich the rich would be more stuff to spend credits on. I am not sure what this could be, next to Garage Ships or Services like the OCD. Maybe @RexXxuS could make Planets and Space per Season also payable with credits, when they arent sold out every season.
Or other sweet stuff to get the money out of their pockets

[Dr.Dark]

@WhizZLe

Planets and Space per Season also payable with credits, when they arent sold out every season.

This would have to be very expensive, or/and limited.
We’d have to go around 500mil, before that’d be an option.
If it costed down around 100mil, then all rich players could buy one, and it’d cost a lot on server performance.

Maybe 1 per alliance bought from credits, or something?

[WhizZLe]

First of all, its just an idea. And yes it should be expensive.

But otherwise there could be Penthouses for Credits, not so much impact on Performance but still something nice.

[Dr.Dark]

Penthouses aren’t really that good though, except they look good, and some exteed size limits.

So that wouldn’t really be a solution. I wouldn’t pay more than 1mil for a penthouse, and not even that.
You can get free penthouses all around. Why buy one

[WhizZLe]

Okay Penthouses arent the best solution, but how about a comeback of the HWS Bunkers? Only affordable per Credits.

[Dr.Dark]

Could be an option, but personally i don’t like the idea of penthouses on Golden Globe at least.

Other PvP planets and stuff it could be an option, but i feel like Golden Globe you should fight to have a base, and bunkers ruin the fact that Golden globe is “the” PvP hotspot on HWS, or at least the most important one.

[WhizZLe]

There are more nice and deadly places then GG

I gonna sleep a night over this and maybe i got tomorrow more ideas how i, ehm we, ehm HWS gets the money from the rich.

[Dr.Dark]

I have a great idea.

Rex can spawn a zirax shield killer thing. The weapon he had by last patreon event.
If rex sells 10 of those, and limits it to 1 per player, then we could start the betting, and see who wins xD?

I’ll start… 300 million.

[Caedus]

Congrats @h1myname1sdav1d! Your personality and willingness to help others make you an ideal candidate for this position.

@RexXxuS

@RexXxuS

Because players do not know that they can just press

CTRL + Left/Right Arrow

This is useful, and I believe most of us know this by now that care to use it. The major problem in my opinion with the chat is that it still switches to the ‘Private’ channel whenever you get a ping in that channel. Since you can’t type in this channel, it deletes the text you are typing in another channel when you receive the ping. Also, this channel switching method has no positive stops. In that, I mean that you can endlessly press ctrl + right arrow and continue switching channels. It would be nice, specifically for HWS server to have a hotkey that directly switched to the server channel for entering server-specific commands.

@DarthMyrten

Keep in mind that inflation this season is largely caused by one time carbon money injection, it should drop in some time.

This in itself is more of a meta problem. Since many people emptied their OCDs to fill them with carbon, there was a much smaller backlog of resources at the beginning of the season.
So, there was extra gold lying around for people to spend. (which in truth many people were using to increase their OCD levels especially with the buff this season) Other people thought correctly, since this would be the case there would be a much greater demand for base resources and sought to (and did) profit from it. This, paired with the resource sink introduced at the traders recently made a certain few commodities prized, while others completely crashed. Since certain commodities are lucrative at the traders, and they have a fixed range at which they will purchase them, this sets the standard for those resources.

I really like the idea of the resource sink and profitability of selling them to traders. It develops a cycle of acquisition and liquidation that has potential to keep veterans interested, profit new players, and reduce the backlog of billions of resources in OCDs. However, I think a broader range of resources should be accepted at traders, and, if possible, current market value should have an effect on their value. Primarily, if meta components were profitable at higher volume, it could broaden the range of materials that players seek out. Also, since you can harvest components from default POIs, it could keep players entertained doing this for profit. At least it might if the Eleon multitool/turret nerf didn’t make this abysmally slow.
In the same regard, HV mining hurts this season due to the same nerf. HV mining is pivotal to new players being productive and successful. If this key element is less fun, then new players aren’t progressing, and eventually adding to the market economy.

Overall, I feel that players should have many paths to become ‘rich’ and there should be more ways for players to spend their riches and dump resources.

@WhizZLe

Planets and Space per Season also payable with credits, when they arent sold out every season.

RexXxus already introduced a way to do this, with HWS Ingots, and it is indeed an expensive endeavor. If you want to use credits, you have to purchase alien containers for the RP to buy the ingots. Then it takes quite a lot of to get to this point.

I think the HWS ingot is a great idea, but it’s price point at the moment is slightly unattainable, especially since there are so many things one can do with RP.

Sorry for the long post, and I apologize for my ADD if I went in random directions with it.

[Loki66]

HWS ingots are way too expensive. For example, you get more cash by simply turning the RP into cash at the end of the season, than you can save by turning all the RP into ingots and spending them on a “save $____ extra at the end of the season” package.

Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. The reason there is inflation on HWS isn’t that there’s too much money, it’s that there are too few goods worth spending it on. Add things for rich players to spend money on after maxing OAM and OCD and voila! the inflation goes away instantly. Trying to address it by making it harder to make money will only punish newer players who haven’t gotten rich yet but are trying very hard to do so.

[Israel_T-C]

I think the following idea could be a hit! And could be a good way to get rid of some of that inflation.

The idea is a Room-renting indestructible planet station or space station that has many rooms inside that acts as a hanger; big enough to fit one sv or hv. Rent could be collected daily, weekly, or monthly. Its up to Rexx. There could also be bigger hangers for cv’s that cost even more credits. This could also be part of a donation package that helps support the server.

To buy the hangers you got to put the commend in. Something like EGS:BuyHanger42 once you buy it the indestructible turrets on the station won’t fire at you.

[Fallen_Angel]

First of all, a big congratulation to @h1myname1sdav1d & massive THANK YOU for sacrificing your own play for the good of the community. We as player-base appreciate it massively.

Can’t give much for the performance topic, except

@RexXxuS

Still, in the end performance should always win, because without performance there can’t be fun in the first place.

This is 100% true & even though people generally protest limitations, it’s for our own good.

Inflation, the excrement of Demon called Greed…
Sits heavy on my shoulds as well, whispering about dem gainz.
I believe to control inflation one has to create new resource sinks and limit the income accordingly in order to achieve balance.

Issue: There is no major resource sink apart from maybe garage ships (How many do you realistically need in a season?) between the cheaper upgrades (OAMs and Lower OCD levels) and between the end-game upgrades (OCD 7–>).
While OCD is amazing resource sink, many feel like the higher levels are unattainable and don’t even try. They end up mustering up major income for themselves (High EB levels, Control play on Golden Globe…), but instead of sparing the income & sinking it all into later OCD levels, they settle and decide to no push it at all. This puts them to very late game way before they should be. This is double bad. They have MAJOR income they need to spend in something, but the options for someone not pushing for OCD are … very limited at this point.

Solution: I bet someone of you think I’m suggesting OCD price reduction, but definitely not. Massive prices for OCD should remain the main resource sink for very late players. Instead, there has to be a new medium-expensive resource sink that costs several hundred millions to maximize. It should be expensive enough to force players saving for it, but cheap enough to make upgrading each level possible (for average mid-game player) within one season.

This should be permanent upgrade to make sure it’s a “must-have” for mid to late game players. While reseting with season does provide permanent resource-sink to some people, it also drives the same exact people away who we are targeting with the update. You want to push the very late game further & introduce a mind-set of big upgrades to “new-moneys”.

Maybe consider to also add something that resets, but can not be donated for or kept by donating, in order to introduce permanent resource sink. This can’t be the only solution, though, as seasonally resetting nature of upgrade drives away certain players → They won’t sink their credits in this. → Back to square one.

This is where the community has to step in. Please suggest lucrative but not directly profitable (or too overpowered) features that could be added in between the regular upgrades & high OCD levels.

Directly profitable = return of investment gained purely on the upgrade. EB would be example of something that can not be added!

OCD is good example of a good suggestion, as it does not give direct profit even though you can benefit from it financially. This would not only push the very end game further, but also show the players that it’s actually very viable to push for high OCDs. These two together will limit the inflation as players seek to spare the credits & sink them in features instead of buying every garage ship & being able to pay any price for items.

Now at this point, it’s important to also limit the income. The balance, however is very very tricky. It should be based on the goals. You want to give players realistic goal for each season to sink their credits to, but you don’t want them to have massive overflow which they have to sink in anything to spare it. I can’t pretend to know how to balance it so I’ll leave that to someone else Cheers for the effort.

tl:dr introduce a new mid-level resource sink which can be either side-project for the already filthy rich or a way for “new moneys” to wrap their head around big spending projects. Don’t delete or change already attained property in a major way (Except maybe the massive income from EB, again this is balancing issue).

[Straneb]

Congratulations David! I am sure you are gonna make a fine admin:) A big thank you for your sacrifice!

[Wiseman738]

Bunkers. Similar to what Israel said, a kind of bunker esque station in a certain area or PVP hotspot to make it worthwhile.

The most success we’ve ever had at creating a massive money sink was with the Bunker system. Sure there was drama, but that could all be solved with a strict set of rules when it comes to using/attacking/defending bunkers so that people aren’t doing any of the goofy stuff they did before. The penalty for this would be the loss of their bunker, no refunds and no buybacks.

For those wondering just how successful the bunker sales were, check this out:

HWS EGS Bunker Season Auction

START: I bid 230m for gg1

(Also make it clear that those bidding can only bid for version 1 and version 2 and can’t swap from version 1 to version 2 when version 1 is too expensive like RED/OPG did which seemed a little bit sneaky ! Otherwise they can inflate the price of Bunker A and then switch over to Bunker B which is somewhat cheesing an auction.)

But all cheekyness aside, the total amount taken from the bunker sales was around 1 billion credits!

So it’s probably one of the most powerful money sinks ever created!

Just don’t let people edit or modify their bids halfway through or it causes chaos but you picked up on that in the last one and forced the other parties to play fair! It was good fun!

Best regards,
Wise.

[Fallen_Angel]

To be honest, 1b total per season for a feature is nothing these days.
Several members of U-T (And I’m sure not only U-T) could buy every single bunker out for 2-3 seasons in row alone. This would not help inflation as only the very late game players who are anyways going to spend their billions in upgrading OCDs could buy them.

It really has to be individual money sink aimed towards every mid to late game player. Eating away 1b simply makes no difference anymore. However, if 100 players all spend 250m … You get the point