Hi HWS Community,
the time for the big HWS Survey was this time a bit shorter but even more important and used than before.
So let’s dive straight to the results and analysis. Especially the three most important questions - Mass & Volume, “Exposed Thrusters” and 2 Months season - are shown at the bottom.
Note: I will only show questions which are valuable for you. Some questions like “how did you like the Starter planet” are more addressed for me and how I will balance them out. Hope that is ok.
HWS Survey IV Results
- A very homogeneous diagram which is great!
- If we cluster it, we see that about 1/4 are “new players”, which is also nice to see in my opinion
- With that question I was curious how the overall term “Multiplayer” plays a role on “HWS”. Especially since I have intentions to push my goal of “Singleplayer in Multiplayer” to a certain degree (PDA Missions, Stargate Missions, etc.)
- It’s interesting to see that still bit more than 1/4 play Solo or Coop on HWS! I can’t ignore the point above
- But that 1/4 on the other hand are in such big factions of 20-50+ shows me that there is much room for improvement needed to support these numbers properly on a global scale.
Remember: Eleon officially recommends only up to 20 players for a whole Multiplayer Server…
- This question was also interesting to ask for me
- The Veteran part is not that big of a surprise, even though a welcome one
- But that so many players are coming from other servers were a surprise to me. I wonder why.
- I keep asking this question until I see no “Wish I did” or anything like that anymore
- It’s true that Empyrion PDA in Multiplayer is bit buggy and HWS is the only server who utilize it to the fullest extend. I try my best to create more redundancy checks in the future to evade any situation which could bug the PDA out and breaks the Story line!
- Remember: I hand out rewards over the PDA and some rewards will get even bigger in the future!
- As always one of the big important question.
- In contrast to the PvP importance question this chat is more homogeneous.
- It shows that even many PvP players value PvE still very high.
- It’s also the reason why HWS is and stays a PvPvE server
- After many seasons I wondered what actual type of PvE you like
- Also for Eleon quite interesting I can imagine. So in a Survival game, we have builder, POI raider and resource hoarder on top 3 ranks.
- The logistic engineer was a hint towards Mass & Volume system. It motivates me to improve that bar for sure now. Without a good logistic your other votes about a large faction for example are bit contradicting. Large factions need good logistic center imo.
- But it motivates me for sure to keep implementing interesting POIs for you and create interesting Resource planets / Orbits!
- The lower Trader bar could probably raise in the next season if I boost Commodity Trading again. As well as Quest / Mission Dealer
- Survivalist… will be maybe boosted by my harder Enviornment setting and the new Drone Base attacks…
- The overall response is: yes
- The new Commodity Trading system was an important fundament for the future. I’ll boost it in the next season hopefully in such a way that PvE will have a sub-section of success in PvE and PvP guys their own, more successful sub-section in PvP
- An interesting outcome, which some explained - thanks
- Could it be that most of the missions are too difficult?
- Not good enough explained before you go through the Stargate?
- What information would you like to see before you go in?
- What would you change to play the Missions there all the time?
- After some time an interesting question for me actually. Supporting couple of other questions I placed and showing contradictions for some… eventually
- Overall the answer is no, which is nice to see. Some PvP hardcore guys claimed that some seasons ago quite loudly.
- But there is room for improvement to balance it out. Especially in combination of Supergates and the RP rewards.
- And here the other important chart about PvP
- As I explained in the PvE chart: you see an irregular bar wave, which means that PvP is much more bound to “conditions” to make it smoothly balanced towards the bars
- For example PvP knowledge, toxicity, faction sizes, risk/reward, lags, glitches, exploits, etc.
- I try to focus on the things in that list which I can control. And I still think that making PvP more available to everyone during their gameplay, would make it much better.
- The regular Deathmatch events are too “instance” like, so I thought about PvP EGS Zones, where everyone could get a free PvP ship for example.
- Feel free to suggest more things which makes PvP more consistent but fun.
- Overall, it still shows a big participation and that it’s quite important to many that we keep going for balancements and improvements!
- Parameters were:
- I don’t understand how prices are calculated
- Unpromising needs a better balancing to other Unpromising Economy Playfields
- Sustainable needs a better balancing to Unpromising or other Sustainable Playfields
- The Traders need more different offers
- Better balancing between PvP and PvE Playfields (Quantity, Prices, …)
- Overall, the new system - which is based on Freelancer, No Man’s Sky and other games with good trading (imo) - is still a bit too complex to understand.
- The idea to actively run around with an Excel Sheet and document any trade and route is in conflict with too many Casual Gamers I think
- I try to not only share more knowledge to the system but also regulate it in such a way, that even if you probably don’t know if your current trade route will be super lucrative, that you still make money somehow.
- A frequent question with more details this time.
- The class limits last season were here and there rushed due missing time. Hence we had quite many different classes which creates some burdens to creators
- Your answers proofed the point to have rather few but “good” Class sizes.
- Class 1 for heavy battleground PvP, Class 5 for orbital PvP
- Class 3 and 7 are rather compromises for some I guess.
- However I would like your dedicated focused feedback, if we can really get rid of Class 7 in PvP playfields and only allow Class 1 and 5. Mainly because PvE players will feel helpless cause they think “bigger is better”.
- A little less ambitious than the PvE Trading question but PvE players are of course concerned about their valuable Goods (PvP players as well)
- Overall we have more conditions here to make it very good in PvP. I will take care of as much as possible to give trading such a meaning to call it someday even “Hotspot”.
- A question with a lot of topic layers packed into it
- While a lot of say No, it’s often combined with feedback to make it even more PvP concentrated - or just more fun.
- Some good feedback were written overall and I try to implement more situations where PvP have daily goals globally.
- Overall, with “HWS PvPvE” in mind, the two charts are awesome though! It motivates me to go further the mixed road but boost both gameplays to such a degree where you can decide freely what style you prefer today to play
- I know this question is not 100% fair to newer players but since we have a lot of Veterans, always interesting to me
- And so far we never had that clear winner of “Current Season” if I remember correctly. If trading and performance would be better, not much negative points would have been left I think.
- We are not a Call Center. We are no big Survey organization. But still I value a free support in an early access game very high. ~4 years ago I played on MP servers where there were no admin ingame. No website. No Discord. Nothing. Your only question was if you should continue or start a new game.
- So thanks for showing your appreciation in the survey that high.
- I would still like to improve to get almost everyone to the 6-7 bar. So feel free to let me know how we can improve.
- Personal Note: some wondering how HWS became for 3 years so big and keep Number 1. Some say our features. Some say our experience. But one of the true reasons are these bars.
- Final Note: One of the biggest issue is no true “support” for the NA server. That is true and it’s not something I ignore. I might start for HWS 10 an active “Recruitment” channel for Full Admins. Just to see if my assumptions are true about that approach…
- A question I was couple of time told to to just ignore and skip it all together and I’ll probably will do in the future.
- In the end, if “HWS is pay to win” became to a personal agenda, without facts, with slandering or lies. It’s just the biggest possible area others can attack me, because what else they have without playing themselves, right.
- Anyways, I try very hard to make it a non-pay-to-win server and 4 times you voted I’m doing it in a good way. I could add insane crazy packages but I don’t.
- Yes I could boost HWS Ingots even more but in that area I don’t do the mistake I made with OCD or Commodity Trading. Where it was insane boosted at the beginning and afterwards nerfed. I will take my time carefully to increase it bit by bit if necessary.
- Cause as you know, I make this for living and if I can invest more money in more people helping me or better equipment I will instantly do.
- So your concerns here are heard and being addressed as soon as possible!
- Well, some think behind all of this there is only that RexXxuS guy, but no, there are awesome helpers – without them HWS would not be possible as well!
- So thanks for your high value towards us!
- And the “haters” or just really pissed of players: you can contact us in a reasonable way and tell us how we can improve personally. We won’t ignore it, I can tell!
- I always try to get a honest impression from everyone how they actually like their gameplay on HWS.
- This feedback here is one of the best so far throughout 3 years! Or simply put: the hard work and your feedback from previous seasons / surveys were not wasted!
- The 3 + 4 guys who “suffered” the last 2 months are bit sad but I hope I can get some day a zero for these two sections. Realistically though: I never can make everyone happy.
- This question is a bit different than the one above. It should give us an impression how much we strive away from Vanilla, which in the end is good or bad.
- There are opinions out there that Vanilla must be “perfect” out of the box and every server should be equal content / feature wise. But in the end, maybe Eleon can learn from us?
The Changer Questions
Let’s concentrate now to the three big questions in the survey.
- This is the plain chart from 281 answers. Many claimed this to be not legit, cause PvE guys have no right to vote here or smurf accounts could manipulate the outcome. So let’s filter:
Filter: 500-3000+ playhours players
Filter: 500-3000+ playhours + PvP importance 6-7
Filter: 500-3000+ playhours + PvP importance 6-7 + PvE importance 1-2
So while some assume that “exposed” Thrusters are only a PvP topic (which is wrong) we see the tendency goes to No the more we dig into the “PvP filters”.
If I create some conditional checks for the text answers we get always about 50%/50% with “No/Yes (let’s try)”
The main intention for me I brought the question up was to let you know we have such setting. Eleon only chose Prefab ships with exposed thrusters and one day it may become mandatory as default.
The other intention is that you actively think about it. That you test it with Alpha 10. Because “exposed” is wrong. You can still have Thrusters inside your ships. They just need “free path” to the outside of your bounding box (I call it tunnel).
Some call it cheese but in actual combat - with shields and increased Thruster hitpoints - it won’t decide the outcome as much as some claim.
Last but not least, everyone who voted for “Yes”, please don’t be upset too much. I think after the Shields are fully discovered and some prepared / played around with it in more detail we can activate it in the future. Ultimately Eleon is working on better flight controller, so the time will come in the future for sure.
Anyways for now, neither Eleon, nor HWS is 100% ready for it. So “exposed” Thrusters won’t be forced / activated in HWS 10.
- A more difficult question, because some already tried it out in Singleplayer or other MP servers. The result was frustration and no acceptance.
It’s especially difficult because everything which caused frustration can be “fixed” with Config settings, in the HWS Config file.
So what is the motivation for that setting?
The main goal is to have different ship types do different jobs. Adding more immersion for PvP and PvE at the same time.
Especially since HWS is the perfect playground for it, isn’t it? You have resource crust planets where you have to value a lot of Cargo. You have Commodity Trading which boosts Escorts and armored Transporters. You have special Missions and POIs in PvP which needs Firepower and Cargo.
But to make it ultimately good in my opinion is the change of 50000 item stack sizes. I want to get rid of Stack Size limitation the old way and let handle your backpack / Container the decision how much you can carry around. Only then decisions matter - something I love as you know.
And by default there are not much decisions in the game, I know.
But have you ever looked at the Mobility Armor Booster? Did you calculate your max. Volume input with a Heavy Armor and 4x Mobility Booster?
Did you ever place an Alien Container in your ship / at your base and checked their Volume Capacity?
You get the idea… I want to implement special ways for you to more or less exclude the Volume system, based by good decisions.
So let’s filter that chart as well:
Filter: PvP importance 6-7 + PvE importance 6-7
The Filter “playhours” is misleading here and I excluded it for reasons I wrote above. Some veterans tried it once and are stuck in their mind that it’s bad. In the text responses I see the majority have the mindset “Let’s try it”.
And I included PvE here because unlike the “exposed” Thrusters topic, Mass & Volume add a lot of immersion and fun for PvE as well - I won’t exclude their opinion here.
So we will try Mass & Volume enabled in HWS 10. Heavily modified with the HWS Config to provide fun and immersion. I try to add my HWS Config to the official EXP server asap, so you can let me know your feedback early!
Note: The values will need adjustments along the way, since it has big impact on different things. At the beginning I create rather more Volume Capacity than less to be able to adapt smoothly
- This was… interesting to see for me. Either 50% ignore my text I wrote above that chart or just didn’t care / disagree.
3 months are for the majority the way to go no matter what. Which is not fully supported by my follow up question:
Analyzing this in more detail we see some contradictions or just not 100% result output for 3 months here.
Ultimately, your text based answers in the follow up question just showed me more clearly why you voted for 3 months and most of it are easy things to consider.
I don’t want to push for 2 months that hard but in the future it might be inevitable for me to change it to 2 months.
As I explained 3 months are actually more stressful for me than 2 months.
Giving me options to implement your feedback faster and improve overall faster is very important to me.
The disadvantages you mention can be addressed quite good in my opinion.
Be it better loot distributions within 2 months, cheaper prices “Keep stuff” packages, higher rewards for Missions and overall adjusting the gameplay in such a way that almost everyone can be fully good to go after ~40 days.
Anyways, similar to “exposed” Thrusters, this will be a topic for the future for now. We keep it to 3 months for HWS 10.
Text based Questions & Answers
I can’t and won’t mention all of your private messages about my questions. I just want to say big thanks you invested for writing those!
I really liked reading through them and I try very hard to address your concerns as good as possible in HWS 10 and up. Some really good points in so many areas!
Even though I got 95+% positive responses overall, I won’t rest on it! I keep pushing hard forward to improve. Always! Until I die.
That was the longest Survey result post ever (sitting 8 hours straight on it now).
I hope it was worth the read. I hope you could follow some of my analysis / interpretation but most importantly get insights of the overall Community mindset.
Thank you a lot for your time, answering my questions!
Your HWS Team
P.S.: Remember: As mentioned in the Survey often: only honest reviews will get rewarded and only if your Steam 64 ID was given. Our automated bot won’t crawl anything else! And I excluded obvious hater / troll answers from the bot crawling, as well as obvious multi-account voter.
