PVE planets overcrowded

HWS General Discussion
1

RexXxus has said that something needs to be done about PVE worlds being overcrowded (and this causes some huge issues on those planets)

I actually agree with him tbh. Something does have to be done. In this topic, we’ll all try and agree on the best course of action.

The 2 actions RexXxus had for ideas are:
1 day of PVP on PVE worlds
or
PVE planets (Nova and Z) are similar to Mars, and get wiped sometimes.

I take issue with both these ideas (although we have to appreciate that RexXxus is trying to tackle a serious problem) on the grounds that these will cause more problems later.

For example. If there is 1 day of PVP on Nova, I just wont log in. I’ll turn offline protection on, fuel my base to last for 3 days, and not come on that day. I imagine if I’m smart enough to do this, so are lots of people.

The other option of “PVE planets get wiped” is also not going to work, as people will just load their HQ onto a CV, put it in orbit over the planet, go offline, protected by offline protection, log back in after wipe, land, and continue on with what they were doing (they could even blueprint their HQ and have it ready to go when they come back)

So although I appreciate and respect RexXxus’s efforts to fix the servers issues, the options suggested will not help, as they either cause problems, or can be all together avoided.

My idea:
Why don’t we add say, 2 more PVE worlds next to Nova (that are maybe 1 pentaxid away, to make moving easier) and then we set those worlds with a “core” limit. If memory serves me, (and from my experience on another server) you can set a core limit on planets, meaning no more HQ’s, ships, CV’s or the like can be made there. Meaning people can’t settle there.

So all we have to do is add 2 more planets, set a core limit on them (and Nova and Z) and that will force us to spread out, thus meaning each playfield (planet) has less bases, cores and players lagging it.

Please let me know if you have any ideas as well, I’m sure the admins will be reading this and keeping an eye on the discussion. Thank you.

2

Thanks Duke - appreciate your initiative here.
A core limit per planet is sadly not possible with built-in options.
Only with our tool what will take time and is not 100% accurate, I guess.

What we can do now: as soon as there are more than 1 CV and BA per player / faction they will automatically set to a let’s say “GET REKT” faction. So they lost it / can’t access them anymore.
Won’t fix the issues too: they still crowd the planet. :confused:
The problem here is: we can’t destroy structures with telnet commands. Only with ingame commands what is time comsuming.

If we had this we could also make planets you have to pay for - an old idea of me. So you need to pay 1000 CR per day to stay on that planet for example. Like renting a house :wink:

My two options are not the best I know. The faction rebalance 2.0 update will be more important than I thought…

3

This is actually a really good idea. I would also suggest making all “free” PVE worlds get no meteors, or resources (except blue crystals, for travel and to get off planet in case you get stuck) so that PVE worlds are used for “storage”

So, PVE worlds you “pay to stay” on are normal, have resources, oxygen, all the good stuff. “Free” PVE worlds are barren, and just used to store your stuff and build.

Also 1000 credits a day is too much, just for the record, lol :smiley:

4

I spend like a week building my BA on Nova. I can’t move it or anything if we get wipes. And now with the meteorites we will only get more people :frowning:. I noticed them this morning. No more need to go to Mars to farm stuff. I understand that Nova is crashing a lot lately and I understand that something must be done.

I will not login. Fine with me. Like you said indeed.

NO WAY! Also if this indeed happens I will of course pack up my CV and do what Duke just said and build my BA on Z and park my CV on Nova. But my BA is then gone… Builders in this game get only punished…

  • The problem is that PVP is just horrible. And some people actually like to have a BA (like me). And I bet that most players are PVE and thus the PVE planets get overcrowded. On top of that PVP factions use PVE planets for storage and they build on every PVE planet.
  • I will just move to Z then along with many others. Then Z get’s overcrowded and we get the same problem there.
  • Also Nova is the only viable nearby PVE planet. So almost everyone prefers to settle there. Because, who wants to farm crystals for 1-2 hours every day just to warp between Z and the real planets? Not me. So Nova it is.
  • Then there are the many people who constantly break rule #6 or (MRA) dock 5-7 CV’s there under “private”… Saw several rulebreakers again on Nova today including exceeding (by far) the 5k ingot limit. Also Thranir broke it (again) today (but his ship was awesome!) and many popular/big factions also don’t care about rule #6 and “HQ” is often not in the name and AGAIN admins do not enforce rule #6… Maybe make an automated script that just deletes stuff? What bothers me the most is that perhaps I lose my base AGAIN due to unclear/changing rules while other people break rule #6 so often. Unfair…
  • There is no viable option for solo-factions to guard your main CV in space. So you either park it 2000km away and spend 4 hours flying forth and back on cruise-control or you simple don’t PVP. Because if you are out mining/raiding/whatever and then some player destroys your CV using some lame cheese tactic while you are not there (amazing accomplishment…) then yeah… Fantastic… That is PVP… No thank you. I stay on a PVE planet. We have offline protection but no protection for when we are far away but online.

Even though we have 360 factions, we have at most ~80 players online. With 3-4 PVE planets like Nova to spread people out it should work. Then add a rule that each faction may only have a BA/CV on either one of those PVE planets. The hard part is to get the people moving from the first Nova since people already have a BA there I guess. And start enforcing rule#6 with an iron fist! This I find the best approach. And some people will quit the server before even leaving Mars.

Lastly you can remove bases/PVE all together (or tax them). But then space would be all laggy. I would then warp to a random galaxy and set my main CV on autopilot in a random direction for as long as it has fuel :smiley:. Then build huge CV’s there with TONS of turrets and 200 layers of combat armor and performance in space will be gone. It solves again nothing. Plus I would join the largest faction for protection and we would probably dock all your CV’s close together for again, protection. It will only add more lag and shift the lag from Nova to space. It solves nothing.

5

This raises an interesting point, that could work with RexXxus’s idea of “renting” planets to people.

Why don’t we set a rule so if your faction has a combined playtime between all of you (which I believe can be seen with cb:info, or something) THEN you can rent a planet (or be gifted one?)

That way the more dedicated players like TinyDewDrop, get a safe spot, and the rest of the server could go PVP for all he would care, he would be safe.

6

This raises an interesting point, that could work with RexXxus’s idea of “renting” planets to people.

Why don’t we set a rule so if your faction has a combined playtime between all of you (which I believe can be seen with cb:info, or something) THEN you can rent a planet (or be gifted one?)

That way the more dedicated players like TinyDewDrop, get a safe spot, and the rest of the server could go PVP for all he would care, he would be safe.[/quote]

This sounds nice but it also sounds infair to players with not that much playtime. Or people who are unable to pay the rent-cost will just start to lag out space instead.

Also sorry for my drama :stuck_out_tongue:. But I spend probably over a 100 hours building that BA and now I hear this… You can imagine this is not fun.

7

Fair play. Still, I think there needs to be a system in place that protects builders, because as you said, PVP sucks in this game at the moment. The only viable sort of “PVP” is raiding somebodies HQ or CV while they’re offline, which offline protection now protects against.

8

Here’s me spitballing ideas:

1 - Headquarters Rental / starter planet rebalance : Add PVE planets which aren’t wiped, Factions have to pay a rental fee from EB to have their HQ on these PVE planets (Size of base relative to rent paid). Effectively remove the current base limit of 1 per faction on PVE planets and add rent:pay:x as a parse command; then if rent is too overdue their base poofs. You can increase the block count allowed for your HQ for higher rent - and admin assigns you the core and location so that PVE planets don’t gt all crowded and clumped together. This way it’s clearly set where real-estate is available and how it is allocated to avoid overcrowding.
If considering this, then I’d also recommend tweaking Starter planets. They are just that, starters, not permanent homes or resource farms. what is missing is progression when people are huddling there. So it may also be wise to tweak the resources distribution on starter planets in order to encourage people to opt for there instead of free rent on starter planets (Basically remove the pretty materials from starter planets and only leave what’s needed to make a GTFO ship, so that people are encouraged to progress.

2 - Link AutoMiner performance to pvp locations, add locations which are rich in bait: make an often-wiped planet or two (like twice a day on different schedules) with a couple of customized POI’s designed to take a very long time to do. The core of the POI, if replaced by a factions core improves members autominers by a nice chunk for as long as it’s there (kinda a king-of-the-hill scenario). This effectively creates a combat zone which pulls people for often-available POIs and pvp and mildly makes more boring pvp planets a safer place for pve-ers. Note: It’d be counterproductive to enable OP here - as the idea is mayhem and a spot to draw the conflict to safen-up the rest of space.

3 - Enable Insurance: You already have ship selling working , instant BP mechanism and a combat log. If the reason people are huddling on planets and afraid of pvp is cuz they will lose their pretties - let them pay insurance which allows a ship of equal / partial value to be instant-spawned (EG, i have a ship that I spawn that’s 500 iron 500 sili etc etc, I fly it to an insurance station and park within a grid (size of grid determines cost) and pay in. This saves a BP of my ship with the insurance company and upon the pwning of my ship I can either have the material cost refunded to me or can make my way to an insurance station and have it spawn that BP in factory/in grid.

I’ll post more when i have more beer.

-Dan

9

I like a few of your ideas Dan, but I think it would be too hard/complicated to implement.

I like the idea of factions of a certain size being given their own planet (or section on planet), so that smaller factions can just share Nova and Z.

10

Rawr ty, but tbh not really as the components are already kinda there thanks to Jascha’s awesome dev work. Think of it as you “sell” a copy of your ship to the insurance broker (similar grid to the ship market) for a negative amount and a recurring negative amount for a fee. As long as the original ships ID shows as existing keep charging and don’t allow that to be “bought”. Once it doesn’t exist you can “buy” it from the insurance company for a cost of zero.

In fact larger point is people opting not to leave starter planets, as they are too accommodating - if they had the necessities and you need to leave the starter planet to get pretty things people are more encouraged to boogie.

Rawr
-Dan

11

Its difficult to balance this. We need to have starter planets that give people the means to build a CV and travel, but not comfy enough to keep them on that planet.

Maybe force a system so that once you leave Mars orbit, you can’t go back?

12

Damn…i was about to start building a base in Nova this night…but after reading this post im thinking about it.

We are only 2 in my faction, me and a friend and we want to be part of the story, be an Alliance Faction (yeah i know we must change the name to match the rules…will do)
So…we need a base in a PVE planet just in case we get killed trying to do our duty.

After readin the entire post we like the idea of renting the HQ and/or the CV, because of that the people who arent active will not be a weight for the server
and hopefully the problem will be solved. But please…a fair price because little factions dont have soooo much credits.

In my opinion wipes are not the way of doing things, Mars is necessary i know but…other planets through the galaxy? please find another solution!

I will think about a solution myself aswell but im a newbie! jeje

13

So with Nova crashing again and causing a server crash, this has made the issue a bit more urgent.

With this in mind, here is what I believe is the best course of action:

Multiple planets can be put in a single orbit. With this in mind, its important we look at why Nova is overcrowded in the first place. The main reason is that Nova is the closest to the starter planets, and thus the easiest to get too, without risking travel in PVP zones, or staying there and risking losing everything.

With this in mind, if we want people to spread out from Nova, we need to provide a suitable alternative.

We can do this 2 ways:

  1. Move Z closer to Nova, so its a choice between the two, rather than people choosing Nova by default because it is closer.

and the best method, I think:
2) We add 2 more planets into the “Milky Way Nova” so that when you arrive at the exact same place as before, you get 2 more planets to choose from, so everybody spreads out among 3 planets, rather than all piling onto one.

HOWEVER

PVE worlds should be barren. No resources, no meteorites, and only small amounts of blue crystals. That way, its not viable to “live” there without travel. Its also important to have no water, or O2, so that people must travel to other planets (Like I did to Mars) for Oxygen and Water.

This is the best solution I can think of. Wiping Nova will fix nothing, and only server to anger people (although as much as I hate to admit it, a wipe would force people to try the new planets, and to fix the corruption the planet file has at the moment)

What do you think lads?

14

[quote=“Duke”]So with Nova crashing again and causing a server crash, this has made the issue a bit more urgent.

With this in mind, here is what I believe is the best course of action:

Multiple planets can be put in a single orbit. With this in mind, its important we look at why Nova is overcrowded in the first place. The main reason is that Nova is the closest to the starter planets, and thus the easiest to get too, without risking travel in PVP zones, or staying there and risking losing everything.

With this in mind, if we want people to spread out from Nova, we need to provide a suitable alternative.

We can do this 2 ways:

  1. Move Z closer to Nova, so its a choice between the two, rather than people choosing Nova by default because it is closer.

and the best method, I think:
2) We add 2 more planets into the “Milky Way Nova” so that when you arrive at the exact same place as before, you get 2 more planets to choose from, so everybody spreads out among 3 planets, rather than all piling onto one.

HOWEVER

PVE worlds should be barren. No resources, no meteorites, and only small amounts of blue crystals. That way, its not viable to “live” there without travel. Its also important to have no water, or O2, so that people must travel to other planets (Like I did to Mars) for Oxygen and Water.

This is the best solution I can think of. Wiping Nova will fix nothing, and only server to anger people (although as much as I hate to admit it, a wipe would force people to try the new planets, and to fix the corruption the planet file has at the moment)

What do you think lads?[/quote]
I agree with everything but the part about making PvE worlds barren. Some people like to be carebears and I don’t think taking that away entirely is fair. There’s more than enough room for them here. On that same note, PvE planets should definitely have much less resources than their PvP counterparts. Adding planets to the Nova system definitely seems like the best option at this point.

15

What are the statistics and how many players do you want on each PVE planet?

Because I think it maybe more of an issue of ‘supply and demand’. Do you need more PvE non-wiped planets? And is there a log on limit before bases etc… are wiped? If a player doesn’t log on for a while perhaps their stuff should be deleted to free up some space.

16

I also think the autominer is partly to blame.

Before understanding how to use it I was planning on taking a risk going into the PvP world to gather some rare ore that can only be mined there. Now I don’t need to go because the autominer gave me the ore I needed.

17

Why are people so concerned with preserving their #alpha made structures/resources on multiplayer server. If you really wanted to play the game to show off what you can build just do it on workshop. Isn’t this why we have turrets/OP in the game? To build something that can attack/defend itself? I understand that turret AI and OP isn’t exactly reliable but this is why we are playing a game that is not even in full release, to iron out the issues and figure out our own workarounds. If you truly want a PVE experience just play single player.

18

So thanks for all your suggestions and feedback.

yeah Jiroh… I don’t like these Minecraft - building simulator gamers too but I tried so often to tell people how they can play on PvP I am tired of it. As I played the game it was absolutley normal to fly 50-100k km away in space to be absolutley save. If you spend more than a day in building big ships then flying this 50-100k km in few minutes is just not worth to mention at all. Especially with a makro press and holding the W key for you during toilet or phone call or whatever.
People got lazy and want everything save and nice and save and stable and and. Not a complain, just the way it changed I guess…

A lot of your stuff is really too hard to do Dan, so we can’t implement it so fast how we need it.

To gain full stabilisation of the server back a wipe would be the best and only choice of course but we try it without it first.
Jascha implemented a more detailed way of warning players. The rule 6 will be change to block count and per player / faction.
Next step is to set the factions to another one so you can’t access your stuff anymore if you don’t follow the rule - deal with it.

Regarding making them barren planets or no resources or not profitable at all: devs trolled me. Meteorites are still random as f***. They spawning like they want. So yeah like Nova and Z I make them not profitable but does not matter in the long run I fear.

So we think to survive the weekend and give us more time to implement other ways against it we add 2 new PvE planets in the Nova Orbit.
I found good names for them - but you can suggest what biome you want on them. You have 5 hours left for it.

Available bioms: temperate, lava, snow, water-temperate, desert / barren, moon.

19

Snow planet would be great.

20

both snow?