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Skybladev2
LUX AETERNA INT
RUST415
106
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Posted - 2014.05.06 19:31:00 -
[1] - Quote
Hello, CCP and others. This thread is my personal feedback and vision of Project Legion (PL) at now.
Emotions and opinions
My general emotion is relief. PL is certainly a step in right direction. Dust was dead while stuck in a single console. PL will live while EVE Online platform will live. This also means some major benefits:
1. We can have test PL servers connected with EVE test servers.
2. CCP Shanghai can conform to main EVE team agile style of working, thus keeping syncing with EVE and providing us more often client updates (you know, there are hotfixes for EVE almost every day).
Next, I want to say, that CCP must completely, I repeat, completely understand what they want to do with PL before they start to do it. I donGÇÖt mean battle gameplay or graphics. Mostly I mean top-level gameplay, including:
- Economics
- Link between EVE and PL
One irrelevant thing that CCP must not worry now is a tournament system. Players donGÇÖt need it now. I believe EVE players want that system for years, so it is better to implement it in EVE first. However, if you still want to make that tournament system, I think it can be nothing more than bet system for semi-private contacts: corps place battle contracts with each other, this contract became visible to everyone and anyone can be bet on it.
So, return to important things. In general, many concepts can be transferred from EVE.
Economics
Dust lacks of player-driven market. That was the second big fault of this game (the first was sticking to PS3). CCP Rouge indicated main cash/item flow, IGÇÖll transform it into own sequence:
- Players run missions (like in EVE) from planetary agents
- Players get loot and SP from battlefield and SP and IPK (InterPlanetary Kredits, more on this later)
- Players buy and sell items on a market.
Missions
Sidenote: why we need missions? Now many players farm ISK/SP by going short public Ambush matches. They put on militia equipment and run for fun. They even not trying to win, because the sooner they die the sooner they get their money. On the other side more skilled and aggressive people run ambush with tanks to easily farm these blueberries. And it seems each side likes what happening, which seems to me a broken logic. We need separate activity for relatively safe battles which give little loot, exp and money (missions) and uncompromising massacre which give huge loot and exp (contracts), but for sake of increased risk.
Players can travel between planets and receive missions from planetary agents. Mission completion will player money and standing increase towards agent and it corporation. Goals of missions will be like in EVE GÇô military (fight with drone NPCs), distribution (transport some goods on a surface), espionage and so on in any mixture.
When player/squad starts mission he or his squad will be sent onto planet surface in startup area (like acceleration gates in EVE). Like in eve, squad behaves like fleet, so random people have friendly fire turned on. But corpmates cannot shoot each other while on mission, regardless whether they in same squad or not. Then players start to run mission objectives from deploy area. Upon map advance they can open new respawn points, while new players should only enter mission instance from single spot. This allows players to split their roles GÇô some of them will do mission objectives, some will defend their backs from attack of intruders.
Each mission should have a limit of players for two reasons:
1. To avoid crushing of NPCs with zerg rush.
2. To avoid crushing of mission runners from unlimited number of intruders.
Who are intruders and how they get to otherGÇÖs missions? Every mission acceptance generates mission instance on a planet surface which can be found with players located in the same system. Any merc (or maybe eve player too?) can scan down planets to localize instance locations and deploy after mission owners. Then he is willing to ally with mission runners or disturb them (or first ally, them disturb).
Mission will be finished when all objectives will be reached or when clone count for mission will reach 0. Clone count is global, so intruders can fail mission by killing other players.
Environmental effects
This was fully covered in my past topic about dust, this applied to PL as well: https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1112116
Signal jamming
Every mission location has a signature that depends on, at least, mission level. Any player already on a battlefield can deploy signal jammers that will hide mission instance location for some time. Signals jammers are part of equipment and consumable. To jam higher level mission one need to deploy more jammers than for lower level missions. Jammers can vary on strength of jam and time of jam. It is obvious, that lower level missions harder to scan than higher level even without jammers.
Loot
Every player that kills someone on a battlefield (NPC or another player) has a chance to loot some equipment/resource at the end of the mission. Equipment is an item that can be potentially used by PL player in game. Resource is something he can not use directly, but can sell to EVE players. EVE players will them produce some equipment for PL players and sell it back. The key is to produce from lower tier resources higher tier equipment, so players can run missions to fill market with needed equipment, as looting amount of this equipment is much smaller than eve players can produce with looting amount of corresponding resources.
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Skybladev2
LUX AETERNA INT
RUST415
106
|
Posted - 2014.05.06 19:33:00 -
[2] - Quote
IPK
Everybody knows that Dust currency ISK is not the same ISK in EVE GÇô their values are different. So I propose using another name for PL currency GÇô InterPlanetary Kredits. It will be used for in-game transactions. Cross-game transactions should be with their local currency to avoid massive inflation of ISKs from EVE to PL. Also, cross-game transactions:
1. Always involve only game items, but not currency.
2. Should have fully automated currency exchange rates.
IGÇÖm not economist, but believe that this is the hardest part of merging two games for CCP too. So I just try to imagine from my very noob point of view how this can be done, donGÇÖt read it if you experienced economist to avoid death from laugh.
I think exchange rate can be calculated something like this:
Exchange rate = (Total ISK flow in EVE-PL market items last month) / (Total IPK flow in EVE-PL market items last month)
Flow here means cost of fulfilled orders, leaving behind dead speculative orders, like too expensive sell orders or too cheap buy orders that will never be fulfilled.
Exchange rate will be recalculated once a day during downtime like any other exchange rate in real world.
What to do before any exchange rate was calculated, i.e. before any PL or EVE player created cross-game order? Well, I think NPC orders can be a start point. CCP will indicate, whether PL items will be something valuable in EVE universe or they can be built by inexperienced industrialists. So they put NPC orders in EVE market for every item in PL before these items can be actually traded via cross-game market.
Now PL players can compete with NPC orders when they will get an opportunity to actually sell items to EVE players? This is easy GÇô the first sell order of that item in universe automatically will have half a cost of NPC order. IPK-ISK mapping of next orders will be calculated according to this first order until actual exchange rate change occurs after downtime.
Example: at EVE market there is single NPC order of some PL resource with cost 20000 ISK for each unit. PL player placed an order for 1000 IPK per unit. This order in EVE market will appear as 10000 ISK per unit order. Then second PL player placed an order for 900 IPK per unit. At EVE market this order will appear as 9000 ISK per unit order.
One may ask - what prevents PL players from placing 10kkk orders? Well, in theory, nothing, but we have to artificially limit that value, so server need to calculate what part of final equipment contains this resource in production chain and limit cost to some fraction of total equipment cost.
Example: PL player salvaged 10xArmor Plate (this is not EVE Armor Plates). These plates are used in Heavy Suit manufacture. To produce Heavy Suit we need 3xArmor Plate. Looted Heavy Suits are selling at minimal price of 10000 IPK per unit at in-game market. So we assume that 3xArmor Plate can cost nothing more than 40% of Heavy Suit cost (I think this fraction must be connected to item current production cost in EVE in any way in future). This means PL player can not sell Armor Plate for more than 10000 * 0.4 / 3 = 1333 IPK per item.
Ok, PL players successfully selling resources and EVE players successfully buying it. Time to produce something and sell it back. Remember, that EVE player bought 3xArmor Plate for 10000 ISK each, so produced Heavy Suit can be placed, say, at 100000 ISK.
Now, what prevents EVE player from placing 10kkk order? It is two things: already defined exchange rate and cost of item at PL in-game market. If we assume that exchange rate equal to 10 now, then 10kkk ISK order will be scaled down to 1kkk IPK. No one buy it. So the smartest thing eve player can do is to sell it at 10000 IPK * 10 ISK/IPK or less.
But how EVE player will know what price he need to place? He will see sell orders of that item in PL at EVE client. However, these orders will be grayed out as read-only, so EVE players can see, but can not buy it (as EVE players have much more money and can buy all of it). Maybe further this limitation will gone.
But selling cheap base items to EVE players and buying expensive advanced goods from them will ruin PL economy. So PL players must buy something from EVE players (new or old cheap resource) and sell them guess what? Right, infiltration capsules! This is better than directly pay mercs for sabotage contracts as this can cause hyperinflation of ISK into PL. Of course, not every player can build this capsule. Probably only corporations that have planetary districts with relevant facilities can build it and then sell it to EVE (or other PL players?).
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Skybladev2
LUX AETERNA INT
RUST415
106
|
Posted - 2014.05.06 19:35:00 -
[3] - Quote
Mercs activity
CCP, donGÇÖt stuck with Planetary Conquest only! Mercs want to distract eve players, so why not allowing them to infiltrate stations/POSes? If infiltration succeeds starbase will be damaged and weakened for future attack. For example, mercs can halve starbase shield or armor, or blow up engine room to temporarily reduce powergrid output or control room to temporarily reduce CPU output inflicting shutdown of starbase modules, including turrets.
To recover from damage starbase operator have to perform some actions. In simplest case he need switch off and re-online damaged modules, but I think this process should be more complex and long.
To start infiltration sequence a ship with special module have to target station/POS and shoot a capsule with mobile clone unit to it. Attacking ship will have no benefits, so it must stay alive under enemy fire until it launches a capsule, so small cheap or tanked ships are preferable for this task. When capsule injects into enemy structure, alarm system warn owners that there was infiltration by in-game mail and any other appropriate way.
Countdown timer starts to tick and attacker corporation/alliance (set up before launch) infantry will see new contract available. Defenders will see this contract as well. In several minutes (3-10) attackers must deploy at least one man into that battle. If no attacker accepts this contract capsule will self-terminate with or without any harm to structure. However, there is no need for defenders to accept contract during countdown to be able to join battle. They can join anytime while attackers did not reach their goal. With absence of defenderGÇÖs infantry attackers will fight with automated turrets and drones.
Battle itself will run like an Assault gamemode in Unreal Tournament 2004 (IGÇÖm not much experienced in FPS, but played this game a lot). Attackers will have some time to complete several objectives. Next objective can be reached only by completing previous one(s).
Maps should be designed in such way that attackers can reach objectives from different directions to avoid being stuck in a long tunnel under direct enemy fire. To help attackers, their initial clone count should be always greater that defenders clone count. Also, attackers can bring vehicles to landing zone of battlefield, while defenders should rely only on stationary defenses and infantry.
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Skybladev2
LUX AETERNA INT
RUST415
113
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Posted - 2014.05.10 10:26:00 -
[4] - Quote
I-Shayz-I wrote:Some great feedback here, thank you for taking the time to post your thoughts in a well structured manner.
Will be included in the Index for sure the next time I update it.
Thanks!
Your link seems to be broken :( http://tinyurl.com/k8yk47
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