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Parson Atreides
Ahrendee Mercenaries
Legacy Rising
131
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Posted - 2013.01.14 06:25:00 -
[1] - Quote
Maken Tosch wrote:Hmm. I'm listening. But what about numbers? How would you set it up so that SP gains still don't go faster than the SP gains for the Eve player?
Does it really matter if SP gain is faster in Dust? I don't understand the logic behind making them similar at all.
First of all, both ways the games currently interact (EVE orbital strikes and FW), aren't affected in any way by how much SP we have. Whether the average merc is getting the same amount of SP per week as an EVE player, or three times as much, it doesn't affect the EVE players.
Secondly, it's unlikely there will ever be the sort of meaningful interaction between the two that deems it necessary to curb any sort of "head start" Dust players could get now. I use that term ironically since EVE has been around for so long already (see final point).
Thirdly, this isn't a game where you can go around mining, slaughtering pirates, exploring wormholes, or trading during your off-time that can make up for a lack of SP intake. Without that influx, people will quickly lose interest and feel like logging on is a requirement instead of something they look forward to--and even when they do play past that point, the games will seem slow and grindy.
Fourthly, Dust players earn their SP. If you do poorly, you don't get much SP. If you don't play, you don't get SP (other than passive SP, which is pretty low and doesn't even apply to all your characters at once). Isn't EVE all passive? Why do people who do nothing get as much as, if not more than, those who work for it?
Lastly, and most importantly, EVE has been around for 10 years. The idea that SP gains in Dust need to be similar to those earned in EVE is absurd. Any attempt at balance between the two in terms of actual SP (which, as above, makes no sense even inherently) a player has is laughable given that some people in EVE already have tens of millions (I don't know much about EVE, but I don't think that number is far off). |
Parson Atreides
Ahrendee Mercenaries
Legacy Rising
131
|
Posted - 2013.01.14 06:32:00 -
[2] - Quote
Heinz Doofenshertz wrote:Actually you missed the fact that Corp battles do currently affect FW control.
Corp battles are all Dust-side though, the SP of the mercs itself doesn't, in any way, affect the EVE players. But yes, I'll amend the first post.
Also is FW out yet? Why haven't I seen anything about that? Where are/would be the contracts? |
Parson Atreides
Ahrendee Mercenaries
Legacy Rising
131
|
Posted - 2013.01.14 07:05:00 -
[3] - Quote
Fivetimes Infinity wrote:Parson Atreides wrote:Does it really matter if SP gain is faster in Dust? I don't understand the logic behind making them similar at all. They want people to be spending many years developing their characters. They don't want people to max out their skills. The whole point behind the cap is that they don't want the people to grind through the progression incredibly quickly and therefore eliminate the ongoing, ever-lasting progression that EVE also has.
It's unlikely anyone will play long enough to even get close to maxing everything, let alone the number of people CCP wants playing for this game to succeed.
And even if that is the reasoning, there are much better ways to go about making sure people don't "max" their character. The one that jumps readily to mind is adding more skills.
They need to find a balance between letting people feel like there's always more they want, and letting people feel like they can actually achieve it. Let's do some math. We'll assume no Passive or Active SP booster. We'll also round slightly just to make things a little easier, plus it won't matter in the end anyway.
50,000 SP per day if you hit the Active cap. (Active SP cap per day: 28,000. Passive SP cap per day: 22,000.)
350,000 SP a week if you hit the Active cap every day.
We'll take a pretty common goal for the purposes of the example: Proto Assault suit. The total cost for this is what, 2.5mil SP? I think that's about right.
2,500,000 divided by 350,000 = A little over 7. You'd have to hit the cap every day for nearly two months and put every skill point you had (other than the initial 250-300k you get when making a new character) into it--and then you'd have nothing to use in the suit itself. This isn't the same game market as when EVE launched ten years ago, it's more about instant gratification now. I'm not saying cater to the masses, I'm saying cater to success. People are going to feel like they're going nowhere.
The current cap is horribly low. |
Parson Atreides
Ahrendee Mercenaries
Legacy Rising
131
|
Posted - 2013.01.14 11:54:00 -
[4] - Quote
Fivetimes Infinity wrote:Parson Atreides wrote:It's unlikely anyone will play long enough to even get close to maxing everything, let alone the number of people CCP wants playing for this game to succeed. Their explicitly stated intent is for years of progression. Maybe you could lend them your crystal ball some day so that they can see the future as well as you can, and they can change their plans accordingly.
As if you need to see into the future to understand people want to be rewarded for their work in a game that offers so much progression potential, yet need to play every day for months to just start making a top-level character in even very specific roles  .
And it's not just that. It's that even if you want to play more and progress faster, you can't. Dust is frequently classified as having MMORPG elements. Imagine another MMORPG that limits your levels per day. Now imagine you finally do spend those 2 months hitting "max level" (for lack of a better analogy). Then you find out you have to level your weapon skills, items, etc so you can actually use them and that's going to take another X months. How well do you think such a game would do?
Let's take off our fanboy caps and put on our thinking ones, then maybe we can realize, once and for all, this isn't EVE and shouldn't be approached as if it is.
They made the decision for Dust to be free-to-play to attract as wide an audience as possible. Moves like this absurdly low progression speed is just going to turn away the vast majority of people who were interested in this game to begin with.
Quote:As for adding more skills, that implies adding more content. That takes a significant amount of time to do well, and feeling compelled to add content for the sake of adding more skills is a pretty bad thing to want hanging over their head. They will undoubtedly be adding skills to correspond to new vehicles etc, but you can't expect that to happen so frequently in an uncapped progression system that it'd keep people occupied in any real sense.
I'm not asking for 1mil SP a day here. Clearly there's a sweet spot somewhere between frustratingly slow (which we have now), and unreasonably fast. If they knocked the "7 years" everyone likes to throw around down to half that, then they have 3 and a half years to come up with more skills to extend it further and, at the same time, we double the progression speed. |
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