As the saying goes: watch this space!
Well, I’ve been watching it, been flying around in motherships in it, fought horrors in it etc...
and... it’s just not taking off. Now I know space has the conceptual problem of being mostly empty in the real universe, but in a virtual universe I’d expect some more creativity in the development.
My main problems are A: the PVP as it is currently implemented and B: the logistics of either wasting time flying a quad from planet to planet or of waiting for a mothership to stop by.
And to show how underhunted the horrors are, for example (a sign of general activity?), when gathering mob balls and killing some off every 20 minutes or so, I guess from the global messages that I am getting something like half or more of ALL the space globals. I don’t know if the new tracker has enough people in space running it, but so far only 1 of my horrors globals has been caught at all (another sign of there not being many people in space AT ALL).
Now I know that space is due for more changes, but I’m not really confident of many people taking up the space challenge, to be honest. I’m currently on Cyrene and I do see the odd traveller, but seeing a handful of people is day also not a sign that people are bothering to travel through space to get to a new world to try it out.
So, DEVS, some suggestions!
Put more things in space to keep people occupied while they travel. Implement a 3D space radar which gives a longer range idea of what is around the ship, not just visuals.
If you really really really want to keep PVP everywhere, then make pilots and passengers put a certain percentage of their stackables in a lootable inventory section, or, alternatively, fund pirate loots from a toxic shot or something and make everything else unlootable. You could make it that this toxic shot only lasts per flight or for a certain time. The loot pool for PVP would thus grow for each pilot and passenger who makes it safely to their destination and would increase kill payouts to pirates until some balance would be reached. The balance could be set such that the loot would be likely to be higher than the cost of a kill if, for example, 75 % of flights end up being made safely. If pirate activity gets too high then the payout to pirates will decrease per kill until the activity becomes unprofitable. Of course there would be a fluctuating nature to the loots to somewhat hide the fill level of the underlying loot pool, but a basic balance would still be reached. Also, if there is a timer like on scanners for personal pirate kills, then players can’t just keep killing each other to get more loots during periods of ‘overfill’.
There is also the problem of logging off while in space. However, if there is a toxic timer, then there will be no (or less) advantage to avoiding fights in this way. Logging back on should not result in the avatar being ejected from the spacecraft and dying. This would also stop the short-cut option of relogging to get to your destination faster. If there is a genuine connection problem, then not much is lost or gained either in my opinion, depending on the length of the lost connection and the decay of toxic shot time if implemented this way.
Another matter is then motherships. Some of these have been considerably upgraded and cost quite a lot to destroy, if the attacker can destroy them at all, that is. At the moment these ships allow the relatively safe transportation of large amounts of materials, but relatively few seem to be in active service for quick travelling between planets. Maybe this is just because space travel itself is so low, and would pick up if space itself becomes more widely used. I have no direct suggestion as to whether a toxic shot or lootable inventory section would also be required of passengers here too.
I feel my suggestion is big enough overall to deserve some serious thought – maybe I will get a kind comment from a dev soon, no matter that this is no longer in the dev section...
