smittens:

Agreed, it's nice to 'be in the know'. However, I really trust the devs not to throw our money out the window, and so I can live without daily live-updates.

I exaggerated here to prove a point.

I took a HAC for a spin today. Trust me, it's more aggravating flying one than not being able to fly one.

Yeah, it would just be HORRIBLE if we had the choice, RR. Gods, how wonderful we don't have that issue, detracting from our enjoyment of all the other deep, cohesive, inter-related, plot-driven, dynamic and fully functional content in Vendetta-Online!

Here, have a towel. It'll mop up that dripping sarcasm nicely.

In fairness, I should note that HACs are awfully big national warships... and if they were all the Devs had that was 'functional', then I'd respect the reservation of player owned caps a good deal more than I do. But having 'functional' Connies, Terradons and Tridents, which lack the RP issues that I think are inherent in HACs, they should be an option, no matter how awkward. We still have the choice to fly Rune valks, despite the fact that current game mechanics make them all but useless.

Teradons are also military vessels, so they'd fall under the same RP restrictions as the HACs. Connies and Tridents should be fair game, but having seen quite a few flown by Guides and Devs, I'd much prefer to wait for a working interface. Maybe some of us won't mind the clunky, nearly impossible flying, but others are really going to go mental when they plunk a considerable amount of credits to buy a Trident just to have it issue on the surrounding roids, scant minutes after they bought it. A Rune might not be a good combat ship in your opinion, but it is still a ship that can be flown like all others; none of the capships even comes close to that, so why add in broken content?

I agree with jex. Of course, no matter what the devs implement for the capships will need tweaking, but I'd rather prefer to have something that is closer to being finished than something that needs incredible amounts of tweaking in order to work. This would also be made more difficult by the userbase who grows accustomed to change and reluctant to accept new concepts. It just generates more work for the devs, in the end.

If only military guilds get possession of big combat ships, the universe will be thrown far out of balance.

There are no 'military' guilds except for the self-proclaimed ones (and those are a laughable excuse for any military force).

Jex & Tosh: I have a simple solution for your concerns. Don't buy them.

Like I said: choice. And it's not like content being broken has prevented its presence in VO... ever.

True enough...

It certainly is true. But since we are dedicating all of our resources to *fixing* broken content, I would rather not add still-more broken content that potentially backs us into an even worse situation. Like say, the server-side problem with collision detection and physics response on the high-poly capship hulls, one of many problems we're trying to sort out. What's the first thing people are going to do with those tridents or teradons (assuming they can launch them without exploding)? Big space battle maybe? That currently doesn't work very well and does horrendous things to the server. We're trying to fix that to make just PvE capship gameplay work better (ie, expand Border Skirmish beyond the small scale test that it currently is, and give it more real purpose and strategic "Nation War" motivation). But even that's not player-owned capships, because there's still a lot of work and testing to be done before that's all ready for prime-time.

The general roadmap we're on is good, it may not be all things to all people, or as quick as most would desire.. including us. But in most cases (and certainly in the capship case) there are reasons why we chose that particular roadmap. I hope that will become somewhat clearer with the Trac system, but I'm sure there will always be those who are unsatisfied. It is my responsibility to define what we do, and make sure it is the best mix of total forward progress, progress that people want, developer productivity, server and game stability, and minimum support nightmare. Note that "progress that people want" is only one of those things, and it would be irresponsible of me to pursue that one thing at the expense of the others (and it wouldn't last long, both the developers and the game would come unglued). Like the situation I outline above, where people get to have their great big wonderful space battle, and it ends up crushing that cluster box and every other sector running on it (Progress People Want at the expense of overall Game and Server Stability). This server problem isn't insurmountable at all, we have a bunch of ways of solving it, but it just requires more development.. which isn't done yet. And yes, I would prefer to do that development before we open an all-new bag of worms. That isn't me being a Mean Developer Guy, it's me being sane.

all i can say is i'd have gone insane a loooooooong time ago if i were in inc's shoes, or slippers, or socks, or whatever

just thinking about his shooes makes me [more] insane

Ok you ninnies, you just cant fly cappies now!

They dont exactly fly you know, they more like... plummet. :D

I thought the cappies automatically headed for the nearest asteroid and made sweet sweet mechanical love to it...

"They dont exactly fly you know, they more like... plummet."

No, it's more like you have got to get out and push it where you want it to go.

Lebermac wrote: "I thought the cappies automatically headed for the nearest asteroid and made sweet sweet mechanical love to it..."

I love it -- literally. :-]