VO has gone though a lot of changes over the last year and the results are impressive. Unfortunantly VO is still hemmoraging players at a rather alarming rate. As cool as PVP may be it only seems to hold most players for a few months before it becomes stale. The graphics work while equally important also has a short shelf life for player retention.

I would like Guild to work on the longer term RPG features now instead of Soon(tm) to help retain our older players. Player controlled stations would go far in reigniting conflict at several levels and would be a lot easier to get in-game then player cap-ships. Player stations would also offer a lot more practical benefit to the overall playerbase as well.

A show of support in this area from the playerbase might help to get these inportant features into the game.

Well fuck. Why didn't ANYONE else ever ever ever think of these things EVER before anywhere ELSE on these FORUMS at any point in time over the last 6 years.

these ideas are so NEW they BLOW my MIND

We know, PaK. Good luck convincing Inc.

PaKettle has an excellent point.

1. Player owned stations allow control of space, and allow strategic level play, instead of just tactical fights.
2. Because station locations are fixed, they will draw players to a single location creating more player interaction (furballs).

Nice troll, PaKettle.

Presumably nobody's under the impression this is a new suggestion,CS. But the game is in critical condition in terms of player count, and we need something Now (Patent Pending) to revitalize it. Player controlled stations would go a long way towards that..

The idea of player-owned stations as a superior short-term goal to player caps because of ease of implementation is a relatively novel suggestion. I'm not sure it's correct, though.

Some rigorous barriers to ownership would need to be established to prevent too many of these things from cropping up. They'd need to be prevented from being constructed anywhere there's a WH or an existing station, and probably not allowed in Deneb. Support and destruction/capture would be tricky. Allowing static stations like we have now would be easy but would it accomplish much?

Maybe it would, actually: it would be nice to be able to set faction-based defense/docking limits and offer hauled-in inventory for sale to those who meet standing limits and for whatever credits one wants to charge. It would surely give a reason for people to trade in Grey if they could set up a store-front.

Good points Lecter. This would add a lot to the game immediately, and make for some great RPG elements.

I'm sure anything and everything has been suggested already at some point. Vendetta has been around for a long time and there has been a ton of great ideas on these boards. So at the risk of saying something that has been said before (which is almost impossible not to...)

What if personal stations weren't permitted initially, but some of the larger guilds were permitted to have their own station. That station would have defenses and bots guarding it of course. More defenses could be purchased if there were enough funds (more bots, defense drones, sattelites, even a capship to patrol the sector...)

You could promote some competition and RPG elements in a number of ways. I can think of two:

1.

Why do you want the station: The more ore and commodities you have stored on a station means the more automatically produced income all the guild members receive. Players would stockpile goods, weapons, ships, and commodities, and get paid out daily(?) based on that.

Attacking Stations: Rival guilds could attack the station. Defeating all the satellite defenses and bots of a station renders it open for pillaging for a period of time. The rival faction could raid the stores of goods and bring them to their own station, thereby rendering their guild more powerful. After the period of time is ended, the defenses respawn and the station stays in the original guild's control.

Potential issues/exploits: Stockpiles would just keep getting bigger and bigger and guilds would just keep getting richer and richer. This may not be that big of an issue, but the second option fixes that...

2.

Or, there are a number of "neutral" stations placed throughout gray space. A player or guild could defeat the defenses of the station and lay claim to it. It would generate revenue for the guild in the same way as above... more goods stockpiled means more daily payout. However, if a rival guild defeated that stations defenses, it falls under their control. The stockpile is destroyed (to prevent massive income escalation), and the station defenses are essentially reset to the base level. But there will be an income bonus for how many stations a guild controls so there is definite benefit to controlling more than one.

With a minimal amount of changes to what is already here (I think) a lot of "game play" would be added to Vendetta, and there would be a lot more staying power for newbies. You could call the release "Vendetta Guild Wars" or something...

Marketing: Guild Software sends out a big email blast to their entire list about the new *HUGE* release of Vendetta Guild Wars. They make a big hoopla about it on every media outlet available to them, and you have instant buzz for the game and something that will set it apart from any other online space game!

What if personal stations weren't permitted initially, but some of the larger guilds were permitted to have their own station.

Wow, you crashed and burned pretty fast there.

Care to expand? Please attempt to see the idea as a whole and offer constructive criticism for how to make it better. :)

I merely meant that if you had stations that could be purchased and/or defeated by a single player, you would quickly end up with a ton of stations littering space. Having a set number of neutral stations in grey space, and making them hard enough to defeat/claim that you need a whole team or guild working together (like with a levi hunt) would likely make for a better game play experience on the whole (not on the *hole)...

Perhaps though that isn't the issue. The one sentence aside, what do you think of the rest of the idea though Lecter?

Stations are not new and have been heavily discussed in the suggestion forum.This is not a troll or a suggestion. It is simply a chance for the players of VO to encourage Guild software to make player controlled stations a high priority for near term development.

This is more of a petition and if enough players stand up and be counted then Guild Software may choose to get this feature into production now instead of Soon(tm).

you can't just have player owned stations appear out of thin air pakettle im pretty sure a lot of development needs to go into it and how it will effect the end game. I would rather the devs take their time and figure everything out insted of listening to a bunch of cries of "DO IT NAO!!" and release some inferior version. All this request is doing is just moaning about wanting something that is planned to come sooner which isn't really a suggestion to improve anything, and really probably wont speed up development anymore.

I agree with the fact we need something new in the game to keep players playing. More and more I see players old and new leaving the game or playing a lot less because there just isn't anything to keep them here.

I would love for all this stuff but i don't think rushing it before Incs priorities are done will help, everything is progressing very nicely at the moment most of you new folks missed the 2 years of "no features cause we're making Deliverator" then 1 year of "No features because Deliverator actually turned out to suck so now we're making Kourier" this year compared to the last 3 has been very well updated and I have been enjoying the progress.

Now just incase you have amnesia or something lets not forget this year had Deneb skirmishes, Hive skirms everywhere, more PCC missions ingame, Turrets in Deneb that spawn more skirmishes, Greyhound, Seems to run less like crap and more like awesome on my mac now, Occlusion, Mission icons, More expensive ship costs, Newb sectors with heavy defenses, Much much better newb missions which is probably why I seem to be running into more and more new faces these days (i made a new char to try them), Badge expansions, Caps in voys, The caps fly better which may lead to us getting them (i have been hoping for atleast tridents), endless weekly fixes, Turrets on moths and atlas, Shield turret weapon

There may be more but thats what I can remember at the moment and there will be more going forward because there always is.

I disagree. Make player stations available, but make them destructable as well, 24/7.

who cares if they put up 50 of them, all an organized group needs is to know where it is and when everyone can get together for drinks and bomber runs.

Suitable costs for building/repair/maintenance will keep the real amount of stations down so long as someone else can blow them up.

Division has an excellent point. Making stations vulnerable will make them the object of conflict. Much fun will be had defending and destroying stations.

"VO is still hemorrhaging players at a rather alarming rate"

Bullshit. We have no idea what the membership situation is, nor have we any idea how many paying players there are.

"I would like Guild to work on the longer term RPG features now instead of Soon(tm) to help retain our older players."

The devs have made their efforts to retain new players perfectly clear. No sooner do the devs state their immediate plans than somebody else starts up with one of these threads. Let the devs work in the way that seems most reasonable to them and stop urging them off course and onto some other uninformed scheme.

I have no complaint with the suggestions, but I do disagree with the request to enact them NOW. We have no clue what sort of infrastructure is required - but the devs do.

Yea, I agree about the now thing as well. I actually hadn't seen the big long post in the news section about what has been up recently with Inc and the game when I wrote my suggestions.

It's hard not to get excited with ideas. :)

Basically, what Whistler said.

1) Player controlled territory is something we're known to be working on. It has some technological caveats, and we've had some serious stuff go wrong in the meantime. We did get so far as creating the testbed situation (player-triggerable Fighter Skirmishes). In fact, I wrote these exact paragraphs in my newspost of July 11th 2009:

"In the longer run, this ability to "flip" the particular alignment of a given sector, and engage in running conquest on a schedule entirely devised by the playerbase, has applications for Guild-vs-Guild warfare in upcoming "expanded grayspace", as well as more generalized Corporate Wars, or even pirates-vs-Nations (don't like monitored space? perhaps a satellite can be knocked out).

There have been a lot of requests, lately, for this kind of larger-scale PvP mechanic, which lets the playerbase build whatever wars they want. This has always been my goal, even going back into the late 90s. However, I must be certain that these sorts of conflicts will not spill over or derail gameplay in other areas, which is why I have been planning this for largely "expanded grayspace" for some years. Still, some aspects can be tested in existing grayspace, and some parts of the game mechanics might be applicable to things like Station Conquest and other areas that are also much-desired. We'll see what we can do, but for now, I just wanted to relate that this is something we're working towards."

It is not trivial to go from where we are, to completely dynamic station ownership, especially using ephemeral "guilds" as "factions", which will require some thought and intelligent architecture. Oh, we could hack all sorts of stupid shit together quickly, and then it would explode and be horrible. So we try to avoid that, because we assume you all would like the game to actually work.

2) Every few months, someone says something about how we're "losing players" and "will be gone any minute now" and "everyone's leaving" and blah blah freakin' blah. I don't know where this comes from.. maybe a bunch of people someone happens to know stop playing at once. We have graphs, that empirically demonstrate our subscriber base. We're still here. We have ebbs and flows that happen continually. The times when things have been really bad, you guys seemed quite unaware.

3) We can wave our hands around and say "DOOM!" about item #2 all we want, but it isn't going to make "RPG elements" more important than the goddamn game crashing. We've had a lot of stuff go wrong in the last few months.. much more than in the last few years (probably since Deliverator imploded). The ability to say.. bill players, is pretty damned important to keeping us in business. The AI pathfinding system going nuts and a handful of bots getting stuck in a route-negotiation loop in several sectors.. taking out a substantial portion of the server cluster.. THAT's important. That's mission critical. That's "do you know what players like even less than no new content? The game not running at all!" We haven't been defining development priorities for months.. they've been defining themselves. What did I do today? I was supposed to work on the 5-year anniversary special content thing I mentioned in the newspost.. what did I actually DO? I went to the colo to try and fix one of our core machines that failed last night. Shit happens, and sometimes it happens a lot.

4) We have this fantastic thing called the suggestions forum, which exists for the purpose of proposing suggestions. Debate on conquerable stations is totally useful, and I welcome it.. it really isn't all that far-fetched to implement (but requires groundwork we were already working on, before things started to break). This debate belongs in the rational location where suggestions are debated.

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Look, guys, I know I haven't been totally in-commission for awhile, and as a result we haven't had even the infrequent statements of direction and intent that I have tended to post (which often go awry anyway, when some new reality intervenes). I understand a general feeling of uncertainty as far as where we're going. All we're trying to do, for now, is get the game stabilized again. Then we'll go back to doing what we have been doing.. which is mostly the sort of things you're asking for. We haven't been working on "graphics stuff" in months, and we're not likely to in the near future.. we spend more time than I expected on that, but it was maybe 45 days? And that was early summer. The Universe Redux is not a "graphics update", which should be apparent.

The game needs a lot of things, some of it is baseline and low-level gameplay changes (economy, factional, universe).. others are high-level.. flaggable territory, far more complex and interesting use of NPCs (pirate clans, communicable convoys, blah blah). We're working towards all of that as best we can.

I made the observation that we lacked an "Endgame" long before anyone else did. I'm viscerally aware of it, it is the single biggest flaw of our game in its current state. But I also know what kind of endgame I want to create.. and I have been continually plodding in that direction for a long time. Conquerable stations are not even remotely an endgame, but they would be fun. And that's why we started working towards that, you know, quite some time ago.

So, yes, we agree. We know. We're doing what we can. And I like debate on things like conquerable stations, but there's a particular place for that. Hell, why not start a "What seemingly-simple gameplay additions would create the most Fun" thread. And then I can run through the ideas and probably throw out 80% for not actually being very simple at all, but perhaps we can put some of the others on the list. Station and territory conquest are pretty well known.

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard?agree=y

for Whistler and Inc

: )