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Conquerable Stations?
So I got a trade mission to deliver some stuff to a "conquerable" station. Needless to say, I showed up and I believe the turrets started shooting at me. Soon I went boom. Whats the deal with these stations? Do the turrets fire on anyone that tries to enter the station or just certain factions? If so is their a way to tell if they'll be hostile or not before they start shooting me?
They're called conquerable for a reason. You haven't conquered it therefore you have no access. Lol.
The glorious Serco Dominion controls the conquerable stations.
You may beg for access here: http://sercodominion.org/Beg_for_conquerable_station_access
You may beg for access here: http://sercodominion.org/Beg_for_conquerable_station_access
Or you can grab a bomber, gather a task force, and start shooting the turrets...
...and have the hammer of the Dominion smash you into a million tiny pieces
LOL, I like this game better every day.
Um, trade missions are including the conquerable stations as destinations? Is that not a bug?
.....More like the feather of the Dominion tickles you into hysterics
I think got the mission at Art Celeste, (though it might have been Helios... I was all over the place) to deliver 86 cargo units to the conquerable station.
I may have missed it in the mission description, but I doan't remembering seeing anything about a key and I'm pretty sure I didn't see that it was conquerable till the jump point. Anyways I aborted the mission as couldn't see any way to get through it in my Atlas. :D
I may have missed it in the mission description, but I doan't remembering seeing anything about a key and I'm pretty sure I didn't see that it was conquerable till the jump point. Anyways I aborted the mission as couldn't see any way to get through it in my Atlas. :D
Definitely sounds like a bug.
So I just got home and was able to review my mission log. I stand corrected, conquerable station was plastered all over the mission notes. Guess I didn't pay much attention cause I didn't realize a conquerable station was hostile, or I needed some type of pass to land there... Live and Learn, or in my case die and learn :D. P.S. it was Latos I-8, guess they aren't gonna get the simple plastic crates they needed so the jokes on them.
Serco problems? Contact your friendly Itani nationalist guild!
Really though, that's a bug. The game shouldn't be sending you there or showing you missions for it unless you can dock.
Really though, that's a bug. The game shouldn't be sending you there or showing you missions for it unless you can dock.
In my opinion, having missions available at conquerable stations with or without a key is not a bug because:
A) It lets players know that the conquerable stations are there
and
B) There *are* warnings in the missions that are currently implemented, saying the pilot will be shot on sight if s/he tries entering without an Access Key. I designed six of these, available at Combat license 3. I'm not saying they are great, but it's better than having nothing at all.
Having a mission that sends a player *to* a conquerable station as a requirement for completion is more of a grey area. It's generally good game design to give the player some idea of what it is s/he is getting into.
If you want to get a sense of what the discovery is like on conquerable stations, try rolling an alt and ranking up from the very beginning.
The final part I wanted to talk about is what I'm the most cautious about mentioning because it's pretty philosophical, and I'm not at all sure this matches the devs' own design philosophy. So, taken with a grain of salt, there is a mathematical paradigm known as the 'edge of chaos' which is when a normal system begins to exhibit a degree of unpredictability. This is generally a good thing, because it introduces a factor of random-ness and surprise to the world. There have been entire games designed around avoiding sudden and unexpected death (it's pretty impossible to play the linked-to game for more than a minute without getting 'glomphed' in some way). Applying the principle to an MMORPG as an illustration in world-entropy, there ought to be some "features" which appear every play-time, some that appear one in ten, and some that appear one in a hundred. Many may disagree with this, but I think it mirrors our own world, to a degree.
For example, I could say the words "Landscape" followed by "Volcano" followed by "Yellowstone"... all three are geologic features, but of course a volcano is a specific example of a landscape under certain conditions, and Yellowstone is a specific example of those conditions in a specific place. Landscape is everywhere, there are many volcanoes, and there is only one Yellowstone. How this applies to VO is that we have these sectors which, devoid of content, would be pretty flat and uninteresting. However, these sectors are everywhere. They are always experienced when one is logged in to VO. Over time, this lends itself to a sort of same-ness about the game (or high entropy). Once in a while, however, you might get sent to a sector where you are SUDDENLY AND VICIOUSLY ATTACKED BY DEFENSE TURRETS...
...which lowers the entropy.
...which leads to a re-configuration of pre-conceived notions about the game, the layout of the galaxy, the socio-political landscape of experienced players, one's own place in the world...
...and that's why I think it's good game design to every once in a while include these unexpected events as a built-in mechanism, so long as those events relate actual truths about game-world from a narrative standpoint.
tl;dr: surprises are good once in a while, so long as they remain true to the game-world
A) It lets players know that the conquerable stations are there
and
B) There *are* warnings in the missions that are currently implemented, saying the pilot will be shot on sight if s/he tries entering without an Access Key. I designed six of these, available at Combat license 3. I'm not saying they are great, but it's better than having nothing at all.
Having a mission that sends a player *to* a conquerable station as a requirement for completion is more of a grey area. It's generally good game design to give the player some idea of what it is s/he is getting into.
If you want to get a sense of what the discovery is like on conquerable stations, try rolling an alt and ranking up from the very beginning.
The final part I wanted to talk about is what I'm the most cautious about mentioning because it's pretty philosophical, and I'm not at all sure this matches the devs' own design philosophy. So, taken with a grain of salt, there is a mathematical paradigm known as the 'edge of chaos' which is when a normal system begins to exhibit a degree of unpredictability. This is generally a good thing, because it introduces a factor of random-ness and surprise to the world. There have been entire games designed around avoiding sudden and unexpected death (it's pretty impossible to play the linked-to game for more than a minute without getting 'glomphed' in some way). Applying the principle to an MMORPG as an illustration in world-entropy, there ought to be some "features" which appear every play-time, some that appear one in ten, and some that appear one in a hundred. Many may disagree with this, but I think it mirrors our own world, to a degree.
For example, I could say the words "Landscape" followed by "Volcano" followed by "Yellowstone"... all three are geologic features, but of course a volcano is a specific example of a landscape under certain conditions, and Yellowstone is a specific example of those conditions in a specific place. Landscape is everywhere, there are many volcanoes, and there is only one Yellowstone. How this applies to VO is that we have these sectors which, devoid of content, would be pretty flat and uninteresting. However, these sectors are everywhere. They are always experienced when one is logged in to VO. Over time, this lends itself to a sort of same-ness about the game (or high entropy). Once in a while, however, you might get sent to a sector where you are SUDDENLY AND VICIOUSLY ATTACKED BY DEFENSE TURRETS...
...which lowers the entropy.
...which leads to a re-configuration of pre-conceived notions about the game, the layout of the galaxy, the socio-political landscape of experienced players, one's own place in the world...
...and that's why I think it's good game design to every once in a while include these unexpected events as a built-in mechanism, so long as those events relate actual truths about game-world from a narrative standpoint.
tl;dr: surprises are good once in a while, so long as they remain true to the game-world
Dah dah de dum! It's Wall of Text man to the rescue!
(You could have summarised it in like a few lines there phaser)
(You could have summarised it in like a few lines there phaser)
Thusly: "It's a feature, not a flaw!"