Hello developers!

I have a few questions that I've already seen asked by other players randomly in chat, so I'm gonna bring 'em here. The worst that could happen is you saying "Not gonna tell you!", I guess.

Concerning the Goliath:

So we all know that thing is available to players for a few months now. How is development progress looking right now? Incarnate once said it could likely release "officially" to everyone in Q1. But also some stuff seemed to have happened with the server. So are we still on schedule?
And since we've been waiting very long, could you atleast now reveal how it will be obtained? Straight buy vs. manufacturing?

Concerning the Capella:

Will you take the same step with the Capella as with the Goliath? Will it be tested by LTS players? Cause that'd be pretty cool to do! Already curious to know what it feels like to fly it. And I'm sure I'm not alone with that!

If the Cape will be first tested like the golly by LTS pilots, that would indeed be cool. But, id let the capella just be npc for now - im much more interested in non-lease gollies.

Yes. But if we get to test-fly Capellas too, I would like to suggest changing LTS in a way that you actually have to buy the year right away. For the Goliath, many newbies have just bought a single month, pledged their support and will now let it time out. I don't think that's a cool thing.

And +1 to prioritizing the Goliath official release.

sorry but i am strictly against anyone getting a free capella even for only a short amount of time. long term subbers will be put in an extreme advantage as the capella will have strong cargo numbers. as soon as long term subbers get to be invincible the fun is lost imo.

tobi - Why? If people have proven to be long term supporters of the game, giving them a few benefits is not too bad. It's not like they're handed a free Capella. It will be taken away. I think it's okay to do it, given the Capella's player-testing phase is not as long as we get to have the free Goliath right now. I believe whole Trident builds have been sped up with these free Golis by now. lol.

Please take your discussion of in-game events to a different forum/thread (Role Playing). I may be deleting off-topic posts, and those that continue to post off-topic may be thread muted.

This is exactly the kind of thing there is very little tolerance for.

I'm inclined to let it stand just to give some of the newer players an example of what not to do. I may look at cleaning up all the off-topic posts tomorrow. Right now I'm exhausted, and sleep is sounding better in the short term than obsessive forum-editing. On-topic posts will be left alone, obviously.

Everyone should have the right to know how rules are skirted around by other players.

If that's your goal, doing it in someone else's thread is just poor netiquette, period. That sort of thing is generally frowned upon even under the context of "Role Playing", and certainly isn't tolerated in General or Suggestions.

I deleted all the off-topic posts.

As always, if you have some accusation of cheating or exploitation to be made, the only acceptable place to do that is in a support ticket to us.

Conversely, if you de-rail threads with off-topic, inflammatory crap, you're going to get thread-muted. And we're going to make thread-muting cumulative, so people over a certain count just get kicked off the forums entirely. So, keep that in mind.

In response to the OP:

- I left the Goliath in place, because right about the time we were going to remove it, people reported a bunch of different issues. We fixed most of those issues, but there seemed to be a bit more testing value in keeping it for a few more weeks and getting continued feedback, so I let it ride.

- I expect the Goliath to be Manufactured. But, I've also talked elsewhere about having capships be accessible via other options, like one-time In App Purchase to acquire a ship that has no insurance. I'm not against the possibility of the Goliath being a test case for this. Particularly for F2P people, maybe it costs like 5000 crystal or something. But, don't expect that to happen immediately.

- In general, LTS people in good standing will have access to things a bit earlier, unless there's some game-breaking reason to not do that. I don't have any problem with LTS people testing the Capella. If there's concern that the Capella would give too great of an advantage for some reason (like cargo capacity), it's easy enough to test with a Capella that has reduced cargo. I'm open to feedback on that.

- At the same time, we're still a little ways off from testing on the Capella. Don't expect that next week or anything, we'll still working on the NPC side of things, etc. It needs more configuration tuning in general.

Cool. Thank you for clearing up this thread, incarnate. I'm really tired of RP always leaving the RP boards...

And also thank you for answering all these questions. It's good to hear that there will be an option to manufacture the Goliath to end up with a permanent insurance like the Trident Type M has right now. I especially like the idea of "multiple ways to acquire a capship". Making a one-time, non-insured in-app purchase option sounds like a really cool idea. You could try to do this with every player-controlled capship in the future, the price ranging with the capabilities of the ship (e.g. A single Goliath for 7$, a Trident Type M for 15$ etc.).

I'm also looking forward to testing the Capella! Good work guys, I'm happy that finally some neat content is on its way.

Yes, TTM builds have been sped up, but is that really a bad thing? It gets people in the game and people in the game are engaged. Those are the ones who will spend money on a sub. I do agree that people pledging then dropping thier sub to get a goli really suck fat horse Wang, but they are hurting themselves if they do. They can't re-up thier LTS status after messing it up once.

Glad to hear it will be manu for insurance. Can we assume similar parts? When might we find out a parts list? How much effort will it be to make in comparison to the TTM? Building a dent is pretty dang grueling. Assuming the Capella will follow a similar path, I really don't see these being built, like ever. But that's for a suggestion thread I suppose.

I'm all for LTS getting to test fully capable ships. Honestly, any advantage it gives is earned. We've played this game and been committed to it for a long time in relation to general online game subscriptions. Some have been around extraordinarily long.

In regards to the Goliath, Behemoth docking is still a bit screwy in first person view. Rather than aiming for the docking port, you have to imagine where the cockpit is on the ship and try to dock that whole realizing your POV is from the center of the cargo hold. It also still bumps when unlocking sometimes. Usually not badly but maybe 1 in 10 will throw your ship for a backflip. Never good when you're hauling something heavy like an FCP or a load of weapons for sale.

Oh yes. I also hope that the parts that already can be manufactured will be used in the Goliath build. Making new parts for every capship would eventually ruin the player market and make it really messed up with thousands of different parts.

@Incarnate

I have to admit I am not too happy with your short term plans. I know, "take it or leave it" has been the usual policy when someone disagrees about direction so I will keep my list of concerns short:

- making Goliath manufacturable... it will be a failure. It's just not worth investing time and resources to build it.

- LTS testing Capella is hilarious. This kind of big cargo barge should not be available to players for years to come since the game is just not ready for it nor it will be in the next 5 years.

- instead of investing time and resources on improving visual assets that players use on a daily basis: small ships available to everyone like atlas, centaur, warthog, centurion, behemoth (not to mention some nation specific ships, they still look ok but kinda obsolete for the new standards) you are focusing on capships that actually have no place in the current state of VO.
Sure, they provide eye candy and... also break the game.
Ffs, the game economy and missions system are still scaled to centaur as the biggest ship in VO, it even predates vanilla behemoth.

- economy redux, mission system revamp and a million bits of small stuff that enhance the game are left behind and players are provided with the grinding for Goliath or Trident as the means to an end game. Well.... neither Goliath nor Trident in their current states and iterations are actually worth investing time and effort and actually make playing the game not really fun... just grinding and grinding to eternity.

How about making the game fun to play by developing economy, introducing new missions, new areas of serco/itani conflict that will either enhance or replace current obsolete CTC, new common ships visual assets, damn utility port and utility widgets so players can have fun customizing their ships (believe it or not people actually love to do this a lot).

Imho, adding a wormhole to "unknown space" and introducing an exploration concept (ships, missions, unexplored systems with new ores, alien station ruins with exotic widgets to be found, actual random aliens that chase and shoot explorers)) would do much more for the game then big eye candy cargo barges.
There are virtually dozens of better directions you can direct your development efforts to instead of insisting on this, in the grand scheme of things, irrelevant capships.

Thats my 2c.
Thanks for reading.

Stella Bovinus Collective:

So, the fact that I'm responding to specific questions about the Capella and Goliath does not mean that development of those ships represents the entire "short term goals" of Vendetta Online development. Not at all.

We have a lot more cooking than just capships, I'm personally quite interested in gameplay changes as well.

But, the realities of development are sometimes that projects can take a long time, or that we're busy on some "mandatory" development for an extended period, which leaves us unable to release visible changes or demonstrate a progress of content in a real way.

The new capships are actually an intentional strategy to fulfill a couple of goals: 1) They help train Curt in development new art assets from scratch, which is something I needed. 2) It gives us more NPC variant options for capship battles, convoys and longer-term usage within gameplay (dynamic "rescue the freighter" missions and so on), and 3) It also creates more player-created options, 4) It gives us something to show during large "quiet" development arcs. But.. the thing to understand here is that Goliath & Capella development have been largely orthogonal (effectively unrelated) to the main development that Ray and I have been doing. So, basically, it's something that can be cooking in the background with Curt, while we're doing other things.

I agree that we need to redo the fighter ships, and add new ones, but larger ships are important to my plans as well, so they took priority in this case. There were also some technical art-asset challenges that I knew we would need to address, like how to handle texture fidelity on really "large" ships, and I needed specifically to train Curt in how to work with detail textures and other concepts that really don't apply to fighter-scale ships.

Anyway, the upshot here is that the Capships do not represent our "progress", they're just the one thing that we can meaningfully show off in a linear fashion. The Capships are also a small minority of our total development investment of the six months.

I understand the tendency to assume that the visible changes are all that is going on, stems from a lack of communication about our projects.. which is a well-known and.. still challenging conundrum (our priorities can be a little chaotic and difficult to communicate, and it's easy for us to be burned by over-promising). But, at any rate, we have more cooking than just capital ships..

Very new to the game and the forum. But this poster above, the ideas sound awesome!! After reading more about upper level game play it seems there is way to much grind and not enough actual fun for the grind to be worth it. I haven't subbed yet as I am still learning more about what the game offers in the upper levels and "end game" to help influence my decision. The ideas mentioned above sound more intriguing than what I've read so far about the "end game" of VO... just saying, imo. I will say I am enjoying the game very much so far and hope that enjoyment will continue.

This is also a noteworthy fact:

The player-base is generally pretty bad at guessing how long things take to develop.

Particularly on the pessimistic side.. people tend to think things that are not that complicated are impossible, because they "seem" complicated from the outside. And often, some relatively simple things are actually incredibly time consuming and challenging to address.

Obviously, we have our own challenges at guessing these things, internally, and we.. know better than anyone? So, there's always some manner of chaos in the mix.

But, it's not a good idea to make assumptions of what will, or will not be possible in the next six months or "five years". Various people tend to throw these assumptions around, but they're ill-informed, people don't actually know what the holdup is on different issues, and much of it would be really time consuming and complex for us to even try to articulate.

Nonetheless, I've been working on the "Expanded Galaxy, Player Owned Stations, Fogged Reef Systems with Choke Points" concept for a long time. Drastically expanding some of those things is actually.. easy. Others are held up by one problem or another. Still others would be completely game-breaking if they were not timed properly with the launch of other "counter-point" features. All that makes for a big matrix of dependencies.. things that depend on one another to happen. But assuming they're all "never going to happen", or are half a decade away, would be a mistake.

So, while it's reasonable for someone to look at my goals from the outside and say "he's just making capships to show off something shiny", that's actually BS. The "shiny" aspect was pretty far down my list above. There is a method to my madness, and a specific plan and order of operations in my goals. The unfortunate thing is that we have to burn so much energy on this platform/VR-type development that essentially "funds" the game development.

Thanks for that reply, Inc. Not to hijack the thread, but since you mentioned platforms... How's the Steam thing going? Is it still a thing?

So, while it's reasonable for someone to look at my goals from the outside and say "he's just making capships to show off something shiny", that's actually BS. The "shiny" aspect was pretty far down my list above. There is a method to my madness, and a specific plan and order of operations in my goals.

Is there a method to your madness?

Could not the time and effort invested in creating Goliath and Capella have been invested more meaningfully in improving existing visual assets - ships all VO players use every day?
I mean... new players who enter VO universe end in a total mess of ancient, old, intermediate and new visual assets. Designs are obviously completely different and inconsistent and I am not talking about separate nations different visual assets but you know that very well.

Training Curt in developing new art assets is fantastic and noteworthy but it could have also been done by creating something usable for everyone on a daily basis - unifying ships and other visual art assets designs or... wild idea, developing new nation/faction specific visual art assets that would add a deeper sense of immersion in the game.

Am I wrong or... maybe I just cannot understand the fine nuances of madness?

Bojan, He also said it was to test out using assets on really big ships somewhere, i think?

Specifically, I wrote:

There were also some technical art-asset challenges that I knew we would need to address, like how to handle texture fidelity on really "large" ships, and I needed specifically to train Curt in how to work with detail textures and other concepts that really don't apply to fighter-scale ships.

There are other reasons too. But the short answer is "Yes, you do not understand." I can't write any more right now..