Is there going to be Capture the Flag in 3.3.x?

I sincerely hope so, since this is one of the most fun activities we have and forces players to work tightly as a team. I know that CTF isn't going to be in the final version, but given the current size of our galaxy I think taking it out would be a mistake.

But Devs, once the economy is reset please please please *please* take out the 1 million reward for capping. It totally kills the point in trading. At least make it so that only the players in the home sector receive the reward.

IMO, people would still cap even if there was no monetary reward just for the fun of it and for bragging rights.

We are a ways away from worrying about a final version. CTF will stay until there are enough other activities to take it's place. The 1 Million credit capping bonus was/is an incentive and financial offset for the increased danger of capping with the beefed-up defenses. Now more than ever CTF is a team activity as was intended. As to who gets the reward and for how much, this remains to be seen as a dynamic economy develops. For the moment, easy money encourages more players to experiment with the game. The more players take risks and experiment, the more bugs are exposed.

Keep in mind that right now this is a test of a game engine to make the final game. The point of the test is to build a flexible and functional game engine. Certainly balance is important in order to keep playtesters interested and happy, but coding a stable and logical platform is the top priority.

I hope capture the flag never dies, i hope it hangs around as a mission "Capture Itani construction secrets" the completion of which could alow you or many people to buy certain technoloogies. Of course the itanis would not want this because that means other people could fly there ships or use there weapons. It's kinda like America not wanting the USSR having an aircraft carrier.

I'd strongly suggest that they hold off on resetting money until CTF is taken out or fixed. I can just see one nation (Itani probably) dominating the game after gettings millions upon millions of credits from ganged caps while everyone else suffers with low credits. At least before the NPCDEFs everyone got an equal chance of capping, and the reward wasn't nearly as high as it is now, but now it's just insane.

"I can just see one nation (Itani probably) dominating the game after gettings millions upon millions of credits from ganged caps..."

Actually, the NT have had more money than the other two factions combined since 3.2 and that trend doesn't seem to have changed despite the most recent reset.

As I said, we're a nation of traders. Making money is our business :-P

But seriously, if all the Itani n00bs right now became decent at the game by the time it is reset, we would all be in trouble. Serco especially.

NT has the most money now only because the devs have super rich bank accounts under Gold. (Or so I've heard)


Perhaps reward system for capping should be altered. When you cap you get money proportional to the total cash balance of all the players of the victim nation online at the time. If the defense bots were toned down a tad it just might work.

Celebrim, most of the money in The Neutral Terrtiories wasn't obtained from caps. It came mostly from trading. I can't say the same for Itani, because well... they've been raping every flag recently. If that money gets reset and they continue on this flag capping rampage, guess which nation will have millions of credits rolling in while the other two struggle to defend.

"...they've been raping every flag recently"

Looking at the Nation Rankings, they lead NT by only 5. For most of 3.2, didn't NT have more caps than both Itani and Serco combined? Now all the sudden, Itani is 'raping' flags. Don't you think that's just a wee bit of propaganda? Is propaganda really called for? Please.

As for where most of the money was obtained, NT has almost 9 billion credits. A trader working for 40 hours per week and never being interupted could amass that in, as a rough estimate, 3-4 years. Given that the caps are about the same, you can't explain the ammount of money by cap awards either. The difference is too great. If I were a betting man, I'd say that most of that was bug exploitation and that most of the money is in a handful of accounts.

Well, we know over 4 billion is on BountyBot alone. So we are now down to 5 billion. We also know Sam used the bug exploit to max out his credits so there is another 4 billion. Down to 1 billion. Considering the amount of Gold players, the ubiquity of the Marauder, and the fact that the Devs have money holding accounts on Gold it doesn't seem at all surprising.

While the Itani and Neutrals are nearly close to each other in caps, I think that the Itani will still keep a constant advantage due to its higher population. In fact if you've been paying attention to the active players listing you'll know for a fact that the Itani have recently (emphasis on recent) been outnumbering everyone else for quite some time. Around the time the CTF update rolled around there weren't many Itani players around. And now for some reason their population has skyrocketed again. Take a close look at those numbers during peak hours again.

And let me state that someone doesn't have to participate in a flag cap to be rich. All they have to do is be there when the flag is being capped to get that million credits. So let's say you have 30 people on Itani and 15 people in Neutral. Itani manage a cap and now we have 30 people with a million credits (well, except for the capper who has more than that). And now you've got dirt poor Neutrals trying to defend the flag while the previous cappers can die all they want with all the money in the world.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to play the blame game. You can't really fault a nation for being highly populated, and I'd totally be against forcing players to join a nation they don't like just for the sake of balance. But I do believe there are solutions to maintain balance without hurting the smaller population nations. Think of it as the electoral college of the Vendetta universe. Well... sorta.

What I think maybe would be a fair way of dealing with this problem is to maybe factor in the number of players on at the time of capture and split that money up so it always equals the same amount in total. So the nation with fewer cappers will gain A LOT more money per person than the nation with a lot of players on at the time. Isn't it harder to capture a flag with fewer people? Why not reward that? And if you think about it, it might also reduce the number of players who like to switch characters just to get the money out of an enemy capture.

or arolte we will get this:

blue capping --> everybody hops on blue when they succeed so that there total profit on the teameffort will be diminished considerably.

Naturally , you could draw the same conclusion for red and gold.

Dont forget, every possible implimentation of something can be exploited. The devs will only make the liability of somethign like that happening less frequent by inducing penaltys for doing somethign like that :D

Lets just keep it as it is, and let the devs work on missions and all other fun implementations wont we ;)

And when the missions are set, maybe , even maybe we could make a cap the flag as a mission. It will all depend if that is manageabe or not.

Like I said, lets just see what the future holds and complain about it then in stead of complaining at it now while WE know that CTF isnt supposed to be eternal.

cheers

PS: and yes, the numbers are disproportional, but 1 trip to 14 - 18 is a lot easier then managing 1 cap. So let us just keep ourhands of it, and have fun testing the engine with that infinite money that the devs have been so kind as to bestow us with.

Well you're right, it's still exploitable. But the one thing team switchers can't take away is CTF score. I'd much rather see cheapened capture rewards than one where players can switch and profit off of enemy captures. I do hope that we'll eventually see one nation per account.

Arolte:


I don't think that one nation per account is neccessary. For one very simple reason, it won't be an issue in the final game, size. Once the game consists of several thoulsand sectors, you will be able to have characters that never EVER come within 30 wormhole jumps of each other, so it won't be a big deal to have characters form different nations.

Right now everyone flys around the same 18 sectors, so there are issues with people having characters on different nations, but when the way space is layed out changes, it wont be an issue. (i think the devs posted something about this not too long ago, something about the sectors we are using now would be something like 1 solar system and there would be thoulsands of solar systems linked by a different type of wormhole)

Everyone who has been within 500 meters of the person holding the flag should get 500k, every time you pick up the flag you get another 250k, once you cap the person with the fkag gets 1 mill. (you don't get the 500k or 250k instantly, you get it when the flag is captured)

Also, if the flag is droped in freindly nation sector (your itani being in s4\s1) the time it takes for it to return should reduce imensly.