Incarnete asked for suggestions to the new changes. I freaked out and made a really bad post, I again apologizes for that post. I want VO to become a super popular game with thousands of players!!

People have made suggestions and that is wonderful, but feelings are what keep customers around! I wish Inc had asked for how do you feel about the new changes and what are your suggestions to change those feelings. Getting the info of how people feel allows a business to mold itself to the customer, make people happy and they will come back! If people feel good about a product they will recommend it to friends and continue to support and buy the product. It they feel ripped off, or stepped on, or harmed, or ignored they will not recommend the product to friends.

How people feel about something is the most important thing in a business. Feelings = MONEY! After you know how they feel then listen to there suggestions. Many times suggestions are not really what a person wants but paying attention to how they feel allows an owner of a business to select the best suggestions.

I know that pirates feel like all the advantage is aimed at TGFT. After all TGFT has the most members, TGFT controls all the conquerable stations. TGFT has the most capships. Capships currently are almost impossible to destroy. The pirate guild membership has decreased. I hardly ever see a pirate on line. So I understand Incarntates desire to turn things around, he is losing piratecustomers, also pirates are important to game play BUT

I suggest doing it in a way that steps on as few feelings as possible. Leave the traders with their huge trucks, give the pirates a capship that is powerful and can kill a truck! Make everybody feel good.

Pirates are important to game play, the game would not be nearly as exciting for traders if there were no pirates! We traders love rallying to protect a friend and kill pirates, it is exciting, it make the game fun.

I do not understand the thinking behind cutting the cap ship cargo by 65% with the only reason being that it is a bug that was always there but nobody had time to fix it. I do not understand that if it has always been a bug then why not have stated that on the build capship info page so people could decide if they want to spend the time building something with unknown capabilities? (I bet if that had been done that there would be a lot fewer capships). I feel ripped off! I spent a lot of time and two accounts to build my capship fast so I could help others. While building I used 2 XC’s for transportation. So now with my new capship and hundreds of hours I can haul 100cu more than my 2 XC’s. I so wish I had known that before I spent the time building.

I have heard of really cool things coming for cap ships. The features have been listed but the effect has not been discussed.

This is what I understand so far. Is it correct???
1. persistence cap ship, which means if I want to log off I have to go to M7 to park, or one of the capital stations when it become possible to park there or risk having my capship blown up or taken over while I am off line?
2. persistent mines, so now when I fly from worm hole to worm hole I most likely will get blown up by mines. If someone puts a persistent mine in front of a station portal and I am admire with that station do they lose standing when I get blown up?
3. Energy drain weapons, new ones that will take all the energy out of a ship leaving it as junk, very easy to destroy. Is this true? Is any defense for this planned?
conquerable capships, so now not only can i get blownup but I can lose my capship. Will this be a perment loss until I can reconquer it? And does this mean people do not have to build capships anymore just steal them?
4. Ability to leave capship. So I park in front of a station and my capship gets attacked, how do I get back in? And like now people can get the station turrets/guards to attack the innocent person, so rats will be able to get station guards to attack my cap ship while I am gone?
5. Ability to lend my capship to a friend. This one is cool for traders. So at least one new feature helps traders!! YEA!!
6. New capships coming with unknown features. (from the picture it looks like a faster ship with 4 engines and different turret layout. I would guess this is a nation war ship. It seems that this will stop all capship construction in its track while people wait for the new ships or a least the specs.

It seems to me that the most players in VO belong to the TGFT guild. The capship changes affect the TGFT players more than any other group. If feels to me like the developers want to discourage the people in their most popular guild, I do not understand how that makes good business sense.

Please reconsider: create a capship that will carry a lot of stuff (you already have that one) and create a capship that will be of real help to rats and people who want to fight in nation wars. Even make the new capship with weapons strong enough to really hurt the old capship. This would level the playing field and make everyone happy! Happiness=money.

All of us who built capships did so because it could carry 800 cu if a person had two accounts, or 1400 cu occasionally if you could get enough friends to help. Telling us a few years later, after hundreds of hours of work, that our cargo ability was really just a bug, sucks! We should have had a choice, to build or not with disclosure of the bug. Of course now with two accounts I can still carry 800cu but I have to fly the XC along side the capship, like I did with my two XC’s while building or as lisa says park a XC in every station and drop my second account.

What is the harm to the game to restore to that ability to haul a lot of stuff? If the new capship is a battle cruiser type ship then the people who like to fight will have a cool ship. It by nature would need to be fast and thus limited in cargo space. The people who like to trade will have the ship they love back, slow and clunky. The rats will have an effective capship killer. Everyone is happy. The traders will build the new capship for protection. More building means more people in game!

It just does not seem like good businesses sense to hurt the biggest number of people in your game. And from listening to all the TGFT guild chat no one is please with the new restrictions!

Also Please with the new capships disclose any bugs that could be correct in a few years :-) so surpises like this one are avoided.

warm regards
xtoph

I dunno man, you were warned.

As a long standing captain of the Itani Military I would like to publicly condemn the OPs complaints and look forward to my battleships being more combat ready than ever before

"And like now people can get the station turrets/guards to attack the innocent person, so rats will be able to get station guards to attack my cap ship while I am gone?"

Probably. But this is an oversight with the NPC units' aiming code, which doesn't tend to bother checking whether other people are in their line of fire. Hopefully it will be fixed eventually.

"It seems to me that the most players in VO belong to the TGFT guild."
"It just does not seem like good businesses sense to hurt the biggest number of people in your game."

TGFT might be the largest guild, but that doesn't mean it consists of most of the players in the game. If you add up the number of people in non-TGFT guilds, you'd easily outnumber the TGFT players. If you add up all the people who aren't in any guild at all, you'd outnumber all of those who are in guilds. TGFT are not the majority. Sorry.

I still haven't read your entire post, by the way. Too much bull for me to bother with. But let's see if I can answer some of the questions:

"1. persistence cap ship, which means if I want to log off I have to go to M7 to park, or one of the capital stations when it become possible to park there or risk having my capship blown up or taken over while I am off line?"

Yes, Incarnate has stated that he definitely intends to do this. There are some bits you're missing though. For example, you could hide it in one of the empty sectors, which significantly reduces the odds anybody will find the ship. Even more so if you fly really far out into the distance. (Note that we don't know yet whether the ship will continue drifting or just come to a dead stop after you log out; if it drifts, sending it far out into space becomes trivial.) Alternately, if you do opt to park it outside a station, anybody who causes too much damage to it will likely take a permanent faction penalty (assuming you were liked by the faction owning the station, of course). Parking at a station inside Nation Space will of course be even safer, since the border turrets do manage to reduce the number of people likely to bump into you.

Another option is to share it with other people, so that they can move it around and use it when you're offline. Hell, if you trust other players enough, you could pay somebody to fly it to the nearest capship dock and park it for you, so you don't have to. And if they screw you, what do you lose? A little money, no big deal. It's just a ship, in the end.

Also keep in mind that once the novelty of destroying parked tridents wears off, people will be less likely to go out of their way or sustain penalties for it.

But yeah, parking it in space is generally going to be more dangerous than logging out to achieve magical safety (which is currently one of the exploits this game has).

"2. persistent mines, so now when I fly from worm hole to worm hole I most likely will get blown up by mines. If someone puts a persistent mine in front of a station portal and I am admire with that station do they lose standing when I get blown up?"

Several things to keep in mind here. First of all, station guards hate mines. If somebody lays down mines outside a station, the station guards will clean up the minefield themselves. So mines around a station won't be any more of a concern than they already are.

Second thing: wormholes are busy places. NPCs fly through them too, not just players. Minefields probably won't last that long.

Third thing: not all players are assholes. The implementation of persistent mines will result in some players taking it upon themselves to patrol around space cleaning up mines, either out of kindness or out of a desire to screw with those laying the mines.

"3. Energy drain weapons, new ones that will take all the energy out of a ship leaving it as junk, very easy to destroy. Is this true? Is any defense for this planned?"

Yes, Incarnate has described something like that, except that it probably doesn't just leave the victim completely helpless indefinitely. Most likely it will be a weapon that must be fired continuously, or in spurts, to keep the victim pinned down. So to get free, all you have to do is kill that guy. Easy, if you have a friend nearby to help. Tridents have a lot of armor, and the energy-drain weapon will take up one of the attacker's ports and probably consume most of his energy to fire as well, so he probably won't be able to do much damage while pinning you. It's the kind of weapon that would let him hold you down while his backup shows up, but that gives you time to get backup of your own. OR, undock in a fighter (which will be much harder for him to hit) and kill him yourself.

"conquerable capships, so now not only can i get blownup but I can lose my capship. Will this be a perment loss until I can reconquer it? And does this mean people do not have to build capships anymore just steal them?"

Unless Incarnate changes the insurance mechanic, what will probably happen is that the guy who steals your ship won't get the insurance with it, so once the ship dies, he'll have to steal a new one. I really can't imagine that Incarnate would allow us to steal the insurance too. As far as what that means for the victim, I don't know. If it were me implementing the feature, I'd have it treat it like your ship was destroyed, so you could buy a new one either immediately or within a week, depending when the last time your trident was stolen or destroyed was. That seems the most sensible way to do things to me.

Also, stealing a ship in faction space would probably be penalized similarly to destroying it or heavily damaging it. They might even make it so that flying the stolen ship into certain places (nation space?) could result in the authorities recognizing the stolen vessel and attacking (ideally there would be a way to counteract that, but it should take some time and effort first; effectively that would give the victim a grace period where the thief is more limited and the victim could more easily recover his ship).

"I know that pirates feel like all the advantage is aimed at TGFT."

This is untrue. Some pirates feel that way. Not all of us. There are always idiots on both sides who think the other side has all the advantages, or that the devs are favoring them, or whatever. And then there are the drama-queens who know better, but like to blow things out of proportion anyway. But they're all idiots.

Besides, this is not a pirates vs. traders situation. It's easy to fall into that mindset, but open your eyes and look around. Lots of the people involved belong to neither pigeonhole.

"TGFT controls all the conquerable stations."

Actually, despite whatever prattle TRS might have said, nobody gives a fuck. That is why TGFT currently holds the conq stations. Do you think they were born holding them? Nope. In the past, when the pirates cared, we held them. More recently, RED cared, so RED held them. Currently, none of us give a fuck but TGFT, so TGFT holds them.

"The pirate guild membership has decreased. I hardly ever see a pirate on line."

This ties back to the "nobody gives a fuck" I mentioned earlier. We're bored, so we've been taking a break. The game tends to go through phases where there are more traders, nationalists, or pirates. We recently had the nationalist phase, preceded by the pirate phase, so it isn't surprising if we're in a trader phase. I'm not saying we are in one, as I haven't played enough lately to have a feel for it. But that's what it sounds like.

Anyway, this is just natural variation, not the result of anything the devs have been doing.

"So I understand Incarntates desire to turn things around, he is losing piratecustomers"

Actually, I think you are severely misunderstanding Incarnate's motivations. I don't think his goals have anything to do with that. After all, he posted much of this stuff years ago. This endgame stuff the devs are finally addressing, however slowly, has been bouncing around in their heads for over a decade.

Thank you Pizzasgood for your excellent descriptions of what is to come. If you are correct it should be fun. Can you address the reason for cutting the tridents cargo ability? I still do not understand the purpose behind that.
xtoph

tl;dr

The reasoning is simple. It was never supposed to carry such a ridiculous amount of cargo in the first place. The Trident is a frigate, not a Constellation Heavy Transport. Rather than a cut, think of it as the expiration of a temporary bonus that made Tridents a bit less useless than they could have been during the years when the devs were basically ignoring capship development in favor of porting to mobile. Now that they're working on capships again, adding more functionality, they finally changed it.

Someday we'll be able to build Connies, and you can get the real cargo mover you want. I want one too, though not so much for moving cargo as for using as a mobile fort. But most of all, I just want to name it Silvana and lurk in ion storms. Hopefully I'll be able to just steal one, but if it comes down to it, I'm fully prepared to program an army of robot minions to build it for me. ROC > /dev/null. I will have my Silvana.

I already answered the questions anyway but since you're apparently unable to use a link i'll make it crystal:

On Apr 16, 2011 Incarnate said:

We're working on having fighters docked to the capships be limited based on their actual size and hanger limitations, as opposed to the number of pilots. There is actually a codepath for this that has been in the works for awhile, but there was no possible way to get it done in time for last night. But, we could do a simple "player limit", so I went with that for the short term.

So in summary, 2 years is short term in Guild software time.

There's a lot of questions here, and it would take me awhile to respond to them all and I don't have that time availability right now.

I think the most important thing to consider is just to not freak out about changes that haven't actually happened yet. Hell, even changes that have happened, but are still being tweaked. Obviously, since this was written, I bumped cargo by another 200cu, which probably mitigates some of your concerns.

"Stealing" a capship, much like stealing a station, is not going to be easy. Every trivial solo pirate who moseys along will not be able to muster this up. I've said I'm adding more capship-stations, and that we'll look at making NFZs friendlier to pilot-less capships, and that the initial "persistency" after log-off will not be very long (minutes, not hours). So this does not mean that every captain should immediately be paranoid about theft.. we aren't even close to that yet.

With some of this stuff I know exactly what we're going to aim for, but some of it I'm expecting to change with testing and implementation, and all of it will continue to be open to feedback from usage.

One point though: I do not play favorites with guilds, or even entire game-play-styles. I do my best to try and stay focused on where I want the game to go, and have wanted it to go since the 90s. I do hope people like it, and I listen to feedback, particularly from player usage; but at the end of the day.. I steer the ship, the ship does not steer me.

Since you don't play favourites with play styles you'll be happy to remove the anti-serco bias give the Itani a heavy assault ship and the Serco a light 3port interceptor, no?

I'll happily make a suggestions post for it!

Good lord TRS you don't stop do you?

He's like the energizer bunny. lol