It is not a good idea to add something so experimental at such a crucial developmental time for VO. It is about to roll out on the iPhone. The last thing a mobile user needs is more combat when trying to haul some goods or mining some roids. I understand that older user base would welcome them, as would I. However, it is bad timing right now. I'd say leave this topic alone for now and resubmit it in about a year.

if the practice of giving new players missions that require them to go into grey space was ended, then both new and old players can get what they want and be happy. Since unrats could be limited to just those territories.

There is absolutely no reason why a player who can only grab a rev is out in sedina on a mission. They're newb griefer missions who's only purpose it seems is to fatten up player kills or break the monotony of players who just sit around in grey space doing nothing but waiting for someone to pvp. Even better when it's someone who doesn't have a chance.

Everyone that said +1 will complain, but it is just simply bad timing. Great idea though. Just bad timing in my opinion.

"There is absolutely no reason why a player who can only grab a rev is out in sedina on a mission."

There's absolutely no reason a newbie has to take or complete a mission that asks him to go to greyspace. They exist for the amusement of the more adventurous/foolhardy newbs. The more cautious pilots can simply ignore those missions.

Low hanging fruit. The above is the same argument drug dealers use. It doesn't serve the purpose you think and if you have been in the game for any amount of time since those missions were added you would know it from the chatter in the game. It is just a cheap way to get player kills.

And guess what? I'm pro legalization. We let people rock climb, play football, be cheerleaders, or become couch potatoes. Hell, you can juggle knives if you want to, so long as you aren't endangering other people. So I don't see what makes drugs special.

Vendetta is a gritty space game. The Serco make heavy use of drugs, both for augmentation and recreation. The UIT is plagued with corruption. Greyspace is full of pirates, mercs, and bounty hunters. All governments and corporations give away free guns, even the naive Itani monks.

Think about that for a minute. Imagine a world where you could walk into a McDonald's and they'd give you a complementary gun with your happy meal.

Helicopter parenting is not appropriate in Vendetta. If a newb wants to take a mission that brings them down to greyspace where they might die and have to replace their ship for the whopping cost of maybe five units of scrap, well, that's up to them. They can chose to take that risk nor not by their own reckoning.

If there are specific missions you have a problem with that do not make clear that they entail venturing into greyspace, you should create a thread pointing them out so that those missions can be updated to more accurately represent their requirements.

I remember the unrats, they were not much fun.

So, as it turns out, I can't bring them back. I have remembered this request, and diligently tried to see what we could do, but it appears that the unrats date back to an earlier AI system (Deliverator), which was replaced by Kourier and.. I don't think the "unrats" were ever re-implemented.

They weren't very complicated, of course, it was just.. some enemies that spawned and tried to kill you a lot. But it is not as simple as just turning something back on.

So, if we're going to do a re-implementation, I would just as soon schedule it properly and do something a bit better. I'll see what can be done in the near-term, but we are kinda swamped under doing the various renderer/shader changes and the like.

more pretty roids 1 more interactive content 0
:p

Why not have a new re-imagining of "Unrats" by forking some key aspects of the hive ai code. Basically, replace the queen with a Constellation modified to allow a lot of docked unrat ships and tweak the AI so that it runs if attacked and no player is in range to a new system.

Similarly, the unrats would utilize a fork of the ai collector. Only instead of being push overs that mine, they are assault ships that home on any non-hive ship (especially players) except Corvus and will collect any dropped cargo and bring it back to the "queen" connie.

Population can be controlled similar to how hive population is.

the new unrats would be hated by all nations except corvus. They would regularly move across grey space. There should probably only ever be 1 or 2 Unrat Connies around. With respawns of the connie requiring 24 hours if it's destroyed.

Additionally, down the road. It would be cool if this segue'd into true grey players. Where if you find yourself in a system with the Unrat cap ship, you can communicate with it some phrase and if you manage to survive long enough to transfer the money and agree to become a pirate, you will then be changed to grey and get Hate standing with all nations except Corvus. You can't raise your standings with any nations unless you communicate with the pirate capship that you dont want to be a pirate anymore. Your standings then have to be built up from hate and you will be seen as hostile to the unrats.

edit: btw, the unrat cap ships should be persistent. Meaning, all the cargo taken by the unrats killing ships and players that get brought to the connie stay with the connie until it is full. After some time of it being full. the cycle starts over again. So booming the pirate connie nets you everything it's collected since the last time it was full or destroyed. possibly hundreds of CU's worth of items. But probably mostly junk. unrats aren't picky, and their cargo hold isn't huge.