VikingRanger, if the build requirements were reasonable, it would be fun to see the dents change hands, be destroyed or rebuilt. With a dent, you could easily and prudently, in a space with real vendettas, store up the parts for the next one.

KB, what you're failing to account for is that people like accomplishments. They want to climb a mountain and then permanently get some benefit from having climbed the mountain. Right now there are only two mountains in VO: learning to fight, and building a Trident. Gutting the build requirements and making Tridents uninsured would improve the game over the long run, but it would also leave the game with only one mountain in the short term. That's bad; the Trident needs to remain a mountain until we have some other mountains to take its place.



Anyway, the main problem with the OP is the possibility of theft, which I really want to be a thing. However, it turns out that you can't have Trident theft, no magic insurance, and mountainous Tridents all at the same time without making them non-fun. You can have any two of those things, but not all three.

So, let's just blithely remove the theft feature from the OP and consider it without; also, we will indeed stick with the "weapons do not damage the wreckage, but repair guns repair it" bit. This also lets us remove the docking-related complications: just leave docking how it normally is (i.e., based on the key and the Trident's capacity). Finally, let's boost the wreckage's health at spawn to at least 24%.

Result: To cause somebody's Trident to permanently die, you have to prevent them from repairing and refurbishing it until the 2% per hour deterioration eliminates it. If the wreckage spawns with 24%, that means they initially have 12 hours in which to react to the situation before the Trident is lost. Restoring the wreckage's hull to 100% using rep guns would give them fifty hours. If that's too short, we can tweak the deterioration rate. Optionally, just remove the hull deterioration mechanic entirely and make the wreckage have infinite lifespan. (I would like for it to be technically possible for a sufficiently dedicated and competent team to cause Trident permadeath, but it's not really necessary.)

The main idea here is to turn losing your Trident into an event rather than just an expense on your bank ledger. Particularly important is the fact that your wreckage sits out there in space and you go out there and interact with it. And other people know this is going on and can interact with you as well (camping it to delay your attempts to repair it and maybe steal parts, or aiding you in getting it online again sooner, or hawking parts to you, etc.).

-1 to the OP but if the idea is for trident loss to hurt a little more, then change the insurance mission to appear after 72 hours or something more than 7 minutes. Time is more valuable than money in VO. I'd pay 5 million for an insurance mission every time but 5 days to rebuild your ship would sting more and make you think twice about bringing a trident on the battlefield.

Rin is correct, but more needs to be made of the distinction between this and the other VO "mountain". Unlike twitch pvp skill, building a trident is the closest VO gets to a traditional 'grind2uber' RPG, the lack of which has I think always frustrated a certain hairy-palmed segment of the player base.

I'd hate to nerf it - such players have so little in their court already.

So, to spin the topic a little differently, would people object to the notion of our monetizing the accelerated replacement of Tridents?

For instance, say there was stilll a general Insurance-mission requirement you would hit (higher cost than 500k in credits, after a few uses), and after payment of the credits it would then start a timer countdown of "constructing" your replacement ship. Maybe that takes 72 hours, as suggested, or maybe it's 5 days or whatever..

But then, additionally, we offer an option to pay $2 to shorten the "insurance rebuild" time down to 12 hours? Still a long enough period of time to sting and not be instant-gratification (and have some impact to the loss of one of these ships), but dramatically shorter overall, and lets the individual get back going in their play session the next day.

It also creates another possible revenue stream for us. Which, between things like this, and selling Liveries, single-use Tridents, and further tweaking F2P, is something that could really help us.

Personally, if you did that, I wouldn't play until the trident re-spawned which would lead to less play time which I would see as even less value for money. On the basis that tridents save a significant amount of time travelling between sectors to change ships and reload after kills which you don't have to do when you have them.

So if you're saying I can only have 4 tridents per sub, that's a bit absurd.

If you want to monetize something, monetize something that accelerates conflict and promotes risk taking. For instance, for $10 your group can fly constellations for a week at a replaceable cost of X or Y or whatever.

The best monetization will come with empire building, hiring automated bots to do your labour etc.. etc..

Look at tsreknor and TGFT for your answers, they like to use automated station bots to attack the stations for them. If you could make hireable bots that did that i'm sure they'd pay for them so they can use their subs to keep the spy bot network operational at the same time.

Oh hey there's a notion, hire-able spy bots.. never heard that one before!

@Rin: Making an event out of trident destruction is a great idea but the only thing you did not account for in your modified suggestion is RL interfering.
All kind of shit happens and it's highly unlikely someone will actually have 50 or more hours to attempt salvaging their trident - especially if you take into account that whoever destroyed the trident will probably invite friends to camp the wreckage 24/7 and score some easy pks on a poor guy coming back with a rep guns rig.

@Raging John: monetizing the accelerated replacement of tridents could work but maybe make it more bang for your bucks by shortening the rebuild time significantly.
I would suggest making timer countdown 48 hours and '$2 payment for a rush job" shortening the time to 1 hour.
Whoever is eager to get his trident back as soon as possible would accept 1 hour wait time (and would pay for it) but probably not for 12.

Yes, it's unfair for players who cannot afford to shell out cash for a rush job but this is still very very far away from pay-to-win other games use.
Most of us know life isn't fair, and there is no free lunch. I think player base can live with that.

1) pilot skill and trident building are absolutely not the only major achievements in the game. There are ridiculous mining achievments that still nobody has reached. There is the top prospecting achievement. There is also political achievement that some value above all else.

2) ARF is correct in that any effort to make the Trident harder to replace is bad for the game. Why in gods name a suggestion like this gets any dev attention without making any real case other than an angsty grasping for irrelevant realism is fucking beyond me. FACT: ANYTHING that is changed to make Tridents WORSE or HARDER TO USE is going to make them, along with their captains, less prevalent, and thus the game will be even more empty and boring.

Being able to steal a trident is a good idea, but not in this bizarre, unreasonably complex form.

Now, since Incarnate decided to take this post off topic, I assume we are allowed to go along:

I agree with TRS in that monetizing Trident replacement is not a good idea. It won't be a good revenue stream because people would rather simply not play. There's a whole universe of other possibilities to monetize things in this game (i.e. making existing, very difficult things, achievable through $$). It makes absolutely no sense to make something that isn't difficult MORE difficult, and then gouge the playerbase for cash to speed it up.

Compared to the effort to build a Trident, yes, the insurance seems (on the surface) pretty easy and non-consequential. However, the insurance money is not the only thing that you are billed for when you have to replace a trident. In addition to whatever addons and cargo you had, you also lose a shitload of time having to fly all the way back to Latos M7, and then even more time flying to the absurdly far away dock. It also takes some real effort to stock up supplies (ships, addons) in M7. It's not as silly as people are making it out to be; it's still a significant pain in the ass to replace a Trident.

If you want to monetize anything related to Tridents, it's in the initial build where people are at their fucking whits end and will happily shower you with money to speed up the process. You want people to feel good about spending money, not worse.

If you want to charge more for a replacement Trident, it really needs to be done in a way that doesn't punish people for using them (i.e. via other enhancements).

"@Rin: Making an event out of trident destruction is a great idea but the only thing you did not account for in your modified suggestion is RL interfering."

That is why I reluctantly suggested that we could just drop the deterioration mechanic entirely. The more I think about it, the more I think that doing so is a good idea.


The rest of you seem to be missing the point. It's not about making losing a Trident more painful or consequential. It's about adding gameplay. When I complain about how the insurance system is essentially just buying your Trident back, my complaint isn't that it's unrealistic or too easy. My complaint is that it's too boring. There is nothing fun or interesting about buying a new Trident. There's even less fun about twiddling your thumbs for an arbitrary time period while you wait to be allowed to buy a new Trident. Throwing in coercive monetization would only make it worse.

By instead making a dead Trident leave behind a wreckage that you have to repair, you're encouraged to play the game rather than to just leave until the Trident comes back on its own. Instead of an abstract and meaningless expense and delay, the cost is the cost of the parts you're using to fix it, and the delay is however much time it takes you to get the job done (ideally something like four to six hours if you're working from scratch; much less if you're prepared and have friends/TRI to assist). And along the way, people have opportunities to help or hinder you.

Although, there does need to be an optional Roidside Assistance mission or something that you can take to recover the Trident if it's lost somewhere inaccessible (e.g. hundreds of km from sector center, or surrounded by hostile border turrets, a training sector, etc.). That mission could involve a boring fee and delay while you wait for imaginary NPCs to do the work for you.

Your proposed gameplay addition would disincentivize Trident use.

Your proposed gameplay addition would disincentivize greenwall's Trident use.

Fixed!

I think pizza's points are very well made. I agree that repairable trident wreckages would invite more gameplay, for everyone including non trident owners.

+1

I think you know better than to make this personal, Joyless.

pilot skill and trident building are absolutely not the only major achievements in the game

True, but they are the only ones that confer any gameplay benefits. Badges themselves are meaningless fluff.

Meaningless to you, meaningful to someone else. Achievement is, in and of itself, a valid gameplay goal.

Gameplay goals can be whatever one likes, to be sure. Gameplay benefits, however, are objectively measurable in some way shape or form. PvP skill and trident ownership confer them, whereas badges by themselves don't.

Rin didn't specify "gameplay benefits". He simply said "[permanent] benefits", a category in which a sense of accomplishment and pride derived from earning various achievments falls comfortably. Don't get me wrong, I don't care about badges much either... but enough people do. Rin's point was that people care about accomplishments, specifically major ones; he just failed to acknowledge there are more major accomplishments in game than combat skill and trident crafting. Why are we arguing about this?

Feel free to debate the number of dancing angels one could possibly find upon the head of a pin all you like, Greeny - so long as your pseudo-intellectual masturbation is done quietly enough for the adults to have a rational discussion.

I accept your admission of defeat! Gf. Moving on.

On the monitization topic, start by selling FCP and FFSA in Dau L10 for crystal. If it works well you can add other things like neural nodules in Odia M14 etc..

I like the idea of cash for a non-warrantied trident and having it done with the crystals is a great way to do it. In fact, having crystals on full sub and things like liveries that can only be bought with them is even better. I know I would certainly pay for a guild themed livery for my trident/moths.