What about the Itani stations in Deneb, Artana Aquilius, Divinia, Cantus, and Pherona? And the Serco stations in Pyronis, Helios, and Betheshee? Who will these switch to? Will they become enclaves of their original nations? That opens up ALOT of problems.

If you make them all sub faction stations, then invariably the Devs will be hounded to no end by people wanting something to be done about their now horridly out of place or inaccessible inventories.

I figure you probably put alot of thought into that map, but I do not understand how you picture the changes happening with the stations.

Another thing to consider is trade, I'm not really up on what is available at what prices in Itani space, nor do I know how the prices are calculated, but it seems that the longer the distance from source, the higher the price.

We really need Inc to weigh in on what kind of effects for instance making Pherona a single jump from Sedina would do. Would the economy automatically adjust, or would they have to manually change things?

I could easily see somebody thinking this is going to happen buying up an enormous sum of some widget that is cheap in Cantus, and waiting for their inventory to be Dev warped to a single jump from Latos, to reap INSANE profit. Such an occurrence would probably not hurt me personally mind you, even though I'd likely not profit from it either I don't believe others becoming richer hurts me.

My point being the potential for unintended consequences is really large when changing something on this scale.

Perhaps if this is implemented, players inventories in affected stations could be placed in their nation's capitol station. The only huge impact this might have for excessively large inventories in systems being changed would be the dynamic hive systems, and even then, only in a few extreme cases. The vast majority of the stuff I have in Itani space, as a mostly Itani player, is in Jallik E-15. The other stuff I really don't care that much about and I suspect that there are not many players who have a whole lot in systems like Cantus or Divinia.

+1

I like this map a lot and looking forward to seeing comments from the Devs.

What about the Itani stations in Deneb, Artana Aquilius, Divinia, Cantus, and Pherona? And the Serco stations in Pyronis, Helios, and Betheshee? Who will these switch to?

Hrm. Make some of them conquerable stations maybe? Would at least create something to fight over.

I am generally in favour of the idea of adding more systems and whs, so the ops suggestion is a good starting point.

Yes, many vets would have stockpiles in the wrong places, and missions would need to be adjusted. So what, VO needs content, and sorting it all out would give us something to do.

Anticipated dev response: *Crickets*

Any chance we could get developer input on this?

Silence is an answer in itself.

Spreading out the reacting particles is not the kind of content we need.

Silence is an answer in itself.

Silence means I'm busy, doing other things, and that a measured, honest and meaningful response to a proposal of this complexity requires more time than I currently have available. I could post a one-liner like "Sounds neat!" and then vanish, but that doesn't seem like it would be an improvement.

But that doesn't sound too hard, not nearly so hard as making entire new systems.

Making new systems is considerably easier than re-organizing old systems, because it sidesteps the entire requirement of needing to go through and figure out everything that would break during the re-organization.

I think the OP map is pretty interesting. I agree it would probably be better than what we have now. But I'm not sure if it's a better solution than the existing expansion plan I've been working towards (new systems), because of the amount of work that may be required to do this kind of redux, or perhaps more accurately, the degree of uncertainty around some of that work.

People are asking "how much change would be needed", and the problem with this kind of drastic change (of something we've spent 12+ years building around) is.. I don't know? Ray won't know either. We could probably spend solid a week digging through things and figure most (?) of what would need to be changed (just investigation, not even changing things). We would likely miss some stuff, but it.. might not be critical stuff, or it might be a giant pain.

In some ways, it might go ok. The old "demand" based economy should keep working, and keep adjusting demand based on actual trade. It doesn't "care" where it is, per se, just whether people show up and sell stuff.

The distribution of the economy might need to be changed, that was defined completely by hand, based on the original map. Moving those definitions around would be either incredibly time consuming, or require development of some new tools to help do that (which might also be time consuming). If we had the "new" prototype economy fully in place, it might (?) be simpler, I'm not sure. Or it might present some other issues I'm not considering..

The mechanics of Kourier's convoy system would probably need work. A number of older missions would need tweaking. I suspect we would be finding problems cropping up for six months or a year after an implementation like this.

There is a tendency for a lazy coder to hard-code things rather than make them more robust or flexible, when there's no expectation of change. That's really what we would be tracking down.. any cases where some Erlang or Lua code thinks "oh, well, this will NEVER change!".

But, that all being said, I still think it's an interesting possibility. I'm still thinking about and considering what it could mean and how. I don't have a simplistic answer for people clamoring for some sort of dev response. This isn't something where I can say "hey, great, let's do that next week!", but I still think it's worth discussing.

It's actually a good example of a thread I consider of value and really useful to me and my forward-looking goals, without necessarily being something where I can say "YES!" or "NOO!". The value of Suggestions threads can be nuanced rather than binary. There was a recent thread asking for more insight into which threads I would "rule out" so people can "stop discussing them", and this is exactly why I rarely do that.

When we get a little time, I may ask Ray to spend an hour digging into a few of the issues that concern me about this, or otherwise bring it up for discussion or general cogitation.

This is most definitely not something I am going to leap into with grand abandon and little idea of the ramifications, as that could be super bad for the game, and the company. But it is worth considering.. it may also be of greater value as some other things come to fruition, as we continue to work on Kourier and the next-gen economy and other moving parts in the overall system.

Thanks for the response inc. Not being a programmer and having little knowledge of such things I appreciate the way you explained it.

As to the missions needing tweaking, I'm sure the PCC could be urged to move in and go through all of them adjusting as needed. That would take at least some of the workload off of the devs. Perhaps being implemented on the test server would also help iron out more bugs before the devs have to put any serious work into it. I love the map layout, and that it would make Deneb more accessable.

+3

The merchants guild, escort, and hive missions are all dynamicly generated and inaccessible to the PCC. Further, even if the PCC could make the adjustments, this sort of change would necessitate a level of QA that it would likely be better for the devs to make the changes themselves.

I wanna see Incarnate's proposed map; the OP's map is nice compared to the existing one, but it may pale compared to Inc's