Undeniable, we no longer support forum-specific alt accounts on Suggestions, due to people abusing the system to evade forum bans, as well as making posts "agreeing" with themselves on other virtual personas.

We've allowed some longstanding users to continue using pre-existing "named" forum accounts; but since your account is brand-new as of February, with zero game-logins, and you're obviously not a newbie, then your account is not permitted in this use case.

You would need to start using your obvious main gameplay account to post here.

I'd say no.

VO has always been game people dip into, they play for a while, RL takes over, they come back, sometimes years later.

At which point they find that a fundamental game mechanism has changed and that inventory which they put a lot of effort into getting has gone.

Personally I would like to see some new stations which are lootable. Have them manufacture stuff using less material than required by the present stations. This would give a player a choice of going for fast track manufacture with the risk of losing it, or playing safe and having to do a lot more work.

To my mind that would expand the gameplay available, whereas making the existing ones lootable would I think reduce the gameplay for many who would just not bother with VO if all their stuff could be stolen while they were not even ingame.

It would also allow the whole thing to be tested to see how the playerbase reacts before making what is a huge change to the game.

Really if making stations lootable happened then a lot of players might well just liquidate their inventory rather that see it be stolen.

At which point they find that a fundamental game mechanism has changed and that inventory which they put a lot of effort into getting has gone.

I mean, I already said that people with idle accounts could be exempt. A couple of times.

Could be , or would be ?

So I'm getting stuck on the idea of how to distribute the loot between players and I'm curious to hear Inc's initial thoughts about how this was going to work.

Here are different ideas about possible ways of doing things. Please note I'm not claiming these are good, just possibilities.

* First Come First Serve: When the inventory releases, anyone who is in the station at the time, can claim anything on the list. This seems like the most simple, but most exploitable. Keys would likely not be given out to prevent people from taking part. This would probably result in a station effectively being locked down for how ever long it took for the inventory to release. There's also the possibility (depending on the system) that an auto-clicker or lua script might be able to literally take everything the instant it unlocked.

* Draft system: When the inventory releases, people with keys take turns picking one item out of the list. Less chance of a greedy person managing to take everything. Still seems likely that the station would be locked down to prevent players from participating.

* Owner gets everything: When the inventory releases, everything transfers to the person that docked first, or someone they delegated with a special key. It would then be up to the recipient to redistribute everything. While on the surface this seems risky, I think it will usually balance out. Assuming that it was a group of players that took the station, there will be social/political pressure for that person to share, and they risk alienating themselves or their guild if agreements aren't upheld.

* Auto-liquidate: When the inventory releases, it is automatically sold, and profits are split amongst people with keys, or some subset. Players that are afraid of losing their hard work might prefer this option since the parts and materials aren't directly going into the pockets of an antagonist.

Besides the ideas above, are there any other systems in the works, like in-station player trading, or guild storage? Systems like those seem similar to how the looting functionality would work in the game engine.

Could be , or would be ?

Seriously? This whole thread is about what "could be".

I keep asking for thoughts on how we could implement things, and I keep offering possible solutions, because that's what we're trying to do here. I mean, that's what Suggestions is.

A rejection without any consideration of mitigating options isn't productive. And I never guarantee anything.

(Sorry theratt, I don't have time to write responses to your topics, right now).

I can only say in response to the OP that I don't understand why this is the next progression of core mechanics change given what we have now. It seems like something you would add to an already rich in-station inventory trading/relocation/logistics system that VO doesn't have.

More impactful would be core trading and transfer mechanics within stations between players and NPC based 'stores' (or just with the station being the central 'store', not that important really).

Is this change higher in the pecking order than proper in-station trading, or is it just do-able as a 2-day project or something?

I view it as just an extension of being able to steal items except now you can do it from a station. The amount of trader adaptation that will go on around this change will outweigh the positive game-play impact it has on players wanting to make a profit from capturing the stations. You are in effect adding a much higher protection bar to a process that is already an obscene grind.

The roll-out of just a few key mechanics changes to the trading and economy system will have much more profound impacts on the replay-ability of VO. This would be interesting after those changes, but not before.

I don't understand why this is the next progression of core mechanics change given what we have now.

I've made absolutely zero statements about the relative priority of this content, as opposed to other content. I've stated no timeline, or, as I explicitly wrote:

Nothing has changed, nothing is being rolled out, it's just words on a page and we're just talking about how things might change, someday.

I really just thought it could be an interesting discussion topic about how such a thing might be structured, and different play-styles might be able to weigh in on what could work for them.

And, I appreciate that some people have genuinely tried to lean into that, and comment purely on design tradeoffs at face value (csgno1, theratt, Inevitable and others); that is the supposed purpose of this forum.

But, net-net this thread has not been very productive. People mostly seem to read their personal fears and frustrations into it. Either I'm destroying the game, or driving away all the users, or prioritizing this over in-station-trading (..?!).. none of which is true, nor is any of it the actual topic. Everything is assessed as the "worst case scenario", some kind of impending doom.

People used to have more faith than that.

Anyway, at this point, I'm moving on. I have too many other things on my plate.

Well I think overall it's a cool idea with some caveats that have been mostly mentioned before:

-Exemption/accomodation for players' inventories that haven't played in a long time (i.e. transferring the inventory to another "Safe" station)

-Clear/fair warning before this goes into effect, with possibly even accommodation / assistance for active players to move their inventories out before hand (so there is as much "starting from square one" as can be had)

-Alternative avenues of capship building. Maybe you can do something quicker in the "stealable" stations, but you can do them elsewhere with less risk involved that takes longer.

Could you expand on what you mean by this? Is there like a secondary "currency" or something that someone wins by conquering stations with content, and then that.. currency can be used somehow, to do something else?

I played some medieval pvp game once where you would get points by attacking keeps/having skirmishes. You could then spend those points looting players who had died, where each of the items in the players inventory had a cost. You would end up spending your loot points or reaching a cap depending on the items you took. You also lose the points you've accrued if you die.

So basically I was thinking of some kind of point system you could use to pillage the stations where there would be a cap on how much you can take and where harder to obtain parts might cost a lot more points.

Regarding players that haven't logged on recently, etc., if this sort of thing is implemented I'd suggest that one day ALL inventory is automatically transferred to a nearby station just beforehand. Everything in I8 can be transferred to M7, etc.. Then the people that are using the i8 station can move their stuff back in as they want.

This is probably the worst thing that can be added to the game!
Many ppl have been manuing stuff for years and storing them on those stations, just to get stolen by someone else in a matter of seconds?
This would make lots of players to quit (including myself, even while I dont have much time to play) just because it would be very unfair to just let anyone steal anyones stuff what some people took many weeks to get.
I agree with Stavin, stealing stuff when killing players is different, as considering most older players use capships to transport stuff, there you have some defense against getting killed, while on a station you do not have any way to prevent your stuff getting stolen
I definitely disagree with this suggestion. No one wants to lose years worth of manued/gathered stuff to people who just not willing to grind for them or just want to fck with people by reselling their own parts to them for an astronomical price

This is probably the worst thing that can be added to the game!

People continuing to post to the thread, without actually reading the entire discussion, is just pointless and irritating and adds further noise to Suggestions.

There were plenty of mitigating options presented, like how it might only be a percentage of one's inventory that's exposed to risk, or it might be some kind of independent "points" system, or how inventory contents might be "insured" in some way, etc. The idea was to have a discussion around what could work.

People screaming about the end of the world is just unhelpful. Which I already wrote on here a number of other times.

I'm locking the thread now.