To suggest that a product is only lacking because the consumer isn't committed enough is a seriously flawed argument.

An average player count below 100 will never attract and keep the average MMO player. Especially not in a space sim/game.

That said, the very fact that VO is still around really is remarkable. Going on six years from release, with the issues it faces on a daily basis...

Well, if you just regard vo as an entertainment product in the same sense as a film or single player game that might be true.

I don't view vo in that way. I see it more as hiring a space environment in which to take part in a game.

Let me draw a comparison. A group of people get together and hire a football pitch. They arrive and then spend the entire session sitting in the changing room discussing the fact that the turf is a bit bumpy in places and some of the lines are a bit wobbly. They go away unhappy.

If they had just said "oh let's just play anyway " they would have gone out and had a fun time. After a few minutes the bumpy turf and wobbly lines would be ignored, they go away happy.

So, having had fun they book the pitch for the next week. Money flows to the football ground allowing them to fix the turf and the lines. The players continue to have fun.

Personally, though I know a lot of people disagree, I don't see vo as a flawed product. The vast majority of vo works perfectly well, it just needs the players to join in to get the whole cycle going so we can all have fun.

Surely there must be a few hundred folk about who think as I do ?

I have never seen a piece of software that was not "broken" to some degree. Guilds efforts to maintain a high level of quality are both blessing and curse as it tends to greatly slow down development. VO has operated for the last six months with almost no downtime and only one instance where guild created a major exploit that required fixing. Thats a pretty good record for ongoing development.

Simply put, I'm not sadomasochistic. I pay for a month every year or so, play for about five hours, see not much has changed (community wise), get bored, and generally regret giving $10. And I'm not stingy by any means, so regretting $10 is pretty bad.

Berate us all you like, but if we're not interested, we're just not interested. VO had a pop near/over 100 around Christmas during the ad blitz/free resub. And now it's back to normal numbers. Certainly, a piece of the equation is missing, but it's definitely not the fault of the player that they get bored when so many people agree.

Surely there must be a few hundred folk about who think as I do ?

After 6 years, I think it's safe to say that "a few hundred folk" are the only ones who think that way.

The really funny thing about all of this is that 50% of the people who post in the forums, don't even play the game anymore...

I feel about the same as Ecka on this.

Another thing that keeps me supporting this game is that the community is great, and the devs are cool and actually give a shit about the player base and interact with us. Also, having native clients for Linux and Mac in addition to Windows is a win.

um, I don't exactly know where this convo came from,

All I was suggesting was that ship and weapon balance is unnecessary if enough new stuff is coming out of the faucet, and if the temperature of the water is approximately right (some 1st order balancing algorithm, doesn't have to be a complicated one)

Wasn't the purpose of the database upgrade last year to make it easier to put new weapons and equipment into the game? So why hasn't that happened? There seems to be an attitude from the devs that flooding the game with cool stuff would be bad for the game, but I don't think that's true. Acquiring "stuff" is a big part of why people play MMOs and making more of it available, some of it rare and therefor valuable would get a lot of prople to look past content issues a bit longer. Us vets will still know and complain, but newbs will last two months or more longer before they notice.

So:
- How about some .001 percent rare widget drops? The a!kon pelt had traction for a while and was a lot of fun for people to chase around

-how about a flood of new weapons? Player controlled turrets Weps are sorely lacking. Put 20 different turrets into the game in one day and watch the fun

-how about a flood of exotic weapons and equipment? Make a randomly available new superpowered varient of a common ship appear in station for purchase.

None of this is game sustaining we understand, but it will be subscriber extending for sure.

I'd resub for Impavid's suggestions, especially if it generated a new source of pvp. Ecka's suggestion to get out and play ball is right on. We just need the impetus to go. The free weekend last Christmas was a good idea. Perhaps combine a new free weekend with some new PVP element and see who resubs?

...Let me draw a comparison. A group of people get together and hire a football pitch. They arrive and then spend the entire session sitting in the changing room discussing the fact that the turf is a bit bumpy in places and some of the lines are a bit wobbly. They go away unhappy...

This really only flies in an environment where the competition is non-existent, as it pretty much is for those of us looking for a purely skill based open environment to pew pew in. The problem is, this analogy doesn't fly for the average MMO player. They're just as likely to head down the road because the lacrosse box isn't bumpy and the lines are straight (not to mention there aren't gaping holes in the nets).

It really is a catch-22 of sorts. As Lecter pointed out, there's probably only a few hundred people out there who are willing to stick around and wait and see what happens with VO. Not enough to actually kick the population into high gear without some serious activity/marketing on the development front. On the flipside, is there was a larger number of people willing to do so, there would be more competition in the market, competition with much bigger budgets (ala JGE).

Either way, VO is in a very, very niche position, for better or for worse.

As most of you already know, I've been a strong supporter of VO and the Dev's over the years, however, I do have to concur with Impavid and Snax.

VO as a product is sadly lacking in a "draw" for the average consumer. VO went through dark times as the Alpha and Beta players will attest to, where money was tight, if not non-existent for the Devs, yet they churned on.

Now, 6 years later, 8 since initiation of development, the game is inherently the same as it was in 2003, and then in 2005. Yes, the universe was expanded, and yes ships and some things like CTC/Border Skirmish has been added, but many of the major draws for players, like Capital-class ships, have remained elusive, and largely hidden projects for years, during which eager players have become jaded, and negative, or have outright left the game completely. The severe lack of visible progress in this field has also contributed to player attrition, as Capital-classes have been "In-Development" since Alpha Test, yet, there is no sign of them being introduced anytime in the foreseeable future.

I must admit that I too am mildly surprised VO is still around. It's graphics are somewhat dated, it's content development is slow for understandable reasons, and there's still major balance/reliability issues with several MAJOR aspects.

Despite my strong, and continuing support of the Dev's and their hardwork, I am becoming increasingly concerned that 4 men will never be able to deliver VO as a marketable MMORPG to a larger audience, because by the time the features are there, the graphics and everything else will be antiquated.

[EDIT] I should add, (now that I am more awake than when I wrote it), I do not mean to sound negative about VO, because I do think it's one of the better games out there, and has an exclusive niche as a twitch-based space game (making it fun, and marketable). I merely mean to highlight some of the reasons/sentiments that I know have been simmering for some time. Like Whistler, I fully intend to keep subscribing, and will be purchasing another 2-year sub. this Oct to replace my current one when it expires.

Oh yes, another thread complaining about the lack of "Y" while the devs work feverishly on "X" like they said they would. I'm mostly amazed they don't lose their minds over the "Won't somebody think of the children!" posts. Yes, there are issues and the devs fully acknowledge their shortcomings. However, they've clearly laid out their plans and have explained them - and they've taken pains to explain any apparent deviations from the plan. The graphics are a bit dated, and yet they've just received a few tweaks recently - it's not like they don't know or care. Content development is what it is. There are bigger teams, but they don't listen to feedback, and when the game is done, development halts. The game isn't shockingly unbalanced, and reliability? VO runs well on several platforms and even on somewhat elderly systems. Graphics can always be updated later on, particularly if time isn't being bled away by other tasks.

I'll keep subscribing.

Well, I appreciate the fact that everyone cares, and all the support from those who have been willing to stick with us. The view from where I sit is.. interesting. I agree with everyone in theory, practice is another story. Most of that story isn't public, and until such a time as I write a "Guild Software: The Postmortem", it isn't likely to be. But, for example, the game server has crashed twice in the last couple of weeks; one issue has been resolved (we think), the other is outstanding. I went to use a newbie sector last week and it was so overloaded from an AI pathfinding bug that docking with the station was totally impossible. Still no workaround for that, just some short-term hacks to blow away the PRM nodes and let it start over (getting bad again sometime.. later).

The former issue is, clearly, a catastrophic outage for the entire game. The latter issue simply prevents any new player from being able to do anything (also kind of important). Neither have been very widely noticed.. the crash on Friday didn't even make it to the boards. However, we notice, we have to fix this stuff, and sometimes it's really really time consuming to figure out what the hell is wrong.. or how to address it.

And that's only a tiny fragment of a picture frame. I've been working on marketing for like the last two months. I am sooo tired of it, and I'm (hopefully) wrapping it up this week, finally, but it's been necessary to keep this ship afloat. People always say "well, if you only added X, we'd come flooding back!", and although I appreciate the individual sentiment (which may be true), aggregated reality does not bear out those promises. People told me that about dropping FF in grayspace, or various other subjects, and our subscriber graph didn't even blip. Marketing, however, does make a very visible impact, on our graphs and our bottom line, and I happen to be the guy who is the least-bad at it. I'm also the game designer, so that takes me and sticks me off doing something to keep the company alive, that I don't particularly want to do, and isn't central to the creation of more content.

Life is life, one does what one can, makes the seemingly-best choices based on the visible picture at the time. It's good to hear everyone's glad we're here, and hopefully we'll continue to be. There are a lot of things I've wanted to get done this year, and well.. as usual, we've had a lot of rather-shitty challenges come up (again, most of which I won't be discussing); but we're here, and we'll keep moving forward.

There's quite a bit of low-hanging-fruit gameplay that's possible in the next few weeks, assuming I don't get hit with some other BS. Michael has fixed some long-term plaguing bugs (like the npc docking thing) that partially prevented us from making heavy use of "random" NPCs. Believe it or not, this does tie into things like "rare drops" and other simple stuff.

At the end of the day, there are only so many hours, and so many people to fill them. You guys know we don't have many of either. It's easy to say "but X seems so simple!", but that doesn't mean it isn't time consuming. And that doesn't mean we don't have some crash, or some critical need, or some personnel issue that's gumming up our works. We do the best we can; and while our choices may be far from perfect sometimes, we do keep moving forward.

i am just curious how you guys are staying afloat? let's say you have 100 subscribers each month, which i think is high, but whatever, that's $1000/month, between 4 developers that's $250/month. is that really your paycheck for the month? if you have day jobs, then that would explain the "lack of time" to do stuff.

After 6 years, I think it's safe to say that "a few hundred folk" are the only ones who think that way.

that may be the first thing you ever said that i agree with.

Now, 6 years later, 8 since initiation of development, the game is inherently the same as it was in 2003, and then in 2005. Yes, the universe was expanded, and yes ships and some things like CTC/Border Skirmish has been added, but many of the major draws for players, like Capital-class ships, have remained elusive, and largely hidden projects for years, during which eager players have become jaded, and negative, or have outright left the game completely. The severe lack of visible progress in this field has also contributed to player attrition, as Capital-classes have been "In-Development" since Alpha Test, yet, there is no sign of them being introduced anytime in the foreseeable future

you hit it on the head. many of us have been patient. many of us "haven't logged in for quite some time". however, we are all over the message boards and irc. we know exactly whats going on ingame. i am still waiting for VO to catch up to the rest of the world because it is very, very fun. there is no other game like it, but we need more stuff to do. i got to the point where i was spending $10 to fly around. My ping was always over 500 so PvP was out of the question, what else is there? My licenses are 13's or so, and i am already bored.

Ecka, your first post was right on, too; we are all saying the same thing. the reason people don't subscribe and watch is because they are waiting, like many of us, for vo to catch up.

btw, 12 active players atm

Because they have around 1000 subs per month, not 100. So multiply everything by 10. Still a small amount, when you consider the cost of rent, bills, colo bills, etc.

Jesus christ Armonia, do you even know how to read?

From the post with the big red name just above yours:
People always say "well, if you only added X, we'd come flooding back!", and although I appreciate the individual sentiment (which may be true), aggregated reality does not bear out those promises. People told me that about dropping FF in grayspace, or various other subjects, and our subscriber graph didn't even blip.

In case there are too many long words in that for you, I'll translate:
Your sentiment that the reason there aren't more subscribers is because the people that would subscribe are waiting for some feature or other is contrary to the truth.

At any rate, I also don't understand where this conversation came from, and would like to respond to Shape's post:
I don't think it's a very good idea to create balance simply by flooding the market with addons and ships of varying quality. I feel like this approach will have two major problems:

1)It will be very confusing for the newbs. As it is, 70% of the stuff I could buy I would never buy. If there are ten times more available addons, the number of addons that are actually used isn't likely to go up, so instead of 70%, there will now be 97% utterly useless addons. It's not going to be easy for newbs to pick out the useful 3%, and so they're likely to get frustrated and bugger off.

Of course, one obvious solution to that problem is to simply trim off the least used addons, but that brings me to my second major problem:

2) Pumping! Supposing the new addons are, as you say, centered around some creatively defined balance point, and are created with a fairly gaussian distribution around that point. Each new addon, then, has a small chance to be a tad better than the best addon in its class. At that point, it becomes the best addon in its class, and probably stays as the most commonly used for quite a while. Meanwhile, the worst usable addon in that class slips out of the usable range and into the world of utterly useless. The usable addons then, as a group, get a bit better.
Repeat this cycle a few more times, and the usable addons are a whole lot better than a few months or years ago. What's more, there's less chance of a new addon making it into the usable class, and so the balancing process essentially stops, with very occasional small changes to the addons used.
Of course, better addons are better, right?
Except that, of course, better addons are faster, more accurate, and probably prettier. That means that it takes more skill to avoid fire from them, and less skill to mine more crap.
And so again, the newbs are alienated, and those that aren't driven off have a smaller chance to be twitchy enough to be competitive in a combat situation.

I think the problem with adding things to the game is they never change the status quo of what is the best ship/weapon for the job every new ship that is added to the game is nerfed to hell in every other category for example the raptor it sucks the greyhound can't do anything but be used by ninnys to spam swarms and run away. none of those ships are changing gameplay in a significant enough way.

another example of this would be the /gunner command and the shield turrets. a ship with two people in it doesn't do better in combat then a ship piloted by one person and the shield turrets (massive credit bug aside) aren't being used at all

I think when version 2.0 comes out VO should do some serious ship/weapons tweaking to bring in fresh new gameplay

Genka:

1) I don't know that that's true, I don't think the system comes to equilibrium that quickly. 70% is unusable now because the system hasn't really changed much in the past 3 years, and people have adapted to the balance. With a large increase in the volume of new ships/weapons, I think the sheer time required to come to equilibrium (and the associated experimentation) would create a large amount of enthusiasm.

An Example:

Right now the vult mk II is unused, because it's just a very mildly worse platform than the mk III, the mk IV is also unused, for similar reasons.

But if a new player picked up either one of those 2 ships, they'd find no problems with it. And if they PvP'ed it would be only a very slight disadvantage.

The only reason that we know any different, is because ships have been around for long enough, that we all know their place in the hierarchy, and what weapon loadouts are the best. I think it took us a long time to get to that point, I remember a lot of experimentation not 2-3 years ago.

My point is, I don't think newbs would get frustrated by too many choices, I think they'd grab one that they liked and fly with it for a while. World of Warcraft, for example, overloads their players with choices. They don't seem to be having too many problems.

2) I think maybe you're assuming only one dimension of quality.

Assuming I have a blaster balancing equation:

let V be the velocity
let M be the mass
let E be the the energy usage per shot
let R be the rate of fire
let D be the damage per shot,
let Z be the quality of autoaim (1,2,3,4)

(A1,A2,A3,A4, A5 are constants to be tweaked)
then a balancing equation could look like this:

A1*(V-195)^3 + A2/M + A3*R^2*D + A4/(R*E) + A5*D + A6*Z^4= Const + (some small random number less than Const, just for interesting variation.)

(note the velocity and rate of fire are cubed and squared respectively in order that a small increase in one of these 2 should require large losses in all the other areas. Also Damage is included twice, for the rate of damage, and the first shot, the rate of damage is what makes neuts powerful, the first shot is what makes gauss powerful. So it accounts for the First shot is free phenomena)

Now, randomly create all blaster drops by bots according to this equation. I think you'll find a range of weapons,

The energy economizers, (multi sector chasers)
The high damage/sec guys (single sector chasers, duelists)
The pure first shot guys (gauss players)
The folks who want to be as light as humanly possible (Ultralights)
The guys who can't be bothered to aim (Heavies)

So we end up with 5 different types of focused weapons, which trade off in the other areas, so players might find a variation of a gun that suits their style of play.

It also offers up something VO hasn't quite worked out yet, crafting, REAL crafting, the ability to make weapons for a market based on an underlying understanding of balance. (With an occasional critical success or failure)

Not just the old "Bring me 10 bear pelts and I'll give you an ion blaster" kind of crafting. The "Okay I want to increase the damage, so I need this mineral, but that also is going to increase the mass and decrease the rate of fire"

You could have a whole little minigame where they choose various minerals for different parts of the gun, and have those minerals interact in interesting ways.

Basically, if you build a system for balance, you open up a lot more interesting gameplay than trying to one-at-a-time it.

Jesus Christ Genka, can you put a light on so you can see beyond the darkest place of that horse's ass your living in? i, obviously, disagree with inc. just because he said it doesnt make it true.

oh, and the reason the graph didnt blip, is because those who are waiting, arent waiting for just "x", they are waiting for "x" "y" & "z". and what graph are we talking about? the new subscriber graph or the number of subscribers for the month? because, obviously, if those who are waiting tried it, the 'new subscriber graph' would barely blip.

Because they have around 1000 subs per month, not 100.

i doubt it.

My point is, I don't think newbs would get frustrated by too many choices, I think they'd grab one that they liked and fly with it for a while. World of Warcraft, for example, overloads their players with choices. They don't seem to be having too many problems.

exactly. we dont have anything now besides weapons or mining lasers (practically). how about tractor beams? cloaking? shields? probes? warp scramblers? cpu scramblers? afterburners (thrust boosters)? in fact, any kind of attribute enhancer? what we need is weps and ships and other things high license players can unlock. a gun with a license rating of 15/15/15 for example. so what if it would pwn a noob? i can be a 6/6/6 in less than a day, and that is already half the items in the game. the new badges were a good start.

so we wait ...