11-11-2016, 07:41 AM
The ingame experience of playing a literal Junker was great. It gave me a reason for using one of the most horrible ships PvP-wise, as the Bustard is practically born for stupid things like this. It was a week of testing. A week of enjoying the odds of Lolberty. Watching the people ganking each other was pretty funny, and all that at the only cost of being pirated every now and then. Or every now and then getting metagamed by people magically knowing when I'm online and contacting me, which is always funny when you're two or three systems away, cloaked or both.
The idea and intention behind it was to offer something active to explain how soooo many people got their hands on ships of factions there aren't really that much to have - people often complain about "how did you get that?", as getting snubs and gunboats of a certain faction doesn't require SRPing it, nor does it require finding an answer to the question. Some people do that, give their characters a decent background, others give a shit on that, and others just make up imaginary friends to have an on-spot-answer. Since we Junker factions don't offer a service like that, and nobody else neither, I wanted to give it a shot.
The concept was rushed, and I didn't really looked at how it would look to people that put months and months on SRPing their caps, be it original or not. Basically the idea was to play a vulture, wait for people to kill each other and gather what is left. To simulate it, I set myself a few limitations, but obviously those weren't enough, what one week of trying that kind of gameplay showed pretty much. When I set the limits, I thought gathering 10 parts of a battleship would be a pain in the ass. When the first day was over, I already had six parts of a Valor, because GRN and Lolberty had a fight in Magellan and I creeped up on it, staying for three hours during that night in the system to simulate the salvaging process, as well as moving the Salvager from Magellan to Rochester (later Puerto Rico) to simulate the transport of the debris from A to B, as even a Bustard can only carry so much debris of a long ship like a Valor. That was basically the most boring part, as I had forced myself to stay available during all that time to make sure I would offer opportunities for RP-encounters, telling people what the ship is currently doing and such.
Another part of the concept was taking screenshots both of something that shows the ship's class as well as the proof of that ship being destroyed while the Salvager was around. To ensure I would have all that, I also recorded those battles and later took screens from the footage, as it was easier than making 1000 screenshots of all the ships in radar range and keep track on who has left and who joined the battle. The thing was less not to just say "I hab da screenshots, so I hab da dabreez" but for transparency, to show ooRP "Okay, a ship was destroyed there and left debris there to loot". I thought that was the best solution to indicate the salvaging process, as showing the entire process of being there during the battle and then remaining for minutes and in some cases hours at the battlefield. Like, nobody would watch a footage of a Bustard standing around the entire time, as there is no ingame mechanic to show the salvaging process.
So, that was all fun and all. I had some nice RP encounters, be it with other Junkers, the cyber party infront of Manhattan, Lolberty's military and their archenemies and also a few other unique people that popped up and showed their interest in getting their hands on the stuff I salvaged.
And that's the point: There are people that welcome that kind of roleplay, as it is an alternative to either steal technology or buy it from their owners. So isn't everything cool then?
No.
It took basically a week of receiving the first negative feedback, and that only via accident, when someone posted a quote of another skype chat. That struck me, because it was not only sudden, but also very clear. And the worst part of it: Nobody told me directly. Now here I could blame myself for not making a feedback thread for Liz and her gameplay concept, but people who give something on their mental health don't do feedback threads.
There is only a small amount of people of the community I actually have in Skype as contacts. I just don't like joining bigger factions with lots of random people, since most factions have their weird members. One can't deny that. However, I was surprised nobody made a direct statement. They just tagged along or didn't care. I don't blame them, I just tell that to have people understand I really was surprised about the feedback then.
So in the Vagrants chat, one told me then, telling me what people were pissed about. That person raised good points and I totally agree with them. Since I really want to hold up some quality standards, both in people dealing with me ooRP in a reasonable manner, but also with RP quality, I took the feedback really, really seriously, and to prevent people from thinking I just don't give a fuck about the entire topic, I requested to delete the Salvaging Thread and made a move to sell a bunch of ships, including the Salvager.
The raised points we in fact following things:
- Reconstruction of Capital Ships is both inRP and ooRP a terrible thing with the concept as it was. While the intention behind reconstructing those was simply "It's just a ship one player will later have to toy around with. Look at how happy Kalh is with his Osiris, for example". Some people simply want ship x to be playable with character x. And a capital ship is just a capital ship, gameplaywise. The weakest link, in case of Battleships, even. And, given the size of caps, it actually should be more easily to put them back together than putting together small ships. Remember the vanilla battleships Trent smashed in the Singeplay Campaign? Those ships didn't get blown into thousands of pieces, but mostly into two or three big chunks. Now we don't have that with any of the mod-contend-caps, so it's just a thing of imagination.
However! People usually do SRPs for capitals, and a lot of people did that, and a lot of those people probably got pissed by something popping up and wanting to just put those capitals back together in a more or less cheap way, probably by just screenshotting blues of other and jerking off the idling time. Now that's an overexaggerated way of saying it, but I have a feeling that's close to the thoughts. But that's not what I did and that's not what I wanted. Undermining people's SRPs with that? When I did the concept, I didn't even think about that, and that's a problem. The probably best while not entirely most inRP logical solution: Let's just not include capital ships here. Let capital ships just stay a thing people should SRP themselves. There will probably still opportunities to combine the people's attempts of SRPing with the salvaging concept, and I'd look forward to it.
Another point:
- Not having to use blueprints.
I think there is a misconception on this topic, although I understand people being salty about it. Blueprints are, whenever I read about them on this forum, a topic related to toxic posts. "How can you inRP have the spare parts for ship x?" "How did you get the blueprints of ship x?" "Why does your ID allow this ship with only 75% technerf?" Just another reason to show how important transparency and an overview over done RP is, but that's not the matter here. The intention was to use debris of a number of ships of a class and put the stuff back together. Like a puzzle. Is it that easy? Is it just patchworking? Theoretically, yes, totally. When you have the spare parts, you can refit everything. You don't need to know how to create technology when you can use still working parts of wrecks. Again, not everything blows up when a ship gets destroyed, and in theory, looking at the guns and explosions ingame, big ships are easier than small ships. However, that all is just a matter of imagination and representation of things ingame and inRP. Aside from that, I never claimed the intention to bring ships back to 100%. Basically, a reconstructed ship is the explanation for a technerf to 75%. After all, Liz' crew is just a bunch of easy mechanics and engineers. They aren't super-high-ranked-LSF-Order-scientist-Seamus-Harpers that save the Andromeda during the episode's climax situation. The ships we have ingame, as well as their explosions, also are just representations. You think you get a totally shiny Guardian? You get a Guardian that is glued together like the ugly [url=http://discoverygc.com/wiki/"Recycler"_Junker_Super_Heavy_Fighter]Recycler[/url].
However. Since I myself found it too easy to just come up with the first Guardian within one week, I think reverse-engineering of ships would be a cool addition to the concept, as some ships are flying special snowflakes, like Auxesian assets (as they have to rely on other shiplines). But what is appropiate here? We don't want to have it look like powergaming. That's the worst thing one could want. I don't want that. In fact, I want to offer something that is accepted by the majority of the community. So how do I simulate reverse engineering?
Here I thought about using the same method I used to get the ships together: Collecting debris. My current thought on it is basically having the debris to reconstruct three ships of a class. Those debris can't be used to build the ships anymore. They are dismantled. Gone. And that's already it? No. I also want to RP the reverse-engineering, something like a catalogue, including time- and crew-management. Asingning people to do the job, but when more projects are around, either reverse-engineer or work on the reconstruction of a ship. Ever played Starscape? If you know it, you know what I mean. However, that's just a little bit of detailwork. To put it short - a funny thing to say here, after already having written a wall of text many people, if not most people, can't be arsed to read - the idea so far looks like this:
- Step one: Reverse-engineering
-- > Gather enough pieces of a ship class to reconstruct it three times.
-- > Have a certain amount of time passing by to simulate the people working and researching (a week for a fighter/freighter, a month for a gunboat/transport at full crew capacity)
-- > Write a catalogue entry about the makeshift-blueprints
- Step two: Construction
-- > Gather enough pieces of a ship class to reconstruct it.
-- > Have a certain amount of time passing by to simulate the people working on the ship (three days for a fighter/freighter, two weeks for a gunboat/transport at full crew capacity)
- Step three: Profit
-- > Sell the stuff, make moneys (since the ship is probably a black market deal, it will cost way more than the usual ship price - at least inRP, I think it's important to be able to negotiate how to solve it ooRP, as people probably already have purchased the ship ingame)
Does that seem more fair? Tell me in the comments, subscribe to my channel and give thumbs up or I'll break them!
So here we have the basics, but what ship needs how many debris to reconstruct it? To be frank, I think five debris of a fighter is a fair amount to reconstruct it (after having RE'd it), however Gunboats, I think, as they are mostly twice to thrice the size of a snub, should be raised to ten debris. I say that with a tear in my eyes, knowing that gunboats are one of the rarely used ship size classes ingame, while everyone and their mother are using snubs and Liberty Dreadnoughts and Carriers and the lame LABC. Seriously, I wouldn't let my ditto produce eggs with an LABC.
Light Fighters: 3 (rarely used)
Heavy Fighters: 5
Very Heavy Fighters: 5
Super Heavy Fighters: 5 (rarely used)
Bombers: 5
Freighters: 5 (rarely used)
Gunboats: 10 (uncommonly used, including Corvo)
Transports: 10 (including Liners, as they are also rarely used, as well as the Bustard)
All those ships are basically openly available to most generic IDs, and I think it's mostly only the generic IDs that would use the service I'd offer. Gunboats, Freighters, Super Heavy Fighters and Liners will be a pain in the ass to get the debris, but I'd rather have a somewhat logical and transparent set number here than decreasing the numbers based on how often ships are used.
Now one last point: The salvaging process itself. That's a little difficult topic, because of some reasons.
First of all: The fact of being a vulture. I have to say for myself, I absolutely hate it when people drop by a running fight to watch, as you always have the feeling of "Oh no, that fag joins any moment!" and both inRP as well as ooRP the players could think "Oh no, that Bustard/Salvager/Collector/Wrecker/Whatnot is just waiting for me to cause debris". That's surely annoying for some peeps, especially when they hear the sound of a cloaked salvager over them and get told by the beloved player list "Oh, it's that person. ._."
Now inRP that still opens some windows of opportunity, and I'm actually glad some peeps used it, like Auxesia asking Liz to not reverse-engineer their shiet. Instead they made a contract with Liz, although I had to shake my head on the explanation for the conditions.
Second of all: Simulation of the progress. So I thought the number of required debris to restore a ship would be a good number of minutes for time neccessary to salvage a wreck. For example, for a Light Fighter, it would be three minutes, or for a gunboat, ten minutes. Since caps aren't a think here anymore, things should be more easy for all sides, as I don't need to force myself to hang around Freeport 4 for multiple hours with 90% of the time just being on my own. In rare cases, if there was a battle happening with more gunboats involved, it would require me to stay for a bit longer. That's okay, I think.
Then, the notifications. Usually, when I played Liz, I waited for the fight to be done. In some cases, I waited for people being out of scanner range (of their scanner range) to type the usual lines like "Liz: Dropping salvaging drones. ETA is five minutes." or something - is that sneaky? Noone would yell into the public comm "HEY, IMA STEALING YOUR EFFING TECHNOLOGY HERE FECKER!!". What's a good alternative here? Writing a descriptive line in the chat like *The hangar bay of the Bustard opens the doors, releasing a swarm of salvaging drones, heading for the debris.* ? Another option would be to just drop the shields to show that. Here I'm actually a bit unsure what would be both a good indicator while offering enough RP opportunities. Like, something must happen. I tend to the shielddrop thing, as it would require people to have an eye on the Bustard, instead of yelling for attention by dropping the line.
TL;DR: Sorry for not having put enough thought into the Salvaging Concept I played the last week. It was a test and the week and the feedback showed me the flaws. I really, really didn't want to piss people off or had the intention of Instant-Soup-SRPs. That's not what I wanted. I'm working on a more flawless concept, as it was fun to play this way and I can imagine to have a group of people playing this way, as it has longterm-goals. Seeing people finding it powergamey and calling it "pure hate material" clearly shows there were changes needed. So putting it short:
- The concept will be revamped.
- No capitals (cruisers/battleships)
- Even more transparency
- the revamped concept will get a clean, eye-friendly thread to explain it
- Reverse-engineering/blueprinting
- shaving birbs
- this is not flood, guys
The idea and intention behind it was to offer something active to explain how soooo many people got their hands on ships of factions there aren't really that much to have - people often complain about "how did you get that?", as getting snubs and gunboats of a certain faction doesn't require SRPing it, nor does it require finding an answer to the question. Some people do that, give their characters a decent background, others give a shit on that, and others just make up imaginary friends to have an on-spot-answer. Since we Junker factions don't offer a service like that, and nobody else neither, I wanted to give it a shot.
The concept was rushed, and I didn't really looked at how it would look to people that put months and months on SRPing their caps, be it original or not. Basically the idea was to play a vulture, wait for people to kill each other and gather what is left. To simulate it, I set myself a few limitations, but obviously those weren't enough, what one week of trying that kind of gameplay showed pretty much. When I set the limits, I thought gathering 10 parts of a battleship would be a pain in the ass. When the first day was over, I already had six parts of a Valor, because GRN and Lolberty had a fight in Magellan and I creeped up on it, staying for three hours during that night in the system to simulate the salvaging process, as well as moving the Salvager from Magellan to Rochester (later Puerto Rico) to simulate the transport of the debris from A to B, as even a Bustard can only carry so much debris of a long ship like a Valor. That was basically the most boring part, as I had forced myself to stay available during all that time to make sure I would offer opportunities for RP-encounters, telling people what the ship is currently doing and such.
Another part of the concept was taking screenshots both of something that shows the ship's class as well as the proof of that ship being destroyed while the Salvager was around. To ensure I would have all that, I also recorded those battles and later took screens from the footage, as it was easier than making 1000 screenshots of all the ships in radar range and keep track on who has left and who joined the battle. The thing was less not to just say "I hab da screenshots, so I hab da dabreez" but for transparency, to show ooRP "Okay, a ship was destroyed there and left debris there to loot". I thought that was the best solution to indicate the salvaging process, as showing the entire process of being there during the battle and then remaining for minutes and in some cases hours at the battlefield. Like, nobody would watch a footage of a Bustard standing around the entire time, as there is no ingame mechanic to show the salvaging process.
So, that was all fun and all. I had some nice RP encounters, be it with other Junkers, the cyber party infront of Manhattan, Lolberty's military and their archenemies and also a few other unique people that popped up and showed their interest in getting their hands on the stuff I salvaged.
And that's the point: There are people that welcome that kind of roleplay, as it is an alternative to either steal technology or buy it from their owners. So isn't everything cool then?
No.
It took basically a week of receiving the first negative feedback, and that only via accident, when someone posted a quote of another skype chat. That struck me, because it was not only sudden, but also very clear. And the worst part of it: Nobody told me directly. Now here I could blame myself for not making a feedback thread for Liz and her gameplay concept, but people who give something on their mental health don't do feedback threads.
There is only a small amount of people of the community I actually have in Skype as contacts. I just don't like joining bigger factions with lots of random people, since most factions have their weird members. One can't deny that. However, I was surprised nobody made a direct statement. They just tagged along or didn't care. I don't blame them, I just tell that to have people understand I really was surprised about the feedback then.
So in the Vagrants chat, one told me then, telling me what people were pissed about. That person raised good points and I totally agree with them. Since I really want to hold up some quality standards, both in people dealing with me ooRP in a reasonable manner, but also with RP quality, I took the feedback really, really seriously, and to prevent people from thinking I just don't give a fuck about the entire topic, I requested to delete the Salvaging Thread and made a move to sell a bunch of ships, including the Salvager.
The raised points we in fact following things:
- Reconstruction of Capital Ships is both inRP and ooRP a terrible thing with the concept as it was. While the intention behind reconstructing those was simply "It's just a ship one player will later have to toy around with. Look at how happy Kalh is with his Osiris, for example". Some people simply want ship x to be playable with character x. And a capital ship is just a capital ship, gameplaywise. The weakest link, in case of Battleships, even. And, given the size of caps, it actually should be more easily to put them back together than putting together small ships. Remember the vanilla battleships Trent smashed in the Singeplay Campaign? Those ships didn't get blown into thousands of pieces, but mostly into two or three big chunks. Now we don't have that with any of the mod-contend-caps, so it's just a thing of imagination.
However! People usually do SRPs for capitals, and a lot of people did that, and a lot of those people probably got pissed by something popping up and wanting to just put those capitals back together in a more or less cheap way, probably by just screenshotting blues of other and jerking off the idling time. Now that's an overexaggerated way of saying it, but I have a feeling that's close to the thoughts. But that's not what I did and that's not what I wanted. Undermining people's SRPs with that? When I did the concept, I didn't even think about that, and that's a problem. The probably best while not entirely most inRP logical solution: Let's just not include capital ships here. Let capital ships just stay a thing people should SRP themselves. There will probably still opportunities to combine the people's attempts of SRPing with the salvaging concept, and I'd look forward to it.
Another point:
- Not having to use blueprints.
I think there is a misconception on this topic, although I understand people being salty about it. Blueprints are, whenever I read about them on this forum, a topic related to toxic posts. "How can you inRP have the spare parts for ship x?" "How did you get the blueprints of ship x?" "Why does your ID allow this ship with only 75% technerf?" Just another reason to show how important transparency and an overview over done RP is, but that's not the matter here. The intention was to use debris of a number of ships of a class and put the stuff back together. Like a puzzle. Is it that easy? Is it just patchworking? Theoretically, yes, totally. When you have the spare parts, you can refit everything. You don't need to know how to create technology when you can use still working parts of wrecks. Again, not everything blows up when a ship gets destroyed, and in theory, looking at the guns and explosions ingame, big ships are easier than small ships. However, that all is just a matter of imagination and representation of things ingame and inRP. Aside from that, I never claimed the intention to bring ships back to 100%. Basically, a reconstructed ship is the explanation for a technerf to 75%. After all, Liz' crew is just a bunch of easy mechanics and engineers. They aren't super-high-ranked-LSF-Order-scientist-Seamus-Harpers that save the Andromeda during the episode's climax situation. The ships we have ingame, as well as their explosions, also are just representations. You think you get a totally shiny Guardian? You get a Guardian that is glued together like the ugly [url=http://discoverygc.com/wiki/"Recycler"_Junker_Super_Heavy_Fighter]Recycler[/url].
However. Since I myself found it too easy to just come up with the first Guardian within one week, I think reverse-engineering of ships would be a cool addition to the concept, as some ships are flying special snowflakes, like Auxesian assets (as they have to rely on other shiplines). But what is appropiate here? We don't want to have it look like powergaming. That's the worst thing one could want. I don't want that. In fact, I want to offer something that is accepted by the majority of the community. So how do I simulate reverse engineering?
Here I thought about using the same method I used to get the ships together: Collecting debris. My current thought on it is basically having the debris to reconstruct three ships of a class. Those debris can't be used to build the ships anymore. They are dismantled. Gone. And that's already it? No. I also want to RP the reverse-engineering, something like a catalogue, including time- and crew-management. Asingning people to do the job, but when more projects are around, either reverse-engineer or work on the reconstruction of a ship. Ever played Starscape? If you know it, you know what I mean. However, that's just a little bit of detailwork. To put it short - a funny thing to say here, after already having written a wall of text many people, if not most people, can't be arsed to read - the idea so far looks like this:
- Step one: Reverse-engineering
-- > Gather enough pieces of a ship class to reconstruct it three times.
-- > Have a certain amount of time passing by to simulate the people working and researching (a week for a fighter/freighter, a month for a gunboat/transport at full crew capacity)
-- > Write a catalogue entry about the makeshift-blueprints
- Step two: Construction
-- > Gather enough pieces of a ship class to reconstruct it.
-- > Have a certain amount of time passing by to simulate the people working on the ship (three days for a fighter/freighter, two weeks for a gunboat/transport at full crew capacity)
- Step three: Profit
-- > Sell the stuff, make moneys (since the ship is probably a black market deal, it will cost way more than the usual ship price - at least inRP, I think it's important to be able to negotiate how to solve it ooRP, as people probably already have purchased the ship ingame)
Does that seem more fair? Tell me in the comments, subscribe to my channel and give thumbs up or I'll break them!
So here we have the basics, but what ship needs how many debris to reconstruct it? To be frank, I think five debris of a fighter is a fair amount to reconstruct it (after having RE'd it), however Gunboats, I think, as they are mostly twice to thrice the size of a snub, should be raised to ten debris. I say that with a tear in my eyes, knowing that gunboats are one of the rarely used ship size classes ingame, while everyone and their mother are using snubs and Liberty Dreadnoughts and Carriers and the lame LABC. Seriously, I wouldn't let my ditto produce eggs with an LABC.
Light Fighters: 3 (rarely used)
Heavy Fighters: 5
Very Heavy Fighters: 5
Super Heavy Fighters: 5 (rarely used)
Bombers: 5
Freighters: 5 (rarely used)
Gunboats: 10 (uncommonly used, including Corvo)
Transports: 10 (including Liners, as they are also rarely used, as well as the Bustard)
All those ships are basically openly available to most generic IDs, and I think it's mostly only the generic IDs that would use the service I'd offer. Gunboats, Freighters, Super Heavy Fighters and Liners will be a pain in the ass to get the debris, but I'd rather have a somewhat logical and transparent set number here than decreasing the numbers based on how often ships are used.
Now one last point: The salvaging process itself. That's a little difficult topic, because of some reasons.
First of all: The fact of being a vulture. I have to say for myself, I absolutely hate it when people drop by a running fight to watch, as you always have the feeling of "Oh no, that fag joins any moment!" and both inRP as well as ooRP the players could think "Oh no, that Bustard/Salvager/Collector/Wrecker/Whatnot is just waiting for me to cause debris". That's surely annoying for some peeps, especially when they hear the sound of a cloaked salvager over them and get told by the beloved player list "Oh, it's that person. ._."
Now inRP that still opens some windows of opportunity, and I'm actually glad some peeps used it, like Auxesia asking Liz to not reverse-engineer their shiet. Instead they made a contract with Liz, although I had to shake my head on the explanation for the conditions.
Second of all: Simulation of the progress. So I thought the number of required debris to restore a ship would be a good number of minutes for time neccessary to salvage a wreck. For example, for a Light Fighter, it would be three minutes, or for a gunboat, ten minutes. Since caps aren't a think here anymore, things should be more easy for all sides, as I don't need to force myself to hang around Freeport 4 for multiple hours with 90% of the time just being on my own. In rare cases, if there was a battle happening with more gunboats involved, it would require me to stay for a bit longer. That's okay, I think.
Then, the notifications. Usually, when I played Liz, I waited for the fight to be done. In some cases, I waited for people being out of scanner range (of their scanner range) to type the usual lines like "Liz: Dropping salvaging drones. ETA is five minutes." or something - is that sneaky? Noone would yell into the public comm "HEY, IMA STEALING YOUR EFFING TECHNOLOGY HERE FECKER!!". What's a good alternative here? Writing a descriptive line in the chat like *The hangar bay of the Bustard opens the doors, releasing a swarm of salvaging drones, heading for the debris.* ? Another option would be to just drop the shields to show that. Here I'm actually a bit unsure what would be both a good indicator while offering enough RP opportunities. Like, something must happen. I tend to the shielddrop thing, as it would require people to have an eye on the Bustard, instead of yelling for attention by dropping the line.
TL;DR: Sorry for not having put enough thought into the Salvaging Concept I played the last week. It was a test and the week and the feedback showed me the flaws. I really, really didn't want to piss people off or had the intention of Instant-Soup-SRPs. That's not what I wanted. I'm working on a more flawless concept, as it was fun to play this way and I can imagine to have a group of people playing this way, as it has longterm-goals. Seeing people finding it powergamey and calling it "pure hate material" clearly shows there were changes needed. So putting it short:
- The concept will be revamped.
- No capitals (cruisers/battleships)
- Even more transparency
- the revamped concept will get a clean, eye-friendly thread to explain it
- Reverse-engineering/blueprinting
- shaving birbs
- this is not flood, guys
