Should there be more unique ships?

[Duvelske]

Wait, hold on a second, Jinx. You were given the ability to create a custom ship for in-game use that only you could fly and would fit to your roleplay exactly and then you choose to roleplay it such that no one ever sees it?

Given that Jinx made i think the most ships in the game its his decision to do what he pleases with a ship HE created. And like he did meantion here:

edit: those who seriously wanted to get involved with the ship inRP - were always given not only a chance but encouragement to do so. ( unless their RP was "omg, i wanne see the ship - where are you" - also the ship is usually in delta or around - no secret there )

I can verrify that. He always was supportive and he did even loan his ship to the phoenix because otherwise it would have collected dust.

That collection of Jinx' stuff is so epic, we should have like.....90% of that in game.

I think its like 80% of jinx his models wich is flying ingame.

Also another question for everyone. If who should model all those unique ships? Do not forget it needs balance too. Blodo & Aerelm do the balancing these days, but i doubt that Jinx for example is willing to create whole days special ships for each and everyone out of nothing. If its allowed it would be nice, but then i would suggest only faction ships. Or player owned ships which belongs to a faction. Ak the Tundra which is a player owned ship, but the lead of K'hara has its keys. And thus is basically a K'Hara faction ship.

I wouldn't be overly focused on making them balanced either, they're SUPPOSED to be special, so let them be a little overpowered, if the player has done enough to be given a special ship, then the player is worthy of a slightly stronger ship than the others.

Its balance must be done on a way that if it would be OP the ship must have some restrictions ID wise. Ak a Zoner not able to shoot first is always in disadvantage. Things like that, or Nomads being chased by everyone on sight. (even ones which aren't allowed to fire on you in the first place, but they do.)

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[Govedo13]

Well yes more unique ships please, add flaggships as well, give bonuses for factions, however add proper penalties for them too.
Now in reality:
Devs does not like the idea much because it creates hassle for them to balance the said ships even if they are made perfect by the ship creator, if not then they need to rework them and this creates even more work.
The truth is that discovery is dying because the Dev team is too small and instead of trying to make deving more accessible to the players so much more people create content and the core Dev team only inspects the content and add it to the game if the Dev clear written criteria are fulfilled. Now they try to do everything alone and fail big time meanwhile.

Making proper tutorials, FAQs and creating criteria and procedures only would enable the players to be Devs as well, if the team is 10 times bigger we would get a way better mod with many more functions.
As long as the Devs have closed forums and only few people do the whole work we cannot expect to have quality product based on the work of selected few volunteers. The truth is that 95% of Discovery problems could be solved by simple manpower grinding also 95 % of the things that Devs refuse to do are time- consumption based. Things are possible but the people that are supposed to be doing them are just not existent in the current Dev model. By changing the Model everyone can contribute even with minor things but if we have let say 100 active contributing Devs the Main Dev team could focus only on Balance and FLHook actually.
The rest minor and time consuming tasks could be executed by the large group of contributing Devs.

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[Tachyon]

I voted yes.
And I don't care about how active those chars would be. I don't even think it should be oh too special to get a single special ship.
Those things are cool. And they make stuff more interesting, appealing.

I don't get the pessimistic attitude here at all.

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[Croft]

I voted yes but not as a reward for good RP or completing a goal. I'd suggest making unique ships for factions, and not all of them like the utter nonsense of capital ships we currently have, I'm thinking special battleships/liners for heads of state and one House specific liner for the larger trading factions. A grand total of 9 extra ships (Kusari has their head of state ship already.)

Instead of giving them to one person make them a reward for becoming an official faction, that way it can kept as a tool for RP and an added incentive for people to take up the banner of their chosen faction.

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Jimmy The Rat | Croft's Feedback | The Rat Pack

[lIceColon]

about unique ships being OP, i think it really should depend.
say you rp a hero.
in any good story, the hero doesn't die. at least not until the end.
So it would make sense that the hero lasts much, much longer than the average lifespan of the rest of our characters.
Especially for the roleplay, i mean if you really want to make good RP you must always play in iron man hardcore mode- but in rp. and the only way to keep a ship alive in this situation is to make it OP.
when I play, most chars die alot.
Now I'm sure the best of us make silly mistakes, but when a good character dies, it STAYS DEAD- doesn't just come back alive again after 2 hours. therefore to avoid a ship from exploding when it shouldn't be, you OP it. singleplayer mode does it all the time, and according to singleplayer games, the only hero is a op hero. so in such instance, the ship should be op.
however if you are rping a ship that is supposed to be weak but contains a very powerful person, then you should have proper escorts around it everytime you fly- and this is the disadvantage of unique ships- if it is weak, then you need multiple players around at the same time, or risk getting it blown up when it's not supposed to be.
as for the existence of unique ships, you either fit the rp, or you make the rp fit you.

just cause you do not see a ship does not mean it is not there. - the core RP of a nephiilim is to be "hidden" - that means "not seen".

for example in this case, unless jinx is prepared to spend all day flying this mostly without any player interaction then it should probably only exist in lore, a ship that roleplay wise exists extremely publically on the other hand (such as the flagship of an space megapersonality doing public events, an incredibly efficient patrol ship or a persistent and slippery black market trader) should be manned a frequently as possible, in shifts if required. (of course, the megapersonality's ship will have high defensive capability and probably need op escorts, the patrol ship needs to be op in combat and CD, and the black market trader needs to be op in speed and stealth)
also i agree with croft that the ships should not be given out as a reward. if it were for a competition, ppl like me wouldn't stand a chance (not that I'd be able to give it much activity), and prevents less competitive players from standing a chance. I think that for unique ships, if a person is willing to spend time on modelling it and making it reasonably "balanced" and has a proper back story and has demonstrated the competence to man the ship properly (or knows someone who can man and rp the ship properly), then that unique ship should exist. Unique ships should be less "i made a cool ship, best arper gets it", but rather a effort from a group/individual that have demonstrated that their unique ship is a good idea, they are willing to put the effort in making the ship and they will use it responsibly.

tl;dr: yes. anyone should be able to have a unique ship if they put in the time and effort and have demonstrated competence

edit: some elaboration- ultimately think of this as a staged thing- you have to make sure the props fit, the story is good and the actors are appropriate. once you got these 3 aspects solved there's no reason not to do it.

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No atmosphere? GTFO.
The propeller is the greatest invention of all time.

[Govedo13]

http://discoverygc.com/forums/showthread...ght=pirate

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[aerelm]

I've always had a mixed feeling when it comes to unique ships. On one hand, they are a good flavor to the game, but on the other they often turn into "unnecessary addition" after some time which can't be removed or replaced because they still may be in use on other servers.

The ultimate solution would be introducing a system similar to the one we use for Player Faction IDs right now, which would allow the mod to use unique ships and grant them to individuals and factions, but once they get bored and leave the game, allow the ships to be recycled and replaced without much hassle. Main challenge though, would be designing and implementing such system. Once and if that's done, unique ships can be added without having to worry about ending up with a ton of unused ships which each have their own individual owner InRP and can't be reused for another concept.

The current disadvantage of unique ships is that they get used by one player, then he either gets bored or gets too caught up with RL to play, and the ships end up just occupying mod space without having any actual use. Later on another player may show up with a solid enough idea to reuse the ship for another concept, but no matter what, long as it's the same ship it would not fit the new character as good as a unique ship should. i.e. they turn into shiny toys which everyone wants but no one can get. Same has happened with each and every unique ship in the mod at least at one point since they were added, and same has even happened with ships and equipment added for closed factions. Phantom tech is a clear example to prove even giving them to a faction won't be a 100% guarantee of ships being used indefinitely and not ending up as dead and forbidden tech, and recently we had another one of such factions disbanding, with the talks of it tech turning into a pseudo-phantom situation.

If there is a functioning system proposed to prevent such cases, I'm sure most of the staff who're skeptical about the idea of unique ships will let the idea fly, if they know each new ship added would be easily recyclable and won't turn into another unused "legacy ship".

[Govedo13]

I agree with aerelm here.
May be the best way is to add 5-6 bases with ship vendors in Bastille. So the unique ships could be bought only by Admin staff and be given to factions not to individual players. If the unique ships stay in the mod as files there is no problem at all as long as they create no Lore problems. The whole 4.86 ship folder is around 38 mb, even if we get this doubled it is still nothing.
There should be additional set of rules for unique ships, also dead penalties and RP penalties for the destruction of unique ships can be implemented. Also this could be extended to faction capital ships used as flag ships- normal faction cap but with more buffed armour for example or bit buffed stats.
If there is concern about inactive unique ships they could be added into the tracker with let say 5-10 hours monthly activity, when the activity is not met then the admins can acquire back the unique ship.

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[Zen_Mechanics]

As far as I know, only 3 ships are unique, umbrage is not one of them and its sad.
Edit : we are fooling ourselves, this thread is unlikely to go to the admins desk.

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Were fools to make war on our brothers in arms.

[Echelon]

As far as I know, only 3 ships are unique, umbrage is not one of them and its sad.
Edit : we are fooling ourselves, this thread is unlikely to go to the admins desk.

Umbrage is a phantom ship as you know and I Highly doubt anyone will get a phoom ship ever.

Also I fully support this idea it will make people Roleplay more and will be more fun.

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