... and better player retention with it
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Recently Lauri commented in forum topic about incoming sieges feature:
“I wouldn't also classify healthy and unhealthy pvp by the actions itself but more by the effect it has to the playerbase: unhealthy pvp reduces playerbase, usually by either allowing griefing pve players or by not having pvp at all, which in turn leads pvp players to quit.”
(Perhaps some of our readers are already a bit… agitated, patience, mateys, patience!)
So, FB is on a quest for balance and, ultimately, player retention -- something we all can agree on, is a nice thing. But how to get there? Time for a healthy discussion! I gathered some good guests today.
And they are:
Removal of severe anti-griefing and anti-pirate restrictions is the key to organic PVP growth. Slapping corps with deletion for camping or demanding payment for safe passage will only end in SB being an EVE wannabe replacement game that lasts for a day and fizzles out next week.
[1stRCT] Subway:
Subway from Empire/1stRCT -- ace pilot, PvP and anti-piracy enthusiast (obviously will never target pirate press people).
Inigma from Interstellar Trading Corporation -- director with vision and aptitude to stand against forces of chaos.
Negev from Biohazard -- leader of said group, EVE veteran, and, if you have not met him before, of course, pirate.
Sigea, Ganny and Lelife and from Endokid Cloud -- active community members and representatives of newbie-friendly organization.
IvanGrozniy from Band of Outlaws -- pirate, renaissance man with strange passion for KFC.
For what? To ask them several questions around a larger fundamental topic, indeed!
Q1:
Traditional MMOs with both PvP and PvE crowds usually heavily rely on bot enemies as critical elements to oil up and balance the ecosystem. Yet games like SB cannot be equalized this way, having only much more complex player behavior based solutions. Its fundamental weakness? Opportunity?.. or both?
[1stRCT] Subway:
It is interesting sure but I feel like the playerbase will eventually eat itself so definitely a weakness. I am all for player run stuff but there needs to be a baseline that you can get from bots.
[ITC] Inigma:
I don't agree with the premise that "SB can not be equalized in this way." SB is a sandbox. It can and should be designed with whatever player demand is balanced with the vision of the developers. Do I agree with an equal amount of PVE content to PVP content, not in the least. But neither do I agree with the premise that SB is limited in its ability to find the right balance of player engagement.
[BIO] Negev:
SB has great potentional because of this. The roadmap is what moved thousands of players from all kinds of MMO's to have a peek at the game in (very) early acces. An underlayer of NPC's would be welcome however to enable a bigger variety of content - especially for a newbro.
[EKC] Ganny:
Add NPC factions which fight each other.
[EKC] Lelife:
mostly a weakness but it definitely isn't a horrible flaw.. it's just really difficult to implement in this game and probably not worth the effort.
[EKC] Sigea:
I think being able to be a part of a greater whole is going to be paramount. Burning out on this game is a very real possibility, and becoming part of a community helps a lot with preventing that burnout since you're playing the game with others.
[BOO] IvanGrozniy:
When there are no bots to farm, players can only farm rocks and... other players. This in turn creates a precarious situation. Players who like organic pvp depend on other players for their fun, while players who play Starbase for other reasons may not like to be "farmed". This can lead to tension in the community as more and more players on opposite ends of the pvp - pve divide get entreched in their positions, leading to extreme outbursts as we have already seen on Starbase Reddit on multiple occasions.
FB devs are already facing the task of leveraging the situation and making concessions. I think SB is on a long and ardous road to balance pvp and pve content, and this will be a fundamental weakness to the game as the devs try to cater to the division of players into pvp and pve gamestyles.
Q2: Speaking of player retention. With PvP players it’s more or less clear -- good fights in an interesting setting. But how do you personally see the key to retention of PvE players in such a game? What really can make them engaged for a really long time? What complex features and fundamental game loops?
[1stRCT] Subway:
The game needs to be rewarding. You need to be able to do something with your mats. Real and working stations will let any guy build his little hut and make it a real living station. Like being able to make your ships, make your tools, make money, etc. I feel like that is rewarding enough.
[ITC] Inigma:
The key to PVP in a sandbox game is to treat it as a sandbox and not as a schoolyard. Permit safe zone camping - and this is coming from an anti-pirate corp! Respond to negative content with positive content, not with deletions and bans. Are griefers camping safe zone borders and gates? Then develop an NPC reactionary police force like EVE Online does, or else commission moderators in uberships to blast reported groups of illegal campers in the meantime. Why ban what you can explode? Make it a job people can apply for!Removal of severe anti-griefing and anti-pirate restrictions is the key to organic PVP growth. Slapping corps with deletion for camping or demanding payment for safe passage will only end in SB being an EVE wannabe replacement game that lasts for a day and fizzles out next week.
[BIO] Negev:
I believe player retention must be focused on getting people into PVP. Either directly as fresh recruits get dropped into an ongoing capital battle or indirectly harvesting the resources to build the capital in the first place. PVE only needs variety and scaling difficulty and risks.
[EKC] Ganny:
Have those NPC factions give quests for resources, cargo transport, and bounty missions against hostile NPC factions.
[EKC] Lelife:
A fun grind towards an obtainable goal. For ship builders/programmers this is easy, really fancy ships take a lot of time and effort.. for mining it will probably be diversity, Having to do the same thing over and over but farther away will get stale.. something like an upgrade loop (tiered mining lasers as a very basic example) where you need to have mined/done X to be able to make something that can mine Y could be a big help. Sigea
[EKC] Sigea:
I think being able to be a part of a greater whole is going to be paramount. Burning out on this game is a very real possibility, and becoming part of a community helps a lot with preventing that burnout since you're playing the game with others.
[BOO] IvanGrozniy: I think what earns PVE players the most respect from the whole community (including PVP oriented players) is when PVErs integrate themselves into the larger context of whatever is going on in the game universe, be it wars, factions disputes, events, helping new players, creating supplies and trade routes, acting as medics and repair engineers in fights, etc.
There are lots of possibilities and opportunities for FB debs to elaborate on mechanics that allow for more logistical, industrial and manufacturing gameplay, player markets, and much more. What is offputting is when players segregate themselves from the mmo playerbase. While this in itself is normal, there is however a subset of such players that will demand mechanics that will leave them in perpetual safety nets and a personal sandbox apart from the dunes of the larger mmo. Lets not name any names (but their initials start with D and L), there are mmos where only a fraction of people end up playing them, the people who like seeing numbers and buildings go up, the people who don't give a hell of beans if there are 10,000 concurrent players or just 10 as long as they get to play in their sandbox.
Q3: Risk and reward balance is definitely a big part of fun in games, especially MMOs. How do you see a good design philosophy for it in Starbase with both PvP and PvE players in one pot? Do we need a softer approach, where risk only grants you faster progression/assets accumulation? Or is there a need for some “elitist” rewards to keep most restless, competitive players engaged?
[1stRCT] Subway:
I think the game has a good idea. Like how T1 mats are in the safezone while the good ores are outside. Like this safezone noobs are forced to use shitty ships while people who go outside the safezone are rewarded. Tho rarer ores need to be closer, because not everyone has 4 hours to go on a mining trip.
[ITC] Inigma:
The risk to reward currently sucks in this game. Everyone knows it takes far more hours to design a good ship, less hours to mine for it, and even less hours to fly it, and an instant to lose it. Content planning - specifically designing blueprints, should not be limited to a physical locale in the game.
Right now players are stuck with the stupid choice of spending their precious gaming hours either in Space AutoCAD or travelling for hours as part of a crew. Why is this even a thing? What logic prevails here? Make the Spaceship Editor Universally Accessible via the menu no matter where you are!
Players COULD be working on making quality blueprints as they wait out the boring bits of Starbase travel as part of a ship crew. This gets more ships out flying, thus more pvp opportunities, at the same time would generate more blueprint content! It's a freakin' win win here. Adding the editor to stations or capitals is not a fix for this, but a bandaid applied to the wrong wound - it just adds more static locations for the same lame choice to be made. I thought encouraging people flying around is a good thing?
[BIO] Negev:
The higher the reward - the bigger the risk.
[EKC] Ganny:
Having resources that are only achieved in PvP space is a great way for factions to come together. This being said it kills solo player game play.
[EKC] Lelife:
I think the current balance is good (although capital ships/sieges will give a more complete picture when thats out)
[EKC] Sigea:
As the others said, resources outside SZ are very important. Having a proper balance between rarity of a resource and corporation size needed to make good use of them is also really important in my eyes: if you restrict an ore to a faraway moon out of reach of most mid-size corps, you get the situation where large corps and alliances have a monopoly on it. This isn't a problem in itself, unless it's used in many pieces of technology a mid-size corp would be interested in (t3 ship machinery, smaller capital ships, etc)
[BOO] IvanGrozniy:
... (very long answer warning!)
To answer this question fully, I need to backtrack a bit and look at this PVP vs PVE divide more fundamentally, because I think it's very artificial, it is not a single axis spectrum. You can have hard core PVErs and docile PVPers, or PVPers who are also builders/miners and PVErs who can hold their own in a gun fight much better than most PVPers. It's nonsensical to treat players as two separate groups and then try to cater to them as if they really are in separate groups on opposite ends of the spectrum. The way these two trenches develop is that all pvpers get lumped into an extreme / toxic exhibit of pvpers, and all pvers get lumped into the "carebear" category. However, the fundamental issue here is personality types, different personality types react to and engage with social games differently.
As it regards pvp, there is an important personality trait (from the Big 5 Personality rubric) called agreeableness that is in large part responsible for how players interact with each other. A player who is low in agreeableness is more competitive, has an easier time climbing social ladders and stepping on toes, can make key decisions in the heat of the moment quickly, etc.
The extreme end of pvpers are often ridiculed as sociopaths, consequently all pvpers get thrown into the same "toxic pvper" bucket. Agreeable people tend to be trusting and altruistic, often exhibiting more prosocial tendencies at the cost of being unable to be very competative while being sabotaged by their own altruism. The extreme ends of pvers tend to be called "carebears", and therefore all pvers get thrown into the carebear supreme bucket. Splitting the player base in this matter, creating an artificial divide that doesn't actually address the nuance of player personalities is like fighting with windmills. The diagnosis is wrong, therefore the treatment is erroneous.
The magic of game design is to integrate multiple personalities into a single universe seamlessly, without creating artificial divides. I am not suggesting safezones should be removed, but I am saying that it is inorganic and leads to more problems than it attempts to solve, both in terms of resource hoarding and setting the groundwork for future conflicts between pvpers and pvpers (at least in the current way FB devs are implementing safezones). Both player types can be accommodated in one pot as you say, there needs to be more avenues for pvers and pvpers to intersect and integrate into the game world while fully expressing their personalities.
(end here!)
Q4: In a game like SB world layout itself is also a huge contributing factor. What kind of world do we need for better, more interesting/nuanced PvP/PvE balance? Is FB on the right track or you've done something completely different? Zoning? Scale? Resource distribution?
[1stRCT] Subway:
Kinda related but I really hate how FB is sectioning off PVP. It feels like they are quarantining us. And it shouldn't be like that. We the players should be able to create our own hotspots but what FB does is place a 30km safezone on our hotspot and builds a random station and tells us to fight there. Anyways for us to create hot zones we need a clear indicator of where to go because the world is just too big.
For example a spot in the belt that glows orange or something has super rare ore and you can't build a station here. Like this all players will flock here. It is definitley a hard problem because the world is massive and the playerbase is very stretched.
[ITC] Inigma:
I assume Frozenbyte intends to add more planets, and entire systems. It's too early to judge if they are on track here.
[BIO] Negev:
I believe FB is on the right track with a clear newbro area we know as Origin – equiped with saftey rules to make people understand this game before they hit an asteroid 100km deep. But the newbro area shouldn't have the facilities nearby to become the major tradehub. A newbro area should only lead to it.
The current zoned ore landscape works - as conflict increases when alliances cannot localize everything in one location. But the world of SB could use more exploration! Discover alien artifacts in anomalies or deal with an universal threat lurking in the dark!
[EKC] Ganny:
By adding more systems it will allow players to be more spread out, by also creating new systems you can place low tier ores in the starting system, while making other systems have more high teir resources but less of the starting resource.
[EKC] Lelife:
For now they are doing fine.. but as soon as people start settling far away from everything else, the devs will need to do something. I would really like to see some sort of timed event with rare resources or valuable parts on a specific location what would attract people from all over the system.
[BOO] IvanGrozniy:
One big pitfall was removing the chokepoint of the moon gate by inreasing the safezone. While I understand the reasons the devs wanted to remove that hot zone, it does raise concerns over how the future of the game will play out in terms of pvp/pve balance.
Purposefully creating chokepoints is the way to go so that people know what areas to avoid, or, if one wants to be adventerous, what areas have the most action. And while this does not relieve other areas of danger, a chokepoint directs the game conflicts into a certain area, relieving other areas from constant action. Directing action to specific locations that are organic will largely solve issues that agreeable people may have (namely trying to avoid conflict), while also giving more action to competitive personalities in specific areas.
Q5: Old. Good. Griefing. There are different views (to say the least) on the term in SB context. At any rate, destroying and stealing of assets is the undeniable lifeblood of some very popular multiplayer games. So... it works? How do you see the place of this phenomena in SB? Maybe we can return to Lauri quote here.
The devs should honestly step back from player affairs. Give the tools to the players and we can solve it. For example what if company ships were vandalized and griefed but a simple pull log for ships would easily stop that issue instead of getting the devs involved. Once company storage is in you will be able to limit how much 1 person can take like Company bank.
Curently most factions have a bank person where everyone gives mats to but it all depends on that bank to stay loyal. This way you don't have 1 dude joining and emptying the place. However I do feel differently about blueprints. I don't know the best way to police this and I don't think FB knows either but stealing BPs is a big problem. Tho i guess ultimately like I said before it all depends on the players.
[ITC] Inigma:
Griefing in a safe zone should be dealt with harshly. New players do need a relvatively safe place to learn the immediate basics of the game without distraction. Griefing outside the safe zone, is an entirely different matter and should be treated with more responsive content, not deletions and bans.
[BIO] Negev:
Outside the newbro area anything u do - should have a form of risk to it. People have to harden the f up.
[EKC] Ganny:
Add in a hacking feature, this will allow for players to board and take over ships, the tech should be costly, and take a long time to actually hack a system. You could even add in some resistance chips which cause hacks to take even longer, or perhaps even days.
[EKC] Lelife:
Pirating is a very legit occupation in starbase. So given that you should be armed against that anyway.. I don't see griefing as being a big problem. If there will be a meta of actual suicide bombers, they will need to fix that.. but again if its viable for griefers, its also viable for wars and it will probably get handled quickly.
[EKC] Sigea:
I'm personally against the hunting of new players just for the fun of it (hence the goal and motto of the EKC), but I'm not naive enough to pretend pirates won't always be around, and they need to be to keep the game ecosystem healthy. With that in mind, I do think having some way of actually occupying derelict/damaged ships should be added, since otherwise those people won't stick around since there's no real gain in hunting people.
[BOO] IvanGrozniy:
"...Unhealthy pvp reduces playerbase, usually by either allowing griefing pve players or by not having pvp at all, which in turn leads pvp players to quit." Lets take this statement recusively. If Lauri means that, if a significant number of people leave, it must be something to do with pvp players or pve players, then, I think that's a very bad statement indeed. Essentially it comes down to blaming a group for causing another group grief. If there is conflict between pvpers and pvers, it is not the fault of the players, it is the fault of game design. Poor game design.
Griefing is a loaded term, exacerbated by faulty game design decisions. It may be that the investment into making a ship is too high, therefore a player may be too attached to their ship because they spent over 20 hours making it. It has become an extension of their personality. Of course they will feel agitated when someone "griefs" them into oblivion. It makes no sense blaming the player for griefing. The pilot of the destroyed ship went out of the safezone, knowing full well that once they do so they are fair game to anyone with weapons loaded. Maybe the shipbuilding process needs to be faster. Maybe it should cost less. Maybe the Ship Builder has some of the worst ui/ux out there and it takes ages to build a flying powder keg.
There are all kinds of reasons why players leave, there are all kinds of incentives people feel compelled by due to them living out their personalities in a designed universe. Is it designed badly? Is it designed well? The population count will tell the tale.
Q6: Anything else you want to add, that is not covered in questions, but you feel really important here?
[1stRCT] Subway:
Please tell me if you felt like I didn't answer something enough.
(All cool!)
[ITC] Inigma:
Organic content makes a game. Organic content is missing in this game because of two Frozenbyte decisions: 1. The spaceship editor is not universally accessible as it is instead tied to a static location in the game world which forces players to choose to stay at home or go on a roam for hours with friends. 2. Camping safe zone borders and the gate is banned. Reverse these two lame, illogical, and shortsighted decisions, and Starbase will become even more popular than EVE Online ever was.
[BIO] Negev: Would love to see more Electronic Warfare!
[EKC] Ganny:
Bounty system, a way for players to add in game bounties for credits, when a player dies, there should also be consequences, this could be done with a loss of tech points, massive credit loss, or other game play mechanics. Lastly a reputation system, pvp impacts your reputation standing, if you initiate combat on a high reputation player your reputation will go down, conversely if you initiate combat on a low reputation player your standings go up. Low reputation makes it so Origin stations and other high reputation stations cannot trade with you or sell propellant. To combat this add in some black market stations. For high reputation players these high rep stations might offer discounts and buy ore for slightly higher credits.
[EKC] Lelife:
Just in general more Points Of Intrest/hotspots.. Markka is a great addition for example with its reduced action house fee... Imagine having different stations with different prices! This would make people travel to different stations based on what ore they wanna make a quick buck on. But it doesn't have to be ores.. you can also hav a station with reduced assembly cost for the SSC. This also gives pirates a way to better pick what they wanna pirate (think pirating experimental ships near the SSC station or valuable resources near a Ymirium station)
[EKC] Sigea:
Nothing more to add, thanks for asking us :D
[BOO] IvanGrozniy:
... (Denied of Q6, because his previous answers were too long)
Big thanks to everyone who participated, it was some food for the mind!
And what about you, dear readers, do you have any strong opinions?
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