quote: Original post by KingRuss
One of two thing could happen. You could either let players travel from one place to another fast and come up with an explanation, or let us travel at the speed of your physics, even though this is a space game, and we aren''t that advanced in that area here on Earth.
Well, it isn''t my physics. There''s a FTL FAQ somewhere ( I found it here) that describes a few ways in which one can avoid breaking the laws of logic when travelling FTL. For our purposes the useful one is the ''Special Frame Of Reference''. This special frame prevents relativistic effects from occuring even if you travel FTL. In shows like Star Trek or Babylon 5, we can imagine that subspace or hyperspace have this special frame of reference. We could also have a subspace that was used for FTL travel.
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I know physics are supposed to apply everywhere in the universe, and they are true until proven false, but like I said, we haven''t traveled that far in space. What if beyond our system objects that are not in motion tend to go into motion without an outside force?
I think players would be bemused if we decided to change the laws of physics for no reason. Besides, we know that objects obey our physical laws outside of our system because stars don''t move without cause.
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That would mean that when I warp in space, I am at my destination, now I just have to wait in real-life for that time to go by, so the server can have correct time.
I think we can agree that this would be a bad thing.
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In frontier you had to deliver stuff by a certain time, yes, but if I had to deliver them in one week, my one week would be my one week.
Sure, it would. But chances are that the week that your client is talking about is his week, I would certainly be talking about one of my weeks.
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Besides that of a race, in which you could still check the times to see who got there first, and having a race in space is pretty ridiculous at 1x speed(several reasons) there would be no reason to keep time other than to hold the story together.
Holding the story together isn''t a bad thing. If the story collapses, then belief is not longer suspended, and the player may not feel that the game''s universe will do what he expects it to do, which would be a bad thing.
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While frontier/Elite would be a nice multiplayer game, it would have to be overhauled quite a bit in order for it to be a game. The story aspect... if you have a big story, it becomes a little less of the game it once was.
Of course, but that''s why this thread was started, right? Because erdbernd wanted to know what overhauling we thought needed to be done. A multiplayer Elite isn''t ever going to be the game is once was, and a storyline can help to bring players together into interesting situations.
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I meant for the average player anyhow. Average players meaning that they only play for 1-3 hours a day at that game. You playing about 5-8 hours a day would have the item much fast(in your months). After conquering the monetary system I am forced to move on.
One way to solve this would be for the best way to earn money to be joining a guild, which would pay you a salary (every real day/week whatever). Just getting money from trading and/or pirating might not be the most profitable option. For many things, like mining, the money you make won''t be dependant upon how often you are online, anyway.
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While the bounty system is a nice idea, once again it is within my game, it is not a solution. They suggest you weaken him if he is attacked by several small people. While in my game you don''t gain relative xp by fighting smaller people, to say that you would lose xp by doing so leaves another loophole for those ddi''s he was speaking of.
My understanding is that he says that you should always be weak, not that you are weakened just because you are attacked by weak people. That makes sense because in reality, humans don''t get more resistant to swords or bullets when their combat skills are increased. The same would apply in space: simply being good at fighting wouldn''t make you resistant to attack: having strong shields would make you resistant to attack.
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My and a group of friends could thereby create level 1 characters with no powers whatsoever. By continually attacking the strongest people there are, we weaken them. For someone who has no control over who attacks them, it would be a pity to lose xp just because you were attacked. Which leads to another part of my discussion. How are you supposed to ''weaken'' the character in a space mmorpg. His spaceship could take damage, but he could pay to have that fixed. If he lost some sort of skills, that wouldn''t seem right, depending on how you raise you skills. Skills like haggling won''t go down from fighting people weaker than you.
Firstly, regardless of the power level of your characters, I could take out a bounty against them. If they don''t actually kill me, it might be that I can put out a police warrant on them, so they''d be charged but not killed. If they couldn''t afford to pay their ship would be impounded and they''d be out of the game.
Secondly, there''s no need to lose xp from being attacked. Assuming your xp isn''t related to your ship''s integrity, there wouldn''t be any point reducing xp if you wanted to weaken a powerful ship when it is attacked by weaker ships.
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However your aiming skills(Ha like we will aim weapons ourselves in space wars, games now even have aimbots). But as long as they don''t stand still then you are still practicing aiming. And unless you deter those powerful people in some way, the system loses its affect.
I''d assume that most twinks wouldn''t hack it long enough to become really powerful. But bearing in mind the use of bounties and/or warrants, I don''t see an issue with this.
We could have AI-controlled police drones that automatically attack bounty targets that happen upon a civilised system. If we have a bounty issued on a ship that doesn''t pay a warrant after a certain number of warnings, then we can pretty much ensure that twinks are kept out of civilised systems. Outside of civilised systems, on the other hand, you''ll still have problems, but you expect trouble there, as erdbend said.
We can assume that a twink, no matter how power, would eventually run out of money. A twink''s reputation would probably make it hard for him to make money with any of the guilds, things like mines might be impounded until warrants he owes are paid for.
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Speaking of the issue of newbies. Since you plan on having interaction with npc''s in the game, You can have newbies start at the same place others have before(don''t get confused here). If you don''t then you have to do something else. Anyhow, newbies so to speak, should no longer be newbies after a certain amount of time. Thus, they would have to leave their protective area after a while, and be restricted to areas outside of it.
Hmm. I''m not so sure about this. newbies should be allowed to leave at any time, and should be allowed to return at any time. If ''sanctuaries'' existed in reality, it is likely that space ports and the like would be bult inside them, and almost every player would want to visit a space port.
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to say that a game that takes place in the future must adhere to the rules of today isn''t exactly right. It can follow the rules to a ''T'' but don''t say it must.
It should follow rules that we know are almost certainly true. This, IMO, will make the game more enjoyable, and different from other similar games.
With our limited experience in testing physics, we know that the only top speed is that of light, but almost every space-based game imposes an arbitary top speed far lower than c, which is usually dependant upon the mass of the ship. That directly violates the laws of physics, and shouldn''t be part of a realistic game.
Following the laws of physics also introduces effects that might have seemed contrived if we''d introduced them without any theoretical backing. For example, lets say we want to be able to detect a ship moving FTL. We would like to be able to tell how fast and in which direction is is moving.
Physics, as it happens, provides an answer. An object moving faster than light in a particular medium emits Cherenkov radiation, which is kinda like a sonic boom for light. This gives us a reasonable way to allow a radar to detect a ship moving FTL. However, it also introduces extra tactical elements. A ship moving at 0.9c, say, wouldn''t emit Cherenkov radiation, and wouldn''t show up on radar because of it. However, the same ship moving through a nebulae, or some artificially constructed field in which the speed of light was lowered, would such emit radiation.
This is at least partly reasonable. It is possible, as documented here, to create a gas in which light is slowed to 15 metes/second. So, unlike a system of FTL detection which isn''t grounded in currently understood physics (like something using graviational waves, for example), the Cherenkov solution not only explains how to detect a FTL ship, but also provides for futher strategic elements that can be added to the game: in that case a special field that can be erected to help detect stealthy ships.
All your bases belong to us (I know. It''s irony.)
You have your sci-fi, I''ll have mine...
