Dreadnought - Captains Wanted

[Colt47]

I can't help but feel like all the publishers and devs looked at the market and thought at the same time "there's too many mainstream fantasy games out there, but man look at this big gaping hole for space sims! Lets all jump in and make a ton of money." Just because Star Citizen is having a mega success does not mean there's room for 20+ more games in the genre to come out at the same time. o o;

At least this one is trying a different angle on gameplay like Star Crawlers is doing. On the flip side, Shroud of the Avatar and Underworld Ascendant are looking to be well positioned in the fallout when everyone tries to release their space sim games around the same block of time.

 

[Darkness665]

Thank you for your post, well I'm not going to deny that some players only play to "stomp new players into dust" because there are people like that but most PvPers want a proper fight if only for the loot or a decent killmail because some shit fit newbie (all newbies are shit fit at first, most pick it up fairly quickly. The rest rant about "Honour" on just any and every forum or comment section in the world instead) won't drop anything and filling a corps KB with newbie kills doesn't look good (I knew a lot of corps that would get annoyed with it if thats all a member kept killing, because its just killboard padding and reflects badly on the corp). While I don't know exactly what "honour" is supposed to mean but how many games would you have enough trust in a freind to blindly jump your ship worth a whopping $14,000 USD if you could convert it into a real money value and thats loaded down with equipment so valuable you could buy and equip a fleet of Battleships for the price of one single module and it has several such modules.

I would never trust an EVE Online player with $14, or 14B ISK, 1 PLEX or any other thing of value based on any real or imaginary kurrency.

I have met three EVE Online players that were good people. Every other one was a back stabbing crook, a thief, or a traitor. And they were quite proud of being dregs of society. New Eden merely allows their true nature to show itself. I am sure there are more than three good people in New Eden. With any luck at all, and diligence on my part, I will never have to test that theory.

Thank you for sharing your views.

 

[Darkness665]

Time Dilation is annoying and its an imperfect solution to an insolvable problem, no matter how much CCP improves the hardware and technology of the Tranquility server cluster its never enough because the players just cram more people into a battle and the blobs and alliances and coalitions of alliances just get bigger and bigger. No other game even attempts what CCP have to do on a daily basis, the lag monster is something players have had to deal with since forever but it only happens in the large battles with thousands of players fighting it out, that means tens of thousands of ships, fighters, drones, missiles and other objects within a solar system and the huge amount of other data that have to be collected and processed.

I know your post was just intended to be contrary but you missed the point of the comments you quoted entirely, it wasn't about space flight simulators or anything else. It was about whether their where communities of players for "slow-paced strategic fleet combat simulators" and EVE Online was brought up, it never fails though. Any time someone mentions EVE you will always get an embittered person that got ganked when they played or tried the game ranting about "honour" (so you want players to /bow to each other and inform someone "have at thee good sir! Defend yourself!" before attacking someone? You can tell the difference between someone that just dislikes the game and someone bitter about being ganked because its always the "honour" thing) and misrepresenting the gameplay with "point and click" comments, the point and click bit always reveals the truth that they where bad at the game because the subtle nuances and the ignorance about the existence of sorcerous concepts like "Hotkeys".

An RTS game is "point and click" if you're bad at it, for players that are at least someone competent at them its an intense challenge of micromanagement, able to rapidly give commands and having good situational awareness of what is exactly going on around them.

I felt that this required a separate response. I did try to learn the game. But I bored out in less than two hours. I also had several show me how much fun it was. It wasn't. It was boring. Farmville in space with a spreadsheet and skill gating mechanics. And, to me, it is definitely point and click. It is a PC game which KB/M and sorry but point and click covers a significant percentage of the action. The reviewed game might well turn out to be that. Until I see or play a demo that shows the interaction I will refrain from guessing. But the point and click definition is a match for EVE.

As far as game interfaces I do have several KB/M games but I prefer controllers. It requires a simpler UI and is more immediate during combat. I enjoy watching RTS games, but rarely enjoy playing them (beside the Total War games). Hotkeys are fine, but memorizing dozens of commands when there is nothing actually happening on screen ... it's not my thing.

Time Dilation is a horrific solution. That CCP was proud of it and explained in detail what a miracle of a solution it was - well, it stuck in my throat. Reading, in these pages, about EVE battles and TD meant seconds (tens of seconds) for response times boggles my mind. Software of that caliber should never be released. Of course, their entire server was written in Ruby until just a few years ago. That explains many of their issues. The battles are resolved on the server. Everything is resolved on the server. They have a customer base that accepts 200+ms latency and that is good combination. I am not one of those customers.

I never got ganked. I merely met people that wanted me to play EVE Online and they bragged about their life. I wouldn't play monopoly with them, except for the three mentioned, they were horrible people. I won't play in the real world or anywhere else with people like that. Life is too short.

It is good that you have friends in the game, friends to trust at that level. To get to those few hours of fun game play takes months of effort. The percentage of fun to boredom is just too steep for me. You have stronger legs - gaming legs. Good for you.

 

[J Tyran]

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As you don't know the game I ask you to take me on face value for this, trust me time dilation is about the best solution they could have come up with. Besides magically "fixing" the lag of course.

In a game with an economy driven by huge fights and the results of those fights the best thing apart from fixing the lag is minimising the effects the lag can have on those fights, at times the players will keep piling more and more ships into a system until it crashes. You can have a big fight with no lag and the alliances will just keep sending blobs in until it lags, if you restrict how many players can enter a system that means people can defend a system just by blobbing it. Or prevent a counter attack on a system they want to take by blobbing it and stop the defending alliance from entering the system.

Then you have situations where crashes can kick people to the desktop which can leave one side with an advantage if it dumps more of one side out than the other, alliances have also "weaponised" the lag in the past. They have fitted fleets of ships that can specifically deal with lag and then purposefully caused the lag, they have also used "lag bombs" to crash a star system to help defend it or if a fight is going badly.

Not joking either, literal lag bombs. Filling a freighter, the biggest cargo haulers in the game with a cargo hold full of cheap drones and then purposefully destroyed it because it would be easily worth a few billion ISK to influence the course of a battle. It would crash the whole star system, timers would reset, shields would essentially go back to full on bases or stations. CCP changed the way cargo dropped from destroyed ships to stop that particular trick, the players came up with new ones though.

So time dilation tries to limit the influence lag can have on the critical large battles, not only does it reduce server load but most importantly it does so fairly and evenly and doesn't create or allow any one side to get any advantage or manipulate anything to help their side. Thats why its imperfect but its about the best thing they could have done, now fewer fights are influenced by server issues.

Anyway, anyone that doesn't like the idea of big laggy fights doesn't have to do big laggy fights. I rarely did, I did my share of alliance blobbing but didn't like it so I joined a small roaming PvP corp instead and spent my time in a small gang of 10-20 roaming nullsec looking for other small gangs who where looking for fights. We also spent time baiting out the alliances into sending a small response fleet looking for us by ganking their ratters or people moving around in their territory, we never had lag issues.

Anyway last thing I wanted to address was your comments about the people playing the game and:-

New Eden merely allows their true nature to show itself.

Why do you say this? Because they killed some other players or are a pirate and took their stuff? Because they have a career as a scammer and/or corp thief? Its a game and those things are part of the gameplay, would you say that Call of Duty players are all murderers that want to go on killing sprees and the game allows their true nature to show itself?

You enjoy the games from the Total War series, does that mean that deep inside you're a genocidal tyrant and megalomaniac but you're just lacking the opportunity and those games allow you express your true nature? You said you like Dark Souls, so are you in fact actually an immortal undead thats trapped in human form and Dark Souls finally gives you the opportunity to be the person (being?) you truly are?

Lots of games, most games in fact depict what would be immoral, criminal or disgusting acts in real life and its just escapism and doesn't reflect on the character of the player.

 

[Darkness665]

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As you don't know the game I ask you to take me on face value for this, trust me time dilation is about the best solution they could have come up with. Besides magically "fixing" the lag of course.

New Eden merely allows their true nature to show itself.

Why do you say this?

Trust me when the retired software engineer tells you that Ruby was the wrong choice to start with. Time dilation is a bad solution to the problem. Realistically it might well be the very best CCP was capable of doing. I hold them in low regard.

I have looked into the game several times over the last decade. Aside from the UI changes and being able to craft whizzy avatars my first opinion of has held true. It bores me, the interface is complex (no doubt it needs to be) and overall EVE Online takes a few months to come up to speed. You extolled the hotkeys previously, yes I know of them. MSFT has them in Excel. Long before EVE Online existed. Many EVE players that urged me to try the game again, the latest update is fabulous, cautioned that it takes a couple of months to get up to speed. I believe them.

Total War games are interactive history for me. Could I have held the line against the Panzers? Can I take the historically accurate path to the shogunate? Or is there a better path, one that less lives lost or can be you take the shogunate faster? They are never about genocidal tyrants, nor do I aspire to be one. Oddly enough you are the only person that has made that assumption, EVE Online Player. ;-)

I have met many EVE Online players. The number of them that I would play any game at all with is less than five. The others failed the humanity test, for me. They were interested in getting new blood in the game, new players to bleed ISK and salvage. Escapism, or freedom from consequences? Doesn't really matter in the final analysis.

Dark Souls is a challenging game. That is why I like it. It has a world, somewhat crazy, but it is consistent within that world. The level designs are some of the best in the business. There are always solutions, not obvious in many cases. Often only death will give you the clue necessary to succeed in the next attempt. That or the wiki, of course.

Enjoy your game. I will enjoy mine.

 

[J Tyran]

Oddly enough you are the only person that has made that assumption, EVE Online Player. ;-)

I wasn't assuming you are like that it was a rhetorical question to try and make you think about what you said, I don't believe that the type of games people choose to play reflects on them. Applying your logic that people play the games they play because it "allows their true nature to express itself would mean someone that likes playing historical strategy games means that they enjoying playing the part of a genocidal megalomaniac, as you point out it doesn't and this particular quote seems reflexively defensive.

Not going to argue about coding issues, if you say that code is bad I will take you at face value but that doesn't change the fact the game manages to do what no other game even attempts (even a fraction actually) with no worse lag for the most part with thousands of players fighting than an MMO with a few hundred people sharing the same area.