Best Of

I am one of those people who can go out and do what others refer to as mindless, boring tasks in a game like this and enjoy it. I haven't been doing much lately because there isn't anything to haul any more. Where I used to bump into mineable asteroids every couple zones, now there seem to be no asteroids to haul at all. @bairloch said "I don't want conflict or combat, I just want to help provide for the economy." Add my "me too" or "+1" or similar sentiment. I don't want to see the process of mining asteroids and scooping gas become some kind of complicated/dangerous minigame. A minigame in and of itself might work. I've played games with hot/cold number guessing required to successfully capture resources, and I actually really enjoyed it, though it was relatively simple. 

I'm not in favour of the process becoming 'slappyhappyfuntime' either. I want there to be an activity that's calm. I have plenty of other games I can load up or log into that get my blood pumping. IMHO resource gathering doesn't need to be one of them. Reliable locations for resources to appear in is a good idea. Asteroid belts, nebulae, etc, where we knew we could find things to gather would be a boon.

Increasing the profitability would also be a good improvement. Right now PvE combat is the only way I make marks. And I can only do that a little bit per day before it just gets boring. See, I find the bashing boring to a certain extent the way others find hauling/processing boring. I've been (mostly good-naturedly) teased on other games for being one of those people who runs out and gather-gather-gathers or haul-haul-hauls, all the livelong day. I like it. It makes me happy. There's a place for all of us in this great big (virtual) world, isn't there?

Most of all there just needs to be something to gather. Right now mining/scooping is at a halt (for me anyhow) because there's nothing to get. Or... okay, I saw a cloud of ultarine yesterday on my way to Omni. But there's no market for ultarine so that would net me a handful of captaincy xp, and I'm of a high enough captaincy rank that I might not even notice it, and it would cost marks to refine. I don't know what it is that's caused all the asteroids and clouds to run away, but I have been logging in less because of it. That's not a shot or a guilt trip: this is a beta. Just expressing my experience. My biggest draws in SM are 1) the hauling/resource gathering/manufacturing, 2) the RP, and PvE is a somewhat distant third. So... please bring back the asteroids and gas clouds? Pretty please? With vuu honey on top?

Before I wander off again, let me say that Starmourn is a great game, beta warts and all. Thank you to the devs and all the helpful people who've made it that way, and whose continued hard work will refine and polish it until it shines.

I think NPCs are needed here:

1. To offer hauling contracts: "haul X units of (various miscellaneous objects) for X amount of marks. I feel like these contracts should be plentiful for people of all skillset, and the rewards should be based upon distance/amount shipped.
So, for example I have entry level captaincy skill and the beginning ship - I could talk to an NPC at Crazy Jerry's whom would give me a list of available contracts in the entire sector. I decide I would like to accept a small contract to get started and I'm close to Iota, so I accept the contract: "Deliver 3 pallets of Assorted Fruits from Iota to Omni station for (reasonable amount in comparison to time taken and what could be earned from bashing) Marks" Once I accept the contract the shipment appears in my station cargo for Iota, so I pilot myself over to Iota, transfer the shipment to my ship, make my way to Omni, transfer the shipment to the station and receive my reward after talking to the NPC at the Crazy Jerry's on Omni. (I wholeheartedly believe Crazy Jerry's should be the place to go for all things logistical such as this) I feel that there should be both generated, and player offered contracts. The generated contracts would follow as above, but you're only shipping non-consequential things like pallets of pies, fruits, pipes, etc. And the player offered contracts would involve moving units such as X amount of Hellium11 from Iota to Omni for X amount of marks. Space Trucking. I believe completion of these contracts should award captaincy exp as well.

2. To streamline the process of passing goods between gatherer and manufacturer: I feel as though there needs to be an NPC available that will buy raw materials for an established amount of marks. The materials sold should then be available for sale at the NPC at a higher established price.
So, this means there will be an NPC at stations that will buy raw materials from players, and then turn around and sell those materials to whomever wishes to buy them. This system should be noticeably lower-profit than buying/selling directly from players. But it should be an option. Maybe this could operate similar to the shipforge, have a broker ship dock with your ship when it is within docking range - giving you the option to either BUY or SELL materials all at a pre-determined price.
So, for example: I am just starting out and would like to earn some marks, I fit my ship with scoops and go gather 100 units of helium11. Now, rather than go through a bunch of numbers and data to find the perfect ratio of time vs. profit, I would rather just CALLBROKER while within docking range of a station - "A massive freighter ship emerges from the nearby station and approaches to board with yours!" Now, I would like to BROKER SELL 100 helium11 for X marks. And just like that, the 100 units of raw helium11 are turned into marks and are now available in that station's broker ship inventory for a predetermined price. Same process with tethered asteroids. For example; It could BUY helium11 at 10 marks per unit, then SELL helium11 at 25 marks per unit (or whatever the pricing should be)
Maybe this "Broker ship" should only be available at Iota and/or Omni... Maybe they should be available at all stations. Maybe it should only be available for the more common materials, maybe it should be for all raw materials... Maybe this broker ship should be 100% player stocked, maybe it should generate a certain amount of certain materials... 

I honestly think the biggest glare with the system as it is simply that is not profitable. People find different things to be enjoyable, and not everyone needs to find everything enjoyable. If you don't enjoy, don't do it, but there is plenty of people who I think would get involved on the trucking business if it was actually worth their while. 

It just... Isn't.
Like with most things on the economy side of the game right now

@RocketCat
I'm that guy. Well, not THAT guy, but like that guy. I still play Eve that way. I played JumpGate that way when it was still live. I log in, I go lick rocks, I process the ore, I log out. That's what I enjoy. No idea why.
I like to do it in SM too. I don't want conflict or combat, I just want to help provide for the economy. Making that a bit more reliable, and my productions a bit more reliable, would be a big step forward.

Thanks for the post Kestrel. Storytime! During my EVE Online days I had a corpmate who would come home from his job as a mining foreman everyday and login, fly out to the asteroid belts, and mine asteroids for 6-8 hours straight. I could not for the life of me understand his affinity for what in my opinion is the most boring aspect of the game. But for him it was an effective mode of relaxation.

But there are some things which make asteroid mining in that game interesting. One thing that SM might strive for is this: Risk/reward, and the opportunity for min/maxing. One of the nice things for my EVE corpmate is that he could login and fly to the same asteroid belts in the same system everyday and mine the most common ore in the game. Incrementally over time he could make improvements to his ship to allow more and better mining lasers, cargo capacity, and resistance to griefers, so that is a mini-gamr. Even the task of flying through the asteroid belt in an efficient manner is a mini-game. Other miners get their kicks by flying into low security space and harvesting higher value ores.

The key here would be RELIABILITY and PLENTIFULNESS. You don't have to scour the sector for rocks to drag back. Mining in SM could be equally relaxing, but removing some of the frustration-inducing aspects, such as the scarcity. Asteroid belts with fixed coordinates which spawn mineable ores regularly seems reasonable to me. So would the introduction of dedicated mining vessels, which could be acquired eventually by a dedicated player who enjoys the relaxation aspect of a repetitive activity, and could be bought SOLELY off the marks they generated from selling their ore to buyers.

So I know Kestrel's point is that scooping and mining is boring, and while I can agree that it's not the most fun experience, I feel like if something is worth doing people will do it, even if it is not the most exciting activity. Many people bash even though they hate it. What is "worth" it depends on each person - it could be enjoyment or it could be for a high reward. I've said this from the beginning, but the only reason we saw such high numbers of people scooping and mining at the start was because of the shininess of something new. Once that wore off, and people realised it wasn't worth doing for any reason, it stopped happening.

There are other problems which I've talked about on Discord many times, but I know the economy is something that attracted a lot of people to Starmourn in the first place and it has been a huge let down, not even because it's not working properly, but because it just feels like we are so scared of making big changes that might break it that they don't realise just how broken it already is.

Double post, but I forgot to mention a couple of other problems.

Because of the PvE requirements there is basically a minimum player requirement. This leads to all of the action happening during peak hours, leaving off peak players with little opportunity to take part. I really like systems like foci in Aetolia and domoths in Lusternia where it is possible to complete the objectives even with just a couple of people. And if there is a fight, does it really matter if there are 10 on each side or just 2? I don't think it should as long as players can reasonably take part when it is convenient for them to play.

The other big problem I see is even in the few PvP fights we have had, the prevailing strategy is still for defenders to just use force movement skills to knock attackers into the aggressive guards. Depending on the level and number of guards in the room, this is almost always a death sentence, and further incentivises rushing down the guards before defenders can do anything about it.

Alright, I've had some time to think over my experiences both taking and defending cosmpiercers since the changes and want to update my thoughts. I'll cut to the chase and give you the conclusion first though. The changes completely missed the mark on creating an engaging experience.

As the primary source of conflict in the game, I think it is fair to expect that this system promotes conflict in the form of inter-factional PvP. All three parts of the current system fail to achieve this. Instead, two of the three parts directly encourage zerging PvE content before any defenders can do anything to meaningfully react. The third part just acts as a small base time and player count requirement, the latter of which is already pretty much covered by the strategy of zerging. For those of you who don't know, there are essentially three phases to a cosmpiercer capture attempt now; generators, guards, hacking. 

In the generator phase, factions need to take down a number of shield generators in space before anyone, including defenders, is able to dock at the cosmpiercer. These generators are very powerful with a lot of health and take multiple destroyers, or one or two larger ships, to even tank for even the lower level cosmpiercers.

Once the generators are all dead, we basically enter the guard phase. I should note here that once this is done, there is almost no reason to engage in space combat whatsoever. Both sides are now free to dock, and this is when attackers will begin to work through the cosmpiercer's guards in an attempt to find the control points. Lower level guards are basically a piece of cake and outside of player error people aren't going to die. Higher level guards are more difficult, but it is again more of a (high level) player count check than anything. 

Once a control point is found, one person needs to hack the terminal. Once all terminals have been hacked by one faction without another faction hacking one back the cosmpiercer is won. I believe there is a 5 minute cooldown for each person, so while one person can hack them all, it makes more sense to bring more people who can do the hacking.

The key thing with both of the first two phases is that the bigger the zerg, the faster you do it. It doesn't matter if the defenders have five times your numbers if you can muster the critical mass required to take down all of the npc generators/guards needed to find the terminals, you win the cosmpiercer. Sure, higher level cosmpiercers will require a higher number of cannons/people before reaching that critical mass, but the principle is the same and this is a massive flaw with the current design. This is now entirely a PvE experience. The only PvP we've seen from any cosmpiercer attempts are from the earlier ones where people were still learning, or ones where a faction wanted to chain multiple captures, so defenders could predict ahead of time. 

There are two factors that have led to this problem. Firstly, the basic design of "bash guards until you win" basically invites zerging. Secondly, cosmpiercers require travel time. Movement between areas in Starmourn in general is much slower than in other IRE games so gathering defenders is going to take some time to begin with. Even without any time to gather, there is a long travel time in space travel. Sure, there are voidgates to help with this, but these are cost-prohibitive, which I'll talk more about later, and even so, there are many cosmpiercers that aren't really that close to any voidgates. This is an even bigger issue if a fight does happen somehow. Without two engineers who can keep wormholes up, combatants who die have no way of getting back to the fight quickly. I don't mean within 1 or 2, or even 5 minutes quickly. I mean within 10-15+ minutes quickly. If somebody flew their ship there and died without a wormhole up? They are stuck without that ship until the cosmpiercer is captured and it gets auto-ejected from the dock, so that player will have to find another ship to travel to the cosmpiercer in.

Alright, but at least you get marks for all the trouble of capturing and defending them, right? Technically, I guess. As far as I can tell, you get 50 + 50 * level of cosmpiercer marks for the faction each mark. Individuals who were there at the time of capture also get a share of the another pool of marks of the same size as the faction tithe. There is also a small adjacency bonus from holding multiple adjacent cosmpiercers, but in total when Song owned all of them it was just a bit over 10000 marks each month. This sounds like a lot until you think about the costs involved in taking just a single level 1 cosmpiercer.

By my estimate, it takes around 15-20 batteries worth of damage to destroy a single level 1 generator. I don't know if higher level generators are tankier, but let's just look at this as an example. Let's say it's 15 batteries, which is on the low end of my estimates. A single battery costs 204 marks from the ship forge. This is 3060 marks to destroy a single level 1 generator. Level 1 cosmpiercers have 3 generators, so you're looking at over 9000 marks to take them all. So essentially, if you own every single cosmpiercer, each month you make about twice the amount it takes to even take down generators. We're not even taking into account the cost of voidgates, which cost 630 for corvettes, which is what most people will bring as the "basic" ship, to over 3000 for some of the larger ships. This is per voidgate. If you're going from Aleph to, say, Neutralspace to try to get to one of those cosmpiercers in the middle of nowhere faster, that's going to cost over 15000 marks. That's almost all of the 20000 or so a faction gets in total for owning every single one. 

Many people will argue that I'm wrong for looking at it from a reward/cost point of view. I'm ready to concede that sometimes an engaging PvP experience is worth much more than some e-money, but I disagree with the overall sentiment because that e-money took time to get, and as a conflict mechanic in a game, there should be some extrinsic incentive for taking part. However, sadly we don't even get to make that argument because the experience itself is not engaging. I can't help but feel that the ideas I presented at the start of the thread would still make for a much better mechanic than what we have. I am in no way saying my ideas are perfect or are the only way to fix this, but fundamentally the design of those ideas lends itself to being much more engaging than what we have in the current iteration of cosmpiercers. Unfortunately, what we have right now will never be fixed by tweaks to numbers, and I ask the admins seriously look into how they can work towards making this aspect of the game worth playing for.