Best Of

Re: Quality of Life Wishlist

What about a small influence gain from storing stuff in faction? Like 5 influence for every 10 items or something small like that?

Ikchor

2

Re: Why don't you craft?

I don't craft because they severely limited how many designs you can have, and then had the gall to charge you if you wanted to store more.

Incidentally, this is also why I don't play Starmourn.

Quell

1

Re: The Dank Crystal (Ta'Deth Crystal Thread)

While we're nerfing doing things while flying, you can still pick up corpses of players while flying.

Rhindara

1

Re: The Dank Crystal (Ta'Deth Crystal Thread)

RocketCat said:

- Cooldown appears to be exactly 3 hours. Consider a fluctuating hidden cooldown of 2hrs 50 minutes - 3hrs 20minutes, to make it less easy to proc the cache exactly when/where you want it.

It already works as suggested here, with a larger fluctuation.

Garryn

1

Re: The Dank Crystal (Ta'Deth Crystal Thread)

More thoughts, after a fun crystal fight in Saksar:

- This is really awesome

- Like when WILDERNESS TRIANGULATE was first released, HARVEST CRYSTAL works while flying or invis. Needs to be squished.

- Cooldown appears to be exactly 3 hours. Consider a fluctuating hidden cooldown of 2hrs 50 minutes - 3hrs 20minutes, to make it less easy to proc the cache exactly when/where you want it.

- This is really awesome.

RocketCat

2

Re: Clean Slate Cosmpiercer Thread

Another request:

- Cosmpiercer power COSMPIERCER ABANDON <piercer>, to relinquish control of a piercer back to Ishvana, in case a faction starts suffering for crystals.

RocketCat

2

Re: The Dank Crystal (Ta'Deth Crystal Thread)

I really like this change. The system looks good and very promising. The powers are strong but I feel like they should be - a real incentive for players to engage with the system. The only possibly OP power I see is the one that turns off kith in the room, because it murders specific classes while ignoring the others. I know Nanos are really strong right now but that's not the way to balance them.

Now, my experience:

I just cleared a cache solo because I was online at the time when almost no one else was. It was decently fun and satisfying even without any PvP - the mobs are strong and aggressive which makes it not mindless. I think mobs being strong is a good thing, it means you can deal with caches faster if you bring more people, and any system that encourages cooperation and teaming up in the context of a whole faction is good.

HOWEVER.

I went to Locorin (the lizards there are adorable by the way) because Tosmar and Tabby were on cooldown for me. If I went to Tosmar, Tabby, or any other wilderness with easy or non-aggro mobs, farming crystals there would be trivial. It'd just be a freebie - get in instance, grab 50 free crystals. Pragmatically speaking, there's no incentive to pick any other wilderness over these two if you want to grab crystals, and I don't think that's the intended player experience here.

So I second Rhindara's idea: take the agency to decide which wilderness the cache appears in out of the players' hands. My suggestion is that we have some kind of semi-random timer (between 4 and 8 hours, the exact number may need changing) and when it clocks down, a cache instance shows up at a random wilderness. We could fluff it as only Y'saari having the tech to detect large caches, so they send us messages: "you can expect another crystal cache to be located in X days". We should know how much longer until the next cache shows up in advance (just like cosmpiercers), because that way people can prepare and PvP should allow for preparation.

I also think normal wilderness triangulation should yield crystals, even if it's just 1 per wilderness. This creates a real incentive to run wilderness instances on their own, because currently there isn't any - the resources are just too puny to bother, especially compared to pirate refinery yields. On the other hand 1 crystal per wilderness means players can feel like they really contribute to their faction just by doing pve instances (possibly teaming up with others to make it safer and faster - more cooperation, even better!), they can get vouchers even if they don't participate in pvp, and they can help their faction maintain a small cosmpiercer or two even if the faction is unlocky or doesn't have manpower for running caches. At the same time the number is small enough that larger cosmpiercers still require cache runs, and factions with active pvper bases can focus on that instead of feeling compelled to run all wilderness missions daily just so they won't miss out on crystals.

But most importantly, letting triangulations yield crystals is a great way to ease newbies into the system. Currently you have to throw them into deep water of caches and cosmpiercers but with this, they can run wilderness on their leisure and still feel like they contribute to their faction, while they also get more familiar with other, more endgame trappings overtime. Mechanical solutions that get folks involved in their faction are great for the game's overall activity levels - so, while Steve decided he doesn't like his first thought, I actually think it's a very good idea.

BTW can Fury have Outburst work on mobs again? It was nerfed because it was used to move guards, but faction and cosmpiercer (when they existed) guards are already immune to move powers, so all it does is make Fury suck when there's more than 1 hostile mob in a room.

Cubey

1

Re: The Dank Crystal (Ta'Deth Crystal Thread)

My first thought was to have triangulation yield crystals regardless of whether a cache is found. This seemed a more useful reward than a few ultarine or whatever. But the longer I thought about it, the less I liked the idea of letting PVE farming yield rewards/supplies for cosmpiercers. Commodities, on the other hand, do have a lot to do with cosmpiercer conflicts, and they already can be acquired by non-PVE content.

I've heard a number of people say that the comms returns need to be increased in order to make wilderness a more worthwhile experience, but I don't think this necessarily correct. Although it was certainly true before the CP change, now the raw yield might be sufficiently high in light of crystal caches. However, the commodity returns on wilderness triangulation are close to zero in practice because we must bring a ship over to pick up the comms using WILDERNESS DESIGNATE when the cache has been found. The cost in time compared to the benefit in comms is a losing proposition.

Here's my suggestion: we should change WILDERNESS DESIGNATE ship pickup system to allow discovered comms to accumulate, thereby deferring the ship pickup process to a more convenient time. I have two ideas for accomplishing this:

Change ship pickup so that your commodities discovered using WILDERNESS TRIANGULATE accumulate, and SHIP PICKUP would allow a designated player to pick up all of that player's wilderness comms at that location. Or,

Remove the ship pickup mechanic entirely by sending the discovered comms to cargo storage on that planet. Of course, the discoverer would have to fly out there any pick up the discovered comms as normal cargo.

I like the first suggestion better because it allows other players to get involved (meaning teamwork opportunity), but WILDERNESS DESIGNATE would have to be rewritten.

Steve

1

The Dank Crystal (Ta'Deth Crystal Thread)

This thread is for constructive critique of everything directly related to Ta'Deth crystals. If you want to discuss the cosmpiercer mechanic specifically, head here.

First of all, I want to say that I'm really into the concept of the crystals, obtaining them, researching skills with them, etc. I obviously haven't had a chance to do anything with the vast majority of it, so I'll only speak to what we've gotten a chance to look at so far to begin with: wilderness open PK events.

I love the idea of random conflicts on the ground that (almost) anyone can get to and participate in, but there are a few snags with how they work right now.

At the moment, there's only a chance to proc a crystal drop when you're triangulating. This means that it depends on someone actually using the wilderness system outside of specifically trying to get crystal drops, which is probably going to be rare considering how light the rewards are for wilderness triangulation right now.
The other issue with making this event player-dependent is that they're able to choose when and where (rng aside) the caches will pop up. This means that you can deliberately only go to certain areas to triangulate, hoping to have some kind of advantage (whether it's aggro or non-aggro mobs, inability to PTP/transit there, whatever).

Solution: Either substantially up rewards for triangulating in wildernesses so that people are more likely to participate in them (maybe do this regardless), or take agency entirely out of players' hands and just have the caches randomly show up in available wildernesses every x hours so that everyone has a relatively fair chance with no premeditated advantages.

It's also worth mentioning that a handful of wildernesses are only accessible by going through faction capitals, which means that if someone is enemied to that faction and that faction has guards blocking their path to that wilderness, they're going to have a hard time participating.

Solution: Make this handful of wilderness ineligible for caches, probably. I don't see any other foolproof change here as long as guards are a thing.

I know it's just the first handful of hours since this substantial change, but I'm looking forward to seeing other people weigh in on the system so that it can get to a place where it's a staple of conflict in Starmourn rather than something that sort of falls to the wayside from disuse.

Rhindara

4

Re: Quality of Life Wishlist

You can already just use SAYTO to target says at people. If your target isn't there, you won't say anything. This way, you can still 'say to tell you the truth' or whatever without it saying 'who the hell is tell you the truth'.

Rhindara

1