Falcon777 wrote:The original discussion was in fact a question of how to balance beginner difficulty with experienced player ease. The idea of trying to "fix" the torus drive "problem" is interesting and all, but just out of curiosity, how does that play into the larger topic of beginner difficulty vs experienced ease? Is the torus drive really THAT big of a boon to players that have been around for a while?
I don't ask this to be bossy or to push the topic staying where it was at the beginning, but rather because I'm curious. I'm frankly not seeing the connection.
Like Redspear says, it's to do with the "spacelane problem". Beginner players often find that they can avoid the dangers and difficulties of the early game by dodging around the spacelanes (which are a product of the way Oolite populates a system), doing a whole lot of identikit trade runs, avoiding all traffic, until they've got enough money to equip their ship. This wasn't possible in Elite, but is possible in Oolite. It's not really about the torus drive at all.
This is a flaw in the design of the game: players can do a whole lot of mechanical, event-free trade runs, build up a supply of cash, kit out their ship, and only then start actually playing the game - which begs the question, should we not simply allow players to start with a moderately well-equipped ship to begin with? I think the answer to that is "no - we need to make the early game compelling, to draw new players in". Essentially, were looking at ways to persuade new players to play the whole game from the start - i.e. ways to keep them in the lane, in the traffic, and in the game.
Elite had a fairly brutal learning curve. In many ways, Oolite has an even more brutal learning curve, which had gone largely unremarked because so many people here were veteran players. At the moment, this is being addressed by altering the pirate population of safer systems, and by giving players non-combat-related methods of dealing with piracy (e.g. surrendering cargo). But it's still possible for players to exploit the structure of the game, go offlane, and avoid the early game entirely - so we're looking for ways to keep people in the lane, by persuasion if not by force.
This has also spun off into a somewhat separate discussion about the torus drive in general. I suggested modifying the torus to keep players in the lane, by limiting where the torus drive can be used (essentially, if players want to go offlane, they can - but it'll take them ages to fly, at standard speeds, to the station). The more I think about this, though, the more convinced I am that the best approach to the spacelane problem is not through fiddling with the game mechanics, but through altering the system populator to place dangerous pirate nets to catch off-laners (and maybe occasional Thargoid scouting parties, just to really put the willies up people). It doesn't have to be predictably dangerous to go offlane - in fact, it's probably better if it's unpredictable, but potentially
very dangerous. It's more important to keep new players on the lanes, I think: once people are hooked into the game, we don't need to worry about them so much (and they can go off happily hunting down off-lane threats, too). But beginners should be enticed to play the game from the start.
Another thing to keep players on the lane is to give people something to do while getting out of masslock. This might be trickier; how and what can we do? I've found myself slightly obsessively checking out the names of ships provided by the Random Ship Names OXP. Perhaps there's some mileage there: perhaps we can generate - with a bit of scanning - some manifests for ships: where they've last been, the name of their commander, that sort of thing. Potted histories generated from a seed, in the same way that the planet descriptions are. It's more than a little trainspottery, I admit, but still ... There might also be potential in communicating with ships, in picking up and sharing news, maybe even getting a few tips and mini-missions for small financial rewards. Things to boost the game-in-the-head, in general. Being friendly might increase the chance that another merchant might help you out, too: bumping into an Anaconda convoy might not just be something you have to slog past, it might be something you can run to for help if you need it.
There could also be things to do inside your ship - mini-games, essentially; timewasters - to do with "smoothing your energy grid" or "maintaining ship systems" (this could stave off time to the next ship maintenance, or even be used for repairing damaged systems, or at least jury-rigging them). If I've got 5 minutes to kill, I might play a quick game of minesweeper: if something similar could be dressed up and presented in the game as doing something to the ship's systems, I might do that if I'm waiting out a masslock.
Another approach is to change how masslocking works. Personally, I think this is doomed: it's a huge, and very important, chunk of the game mechanics, and altering it is almost certainly going to be game-breaking. For example:
Redspear wrote:What if you could only be mass-locked by enties ahead of you?
This would mean that the best defensive tactic is to get your attacker onto your six - then he's not masslocking you, and you can engage your torus drive and escape. Of course, this could be further adjusted by not letting people use the torus when in red alert, but this has further complications: what if you're in combat, and someone else lands a shot on your attacker, and he switches targets? You're no longer in red alert ... you can turn tail and press the escape button.
The torus is there to stop human players getting bored. The masslock is there to limit the torus, and to force player interaction. I don't see any benefit - any more fun being added - by giving them to NPCs: I do see problems being caused. Fundamentally, too, this doesn't address the problem of how to keep players on the lane. And to repeat: I see this as very much an early-game problem. Experienced players will soon get hold of injectors to take them past masslocks, if they want to, or can risk going offlane if they want to, if they're in a hurry to get to some piece of more advanced gameplay in some other part of the galaxy. The central question should be, how can we persuade new players to stay on the spacelane; and a secondary question is, can we find things for players to do during the stretches of standard flight to clear masslock.
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