Matthew
BloodStar Technologies
10
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Posted - 2014.04.19 00:53:00 -
[1] - Quote
My thoughts, in no particular order:
The big plan
I like the direction and goals stated. As an industrialist, it does increase my risks in some areas, but also expands on opportunities. I'm excited about being in industry in a way I haven't been for a long time now. However, as with most changes, it has the potential to be done really well or very badly, and there is not enough detail in this first blog to judge. So I will largely reserve judgement until the more detailed blogs arrive.
Cleaning Market Groups
All sounds sensible, liking the icons especially, as icon pattern matching should help a bit when trying to work out which section your item might be under.
Stopping the damage
Loving this change, gets rid of needless complexity and all the odd behaviors that occurred around this mechanic. Only concern is that the volume gets adjusted along with the quantity, but that has already been mentioned.
Removal of Extra Materials
CCP Ytterbium wrote:All extra materials are turned into regular materials, that will indeed be now affected by skills and waste. Except for Tech I ships and items, as such:
- You should never see a Paladin require 2 Apocalypses to build
- You should never see a Large shield Extender II require 0.75 Large Shield Extender I to build
I support the concept of tidying up the current mess that is the Raw/Extra material requirements (especially the messy way they are implemented in the static data). However, this response makes it clear that we will still have some materials that behave like Extra Materials (i.e. not subject to waste), even if they are no longer called Extra Materials.
Whatever the new rules are for what counts as a non-waste material need to be clearly shown in the bill of materials (and easily identifiable in the static data dump). Otherwise, you will simply be replacing one form of obfuscation with another. I'd also hope that this has been implemented as some sort of "no-waste" flag that could be applied to anything, rather than a special-casing in the code for Tech 1 items. Otherwise it'll significantly limit design flexibility further down the line.
Assuming these issues have been designed for properly, it sounds like what we'd end up with is a rationalized list of Extra Materials with an improved back-end implementation, rather than the complete removal of Extra Materials. Which is fine. If the above concerns have not yet been considered, I would encourage them to be.
Cost Scaling System
Sounds good in principle, bringing back the connection between cost and demand is very welcome. I never understood why it was removed when the current slot system was introduced. Will wait on the detail blog to judge how it will work in practice.
Starbase Changes
Loving the removal of anchoring and standing restrictions. Addressing the issue of abandoned starbases is a must to go alongside this though.
There has been a lot of discussion in the thread already about whether wardecs are enough, and what should count as "abandoned". However, we've had a definition of "abandoned" for anchored (but offline) objects since 2008. While starbases being an exception while online is perfectly reasonable, I've never understood why they were still an exception when offline, especially since the changes to anchoring times made the time difference between re-activating an offline starbase and re-deploying a removed starbase much less.
Placeholding moons with offline starbases would still be viable - if the real estate is valuable to you, visiting the tower once every 30 days is not an unreasonable imposition. People who do this, and starbases within the 30-day window, would still offer a perfectly viable target set for any of the more interesting hacking mechanics that have been discussed.
As to why not just leave them up indefinitely and let people take them down with wardecs? It adds a barrier to entry based on how popular the area used to be, or just how long the moons have been available for junk towers to accrue at, and grinding down the tower of someone who hasn't logged in, and may never log in again, does not add gameplay, it adds a grind. As we are removing the standings grind, it makes sense to remove this HP grind as well. This would do nothing to block conflict around genuinely active towers with players that may fight back, or at least be materially affected by your actions.
Losing the safety of keeping blueprints in the station is a concern, but this has been acknowledged, so I will await details on the promised improvements to copying and the starbase facilities before judging this.
New UI
Looks very swish, but will need to wait for the detail blog and get my hands on it to really judge how the workflow handles. |