Lake wrote:CCP Greyscale wrote:Lake wrote:A suggestion to make the switchover less painful, and which doesn't require code changes to the Crucible release:
Run a DB script to convert the fuel currently in towers into fuel blocks during the DT.
This will alleviate some player concerns about producing enough fuel blocks in a reasonable time frame (and the resultant price shock) by providing a one-time buffer of up to roughly a month of fuel block production.
It prevents the inevitable player frustration with towers going offline due to mis-fueling (no matter how many blog posts or news items you make, this will happen, and it will be frustrating and they will blame CCP).
It's verifiable. You can check the results of the script before any code runs when you turn the server on.
It's just all around easier on the players. That's the whole point of this change right? Less frustrating non-gameplay.
It makes you look like the good guys. You already took the player advice on raising the block-count so you could do fuel bonuses sanely. This alleviates the remaining major concern.
If we made this a condition of adding fuel blocks, we wouldn't be adding fuel blocks, because it pushes the complexity and risk to a level that's unacceptable for a change of this sort. We'd love to do an automatic switch-over script, but it's just not going to happen, sorry.
The suggestion I made is obvious, so naturally you've already considered it and rejected it.
The purpose of my post is to raise your awareness of the value of that extra complexity and risk, by giving other players an opportunity to support the notion. The hope is that given sufficient "likes" and posts chiming in with support (and perhaps a couple of CSM reps I know adding their own comments) you'll determine that the extra effort is worth the value to the players.
Though I contend that the risk and complexity of a one-off DB script is actually less than the complexity and risk than asking every manager of every one of tens of thousands of POS in the game to prepare for a hard switchover date. But then perhaps you have more faith in humanity than I do.
To be clear, I'm not saying "the complexity and risk of a switchover script makes a switchover script not worth doing", I'm saying "the complexity and risk of a switchover script makes
fuel blocks not worth doing", at least for this release. We rejected doing this sort of upgrade because it would take so much QA time to test it properly that we'd have to cut a whole stack of other features to get it in, and while we like fuel blocks we don't think they're important enough to justify cutting all the ship balancing we're doing, for example.
If you want to argue that "no fuel blocks at all" is better than "fuel blocks without a handover script", then that's an interesting conversation (although only in a theoretical sense this late in the day), but "fuel blocks
and a handover script" just isn't something we could justify considering for this release. We only have so many developer hours to work with in a given expansion so everything is a zero-sum decision - adding time to one thing means taking it away from something else.
Iniquita wrote:You cant just make pos use both fuel types in series? If Fuel A exists then use it, else Fuel B?
The downside I see is that we're not only going to have go forth and toss fuel blocks in these pos, but then someone with starbase config will need to go around and take out the old fuel that is no longer being consumed. Having the pos burn both fuel types as long as they exist in the proper quantity in the tower would be an effective transition strategy imo.
Basically, no - see previous point :)
(Doing this would entail significant code changes to the way starbase fuel works, which would push the complexity sufficiently high that it would mean cutting the entire feature.)