Postby Songthrush » Tue Feb 26, 2008 2:55 am
Many people contributed interesting tactical observations in this thread, regarding the advantages and disadvantages that pirates have or don't have vs. city dwellers. While these are interesting on their own, I'd like to again point out to everyone that the balancing of advantages has nothing to do with the topic of this particular suggestion. It is strictly about removing an existing bias, easily exploitable but only by one side, and occuring in a special case, which we feel is important.
I would ask everyone to consider the post added above by Doug. R.
Look at what he is saying - basically that it would be more realistic to just remove the docking issue, instead of adding the ability of fixed movement to ships.
This is Doug's view, mine however is different.
I suspect that first, it would be more complicated to do implementation-wise.
Second, on the objective level, Doug's solution would cause fierce ship-reset battles (which are for now an overarching fact of our characters' lives, I am not trying to say they should not be there). The difference is that without my suggestion, these battles will occur hourly - at ship processing times every hour. One of the positive things I see in our suggestion, is that such battles can be made 3-hourly, and therefore much more player-friendly, less punishing for players who do not dedicate themselves to Cantr 24/7. I've always felt that such players also deserve a chance to play "feared pirates", renegades and so on. But that's quite impossible the way things are now.
Doug rightly points out that Player A (who is trying, remember, to undock the ship and steer it away) would have an advantage because the initiative is with him: he could "set it and forget" essentially - for the next three hours there would be nothing Player B could do about it. BUT, if you consider Doug's alternative carefully, you will see plainly that in this case too, Player A gets exactly the same advantage. Only now, Player A is forced to track server update times, to undock and steer the vessel exactly before the server updates ships. I feel this should NOT be an hourly part of the game, and that's why our suggestion has better thinking behind it. We do not eliminate the fact that the active player has a massive advantage over the inactive, but with our suggestion things are more smoothly spread out in time and less strictly dependent on server mechanics which are obscure to many players. It is much more natural to set a ship on a failsafe course for 1-3 turns, from the player's perspective, than to fight with another player every 1 hour to do the same thing in a roundabout way.
Besides, many people have grown to like the unstoppable docking feature of the current implementation. It is a very reasonable feature, when it is not being unfairly exploited by only one side - so I suggest we should not remove it.
Thirdly, and purely subjectively, having the ability to move your ship on a fixed course for 1, 2, or 3 turns at a time seems completely natural to me; it is understood as a kind of special, emergency steering mode. Which players activate only when they specifically select 1, 2, or 3 turn movement. While it does not correspond to any kind of "rudder lock" (I never liked this idea, though I feel something of the sort is mechanically necessary), the possibility of an emergency movement mode like this would fit naturally into the gameplay as it is, in the sense of being immediately understood by players and utilized in many different ways.
I think we are all agreed, by now, that something must be done about the issues discussed in this thread. What are everyone's else's thoughts on the issue of Doug's suggestion (remove the possibility of unstoppable docking, instead of adding anything) versus mine, adding a possibility of an emergency unstoppable 1,2, or 3 turn movement mode for ships?
Last edited by
Songthrush on Tue Feb 26, 2008 3:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
