The maintenance release is out, and Michi started working on a new feature: Faction Influence
You can find the full issue of the development log here.
2 Likes
If I may - I’d like to propose that there are more important things and pressing issues to tackle first before what appears to be the scope of this project. I don’t want to say it isn’t important or a cool feature, it is and many people would want it, but I think there are more pressing items. The following is a non-exhaustive list of some suggestions:
- Planet plot limit problem
- Horizontal integration incentives
- Corporation overhaul
- New player experience
- Player retention (good steps have been made here!)
- Tips in the ui for new players to address common questions
- Better explanations on what: 200 (100) in your workforce columns mean
- Profitability balance of starting professions (constructor is terrible)
- This ties into broader economic meta balancing i.e marketmakers like bfabs, rat\dw acting like deflation currency sinks currently.
- Quality of life items
- Smarter flight planner for gateway travel
- Multi-item CONTD refinement
- Reoccurring shipping routes
- More reliable leaderboard data
While its difficult to determine that any individual item may be more important to a different group of people. However, I think we could agree that the community would deem at least a few of these items as having a higher level of importance in terms of priority of limited development time and resources.
As always, appreciate the continued work and transparency about what’s coming and the status of the work being done.
8 Likes
I very strongly agree.
It feels like there’s so much other stuff that needs to be done first.
I actually oppose corporation overhauls / improvements because all of the other things mentioned (less than this upate though). I think corps can hold their own due to player driven programs and orginization.
Fuel refining is annother thing in a bad spot.
LMs too !
If we need a feature that doesn’t benefit most players gov UI/UX improvements might be good.
1 Like
I tend to agree also, quite a few things need a “bit of a polish” perhaps to help sharpen up the overall game, before adding in another whole new feature that will itself likely become another maint overhead on dev time once its deployed…
1 Like
My (hopefully mostly neutral) ranking would be:
+++++ Profitability balance of starting professions (constructor is terrible) (PP1 are a “bad” starting building because of high logistics too, and the same or worse than PP2 which should imo only produce emergency bfabs which are a bit more expensive but not too much)
- +++ This ties into broader economic meta balancing i.e marketmakers like bfabs, rat\dw acting like deflation currency sinks currently. (imo MMs should be raised as soon as they are hit on a regular basis, or even better dynamik MMs for ask or both)
++++ Horizontal integration incentives (HQ bonus is already neither balanced nor relevant for the most players so it ends up being ignored and all players can do everything with the same efficiency while specialization has to pick more expensive planets with longer logistics rountes)
+++ Planet plot limit problem (developing plots for example and maybe taking the first base out of the plot system)
++ New player experience
-
Tips in the ui for new players to address common questions
-
Better explanations on what: 200 (100) in your workforce columns mean
++ Player retention (good steps have been made here!)
++ Smarter flight planner for gateway travel
++ Multi-item CONTD refinement
- more automation in conts in general, sell conts have to be interacted with twice by each side
- Corporation overhaul
- Reoccurring shipping routes
? Quality of life items
More reliable leaderboard data
I can only second this 
1 Like
Its also a bit unclear what the purpose these changes is, for example one of the options suggested would be new starting planets. Under the current system you are severly punished for not picking a permit locked starter. So new starter options while nice probally wouldn’t be picked too much.
This kinda feels like a bit of a hamster wheel feature a la apex representation points. Even the map painting nature has been greatly reduced since pvp is disabled.
Also how many people can particpate in the faction parliment? Will the average player be able to have meaningful participation in this mechanic?
At 20 people less than 1% of the playerbase will be able to participate.
I have to agree with lowstrife here - while I would like to see factions become more important in the game - I think there are several things that would improve the game for the vast majority of the player base - and at least the one I would start with is the plot limit question. One of the problems is that even though we are up to 6 CXs, only really 2 are what I would consider fully liquid - and even there we have periodic shortages of different materials - LI was a few weeks ago and it looks like TI is the new one at Moria. So we really can’t add a CX to fix this problem, which means that designating new starting planets is probably a non-starter.
The flip side of this though is that if we add MM for more materials - and add them to the outlying CXs - then even if the CX is too thin, the MM would make sure there are materials and then we can designate starter planets around all the CXs (right now if you start near Hubur you could be in serious problems) - and this is also one of the ideas to help encourage horizontal specialization that we have been kicking around.
I do also agree that you guys are doing a great job - we just want to see that retention of new players can increase so we have a larger pool of people when you do work on the faction improvements.
In short, my recommendation would be to work on the new player experience, specficially with regards to the plot (or lack there of) on starter planets and rebalancing starting professions - and maybe in the process of that merging fuel refining COGC in with resource extraction or chemistry (I prefer resource extraction because I think chemistry is already too loaded). Part of this could also be the fixes that have been discussed on how to encourage horizontal specialization and increase player interaction and trade.
3 Likes
I did at one point propose that MMs be controlled by factions gov.
Regardless, I agree that while a very cool idea, some spit and polish on existing systems would be better
I created a topic just for this: QoL suggestions
Once I am on a computer, I will copy and paste your suggestions! As long as you don’t mind?