QoL suggestions

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In response to @lowstrife ‘s suggestion that the next update focus on QOL and refinement of existing systems, I have created this topic to record suggestions. This will be linked to a discord thread on the official discord as well, where I think it would be more valuable to conduct discussion, and simply suggest ideas here.

I’ve also edited response that seem outside the scope of “fix/improve existing features”, though those would make great feature suggestions!

Discord thread: Discord

From @lowstrife:

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.

Further thoughts from @SLKLS

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

From @saigo
A way to group multiple screens into a “tab” so as to organize large numbers of screens efficiently (+1 from me personally :wink:)

From untech

  • I want the vestiges of unimplemented features to be removed, it does not look good. Examples: ECD, recurring contracts, price change in CXM, the leaderboards that does not work
  • I want the map to be much more useful: easier search, more information on popup, more noticeable “pings”
  • I want syncronized panes for trading
  • I want screen templates for planet management and trading
  • I want the leaderboards to load instantly
  • I want as much Refined Prun features to be backported as possible. Must have: financials, burn, mat colors (icons are optional), CXTS.
1 Like
Faction Influence - Development Log #517
2

Inventory separation - so that I can store Corp or Gateway items in a dedicated warehouse inventory at the CX instead of having to keep track in a spreadsheet.

4 Likes
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Quality of life features feel really good to get and can improve the gameplay experience of a broad swath of players.

I understand the incentive for big headline improvements and large new features. But I think they are less important to PRUN than they are for games like WoW or Eve, where they are paying for huge marketing campaigns that need to headline a flashy feature.

My personal wishlist has two categories:

Big impact with (hopefully) smaller development lifts:

  • COM loading time, sorting of messages
  • Fulfill all button
  • Refuel all ships button… somewhere.
  • Fleet sorting is great. Can we drag-and-drop sort CONTD?
  • Backend performance tooling: Is there a system that measures the duration taken to respond to each APEX request? And the time spent processing each request? Sorted by type of request? (how long does a STORAGE_CHANGE take vs. a LEAD query) Do some users make longer requests that slow down the server? That might help identify bottlenecks.
  • JSON contract import
  • Export/import a SCRN to share with other players. New players love seeing and sharing their screens. Sure they’ll have to sub in their base names, but the layout and buffer commands would export and import easily.

Leverage newer features in PRUN to improve their impact:

We sort of have custom contracts. Clearly, government motions and faction entities can create interesting lists of contract terms, so the engine supports these types of contracts. But we don’t have a UI to create them ourselves. Add this would unlock a lot of nice behaviors:

  • Selling multiple items without corresponding 1:1
  • Cash transfers that don’t include 1 RAT
  • Convert currencies by sending cash and retrieving cash in a single contract, without moving items.
  • Adding an item sale on the end of a loan contract.
  • More creative loan structures in a single contract
  • Private contracts are a pro feature, so adding value to them improves the proposition of buying pro.

Autoprovision behavior on buy and sell contracts:

Once you push “Close” on a 20 item contract, both parties are obligated to fulfill all the terms of that contract. But the game requires us to click on 3 fullfill buttons for each of the 20 items in that contract. At that point it’s just busywork, and they should all be optionally autofilling, just like shipping contracts. I think most people past a couple bases are regularly clicking through at least a couple contracts like this:

Shared Storage:

We have shared storage- inventories that multiple people can simultaneously drag materials in and out. However, that’s only for gateway upkeep and fuel. How close are we to shared corp storage? I have no idea!

Orbital Infrastructure:

All the features in place for gateway construction was clearly written with other types of infrastructure in mind. It was a ton of work to add all those new features. Can those be brought to more players by reusing those mechanics in smaller updates?

Talking with some old OOG members recently who retired, it’s amazing how far the QoL features have brought the game in the last 4 years. When I started we were shuffling items around with carefully crafted Local Market ads to trade. Even seemingly small things like sorting the fleet buffer are a big improvement.

I would suggest trying out rprun just for one day a week. I think it’s important for the devs to play the game in vanilla form, but seeing what’s available in rprun will inspire a lot of improvements.

Thanks!

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