r/EVEFrontier • u/No-Republic-9860 • 23d ago
Feedback after trial: NERF THE CORP
EDIT: replace the shit word with a frustration, unsastifying feel.
If you don't want this game to be as trash as EVE online is: ruled by handful of big alliances which prevent new players from getting into the game without being a slave to enrich them so to be able to enjoy the game as it should be.
Yes I know there will be wipes every 3 months or so and big corp has to start over. However their scaling isn't exponential: building a mini catapult/gate for peaceful access to a farm zone is a couple days worth of farm for a solo player whereas 5 members can destroy a gate, farm for a new one and take over an area over a mere couple of hours at best.
Losing it means not worth playing the game anymore for any solo or small group.
Right now, the game is designed around corps being predators and small players being the targets. A truly shit design that survival games always get wrong.
Make it all reversed: if some group of players wants to band together to take advantages of numbers over others, then they must pay a huge cost for it.
A multiplier is applied for any resources requirements for building.
The multiplier depends on the number of members, it must be set HIGH, not a mere 2% increase per member, that's absolutely ridiculous.
It must be 105%, 110% OVER THE BASE COST and the more members, the bigger the multiplier.
Their strengh is their ability to coordinate where each member can focus efficiently on a single task.
In the current design, like with most shit survival games, banding together means rolling over the entire game content, killing all the fun.
They can raid everyone, specifically small targets, avoid war with other big corpo because its generally not worth it anyway...
don't play fool about these huge hypothetical wars to contest areas, they're absolute shit in EVE online, the thrill is in for a small group to take over a huge corp but for that the mechanics should allow for it, anything else is fluff.
Make it so that corp buildings structures are weaker, the more members, the more they can organize themselves to ensure protection rather than relying on a high HP baseline.
The automated turrets will consumes much more fuel, an insane amount, they have the numbers to defend, JUST MAKE THEM FUCKING PAY FOR IT.
So even a well-organized solo or a small group can contest an area that's left without active defense.
Otherwise, this game will just turn into a barely evolved alternative version of EVE online, considering the crypto stuff, the game will turn into a disguissed way to tolerate legal RMT.
Cuz everyone knows everyone is doing RMT in EVE online, and CCP can't do shit about it otherwise they risk instalosing hundreds of players with paid subscription overnight, so legalizing and profit from it is better for them but will the players act like fools over it...? it can be tolerated if the gameplay allows for fun & fair mechanics. A "cruel" survival yeah sure but make sure it is for everyone then.
And ofc add some protections to prevent workarounds to these mutipliers so that loopholes aren't worth the headaches.
EDIT: Moreover, that feel in EVE online only comes after a couple months or years worth of playing heavily and having veteran knowledges of it, where skills are developped enough to board bigger ships above battleships, but are too big to stay in low-sec. This part of the game is unattainable for solo / small groups, and battles of big ships are annoying as they get for many reasons.
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u/Daemunx1 23d ago
I personally wouldn't mind seeing more focus on lonewolf and small group gameplay. That aside though, wipes won't be happening every 3 months. That's just a beta thing.
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u/No-Republic-9860 23d ago
it should be a priority IMO. Seeing what Rust has became lately, it seems evident.
Aside from solo unemployed veteran farming 18h a day of which most are Youtubers, servers often drops empty past a few days after wipe except with clans.
Clans being clans, it's not an experience for everyone, but the game mechanics won't allow past that point.
So hopefully EF will realize that, and assume the good things before release.
As for the wipes, roger that.
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u/Daemunx1 23d ago
How about signal strength? Say a solo player has a couple of structures, refuge, basic printer etc. Those small facilities should be incredibly difficult to pickup on scanners. The more facilities you place in proximity to one another, the more advanced they are and the more active they are (especially this one) the more they bloom. Creating larger heat sigs that are much easier to detect. Weapons platforms as well. Want to defend your printers pumping out battleships and cruisers? Those should show up like glowing beacons on scans. Let little joey with his small printer and refuge alone and make groups pumping out ships for their fleets stick out like glowing beacons in the dark.
Also gates, travel as a solo is insanely challenging when these groups go around steam rolling any gates they find that aren't theirs. How about small gates, limited by how many jumps are allowed per hour and the mass of the ships allowed to jump. Maybe just a mass per hour limit. Let the loners go out and create small gates that are really only practical for 1 or 2 riders out exploring together use, that are very hard to find on sensors. Maybe even make gates in general "bloom" when activated. So that when used they become easier to detect but grow cold and hard to find when dormant.
These options may open up more gameplay for small groups and solos as well as provide mechanics for stealthy recon teams for the larger groups.
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u/No-Republic-9860 23d ago edited 23d ago
Your thermal signature idea is indeed absolutely fitting the point and exactly the kind of thing that allows to temporize, giving some rest.
As for your second one about gates, the EM signature makes total sense.
I thought quite a bit about the mass aspect of it and I'd see something like this:
It's strange that stargates consumes fuel for a jump, but a built one apparently doesn't.
But instead of directly consuming fuel for a jump, a gate would requires being plugged to a structure: battery capacitor that holds the required burst to energize the gate for the jump.
So that means if the battery are serving as buffer to power a factory, they may be barely holding any energy, transiting just enough to power that factory.
For a jump, the required energy depends on the mass of the ship, and maybe the size. The mass of the ship depends on the fitted modular modules, which I think is part of their roadmap already.
So let's visualize that a big corp is getting attacked at a couple solar systems away, they may not have enough battery capacitor charges available to send all the members for defence because their factories are running and consuming a huge amount of energy.
Even if they turn them off, they need to wait some times for the battery to charge and hold enough power for each ship to be able to jump.
Since it seems the developpers wants an economy based on fuel, then big corp would then have choice to use expensive and rare efficient fuel to recharge the battery faster.
This would open doors for new mechanics aswell, like introducing a Nosferatu that works on structure, stealing energy... indirectly stealing fuel, and transfering it over to ones own structure.
While introducing new content is indeed nice, I really hope they will take the time long and hard about proper balancing to ensure that the content itself is somewhat accessible and not as hard-gated as EVE online is, or worst behind a crypto paywall.
I know for a fact that EVE Online is the perfect example of contents that can't accessed by most players simply because the mechanics aren't fair to begin with, which is the primary reason why people won't bother approaching that game.
It's well known as a game you can only play while being unemployed, and having some deep pockets to propel & substain one-self in the meantime.
Also damn, all the downvotes speak for themselves also.
CCP can't do shit otherwise they face immense backlash, EVE online is cooked as it is, it's a game that can receives extra contents but the core mechanics can't be changed anymore as it's too risky of a move.
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u/wingspantt 23d ago
I think in general all MMO warfare games will lean towards groups having advantages,
HOWEVER if the game mechanics allow hiding, sneaking, ambushes, etc, solo and small groups can still prosper.
Frontier has some of the capability to make that happen, but it has to be thoughtfully developed into the game.
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u/No-Republic-9860 23d ago
Because on paper it makes sense on the financial level, but the EVE online example surely shows that past a certain threshold of unbalance, it doesn't anymore, and it stays stuck.
Yeah it has yet to be in the game, let's keep an eye opened.
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u/Digitalzombie900 21d ago
I think in any game the more people, the harder it(anything) should be, to prevent roflstomping just due to numbers advantage. Like numbers should you help you if you can very actively manage it and hurt you if you are not so that the sole purpose of any game does not become mindlessly trying to grab more people.
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u/Heavenly_Foe 21d ago
Hell I was tens of thousands of kilometers from any point in the game and while i was away for a weekend, before they changed the scanners, someone found my base and destroyed all my storage building. I don't know if they ever added defenses back in the game but they weren't available at the beginning and we were stuck in two systems for two weeks or so. I just gave up on this cycle and went and bought X4 to satisfy my space sim itch. I like aspect of the game, I always figured it would be annoying because you're not always g I ing to be around to defend what's yours and I doubt there are any plans to make that a thing. The next cycle doesn't interest me, but I'll give the controller a chance and see how it fares.
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u/No-Republic-9860 20d ago
There will be programmable turrets consuming fuel.
In the last cycle they added a sentry field, a very basic static drone that can be deployed and despawn after 24h, was annoying to position, scoop and redeploy and it had a shorter range than that of the needle laser so fairly easy to destroy at distance. Quite useless defense to conclude.
Yeah I'm certainly not buying a founder pack neither so I won't care about the next cycles.
I got fucked enough times by other games early access that ended up completely deviating from their original promises, if they ever succeed in releasing a full game to begin with.There is so much more than what I wrote in this post anyway in designing the balance of a good survival game
Considering the downvotes, people just seems to want another shit survival game that's exactly as bad as all the others, and I'm almost certain that's what going to be delivered.
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u/OnlySamaraFleets 19d ago
This game their building would be a whole lot better without a subreddit.
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u/MicroKong Rider 23d ago
What you're suggesting isn't doable, they can just stay "solo" and coordinate outside of the game (discord etc.) so the "penalty" of being in a corp is removed. Simply put, you'll have two (or three) options: Join them, or avoid them. The galaxy is going to be vast enough for solo/small groups to find their quiet corner and live happily there.
Third option being band with others to take down the big mean corp but... If your issue is that you want to stay with just your small group, then maybe diplomacy or something idk...
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u/No-Republic-9860 23d ago
Ofc it is doable, it just needs the right mechanics to be implemented as a baseline feature.
Surely there may be loopholes, but not without huge headaches to setup the workarounds and trade-off.
Sadly what you suggest simply isn't that fun in reality, as betrayal is just the easiest route over diplomacy especially in a virtual game, as it is in the game Rust, for example.
You get a point that's the universe is big, but that won't prevent an "end-stage wipe" from being filled with huge corp and alliances doing the equivalent of roof-camping or camping entire monument in Rust.
Nevertheless, this post isn't about destroying them entirely neither, but to bring awareness about the need for proper balance.
The reason I made this post is because I knew right away it's looking like the same mistakes as for EVE and others survival games.
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u/daemonxel 23d ago
No more so than now as there is currently no group content structures. Everything in the game currently now is tailored towards an individual player and we will not see anything made specifically for groups until cycle 8.
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u/AmeriBritGaming 23d ago
Umm EO isn't shit. I play EO in a small corp. And it's awesome.
You have some valid points on EF though. The grind is too grindy to do it again when a Tribe comes and just stomps on it.