Make colonisation have real feeling of a point to ownership - with an architect's exclusive room/hab on a port/ground settlement to login/out there

[GraphicEqualizer]

IMO for system colonisation to make sense from a feeling of it being a home and achievement that I "made", it will need to offer something unique that is not just a cookie cutter system that is effectively no different than others. Like the carrier's exclusive quarters should have been, provide a room on a station, or surface settlement that is just for the architect... preferably customisable with Arx cosmetics, allow us to decorate it with trinkets relevant to our years of toils in game. Trophies available for taking down Titans (after participation), placeable Hutton Mug (if you have collected one), Guardian trinkets available (if you have visited), bottle of Lavian Brandy or Leathery Egg (if you have also purchased them). Etc. Make it like Picard's ready room showing artifacts from his years of adventures.

Also, this is especially relevant because it's going to be hard to even enable players to have free-form naming ability of planets and systems, cos it'll end up stupid. maybe have a random wheel of safe word combos to choose from would be the only safe thing to do.

 

[metatheurgist]

It's not about ownership.

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

It is for me and a whole bunch of others. Expanding the bubble without personal stakes in it would be worthless

 

[varonica]

It's not about ownership.

It is for me and a whole bunch of others. Expanding the bubble without personal stakes in it would be worthless

And this is what I have said in other threads, this is not the "base building" these players wanted, it never will be. There was a lot of throw around talk criticizing people for saying base building wouldn't be coming, some of it directed my way, and it suddenly is, so "nya nya you were wrong" type comments came my way. Now suddenly colonisation isn't enough, they want, well what they want is "base building," not the base building they are getting however, the base building they want!

 

[GrimSageX3]

I agree that getting recognition for being an agent in the creation or establishment of a colony would be great.

I also know preset options allow for massive compression of database info so the colonization system is probably better off following a formula where certain stages of it can be represented with drastically little storage.

As you probably know, 1 byte can represent 256 different values. 0-255.
Certain stages of colonization could actually be represented with a single byte of information.
I think that is where the colonization beacon and ship come into play.
Without getting into some crazy DB theory, I'll keep the example simple and lets imagine colonization "stages" being represented by 255 numbers.

The solar system data is probably a mixture of procedural and database but
lets assume AT MINIMUM we have to pull one more byte for colonization.

So using a single byte to represent stages of colonization with numbers 0-255
-----
0 could mean no beacon. Ok nobody tried to colonize yet.
1 could mean a beacon. ok a colonization beacon exist.
2 beacon + Colony ship just arrived.
3 beacon + Colony ship has no supply
4 beacon + colony ship has supply.
5.beacon + colony ship supply + station construction begins.
6. Colony ship + bacon & eggs.
On a small scale for a small number of players, lots of customization is possible simply because there are not millions of concurrent players, but i dont think full on base configuration would scale very well at all.

Just like stages of colonization can be stored or represented with a single byte,
255 possible combinations of various perks could be stored with the player stats using a single byte.
So yeah... a few bytes and little database indirection magic should allow players to have some preset perks.

I agree with your sentiment that we do not want players naming names and full control over placing objects at settlements and stations.

 

[aRJay]

No.

This isn’t apartment building and decorating it is overseeing the building of a colony if the architect does get anywhere it should be a control room and office to deal with the paper work and scheduling.

After all we will have to abandon it when we move on to the next job.

 

[Fixitman]

Another suggestion to start turning ED into some other game. Why not just play that other game instead?

This is getting silly....

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

I'm certainly glad we are NOT getting base building like, I don't know, NMS or Minecraft, DayZ, etc., etc., but more like a carrier's captains room to make it feel even a little like actual tangible ownership would really help sell it as, "this is my place". It's one of the major reasons all the belly aching about ship interiors.
Otherwise I am just spending a lot of time and credits just to create a system essentially like any other (with the exception of maybe personal placement choices of standardised surface ports/settlements - and I have no problem with these all being standardised ports and stations).
Just that little effort though for a bit of a nod to it being something that I want to spend time in opposed to anywhere else. A place to call home perhaps. A more compelling reason.

 

[varonica]

I'm certainly glad we are NOT getting base building like, I don't know, NMS or Minecraft, DayZ, etc., etc., but more like a carrier's captains room to make it feel even a little like actual tangible ownership would really help sell it as, "this is my place". It's one of the major reasons all the belly aching about ship interiors.
Otherwise I am just spending a lot of time and credits just to create a system essentially like any other (with the exception of maybe personal placement choices of standardised surface ports/settlements - and I have no problem with these all being standardised ports and stations).
Just that little effort though for a bit of a nod to it being something that I want to spend time in opposed to anywhere else. A place to call home perhaps. A more compelling reason.

There's a lot we don't know about colonisation yet, and there will probably be stuff in there that surprises us, who knows, FDEV may even listen to requests on the forums of they aren't that difficult to do.

 

[the100thmonkey]

IMO for system colonisation to make sense from a feeling of it being a home and achievement that I "made", it will need to offer something unique that is not just a cookie cutter system that is effectively no different than others. Like the carrier's exclusive quarters should have been, provide a room on a station, or surface settlement that is just for the architect... preferably customisable with Arx cosmetics, allow us to decorate it with trinkets relevant to our years of toils in game. Trophies available for taking down Titans (after participation), placeable Hutton Mug (if you have collected one), Guardian trinkets available (if you have visited), bottle of Lavian Brandy or Leathery Egg (if you have also purchased them). Etc. Make it like Picard's ready room showing artifacts from his years of adventures.

Also, this is especially relevant because it's going to be hard to even enable players to have free-form naming ability of planets and systems, cos it'll end up stupid. maybe have a random wheel of safe word combos to choose from would be the only safe thing to do.

The Fist of Family Values awaits orders to destroy the Terminids and crush the Automatons.

Arrowhead did a great job with those dropdowns. Irony is built right in and the choices are consistent with the world they created. However, it would be a lot harder to create a whitelist that basically includes every possible combination of things that won't be offensive. This is not least because deliberate irony is not programmable within a free choice - one has to limit interpretations in order for it to work. In combination, language gets exponentially more complex. The easiest thing to do in this regard is either a single-word list for system names or just not allow player-driven system naming at all.

With regard to the systems having a 'real' feeling of 'point' to ownership, I'm not really sure that 'ownership' was a promise. It's certainly not a given. One might expect, however, that designing, building and upgrading a system from scratch might naturally engender such a feeling, even if we can't name the system "Alien's mum has no social skills."

Do I need my own little room on a station for that? For me, no. You don't get to name your own Pokemon. This is no different.

 

[the100thmonkey]

0 could mean no beacon. Ok nobody tried to colonize yet.
1 could mean a beacon. ok a colonization beacon exist.
2 Beacon + Colony ship just arrived.
3 Becon + Colony ship has no supply
4 becon + colony ship has supply.
5.beacon + colony ship supply + station construction begins.

Now all I can think about is bacon. I want 6 bacon. That's two good sarnies right there.

 

[GrimSageX3]

Now all I can think about is bacon. I want 6 bacon. That's two good sarnies right there.

6. Colony ship + bacon & eggs.
Done

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

Imagine building the architect, or even the project manager, a house on every estate they build. At most you get a space in the site hut while the building is going on.

Difference is that the architect in this case is also paying for the place AND putting in the work, so that analogy does not really apply.

Imagine if you likely have to pay 20 billion in game credits and say 100 hours in game time to produce at the end of it something that looks essentially just like any other system you visit.

Imagine if after toiling to buying a carrier it was just a hangar and a menu (pretty much like it was initially to the horror of players lol), and not at least something you get to go onboard, log out at and log in at, something you can customise at least superficially, and have some agency of with your own private elevator to the bridge and separate room -- however infrequently we use them. We still have people whining about ship interiors 4 years after Odyssey.

There is a risk that for a majority of people, colonisation without a greater sense of a personal point to it, will turn out to be a missed opportunity.

I am however beginning formulate in the old noggin other alternatives for a "point to it" which I'll post about soon

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

I spend most of my time in game flying to new systems just so my CMDRs name is all over them. I’m probably not the person to make that argument to.

As for the private room on a carrier, it was cool going into it on the first day. I’ve not been back since because there’s nothing to do there. It doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies knowing it’s there.

Same as ship interiors would be - I get it, I do.

But its something unique that only you get to experience in your own.

What I am saying is that our own personal experiences not needing this or that (interiors or sense of ownership like I suggest) is not going to make this upcoming feature compelling for the greater numbers of people who we WANT the feature to be a success for, bringing in more players, getting the playerbase enthused for the "grind" it will entail. If the majority of whiny players just see this as a grind with nothing in it for them, they will screech from the rooftops, again, and leave, again.

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

My other thoughts on unique opportunities to WANT to grind to create a system that is not just essentially only to put your name on it

Colonisation COULD bring things we have wanted for ages: In-game racing locations and surface drilling and associated functionality

As a side step from an earlier post I made about wanting colonised systems to have some kind of feeling of unique "ownership" benefits - like a private customisable architect's quarters or something (a bit like carriers), it got me to thinking another thing that would "Sell" the want to grind...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

It's not about ownership.

This, the actual idea of having a place to show off your achievements is cool, but it's better done by having an instanced museum or something you can donate items to to have them on display (The Secret World did this okay, the thargoid bobblehead in elite is a good example of stuff like that too).

Of all the things I want from colonization this would be near the bottom of the list too.

 

[GraphicEqualizer]

by having an instanced museum or something you can donate items to

but will we get that either? Or will it just be a system with your name on it (no better than the name you get for discovering a system already), for example would you grind 100 hours and pay 10 billion credits for that?