The bids can be engineering materials.
Changes are needed for making claims at new outposts
- Thread starter winchester1188
- Start date
Not really. One claim at a time, remember.
The Architect is only last in line if someone is near, or where, the station spawns in. Someone would have to track them to know that they're online and finishing the construction to time it purposely.
It isn't solely down to the System Architect to contribute to constructions, though. The Architects outpost could be at 40% when they log off, and whilst they're asleep, another CMDR may contribute the remaining 60%. What then? Only the Architect is allowed to colonise another system first? Why?
The station spawns near the System Colonisation Ship, so 99% of the time the Architect is closer than every other player in the game.
Yes, but that's for the specific system the Architect is staking a claim on. They have 24 hours to deploy the beacon, and they get 4 weeks to build the primary port. They're given a chance to get set up in the system they've staked a claim on.
That's the difference. We stake a claim on a singular system and have a time limit until that claim is rescinded if we don't do anything with it. What we don't have is a claim to every other system around our current one just because we're the architects there.
I could agree with a 10 minute timer for the Architect. These long cooldowns, and other suggested rules, are to try and give CMDR's the right to systems in range of their colony just because they've built a station there, but they don't have that right.
Even a 10 minute cooldown is giving in to that, but it's offset by being so short.
It's System Colonisation, not claim a Sector of Space Colonisation. Yes, we can daisy chain, but engaging in that doesn't give any of us a right to one specific system just because we're heading towards it.
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I agree, it does set up a situation where someone might put in many hours or even days of work to get out to the system they REALLY want to develop... only to find that someone else was just watching and waiting for the chance to sneak in and grab it. I get the argument that it's a competition in that way, but still, it does mean that the person that puts in all the work might totally lose out on their actual goal which kinda sucks. And yeah it does result in a bunch of "junk" colonisation with just a single outpost that will never be expanded on.
Overall I think the problem is the daisy-chain system itself, but I'd imagine FDEV will be pretty committed to keeping that system in place. I wish they would have gone with, "You can colonize anywhere in the galaxy, but the further you go from inhabited systems, the harder it's going to be to get materials." And really that's what would happen automatically - if you claim something 1000LY out, it's going to take a lot more time and effort to get your deliveries done. We've seen that people can get an outpost done solo in 1 day if they really want to - but getting one done 1000LY out in less than 4 weeks? That might be an actual challenge. Just think if we could all have a shot at our dream systems, with more manageable competition just by virtue of the sheer number of options available, but the caveat is "Don't bite off more than you can chew." To me that's appealing.
Anyway, count me as a +1 for "The system architect should get a 10 minute window to make the next claim once they finish their first station." If nothing else, because they're probably in something like a Type-9 and a camper can hang out in an engineered Viper and get to the outpost 5 times faster than the architect ever could. 10 minutes is long enough that if they're paying attention they won't lose their claim, but short enough that there's definitely a "Snooze you lose" element and other players can jump in.
Overall I think the problem is the daisy-chain system itself, but I'd imagine FDEV will be pretty committed to keeping that system in place. I wish they would have gone with, "You can colonize anywhere in the galaxy, but the further you go from inhabited systems, the harder it's going to be to get materials." And really that's what would happen automatically - if you claim something 1000LY out, it's going to take a lot more time and effort to get your deliveries done. We've seen that people can get an outpost done solo in 1 day if they really want to - but getting one done 1000LY out in less than 4 weeks? That might be an actual challenge. Just think if we could all have a shot at our dream systems, with more manageable competition just by virtue of the sheer number of options available, but the caveat is "Don't bite off more than you can chew." To me that's appealing.
Anyway, count me as a +1 for "The system architect should get a 10 minute window to make the next claim once they finish their first station." If nothing else, because they're probably in something like a Type-9 and a camper can hang out in an engineered Viper and get to the outpost 5 times faster than the architect ever could. 10 minutes is long enough that if they're paying attention they won't lose their claim, but short enough that there's definitely a "Snooze you lose" element and other players can jump in.
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You do know that a single person can only claim one system at a time, right? How do you get from that to "grab all the shiny systems"?
They're even worse, especially since the HGE change.
out of all the system in the bubble that are within range for colonisation,find it hard to see a cmdr watching a system to complete then grabbing the next system out,how do they know and if they are watching mine,they will get bored before i do as i have 2 weeks to complete and it will take me that time as im in no hurry lol.
Unless they get tired of waiting and complete it for you while you are offline. lol
You could make the exact same claim about the BGS.
For that, there's a litany of examples where, instead of using the mechanics as-designed, people have just complained and that FD should directly intervene to undo or introduce more rules to prevent the actions taken, because the exact outcome someone sought wasn't achieved due to the actions of others.
Then there's things like CMM composites, which fostered player demand for a basic commodity for the first time i can remember... but complaints meant that got homogenised to be indistinct from steel and titanium with the supply buff.
So, no, even if there's rules or conditions that promote engagement like i explained, people would still complain when they didn't get their way (and indeed, would have those complaints intensified because they felt like they were meant to be protected)
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I don't follow. What "exact same claim" could I make about the BGS? That it's interesting? And if I made the "exact same claim" would I be wrong?
What are you trying to say? That Frontier's main job is to never have people complain at them? Or that Frontier should never listen to feedback because inevitably some people will complain about some things some of the time no matter what happens?
This started as a conversation about whether or not it would be a good idea to introduce a mechanism whereby a system architect has a leg up on choosing the next claim site from their newly created station. I think it's probably a good idea. Ideally it would be something like a 24 hour holding period until the Architect has docked at their new station at least once. There might be a need for more nuance to it - levels of participation in the actual hauling part of this come readily to mind as a consideration, for example. But the current state of affairs is skewed in a way that weakens the overall value proposition for most people undertaking a colonization project, especially if Frontier are trying to incentivize the whole "daisy chain" thing which they seem quite keen on.
Your argument "against" was . . . people can still find other ways to annoy each other therefore implementing such a change won't shield Frontier from . . . complaining?
Is this still the conversation?
WHO CARES if people are complaining in one direction or another. We're talking about design. Like it? Don't like it? Cool let's talk about it. But this bizarre handwave against discussing and proposing changes IN A BETA, especially when the rationale begins and ends with "oh no complaining might happen!" makes no sense.
Nothing of the sort.
My point is, if FD put some sort of arbitrary rule like an x-minute cooldown, people will work out ways around it. No surprises there.
But, once there are rules put in place, seemingly to give player "protection" from claim sniping... if someone still manages to get around that, not only will there be complaints, but they will be intensified because of the expectation that those rules would protect you.
You can see this behaviour from the player base writ-large with C&P.... because players get penalised through bounties and what-not, the expectation from players in a lot of cases is that, if they still die, clearly C&P is ineffective and should be made more onerous. Or the last CG when the CG system went into Lockdown, people just complained til FD godhanded it instead of actually playing the game presented.
No rules means no expectations. If we're ok with the idea of me getting people to work together and snipe others... then we're surely OK with cases like the OP just getting a mate to "countersnipe" the system, and leaving this without convoluted rulesets over the top.
Okay not that I want to get dragged into this, but the lockdown lifted because players did literally billions of credits worth of bounty hunting, and that's how the system works. If Bounties > Crimes, eventually the lockdown is gonna lift. All FDEV did was give players more time to push back against the lockdown... meaning more gameplay, which ought to mean more fun, but ya'll were still mad. I don't get why you guys are always arguing for everything to be 100% wild west 100% of the time... rarely is that fun. We're talking about 10 measly minutes of grace for the system architect here, or at most a day.
Edit: One thought that just occurred to me, a short grace period wouldn't rule out the possibility of getting sniped, it would just mean that if someone wants to snipe your target system, they'd have to hop to ANOTHER potential system in the chain, build an outpost before you can, then swoop in and grab the target system. Totally doable, and hey if you can finish an outpost on the chain faster than I can, way to go, you earned the target system. The problem now is that someone can camp out, do 0 work, then snag the best system at the end of the chain at the last minute. And potentially then drop the game and never do anything with it ever, which is lame.
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Nah, that's definitely not what happened. But everyone can pat themselves on the back and think it's what happened. Over 10 years of BGSing, i know what a hand correction looks like.
Also, no, I'm not espousing "no rules wild west", I'm espousing rules that make sense and achieve the desired effect, as opposed to just seeing people up for disappointment.
Nah, that's definitely not what happened. But everyone can pat themselves on the back and think it's what happened. Over 10 years of BGSing, i know what a hand correction looks like.
Also, no, I'm not espousing "no rules wild west", I'm espousing rules that make sense and achieve the desired effect, as opposed to just seeing people up for disappointment
I have absolutely zero confidence players would be ok with that.
I acknowledge the problem, but arbitrary timers won't fix it, and will just give a false sense of security that they won't get sniped.
Dude the in-game news network spelled it out clear as day. There were 7 billion credits worth of bounties claimed in the day before the lockdown lifted, and it was posted about right in the CG forum thread.
I honestly don't know what you want then, because you're acknowledging the problem while also insisting that nothing can ever be done to fix it.
Attachments
And if you know how the BGS works (or had checked the other days), that wouldn't have been enough. Of course, it got sold that way though.
I'll be honest, i don't know how to fix this particular problem.
But i do know that putting on a rule in explicitly for protecting an architects first claim from their new system will go down like a tonne of bricks when that rule is ineffectual at preventing the problem occurring. That would be a worse scenario than what we have right now.
EDIT: Also, you omitted this part:
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The problem is:
- you're only ever going to be sniped by someone who's watching you closely enough to know what your plans are (or it's such a high-quality system and the only one for a long way around that it's really obvious) and is ready to pounce, including monitoring you closely enough to know pretty much exactly when you're going to bring the station online (because you only need five minutes, if that, to use its contact yourself)
- that's certainly not impossible, especially if you're syncing data to a public Inara profile, or they've got you on their friend list, or you're doing the hauling in Open and they're being fairly stealthy... but it's a long way from automatic
- so we can assume they're willing to spend a fair amount of resources in terms of time and thinking to secure the snipe
- therefore, if the aim is preventing it, it needs to be made quite a bit harder: they've already bypassed a large number of non-trivial barriers to get a snipe to work under the current rules
If you give 10 minutes grace period, they just use this knowledge of your movements to complete the system while you're offline, wait out the ten minutes, and build onwards. It's so easy for the sniper to adapt to this that it's barely a barrier. (Same applies to any timer much less than 24 hours)
But if you give 24 hours (or more), it's just really annoying for group chaining projects, because you either take an entire day's delay after every step, or you have to have the same person be the architect for the entire chain. Comparing the number of groups working on colonisation together with the number of people who have a sufficiently long solo multi-step chain to be possible to snipe at all, it's not clear that this would reduce the number of complaints overall - and Frontier certainly expects the longer-distance projects to be the group ones, in general.
As you say, in most cases with the long timeout someone can chain off the penultimate step to build their own intermediate colony anyway and get ahead of you. And if you don't know you're in a race yet [1] - or assume that of course you'll win it because you get a timeout on system completion and there aren't any other colonies nearby yet - you're pretty assured of losing that one before you find out.
[1] If you do know you're in a race, then you can get a friend to finish off the construction for you. This will both confuse the sniper (who's watching you, not them) and give you much better timing information than they can possibly obtain. That's probably enough to buy you the 2-3 minutes you need anyway.
Yes ... with some bafflement as to why that excessive rate of bounty claims hadn't lifted the lockdown or even moved the slider much on any of the previous days either.
And the tick for the CG system (and only the CG system) was delayed by 8 hours on the lockdown-lifting day. That doesn't say what Frontier's intervention was (my belief is that it was a bug fix to deal with the fact that 7B daily claims wasn't touching the security slider) but there certainly was one of some sort.
At the end of the day, no one has a claim to a system just because they're daisy chaining towards it. It's as simple as that. This idea is coming from people thinking they have a right to these systems because they chose them and decided to head that way. They don't. None of us do until we stake a claim with the colonisation contact. Yeah, I understand it's probably frustrating, but the system wasn't one singular CMDR's for the taking. It was up for grabs across the board.
Fair enough, I appreciate you engaging with those points. I don't think we can arrive at a solution unless we talk through what each change might result in, so Jmanis I'm not trying to fight with you but that's my frustration with how you're talking through this. It feels like you're just arguing that "Rules just make things worse, always" when I really do think there are steps that could be taken to make the system less grief-inducing. I think we just disagree on whether that's a good thing or not. But that's a general frustration I have with this whole game, there's a whole category of players who feel like they should be able to seal-club noobs at Deciat with no repercussions even though it drives new players away from the game or at least away from Open (I really wish there were more players in Open, but the crime system would need a revamp).
Regarding having to watch someone closely to snipe their system, I don't think it's that complex at all. The Pleiades systems are a prime example right now. I was hoping to get something out there, and all I would have to do is sit on a colonisation ship in anything faster than a Type-9 until it's at 90-something percent, make 1 delivery (or NO deliveries, and just wait), then zip over to the outpost and claim a prime system. There are only maybe a dozen prime systems right next to/in the nebula, so you don't need to know anything about specific players to know "I want this system, and it'll be available as soon as this progress bar finishes."
As for a 24h timer, if it's so easy for the sniper to adapt to it, why not put it in place then? It would only be a barrier to someone doing 0% of the work on that chain then sniping at the last minute. If they want to snipe a system by doing the last 10% of the work, okay fine, that's the nature of the game.
As for group projects, I honestly agree, and I wish the system were set up so groups could co-own systems or something like that. Because yeah a lot of squadrons are going to want to take on crazy projects out into the middle of nowhere.
I think everyone would still assume they're in a race - we've all seen how much of a gold rush this is just in the first week, I don't think anyone who's serious about reaching a desired system is going to leave their daisy chain at 99% and go to bed thinking nobody's gonna swoop in and finish it before them.
Regarding the CG, the theory I heard was that it was something like 7.2B in crimes, and 7.1B or less in bounties for a while, and then when more players realized, "Oh, if we really push hard against the lockdown we can undo it" the scales finally flipped. Maybe FDEV intervened, I really don't mind if they did, because like I said in the CG thread: You guys got to lock it down for 6 whole days, good for you, glad you had fun.
I really don't think that's what people are saying here. They're mostly saying, "It sucks that the person who does the final delivery has zero chance of reaching the outpost before someone who's camping out waiting."
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No, the problem was the OP didn't get the system they were daisy chaining to.
Even if you gave the system architect infinite time to stake their first claim, it doesn't stop someone sneaking a good system resulting from a planned expansion out from underneath them... it just changes the mechanism for doing so.
The person who did this by being first to get to the outpost is just a symptom of a different problem entirely.