Fdev hint at space legs (Ship theft) Too soon™ - Barben video link inside

[IndigoWyrd]

There are a few problems with "Grand Theft Space Ship".

1. How do you get to where a space ship is left parked, except with a space ship of your own. This means you're essentially trading space ships.

2. Who is responsible for the rebuy cost of a stolen ship? If it's the thief, this can become the single greatest form of griefing since the discovery of Spawn Camping. I steal your Billion Credit+ Cutter, pancake it into Achenar 3, don't rebuy it, you're out a ship. If the owner is responsible, this paves the way to not just griefing by destruction, but could well open the door to outright blackmail - "Ok, look, I'll return your ship without destroying it, just send me a PayPal of $200."

3. Ship Transfer - If the ship still belongs to its owner, not the thief, a simply ship transfer should then route the thief from wherever the ship is to which ever station the owner is at, who should then be standing by at whichever pad the transfer ship is delivered, with an army of armed station security to greet them.

4. GTA 5 Online is all the evidence we need why this is a terrible form of player interaction

Now, if we're limited just to hijacking NPC ships, this isn't quite so bad, since NPC's have no feelings to hurt, can't be blackmailed, don't post 100+ pages of btching in the forums, have unlimited funds for rebuys and can even make full repairs to all systems and reload all weapons simply by frame shift jumping. But this still leaves #1 as a minor problem.

 

[wstephenson]

There are a few problems with "Grand Theft Space Ship".

These would be alleviated by building out other gameplay systems:

1. How do you get to where a space ship is left parked, except with a space ship of your own. This means you're essentially trading space ships.

Physical multicrew. For those without a crew, NPC drivers, who will drop you off in a SRV (non-returnable) for a price. When the job fails and you're left on your own, use an electronic thumb to summon a ride, subject to a distance-dependent amount of enforced materials gathering time. If you are going to steal explorers' ships at beagle point, be darn sure you won't end up marooned.

2. Who is responsible for the rebuy cost of a stolen ship? If it's the thief, this can become the single greatest form of griefing since the discovery of Spawn Camping. I steal your Billion Credit+ Cutter, pancake it into Achenar 3, don't rebuy it, you're out a ship. If the owner is responsible, this paves the way to not just griefing by destruction, but could well open the door to outright blackmail - "Ok, look, I'll return your ship without destroying it, just send me a PayPal of $200."

3. Ship Transfer - If the ship still belongs to its owner, not the thief, a simply ship transfer should then route the thief from wherever the ship is to which ever station the owner is at, who should then be standing by at whichever pad the transfer ship is delivered, with an army of armed station security to greet them.

Treat the ship as destroyed after 24 hours, then owner pays, for being so careless as to let their ship get jacked, but at a reduced rate (the insurance gets reimbursed out of the perpetrators' eventual bounty). Consider that if the owner has invested in internal, that would make ship theft considerably more risky than blowing the thing up.

A more detailed set of criminal economy features would exclude stolen ships from outfitting and transfer between lawful locations forever, and require reputation-building and maintenance for equivalent services at criminal locations. Perhaps they could eventually be scrubbed by a criminal Engineer for a significant material investment.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

plz let this post disappear.. necroing a vid from 2012.. come on..

Problem is FD sold a lot of life time passes in the kickstarter as well as post kickstarter based on those videos and Design Decisions..... Whilst it may be an inconvenient truth that FD made sales by telling us about certain key features and a number of people - players as well as FD which surprises me - would happily have everyone forget about the Elite Dangerous from then, personally I wont forget or give up, not until FD actually come out and tell us that the scope has been massively cut back.

When a company make money off a roadmap of what will come in the future, that cuts both ways, they ask us to trust them with our money up front, we are then entitled to expect them to respect that trust by delivering, or at the very least telling us what is what if things change. In general this is why personally I no longer trust KSer or early access....

I look at Anthem and I feel sorry for those who backed that based on promises of features to come, that could easily be us in the future - if it isnt already.

I do agree however stealing ships multiplayer is not gonna work.... the salt would be incredible.
Not sure how FD could balance that.... the easy solution is make it npc only - the lore being "you do not mess with a pilots federation members ride!". It will work well in solo and in PG but in open, will be a balancing mine field if we can steal players ships........ I would hate FD to bin perfectly good ideas just because of appeasing the multiplayer folk however.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

These would be alleviated by building out other gameplay systems:


Physical multicrew. For those without a crew, NPC drivers, who will drop you off in a SRV (non-returnable) for a price. When the job fails and you're left on your own, use an electronic thumb to summon a ride, subject to a distance-dependent amount of enforced materials gathering time. If you are going to steal explorers' ships at beagle point, be darn sure you won't end up marooned.

Then this should be available to everyone, which means there should be no player ships sitting around to be stolen in the first place. Even now, it's a simple button push to dismiss a ship to Raxxla when landed on a planet's surface. Add this trash, and game play goes like this:

• Land ship
• Deploy SRV
• Dismiss Ship

And it's done. Nothing to steal, ever.

Treat the ship as destroyed after 24 hours, then owner pays, for being so careless as to let their ship get jacked, but at a reduced rate (the insurance gets reimbursed out of the perpetrators' eventual bounty). Consider that if the owner has invested in internal, that would make ship theft considerably more risky than blowing the thing up.

I'm that guy who would already die before ejecting even a single canister of Hydrogen Fuel to a pirate, so self-destructing a ship that's been boarded is an automatic given. Convincing new players that this is "good gameplay" just isn't going to happen, and will result in an avalanche of support tickets that makes the old fame-shift-into-the-exclusion-zone-ol-white-dwarf-stars issue look like a minor problem. Leave the Grand Theft Gameplay to Rockstar.

A more detailed set of criminal economy features would exclude stolen ships from outfitting and transfer between lawful locations forever, and require reputation-building and maintenance for equivalent services at criminal locations. Perhaps they could eventually be scrubbed by a criminal Engineer for a significant material investment.

100 Datamined Wake Exceptions, 100 units of Polonium, 100 Pharaceutical Isolators, and 10 Thargoid Hydra Samples, plus twice the ship's hull cost in credits.

Bring on the the "it's so much grind" threads. Not to mention the one thing I've been avoiding here:

The transfer of ships from player to player.

Want an Imperial Cutter to start the game? $100 to my PayPal, I'll let you steal one.
Want it fully G5 engineered? $500 to PayPal and I'll let you steal one.

This simply wouldn't do, but it would happen. It would be on stand-by weeks before the launch.

I'm afraid this non-feature is doomed in the womb. Only limited to NPC ships could it even be remotely viable.

 

[wstephenson]

Completely stealing entire ships, any ship, would have to be about as hard as clearing an appropriately sized dungeon, not just a matter of beating a hacking minigame.

Triggering any alarm in inhabited space is going to bring the authorities down on you, so smash and grab raids of materials, cargo or data are more feasible.

An entertaining array of traps and tiered countermeasure response levels are imaginable, from blast doors, vacuum/overpressure (what was that UT99 map called again?) electrification, locking turrets, defense bots, high-g maneuvers, flying off into space and powering down, right up to blowing its own canopy or self destruct. An attacker would have to locate and disable the ship's security computer in the face of this opposition, so making off with something on the scale of an Anaconda an enormous challenge. More likely that you would end up with a disabled ship and some stolen cargo, reducing the situation for the owner to the same as a fraction of a regular loss of vessel rebuy.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

Completely stealing entire ships, any ship, would have to be about as hard as clearing an appropriately sized dungeon, not just a matter of beating a hacking minigame.

Triggering any alarm in inhabited space is going to bring the authorities down on you, so smash and grab raids of materials, cargo or data are more feasible.

An entertaining array of traps and tiered countermeasure response levels are imaginable, from blast doors, vacuum/overpressure (what was that UT99 map called again?) electrification, locking turrets, defense bots, high-g maneuvers, flying off into space and powering down, right up to blowing its own canopy or self destruct. An attacker would have to locate and disable the ship's security computer in the face of this opposition, so making off with something on the scale of an Anaconda an enormous challenge. More likely that you would end up with a disabled ship and some stolen cargo, reducing the situation for the owner to the same as a fraction of a regular loss of vessel rebuy.

It almost never happened in any of the Star Trek series, but there was never a reason any ship should have ever been boarded, let alone threatened by hostiles aboard:

"Seal off that section, vent the atmosphere and beam the intruders into each other, then out into space." should have been the first order given by any captain who's vessel was boarded. Yes, beam them into each other, creating one large biomass of the intruders, then beam that mass into space. Done.

For us here in Elite-land, a simple "Deactivate life support and vent the entire ship into space." should be more than solution enough for unwanted "guests". Magnetic boots or no, the blast of a ship being vented into space, especially suddenly, is going to rip someone from the decking - or maybe leave just their boots behind, possibly with feet if you're lucky.

Likewise a simple addition to the door on every bridge:

The door closes, hydrolic pins are pushed into place and titanium/magnesium tapes are electronically ignited, welding the door shut in its frame. The atmosphere outside is vented, the door at the opposite end is sealed, and the floor is raised to meet the ceiling. Not enough time to cut your way through anywhere, and invader pulp is simply rinsed out with a hose later.

 

[Factabulous]

Ship boarding has been stated by DBOBE to be in his original plan, and other games have done it - so not a lot of point in theorycrafting reasons it will be impossible - as we already know it is possible in the ED universe.

Will be difficult to balance, but then aren't most things? Main thing we can predict is that it will cause lots of circular arguments until it releases. I guess it would make sense in the 2020 legs release, so only a year of guessing to go

 

[Raino]

I honestly would not be one tiny bit surprised if our new update for 2020 was atmospheric landings, possibly with flora and fauna using reskinned tech from zoo planet / jurassic world evolution.

this, i think, is the masterplan, no need for a beta

goes hiding....

 

[myothershipisacobraiv]

I thought it was common knowledge that this was just at tongue-in-cheek reference to that bug in the docking computer and that guy who found his ship gone or launched without him doing it or something? I don't remember what the particulars were. Maybe he left the game on the pad and then came back to the rebuy screen. But it was something like that.

The Advanced Docking Computer made this guy's ship disappear or get blown up or something.

 

[wstephenson]

Want an Imperial Cutter to start the game? $100 to my PayPal, I'll let you steal one.
Want it fully G5 engineered? $500 to PayPal and I'll let you steal one.

Which, if we had a fleshed out criminal economy, would swiftly result in Steam forum posts to the tune of "I spent $100 on a stolen ship but none of the superpower stations would let me dock and when I went to an outlaw station they rolled me and blew up the ship because they didn't know me and when I got to the rebuy screen it said SHIP DESTROYED - NO INSURER FOUND and now I'm having a no-good, horrible, very bad day in a sidewinder".

The only real currency in the game is time, and not all of its in-game derivatives can be transferred, so if services and insurance for criminals are contingent on having built up rep with the wrong sort of people, the galaxy has a way of ending $100 joyrides.

Might work if you want to nick a self-sufficient exploration vessel and head straight for Andromeda, though.

 

[Cosmo]

That video is so old. We're still waiting for Frontier to deliver these features.

 

[kaokao]

As you may know there is a ship theft story evolving on Galnet, I've heard people say what's the point?
Currently the story tells us a pilot steals a ship, it adds that he had been having vivid dreams before the 'theft'.

Now listen to David Braben and his 'vivid dream' I've bookmarked the the key moment (3:50) but is worth a watch from the beginning.

Nailed it!

Ship theft? Don't count on that. The ED carebears will nerf that into oblivion.

 

[Kzak]

It almost never happened in any of the Star Trek series, but there was never a reason any ship should have ever been boarded, let alone threatened by hostiles aboard:

"Seal off that section, vent the atmosphere and beam the intruders into each other, then out into space." should have been the first order given by any captain who's vessel was boarded. Yes, beam them into each other, creating one large biomass of the intruders, then beam that mass into space. Done.

For us here in Elite-land, a simple "Deactivate life support and vent the entire ship into space." should be more than solution enough for unwanted "guests". Magnetic boots or no, the blast of a ship being vented into space, especially suddenly, is going to rip someone from the decking - or maybe leave just their boots behind, possibly with feet if you're lucky.

Likewise a simple addition to the door on every bridge:

The door closes, hydrolic pins are pushed into place and titanium/magnesium tapes are electronically ignited, welding the door shut in its frame. The atmosphere outside is vented, the door at the opposite end is sealed, and the floor is raised to meet the ceiling. Not enough time to cut your way through anywhere, and invader pulp is simply rinsed out with a hose later.

If you want a bit of extra oomph with your atmospheric venting, have certain panels/weights in the corridors be detachable via the central computer command, so it's not just a blast of air hitting a would-be boarder, but say a 250-kg panel moving at 50 m/s or so, which would be enough to pretty much mess up their day.

 

[Stigbob]

Ship theft? Don't count on that. The ED carebears will nerf that into oblivion.

The 'exclusive' cobra IV already ruled it out completely.

 

[Leper Messiah]

I'd accept ship theft if I can set a silent autodestruct that sends the would be thief to square one starter Sidewinder and 1000 cr. Some people are gagging for the game to be harder, can't get more hardcore than that can you?

 

[IndigoWyrd]

If you want a bit of extra oomph with your atmospheric venting, have certain panels/weights in the corridors be detachable via the central computer command, so it's not just a blast of air hitting a would-be boarder, but say a 250-kg panel moving at 50 m/s or so, which would be enough to pretty much mess up their day.

Or just flood the interior of ship with excited neutrons - a directional neutron bomb blast to atomize intruders.

 

[Red Zephyr]

Let me shoot my multicrew on board an enemy ship via limpet, and then they fight to take control of that ship or scuttle it.

 

[o2thaZ]

...(what was that UT99 map called again?) ...

Pressure
Oh how I hated that map ^^
OT.. carry on!

 

[Vandaahl]

The ED carebears will nerf that into oblivion.

How did you figure that?

 

[IndigoWyrd]

How did you figure that?

With one of these.