Apologies if this is the wrong forum.
Recently Frontier extended the invitation for people to comment on balance, and this is something that I've been thinking a lot about, but I'll try to condense it down and keep it short.
Before I begin, allow me to say that I've been a paid game designer, I've won a lot of Settlers of Catan and I've programmed in Java and Visual Basic, so you can rest assured that I know what I'm talking about here.
So let's jump straight in - Bounty Hunting. It's been a couple of weeks since bounties were doubled, so they're overdue for another buff. I recommend multiplying them by e (for the non mathy types in the audience that's approximately 2.781828). Why not just double them again? Well, obviously we don't just want to appear to be repeating the previous buff, that would get stale. Then in the following buff we can use π (pi), because who doesn't like free pie?
That's cool, but we also need some new features to round it out. I know that many Bounty Hunters view themselves as being above the law, well then, why not cut out the middleman? Whenever a crime is reported, drop a selectable waypoint in the local system. Boom. Space cops and space robbers. How cool is that?
Speaking about space robbers and other antisocial behaviour, recently people on the receiving end have been complaining a lot about this, but then the aggressors say that they're just embracing the tools that Frontier grants them, I think we're long overdue for an official announcement to finally end this debate once and for all. So I think you need an official stickied post regarding the different game modes.
The announcement should read something like this: "If you don't want Itchy Nipples you shouldn't play in open, and by playing in open you consent to receiving Itchy Nipples and all that implies."
While we're on the topic of game modes; as for the whole debacle around the difficulty of implementing blockades and that sort of thing for community goals when people can just switch to solo; if there were separate saves for open, group and solo that would solve all those problems.
Accordingly, and to avoid confusion with older posts about how the modes used to work I propose that Open be renamed in honour of the best tester in Federation or Empire space, CMDR NitchyBipples (or whatever he's calling himself), so 'Itchy Nipple mode' and solo should be renamed 'Wuss mode'. That should remove any confusion and ambiguity.
Now let's talk about pirates. I have it on good authority that Frontier is working on adding a keybinding that will allow you to instantly steal another commander's entire cargo from anywhere in the same system. I'm not sure what stop-gap measures can make them happy in the meantime until that is ready to roll out.
-------
But before we get too deep down the rabbit hole of game balance, we should ask (and answer) the question 'what is the core value proposition of Elite
angerous?'. That answer will inform us and light our way, since there are vastly many more things that could be done than should be done (as is self evident by perusing the original design documents that Frontier put out).
A naive bystander might suggest that the core value proposition of Eliteangerous is flying a spaceship. If they were particularly ignorant they might mumble something about 'having fun'.
But we're more savvy than that, so let's look at what Frontier says about the game in their marketing materials. They talk about having a 1:1 scale procedurally generated galaxy with 400 billion systems, each of which has at least one star, usually more. Never mind that wikipedia reveals that there are only an estimated 400 billion stars, it's only an order of magnitude, and what's an order of magnitude between friends? Pay no attention to the wikipedia behind the curtain.
Now obviously Miners, Bounty Hunters, Smugglers, Pirates and Traders could give two figs about the rest of the galaxy, so the only career that 1:1 procedurally generated galaxy speaks to is Explorers. It is there that the purest implementation of our core value proposition will be found.
Our naive ignoramus friend will now object strenuously, saying that "Exploration is nothing except flying a spaceship!"
But is it?
What does exploring really look like when we get down to the fine details?
You jump into a system.
You kill your speed.
You wait until the ship recognises the enormous nuclear inferno filling your vision as being something of interest, so you can select and start scanning the star in front of you.
You wait for the scan to finish.
You set off the space-fog-horn (Advanced Discovery Scanner) to identify all other objects in the system.
You wait for the scan to finish.
You might look at the local map while you wait.
Most of the time there's nothing interesting, so you finish waiting for the scan to complete.
You then (optionally) begin fuel scooping if the scan reveals the star is scoopable.
The best way to scoop of course is to approach the star slowly, and kill your speed and sit there doing nothing while the scooping happens. You can try to do something a bit more exciting than that, e.g. whizzing around the star at high speeds, but you'll probably overheat and damage your ship.
You then select your next destination, and wait for the game to tell you you can jump.
You press jump, and wait for the game timer to count down while your FSD charges.
You then wait for a second timer to count down while you enter witchspace.
You wait for witchspace to end. If you have a proper throttle you can now kill your speed. Too bad if you're on a keyboard, those people deserve to die by rapidly accelerating into the destination star anyway.
So most of the time exploring involves practically no actual flying of the ship, but rather is about 95% sitting doing nothing waiting for game timers to count down.
But hang on, says our persistent friend who doesn't know when he's beaten. What about when you do find something worth exploring? Don't you fly your ship then?
Well, okay, so you line your ship up with the destination, and then sit there doing nothing waiting for a game counter to count down.
When the spinny hexagon of hurry up and wait starts doing its thing you kill your speed. Hopefully you're more than 5 seconds away when that happens, because otherwise your drive will suddenly speed up and tick over to 4 seconds, this guarantees you won't be able to complete the scan before overshooting the target, because sucks to be you. Anything you try to do to correct this will involve flying in a slightly different direction, thus breaking the scan, necessitating starting over from scratch.
You then sit there and scratch your space balls waiting for the game counter to finish counting down. Most of the time you won't even see the thing you're 'exploring' except as a small dot.
So when we look closely at the game it's not actually difficult to determine that in actual fact the core value proposition of Eliteangerous is sitting in a spaceship doing nothing, waiting for a game timer to count down.
-------
So what, you might say. But this is huge. Now that we know the core value proposition of Eliteangerous is sitting in a spaceship doing nothing and waiting for a timer to count down, we can immediately see the problem with Trading, and how to fix it.
People say that Trading is the only career that scales, but now we see that it's really about the need to add a timer that you can watch while you do nothing.
When can we do that? When buying or selling cargo obviously. The lore of Elite doesn't include transporters to beam the cargo straight into your hull, so it makes sense to add a thirty second timer for each ton being transferred. This is still clearly unrealistic, since it is much too fast, but it is a step in the right direction. It should take at least an hour to load or unload 120 tons of cargo. And if you do anything in the meantime, the space-stevedores union representative will pitch a hissy fit about unsafe working conditions, you'll get whacked with a crunchy fine, and you'll have to restart loading and unloading all over again.
That's the trick you see, instead of adding scaling to other careers in order to balance them, it's much much easier simply to remove it from the only career that had it in the first place.
When we look at rare trading, we see that people are already rewarded by sitting around doing nothing, when the rares restock. But sometimes they don't - e.g. if the lower maximum threshold (now there's a contradiction in terms) has already been reached. This is close to an ideal system, but with a few tweaks can be made even better. The key is to turn the equation on its head. Instead of starting with a big pile of rares and maybe adding a few rares if they wait, simply make the initial piles very small. If there was only one rare (zero if the normal amount is one, e.g. leathery eggs) initially, and waiting an extra fifteen minutes gives you a small extra amount of rares. Boom, lots more sitting around doing nothing. But wait, there's more, I'm just getting started.
-------
How do we apply that same principle to bounty hunting? Better yet, how do we achieve more than one thing with a single change? That after all is the essence of good game design, having all these unintended side-effects, much like how nobody goes to RES points to mine, but only to Bounty Hunt. I know that Frontier is also working on ways to make the bounty system a bit crunchier, and here's how you combine those two ingredients. Simply make it so that pirates don't spawn unless there are zero coppers in the instance. This is going to have all sorts of interesting effects on the game. Firstly after killing all the pirates you have the option of sitting in your spaceship doing nothing, waiting for the cops to get bored and leave. Thus we fulfil the core value proposition. However, there is an alternative, you could hasten the 'departure' of the cops by killing them instead. That way you'd rack up a big crunchy bounty very quickly. Or maybe Bounty Hunters would have to 'cooperate' with a new career, the Cop Killer. And of course the Cop Killer would need to be able to pop the cops quickly, so that means that all those big guns (railguns etc.) which are currently only used for two-shotting other players would also have an application against NPCs.
Naturally there would be a tension between Bounty Hunters and Cop Killers, because each time the Cop Killer has to wonder when and where the sudden but inevitable betrayal will come from.
-------
Smuggling is good as is because you already have to spend all this time waiting for unidentified signal sources to spawn.
-------
Mining is a huge problem. We can see this now that we understand the core value proposition is sitting around in your spaceship doing nothing, because mining is the almost complete opposite of that. Suddenly it becomes clear why Frontier has been nerfing mining with every patch since the beta.
This is why Frontier taunts miners - adding new minerals like Painite which cannot be mined in any location, but only found at USS's with convoys.
This is why Frontier makes a mining community goal which can best be done by traders.
This is why Frontier sticks a mining event (Gold Rush in LAWD 26) in a system which is utterly worthless for mining, and when all the metal rich asteroid belts get flipped to rocky and the rocky planetary belt gets flipped to metal rich, that it's still worthless for mining, because you need metallic, not metal rich.
This is why Frontier sticks 'New Yembo' in a system 'good for mining' which is too far to jump to without a fuel scoop, but then there are no outfitting options when you get there.
In order to stop Frontier's space jihad against mining, what can we do? Clearly the way to do this is to slow it way down. People have proposed adding scanners to mining, and this is a brilliant way to introduce an unnecessary delay into the process. But we also need to stop them bypassing the scan. So how about this - you can't shoot off any fragments from any rocks until you've scanned them.
Then players complain that there's no point in scooping up any of the lesser materials, so let's fix that too. How can we do this? There are lots of ways, but an obvious one is to reduce the maximum number of fragments each rock can produce down to one. If there's only one fragment and it took you ages to scan the asteroid to get even that, then a lot of people will simply scoop everything. Problem solved.
Another big problem with mining is the refinery server communication errors. These frequently happen when you scoop a fragment with two materials and both complete a ton in a bin at the same time. The server spits the dummy and you have to manipulate them by hand. Presumably what's actually going on behind the scenes is that the database has a field which indicates an update number, so you query that row and get say 61. Then you update it with the first fragment and that would say 'I know about 61 and here's an update' (in layman's terms), and if that transaction succeeds the row gets incremented to now say 62. But at almost the same time a second transaction comes in, which says 'I know about 61 and here's an update', but then the database will go 'hang on a minute buddy, that's the wrong number, you said 61 when it should have been 62' and then both transactions get rolled back, because the first one hasn't committed yet.
So instead of debugging all that, here's an easy solution: simply stop double minerals from spawning. Way easier than debugging the code.
Some people say that the refinery should be fully automated, that for instance if a ton of gold gets completed and there is still gold in the hopper it should be auto-allocated to the bin which the ton of gold just came from, since it is by definition now available. Or that if you scoop a fragment with a new material and have an empty bin it should auto-allocate to the empty bin. But that is clearly madness. Instead, we should remove all automation from the process in order to make it as long and painful as possible, if there is a bin with 40% gold and you scoop a fragment with 20% gold, you should have to manually allocate it.
Recently Frontier extended the invitation for people to comment on balance, and this is something that I've been thinking a lot about, but I'll try to condense it down and keep it short.
Before I begin, allow me to say that I've been a paid game designer, I've won a lot of Settlers of Catan and I've programmed in Java and Visual Basic, so you can rest assured that I know what I'm talking about here.
So let's jump straight in - Bounty Hunting. It's been a couple of weeks since bounties were doubled, so they're overdue for another buff. I recommend multiplying them by e (for the non mathy types in the audience that's approximately 2.781828). Why not just double them again? Well, obviously we don't just want to appear to be repeating the previous buff, that would get stale. Then in the following buff we can use π (pi), because who doesn't like free pie?
That's cool, but we also need some new features to round it out. I know that many Bounty Hunters view themselves as being above the law, well then, why not cut out the middleman? Whenever a crime is reported, drop a selectable waypoint in the local system. Boom. Space cops and space robbers. How cool is that?
Speaking about space robbers and other antisocial behaviour, recently people on the receiving end have been complaining a lot about this, but then the aggressors say that they're just embracing the tools that Frontier grants them, I think we're long overdue for an official announcement to finally end this debate once and for all. So I think you need an official stickied post regarding the different game modes.
The announcement should read something like this: "If you don't want Itchy Nipples you shouldn't play in open, and by playing in open you consent to receiving Itchy Nipples and all that implies."
While we're on the topic of game modes; as for the whole debacle around the difficulty of implementing blockades and that sort of thing for community goals when people can just switch to solo; if there were separate saves for open, group and solo that would solve all those problems.
Accordingly, and to avoid confusion with older posts about how the modes used to work I propose that Open be renamed in honour of the best tester in Federation or Empire space, CMDR NitchyBipples (or whatever he's calling himself), so 'Itchy Nipple mode' and solo should be renamed 'Wuss mode'. That should remove any confusion and ambiguity.
Now let's talk about pirates. I have it on good authority that Frontier is working on adding a keybinding that will allow you to instantly steal another commander's entire cargo from anywhere in the same system. I'm not sure what stop-gap measures can make them happy in the meantime until that is ready to roll out.
-------
But before we get too deep down the rabbit hole of game balance, we should ask (and answer) the question 'what is the core value proposition of Elite
angerous?'. That answer will inform us and light our way, since there are vastly many more things that could be done than should be done (as is self evident by perusing the original design documents that Frontier put out).A naive bystander might suggest that the core value proposition of Elite
angerous is flying a spaceship. If they were particularly ignorant they might mumble something about 'having fun'.But we're more savvy than that, so let's look at what Frontier says about the game in their marketing materials. They talk about having a 1:1 scale procedurally generated galaxy with 400 billion systems, each of which has at least one star, usually more. Never mind that wikipedia reveals that there are only an estimated 400 billion stars, it's only an order of magnitude, and what's an order of magnitude between friends? Pay no attention to the wikipedia behind the curtain.
Now obviously Miners, Bounty Hunters, Smugglers, Pirates and Traders could give two figs about the rest of the galaxy, so the only career that 1:1 procedurally generated galaxy speaks to is Explorers. It is there that the purest implementation of our core value proposition will be found.
Our naive ignoramus friend will now object strenuously, saying that "Exploration is nothing except flying a spaceship!"
But is it?
What does exploring really look like when we get down to the fine details?
You jump into a system.
You kill your speed.
You wait until the ship recognises the enormous nuclear inferno filling your vision as being something of interest, so you can select and start scanning the star in front of you.
You wait for the scan to finish.
You set off the space-fog-horn (Advanced Discovery Scanner) to identify all other objects in the system.
You wait for the scan to finish.
You might look at the local map while you wait.
Most of the time there's nothing interesting, so you finish waiting for the scan to complete.
You then (optionally) begin fuel scooping if the scan reveals the star is scoopable.
The best way to scoop of course is to approach the star slowly, and kill your speed and sit there doing nothing while the scooping happens. You can try to do something a bit more exciting than that, e.g. whizzing around the star at high speeds, but you'll probably overheat and damage your ship.
You then select your next destination, and wait for the game to tell you you can jump.
You press jump, and wait for the game timer to count down while your FSD charges.
You then wait for a second timer to count down while you enter witchspace.
You wait for witchspace to end. If you have a proper throttle you can now kill your speed. Too bad if you're on a keyboard, those people deserve to die by rapidly accelerating into the destination star anyway.
So most of the time exploring involves practically no actual flying of the ship, but rather is about 95% sitting doing nothing waiting for game timers to count down.
But hang on, says our persistent friend who doesn't know when he's beaten. What about when you do find something worth exploring? Don't you fly your ship then?
Well, okay, so you line your ship up with the destination, and then sit there doing nothing waiting for a game counter to count down.
When the spinny hexagon of hurry up and wait starts doing its thing you kill your speed. Hopefully you're more than 5 seconds away when that happens, because otherwise your drive will suddenly speed up and tick over to 4 seconds, this guarantees you won't be able to complete the scan before overshooting the target, because sucks to be you. Anything you try to do to correct this will involve flying in a slightly different direction, thus breaking the scan, necessitating starting over from scratch.
You then sit there and scratch your space balls waiting for the game counter to finish counting down. Most of the time you won't even see the thing you're 'exploring' except as a small dot.
So when we look closely at the game it's not actually difficult to determine that in actual fact the core value proposition of Elite
angerous is sitting in a spaceship doing nothing, waiting for a game timer to count down.-------
So what, you might say. But this is huge. Now that we know the core value proposition of Elite
angerous is sitting in a spaceship doing nothing and waiting for a timer to count down, we can immediately see the problem with Trading, and how to fix it.People say that Trading is the only career that scales, but now we see that it's really about the need to add a timer that you can watch while you do nothing.
When can we do that? When buying or selling cargo obviously. The lore of Elite doesn't include transporters to beam the cargo straight into your hull, so it makes sense to add a thirty second timer for each ton being transferred. This is still clearly unrealistic, since it is much too fast, but it is a step in the right direction. It should take at least an hour to load or unload 120 tons of cargo. And if you do anything in the meantime, the space-stevedores union representative will pitch a hissy fit about unsafe working conditions, you'll get whacked with a crunchy fine, and you'll have to restart loading and unloading all over again.
That's the trick you see, instead of adding scaling to other careers in order to balance them, it's much much easier simply to remove it from the only career that had it in the first place.
When we look at rare trading, we see that people are already rewarded by sitting around doing nothing, when the rares restock. But sometimes they don't - e.g. if the lower maximum threshold (now there's a contradiction in terms) has already been reached. This is close to an ideal system, but with a few tweaks can be made even better. The key is to turn the equation on its head. Instead of starting with a big pile of rares and maybe adding a few rares if they wait, simply make the initial piles very small. If there was only one rare (zero if the normal amount is one, e.g. leathery eggs) initially, and waiting an extra fifteen minutes gives you a small extra amount of rares. Boom, lots more sitting around doing nothing. But wait, there's more, I'm just getting started.
-------
How do we apply that same principle to bounty hunting? Better yet, how do we achieve more than one thing with a single change? That after all is the essence of good game design, having all these unintended side-effects, much like how nobody goes to RES points to mine, but only to Bounty Hunt. I know that Frontier is also working on ways to make the bounty system a bit crunchier, and here's how you combine those two ingredients. Simply make it so that pirates don't spawn unless there are zero coppers in the instance. This is going to have all sorts of interesting effects on the game. Firstly after killing all the pirates you have the option of sitting in your spaceship doing nothing, waiting for the cops to get bored and leave. Thus we fulfil the core value proposition. However, there is an alternative, you could hasten the 'departure' of the cops by killing them instead. That way you'd rack up a big crunchy bounty very quickly. Or maybe Bounty Hunters would have to 'cooperate' with a new career, the Cop Killer. And of course the Cop Killer would need to be able to pop the cops quickly, so that means that all those big guns (railguns etc.) which are currently only used for two-shotting other players would also have an application against NPCs.
Naturally there would be a tension between Bounty Hunters and Cop Killers, because each time the Cop Killer has to wonder when and where the sudden but inevitable betrayal will come from.
-------
Smuggling is good as is because you already have to spend all this time waiting for unidentified signal sources to spawn.
-------
Mining is a huge problem. We can see this now that we understand the core value proposition is sitting around in your spaceship doing nothing, because mining is the almost complete opposite of that. Suddenly it becomes clear why Frontier has been nerfing mining with every patch since the beta.
This is why Frontier taunts miners - adding new minerals like Painite which cannot be mined in any location, but only found at USS's with convoys.
This is why Frontier makes a mining community goal which can best be done by traders.
This is why Frontier sticks a mining event (Gold Rush in LAWD 26) in a system which is utterly worthless for mining, and when all the metal rich asteroid belts get flipped to rocky and the rocky planetary belt gets flipped to metal rich, that it's still worthless for mining, because you need metallic, not metal rich.
This is why Frontier sticks 'New Yembo' in a system 'good for mining' which is too far to jump to without a fuel scoop, but then there are no outfitting options when you get there.
In order to stop Frontier's space jihad against mining, what can we do? Clearly the way to do this is to slow it way down. People have proposed adding scanners to mining, and this is a brilliant way to introduce an unnecessary delay into the process. But we also need to stop them bypassing the scan. So how about this - you can't shoot off any fragments from any rocks until you've scanned them.
Then players complain that there's no point in scooping up any of the lesser materials, so let's fix that too. How can we do this? There are lots of ways, but an obvious one is to reduce the maximum number of fragments each rock can produce down to one. If there's only one fragment and it took you ages to scan the asteroid to get even that, then a lot of people will simply scoop everything. Problem solved.
Another big problem with mining is the refinery server communication errors. These frequently happen when you scoop a fragment with two materials and both complete a ton in a bin at the same time. The server spits the dummy and you have to manipulate them by hand. Presumably what's actually going on behind the scenes is that the database has a field which indicates an update number, so you query that row and get say 61. Then you update it with the first fragment and that would say 'I know about 61 and here's an update' (in layman's terms), and if that transaction succeeds the row gets incremented to now say 62. But at almost the same time a second transaction comes in, which says 'I know about 61 and here's an update', but then the database will go 'hang on a minute buddy, that's the wrong number, you said 61 when it should have been 62' and then both transactions get rolled back, because the first one hasn't committed yet.
So instead of debugging all that, here's an easy solution: simply stop double minerals from spawning. Way easier than debugging the code.
Some people say that the refinery should be fully automated, that for instance if a ton of gold gets completed and there is still gold in the hopper it should be auto-allocated to the bin which the ton of gold just came from, since it is by definition now available. Or that if you scoop a fragment with a new material and have an empty bin it should auto-allocate to the empty bin. But that is clearly madness. Instead, we should remove all automation from the process in order to make it as long and painful as possible, if there is a bin with 40% gold and you scoop a fragment with 20% gold, you should have to manually allocate it.