Since the beginning of Elite, there have been two camps; those who want some or all of the game to be Open-Only, and those who prefer to remain out of the sight of the first group.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this, and proposals for Open Only activities, since the recent dev posts about powerplay. And here's the conclusion I've ultimately come to:
It's impossible to make open-only work with the current system.
The primary reason for this is twofold:
When it comes to Elite, the p2p matchmaking system means that, in order for any two players to instance together, their computers must be able to connect with each other. Open only only means you see the players in close geographical proximity to you; the chances of instancing with someone who lives any significant distance from you is severely curtailed. This can be exploited in multiple ways, including VPNs to shift your apparent location, to simply adding enough lag to your connection you can connect with the frontier servers for basic transactions like trade or delivering commodities, but not for high-bandwidth contact like pvp. But at its core, even a player with a bad internet connection will have a profound advantage over those who can connect easily.
Compounding this is the existing of ingame features such as Fleet Carriers, that make interdictions of players nigh-impossible, if they don't actively want it to happen. Players can jump in from an adjacent system, land their fleet carrier 25MM from the station, and drop in so fast it would be impossible to intercept them.
But worst of all is the fact that one half of players are intensely driven to avoid other players as much as possible. If a hauler can guarantee they won't see enemy players, they can dramatically increase their hauling efficiency. So any strategy they can come up with to avoid pvp contact entirely is always going to be the ideal solution.
This is where this problem can actually be fixed, and where I would like to draw attention and focused brain power: How do you make players WANT to instance together?
There's a paradox, here. On the one hand, you want players to interact and engage with one another. On the other hand, every mechanic is pushing players to avoid contact and engagement as much as possible. The haulers don't want to engage the interdictors. The interdictors don't want to engage the hauler's defenders. And the haulers defenders don't really even want to kill the interdictors, because that just means a quick respawn, instead of a prolonged fight.
At no stage of the powerplay cycle are players actually wanting to fight.
So how do you fix this?
The first idea that came to my mind was rewarding the haulers for interaction with the interdictors. Maybe giving them a large multiplier to their hauling efforts if they get interdicted and escape.
Only, that hangs on a tightrope. If the bonus is too small, then it won't be worth it, and people will still just avoid contact entirely. If the bonus is too big, then you end up actively discouraging interdictors from participating, for fear of making the situation worse.
You could simply reward players for pvp outright. Killing enemy players in combat ships rewards you with merits.
Only that's open to exploitation and farming.
You could instigate a pvp elo-based system, with duels between high-skill players giving great rewards.
Only that ignores any complexity at all, and simplifies powerplay down to an elaborate dueling mechanic.
The list goes on. None of my ideas are perfect. The one thing I know is this; without making the haulers want to participate with other players, given the architecture and design of multiplayer in elite, you cannot make them do it. Open only or not makes no practical difference in that fundamental problem of the desire(or lack thereof) for participation.
So I turn to you. Help me answer this question. How do you make players want to play in open, knowing they might be killed? How do you do this without discouraging the interdictors from interdicting, feeling as if they're useless?
Update
So, over the course of 69 pages of discussion, we've come to what I think is a reasonable conclusion.
To sum up: it's not possible to make players WANT to encounter hostile players, but it may be possible to lower the barriers to entry enough for other benefits of cooperative gameplay to take precedence.
The basic problem is this; PVP interactions are rare. Rare enough that, outside of specific exceptions, most players can go for hundreds of hours without encountering them. On the flipside, PVE interactions are extremely easy. It's perfectly possible to win PVE interdictions 100% of the time, even in a Type 9. Because of this, it makes no sense to outfit a trade vessel for survival; it's a statistically bad choice, that ends up hurting you more than it helps you. So, of course, nobody ever does it. But this also means that pvp encounters, when they DO occur, end up being hopelessly one-sided. And one-sided, unwinnable encounters are not fun. So, naturally, people avoid them as much as possible.
The problem isn't innately the pvp! Many players(though admittedly not all - this isn't ever going to be a solution for everyone) are more than willing to take a risk, if they have some chance of success! But it's being unprepared for any sort of attack, because NPCs are hopeless incompetent, and there's no meaningful difference between trading in high security systems versus anarchy systems, that makes players utterly unwilling to engage.
Now, how do you fix this? By making low security systems much more dangerous! By inundating these systems with large numbers of hostile NPCs, players will always need to be prepared for combat, and therefore the prospect of being attacked by a player instantly becomes far less of a concern! Now, naturally, the rewards for trading in low-sec need to be increased correspondingly to compensate. Not only will players be attacked regularly, slowing their trade, they'll also need to give up valuable cargo space for shields and the like, further reducing their profits. So the profits from trading commodities to low-sec stations would need to be increased by a significant margin, possibly as high as 300-400%.
On the flipside of the equation lie the systems where players shouldn't need to be afraid of coming under attack; High Security systems, as well as Medium security systems within the shipping lanes. In these areas, it should be very close to impossible to assassinate anyone or anything. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, the simplest of which is by giving stations and police Shield Projection Generators, giving nearby neutral and ally players a free reserve of shields, regardless of whether or not they have a shield generator. This prevents all sorts of unsavory behavior, such as using a low-health sidewinder to bait boosting players to accidentally get a murder charge, but also prevents ganking and most types of assassination. An additional change would be starting the interdiction timer to police arriving at the START of the interdiction; in a high security system, where the police can be there in seconds, just holding out for a short period of time would mean the police arriving at the same time as the pirate, instantly shielding the player, and the assassination attempt is foiled. Prospective assassins would need to find very specific windows to assassinate their targets, and then get out quickly.
The benefits of this are manifold. Players will be able to play safely in Open in high-security systems, without fear of ganking of any kind. However, all players will feel encouraged to go to dangerous low-sec areas to make a profit, which is where pirates and gankers can lie in wait, knowing their targets will come to them! But those targets will likewise know that their destination is dangerous, and so will be prepared, regardless of whether they're playing in open or solo. That means there will be much less pressure to play in Solo, because they'll need to be prepared either way!
The net result of this is that players won't be forced to play in Open, but if they choose to do so, for the social benefits that entails, they can do so and enjoy them, with most previous barriers to entry removed, a better game for all!
And even the players who still don't want to play in Open can still have a better game! They'll still have roughly 10000 high and medium security systems to enjoy fully if they don't like danger, but the new addition of 10000 legitimately low-security systems gives broad vistas of new content for those who want a challenge!
And that, ladies, gentlemen, and those of unspecified gender, is how you split a banana.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this, and proposals for Open Only activities, since the recent dev posts about powerplay. And here's the conclusion I've ultimately come to:
It's impossible to make open-only work with the current system.
The primary reason for this is twofold:
- One side of any powerplay-related engagement prefers to never see the other player.
- The underlying mechanics of Elite make avoiding other players almost impossible to prohibit.
When it comes to Elite, the p2p matchmaking system means that, in order for any two players to instance together, their computers must be able to connect with each other. Open only only means you see the players in close geographical proximity to you; the chances of instancing with someone who lives any significant distance from you is severely curtailed. This can be exploited in multiple ways, including VPNs to shift your apparent location, to simply adding enough lag to your connection you can connect with the frontier servers for basic transactions like trade or delivering commodities, but not for high-bandwidth contact like pvp. But at its core, even a player with a bad internet connection will have a profound advantage over those who can connect easily.
Compounding this is the existing of ingame features such as Fleet Carriers, that make interdictions of players nigh-impossible, if they don't actively want it to happen. Players can jump in from an adjacent system, land their fleet carrier 25MM from the station, and drop in so fast it would be impossible to intercept them.
But worst of all is the fact that one half of players are intensely driven to avoid other players as much as possible. If a hauler can guarantee they won't see enemy players, they can dramatically increase their hauling efficiency. So any strategy they can come up with to avoid pvp contact entirely is always going to be the ideal solution.
This is where this problem can actually be fixed, and where I would like to draw attention and focused brain power: How do you make players WANT to instance together?
There's a paradox, here. On the one hand, you want players to interact and engage with one another. On the other hand, every mechanic is pushing players to avoid contact and engagement as much as possible. The haulers don't want to engage the interdictors. The interdictors don't want to engage the hauler's defenders. And the haulers defenders don't really even want to kill the interdictors, because that just means a quick respawn, instead of a prolonged fight.
At no stage of the powerplay cycle are players actually wanting to fight.
So how do you fix this?
The first idea that came to my mind was rewarding the haulers for interaction with the interdictors. Maybe giving them a large multiplier to their hauling efforts if they get interdicted and escape.
Only, that hangs on a tightrope. If the bonus is too small, then it won't be worth it, and people will still just avoid contact entirely. If the bonus is too big, then you end up actively discouraging interdictors from participating, for fear of making the situation worse.
You could simply reward players for pvp outright. Killing enemy players in combat ships rewards you with merits.
Only that's open to exploitation and farming.
You could instigate a pvp elo-based system, with duels between high-skill players giving great rewards.
Only that ignores any complexity at all, and simplifies powerplay down to an elaborate dueling mechanic.
The list goes on. None of my ideas are perfect. The one thing I know is this; without making the haulers want to participate with other players, given the architecture and design of multiplayer in elite, you cannot make them do it. Open only or not makes no practical difference in that fundamental problem of the desire(or lack thereof) for participation.
So I turn to you. Help me answer this question. How do you make players want to play in open, knowing they might be killed? How do you do this without discouraging the interdictors from interdicting, feeling as if they're useless?
Update
So, over the course of 69 pages of discussion, we've come to what I think is a reasonable conclusion.
To sum up: it's not possible to make players WANT to encounter hostile players, but it may be possible to lower the barriers to entry enough for other benefits of cooperative gameplay to take precedence.
The basic problem is this; PVP interactions are rare. Rare enough that, outside of specific exceptions, most players can go for hundreds of hours without encountering them. On the flipside, PVE interactions are extremely easy. It's perfectly possible to win PVE interdictions 100% of the time, even in a Type 9. Because of this, it makes no sense to outfit a trade vessel for survival; it's a statistically bad choice, that ends up hurting you more than it helps you. So, of course, nobody ever does it. But this also means that pvp encounters, when they DO occur, end up being hopelessly one-sided. And one-sided, unwinnable encounters are not fun. So, naturally, people avoid them as much as possible.
The problem isn't innately the pvp! Many players(though admittedly not all - this isn't ever going to be a solution for everyone) are more than willing to take a risk, if they have some chance of success! But it's being unprepared for any sort of attack, because NPCs are hopeless incompetent, and there's no meaningful difference between trading in high security systems versus anarchy systems, that makes players utterly unwilling to engage.
Now, how do you fix this? By making low security systems much more dangerous! By inundating these systems with large numbers of hostile NPCs, players will always need to be prepared for combat, and therefore the prospect of being attacked by a player instantly becomes far less of a concern! Now, naturally, the rewards for trading in low-sec need to be increased correspondingly to compensate. Not only will players be attacked regularly, slowing their trade, they'll also need to give up valuable cargo space for shields and the like, further reducing their profits. So the profits from trading commodities to low-sec stations would need to be increased by a significant margin, possibly as high as 300-400%.
On the flipside of the equation lie the systems where players shouldn't need to be afraid of coming under attack; High Security systems, as well as Medium security systems within the shipping lanes. In these areas, it should be very close to impossible to assassinate anyone or anything. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, the simplest of which is by giving stations and police Shield Projection Generators, giving nearby neutral and ally players a free reserve of shields, regardless of whether or not they have a shield generator. This prevents all sorts of unsavory behavior, such as using a low-health sidewinder to bait boosting players to accidentally get a murder charge, but also prevents ganking and most types of assassination. An additional change would be starting the interdiction timer to police arriving at the START of the interdiction; in a high security system, where the police can be there in seconds, just holding out for a short period of time would mean the police arriving at the same time as the pirate, instantly shielding the player, and the assassination attempt is foiled. Prospective assassins would need to find very specific windows to assassinate their targets, and then get out quickly.
The benefits of this are manifold. Players will be able to play safely in Open in high-security systems, without fear of ganking of any kind. However, all players will feel encouraged to go to dangerous low-sec areas to make a profit, which is where pirates and gankers can lie in wait, knowing their targets will come to them! But those targets will likewise know that their destination is dangerous, and so will be prepared, regardless of whether they're playing in open or solo. That means there will be much less pressure to play in Solo, because they'll need to be prepared either way!
The net result of this is that players won't be forced to play in Open, but if they choose to do so, for the social benefits that entails, they can do so and enjoy them, with most previous barriers to entry removed, a better game for all!
And even the players who still don't want to play in Open can still have a better game! They'll still have roughly 10000 high and medium security systems to enjoy fully if they don't like danger, but the new addition of 10000 legitimately low-security systems gives broad vistas of new content for those who want a challenge!
And that, ladies, gentlemen, and those of unspecified gender, is how you split a banana.
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