I suspect, based on things like the 40 LY limit on material trader searches, and the way the route plotter works, that "find nearby systems with property X" is a very expensive type of search, and running that for every system since an explorer last docked could take a long time to determine if there was a suitable station.
Upper bound on respawn distance for deep space rebuy; retrieval of lost data via mission/challenge
- Thread starter Feros-da-Grundig
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That particular player has been PvP'ing at least a year and combat logged at least once that I know of, so won't lose much sleep over that one. He should have known better, and now probably hates me.
But I've seen screencaps of 13kly or more. I suspect many players don't even realize the advantage of periodically "checking in" with respect to rebuy (it wasn't really even clear to me until DG2, since I never cared as a mostly in-bubble player until now. I took the time to learn before embarking, but many new players won't).
I'm torn between my strongly held opinions that both:
1. The in game instruction is atrociously bad
2. Many (most?) people are often gullible, and no amount of prep is going to help a large chunk of DW2 in open. Some of the tactics I've used to secure targets are unbelievably simple. 3 card monte still works in public parks after hundreds of years...
But I wish FDev would at least take a stab at #1, and soften the blow for #2. They're not bad people and they paid their money for the game.
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It's not, if they do it right. I'm not trying to be a wiseguy. I have extensive IRL experience with pathfinding algorithms and actually have posted in a few threads here on simiar subjects. A proof of concept is a probably a few hours work for a dev familiar with the dataset. (The actual implementation, I have no idea, depends on their development habits).
The "with property X" part actually makes the task much simpler, by making the graph more sparse. (If that means nothing to you, just trust the green manatee pirate since I'm speaking in my real world voice, not my CMDR voice
)Yes. The difficult bit for "with property X" is not "traverse the resulting graph" - which is indeed made easier by it being a much smaller subset - but "filter the set of all stars to just those with that property".It's not, if they do it right. I'm not trying to be a wiseguy. I have extensive IRL experience with pathfinding algorithms and actually have posted in a few threads here on simiar subjects. A proof of concept is a probably a few hours work for a dev familiar with the dataset. (The actual implementation, I have no idea, depends on their development habits).
The "with property X" part actually makes the task much simpler, by making the graph more sparse. (If that means nothing to you, just trust the green manatee pirate since I'm speaking in my real world voice, not my CMDR voice
The reason this is difficult is that there's not actually a database of all the stars in the first place [1] - there's an algorithm to allow them to be generated from first principles, which is fast enough to appear real-time when viewing the galaxy map (though if you zoom out a bit you can see the edges of that generation easily enough) but wouldn't work for a generic search over hundreds or thousands of LY radius.
Where X = inhabited then this could probably be pre-cached as there's relatively few of them - detention centres (which are extremely rare) already have this. Calculating the nearest inhabited system on arrival might be practical ... though once you get outside the ~6kLY shell of systems around the bubble, unless you're heading to Colonia the nearest inhabited system is still going to be a very long way away.
[1] For an extremely basic one with just coordinates you'd be looking at 8 bytes per system in a compacted representation, or 12 to make it reasonably searchable, which with 400 billion systems is a significant fraction of an exabyte, not counting index metadata. Then if you want to add X properties to be able to filter on you're paying about 93 terabytes per byte of per-system property. That's obviously not going to happen.
Depending on what "property X" is, that could be computed once on a big honking server (which would be storing only matching systems, discarding non matching, to avoid the space complexity you note). And then that subset distributed. But it's late and I can't remember what X is so whatevs.
My real point was, poor CMDR noob-e-bear just needs a simple way to not have his entire week ruined by the nasty green pirate man, while still allowing nasty green pirate man to pretend he's actually a mean pirate man, and not in fact an insomniac computer vision researcher.
Just pathfind some rando system within 1000ly reachable by jump range of rebuy ship if and only if rebuy is due to nasty murder (maybe also "and if fuel scoop"). Otherwise same mechanics as now. And call it a day.
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I have my doubts about the "respawn at nearest station" mechanic, it would be so much simpler and more logical to have a few more stations in deep space (and better in-game instructions about how to find them, and better info about the "respawn at last dock" for noobs). The station at Sag A* is very welcome, and there ought to be at least two more: one somewhere in the "eastern" half of the galaxy (opposite Colonia or thereabouts) and one somewhere on the far side of the core. Does seem strange to have most of the galaxy completely devoid of stations.
But the recoverable "black box" has been sorely needed for years (and also the NPC copilot escape pod). We can already find data caches and occupied escape pods in-game, so clearly the technology exists, so why can't we use it???
But the recoverable "black box" has been sorely needed for years (and also the NPC copilot escape pod). We can already find data caches and occupied escape pods in-game, so clearly the technology exists, so why can't we use it???
TheMegaTurnip
Banned
Innit lol.
At this point I think you could almost conduct yourself in any manner you can imagine and people in this community will try to rip you down.
People just love to hate. And it is pathetic.
seems fair. after all, we don't want people getting fed up with the game. justified or not by their actions, sometimes the loss can be to much for a new player, and they leave the game upset... when all they needed was time to learn (Learn, listen, advice... i know, who listens to that
)And now with more stations out there, and mega ships (after all, mega ship should (Make Elite Great Again) its in their name)... and maybe fleet carriers on the Horizontm ... its not beyondtm reasonable game play 'lore' to have fleet carriers dropping players within 500ly of their death, as part of the insurance package, if they so choose
Drop them in an empty instance, watch the fleet carriage fly away while it says 'Fly safe commander, 07' /.. and the player is back in the game
Also not saying this should be in game cus i really want it.. after the last big patch, i Crashed my ship into a world, right near the galactic centre.... Didnt pay attention to the 2.4g, was to excited i had found life.
I didn't even worry, just headed right back out there
(only to find out that version of space pumpkin was bugged and could not be scanned .,, that ticked me off lol)
I see where the suggestion is coming from, to balance the loss explorers have compared to other game activities. I guess the question i keep asking myself when reviewing this post is what does DG2 get out of this gameplay? Blowing up an explorer build ship is not a challenge or all that interesting. You don't get any credits (unless the explorer is wanted), You do get cargo loot like a pirate (explorers rarely carry cargo), You don't steal exploration data (simply not an option in the game).
If the hole endeavor is to force explorers to redesign ship builds to deal with other player combat, would defeat the point of building as an explorer ship to reach distant stars and ranges that would take days with a stock jump range. It would be like imposing a rule on combat ships to have a standard 50+LY jump range or they can't visit a station on the edge of the galaxy that has the one engineer who can upgrade all there weapons, we have removed all others from the bubble.
Explorers have their own complications to contend with, mainly the data loss of hours worth of game play it took to collect. all can be caused by pilot error, high gravity planets, neutron stars, exclusion zones etc. Now your suggestion they add other players to the list of issues to deal with?
Combat pilots lose what? bounties, stolen cargo, current mission (no you can still complete a mission if you blow up) all of which takes a fraction of the time to recoup compared to an explorer.
Ships are different design focuses to achieve the game activity they partake in. Why is combat a demanding priority build before all others?
No build non-combat can every compete with a pure combat built. Even if they try to arm themselves the activity the player is trying to accomplish has to take priority or they wont be able to preform said activity effectively.
Combat builds don't demand that they fairy 60+ units of cargo around while they are bounty hunting. or travel 1000+ly to assassinate a target.
If we are looking for a balance to lost game time (ie exploration data) we could just suggest a reverse solution and increase the penalty for combat pilots to match what an explorer would lose. All bounties, combat bonds etc can not be turned in right away they must be kept onboard for 24 hours. So any potential credits gained have a time where all the work can be lost, ruining an entire evening of game time should that happen. Does it sound fair? likely not but that's what explorers are dealing with, they can't quickly turn in the data, they have to hold on to it until they can make it back to a station.
This all boils down to time loss, not credits.
How do you compensate for loss time?
The best solution currently is stop killing explorers when there is nothing to be gained from it. (start by asking for the ability to steal exploration data) Add gameplay not take away from it.
If the hole endeavor is to force explorers to redesign ship builds to deal with other player combat, would defeat the point of building as an explorer ship to reach distant stars and ranges that would take days with a stock jump range. It would be like imposing a rule on combat ships to have a standard 50+LY jump range or they can't visit a station on the edge of the galaxy that has the one engineer who can upgrade all there weapons, we have removed all others from the bubble.
Explorers have their own complications to contend with, mainly the data loss of hours worth of game play it took to collect. all can be caused by pilot error, high gravity planets, neutron stars, exclusion zones etc. Now your suggestion they add other players to the list of issues to deal with?
Combat pilots lose what? bounties, stolen cargo, current mission (no you can still complete a mission if you blow up) all of which takes a fraction of the time to recoup compared to an explorer.
Ships are different design focuses to achieve the game activity they partake in. Why is combat a demanding priority build before all others?
No build non-combat can every compete with a pure combat built. Even if they try to arm themselves the activity the player is trying to accomplish has to take priority or they wont be able to preform said activity effectively.
Combat builds don't demand that they fairy 60+ units of cargo around while they are bounty hunting. or travel 1000+ly to assassinate a target.
If we are looking for a balance to lost game time (ie exploration data) we could just suggest a reverse solution and increase the penalty for combat pilots to match what an explorer would lose. All bounties, combat bonds etc can not be turned in right away they must be kept onboard for 24 hours. So any potential credits gained have a time where all the work can be lost, ruining an entire evening of game time should that happen. Does it sound fair? likely not but that's what explorers are dealing with, they can't quickly turn in the data, they have to hold on to it until they can make it back to a station.
This all boils down to time loss, not credits.
How do you compensate for loss time?
The best solution currently is stop killing explorers when there is nothing to be gained from it. (start by asking for the ability to steal exploration data) Add gameplay not take away from it.
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This will never happen. It is not a solution it is a wish.
Keep in mind, I'm a "nice" ganker. Probably any of my compatriots who read this are just laughing at how stupid I am to even bother trying to reason with anyone, instead of just kill. They'll tease me later, and then go blow some things up.
"I'm blowing up explorers, but I feel like I'm not ruining their game badly enough. Here's an idea for letting me hurt them more..."
You express your massive sense of entitlement very clearly.
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Lestat
Banned
I just posted a idea to Ruin PvP game. Give Explorers a 100ly location of their kills. So Explorers can avoid PvP gankers.
Yep, b/c much harder to figure out their last dock. And the explo data retrieval only accessible to the explorer, available in solo, yes that helps us gank too. Because reasons.
Request to close thread.
Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Closed accordingly.
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