Forum Questions and Answers II

Originally Posted by Magnus-Ex:

Regarding the "friendly fire off" situation; how do you plan to prevent people nuking the battlefield continuously? Because with no friendly fire, this then seems to be most effective way to kill enemies. Simply nuke the whole bunch (knowing that any friendlies will be fine) or just fly into battle and nuke nearest object or squadmate. This looks to me as critical design problem of "No FF" and i would like to know if there are any ideas to work this out.

Hermann Peterscheck:

The real balance problem there is having a super weapon, which you simply can't have. Regardless of FF, if you have a nuke that kills everything then that pretty much is a critical design problem in my mind. That being said, there isn't a nuke that kills everything, or even anything close to that in the game right now, so I can't comment on how we would prevent that from being an exploit

Originally Posted by Gridlock:

On the topic of ships, I understand that we have to pick a nation right off the bat. Will that then "lock us in" to using ONLY that nation's ships, or will we be able to, fly Quant ships if we chose Solrain, for example?

Hermann Peterscheck:

Quantar will be the only nation that can fly Quantar specific ships, but there are non-nation specific ships which any nation can purchase.

Originally Posted by Gridlock:

Will there be some sort of bounty system put in place?

Hermann Peterscheck:

Currently there is nothing implemented, but there's a lot of ideas on how to do this, so it's really just a question of getting to it.

Originally Posted by Gridlock:

Since the game has been touted as RvRvR, will, for example, a Solrain pilot be able to fly straight into the Octavian core without any trouble? Expanding on that, will there be a system put in place similar to Eve's "security status" which could possibly limit flight in regulated sectors?

Hermann Peterscheck:

Currently a Solrain pilot can fly into Octavian space with no restriction. The major stations are in PvE space. Currently, sectors are either PvE or PvP we don't have a scaling security level system at this time.

Originally Posted by Gridlock:

Mines/deployable weapons were touched upon very slightly in the last DevChat. Is there anything else you can tell us about them? Deployment, AoE size, with/without timers, etc.?

Hermann Peterscheck:

Currently we have chaff and basic mines (basically AoE non-moving missiles). We have ideas around things like deployable turrets and possibly bots, gravity wells and things of that nature, but it's not in game right now and as such there are no details.

Originally Posted by Gridlock:

Is there any chance, perhaps in the future, of "mini professions." Example: salvage operations, illicit material smuggling, slave trafficking, etc.?

Hermann Peterscheck:

Yes. That is possible, although I'm not sure how happy people would be about slave trafficking.

Originally Posted by Widow:

Justify PVP to me if there is no loss? I have a high level toon, I have millions of credits, I have the best gear from my raid guild. Why would I care about PVP. If I don't lose anything, and it doesn't cost me anything, why should I bother with pvp. I don't care about XP anymore, why do it if there is not risk involved?

Hermann Peterscheck:

Justification is hard because if something is justified is determined by the listener, not the speaker. Here's how I see it. There's lots of other kinds of achievements beyond gear: leaderboards, medals, and titles which are in a relative state of flux, so getting and staying on top of those is a kind of constant achievement system. There is also the activity of taking over areas of space which is also a constant war over who owns what. Risk is also a personal valuation. For some people nothing short of loss of everything on death represents risk. For others, just having to fly back to where they died, is enough to represent risk. The difficulty for us is to figure out how to balance those two extremes. For each group the answer is "obvious" and the other group is "insane." If you measure the aggregate you end up somewhere in the middle, which is why most games end up sharding and having separate rule sets. That's the same answer that's been given a bazillion times and I think it's just not very satisfying, sorry about that. I really wish there was one solution that everyone agrees is perfect, but that's not the case, so we just have to make the decisions that we think will please the largest number of players.

Originally Posted by Widow:

Peter said in the MMORPG interview that in unregulated space you can attack and be attacked by ANYONE. Does this mean an octavian can attack another octavian or not?

Hermann Peterscheck:

Currently, there is no same nation damage possible. We have thought a lot about stuff like dueling and piracy (both of which I think are awesome) but as of right now, those things are not implemented.

Originally Posted by PhoenixRisen:

We know now that when you travel to another station, your other ships will be available to you there as well, with the equipped items. What is in place to stop me from loading up a hauler with cargo, switching to my fastest ship, flying where I want to go, switching back to my hauler and then unloading my cargo?

Hermann Peterscheck:

Nope, when you switch ships, the cargo in your ship goes into the switched ship's locker. That is when you put your ship back into the locker, the cargo on it does not persist with it... precisely to prevent this kind of exploit

Originally Posted by Gridlock:

They've already stated this. What you see in the videos is them flying in "Dampeners On" mode. It gives space flight a more atmospheric feel.

Before you ask, they've already stated that the dampeners are really only there so noobs can learn to have fun right away instead of worrying about crashing into this or that. Once flying with dampeners off is learned, it's better than with them on.

Hermann Peterscheck:

Just as a clarification, it wasn't ND vs. Me . That is never the case. What was happening is that in early playtesting of the original flight model the general consensus was that ships were basically impossible and frustrating to fly. This lead directly to increasing the controlability of the ships. This lead to more advanced players being frustrated that they couldn't drift as much which lead to the dampner being an option so that new players aren't frustrated and advanced players have options. One of the hallmarks of development of this project is that we try to test and react A LOT and try to avoid arguments about ego and theory. Dampner is one of the classic cases where there was no good universal solution (similar to inverted or non-inverted). You can't win the argument, so you support both whenever you can.