Integrating creative bridges and portal hubs

General
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OK so we have creative bridges coming, a new mechanic. This is explicitly not intended as a complaining thread, and it’s being made on the basis that the current system is set in stone. Complaints and suggestions for changes belong in the testing thread.

My base is on a T1 USE planet (Raxxa) and I run a mid size hub here with access to several all-planets networks and other links around Raxxa and currently Sorissi. I’d like to integrate some bridge endpoints for eventual creative players who want a survival link, and aren’t survival builders, or who don’t specifically want to build a base on Raxxa.

i think there are other players who feel the same, and testing has shown a couple of obstacles to this.

First (and less important) the bridge format is 8 high by 2 wide. I did test and determine that 8 wide by 2 high is not allowed either. The uniformity is due to a technical requirement that I understand so I’m not complaining about it, just pointing out that the selected shape doesn’t integrate well with many hub designs.

Many hub designs will also be fine with it so it’s just something to be aware of. And for myself and some others, addressing point 2 will make this a moot point.

So secondly, there are some strict requirements for opening a creative bridge. This is not going to work with the current self-service portal hub model that has come to dominate in the game. I’d like to open up some discussion of how people might handle this to get some ideas on the table before the release.

  • The creative bridge token can only be generated on the creative side
  • In creative there is no trading, shops stand, or request basket
  • The creative bridge token cannot be seen or traded on survival, outside of a bridge
  • Bridges require the same 2 permissions as portals to be activated

So, a creative player cannot come to the survival hub and get a token, then open the bridge from their side.

They also cannot provide a bridge token to the hub operator to have the hub operator open the bridge.

With these requirements in place, there is no way for a hub operator and an unknown creative player to asynchrously create an open creative bridge, the two must meet at least once to become friends and either implement or work around a trust system.

To be clear the reason that I’m going on about ‘trust systems’ is because the permissions required to provide a bridge token on the survival side are sufficient to steal fuel (oort shards) from any other portals within the beacon.

Tokens too but that’s not a big deal. A griefer could also close nearby portals if they just wanted to wreak general havoc during a brief window with permissions on a hub.

Here are some points from the testing I’ve done with @Soju-VB:

As far as I can tell, the ‘lowest trust’ scenario involves friending the creative player, and placing a temporary advanced lock on the bridge conduits. This allows them to place the bridge token into the conduits with the least amount of effort/exposure for either player. The hub owner can then open the bridge.

The next lowest trust scenario is for the creative player to provide beacon level permissions to the hub owner on a specific beacon on the creative planet with just a storage unit in it. The bridge token can be placed in the storage by the owner and the hub owner can then put it in their own creative inventory, making it accessible to them back in their survival hub.

The least effort scenario I can see is for the creative player to permission the hub owner to their existing space on the creative side and allow the hub owner to extract the bridge token directly, then return to survival and open the bridge.

I suspect that with theft not really being an issue on a creative planet, and this being the lowest effort scenario, it’s likely to be what happens most often. But it does mean that if the creative planet isn’t public and/or the creative builder isn’t the planet owner, a third player may have to get involved.

I was thinking of creating an area adjacent to my hub that is made of 1x1 beacons. This way after an initial meeting to friend the builder, I can give them worker/engineer perms to a set of bridge conduits, and they can open/close at their convenience. Then I realized this leaves them the ability to steal my bridge conduits :frowning_face:

Does anybody else have any thoughts on this, or see another system?

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As it stands, it seems like advanced lock to let them place the token in the bridge at your hub then you handle the rest is the safest way to go… but as you mentioned, this means there must be a face to face meeting and friending if they are not already one of your friends.

Edit: Thinking about it, I would be tempted to make one of my lesser used alts a “bridge mule” and just leave them parked at the hub for this purpose alone. That way I would not need to run back every time… could just switch the alt, friend the person and add them to a pre-placed bridge advanced lock, let them drop in the token then break the lock and open the bridge with the alt.

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TBH I haven’t totally formulated this in my head but you could probably make use of auto-join guild book to give the proper perms to avoid both players having to be online at the same time.

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If its for the whole hub, could be dangerous if you are giving worker and engineer permissions automatically.

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Auto-join guild books are unable to provide automatic granting of permissions. There was a discussion on this a few months back.

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For example, the way Nexton runs his public minter, is he has an advanced lock on the minter. Guild members have no perms on the guild-aligned beacon, but being in the guild means he can give people advanced lock access to individual chrysominters without friending them.

So the point is that you have auto-join so someone can auto-join while you’re offline, then you can give them perms while they’re offline, and then the token stuff happens.

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The problem with this is that you have to give them permissions to close all of your portals, take all of your fuel, and take all of your portal and bridge conduits.

If you just give them worker perms, they can add their token but they can’t open the bridge. They can’t take your blocks, but they can close all the portals and take any fuel you have at your end.

This would work in the scenario where every creative bridge has it’s own 1x1 plot beacon though.

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This definitely seems to be the least work and it’s basically no risk regardless of how well you do or don’t know the person.

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My point is that you can give adv. lock perms to people in the same guild. Without any guild worker/etc permissions. Without face-to-face friending.

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I’m pretty sure the devs will come up with a more user friendly version for the release.

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Hadn’t thought of that so thanks for spelling it out. I’ll have to consider making that section of my hub not aligned to the rest of my build and having a guild for it.

Hard to be sure, especially with james’ statement. It can’t hurt to point out the pitfalls and try to find a minimum effort way around them prior to release. Not that it’s too urgent - most (all?) of the first wave of planets will probably be established players and then there’s the odds of one coming around Raxxa, for me.

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I think it’s pretty much done for now.

Of course, they might tweak it here & there later if there are any wide-spread issues that everyone is running into.

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I think the problem right now is everyone is trying to apply survival portal/hub logic to creative portals. They’re different. The fact they the devs tried to include them in the main universe at all is crazy (in a good way). Creative networks will mostly reside in the Creative realm.

I think the majority of existing hubs will need to create space for portals to Sovereign worlds and let the portals to creative be done solely by their founders.

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Might be easiest for the players that have creative planets in orbit to open their own mini hub and see which major hubs want to link with them. This way each creative planet owner can use their own plots/beacon, they can get a little footfall from any traffic they create, and it eliminates a lot of the re work to the existing hubs. It might also give them the chance to have their workshop or storage adjacent to their creative portal.

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with the release nearing, we do have to keep in mind that we will have issues we might run into.
since there has not been 1 release without trouble so far, let this be the first one lol?
many are hyped about it (so am i) i know roughly what to expect and lets hope this release can increase the boundless population :slight_smile: as it deserves

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Would it not be possible to do it backwards, so the owner of the creative planet gives permission to the hub owner to come and collect a token from the portal, and then the creative owner never needs to get permissions to access the hub at all?

It does put more onus on the Hub owner, but then if you’re running a hub and getting footfall (on the survival side) for getting people access to creative worlds, it seems like a reasonable compromise.

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If it’s not your portal on your creative planet, you won’t have the location of where the portal will/should be.

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I find this to be highly ironic. There are manyseveral players here who have advocated on behalf of a hypothetical “creative player”. A content creator, a child, whatever. Someone who doesn’t want to play on survival, not interested in hunting, gathering, farming, crafting, mining, any of it.

I do agree that in the first batch of planets, and maybe for some time, this (creative players creating owning/creating survival bases) is likely to be the case. I doubt that any completely new players are going to be renting creative worlds within the first few weeks. Word will get around though, and they will come. Also immediately we may get some as kids of regular players, etc… are finally able to build freely without actually playing the game.

Anyways PS, TNT, Ultima, Guardian, these groups are not ‘reaching out’ to mini hub owners or small builds, but quite the opposite. However there will be plenty of hubs that will welcome creative players because they want to be helpful and interact or simply, as @Marrash notes, for footfall which is a basic hub mechanic.

Since in the current system there is no limit on bridges, a creative player who is looking to be connected and getting free bridges anyways is likely to want to reach out to as many hubs as possible - directly from the creative side. Reaching out via a mini-hub on survival has a continuous cost, in survival.

The reason for bringing this up into a thread at this time is to raise awareness of the specific issues involved and fish for ideas on how to circumvent or plan for them, is all. I suspect there are plenty of people no longer following the thousand post testing thread but who have some specific interest in this matter.

For instance while setup would be a bit of a pain, @Alwin already pointed out something I wasn’t thinking of that would require a bit of intricate setup to be minimal risk, but would also allow completely asynchronous setup. By which i mean the two players involved never coming face to face in game, and the only “at risk” item being one set of bridge conduits. Everything could be handled across time zones or other obstacles via forum/discord/whatever if necessary.

This is also mentioned above, and IMO between strangers who CAN meet up, it’s a low risk solution. There’s no reason to steal anything on creative, it requires the minimal permissioning and configuration. etc …

Still AFAIK the lowest effort and safest thing to do is meet up, place an advanced lock on the bridge, and let the creative player add the token. Hub owner breaks the blocks, which removes the locks, and it’s done.

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I advocated for users that want Creative mode because that can open up a highly-requested play style for a lot of current and potential users. I don’t think they should have to spend any time grinding away in Survival mode (as a prerequisite), to get the full Creative mode experience that they paid for. I stand by that.

After trying out Creative bridges myself, I just feel like it’s not a simple/easy process for users to go through & set up. Convoluting that further with locks, guilds, permissions, using/trusting another player’s beacon/etc… :scream: that’s why I said it would probably be best (imo) if they put a Creative portal on their own controlled plot for now.

If some hub owners figure out a system that works smoothly for Creative planets - kudos to them x10000 :+1: . The service will be much appreciated by many

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Right that’s what I’m looking for here, suggestions etc… on ways to actually simplify it as the population goes. There’s nothing here that adds complexity it’s the requirements of the system.

There’s not a lot of immediacy as for some time it’s going to be established players, for the most part, who own the creative worlds. But as the population grows and new players come for creative play (just assuming best case) these things will become issues. I don’t see it as very likely that the system is going to iterate which is why I discourage suggestions for changing the system here.

I agree with you the process is a little complex. As a hub owner and network participant, that’s why I’m asking people to think about it.

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