The more I read on the forums, and the more time I spend thinking about it, the less I understand how and why sovereign worlds have been built the way that they have. It really feels like the big disconnect between what people might actually want planets for, and what the developers had in mind when they designed and built the system. Or perhaps they spent so much time trying to make sure it was “fair” (as if you could be fair to everyone when you’re asking people to essentially pay a monthly subscription but still keep it ‘fair’ to those who aren’t) that they factored out too many desirable features.
We can talk about what we want, and why we think what we do about them all day. But it would be great to get some developer feedback on who the system was actually built for. What uses was it designed to cater to? Who were the intended buyers? What did they think we’d be doing with them?
Xaldafax (who probably knows as much as anyone about where they’re going with this, even when he can’t always say what he knows) felt it necessary to create a poll to demonstrate to the developers that people think the landscape of their world is important. This strongly hints that developers don’t think that having nice landscape features is high on our list of importance.
The fact that James had to ask why a player would want their sovereign orbiting a specific planet was slightly concerning. Was it not obvious that players might want to keep their sovereign close to their home to keep ort costs down? Or that they might want to rent a few planets and keep then in a mini network around the same planet?
I think it’s probably time that we found a way to understand the disconnect, and the only way we can accomplish that is by knowing what their intended purpose is.
This release, as announced, has stirred up a lot of debate, and some interesting points on several issues.
I’ve been pretty open/vocal about this, I’m not in a place to throw the tons of cash at this that some people have mentioned. But as an avid player I have a lot of thoughts on the matter, and I’d love to have a sovereign world even though I’m not in a position to budget for an entire AWS server for myself ATM.
Anyways I really hope that the intention with a release like this is to hit the ground with some $5 - $10 worlds that require minimal admin/dev time for setup, try out the systems at high volume, and make decisions on how to expand the offering moving forward.
I’m not sure really how much less server resources and exo-sized world really requires, especially if it’s capped at a low occupancy number.
In any case the discussion has really focused my ideas on what’s important to me (outside of budget ofc) in terms of sovereign worlds and also to try and consider how future offerings could be shaped to encourage both satisfaction, and retention.
No idea, ofc, on what their actual intentions or reactions are
Yeah, this certainly does make me pine for the EA days when they’d float ideas by the community and have a discussion before implementing them and it was too late for any major changes or alternate implementations.
I agree we could use some topic or list where developer talks us through the design progress at least the part why certain things were designed the way they are.
This comes again to the point where we are always when sone bigger thing comes into testing.
Theres almost 0 info about it.
We play it and give feedback.
No one answers to the feedback (“we are doing it cause…”)
Atm im sure over 50% of forum users wouldnt be able to say/tell what are sovereign planets if someone would asked about it.
This is purely cause theres no
BASIC info(what.why.when) that is written in common language not some coder language etc.
I
I remember when Ollie first released the planned design for guilds, and the community RIPPED into it. It was then close to a year (longer?) before a redesigned system was implemented, and people complained even worse about how long it took to get them into the game. I think they took that as a lesson on feature development. Build and present a system into testing first, then let the community work with that and make necessary minor tweaks and release it in one or two months with community hands-on feedback. This generates much less noise and faster results, and wastes less dev time and resources. All major content updates since guilds have worked in a similar manner.
Did the other releases require payment for them? or were they free content? It seems like this is a bit different but I wouldn’t really know. Not that I think whatever the devs release wont be a great addition to the game. I’m sure it will. What is on test currently is certainly a cool feature. I think the community wants more control over enhancement or prioritize enhancements differently than the devs do/realize though.
Between $5 and $15 is what they were hoping for tho…
They can probably offer different sizes and different amount of max people on 1 planet and price those accordingly.
So perhaps the smallest planet size with a max of 5 people on planet can cost $5 a month, who knows. But the biggest planet with the same max people as a public one might cost $15…
Some design choices seems strange when we don’t know what plans there is on something in future. We see what game is now, not what there could be in future.
With new Sovereign update coming testing seem little bit like showing up what is coming next after many topics of asking roadmap and when next updates are coming. After update comes it will start again: We have seen this, give us this and that.
To me some of best things of game has been available from start, like that beautiful night sky.
Yeah, it reminds me of one comic about IceFrog and new updates
You don’t like reading update notes? Some of us like to know what is coming next. To me it is part of the game content . It gives players react upcoming changes and new features.
Some of the update details are completely foreign to me and will stay like that but have sometimes those have made more sense after I have tested related feature of it.
When update is released there has been usually better short overview description of it.
Aye I’m not honestly expecting it. But until they announce prices there’s hope
Yeah this is going to require dedicated AWS server space, and it’s not likely that they can pack too many worlds onto one server. Storage is relatively cheap but processing power isn’t and for $5 a month it would probably take a lot of planets to pay for a single server.
IMO to do that they’re going to need to offer some small planets and so far they haven’t said anything about different sizes or player capacities in the information about the release.
So, basically what Aenea said …
It’s ok though I’m not personally in a rush. I like being in the public worlds and I’m not a huge builder. So it’s a matter of technical curiosity for me in a way and I’m definitely eager to see what/how they roll out.
I think the disconnect is coming from the devs not being entirely sure how popular rental worlds are going to be, combined with it taking a lot of time to implement everything so they opted to go with an initial release where not everything can be changed in the looks department of a world by the player themselves.
After it’s initial release and after it seems to be popular and thus seems worthwhile to expand on it they most certainly will do so.
My understanding is that they are going now with a PM the devs system with a description of what one wants. Then later on they can always add an UI for it in the game and automate it all. Then they can also add all kinds of settings for the terrain/biomes so one can tinker before settling on a look.
What also seems to be a thing of confusion for a lot of people is that the devs long ago decided on many things, rules, for planets to abide by. Rental worlds will need to have most of the same rules if they want to be in the main universe. Later on when creative mode is being more refined they will add those to the rental options as well and anything between full creative and main universe planet can be chosen and created.
Abiding by the rules thus means using the same plotting system, same beaconing system (and thus fueling rules) but also where in the universe the planets are to appear.
They’ve once decided that higher tier planets should be further away from lower ones, so when you’re full up thinking in those rule sets like the devs do they can be surprised when one asks for a T6 to be orbiting a T1…
I think there is a lot of speculation from small conversations people have had with the developers over their time, but I also don’t think anyone here knows what their full plans are for this release. At first I thought this was going to be a quick release like many of the other patches, but it still feels like we are in the early stages of this one. I’m interested to see how how this is actually going to turn out since people claiming to know information all seem to have different information LOL.
For some reason I just assumed there would be a transaction UI setup. Never in a million years did I think it would be done manually, outside of test. Thanks for clarification.
