5 ms·

> I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems they're adding like being put in prison and escaping On its face, this seems like an obviously awf

> I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems they're adding like being put in prison and escaping On its face, this seems like an obviously awful idea. Escaping from prison the first time sounds awesome. Escaping from prison the fifth time sounds super boring.

zionic 5y ago
It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you’re a pirate who has been to prison multiple times you really don’t want to go back… so your behavior is different.
- cletus 5y ago
  Hot take: trying to appeal to both PvP and PvE players is the biggest mistake game designers make. History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds). This focus on PvP is my biggest concern with Ashes of Creation. The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences. You don't really die. You can communicate outside of the confines of the game. You know there are no consequences. This leads to antisocial behaviours like griefing even though the griefer gets nothing in-game for doing so. Many have tried to make in-game consequences to deter griefing and they never work and (IMHO) never will work because in-game isn't reality. Death isn't permanent. Even the permanent death of a character isn't permanent. Game designers spend so much effort on these systems to appeal to the minority of players and it literally kills games. But no one seems to learn this lesson. Or it's just hubris that "my game will be different". So what Star Citizen should do is just not have open world PvP, at all. That requires no development effort whatsoever. Maybe you could have an arena or some BG like concept but those are optional and can be added later. No system will eliminate pointless griefing and you just alienate those who don't want PvP.
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    Agreed with all this. There was at one point a notion of a "PvP slider" that you could turn down to reduce encounters with other players (I assume via instancing) but it's gone away in favor of a totally in-universe "crime stat" and law system. Predictably, it does fuckall because the defense turrets on stations can't even hit anyone. I think the plan is for all landing pads to eventually be replaced with hangars so at least the pad ramming greifers will have to wait until you've gotten in your ship and taken off before they can ruin your fun for cheap entertainment.
  - korse 5y ago
    What about Eve online?
    - leetcrew 5y ago
      yes, eve online solved "griefing" by redefining it as "pvp". in all seriousness, I think their solution is pretty good. it's never 100% safe to undock, but it's prohibitively expensive to repeatedly kill a specific pve player in high-sec.
      - kiksy 5y ago
        Eve solved it perfectly. The Eve universe is dangerous. By undocking you consent to PvP, don't fly what you can't afford to lose. The game treats you like an adult that can accept risk and thus the rewards from playing the game are higher for me. I wish more games took a similar mature approach.
        bserge 5y ago
        They would lose a lot of potential players. I used to be a pretty hardcore PvPer when I was young then got tired of griefing, being griefed, fixing and getting better gear, spending hours to craft stuff that would be gone in minutes. Basically, wasting a ton of time. That may be fine when you're in school, but not when you have a job and a life. EVE was an outlier probably because they could afford to be with what looked like zero competition in their heyday. Now they sold the game to Pearl Abyss, must have been doing pretty poorly.
atoav 5y ago
This is a question of gameplay. You could build entire games around escaping from prisons that people would totally enjoy playing. There have been far simpler ideas that people play even after a decade. Heck if you do it the right way I could see players want to go to prison just to play the escape thing. So there is nothing inherent to the topic that makes or breaks this. On an very abstract level it is something that forces you into a different kind of gameplay as a punishment. Whether that different kind of gameplay is engaging or boring is a different can of beans.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I disagree. If it's a rewarding experience, then it's not a punishment. The difference is between making prison break levels, and actually implementing a prison system as a player punishment. The goals are conflicting. In general forcing a player to do content they don't want to do is not good.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Why? It's a mechanic in TES games like Skyrim; commit a crime, you get the option to either pay it off, go to jail (and lose some stats), or try and fight a whole town worth of guards. I mean you start most TES games in prison.
- branon 5y ago
  Or go to jail, escape from jail, steal your equipment back, and assassinate a few guards on the way out. Yeah, going to prison in video games can be quite fun and dynamic to the point where the scenario is replayable. Helps that there's a different jail in each major city in Skyrim as well.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I'm not very interested in TES, but how often do you choose to go to prison? I can't tell if you're saying going to prison is just lose stats and then cut to the end of it, or lose stats and have to break out. If it's the former, maybe you tank the stat loss and deal with it. If it's the former, how many times are you actually going to tolerate going to prison rather than loading your save file from before you got caught? In a multiplayer game that's probably not an option. Breaking out of prison multiple times is both annoying and immersion breaking, especially if its the same prison over a short period. Obviously the concept of a prison break is fine for gameplay. There are whole games dedicated to it. But implementing it as a punishment is by default going to be viewed as either not a punishment, due to it being rewarding, or tedious, because the player doesn't want to do it. Generally speaking, there's intrinsic loss to being put in prison already because you're forced to stop what you were actually trying to do already. Ocarina of Time had the gerudo sequence where you could get thrown into prison if caught, but then hookshot yourself out immediately. That's probably the better choice for most games because having to deal with consequences of prison are very boring. If the system to escape is easy, it should be very short. If it's not easy, you have to question how annoying it is to the player and whether it actually makes the game better.
dreen 5y ago
They had a weekend of free ship flytesting or something. I wanted to check the game out so I configured my joystick but had a bit of trouble starting and ended up crashing and going to prison. I was annoyed at the quest, I just wanted to fly around not do an RPG, that should come way after youve had time to get hooked by core mechanics
- wavefunction 5y ago
  Next time play the Arena Commander mode which is a game within the SC/Squadron42 games and functions as a simple ship combat sim and a great tutorial for folks like you who want to just mess around in a ship. There is a similar FPS mode for people who just want to try out the FPS combat.
  - dreen 5y ago
    Thanks!
wavefunction 5y ago
>escaping from prison Don't get caught. And yeah, that's an option, if you're leet enough ;)

zionic 5y ago

It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you’re a pirate who has been to prison multiple times you really don’t want to go back… so your behavior is different.

cletus 5y ago
Hot take: trying to appeal to both PvP and PvE players is the biggest mistake game designers make. History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds). This focus on PvP is my biggest concern with Ashes of Creation. The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences. You don't really die. You can communicate outside of the confines of the game. You know there are no consequences. This leads to antisocial behaviours like griefing even though the griefer gets nothing in-game for doing so. Many have tried to make in-game consequences to deter griefing and they never work and (IMHO) never will work because in-game isn't reality. Death isn't permanent. Even the permanent death of a character isn't permanent. Game designers spend so much effort on these systems to appeal to the minority of players and it literally kills games. But no one seems to learn this lesson. Or it's just hubris that "my game will be different". So what Star Citizen should do is just not have open world PvP, at all. That requires no development effort whatsoever. Maybe you could have an arena or some BG like concept but those are optional and can be added later. No system will eliminate pointless griefing and you just alienate those who don't want PvP.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  Agreed with all this. There was at one point a notion of a "PvP slider" that you could turn down to reduce encounters with other players (I assume via instancing) but it's gone away in favor of a totally in-universe "crime stat" and law system. Predictably, it does fuckall because the defense turrets on stations can't even hit anyone. I think the plan is for all landing pads to eventually be replaced with hangars so at least the pad ramming greifers will have to wait until you've gotten in your ship and taken off before they can ruin your fun for cheap entertainment.
- korse 5y ago
  What about Eve online?
  - leetcrew 5y ago
    yes, eve online solved "griefing" by redefining it as "pvp". in all seriousness, I think their solution is pretty good. it's never 100% safe to undock, but it's prohibitively expensive to repeatedly kill a specific pve player in high-sec.
    - kiksy 5y ago
      Eve solved it perfectly. The Eve universe is dangerous. By undocking you consent to PvP, don't fly what you can't afford to lose. The game treats you like an adult that can accept risk and thus the rewards from playing the game are higher for me. I wish more games took a similar mature approach.
      - bserge 5y ago
        They would lose a lot of potential players. I used to be a pretty hardcore PvPer when I was young then got tired of griefing, being griefed, fixing and getting better gear, spending hours to craft stuff that would be gone in minutes. Basically, wasting a ton of time. That may be fine when you're in school, but not when you have a job and a life. EVE was an outlier probably because they could afford to be with what looked like zero competition in their heyday. Now they sold the game to Pearl Abyss, must have been doing pretty poorly.

atoav 5y ago

This is a question of gameplay. You could build entire games around escaping from prisons that people would totally enjoy playing. There have been far simpler ideas that people play even after a decade. Heck if you do it the right way I could see players want to go to prison just to play the escape thing. So there is nothing inherent to the topic that makes or breaks this. On an very abstract level it is something that forces you into a different kind of gameplay as a punishment. Whether that different kind of gameplay is engaging or boring is a different can of beans.

spywaregorilla 5y ago
I disagree. If it's a rewarding experience, then it's not a punishment. The difference is between making prison break levels, and actually implementing a prison system as a player punishment. The goals are conflicting. In general forcing a player to do content they don't want to do is not good.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

Why? It's a mechanic in TES games like Skyrim; commit a crime, you get the option to either pay it off, go to jail (and lose some stats), or try and fight a whole town worth of guards. I mean you start most TES games in prison.

branon 5y ago
Or go to jail, escape from jail, steal your equipment back, and assassinate a few guards on the way out. Yeah, going to prison in video games can be quite fun and dynamic to the point where the scenario is replayable. Helps that there's a different jail in each major city in Skyrim as well.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I'm not very interested in TES, but how often do you choose to go to prison? I can't tell if you're saying going to prison is just lose stats and then cut to the end of it, or lose stats and have to break out. If it's the former, maybe you tank the stat loss and deal with it. If it's the former, how many times are you actually going to tolerate going to prison rather than loading your save file from before you got caught? In a multiplayer game that's probably not an option. Breaking out of prison multiple times is both annoying and immersion breaking, especially if its the same prison over a short period. Obviously the concept of a prison break is fine for gameplay. There are whole games dedicated to it. But implementing it as a punishment is by default going to be viewed as either not a punishment, due to it being rewarding, or tedious, because the player doesn't want to do it. Generally speaking, there's intrinsic loss to being put in prison already because you're forced to stop what you were actually trying to do already. Ocarina of Time had the gerudo sequence where you could get thrown into prison if caught, but then hookshot yourself out immediately. That's probably the better choice for most games because having to deal with consequences of prison are very boring. If the system to escape is easy, it should be very short. If it's not easy, you have to question how annoying it is to the player and whether it actually makes the game better.

dreen 5y ago

They had a weekend of free ship flytesting or something. I wanted to check the game out so I configured my joystick but had a bit of trouble starting and ended up crashing and going to prison. I was annoyed at the quest, I just wanted to fly around not do an RPG, that should come way after youve had time to get hooked by core mechanics

wavefunction 5y ago
Next time play the Arena Commander mode which is a game within the SC/Squadron42 games and functions as a simple ship combat sim and a great tutorial for folks like you who want to just mess around in a ship. There is a similar FPS mode for people who just want to try out the FPS combat.
- dreen 5y ago
  Thanks!

wavefunction 5y ago

>escaping from prison Don't get caught. And yeah, that's an option, if you're leet enough ;)