D
Even if not a set bonus, something to allow traders/crafters to either set up installations/structures or even just hand sample over water would be neat. Plenty of times there have been very high concentrations of resources that are underwater and as a result inaccessible.
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Tdeadly, post: 2696, member: 364 wrote:
If you looking for more ways to get mining resources. I would maybe tie the convoy missions with getting a deed for space resources.
Also you can do a bandit kill count daily mission a day to get additional resources. But for the lvl of mining since we want to get people to do space. Not everyone is awesome flying in space to be able to complete it. That if it’s to hard for them.
Also make a grinder that breaks space
parts you don’t need to resources.Add a chip that can give ability to mining more resources. Drop that comes out In hardmode.
TCG had an item that gave a 50% increase to asteroid mining yields. It'll likely be added at some point for traders who need it. Whether it be added to the vendor or at the end of a questline or something, who knows.
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Tdeadly, post: 2642, member: 364 wrote:
I saying use color but one in per area not lvl. Make it a shade of the color so everyone can see it clear. Using shades of the colors you can miss things. But if you need to do research on what is better.
If you want to make space better using certain options like who uses multi guns to fire all at once. Plus make it easy to kill the corvette here like on legends. You have a big difference damaging it. This with just gun. I know right now I can say I need help to kill it on evolve. I do space but suck at kill corvette solo. But on legends they made it easy for mouse user in space. Plus that would also get people for suck at it to give it more of a chance.
What did they do to make mouse and keyboard better for space? I play with controller and very rarely joystick so I'm not familiar with M&K and don't personally prefer it although I know a chunk of players do use it, so it'd be neat to know.
I feel like colour per area (per individual stat) might be oversimplifying the system in a way that will create a new problem, personally. Unless you also made more colours for individual stats, seeing Engine TS, Weapon VsA, Capacitor Recharge Rate, and Shield FHP all being the same colour would be extremely confusing wouldn't it? All the colour tells me in that method is that I need to keep the drop, but having the colour match the stat range tells you why you need to keep it and how good it is without needing to research it just for that confirmation; Especially if the examine window has the explanations down below.
The reason why setting a colour to a grade for thresholds would not just be a better system for quick filtering, but is actually pretty important is because of the way stats like Refire rate on guns are handled. Every time those are reverse engineered (and/or even slotted into a ship raw), those stats will round up or down to the nearest .010. In the case of RE'ing, a .787 VsS and a .785 VsS, or a .324 and .321 refire rate could end up in very different places (especially the .005's), but they all end up in the same places post-RE if they fall into a specific range. (0.320 and 0.321 refire will both end up the same stat post-RE, but 0.322 will be a threshold worse off.)
There's actually merit to pre-rounding some stats to force them into a range for RE to take advantage of, or to just check for duds before RE'ing. (Like Weapon 7 refire rate can be rounded down to .320 pre-RE to push it into what Legends considers "C tier", because the threshold for C tier begins at 0.321 iirc.) This makes the post-RE weapon's outcome more predictable where those stats are concerned; Making VsS red and VsA blue would just be really confusing and not tell you anything that important at a glance other than just to keep it. Not all stats should be pre-rounded though, as the likelihood of ruining the stat is higher in some ranges.
Research time should be done when you're about to build/RE something. Especially if you're only looking to use B tier or above and C tier or below are just automatic sales on your own vendor for other people to use, for example.
Tdeadly, post: 2610, member: 364 wrote:
What I am saying you do is have a color just for mass like blue. Min dam green. Max dam red and can have after inning an items a color part yellow for needs a re to be worth it. More as a help part if you feel like doing that. The no flag will help incase someone does not notice the colors. Plus if someone is color blind can’t make the difference.
You mention the Legends system being "lame" and "way out of order" but their colour pattern matches the rarities you'd find in items in the vast majority of modern RPGs:
Grey - Junk (This colour wasn't used by them by default, but I know some people modified theirs to use this colour/tier.)
White - Common
Green - Uncommon
Blue - Rare
Purple - Ultra Rare
Yellow - Legendary
Red - Epic
Legends assigned letter grades with base colours according to this template (both for part rarity AND for their performance), and their "+" grades were lighter versions of the same colour to help stand out. I believe Resto actually included the rarity % in each stat, which I think would be a more informative system than just a colour and letter grade (as letters on their own with no context are up to interpretation.) Besides, Legends allowed you to customize the colours to your liking, so if you do have some form of colour blindness, (or just hate the standard colours chosen, whatever they are) you can easily tailor it to a palette that is comfortable for you to look at using hex colours like the game already supports, unless a system is added ingame to easily change them.
The system I'd personally go for is for a fusion of all 3; Coloured text, letter grade, % of rarity. A lexicon or legend at the bottom of the part's examine window could be included to explain each colour, quality, and even the % rarity meanings. Setting the thresholds is really the only weird area still.
You're right that it's very easy to just open and use the notepad ingame, but wouldn't you rather spend more of your time actually in space, flying, playing, and using your loot rather than sitting at Kash all day, staring back and forth between stats on an out-of-game resource to check whether your parts are worth keeping or not, and for what quality of a build to use them for?
I can't tell you how many times I've needed to re-check parts whereas having a simple easy-to-see highlight system will tell me that information at a glance, saving a tremendous amount of time. Before this system on Legends, comparing parts hurt my eyes and gave me headaches, and I was in a guild where that grievance was shared, especially because we ran group convoys every week and would loot 20+ crates each session. The notepad just did not cut it at that point if I wanted to retain my health and life outside of SWG.
Adding an automatic no-sell flag to parts that meet the thresholds would be an interesting solution! I just want to comment on my concern about it being a bit oversimplified:
If you made a Weapon 10 with high max damage and low minimum damage, it would be extremely inconsistent in DPS and would lower its performance and potential value. If it also had a high EPS and low Refire, you'd sap your capacitor clean in no time flat (especially with multiple). Some of those stats actually round up and/or down during the RE process as well, so I think it's important to preserve the quality of part stats within the information given, not just simple categories of KEEP, TRADE, SELL TO VENDOR, if that makes sense.
If you're at the stage in your space career where you look at parts in Keep/Trade/Vendor categories, then you can just use the system for assigning a colour to how many credits signs you see, lol.
I get where you guys are coming from though, it's just that JTL's loot isn't as simple as we'd like to appropriately treat it with a simple system, much as we'd love that to be the case.
Tdeadly, post: 2608, member: 364 wrote:
P
But that is like legends. If they want to do something different. Maybe an items that you can place a bunch of items in you can flag not to sell that worth keeping. Than can post min-max for each lvl that they can look at to go with the file link you can uses or whatever it in link in the pin part.
You mean to make a container item to put parts into to evaluate them first and refer them to a min-max guide or something similar? Just making sure I understood what you're suggesting, because we shouldn't want to shy away from genuinely good ideas just because they are already done by other servers. Unless I misunderstand, adding a container item just to evaluate parts adds an extra step that won't make much of a difference to newer spacers, since they won't know about it or what it does until way later, and likely already sold/scrapped a bunch of good loot by that point.
Having a colour-tiered grading system intrinsically in the examine window with the looted part is very user-friendly and makes sorting through loot much, much easier and less time consuming. Despite the system's flaws, it's genuinely a great idea.
orton, post: 2605, member: 2006 wrote:
This was a ton of great info and incite.
I think a simple grading system would be the most beneficial. Sticking a letter grade to the part based upon an estimated average.
F-Way below average
D-Below average
C-Average
B-Above average
A-Exceptionally rare.We can even break that down further to F+ or - D+ or - C + or - and so on.
A color change of the text when the part is a B or an A to be a better visual queue as well would be beneficial.
While I have a basic understand of this bell curve loot generation system it has to have theoretical limits based upon probability. This is what could be done to generate the grading scale.
This would also prevent a change of the grading system thus preventing a person from buying a part with an A class stat only to have it downgrade to a B class stat a few days later thus likely reducing the value and investment of the part.
The nice thing about space parts and the economy is it is self-correcting. You can list a cherry part for an insane amount of money but if no one is willing to buy it then it never gets sold. Additionally, a grading system would also prevent unknowing players from selling a part to the junk dealer that could have fetched them a pretty penny. Then we start moving into supply and demand theories, as more grade A parts hit the market prices will come down, simple supply and demand, self-correcting market.
Appreciated!
I agree that a visual coloured text system should be implemented, and it'd be nice to have the colours for each threshold configurable to match a user's liking, but not the actual thresholds themselves if at all possible, since that then will turn what's supposed to be a more objective grading system fundamentally into a purely user-by-user subjective system, overriding the basis of the thresholds set according to the data the grades are based on, if that makes sense.
Using probability as a means to determine theoretical limits is a fair approach but still a bit dicey because of statistical outliers. They can and will exist with the system as it is which makes the grading system trickier for another reason:
What do we want to base the grading system on, precisely? Do we want to base it on rarity, or part performance, or the results after RE'ing? (In the case of VsA/VsS/EPS/Refire on weapons, these all round to the nearest .010 quite predictably unlike any other stat.) A lot of the issue I see with the grading system on other servers, and even in my own experience is that up until around C+ and B tier components, the mentality of the grading system starts to shift from usage and "strength" to rarity and potential trades/sales which blurs the line of what the grading system is supposed to represent, if that makes sense. It can represent both, but I think any kind of a grading system should be pretty clear on what exactly it means when you see a letter grade next to a part.
You definitely have a case of diminishing returns with parts in this game as well, so I guess it's natural for that overlap, but I think having some way of showing the grade as it relates to performance is better than rarity, but it could be included in the same grade letter as a percentile, or something.
... Though then what percentile do you reference? The overall probability of that stat across all the averages on the server? Or percentile based on simulated probability of getting a drop in that range? Because if we ran simulations of multiple hundreds of thousands/millions of rolls, you'd get a different average every time; Enough to skew the grading system or even percentile in a significant enough way as there is no absolute cap (aside from zero, like I mentioned) to stats.
Makes my head hurt just thinking about it haha.
To chime in on the point about a part grading system, there's one main issue with creating a system like it with the way loot in JTL is handled:
Determining the thresholds for "grades" of parts is tricky because the loot generation system uses an uncapped bell-curve distribution model to generate all the stats for every part. All components are given a base float value (a number with a decimal point), and a modifier value (another float/decimal that determines the "range" of distribution using the base value as its anchor.) This creates a system where, as I'm sure you may have experienced over time, parts that are considered to be unicorns far exceed what is a reasonable statistic (as there is literally no maximum or minimum cap aside from 0), and this poses a couple of problems:
Should you ever get a very high stat part, those parts are hard to make complete balanced builds for, thus becoming largely useless unless you have the necessary components to complete a build. On the more extreme end, this can take literally years to build a single component depending on the RE level, or it causes everyone who witnesses it being put into a bad project to cry out collectively and wish the Death Star destroyed their current location to end their suffering immediately.
Those parts are one of a kind and are either hoarded or purchased by people who are absolutely loaded with credits, or by successful scammers. Some parts can be so good that they skew the balance a bit unfairly in PvP environments; Extremely good engines with very low mass on interceptors, Armour RE10's with barely any mass but extremely high HP/Armour values, that kind of thing.
A grading system that relies on thresholds would need to be set definitively and never changed unless new parts and stat ranges are added. From my experience on other servers that had this grading system, they would change the grades dynamically depending on whatever the currently known server's best of that particular stat was. I don't think anyone would appreciate spending a lot of time and credits investing in a high statted W10 only to log on one day and find out that it's been downgraded a threshold all because someone looted a higher server's best VsS for example.
Using the bell-curve system, any ranges we came up with would need to be regarded as (because they are, really) estimates in most cases. We could run a simulated generation script of thousands at a time and come up with a different average each time, and some people may not even feel the number the simulation gives out to be reasonable.
A system that makes loot a bit more predictable and confined would make a grading system a lot better in the long run, but I definitely do agree that some kind of a system should exist even with the loot system's flaws. I understand as well that people like the "chase" of unicorn parts and "big number activate neuron" and worry that any kind of cap would ruin the loot or make things worse in some way, but I personally like to think of it in a more practical way, especially long term. I'm of the opinion that while you shouldn't get handouts, it shouldn't take 3 lifetimes to get the parts to build a toy just to barely use it. I also think that for the interest of preserving the game's balance, there should be a limit to stats in some capacity, but with the same weighting or more "generous" weighting than the game currently has.
That, and overall component balancing between tiers never really made much sense to me. It's not exactly intuitive to have the odd-level components being better crafted (with some exceptions) and the even-level components always being better looted. There should be elements that crafted components can achieve that looted cannot, and vice versa to give them their staying power. One system I was experimenting with was changing the overall profiles of RE level tiers.
Tiers 1-5 would be "low-rank" (if you're familiar with Monster Hunter) archetypes of weapons, shields, engines, etc. Tiers 6-10 would be higher statistic versions of the same archetypes.
For example, a Tier 1 weapon would do minimal damage, but would have a very high refire rate to compensate for this. Tier 2 would begin to sway more toward higher damage and lower refire rate so that you can find and fit something more to your personal play style and not be quite so restricted in part choice. Engines could have the lower tiers focusing more on maneuverability, whereas higher tiers focus more on top speed/acceleration. Middle tiers are more well-rounded, if that makes sense.
Some kind of system to supplement shipwrights with regard to looted gear beyond RE'ing would also be a huge boon, I think. Some reduction in shipwright costs would probably be helpful as well, but these are just spitballing ideas at this point. Would love to hear more thoughts and suggestions, and especially if you disagree with what I've written here. Glad to see some revival in the space side of things here.
TL;DR:
A visual system for filtering parts is an absolute must, regardless of the system currently in place, I agree wholeheartedly. The only concern I have is how to actually formulate the ranges for each grade/tier when you consider that loot generated has no theoretical maximum or minimum (excluding 0) cap to statistics, so no matter how unlikely it is, you could always loot something with a stat that is beyond reasonable, and that part would be... completely impractical to use, and a bargaining chip for the people with enough credits to afford to buy something that statistically rare.
The JTL loot system is a bloody mess, don't ya love it?
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What would it need to be renamed to to solve the problem when people tend to look at the item's appearance directly in the inventory? It's not that much harder to make a new appearance, and is a more effective distinction than a simple name change. If anything that might confuse people more depending on the name chosen.
A simple recolour would suffice enough for this I should think; it would also be far easier to implement as a visual distinction than making something entirely new.
Could just make it red, since typically "advanced" items in games, especially Star Wars, typically have a red shade to them or some kind of marking that's a clear colour distinction.
EDIT:
Having looked into it a bit more, since you need to combine the Alum Gel with the regular Rebreather to make the Advanced Rebreather as is, colouring it red would be a perfect solution, I think, since the Alum Gel itself is already red/pinkish in colour.
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Indeed, "assets" could mean many different things to different people as well, especially non-developers.
In this context, assets refer to items the player can wear/use, at least for EFOL. However, assets can also be entire maps, world objects like buildings, rocks, geometry, and other such items that a player cannot necessarily "own" or "use".
So the questions are perfectly warranted, and not deserving of this kind of harsh response imo. I also think a top hat and tuxedo would be fitting items to add for a Valentine's themed event, and even if they weren't, like Griffy says, you could adapt them to fit in some way.
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Space will get it's time to shine, for sure; nothing has really evolved or changed about it since Nova Orion was introduced way back on live. A lot of servers also don't tend to touch space content on this game, which is unfortunate.
However, I just want to mention that while having higher mass variants of ships sounds nice on paper, it'll cause a lot of balancing issues beyond what already exists in practice. Instead of needing to build the best components to fit within the mass limit of each ship, you'll now be limited to moreso what you can slot into the ship based on how many slots it has.
Multi-weapon ships already outperform any and every 1-weapon ship in every area. The only thing that give 1-weapon chassis any potential "relevance" are missiles, and missiles are a necessity in PvP regardless of ship chosen. Increasing mass limits will only reduce Time To Kill, and TTK is already very low as it is with missiles and component targeting enabled. (Something we attempted to change, but was met with quite the bit of backlash and thus reverted.)
That also being an example of the SWG space community being very much traditionally minded; any kind of change is going to need delicate care and a lot of convincing to sell people on. It's going to have to be handled with the utmost care regardless of what is done. A way to keep the veterans happy, while also still bringing a new fresh flavour to an experience that is incredibly unique to SWG, but never truly realized it's potential.
Ultimately, I agree that space needs a lot of updating and work. It'll come.
As Evolve is based on the NGE, trainers are a thing of the past, but if you press the U key by default to bring up your expertise window, you can learn and mix and match any combination of skills for every listed profession as you like. So long as you have the required XP and such. This feature on its own brings the flexibility of the CU era systems in line with the NGE era, as NGE originally was way too restrictive.
The only classes that cannot be mixed and matched are Commando and TKM for balance reasons. Otherwise, you can acquire and unlearn skills as you like straight from the expertise window.
If you're only using 5 then that makes sense as to where you're coming from with this. I just want to put a few things out there because while there are people out there who hoard millions of units of resources and never touch or even get through most of it, there are more players where that's not the case.
For example, majority of the players who have an army of harvesters across all 7 or 8 toons and regularly deploy as many as they possibly can (even though you can definitely make the case that THAT is excessive), a lot of these players gather all of these resources for their guilds to use, which may be comprised of largely crafters, or even more close to home, the player in question also runs multiple crafters on the same account.
Though this is especially important if you're a Shipwright, given that it's the single most resource hungry profession in the game if you want to mass-produce anything of value. If you don't have the best materials, ship chassis and components will just not be worth using at all. 1 million units of a resource won't last long if you're building anything other than texture and paint kits, I can promise you that much.
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Nexacon, post: 2198, member: 1362 wrote:
That is not enough locations and not that easy to try to get that on multiple characters.
The G9 Rigger (Secret of the Syrens questline) lets you save 3 locations at once, and is easier to obtain comparatively. You can also do it on multiple toons at once and have them as dedicated resource "slave" slots.
Even then I think the point being made here is that you still have to manually walk to each and every harvester and interact with and empty the hopper of each one, and it just becomes a massive chore that you can inadvertently miss or forget a harvester or two, or one is lower on maint/power than the rest, and it's just a mess. Not even considering when it comes time to tear everything down when a resource pool is gone, the amount of tiny font destroy/re-deed codes you have to enter is absurd.
Additionally, you can only take down harvesters that that character owns, and transferring ownership tends to mess with the character's total available lots after a while for some reason, so you'll end up with less than the 20 this server has.
The whole system needs a bit of a touch-up. Less clicks is always a plus.
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Funny, I was just thinking about drafting up a system similar to this like this last week, because managing even just a handful of them can be a massive chore. (Especially if you exceed the lots per character to place any and you need to use multiple toons.)
On a sidenote, I almost wish harvesters and such were self-powered by default without the use of the deeds you get from daily tokens. You need 3 to make a single elite harvester self-powered, which imo is a bit excessive when people typically run as many harvesters as they do, but that's just me.
This is a good suggestion though.
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The ARC-170, Jedi Starfighter, and Belbullab-22 are all factionless. However, the caveat for the ARC-170 and JSF is that you had to have completed their respective quests to fly them, which is why they can't be flown on other toons (unless you complete them). This is a restriction that we can look at lifting, for sure.
It's the same as the Royal Guard TIE Interceptor, Adv. X-Wing and Vaksai needing a certain threshold of badges (5) before they can be used.
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Yes, I forgot about the stations as I hate going to them to get there or to Kessel. Thank you for the correction.
The lead indicator is never going to be precise either because it's predicting where something is moving. It updates slowly enough that quick movements can be enough to throw you off. If the lead indicator can act more like the joystick emulation reticule (in that it shows different opacity reticules at different distances in relation to where you're aiming/going) or something similar, then that may be helpful, albeit probably a bit distracting.
The way the reticule is designed with the "hooks" up in each diagonal direction is supposed to help you line up a shot in relation to your target during movement. However, it can be a bit tricky to get used to, but if you get a feel for it, eventually you only need to use the lead indicator as a reference point and not a direct target to shoot for. There are plenty of times I've flown directly passed the bow of a Lambda shooting literally nothing and kill it because I know where its hitboxes are.
I know there are different reticules to use with a /ui reticule something command, so the hooks don't apply to every reticule you can use obviously, but I hope that makes sense.
I'll admit that I didn't know if DS was a good place for Vettes compared to Ord. Ord isn't bad once you get passed the initial spawns of T6 and T9's, because they don't spawn out that far, it's just the copious amounts of T5's you have to contend with which isn't exactly much easier sometimes. Not to mention killing 25 Vettes each for the gunship schematics is about as boring as it gets after a while.
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Nexacon, post: 1570, member: 1362 wrote:
I don't go into details because there is a lot to cover; ...
Ship shields showing a hit yet not actually registering damage is something that can't really be improved all that easily, because that's a client to server "talkback" issue. When you directly hit a ship, your client will show a shield hit because yes, you hit the ship directly on your screen. However, your target's hitsphere/hitbox is further ahead of the ship server-side, which is why sometimes you have to shoot absurdly far in front of a ship to actually damage it. It depends on many factors, like ping, distance, and relative speeds.
That's why you always have to lead between the lead reticule and the ship's actual position in order to properly register damage.
Space overall is a bit too slow, yes; scaling is all over the place and inconsistent as well. The PvP thing is a bit weird because the only places PvP is enabled are in Dantooine and Lok GCW Space battles (which has shoddy implementation for the moment) and the Deep Space sector which you need special hyperspace chips to get to (and is largely empty because there's no reason to even really go there). You can technically PvP anywhere you want with a command to flag as Space SF/Overt, but for designated PvP zones, the aforementioned are all that're there atm.
Pretty much everything in your post regarding balancing is being addressed. However, there are definitely some limitations to things. I doubt we'll ever be able to make landing on planets possible with the engine's infrastructure, and it wouldn't make sense to dedicate that much time to trying to turn SWG into an extremely archaic version of No Man's Sky; as much as I'd love that.
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You can quickly soft log-out to the character screen and jump back in to not disrupt the mission or anything to fix it as well. However, if it's happening exactly the same way with that exact enemy all the time, please submit a ticket with as much info as you can, because we can take a look at it to see if it's that NPC in specifically.
But yeah, soft-logging should fix it for you and not fail the mission or do anything weird.