2018-03-04 11:02:11

Hi there
@karate25 I totally understand your problem. First let me thank you for the apology, it is well appreciated and accepted. It can often be difficult to convey  a meaning based on just text with no tone.
It is interesting. You speak about wanting there to be a game/mud that could do what these other games[the ones you mentioned] can do, in term of quality or actions. That's exactly what this thread is for. It's us, as the staff of Cosmic, reaching out and saying hey, what're we missing that you'd like?
Anything is possible with code, but only if we know what you'd like! smile

Nathan Smith
Managing Director of Nathan Tech
It's not disability
It's ability!

2018-03-04 14:58:36

lol I'd like a fully fledged universe, thousands of star systems, true space simulation in as much as what you can see from outside your vestle etc, more random attacks by the enemy, factories are never threatened, so yes you should have to defend them, a much better economy system which would make trading a real reality,

2018-03-05 06:06:02

I'm going to go on a bit of a rant here, because I have an on and off with this game that's really putting me off as of late.

I see the typos are getting fixed, good on you there.

I think ship upgrades and cargo upgrades need an overhaul. This system is pretty confusing for newbies, I'd say, and just downright annoying for everyone else, but we're all used to it so nobody's saying anything.
Here's what I have to do if I lose a ship and want to get a new one back in shape. I have to buy the ship. If it's not one of the player ships that has everything upgraded, you then have to buy the misc upgrades and worst of all, cargo upgrades. Oh and I forgot, you have to buy a drone, which is fine, but then oh, wait, you have to buy upgrades for that drone so that it can physically add... what, exactly? to 20+ cargo bays? Not the mention the packs of plates you have to get for it first to do that.

I think at least one of these steps should be eliminated. The cargo drones are practically useless and are only used for expanding cargo bays. I think the ship level should determine what minerals/gases/etc it can harvest and/or otherwise hold in it's cargo bays. Perhaps, like this new ratio system implemented now, cargo drones can actually help you with useful things and turn into resource drones and become what the hard to learn resource trolleys are. Speaking of that, Nate, didn't you say you were going to implement some kind of resource drone?

I just hope it's not as bad as the helper drone, something I thought would've been a lot more autonomous than they actually are. I think it would be cool if we could write scripts of commands for them to execute, rather than one command at a time. Some interesting ideas could no doubt come from that. I'm not talking about boting either.
Lastly, perhaps you should consider the advancement potential of an activity before implementing it. Lately, whether it's Dark Matter Mining, or anything having to do with resources activities have been getting implemented lately. It may help the economy, but it is not helping those of us who aren't interested in crafting. I've thought several times about selling my factory because the resources I've been getting I've been trying to advance levels with, not give them to myself at the factory.
also, how about developing AI's to help out the economy a bit? They can do their thing and contribute to the economy by giving players resources at factories, clan or otherwise, because... more realism. It looks like it's working out for Star Conquest.
I'm not so sure I like this new ground combat system, actually. Putting X number of points into limbs is silly. Stats should be generalized for your whole character that should then effect your limbs in combat, etc.

I think some of the military organization application questions should be changed to reflect the world you're trying to create. The Infantry questions felt like I was being asked about the laws of today, not four centuries later. I didn't fill it out because I don't have a profile yet, but still. I'd also would like some idea of what I'd be getting into when joining. AKA with the SDL do they require you to do a Vacus solo battle exam without obfuscation? If so, I was never able to type/think fast enough, something I hope the new combat system can change in this regard.
HTH.

2018-03-05 06:34:11

@Dardar just trying the new planetoid system now.
I like the idea behind it, though it doesn't seem to trigger that often, Ie, I just harvested 1600 minerals at a rate of four per scoop, and got a grand total of five objects, I'm not sure if this is just me being unlucky, but maybe if this object grabbing system is supposed to give interest you could consider making it occur a bit moreoften.

I also wonder if you'd considered occasions where instead of giving players  information and just asking them to push buttons, you actually require them to think.
perfect example of this is the mastermind minigame in land of livia for ios. Lots of games have a basic item research skill where you just tap away and auto research, however land of livia has you play mastermind instead.

So what occurred to me with the planetoid drones, is instead of giving players all information and just requiring them to match that information with the concept, why not get them to think?

For example, instead of having you do a "view" command and the drone telling players where  item is so they just find it, why not have a sort of light locator affair where the player is just told the debris is either above or below, and instead of the player typing "pd up" or "pd down" the player has to type pd 1-10 to go to the appropriate level.

Nope, it wouldn't be difficult, but it'd be something to do and a way of getting rewards.

This is the sort of thing I mean, finding ways to engage players while the game is going on rather than working on automatic stuff.

Btw, totally agree with Orin about the economy and Ai buyers as well, I'd love to be able to actually sell my minerals and such rather than just turn them in for points.

I also really agree about all the upgrades, the amount of times I've tried to do something new like planetoid harvesting and forgot a certain part of the upgrade. I'd love to see the universe get more dangerous and more chances of being attacked and ships destroyed (assuming the space combat overhawl works out), in which case the easier to replace your ships the better, and I don't mean financially since cash is easy to come by, i mean in terms of all the random stuff you need to have a ship of your level that can actually do the various in game activities.

I'd also like to see ways where some of the other crafting methods, spear making, building statues, quilt making etc could actually have a tangible bennifit in game, since again, those could be activities that revolve around exploring the universe and finding stuff and could be great fun.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-05 07:45:08

and of course we all still want racing dragons.

Who's that trip trapping over My bridge? Come find out.

2018-03-05 11:54:21 (edited by dardar 2018-03-05 11:56:27)

A very good morning to you all.
An interesting idea, @dark regarding the drones. Certainly food for thought. I've not actually played land of livia, though I keep meaning too, as it looks quite fun.
Talking of upgrades on ships, I'd like to bring your attention to the message boards. In the spirit of being open and honest with our players, the host post a revised copy of the minutes of their monthly meetings upon the board. By revised, we mean any personal details, or private content, is removed, but still with what we spoke about clearly displayed. One of the items discussed in the last meeting was ships. With the spell check on planets now complete, we turn to ships. A large committee, comprising five hosts, have been elected, two of whom will go over the spelling, 3 of whom will go over upgrades and install missing upgrades on ships. Sadly, this situation was unavoidable. In a game of new features, sometimes they are bound to get missed on older models of ship. We aim to rectify that over the next week or two.
We are also, to the best of my knowledge anyway, the only space mud out of the big four whom will soon have multilanguage policies. To ensure complete understanding, our policies are being translated, right now, into russian and spanish and not just by google translate, either.
Regarding cargo drones I find the comments interesting. There was of course, the change last night that ensured they could go to multiple cargo bays at once, but I think what interests me is your wording "useless."
The cargo drones are perhaps the singularly most unuseless item in the entire game. Without the cargo drones, you can not upgrade cargo bays period. Look at any other space mud, lets take one that uses an upgrade. You pick an upgrade and who installs that upgrade, exactly? Oh, right! A cargo drone! Every ship in any universe will require some form of cargo drone, whether it be stored on the ship, following you around like a lost puppy, or sitting in someones upgrade store. When I created cargo drones, it made sense to me that, why should players have to move all their ships to one planet, to get one cargo upgrade, when they could just lead their drone around, and install the upgrade directly from it instead?
Perhaps, using my explanation above, it is not a unique system, but I like to think it is not a "useless " one, either. I'd like to see people play the game without them! smile smile

Dragon racing. Of course! smile

Nathan Smith
Managing Director of Nathan Tech
It's not disability
It's ability!

2018-03-05 14:17:45

also I would like to point out that you don't need to go and outfit a ship every time you lose one. that's what drydocks are for. go use them. the only real thing I have to do when I lose a ship is to place my furniture again which does include rat traps. so no I don't think upgrading is as bad as all that. every time you upgrade, go save your ship design every time. it doesn't matter where you do it, it works across the board.

2018-03-05 20:18:21

@57, I know and use Dry-docks all the time. What about those low level players that don't have factories yet, though?
Also, when you buy a new ship at a new rank, you then obviously have to spend time upgrading it. A lot of the stuff that the ship is designed for should be there. If it's largely an exploration ship it should have all gases, all minerals, etc. I'm not sure what this new change to cargo drones was where they can go to multiple cargo bays, but if I have to manually move them one at a time, that's missing the point of what I was trying to get across. If I have to manually move them they don't feel like drones at all. These are supposed to be robots correct? I should be able to set it up so that it can go and upgrade what it needs to upgrade, while I go do something else, whether that's loading some ammo into storage, etc. Installing plates and doing "upgrade on drone" and select from a menu, then get some runtime and continue doing it until complete is a bit repetitive.

2018-03-05 22:33:03

hi,

you don't have to have a factory to use a drydock. you can use any drydock at any public factory. so it's not limited to factory owners.
as for cargo drones, as an from last night they will now assuming you have enough plates stored they will go through each hold if asked and they will upgrade them accordingly.

2018-03-05 22:40:15

@dardar, I haven't posted in this topic, but just want to say that your multilanguage policies are going to need a lot of hacking. By that I mean mainly unicode characters. VIPMud and MUSHclient do not support unicode input (I don't think any MUDding client supports that right now) and unicode transmission is definitely out of the window due to the way Telnet was created (and hasn't ever been updated to go with the times). As such, unicode characters like ¨, ¬, ¿, À, Á, and other characters (Å, Ø) and their lower-case equivalents (å, à, á, â, ã, etc) will be translated into question marks (?). For example, the Spanish phrase "The Spanish", which, in Spanish, is "El Español", will be translated, over Telnet, as "El espa?ol". Same to the Spanish word 'Policy', which is 'política'. Russian might not present you with troubles like these with certain words, but my point still stands. (Translation source: Google Translate, may not be accurate).

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
My Github

2018-03-06 10:54:16

I can't speak on the translation issue, but my problem in terms of ships is precisely as stated.

when you buy a new ship, you need to install upgrades for each and every activity, not to mention mineral type upgrades for each type you want and upgrades for your scoops for each thing, e.g planetoids, asteroids, orbit cleaning gear  etc, as well as scanning modules, and that's not to speak of warp tanks,spray bottles and extinguishers (plus now apparently even more drones to take on the ratica), engine speed upgrades, extra rooms such as a vehicle bay etc, oh and of course upgrading weapons or defensive systems is near impossible, indeed I suspect that when you do eventually have the capacity to fill enough cargo space to start fighting vacus ships in asteroid and planetoid fields, it'll be easier to buy a battleship and upgrade it with all the cargo holds and resource upgrades than to buy a ship actually designed! for mining and try to add weapons to it.

The amount of times I've flown out to the asteroid belt with a new ship and realized that I forgot to buy a scoop upgrade for a specific mineral, or forgot to add the minerals per scoop or something.


I would suggest myself firstly reducing the harvesting equipment down to only the type of thing and giving it appropriate names, E.g mineral harvesting scoop, gas extractor, acid extractor etc, after all it makes sense that  same sort of mineral scoop could be used on planetoids and asteroids depending upon a person's skill.

then I would suggest removing this bit about having to buy specific upgrades for each mineral and gas type and just leaving it that you need the mineral or gas tank for your cargo drone.

I would also suggest making debris collection and orbit cleaning use the same equipment, or at least having orbit cleaning as a function of debris collection.

Lastly I would suggest removing all scanning modules from the game and just having any ship able to scan for anything  upon how a person sets their equipment.

Contrast cosmic rage with core exiles. There you need no special cargo upgrades, no extra scanners, you just buy your ore laser for asteroid mining, or your wreck laser for wreck collection, install as many cargo holds  your ship's energy allows (since of course in Core exiles cargo space is cargo space whatever you put there), and wail away!

No need for running across  entire galaxy looking for hosts of upgrades.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-06 13:51:36

actually dark in ce you do need asteroid scanners and the like. there are a few types of scanners depending on level. personally I don't have an issue with that because it stands to reason that the higher the rank the better equipment you can get. that to me makes sense. I do agree however with the purchase of new ships they should come equipped at the level they are purchased at.

2018-03-07 00:00:56

Hello everyone
@dark we're working on that as quick as we can. The ships overhaul has a committee of five hosts dedicated to bringing things up to snuff.

There is no roundtime with upgrade drones. There never has been.

@Ethin Your post makes a few inaccurate assumtions, most noteably, you think I've already not successfully found a way to do it. Vip does support unicode characters, though I had to test it to find that out.

Anyways, keep the reviews coming!

Nathan Smith
Managing Director of Nathan Tech
It's not disability
It's ability!

2018-03-07 04:16:43

Hi
What dark and orin etc are getting at and I kind of agree with their sentiments is, if its a ship ment for astroid hauling, make it come with a roid anchor. If its a harvester have it come with scoops, if its a combat ship, have it come with weapons and defenses appropriate for that level.
Different upgrade required for minerals could be gotten rid of, made level dependent, or let there be a roid/planet harvester for lower levels,then 1 for higher levels. So that the time a person spends thinking of and getting upgrades reduces.

My slight issue with the upgrades right now is, there are certain upgrades that you will just have to sit down and type or arrow up to and press enter upon buy 1, 1 at least 10 20 times... you could either have a prompt for such asking how many of those upgrade or what tear of that upgrade you would like to buy or if you have the level for it,max it.

I agree with dardar about the cargo drones,though the update does make them more useful now...
Grryf

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.
Follow me on twitter

2018-03-07 09:06:21

I don't mind the cargo drones myself, but yee gods to do activities there are sooooo many upgrades, and if you miss one of them your stuck, actually it gives the ships in the game very little personality at all since baiscally your ship is just a container for your upgrades and the only things that make ships individual are combat gear (which isn't really needed for most activity ships anyway since combat has become such a specialist area in and of it's own right).


Speaking of combat, I am really! looking forward to that combat overhaul, I'd love to see combat more intigrated into the game, and the need to cope with being jumped on more oftne, but actually some ability to survive said encounters, ie, making combat more than a manner of fly in one direction typing as fast as possible and hoping your armour and cloaks stand up to things.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-07 10:50:15

@gryffindor: Thank you for explaining. I keep forgetting if I have mentioned this in a previous post or not, and so am probably repeating myself somewhat. A committee of five hosts have been formed, whose job it is is to go over the current "stock" ships, ensuring they are completely spell checked, and also adding any missing upgrades too them. To use dark's example, one job of this committee would be is to ensure the asteroid hauler actually has an anchor[though I'm pretty sure it does.]

@dark Get excited, because development has begun! As I promised the players, it will be a slow intigration, allowing them the time to adjust to each change. Some changes might be two days apart, if they are most asthetics, others might be a week apart, either way, this new system has "different" and "unique" in mind. The first changes are already noticeable, in that targeting, i.e, when you type t <ship>, now shows next to it where the ship is in relation to yours, heading, such that if you target a ship and it is off of your port forward, then you turn to the left all of a sudden, the direction will now adjust such that it is starboard forward.

Nathan Smith
Managing Director of Nathan Tech
It's not disability
It's ability!

2018-03-07 12:03:20

Hi Dardar.

Interesting, I'm really looking forward to the combat upgrades and seeing combat more frequently as part of the main game rather than a sort of specialised activity along side everything else.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-07 13:17:32

yes this is true if we are at war it doesn't really feel like we are at war. even invasions feel sort of scripted if you know what I mean. they happen at given times of the day not randomly etc.

2018-03-07 14:06:43

I haven't actually seen an invasion, indeed it's sort of interesting that those thugs you get trying to stop you in package delivery missions are actually the only sort of random ground combat encounter in the game and everything else happens on outpost theta 15.

For a start, I would've assumed the Vacus, droidics and other aliens would all have different fronteers, not the entire ground battle be confined to just the one planet, indeed I'd love to see  different mission types and maybe even encounters on some of the wilder main planets, as well as combat being more intigrated into the game as I said.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-03-07 14:39:40

yeah but what else I'd like to see is reprisals from missions. I mean yeah people do missions. why doesn't that piss the vacus druidic or any other enemy race off to the point whereby they strike back? it's like we can do missions with impunity.

2018-03-07 16:11:04

There used to be a vacus warbase you could randomly jump into and destroy enemies, which actually would cause enemies to invade once you left it. The thing about enemies not striking back is something every space moo leaves out a lot, not even sc gets that right. Makes the war effort seam very one-sided if you ask me.

I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.

2018-03-08 05:32:47

One reason I'd like to see vacus, droidic etc ships hanging around when your doing your normal activities, provided of course combat could be made a little more possible to survive and a little more tactical.

As a great example of this,look at smugglers 5. If you play a trader and head into a nsystem your faction has a war with, or if you run into a pirate, you will be in a turn based battle, and you will need to use your shields and flee pretty sharpish, indeed lots of the traders battle abilities are more about reducing random encounters and getting out of battles intact.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-07-22 09:34:13

I'm a few months late to the party. However, I thought I might chime in and one, echo some sentiments (that I'm happy to hear are finally being listened to), and perhaps point out a few more things.

From someone who would play if there were changes, here goes.

As someone who prefers roleplay, but not all games are, I'm not even going to go there. If the playerbase doesn't want to roleplay, then they won't roleplay, no matter how much other players or staff want them to. If they want to roleplay, lack of policy relating to it won't make them stop.

It's great to hear that the host team is working on some of the things that have been asked for repeatedly by numerous players for two years. Those things being general presentation (menu issues, spelling/grammar issues), social media spam, overcomplexity of the starship system, and more. What would be nice is for that feedback to be taken sooner rather than waiting two years to implement it. Activity cloning (all the dozens of activities being based off four or five core activities) is one of those things. This is something that has been brought up for at least a year and a half by countless current and former players.

Host turnover. Okay, this is one I haven't heard brought up. But I keep pretty up to date with the goings on, even though I don't play anymore. First and foremost, while having a sizeable host team can be a plus so that you don't end up with a huge backlog or one host taking on so much they burn out (Star Conquest as a prime example for both of those), it's also true that too many cooks spoil the soup. In addition, when it's not just adding new hosts, but it's also suddenly dropping one or more for one reason or another, it makes maintaining a single direction forward difficult. Any company that's had as many turnovers in upper management as Comic Rage has had in the last two years would be in huge trouble. And Nathan, I heard you mention that your playerbase is declining. Reach out to former players (not just current) and find out why they left. Maybe see about fixing it and getting some of those players back.

Going to go back to activity cloning for a moment. Yes, I know it's been brought up already, but let me put a bit of perspective on why it's an issue. There isn't a lot of tavern-sitting, chatting on channels type of roleplay. Which leaves little to do except grind. For someone who tends to sink themself into something, the activity system on Cosmic Rage will make someone burn out. And fast. If I hadn't been turned off by so many other things, I could easily grind my way to the top in a month or two. Caveat being if I didn't burn out first from all the repetition. Once you've done a few activities, you've done them all. There is no challenge, and there is no real variety. Someone I know called it a "baby game" for various reasons, but this is the one that stuck with me. I don't recall who it was that said that a five-year old would have no disadvantage starting out, and I tend to agree. But I'm not five. And I like a challenge. One that ramps up with my experience.

Host favoritism. Goodness, here it goes. For a game where countless players and a few (at one time or another) hosts have told me that there is absolutely no favoritism in Cosmic Rage, I could tell you a couple of stories. One about a HTPL's ooc girlfriend who bought babies with real-world money and had them summarily taken away by hosts and given to the HTPL's character when they broke up in-game. This after the HTPL and another host (if I'm remembering who was involved correctly) basically bullied the ex-girlfriend on the ooc channel. Or the in-game girlfriend of a host character who received special roleplay opportunities because they were the host character's in-game girlfriend.

I've also heard a number of former players and disenchanted current players talk about being blown off by a host when they had a legitimate concern. I'm not even going to pretend this doesn't happen other places, because of course it does. But for a host team that claims to pride itself on listening to the players and being sensitive to their needs and wishes, I am surprised at how much I've heard that sentiment repeated.

I almost filled out a survey once, to explain why I chose not to play any longer, but I didn't feel comfortable giving my character name or username (so don't ask here either). If it had been anonymous, I certainly would have brought up these issues (again).

“What's fun for other people may not be fun for you- and vice versa.”
― Gretchen Rubin