Finding (and combat) other players easier

[DoorsMonster]

Hi all,

 

I can see a lot of suggestions about badass weapons, a dramatic game story, lights and everything, but IMO Avorion had 3 basic things to improve to fully use all it's potential, 2 of them seems to be fixed, 1 is pending:

 

[*]Reduced number of players online per server. This seems to be fixed since the 0.13 multithreading update.

We saw a no more than 8 players online because of the lag, now we can see about 35 and servers keep running fine.

 

[*]Economy freezed. This was fixed with 0.13 update and the recent economy update + 15.8 patch. Before stations were useless, now we can have up to 5 sectors loaded per player.

[*]Players never pvp because they almost never meet eachother. Somebody destroyed your ship while you were offline, wow, impressive, does it sounds familiar to you?

 

My suggestion is changing the behaviour of something already present on the game: scanners. Use scanners to find players on the map.

 

Ppl on the forum has really cool ideas about huge battles, weapons, bases, ships, fighters... I would never be able to imagine them, but all of that become pointless because you can't use those cool ideas to fight other players.

 

If you find another player in the galaxy you are lucky. Why would you kill him?

 

The most common reason of pvp death is some coward killed you when offline. And you can't take revenge because galaxy has 1 million sectors, are you going to visit each sector to find the aggressor?

 

If you had some tool (scanners would be nice, currently they are almost useless) to find players on the map (maybe as purple blips, or navy blue, pink, turquoise.. any color), then the game would be more exciting. That doesn't need to be broken, they could have a decent range to let you chase somebody, or prevent you from an ambush.

 

Also we need a way to prevent players from jumping out the sector: Okay, so you finally found a player you want to kill, you have 20m shields, 10m hp, like 500k damage, you deploy all your fighters, turbo on engines... oh, wait... your enemy already left the sector! Game already has hyperspace block features, that just need to be attainable by players. Maybe you could active hyperspace blocker and it would block both parts, attacker and defender which would force you to assume the consequences of the battle.

 

Yeah, I'm waiting for that 0.16 "Combat update", too. I want to use those torpeadoes and kill those nasty fighters with my point defence, but we have no worthy rival (and fighting pirates and aliens becomes boring after some time no matter if we will have specialist or not) and a way to find oponents and keep them battling you is not listed on the goals of the combat update.

[Shrooblord]

I like the idea of being able to find players by using Scanners. Currently you can already cheese the system by using the /whereis Player command, but that is very immersion-breaking and also quite cheaty.

 

Maybe there could be an Intel Satellite that gathers data from all linked Spy Satellites in its network, which supplies anyone who requests data from it a feed of currently known locations of player (and other?) vessels, at a price. This also could turn into a cool game of hide-and-seek where the hiders who don't want to be found take out a Spy Satellite, or spoof one of their signals by hacking them, or something like that. The Intel network would of course need some way of counterplay to this, and replenish lost or broken satellites or build new ones over time. Players could also build networks like this, or sell their own ships' scanners to feed into this network for some compensation in return.

 

I've seen cloaking technology on the roadmap. I wonder if this would be the FTL-style active camo, with a cooldown, or passive cloaking that would allow you to chill in an asteroid field while offline and go undetected by casual griefers.