Post Economy test "Meh.."

I wonder what the player count will be, now that the new features (and actual single player content) of the Economy test has ended, and we are left with plain old, now boring and empty universes to stare out our helmets at. Its almost cruel to wave it in our collective faces and then deny it again for an unknown and unannounced amount of further time.

I felt a definite "meh" at trying to go back to playing the old way. I hope the rest of the player base doesnt feel much the same way- and hope and the player count doesnt just tank.

I hope the "SoonTM" is seriously not much longer (Btw: Novenmber is NOT "soon"), as now knowing how much more interesting things could be, playing now feels barren (back to absolutely empty sp worlds) - and I wonder how much I will be interested in playing until the update (or next test) is released.

 

There are some of us that were kinda "meh" about the economy test, if not the update itself.

Now that the test is over and you have had a taste of what SE is like with an "economy", ask yourself if it's not possible to buy and sell stuff and have contracts without benefit of special blocks and space credits. Maybe give it a shot while you are waiting for the, heh, "real thing." You might find yourself so busy you miss the actual release
--- Automerge ---
There are some of us that were kinda "meh" about the economy test, if not the update itself.

Now that the test is over and you have had a taste of what SE is like with an "economy", ask yourself if it's not possible to buy and sell stuff and have contracts without benefit of special blocks and space credits. Maybe give it a shot while you are waiting for the, heh, "real thing." You might find yourself so busy you miss the actual release

 

I see that you and i see the point of the economy mod completely differently.

You see it as a way to get objective items... I see it as a list of various things to DO.

Sure the old hat of sitting in a control station watching the refineries churn, and the assemblers clickity clack away, watching the raw #s of this and that grow so that I can place that One More Block is one way to play. And sure, building a sick ship that in theory can visit all worlds and do things is another fine endeavor...

With the economy mod additions- now there were reasons to go and actually DO things. You know- play a little. Put my resources and ships and rovers to some use.

If ever I'm bored waiting for those 1000 superconductors to get printed, or the platinum for 3400 thruster components to get refined, and I done tinkering on and ogling my new space fighter curves for now, maybe ill fly to that Shipyard station by the moon and buy a stock bomber take out that Salvage Station that been sending grinder drones my way, using the $$ I gained by simply selling some of my extra gravity generators there (16 grav gens = 1 bomber? sounds like my kind of barter)

"There is a datapad marking another shipyard, but this one is on the alien world over there, maybe i'll go see what kind of alien rovers they have to sell- I would indeed like to visit and buy a rover there to squelch through some alien canyons- maybe on a trek to another station found over there- that does sound like some fun!"

"Oooh I heard theres a Imperial and Divine factional mix-mashup around mars/Europa... those two factions hate each other.. I could pick a side, and gain a "privateer license" clearance to raid one of them or just play one against the other.. gotta stop by there- there are sure to be competitive prices between those two."

"Theres word of an Engineer out there behaving badly- so badly though that hes managed to tick off a NPC faction just enough to have them put a bounty on his head... ooh! gps marks of that asshats current location if I take the mission? every 30 seconds? like- his base? Why yes, please- that does sound like a noble adventure"

These are the kind of things that player to player interactions simply cannot come close to matching in the current state of the game, and all things I was doing 2 days ago. Now i look around and... meh.

 

Have to say, as someone that put the game on hold until new updates. The economy update looks perfect. I thought nothing like this would ever be added to SE. It's great to see they're putting things for us to do in the sandbox. Buying DLC when the update hits. I would assume they put out some cosmetics DLC as well with this.

I hope they can get the cargo missions to be actual cargo. I wish for a lot of shipping containers that you have to haul from place to place. That would be a nice engineering challenge to build a ship that can stow those shipping containers inside and then move it.

Better yet, different sized cargo missions. You would have to build huge ships to haul the largest container missions. Or just merge them to the side of the ship I guess.
Even better if we would get planet to planet cargo missions. That would take some slick engineering work.

 

While I enjoyed the premise behind the economy update, it was all too easy to just rush to mining magnesium and make a lot of money really fast. I never got around to the escort missions, hopefully those will be interesting, but I'm hoping for more combat missions and better hauling missions.

Mostly, I'm looking forward to what the modding community does with this.

 

Actually, it's quite clear that the main purpose of the update is to give people something to do. That has been the major criticism of the game since forever, even though it has always been characterized and promoted as a sandbox game.

Agreed. Apparently all the game needed was an outside entity giving you missions and rewarding you for that. This is what most other games do, especially single player games. However, long ago Keen gave us the Scenario Editor. It allows players to make objectives and goals, and create objective based campaigns complete with cutscenes and alternate session downloading. Of course, making your own objectives kinda takes the mystery out of playing the game, but I thought Scenarios in the Workshop would be a thing. Alas, it looked like if Keen didn't do this for us it would never happen.

This is where we differ in opinion. The update provides a convenient infrastructure for obtaining contracts and getting compensation for successfully completing them, but it's always been possible.

You mean, like this:



Or this?





Cause I made my own cargo missions a long time ago

 

No, nothing at all like that. Vanilla, Proper Keen scale of ships/rovers.

I too would like an "engineering challenge within limited scope" sort of hauling contract, like the one build competition where you had to lift "the container" a special modded large cargobox that weighed 3 million kg. Where you had to haul it from earth surface to the moon. Self contained ship, single load of fuel. no refuels/pitstops. We accept the contract on the surface of the earth-like, and plop goes the heavy as hell container... from there on how the engineer gets it to the moon station is up to the engineer. -only its vanilla survival, with 10,000PCU limits. oh and a mere 4 hours to get it there. And if you break the normal toughness container- you owe 120 million space credits- auto deducted whenever credits would be made until paid off.

... game on.

 

As someone who hasn't played SE for a while I will take this as a good thing as it suggests the update is at the very least interesting.

 

I didn't get involved with the test for economy, but I am looking forward to it.

I understand that players can make their own worlds, I made mine years ago, but the game always found a way to break it somewhere, so I sort of gave up (in fact its mostly in bits now). Ended up just messing around in the game and thinking how great it is, but how much better it could be, only if...
But ultimately I end up just putting it down again for a while, because well, I just didn't want to invest in the game because of those issues, just to have to keep restarting over. When I invest time in a sandbox game, I tend to try hard to make something out of it.

Playing sandbox games is all I do pretty much, SE was one of the best, still is and could be 'the best' space wise, if those problems (of old) are getting sorted, which they seem to be (here and there at least). Plus the addition of new content like this economy, the new blocks etc, does point toward them (KSH) being a little more confident in the game (or engine) themselves, which helps give the player confidence to invest time and effort into SE.

I have thousands of hours in SE, it is a space game that is on the verge of being the best out there (it has been for a long time), just needs the devs to believe that, and adding content would seem to point to that. Which, as said, gives us players more confidence to play and invest that time.

If however it throws up lots of problems which they are slow to sort out, then that is a whole other issue. :/ But we'll see.

I'm trying to keep vanilla more nowadays and hope they introduce more blocks so it can remain that way. It's nice to have a crew cabin in vanilla that looks good.
The block texture pack was very nice too.. Although on principle I wasn't going to buy it.. But enthusiasm always knocks principle aside.
See.. I'm still excited about the game, can't help it..

I do however have to use MMasters script, although even on that side, we are seeing vanilla come along.

 

That's not a knife. This is a knife!
Honestly that facility/ship looks really nice.

I would actually prefer if there was the possibility of ridicilous size cargo hauling, when we get proper cargo. Some other mission called massive cargo or whatever. You could just do multiple trips if you have a smaller ship.

I hope we get to buy full made ships in the future as well. Would be sweet.

 

I thought it had been publicly disclosed that it's expected to be in December just in time for the pre-Christmas sales rush ?

 

@Roxette Nope. That was some youtuber misunderstanding or something. As usual there's been no public statement of a "when" other than SoonTM.

 

Right, that makes more sense

 

I liked the economy. And you could turn it off if you don't want it. Devinately looking Forward to it. The only thing I don't like is the different faction attacking each other stations. Doesn't make much sense to attack a safe zone... And wouldn't such conflict solving end in an all-out war?

 

Sadly that (war) is what drives most economies in the real world.

 

Look at the photos again. Yukon is a "proper Keen scale of ship." Her keel was laid pre-planets. Her cargo deck was intentionally sized so that five vanilla large grid large cargo containers could fit across side by side. She might be big, but she's ten times smaller than her mothership, which is definitely not a proper Keen scale of ship. She's not all vanilla because I found various blocks on the Workshop that just look better. Otherwise they are totally unnecessary. The only "essential" mods on the ship are the conveyor hinges (thanks, @Digi).

I posted those pictures in response to @SirConnery 's comment that Keen's NPC contracts would inspire cargo vessels that could pick up and transport cargo containers. It was kind of a mischievous way of me saying that if you're waiting on Keen for inspiration, you're gonna be way behind

You and me both, man. This game hits the spot for me, and if it disappeared I don't know what I'd do. It's engineering. In space. Sure, it's not real engineering and it's not really perfectly like space, but it's all close enough (Don't stop trying though, Keen). Many people re-create other games on SE. Can you duplicate SE on any other game? I think not.

I just always thought SE didn't need an economy to be a great game. Everyone is talking about what they're going to be able to do when the update comes out, and I'm just saying that whatever that is doesn't have to wait for the update. I sincerely believe the blocks and infrastructure will be a great addition, but I think they peed in the pool with the space credits. I'll live, though.

That's just it. We don't know what drives the economy in SE. Most people don't care and that bugs me. We should all get in the habit of caring about how things work. Specifically, in my opinion, economics and government. Letting this stuff go on auto-pilot is why war ends up driving most economies.

I personally believe SE provides a perfect testbed for studying both.

 

I disagree. War is the result of an uncontrolled enviroment, where no authority can enforce rules. Then it's right of the strongest. A border world may be such an enviroment, outside of the reach of goverments and their authorities. But if there is authority, then there are rules enforced. And if I look in our world I would take it that Goverments would prosecute certain behavior of companies working in their jurisdiction even if it is conducted outside of said jurisdiction.
Economies can be driven by war, and nowadays it looks like it's necessary, but while war needs economy to work, economy doesn't need war to work. Economy is about offering something to a lower price/efford as it would cost the other to gather it himselfe, or to offer what the other doesn't have, or can't do, like art. Specially the later can't be claimed by war. It was this fact that broke the feudal system and moved us to democracy. That you have specialized humans that can preform specific tasks, and they won't do it for you if you try to force them into slavery.

Nonetheless, I just got annoyed by the fact that firing on a save zone is wasting resources and makes the vessels vulnerable to capture by players, because the turrets fire on the station, not on the players, who can easily grind down the guns and take over the ship....

 

Well... just about every update ever has been about mechanics. The economy update will bring an expansion of gameplay. If the gameplay thing is successful, I hope they take the time to revamp the spawning mechanism... especially for asteroids. Hopefully procedural asteroid spawning will also include localized asteroid fields with input into the specifics of ore types, frequency, etc.

 

Could you tell your turrets to ignore stations, thus freeing them to look for other targets, like enemy players?

 

Scenarios could be as thing I guess... But for me is one of the problems with SE. It is so easy to go away from Vanilla and thoroughly change game play style. I am not even sure many can/like to play vanilla as a result. For the most part, SP has always been very limited on its return to me for gameplay enjoyment as part of the joy of playing for me is player interaction to some degree or another, even if just lurking in chat and watching the chatter among newbs. My initial point, at least for me, is that SP may always, unless extremely blessed with content, will always seem lacking in SP mode.

Scenarios: I may be wrong, but I have not seen any in MP. As it seem up until recently, to make a good server and run it already takes time and resources that many do not want to invest in. Worse was that as an early admin it was too easy to watch a world/map get corrupted or the player base become caustic with a resident troll or griefer.. I suppose of you had a server with huge main objectives some cut scene scripting could be a thing but then, if I am not mistaken, much of what people love aboue SE is all is real time, seamless, gameplay. No transitions to space, cut scenes, and generally speaking, goals are self-defined.

BEST SPECIALIZED SERVER:
TBH, one example of a server I had a great time on was one that had the Frontier Economy mod on it. Forget the resources and trading. For me, much of that mod was just a waste of time... (no resources at the traders there or just way easier to get your own ores) What was entirely cool about it was that you did not start with a ship on that server. You started with just cash at a central station. Sure, you could buy, grind, drill and build like normal after you bought a drill, etc. However, you could buy ready made ships there at the station that were made by the server players. So, as a player, you could design and sell a ship there. A REAL economy.
When I first logged in there, those selling were selling mostly crap (IMO) and selling it over priced. I mean it was entirely a money grab. Crappy ships in general for "way too much" investment which was usually as close as they could get to the actual cash you started with,.. IE: they wanted to gank your cash. Not saying I am any kind of great ship designer or entrepreneur, but I spent a good weekend coming up with a cost effective starter ship named the "Scarab" that sorta caught the eye with its shape and lighting (to appeal to the aesthetic desire of consumers). I quickly glutted the server with ships of my design and upset the power balance. It also had a cool effect that some players selling started to get competitive in design and pricing. True Capitalism. Some were even buying my ships and just relisting them!!... LMAO

Ahhh... but then, one day I logged in (forget that I was bored and was really getting ready that day to quit playing). I was just mindlessly hanging out while I finally decided to quit. Takes a moment to finally do sometimes since you give up so much. As I lingered with my base ship suddenly a major attack ship and 2 or more players swooped in saying "We have been waiting for you to log in" and took out a hit on me. That means they could have griefed me but wanted to execute while I was logged in. Not sure if it was noble or just a sadistic need.. LOL Even as I laughed and tried to tell them it was not necessary to wipe the ship out that I had, they could have it, I was quitting, they gleefully rubbed me out. I am not entirely sure... BUt I was led to beleive it was a hit made on me over how I interrupted a players income stream and they didn't want competition.

 

Well, the reason we are all waiting for the Economy Update is because they are feverously trying to figure out how to allow player made ship sales. Not sure how the Frontier Economy mod pulled it off but according to the guy that did Keen's model, it's kinda complicated. He didn't originally do it because of the complications. However, in all the official streams players asked for that, and Xocliw pestered the guy to the point that he said he would try. I fear, however, that the push from players is because they want to sell their ships and not necessarily because they want to buy someone else's. I suppose this update will contain an economics lesson after all

 

Oh my, while I am personally all for selling my own ships as this gives me one hell of an edge for my worlds (not having to mod that economy update, that is) - I am quite sure that that's not going to fly well in terms of economics, you're right ^^ - the economy update should include a direct link to the players's steam workshop where you can buy the blueprint ships. Might fare better then Skyrim paid mods, tho.

 

Dust off that computer, Space Engineer.

And, your wallet