The developers cover the organization system's planned divisions, jobs and affiliate memberships, plus how much control leaders have. They also cover credits in the dogfighting module, UEE security response to org wars, ship disguises, Tevarin ships, and the dogfighting release.
We initially wanted the second drop to contain divisions and jobs, which is the two big concepts that we want to bring to the organization system, which will allow people to basically create their tree of their organization. You can have the B-Wing and the 42 Squadron and organize your org in a hierarchy. Put your members and then decide on which leaders are going to be on each division. And then so these become specific units of your org, of your larger or smaller org. Even small orgs can benefit from that.
Well, we know for V1 there's not going to be anything like that. Obviously, in the long, long term, when this becomes the arena mode in the game, then you'll be able to earn credits there. We're still discussing when and if you can earn money in the game, in the dogfighting module, but as of right now, no.
I doubt there will ever be a full us versus them thing going on. We want to support our universe, not demolish it. But there will definitely be active dev participation in the PU.
Right, and there might be some events going on where we announce we're doing something. We'll probably do something with other citizens out there, join forces to do stuff together. That's kind of more the line of what we're trying to do there.
Organizations is the generalized term. And really, we're letting players decide what their organization is, really. So don't think of that as limiting what you can be. You decide what your group is. So organization is just the blanket term.
It is a good question, but in a lot of cases like this, we don't necessarily have plans to directly interfere in that kind of player interaction. Now, things could change as we see how the population feels about different things, but basically my thinking on this is, if you see an organization where one person has all the power, you shy away from something like that, because you put yourself in that kind of situation. And we're letting you know now that that might happen. So I'd prefer a well-governed organization with a group of shysters over just one.
That might be a little bit extreme there. You're not going to be able to be that heavily disguised, but we've talked about the idea of tucking away turrets. That could happen on some ships at some point. Not that you've seen it yet. But for instance, a long time ago we gave our early backers the electric skin, which lets you change the paint job on the fly. So that would let you change your pirate ship into a military-looking ship, for instance. And you can also spoof your ID.
Yeah, think about it in real world terms. It's not like your Crips and your Bloods are out there having a throwdown in the middle of the street and the cops are like, "Oh, well, it's just them. They're at war."
That happens in L.A. all the time, just saying. Just kidding. No, you're right. You still have to maintain, the whole point of it is that area is safe and police protected, and they're just not going to let people go at it.
Now, the exception to that is if they don't know about it, they won't interfere. So if you can cut off communications, for instance, and no one sees your little battle going on, sure.
So the simple answer to that is we're still discussing some of that. But if it varies, it'll probably vary differently for different races, too. So no hard answer on that yet for you folks.
Well, each module might utilize the organization function in a little bit different ways as it relates to that module. And it's not necessarily up to my team to define how that would happen for the different modules, but those teams themselves might want to have some aspects that are unique to first-person shooter playing that aren't relevant in dogfighting or something.
Great. We've done several small updates to the system that people might not notice. We've added a bunch of additional functionality and capacity on the back end. We've tweaked some of the algorithms that show how organizations are ranked, and we've improved the system that's involved in inviting people into the organization and managing that process. So we've done a lot of small incremental updates to the system since the major launch in January. And as you probably already know from watching the video, we have some new stuff that's planned that's going to be coming online in the near future.
TL;DRThe goal is for organizations to govern themselves rather than have rules imposed, while avoiding bad player experiences, and the design stays modular so player feedback can guide later changes.
The goal is for organizations to be governed by the organization, more so than to enforce rules onto the organization. But one guiding principle that we have from the design side is that we don't want to enable organizations to create bad experiences for people, but we want to create interesting experiences. So in the question that I heard you guys talking about, it would seem like as an organization member, just like you said, you should be able to evaluate what's the leadership of this organization like and do I trust these people. And I think that's kind of an interesting thought process to go through as a player. So that's our goal as a design principle.
And one of the reasons we do all this together with the citizens out there is, once we get that out into the verse, they're going to be able to give us feedback on what they like. We always try to get everything we can in there, but sometimes we might miss a few things that they think are important, and I'm sure they'll let us know. And we'll be malleable and agile enough to change for that, right?
Yep. And that's one reason why we like to build things in a modular fashion. It's definitely a core value of our entire company and it applies here too. If we can launch the next piece that we're confident in, it'll answer some of the questions we might have about the piece after that and the piece after that. So we can use that feedback to guide our direction over time.
TL;DRIn the upcoming organization module players can have a main organization plus affiliates, and may hide affiliate memberships from fellow members, though the main organization's leader can see that they belong to another one.
So in the upcoming module of the organization system you'll be able to join more than one organization, and you'll always have a main organization, and your additional organizations would be considered affiliates. And we have to have something like that so that you can keep track of scores and ranks and responsibilities in your main organization, and your affiliate organizations are not quite as formal. And so if you're a member of an affiliate organization, you could choose not to show that to your other organization mates in your main organization or even in your other affiliate organizations. Now the organization leader, I tend to call it guild because that's what we call it in a lot of other games too, but the organization leader can tell that you're in another organization, but you might keep it secret even from them. And so they may have some questions for you to say, "Why are you in another organization and you won't show me?" And so we think that would be an interesting conversation to have.
That's right. And as you can imagine, we had very lengthy discussions about some of these design decisions, and we talked about whether we should make it an option for the guild leader to flag that as a system requirement to say it has to be that way. And ultimately we decided that it was more interesting to not make it something that the system enforces, but that it's more about the communication and the organization's governance policies of their own. And so the system doesn't force you to do one thing or the other, but the organization leader and the people that are joining the organization, or maybe even already members of the organization, will have to have that discussion amongst themselves.
TL;DRWith the dogfighting launch, the hangar module will be expanded to show module status and studio updates, alongside planned leaderboards, possibly organization rankings, though not necessarily at first.
We have a lot of cool things planned for dogfighting. The main thing that you'll notice is that when you go to download the game, that first experience is going to change, because today when that happens, we know that you're going to the hangar module. And the hangar module is going to remain the hub of all the interactions that you have with other modules. But we're adding quite a bit of functionality to that process so that people who are new to the game can understand what the different modules are, what the status of each module is in its development path. We're going to include some other relevant information, like the monthly studio updates that we're preparing are going to be available in this page in a way that makes sense. So we're trying to bring together all the information about the state of the game and the different modules into one place so that people who may be new to the game or new to a particular module can tell what's up. And so that's going to be cool, and that's coming with the launch of the dogfighting module. We're also creating a scoring system, a leaderboard system that'll be available. And there's some pretty cool stuff that we're working on for that. There's going to be a variety of different leaderboards for different types of things that are going on in the game. I'm not sure if it's going to be available right at first, but we're also working on a leaderboard system that's tied to organizations so that organizations can have rankings against other organizations. And so there's a lot of cool gameplay that'll come from that. And the way that we work on the platform team is that we're building these little pieces and they all start to fit together. So that's an example: there's a fair bit of stuff coming in the new organization version that we just talked about that'll also have some application. Internally, we call them drops. So we're calling multi-org membership drop 1.5, and then this other stuff is drop 2. So there's some functions in 1.5 that'll also apply to these leaderboards. So the way we work is it all fits together, and we have a big roadmap of stuff, and we're working on this piece, and we'll pull it in over here. And so I think it's going to be pretty cool the way that your experience on the web is going to supplement your experience in the game and the way it will tie it all together.