Calling All Devs - Piracy vs. Griefing

For the FPS weapon attachments, with 3.2 we're introducing Weapon System 2.0, and part of Weapon System 2.0 is that it allows you to modify the weapon's values like damage, recoil, spread and so on with attachments. So the system is there. We also have a couple of assets already, like scopes and grips, that you can then attach to a weapon. So that works. What doesn't work yet is the bit that lets the player swap it out. So whether that would be through the mobiGlas, just selecting the attachments, or whether that be an animation where you can see in first person swapping the attachments, that's basically the bit that's still missing. It's on the backlog, it's on our schedule, but that's basically keeping it from being released.

That sounds very similar to our ship modulator system, where we have the internal developer-facing system up and running, but we're still waiting on development for the player-facing system. As folks know who watch Around the Verse or RTV or anything, UI is the one department that touches every single aspect of two massive games. So their backlog is pretty hefty. But yeah, so the technology is in 3.2, but backers will not be able to utilize it themselves in 3.2. We can as we create new weapons and tune new weapons. But we are waiting on that front-end development before we can allow backers to control the weapons themselves.

The ship weapons, that's actually interesting because it's pretty much the other way around. So for the ship weapons, all the components, everything, the asset is ready, because we already knew that this was coming up. We want the player to be able to swap out specific parts of the weapon, only upgrade the barrel, only upgrade the cooling unit, the firing unit, and so on. So we made our art assets ready to support that. So that actually works for all weapons, I think, released after 3.0, except the legacy ones. But the system's not there. So you can't yet swap it out, and you can't upgrade specific parts yet, which then has an influence on the weapon. But again, that's also on our plate and scheduled in the backlog.

So Art anticipated it. Art has been working on it basically for 2018, since 3.0 came out. Now we just need to do the backlog of all those weapons that came before, and then our design and engineering and programming teams need to get to building the system that allows the actual switching out.

Yep, it's a big one. So there's a few things that we have in the plans right now which will improve this, and it will all start with our law system. And also it all starts with the definition of what we consider a pirate. Where does piracy become griefing, and where would we draw the line? We don't necessarily want to encourage piracy, but we definitely want to have it there. It needs to be there. There's people who love doing it, and if you're able to mine over and over with no challenge, with no interesting things getting your heart pumping, it becomes boring after a while. So piracy has its purposes. We want these people to be trying to catch a miner off his guard, or without any guards and patrols around them that are trying to keep him alive. It's a matter of, do you kill someone to loot them and make some money? That is a pirate for us. If you kill him five times over and over and over and don't allow him to play the game, then that becomes griefing. And this is what we're trying to identify.

Now, when the law system comes into play, that will see pockets of space, starting from the size of a solar system all the way to maybe a small pirate outpost in the middle of a lawful region, but around that outpost they are maintaining the law. They create a law bubble around that place, and everything that they can monitor and see and track respects their law. If you're inside that pirate bubble, you might be able to just shoot everyone, or whatever those pirate rules are. Maybe they don't shoot each other. They have a pirate code, or whatever. It might be drug lord territory where they're trying to build drugs, but they still have some kind of law. They still want to make money and they don't want it to be no man's land. We will create all of these pockets of different things that you're allowed to do, things that you're not allowed to do. And then you choose basically which pocket do you want to be in. Do you want to live in this area of the universe where basically there's no one and no laws and you can shoot anyone, anyone can shoot you? And that is fun for some people. Other people might want to be in an area that is more controlled, and as soon as someone attacks them, suddenly there's UEE ships coming in and there's a big armada just there to protect them at any time.

Obviously, the rewards will be different. If the UEE has to protect you, that space probably, let's say you're a miner, there's not much to mine anymore because everyone kind of lives in that space and it's kind of depleted now. If you go into no man's land, now this is where all the riches are, but you might not make it out alive. So players will have to make a choice. And as long as that choice is something they voluntarily make and they go, I want to go there, I know the risks, I can read the risks. There's a readability of going, okay, I like that, I don't like that, I'm not going in there, I'm going here. And as long as they can make that choice, it's very hard for them to then go, well, I'm being griefed by people who are killing me. You knew the consequences. You just went for the big box. Sorry, you lost. Try again.

But then let's say you go into a very lawful region. Players are players, players will do crazy stuff. Players will continuously, even if they lose their ship, shoot someone down, knowing that the law enforcement will track them down and kill them anyway and they lose reputation. They won't care. There will be people who have so much money because they work. They gain that money lawfully or not lawfully, but they work for it. Within the confines of the game, they worked for that money. They might just go, yeah, I'll waste half of my fortune just to mess with someone. And this is where we need to step in. It'll be a matter of, let's say, I'm average dude and super billionaire is killing me now, and then I wait for my ship to come from insurance and I go out again and he kills me again and again and again. I cannot play the game. At that point, you will have to put in a ticket and we will have to step in. We'll look through the logs. We'll try to track the guy down because we know what server he's playing. We can actually see his activity, and there will be consequences for the griefer. Ideally, we're trying to automate as much as possible of these systems, but people find a way around it. Generally, people are very good at tricking machines. And this is where real people will have to track a ticket down and track that griefer and find out what he did, and there will be consequences. We cannot have a toxic atmosphere in the game. If it's within the confines of the game, fair enough, and that is piracy. But as soon as you break that and your main goal is just to upset someone over and over and over so they can't play the game, that is where we need to step in.

It's okay to have an antagonistic relationship. We want that in the world.

We want all kinds of... We want hatred and love. I love these guys because they helped me fight this other guy who I really hate. I hate these guys because these guys killed me last month and I need to do something against them. We want that kind of interaction. We don't want to sterilize. A game where everyone is friendly and I can't interact with anyone, it's boring. So we want to keep that part interesting. We just don't want it going too far.

Yeah, there's a line. It's when you prevent them from being able to play the game. That's griefing. When you make their lives difficult, that's not griefing. It's a thing that MMOs have struggled with for years, across all genres, from all developers. And everybody's got their own kind of litmus test for where that line is and when it crosses. And of course, we'll develop our own as the game goes and we see how the game can be played and what's possible in the game and how fast it takes to recover. It's not like we can sit there and draw it out and show you a diagram right now, like this is the line. The game needs further development before we draw such borders. But it's a challenge that every MMO has to face, and we're up for it.

So the short answer is they should be. I think a lot of them actually are already. Maybe they're not far enough, but certainly the intention is they shoot further so they can hit further. With Weapons 2.0, which is coming online with 3.2, we've essentially re-set up every single weapon in the game from scratch. We kept the art assets, but all the actual data record side of it is different. So all the DPS values almost certainly changed. The spread absolutely has changed on all the guns because it's a completely different system. It's gone from this just arbitrary number to an actual degree cone, which is a lot friendlier for designers to understand rather than just this magic number. For ship weapons, they've got all power and heat. That's all changed. So the weapons are all going to be completely different in 3.2 in terms of how they handle and how they do damage.

And I imagine that's part of the conversion from XML to DataForge.

Yes.