[SC] DarkOrbit on the right direction?

Things are getting worse and worse.
Yesterday, when the influence event faq was released i was really angry. Once again BP team "made the things wrong" (mod asked me to follow the forum rules" on other event and we had to complain on discord chat. If that was the only event i think no one would compain, at least on the same way as yesterday, but commit this kind of mistakes after all the fails they are commiting is just ridicolous. The problem is not only the man who checks if everything on the faq is correct. That person may commit a mistake. The problem is the background, who decided to put 2 points / alien kill ? It must have been someone no plays this game. If they say that they are aware of bot usage they cannot put such stuff as it is just laugth at the community.

But the problem is not this event, as i said, the problem is here since years, but, maybe, in the last few months its worse than ever.

On the one hand, for example we have a new gate, QZ. Imagine how bad is the welcome from players about that gate that they even recognize that the gate does not fit on the game. However the gate is still here and it is the only way to obtain the new ships.

On the other hand we have the new lf4. Before they were released the gap between players was getting closer. Something that the community has been asking for years. Good decisions like obsidian materials on gates and double rewards day helped new players to close such gap. Howevenr, with this new kind of lf4 we have moved again to the farming and only farming game logic. Imagine for a while that you stop playing for 1 year. Once you comeback you will not be able to kill anyone. And even if you play 24/7 when you comeback you will never be able to close that gap as to obtain the materials you have to complete the weekly and dialy missions. Appart from that as we all know maybe on the future there appear ships upgrades or maybe new shields so the gap will be bigger and bigger and the opportunity to close it lower. Another example is spartan drones, you have to complete arround 80-90 hades gates to get them (if you already have the havoc and the hercules). It seems a fair number for new players no?.

Instead of create new stuff, which we the community, or at least me, don't want they may try to focus on things we are asking for years. Here is my list of such things:

-UBA. The map is wrong, it should be a JPA like map. The matchmaking is wrong. We need a option to enter on it with a friend in order to make a duel. It also needs bug fixes.....

-Credits. Nowadays credits are not powerfull anymore. Why not to create a new tab in the auction with the old system? I mean where you only see who bids but not how much and if you send a wrong bid you lose your credits? On that auction they can put new lf4 materials, some obsidian keys and that kind of stuff. They can also put on the payment area credits for sell.

-Seprom. Why they don't wonder about why there are always seprom bugs? A bug does not appear if people does not search for them. If people focus on search seprom bugs it is maybe because the skylab system is competely wrong. We cannot be using the same seprom as when we had 8 iris. If they allow us to send more maybe people stop searching that.....

-Normal event rewards. What about TDM, CTB, INFILTRATION, INVASION GATE and so on rewards? Just a little comparison, spaceball && CTB, what do you get on CTB? Nothing. They have normal events which could be awesome but as there are no rewards for play them then no1 plays them

-Player kills. How can be possible that we still earn more by killing a kristallon than by killing another player?

-Missions. Why not to create missions to help newbies? For example, lvl 21 mission: Help a player under lvl 15 to kill X aliens. With a proper reward by completing the mission it will help both newbies and old players. Appart of that as those players have to speak each other the chances that the newbie lefts the game will be lower.

-JPA or similar event is needed for real money or for vouchers to use the money on bigpoint products. It is also a nice way to promote the game. "Come, play and earn X".

-Old titles, the ones you get by killing other players. Why those titles have the same colour as the normal shitty ones? It has no sense, those titles had a really good meaning in the past and nowadays its really hard to see them on maps.

-When will auto-GG-clicker, auto-configuration manager and auto-upgrade be included on game? These features would be awesome. Maybe they can be included as premium features?

I can continue saying stuff like this the whole day, so share your opinion guys.
Regards
skeith

 

The moment they removed NPC kills from the Influence Points immediately tells us that they can't beat the bots, but instead decide to ruin everyone elses game based on this fact.

On a side note, and some may agree (Like if you do), what exactly was the idea behind employing or taking on someone as community manager who just posted pictures onto a forum beforehand? Can't we have had someone who has experience in gaming, team building, player liaison, or basically some idea of what he or she is doing? The games I played before semi professionally, had Anti Cheat built in and could scan a system and/or game files upon the user accepting these terms, and the software obviously stating what it will scan). You basically took on someone who could take your .SWF files, website code and/or other components and pasted them onto a forum. Doesn't take a genius to download an .SWF decompiler and have a look for themselves. Not blowing my own horn here, but I competed in the World Cyber Games in London back in 2001 (or there abouts), I didn't get there by posting URL and IMAGE links. I got there by being a major player in a community and a main competitor in the game of choice I played (European cups etc). Just my 2 pence, as this has been bugging me for weeks/months.

 

i have the same feelings towards the game. I did post further down '....more thoughts' about the game. Its defo gone down hill. More rewards for bk's than player kills is pointless. Its gate based and will stay that way for ever - how would BP make any money otherwise?

 

Hey skeith,

Thanks for posting this here. With regards to the issues listed, I can tell you the team agrees with a lot of it.

We are aware the UBA has many issues, not just in the map but in the matchmaking, the credit economy is almost entirely useless, seprom isn't what most players want it to be and then the normal events have the issues you have already listed.

The issue with these things is they take time, for example reworking the galaxy gate generator and the hangar system are both deceptively big tasks and time is common theme with all the big updates and changes the game needs. The team has decided to go or the biggest one first in server merges and rank system changes.

Once this happens a few big issues will be addressed, the lack of activity in events like TDM, SC, CTB should be resolved and a rework of the rank system will make it so all aspects of the game are represented properly in value, which touches upon the issue listed with player kills.
Titles are also likely to be looked at as part of the rank system changes, there's a lot of potential for them there.

The exception to this 'time rule' is probably ship / formation / ammo rebalances, which does not require a lot of development time but does take up a lot of time for the designers. There's currently a discussion on going for a fairly large rebalance update, by this games standards, and what each knock-on effect of a change will be.

Things like JPA and JPB for anything other than purely ingame prizes is still a bit of a grey area, so we would like to run these events again as players enjoyed the format regardless of the prizes available.

The only point I disagree on is the missions that ask big players to help small players, it should never be expected for players in a game to have to spend their time helping smaller players.

Would much rather see smaller players be given the ability to help themselves rather than hope for hand-outs from the more experiences ones - with that said the players who do spend their time helping out the smaller guys are incredibly valuable for the overall mood of the community and often some of the most respected members of the game.
Again though, this desire for a improved progression system suffers from the big problem of time.

I have to comment on this as your assumptions are pretty far off the mark.

I was not contacted about this role due to the ability to post some datamined images from the test server. I had been in contact with a few members of the DarkOrbit team for a while and was often asked to give feedback on ideas or updates which had gone live.
They valued my critical feedback and the fact that I was often quite blunt and realistic with what I said in regards to feedback on updates or subjects of interest.

I had also created and managed my own mini-community on social media prior to joining the team, which players who were part of seemed to value the direct contact a lot, something which I have carried over into discord as much as I can.

I was not the only person who knew how to open an swf file (although I must say for some things it required a lot more than that!), as you can see people have carried on what I started on the EN forum, often with better presentation quality. I was not the first person to do it either, that would go to someone called Re-Co on the DE forum many years ago. I just communicated it better with players.

In fact, 'datamining' the test servers almost got me banned on a few occasions - something I only found out once I joined ^^

Thanks,

OP32

 

I'll add to Skeith's points.

One of the current issues with the game, in my opinion, is that Dark Orbit seem to "hammering out" more updates to game content rather than bug fixes or patches. I've mentioned this in Discord several times, but each seprom bug that we've had in game lasts for anywhere between 2-6 months it seems - which is pretty ridiculous amount of time for a bug that alters the games eco-system in such a heavy way.

Similarly, bots in game usually make it months (sometimes years) to be fixed - I know OP32 has answered this in Discord before saying it's difficult to work out how the bot works with the client, but surely if you're having that much of an issue to find and fix - hire more developers or at least hire more efficient ones? I find it hard to believe that it takes that long to fix bugs because "it's hard".

On this topic, could you answer the following questions; - I'm sure the wider Dark Orbit community is intrigued to know the answer to these questions too. (FYI not asking you to give away any secrets, simply asking for more transparency).

1. Why does it take so long for the bugs to be fixed? Clearly initial detection isn't an issue when you've got us, the fair player community, reporting the bugs when they happen.
2. Why is there almost never any acknowledgment of said problems when they arise and very little communication from the internal DO team on what they're doing to try to achieve the removal of cheaters when exploits or bots pop up (IIRC it took several weeks and reports for an official announcement to appear on the issue of seprom bug, nothing yet about the current NPC bug). It is also becoming apparent to me that you also don't pass enough information down to the mod team for them to be able to give a reply to users either.

We get it. Dark Orbit is a business, I'm guessing developers have certain targets in terms of releasing new content. However, it's extremely frustrating that we have issues in game for months and even more frustrating when we get little to no contact on the issue.

I really think it would be smart to fix all bugs and errors with the game, improve anti-cheat systems before the server merge and any other additional updates.

 

Judging by the reward suggestions when the recent events have been on, I am yet to see any convincing stats to encourage me to trust anything which comes into the game now.

On the next event, lets see some final release idea's and rewards which come from you as a player, not what is decided by your superiors.

This, will, is some way, make me believe you are actually around to change the game for better, not to listen and reply "how high sir?" when they say jump.

 

The things that need changing and are long term is no help whatsoever, lets imagine these updates take 6 months, the server populations are not going to increase during that time, there needs to be BIG changes and soon....

 

Lol, Agreed. Tbh in OP32's defense, It can be quite difficult to get the higher ups to see the error in their ways In the end it's
all about balance. DO have to strike a balance between the money grabbing updates an updates that actually help the game an it's community

 

My question for a MOD or someone that has any idea...

Are they planning to change DOs platform??? They might be kidding if theyn wanna keep goiong with flash player!!! It's completly useless and old... try to move the game to something similar to what you did to Battlestargalactia online! This platform works really well. Your server will no longer have to send all the information related to backgrounds, skins, etc.. to players, they'll gave all this stuff downloaded on their computers... so there'll be less lag

Pls guys do something! We love this game and it has a lot of potential.

 

At this point even dropping the costs of items to more reasonable levels will not return any player base. Betrayal and suppression of issues made for a very large loss of players.

The influence event was honestly a sign showing us how disconnected the staff is from the game. There are no players to shoot. Of course if you had a multi company clan... On a server with maybe 20 active players how do you compete?

Yeah. They pretty much showed us.

 

The only good direction is to open a server without ufe crap on it (i.e old school). We want the game that was about having fun not this about being poped in 0.5 seconds and farming until u are brain dead.

 

One other point i have noticed lately is the shared boosters, So if i am pvping alone and maybe even double boosters the best i can do is 20% bonuses and that's pretty good but, what about when i am attacking a player that is in a group of 8 players and they all are double boosted now i get 20% and they get 50%. So my problem is before only same factions could share the boosters now DO made it so anyone in the group gets the shared boosters. I am sure this works well for players doing hades gate during double rewards but how can you call this a faction based game when not only do you allow multiple faction companies but allow multiple companies to share boosters? Same with battle for influence again EIC in GA3 won and that's ok my problem is how many mmo and vru players in those eic clans were helping eic to make point's? Just saying what i think, Enjoy and welcome any input.

 

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I completely agree with your view. Right on point!

-FT

 

I have always seen the issue when sitting at a Portal and someone with Shared boosters approach I see I get an increase in my boosters because of the PROXIMITY of them to me. Unless they made a change to these you only get the boost when you are in close proximity to the ships with the boosters to gain the benefits. I would Cube with Starzie and she would have be get close to her to gain the booster from her. You are not required to be in a group, but you are supposed to be in the same Company to benefit from the shared booster.

 

Not like that anymore if your in a group you share all the shared boosters now you just have to be on the same map.

 

I'm mostly, in the past year or so, a pvp player. I logon go hunting, not much for NPC anymore been there done that.

I have noticed a big change in some of my opponents damage levels and to be honest I've thought and expressed openly that something fishy was going on. What brought me to this conclusion was that sometimes (most times) I can clean their clocks fairly easily, but there are times when their damage levels are way up there making me think there is a use of damage bugs or code manipulation being used.​

Then I think of this "NEW shared boosters in group" situation. I'm not much for calculating but I'm thinking.. 8 players all double boosted in a group gives the most powerful of the group some very serious damage and shield capability no matter where on the map anyone is

What ticks me off about the whole idea is that these shared boosters are shared across companies as long as your in the group

Only a half wit would over see this situation and allow the update to proceed. Did I just call someone a name

Figure it out, sort it out and fix it!

-FT

Leadership's less about the bigness of your title and the size of your office and more about the largeness of your commitment and the depth of your excellence.
​

 

Good one. lol