Make the game Great again

what if you roll the game back at the beginning and new engine its not so hard this is the only think that can bring some players again , its also good to put it on steam after so many years , i dont know what else to think .

 

I hear you, but for us OG's, they ruined the game when you can in 1 week do what it used to take a year to do or even longer.

 

yea but its about the game you wont to play with bots and 3-4 players or with 20+ real players

 

Here's the thing. Bigpoint is all about the money. Money money money. Steam takes a percentage of the sale value (let's say 15% for example). If Bigpoint earns $100,000 a week on Steam, they're forking over $15,000 off the bat to Steam. They're saving that $15,000 just by having their own client.

A grind does not always equal a good game. Hell, you can start a brand new account and see how quickly you can make it either as strong or even stronger than your current account.

I'm not gonna come out here with the "botters are misunderstood" argument. While I agree botters should be removed, it's far too late to do anything about it now. A good 65%-70% of the playerbase is botting. If they suddenly decided to up and ban every botting ship, the servers wouldn't be populated enough to bother keeping them open and that leads us into the server merge garbage again. If you take all the legit players of the game and cram them all into one server, you'll never get anything done. So in a way, thank the botters for keeping the servers split up to where we *can* do what we need to do instead of waiting for dead times to roll around to accomplish anything.

__________________

Now that quotes are out of the way, let's get to my two cents of it. DarkOrbit, even though it's fallen from grace, still is great. I just had a friend join 17 years into the game and he's loving it already. The people who wish the game was better are still here playing, and the people who wish the game would go back to how it was have moved to WarUniverse. Let's face the facts here though. If DarkOrbit never moved past LF-3s, everyone would have max equipment, and there'd be nothing to keep players engaged in playing and people would only log in for special events. If you beat a game to 100%, you're likely to not keep playing it, because you've already earned and collected everything. There's nothing to work for. Bringing out new items with limited time resources means that players have to engage with events like Chromin Rush to have any hope of getting to full BO3s.

A graphics refresh though, I could get behind that. We last had NPC skins touched up for the 5 year anniversary, 12 years ago. We're long overdue for an overhaul. Ships have been getting updated in the form of plus ships, but it's not always for the better. Spectrum looks amazing. Spectrum Plus looks like a Transformer with a mutated back. So I agree on a graphics update. (Btw, the "3D" update was not a graphics update. It's 2D with depth perception, not 3D)


As a game that is 17 years old, we need to talk about the technical specs of it though. The game breaks constantly and the code was not made to sustain 17 years. Lately we've been having what I call "shot lag". When you kill an npc and try to shoot the next one, it takes forever to start shooting because the game hasn't recognized that you killed the last one already and once the rewards apply, then you start shooting. This is mindnumbingly frustrating when it comes to galaxy gates. I end up having to use NPC nukes because its more reliable than kami. As a Flash game, Flash has been retired and our "client" is essentially a flash browser emulator, which honestly is even dumber than the old webpage version. At least on the webpage we could have multiple tabs, in the client we have to trade out to find something. Honestly over the next year, aside from our scheduled events like normal, the BP team should be re-writing the code and preparing the game to move to Unity so we can have a better graphics update and better performances. Living in the past fixes no issues, and rather holds us back. This would be the only way darkorbit could put all the servers into one huge server, having a ton of ships on the same map using abilities and fighting would lag the current servers to the point of no return and crash the game. Better performance options would increase the amount of capable ships in a map and it'd allow big group fights again.


On the subject of "too many ships in the map", the Strokelight needs to be retired from the BL maps. I get it, it's a prosperous NPC and pays out heavy on the honor. But nobody and I mean **NOBODY** is killing the Steadfast and Abide that come out of it. These NPCs either need a timer to automatically despawn, or a reward that entices people to kill them. The Strokelight could be moved to the 4-X maps and provide some additional danger in there, but I'm also not a fan of NPC's on a dedicated PVP map. I hate that they added the battlerays to the 4-X maps.


So, to put it in a tl;dr, here's some things I'd also like to add:

- revert or increase the credit payout for clans, remove the 10% cut as well. 250mn is chump change these days
- clan vault. allow members to put their extra things in the vault for other players to buy or be given (exceptions: no upgraded items, nor the latest equipment of a slot (no Asmo lasers, newest laser, no special rockets launchers like Hydra or Neptune, no bo3 shield gens, no pet lasers). This allows us to throw our old trash into a vault for new players to have something to help them get started. The whole point of a clan is to help each other
- revamp the clan page. aside from skylab, this is the only page that has remained untouched in years. the last big update we got was CBS addition and wars updated to 100 days. change wars to option based, you can have a brief war for clan pvp practice between 2 clans (like 24 hours), 10 days against clans bothering you in the moment, 100 days for huge clan wars, and permanent for clans you just dislike
- revert hangar. yes its cool to see all your ships spaced out, but it was much neater to just have all the goli designs together. if it has a different number of slots, its a different ship, but don't separate ships based on bonuses. condense all goli/skill goli together (amber, jade, crimson, enforcer, razer, bastion, spectrum, venom, solace, sentinel, diminisher, iron, etc). for example, surgeon would be an entirely different ship because it has 1 extra generator slot. same with citadel, aegis, and spearhead. condense them back down and it'll cut on active resources being eaten by the hangar tab
- revert the moth formation in the "active maps" to how it currently performs in galaxy gates
- bring back the referral program we used to have to help get people motivated to invite players, and dont put obscene objectives in place like you did last time. add certain milestones instead that the new players needs to earn in order to get rewards so you're enticed to support the person you brought along. (ex. new player receives an LF4 laser for the first time)
- most players dont care about rank, revamp the rank system to bring it back to where rank means something other than how much honor someone has
- retire refractions and its associated quest. it was a failed experiment, admit it. it's been broken since server merge and it's pointless to have the quest system flooded with quests you can no longer do.
- remove old quests from the challenges list and put them back into active service. these quests, although they had lower payouts, were still great quests back in the day. update them to today's payouts for quests.
- increase the stock galaxy gate payout rewards and remove the double day. this just makes players only log in on the weekends to do gates, players should be doing gates when they get them built like we used to, not hoarding them and wasting resources in the server to hold onto it until sunday. run discounted gates on the weekend still, that's a nice feature. but double day and double kronos, retire them. make the gates better and more people will run them like we used to



I could sit here and type for hours on ideas I have to bring the game up to a better day and age, but frankly, I've said enough

 

Especially now that this game has those stupid unstable modules it is ridiculous that you can get an module for example for Aegis veteran and cant use it on base model or Elite, especially for beginners it is very hard to get full set of good modules for these ''beginner ships'' as most of the old stable modules are unavailable now. But if they would bring the old hangar back I would still think it would be best to keep the 5 goliath skill designs as separate ships as they each have unique ability, look totally different and have extra cargo space compared to normal goliath

 

we need a server merge, too much servers and average of 400 players which 350 are zombies...