[UI] Major Feedback Collection: Let's go Community!

new adds are market in red font.

The following thread is meant to be a collection and discussion of ideas that are meant to improve the game, the goal is to give constructive feedback based on the community’s perspective. I will list the topics in a form of "to do" paragraphs and hope to get the attention of the developers and players. Everything can and should be discussed by everyone in the comments below and I will add, edit or delete ideas based on the feedback of the other players. The passion that I have grown for Darkorbit in over the last years motivates me to make things better. I will create the same thread in the German forum (later), to have a higher range and attention.

Please note that there are more important and less important sections. This is meant to be a collection of everything. Regardless of how much you read, thanks for your time, upvotes appreciated


• Pop Up Texts:
In Hades and Kuiper gate for example. They might be fun for doing it the first time, putting a little bit of story in it… but they are just getting annoying when doing the gate for the 100th+ time. Please create a setting that allows users to block it.

• On the map:
Make it possible to safe presets of quick-slot taskbars. It’s frustrating to set it up newly for every ship or get it lost when switching to a ship the wrong way. Stuff like this improve the flexibility for switches which makes more fun to play (diversity).

• Group Pings:
Group leaders should have a different colour for pings to separate their marks from other users. Two pings at the same time should be possible with that. This will help with the coordination within a group.

• “Old New Lasers”:
Magmadrill, Paritydrill and Hyperplasmoid are kinda useless since the new Black Light lasers are in the game, which makes daily/weekly quests useless, too. Many players spent hundreds of hours on fighting for them at events or doing their over-expensive Delta-Gates. The current situation of “the new lasers are better in any way” is frustrating. There should be a possibility to combine the three Lasers in the Assembly / Crafting. Even the combined stats are not overpowered compared to the Black Lights +15%~ more dmg in total and insane potential of first-shots. The combined LF4 could be buffed to +10 NPC-, +10 Playerdmg and +0,5% HP bonus. Reduce the crafting costs from 400 to at least 300 logfiles for the three named lasers.

• Clan points:
Fix the ranking points for clans (e.g. in GE1 http://prntscr.com/m9ob4l - I mean ***...). Necessary to keep the competitive character of the game like it’s meant to be. Just like you fixed the player hon.

• Shared Boosters:
Currently it’s impossible to fight a 4v8 regardless of the skillset of the players when the 8x group has full boosters. Please lower the shild buff from group players from +10% to +5%. Together with +HP and +DMG bonus this will still be very hard to beat for players not having a group.

• Item Upgrading:
Patch the graphics of the numbers on the pictures. They are impossible to read http://prntscr.com/m9ox4k properly. Provide detailled information on the bases. What are the ranges, missrates, average dmg of the modules? Nobody really knows that for sure, also the improvements with the upgrades should be given. Make stuff like this more transparent to the players!

• Clan Jumping:
It shouldn’t be possible to leave and join clans without any limitation. There are clans that provoke other players and exploit this on a high level. In the morning there are 20 players in the clan, in the evening 40 players who go hunt down everyone, kill bases etc. They shouldn’t get to decide in which hour they want to fight and in which hour they want peace. Actions should have consequences in the game for longer times. After they are active with 20 players on the map they leave the clan and go back to botting or farming Blacklight Lasers peacefully just right next to you. There’s no chance for revenge to these guys, even though they are planting mines on you every minute and insult people outside of the game. Often these players keep changing their names in a period of 2-days to support their “undercover” farming. Without having a list of all these guys and their profile links it’s not possible to track them down, in my opinion that’s unfair. Also creating “undercover-Clans” to jump in just for bases so that the wars don’t appear to the new clans seems unfair to me. Players who recently joined a clan shouldn’t take profit from the full base-boosters. Let them fight for it vs. their war clans like the developers intended it to be! Cut these kind of exploits off, please.
- Suggestion: First time within X period of time no barriers, 2nd time 10 hours, 3rd time 2 days and so on. Add a similar reset system as with -Hon for company kills (just maybe 3 days for every decrease).

• Botters:
There can’t be any serious Feedback Thread here without mentioning this topic. Many good balancing ideas don’t work because of them. What everyone needs to understand is that Darkorbit is an Eco-System. The whole concept of the game doesn’t work when many players bot stuff for free. Because everyone is thrown on the same maps, new players don’t have a chance to compete and even for good players it’s not fair, the developers earn less money etc. I guess you can think for yourself what else to say about this. I’m not going to go into more detail here.

• Auction:
Put P.E.T. Gear lvl 1-2 to auctions. Would be a very nice way for new players to get lower gear and creates a new way of spending Credits. Gear that fits a certain purpose for specific situations could be used (even on a low level) more this way. It’s not practical to spend Uridium on most of them.
Increase amount of: Log-Disks, Xenomit (currently 10?!), Mines, Ammunition (50.000 Packs at least), Rockets (1.000 at least).

• Centurion Ship:
There are too many completely useless designs out there that are overflowing the players. Also note that a simple screenshot from an excel sheet about the stats somewhere in the forum is untransparent. Why not create a quick Localization for the Hangar (http://prntscr.com/m9q4hz). Better create only 20 more useable designs than 50 where 95% of are trash (and put something else into the boxes to balance the lower amount). Sometimes less is more. E.g. the dmg even with 12% is losing completely against the Cyborg because of the disadvantages and the Cyborgs ability. For most of the current ones I can’t think about any usecase.
There is a general agreement that the ship is looking ugly. The design doesn't fit in the game.

• Toooo many LF4:
Make it possible to sell LF4-Lasers. They are plugging the space in the hangar, which makes loading times unnecessarily long. Suggestion: Sell one Laser for 250-500 Uridium would be fair. So you can get a little benefit of farming them and they are not only relicts of old times anymore. Even for Credits would be fine. Just let us get rid of them, please.

• Spaceball:
Currently the game is not being played like it’s intended to be. There is no need to fight for the ball because players can collect boxes with cloaks and spearhead skill regardless of their company or own efforts put into the spaceball events. Regular players have a very bad chance to get a box. There are no fights anymore, it’s basically just waiting and 10 seconds before the ball comes into a gate 100x cloaked players and their P.E.T get all boxes and disappear in the radiation zone (on GE1). Gates should be anti-cloak zones at spaceball-event, spearhead ability should be disabled on 4-4 in total. Also It’s much easier for other company players to flee from VRU gate because the radiation zone where players can’t be seen on radar is much closer to the gate than at the MMO-gate.

• Hangar:
The Transfer System should be working better. It’s frustrating not to be able to perform a switch because of only one generator slot less or more compared to the other ship. Many Darkorbit players are playing on a laptop, it’s very energy-sapping and takes the joy out of the equipping which is a big part of the game. Mostly you are too tired of switching between stuff and just stick to the one you have even though you would like to use other ships for different situations.
- Creating presets of configs would help, too! Probably this topic is the hardest one to implement because of all the bugs and the worth of the players EQ that needs to be considered, even though it’s very important so I brought it up.
- Add a button to repair all destroyed modules with 1 click only, with the current solution it takes too long.

• Galaxy Gates Clicks:
Implement a feature like the GG Tool that makes it possible to click gates until they are build or at least do 100 single clicks and use the multiplication directly etc. At the moment the clicking for Galaxy Gates is either a waste of Uridium or time. Why can a third party coder create such a good solution and the official game doesn’t implement it for several years? It’s too much clicking if you play gates more often. Basically all top users take the tool, cause the games version is frustratingly worse.

• Clan:
When stopping a war in the clan information text it says that the war with my own clan has been stopped (only for german?) “Dein Clan hat den Krieg gegen den Clan STABILE MASSE IM ALL beendet.“
- In every list (ranking or diplomacy) there should be the clantags listed in front of the name. You mostly know the clans from the map only by their tags and have to check the names by switching to the information page every time, which is lagging very much btw. and takes ages when doing this for more clans.
- Increase the maximum Clan-Logo file upload size.
- General Layout improvement would be good. Hasn’t been done since the game’s first years? Currently looks like Windows 98 design.

• PVP Ranking System:
Currently it feels like the game is doing a lot for NPC-players and disregards the PVP-fraction, which has been a big pillar in the game ever since. I have thought about a concept for a new Ranking System based on PVP for long. Again on this topic it’s fundamental to imply the bot topic. My favourite solution is already used in a lot of other games. We need to reward players for kills, get the focus away from killing small players/bots, create more PVP-fun, punish players for dying very often (by being bad or botting) and have a good balance between farming and hunting. So here we go:
- Every player starts with a “default” rank based on a ranking number, let’s take e.g. 5.000.
If I kill a player, I earn points, the player that I kill loses points, that’s the basic system. Soon the Server will balance itself and have people with better and people with lower PVP-ratings. If I have 6.000 Points and kill someone with 10.000 I get more points than killing someone with only 3.000 points. This way the small players (or good equipped ships that just don’t care so much about their PVP rank because they prefer farming) are not as much a target as high skilled PVP players. It’s kinda the same with the old titles, many players want to shoot you, this will create a lot of fun and competition on the maps – for good and weaker hunting players the same way.
- I’ve thought about the disadvantages aswell, here are a few ways to solve them:
Points need to get lower for inactivity, this way you can’t just “camp” with your high points and only pick fights when you have a good group or want to fight once in a month.
There should be a maximum and a minimum.
If you reached a minimum you should get locked for making and taking points for 2-4 weeks (not less!). The reason behind this is that bot-users will have a bad rating even though their equipment will be good. So for regular players it would be very frustrating to be killed by someone with 1.000 points while you have 10.000 even though the equipment is the same.
How do you like the system? What else is there to consider?

• Bases:
Currently it's impossible to defend bases on full servers when ~10+ players attack. No matter how good your skill is, the base will get destroyed because attackers can come again and again. It's frustrating to defend a base for two hours and lose it within 2 minutes.
- Suggestion: One module needs to be shot from the base before the core can be attacked. This way the defending players will have a chance to jump to the map when receiving the warning in the log (no need to sit there for hours and hours anymore maybe). Additionally the chance of replacing the module in that way will help the base to recover when winning a fight.
- It should not be possible to come with 15 people and kill the base just by using a venom ability and running from players with emp cloak. The abilitys should not be blocking the shild recharge from a base. Elseway block Venom/Cyborg Abilitys to bases completely.
- There should be a benefit when a clan manages to open a base for longer than only 30 minutes. Defending a base for 60 minutes is harder than 2x30 minutes, there should be a reason for people to open bases for more than the minimum. If you add a message for everyone in the log when a base is opened (not if automatically reopens) for longer than 1 hour it should be worth getting 90 minutes of defending time on the base instead for the 60 minutes.

• 1v1:
Create a possibility to challenge a friend to a 1v1 on the Battle-Arena. This way you will have less waiting time and don’t have to make 1v1 somewhere in the corner of a map.

• QZ-Gate:
The quarantine gate could be buffed to reward players with 1000 Seprom. Currently the gate is being played only for the quests or when players are in need of a bit oil. However many players don’t need the oil anymore but everyone needs Seprom for Lasers.

• Global Chat:
For servers like Global Europe 1 I keep asking myself, why isn’t there a global chat open for all users? It would help the communication between the players and decrease the separation of nations within these servers. E.g. at times when only a few users are online to chat with or when I am looking for a few more Hades mates, why can’t it be possible to ask in an English chat, atm I’m restricted to the german one. The company chats are kinda dead, so you got a replacement there. Create an actual “global” chat for global users. Add a hint that English is mandatory, most of the CM speak a little English anyways, so there you go: More activity and networking within the communities, which helps the game. The players who are not interested in a global chat are free to stay out and remain in their country chats.

• Daily Quests:
New Balance needed. Rewards for lower ones are not worth the effort for any player stage now. Go for 10; 20; 30; 40 Tetrathin and add 400; 500; 600; 800 Uridium to the Quests to make them count more. Getting players into the game on a daily basis should help the game.

• Gates:
Reduce cooldowns for the gate waves from 15 to max 5, also between the spawns it should be adjusted. There is no need to wait so long for streuner, lordakia etc. in the alpha gate.

• Kuiper Gate:
Give one random kronos gate part as reward from the kuiper gate. Also more ammunition as reward (add x3?) would be fair. Buff the gates anything, special GG rewards system is not helpful and should be reworked.

• x-1 map:
NPC are totally useless. I create an account and go on x-2 after the first few minutes. There is nothing to collect or shoot on the map for players – ever again. Normally you leave it as fast as possible with a Jump-CPU. It could be more than only a parking space for Galaxy Gates and a cage for died players. Why not put X-2 Aliens to that map, X-3 Aliens to X-2 etc. and put new ones on x-4. Maybe you can think of some other usecase for the map? Also a few Uber NPC could appear on normal maps! The old maps should be a joyful place for new members and not only bots. Therefor:

• New Players Protection:
I hear that a lot in the game and forums and have experienced it by myself. You should use the opportunity to help the new players in the game soon, because there are a lot starting at the moment. New Players (- lvl 14) should have protection on all their company’s old maps, maybe even on x-5, (deal with botters in advance to avoid exploit). By that they have peace and don’t get frustrated when being killed so often. If they play along better players will have more to shoot, because they bring friends etc. Like I said, it’s an Eco-System, waters are currently overfished.

• Uridium-Purchases:
All start kits suck. The offers need to buffed a lot to make them attractive compared to the Helix prices. Besides Best Offers (Laser and shild packages) are – sorry I use the word way too often, but here it comes – useless. Let me do the math, 30€ for 10Lf3 with lvl 5 upgrades. In Helix you get 360.000 Uridium for the same price which makes it 36 Lasers (51 with rebate). And you are not limited to a special item here, so please rethink these offers. The code you had in your game recently for the battlestar players would be fine stuff to have for ~30€. Bring them into the game with offers like these and premium and following payments will help you much more in the long end.
The game has grown a lot which makes it necessary to check on these things on a regular basis.

• (useless) Quests:
First of all compliments to the new 100 series and Blacklight quests. They are mostly very fun to play! Doing the most points by playing for it on the map is the best way, 1000x the same gate - borrrring. A few quests though are insane, e.g. the uber devo dmg or 1000 battleray is not fun at all. Quests like “Miner Madness” are completely dumb to be honest. The reward should be 100x higher compared to what you need to do there. In general don’t just update the numbers, kill 100x behemoth, kill 1000x behemoth – what comes next? Quest should be fun! The 50 Attend and 100 Impulse quest in 30 minutes I liked that a lot. You need a good group for it, have it prepared, play it as a team, think it ahead and have adrenaline while doing it.

• Localization:
There is a lot to improve, generally we need less blablabla and more 1-view information. For one the Cyborg Information says: “The Cyborg is engineered from the fundamental design ethics of the Goliath, combined with forms found in the insect world to give it added bite! This ship also has the following abilities: 10% extra damage.” This Text is nonessential and misses important information. What Users need is this: “16 Laser slots, 16 Shild slots, bonus HP, Venom Ability (what it does), +10% damage.” There is no need for Tooltips of any design at all.
- Numbers like “du hast 2576000000 Erfahrungspunkte erhalten (for german)” are easier to read when “.” or “,” are used: 2.576.000.000. It’s already implemented this way in English Version, please adapt for all languages.
- Why does it show on every ship in the Hangar how many Drones, Laser ammo, repair and jump credits, Booty Keys etc. I have? It doesn’t belong there. Users need an easy to understand description of the s h i p, when clicking on it.

• Music:
is by default way too loud, I don’t know many guys who like to play the game with the music. A few people said they prefer the old music, make them chose.

• Lordakium Spore:
Don’t make the Lordakium Spores drop cargo boxes. There is too much stuff on the map and the P.E.T. is busy with collecting the 5x Endurium etc. (especially in Hades).

• MHH:
The Mega Happy Hour advertising window appearing whenever you click on a Page in the interface – annooooying.

• Ranking Bugs:
http://prntscr.com/m9qahu - did they play the gate alone in 3 minutes or what is that supposed to mean? Needs to be checked for all gates. A cleaned leaderboard would support the competition between the players and create more fun when going for it. At the moment players will think like “impossible to get top 10 so I don’t care about it”.

• P.E.T.
AI-ECO1 (fuel protocol) needs to be buffed to be usefull;
- AI-E1 (evasion protocol) fits no purpose after C-GM2 gear has been launched. Maybe it’s possible to put a lower evasion bonus for players in like 0,75%. For fights it’s only laser protocols to pick now;
- G-TRA1 (sell gear): with the upcoming levels there should be a faster speed to get the P.E.T. back helping. Selling Bonus Percentages can be lowered or removed therefor;
- Kamikaze Gear should be working regardless of the players or PET HP. Nobody is using the -repair function anymore. Sometimes the PET is not exploding, has higher hitpoints and needs to be shut to get the gear working again.

• Shop:
Change the pictures from BO-2/BO-1 Boosters slightly so they can be differed from each other easier. The same looking pictures might confuse a few players. In the game there are also 5x the same icons listed (DMG B01, my B02, group B02, DLB1, DLB2 all of them look exactly the same).
- Put REP-1 out of shop, everyone will pick REP-2 for Credits instead or own it already when starting to play.
- Put a new column for CPUs (stuff you can equip to your ship), currently there is too much stuff at “extras” which makes it hard to find something, especially with the bad interface scrolling.
- Lower the price for SL04-CPU. Nobody is buying that stuff for 250.000 Uridium. Maybe for ~40.000 people would think about it instead of getting it from the auction house. Buff the other ones to 3,5,7 and make them available for Credits. 150.000 Uridium for 6x slot CPU is just ridiculous. Maybe the prices made sense 10 years ago but are not applicable today.
- No need 5 different speed generator model types for Credits, 6,8,10 would be good balancing.
- No need for LF1 laser or MP-1 (replaced completely by SL-01), I guess not a single pilot uses them. Sometimes less is more. Putting all stuff together there is just too much trash in the shop which makes it confusing for new players. Delete the items from the shop. The items can be left for the players to avoid conflicts with removing them. Polish the game like this.
- Move the ugly ships (S-OS 01, D-Raven, Y-Ronin, G-ignite etc.) and put them to the other cosmetic useless stuff.
- Buff Credit-ships, currently they seem to be completely out of the game. E.g. BigBoy could have 3x the HP and +20 Speed and would still be bad.
- Total layout change of the hangar would be good in the future, too.

• DD-M01:
should be coming more often at event rewards. Currently it has been almost impossible to farm them, that only 1 day for collecting ice-rockets last year was too short for every player to have a chance!

• Logfiles:
Make use of logfiles, crafting recipes for ammunition (DM-Mines?) e.g.

• Other Resolutions:
Game and page is not ready for WQHD or 4K yet.

• Startpage:
On the “Upcoming events” list there should be listed events that are currently running, too. This well help e.g. when I want to look for how long the Icys will be there while I’m playing this.

• Events:
I hardly recommend to rethink events like TDM, Evasion-Gate etc.

• Skilltree:
Lower the Seprom cost after a reset of the skilltree. Since it's not possible to farm Seprom anymore and send it into the Skylab this should be considered. Or maybe make the Seprom in the ship cargo count for putting Skilltree points.

________________________________________
Sorry for the long post, here is a potato

 

-1 from me, actually -5 because I don't like it...

NO! I'm kidding! I'm not one of them, I'm not a judge.

Contribution to this thread:

Chat System (also related to the Resolution change)
Implementation of Font Size selection: Small, Medium, Large.

I think the font size is 3 compared to the forum.
I find it too small to read to the point I'm gonna be nearsighted soon
Same thing can be applied to the whole in-game UI, or just make it a little bigger.

Designs (also related to Centurion)
Remove any idea of designs with passives from the game.

I thought we were done doing designs with passives. We even get the old designs (Citadel, Spearhead, Aegis) separated in new Ships. Do I have to look at the color of a ship to determine which strategy I'm gonna use in a fight?

Name change
Limitation regarding this feature.


Can we change community before making any change on game? (joke)

I'll read the whole thread carefully later and see if I can add anything else.
Also some ideas would need their own thread to discuss the details, with solutions and whatnot.

 

good ideas!

 

Thanks for taking the time to mention just about everything "annoying" in the DarkOrbit and writing it all, I hope the developers of the game at least work on and improve on a few of the things mentioned.

 

Really great ideas! Hoping they get through!

 

Nice

 

Overall a lot of great ideas improving the game and making it more valuable to play in groups.
Also I like how you keep a good balance between changes for small/big and PvP/PvE players.
And you made a lot of your thoughts on the group elements of the game which is also important imo.

 

I think 90% of what he writes makes sense! Especially with the groups of boosters that really have to go because it is too blatant with the damage and alone you can not do anything anymore

GOOOOOOOD IDEAS!!!!

 

Currently, I've seen some REALLY ridiculous attempts of a SINGLE UFE Cyborg capable of single handedly solo'ing a single clan battle station, because the repair module isn't working as intended (it did not repair the battle station main hull when no one was attacking for more than 1 minute). Using Ring formation to maximize shield power and quickly pop out his PET to use as a "meatshield" to briefly distract the battle station turrets when retreating. It took him roughly 10-15 minutes, but he did it.

...yeah, clan battle stations need some rework. Like give immunity to the main hull until every modules in the station are destroyed first.

 

Thanks everyone for the 1 up and your Feedback.
I translated the thread to german now and implemented your Feedback already. Keep on going!

 

There are lots of good ideas that have been explained.
We must review rank system, actually we need only honors for a good rank but we have some possibilities to make a better rank system.

EP and honor should be what counts the least. Also few years ago there was five 3 stars per company (europe 1) now only one. You should to increase the percentage of player who can have best ranks. We are not many like few years ago.

Please do publicity, we need new players and get them a easy way to be competitive in this game.

Thanks

 

What about when in full-screen mode and your cursor touches the top of the map, dropping down that big black bar of advertising that blocks your vision for 5 seconds! That's just pure aggravation when you're in combat!

 

nice ideas,

for me all the new ships and stuff havent done a lot for me, currently everyone is using the cyborg.

the most fun i have had in ages is when the first lot of new ships came out, as in the venom etc.

as the cyborg is pretty much the vemon mkII, is there any chance of doing the same with the spectrum and others?