[UI] Skylab Overhaul

The skylab needs a overhaul in 3 important areas:

1. Increase the levels. Not by a whole lot, but maybe 5 or 10. A Non-premium member can currently transfer enough prom and sep until there is none in storage. This means that around 5000-6000 is sent every 12 hours. This will make it more likely for players to want premium (more prom to sell and sep to use) by making it impossible for a non-premium member to transfer and sell/use all available resources.

2. Add palli to the skylab. I've read a couple threads about this and i agree that it should not be a huge amount at the maximum level, somewhere between 1000 - 2000 in a 24 hour cycle so the player would get extra energy of between 66-133 a day. Many have complained because they put in hours and days at the 5-3 map but 5-3 is becoming more and more dangerous as many UFEs patrol it. New players are already put off by almost everything in this game, it needs to be tuned a little. Plus this benefits all, not just the noobs.

3. Bring back the transfer to ship. I dont personally use it but I've seen quite a few threads where people mention this. There is not a huge reason not to have it.

Conclusion: If you institute at least the first two ideas, it will force a non-premium member, and if the levels increase enough, even a premium member, to make harder choices. If each player has to choose between prom, sep, and palli, and what amounts, it creates the bottle neck of what to send. Notice i did not say decrease the time it takes to transfer. This will give each player more incentive to work towards individual goals and make the best use of time. It will force players to consider the next best alternative when transferring and help new players to get to any sort of place in the game where they can fight (or at least put up a fight). The game needs to attract and keep new players and this is one area where it would be easiest to do so.

 

Also, I forgot to include boxing in the equation since I've read how many people are against palli in the skylab. Boxing is only so effective as it takes 1300-2000 spins to do a 100 piece galaxy gate. If you box on a PvP map for an hour (no double box upgrade) you MIGHT get 60-100 energy. That is also a large reason for all the botters.
What everyone fails to realize is that even if you add palli to the skylab, even in large amount that equal 100-200 extra energy a day, players will STILL box and go to 5-3. Players will STILL buy premium. Players will STILL buy energy. Just because you have a little of something does not mean players will suddenly stop doing what they are doing. We all live in capitalist societies, we want more and we want it now. We want to be better than others and build faster, tougher ships. Nothing will really change, people will still spend money, people will still complain about the 'work' they put in and fight any sort of change, and the game will move on.
Also, as noted above, if theres too much prom, sep, and palli in the skylab, players have to choose what is more important to them. Just because you have the option to send 1500 palli doesnt mean every player will. For some, large amount of credits for the auction house or sep for their lasers and rockets will take precedence.

 

1. Why increase the levels by anything? If anything, decrease the time it takes for them to fill up. Seprom takes over 48 hours to refill when empty at level 20. It should take 20 hours to really be useful. There could be several reasons why it is so slow but the new players are encouraged to get it and put it on the lasers so they can hit the missions harder. With this, they will always run out on the ship, and get skylab will always be struggling.
2. Pally in the skylab at 2k max is not a bad idea. 2k is really a tease since you are going to spend hours in the maps collecting pally or boxing for spins. Having it in the skylab would be nice, but you should realize that choosing what to send for a non-prem players, as you pointed out, would not be that big of a deal. With the stats of the skylab limits, you just rotate when you are sending different ore. With a goli, start the day with 1500 pally and 1500 seprom, with cargo doubler. Send prom when that comes in and go half and half on prom and seprom before bed. So not that big of a decision.
3. We don't need transfers to the skylab. It is self sufficient.
4. Please remove your justification for the botters. We know why they do it, but its still not right... And I am sure every player will attempt to send the free pally if it becomes available. As you pointed out, we are all capitalist. We will take anything that is free.

 

The transfer to ship was stopped because it was abused and exploited, adding palli to the skylab would be good but the amounts you could make and send should be restricted so that players can't spam the skylab as an easy way to build gates. The levels at the moment are OK but an increase in storage space for sep and a reduction in transfer time for sep is needed.

 

I like #1 and #2, number 3 is not very important because it really has no use...

 

id add to this but really all i gotta say is +1 to what PSK said

 

increase the refinery speed sounds good to me.

 

My skylab is at full capacity and being premium sending to a Citadel, I can only send 4660 Seprom and Promerium every 24 hours as the Skylab has problems keeping up with this transfer on a daily basis. I also complete 2 of the daily quests by transfering Prometium and Duranium to the ship for those 2 quests. So I agree we need to be able to increase the level of our Skylab, I do not think it would be wise to give the Pallidium collection to the Skylab as there are too many who would find a way to exploit this and even insta-send this to their ship and generate even more spins than from using uridium to buy the spins.

Biggest issue again is the Insta-Send option which would allow a player to send all 3 items maximum transfer one right after the other and if using Premium and Rebate would cost the same as 25 non-discounted spins, in my case (and it depends on what storage level the Pallidium collector would have) a full transfer of Palladium would give me 621 spins for the cost of 25.

The reason it takes so long to produce the Seprom is because all other resources are restricting the production of Seprom. A fully operational Skylab that has had all materials depleted (like mine) collects enough Promerium, Endurium, and Terbium to refine into Prometid and Duranium with nothing left in storage. Prometium is refined at a speed where you only create storage of 2-4 pieces of Duranium and Prometid per day otherwise it is consumed in the refining of Prometium and Seprom only leaves an increase of Prometium at the rate of 191 pieces an hour for transfer to the ship (which is 2 pieces more than the Seprom refined) so basically if you turned your collectors off and allowed the refineries to deplete the stores of these minerals and allowed the Prometium to deplete the Prometid and Duranium refineries and transferred all of the Promerium and Seprom to the ship, then turned on your collectors in a day you would see the Prometid and Duranium store 2-4 rocks each, the Prometium would make 4584 and Seprom would make 4536. My Citadel takes 9320 with cargo expansion and Pilot Bio along with the Premium increase of cargo every 9 hours and 19 minutes, so I transfer when I get up and before I go to bed. I do not make a choice of what to send as I have emptied my Skylab of all materials in one transfer (except I turn off the Duranium for 3 minutes to create the 1000 units of Prometid needed for "Earn Credits" quest of daily quests and buy 1 credit robot to collect Prometium for "Prometium Deficiency" quest requiring 5000 Prometium. The storage of Prometid allows me to generate Endurium and Terbium which I deplete on my second transfer for credits only (no upgrade/boost of generators or weapons). Once a week I turn off the Seprom Refinery to build my Prometium storage so I can transfer 4660 units twice a day and then Seprom and the other ore alternate for boosting and credits and if I did not allow just over 24 hours for Seprom to allow a full half I fill the gap with primary ore to do a full transfer.

As I pointed out I empty my Skylab everyday with one transfer with the Citadel split between Promerium and Seprom and then have one transfer of collector material and Promerium for pure credits.

So my opinion is the SkyLab needs to be leveled up 5 more levels, to prevent the ability to empty out the Seprom with 1 transfer a day (max storage is 9079 transfer is 9320). The big item to remember is the level 20 upgrade of Seprom was a VERY LONG upgrade period and anything more would be even longer still. Adding a Palladium Collector I feel would be abused, but it would have to have a SMALL Storage capacity (maybe 3000 maximum/200 spins) but would give the possibility to build a gate a week for no effort, remembering this is only traded in the 5-2 map and does restrict cargo space till exchanged. But it would be something to aid the noobs to get their ship stronger and allow them to get UFE equipment faster (without having to BUY it) thus maybe keeping some of them around a little longer.

 

I think they need to get rid of the skylab bug that lets people put extreme amounts of sep on their ship in a day before anything is done with skylab. Imagine if pally was put in there and the bug worked on it that would really screw up DOs economy.

sep is good where it is the benefit of it is so huge that to have more is more hurtful than helpful so i got to disagree with the sep part. i think ubers should drop sep in their cargo put us back to the old days you want to hunt with the best stuff work for it.

prom dont care double it if you want its worthless credits blah npc grinding is all its good for

love the idea about pally 1 to 2 k a day would be cool as hell to help with the hundreds of gates you have to do but fix the exploit first. hmm maybe too much though think on the ammo you get from 100 spins this could be another reason for people just to log in to do skylab and not go on map might be good if pally was linked to an activity counter the more active you are in the maps the more bonus pally you'll have in skylab in the morning. This would fight the population problem and give a good incentive for noobs to take the bashings they get every 5 mins knowing they will get more pally if they stay at it and deal with the imbalance.

 

Man I don't understand the problem with ur skylabs but I take 7k sep almost every day from mine.
Do u guys use the production robots in the prom, edu and ter collectors?
I bought 84 for each and haven't had a shortage problem since.

 

What bug are you referring to I have not heard of a Bug effecting Seprom transfers. The Skylab only stores 9079 units and can only generate 4536 units a day so any extra being sent to or stored on ship would be impossible to get around. The massive amount of Sepped ammo is strictly from players that have applied that to their weapons and not shot it all up, this is not a bug or exploitation, just an inactive (in maps) player till they have enough sepped ammo to feel comfortable to go fight with.

As far as placing an activity meter on the Pallidium Collector, I feel this would be counter productive as this is a feature designed for the noobs and the UFE (again) would get the most benefit out of it as they are the most active hunting the noobs to death.

I, like Hades~Pôšëîdõn‡Tríp, send Skylab to my ship (also a Citadel) twice a day. I find the Seprom does not generate enough to send a complete split load of Prom and Sep so I have to send extra Prom or other resource to do the complete 9320 transfer once a day, and find I am shutting the Seprom refinery off for 3 days to build a full storage of Prom to be able to send it for credits twice a day which gives me about 21 days of transfers before I have to do it again (so like Hades~Pôšëîdõn‡Tríp said killing the Sep one day a week keeps the prom flowing smoothly).

The only good reason to provide Pallidium in the Skylab would be to allow lower level players the ability to build a FREE gate on a weekly basis.

Buying the robots just caused me to have the raw minerals in storage it never increased the production of the refineries. They produce according to the amount per hour they consume and the Prometid and Duranium produce more than can be consumed for Promerium and Promerium makes more than can be consumed by Seprom. If you are transferring EVERY DAY like Hades~Pôšëîdõn‡Tríp and myself are, we transfer more than the lab can generate in one load per day (our Citadels will accept 9320 per transfer and the Skylab only makes 9120 Prom and Sep/24 hour period) so doing this transfer TWICE a day we have to ship other ores to supplement the transfers, which comes from turning refineries off or buying a single CREDIT Robot for Prometium (which generates enough in storage to do over a years worth of the Daily "Prometium Deficiency" quest. And when we shut down the Duranium (for 3 minutes) to produce the Prometid (for Daily "Earn Credits" quest) we generate the extra Endurium and Terbium to ship for about a week of the 12 day cycle of the daily quests. We could also send more Promerium, if we wanted to, but this would cause us to shut down the Sep Refinery more often.

 

there is a bug that when you send sep to ship if done a certain way it will not deduct the sep from skylab but will be put on ship has to do with instasend so you send 9 k sep to your cat put on lasers and repeat never running out in skylab this has been confirmed to still be working about a month ago and has been this way for a long time. Ii wish DO would fix there are too many that don't care it they get banned if the gains are good enough i for one worked way to hard to try anything so foolish.

 

Thanks for all the replies and ideas everyone. Overall I would like to see the skylab increased for levels and palladium added as it would help newer players. For me, the whole goal was to see what people thought about the idea and try to apply those thoughts into ways to help newer players.

We all know this game needs more pilots flying around and its very difficult to attract and keep them in the current configuration. The main problem is helping them out without assisting the UFEs in destroying them. Of course UFEs can use anything a new player can use, I was just weighing the odds about doing things that would help the new players more. The added levels would not really help a new player much, but the palli would help them complete all the gates necessary to eventually challenge a UFE with some work (ok, maybe a lot of work). This palli addition would not help a UFE much as most UFEs have already done the gates they need and simply cruise around 5-3 looking for victims.

As far as sep goes, there will always be some bug, trick, or tactic to getting more onto your ship. That wont change and the amount the skylab produces only limits that to a certain number per day. Why not raise that number? If theres more sep available, there are more players flying around longer shooting things (each other). If we want a busy game, we need to increase the amount players want to play by providing more. Its like the law of demand in economics: The quantity of a good demanded (ex. sep) in a given time period increases as its price falls, ceteris paribus. The latin means 'all else being equal' or 'held constant', referring to only the one variable changing: price.

This is not to say everything should be free or super cheap. BP is a company and they need to generate income. Its just a suggestion to increase the amounts and add palli and stand back and watch the economy shift to its new equilibrium. Objectively, yes, people will use instant send to get more onto their ships. You can collect boxes for an hour or less and have enough to do that without premium and rebates. But that means another hour of pilots flying. It means more action on the maps. I would love to see more maps but guess what? There is not exactly a crowding problem to begin with! The game doesnt need to be easier, it just needs to have a little bit more available for a new player to figure out and use.

 

I really do find this idea interesting, how much a boost would the sep refineries get if upgraded further.

 

The fact that there was several seprom exploits and there are people on my server with more than 200 million seprom on lasers, it definitely needs an overhaul...