Sean Murray's Reveals MAY 2018 (PvP Disscussion)

That’s not happening…pretending that people will all choose to obey someone else for no particular reason is silly. People will want to play their games and do whatever they want to do…the notion of “governance” and “politics” in a space like NMS is silly at best. Some may choose to go help against a griefer if they feel like it but at the end of the day nobody will listen to anybody beyond what they feel like doing or would do regardless. We really need to stop pretending this is more than it is.

Honestly, I disagree. Just see the Galactic Hub for example - who ever thought that there would one day such a massive group of people creating / exploring / sharing a part of the universe?

Also, people love to roleplay. There definitely will be things emerging which are bigger than just a small group of people.

Freelancer still has an active (modding) community which is creating groups with strong hierarchy. Why would it be different in NMS? Sure, not immediately after the update, but given time, something will arise. Even more, many things will arise.

Of course, it is not a given. Yet I think it is a quite probable possibility.

Yeah i got you fam. one sec

Will edit in with pic

People can choose to live near one another because they benefit…I just want to unlock all the decorations related to visiting player bases, some of which are bugged right now, others want to go harvest stuff from others farms, others still like to benefit from the discoveries of others because they’re not very good at finding stuff for themselves like S class stuff and so on…but there is no such thing as any form of power or structure. It’s not like anyone has to do something they don’t want to or otherwise wouldn’t do regardless because someone says so. It’s a system that right now doesn’t allow for friction. And if PvP were unrestricted many of those people have no interest in dealing with griefers or let’s play pretend government where they listen to someone else and go fight the griefers they have no interest in dealing with.

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Well, no point in arguing that. It’s always a question of cost / benefit.

Still, we shouldn’t underestimate the player’s readiness to build up bigger societies. Someone definitely will do it, and others will definitely follow.

Anyhow, only time will tell. But I am very excited at the thought of it.

It’s ok dude I got it now, thanks anyway :+1:

There is no cost and there would be no benefit if PvP is unrestricted…pretending that the current hubs would be anything other than war zones if PvP is unrestricted is silly. Because there would be griefer groups too that would come in numbers…actually they’d have a massive advantage and practically always win. Why? Because the game engine isn’t without limits…only so many player characters will be able to be rendered at once so if the griefers coordinate and come in numbers the one they attack would be literally incapable of getting help…at best reinforcements would be orbs that do nothing.

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There’s a few technical issues that I think some people are not considering fully.
Most seem to assume an MMO-type game, where most of the world resides on a server. I wouldn’t really expect that, I’m assuming that HG are building on top of what they already have.

Which means that you should probably think of NEXT more like a single-player game with co-op mode than an MMO, with some sharing features. Pretty much like what we have now, just more developed.
So you would be able to invite people to form a temporary “party”, which would be coupled together relatively tightly I imagine, probably through a server-negotiated P2P connection. If they even need their own server… the current system, uses platform-provided APIs that negotiate all that jazz. Basically, Steam is the server that connects you together right now (if you’re on PC), because it has all the features to match users and exchange live data between them already built in. This is also the reason why GoG-players like me don’t actually have that feature yet. They didn’t get the GoG-API to cooperate in time.
There is absolutely nothing in this entire scheme that would require HG to maintain their own multiplayer servers.
Then there’s the “meet by accident”-scenario, which is already possible, but is technically not that different. The matching API is in fact pretty straightforward when compared to arena-style shooters that have to match players based on availability, achievements, instance capacity etc. All you need is a position-based match with a lobby that still has free capacity. Instancing the lobbies could get a bit complicated when, say, four entire parties happen to meet that already carry their own lobbies with them, none of which might be large enough to accommodate every single player, but I’ve solved worse in my time developing web-services. I don’t know the API’s in question and how much flexibility they provide, but this is not something I’d expect trouble with.

T hen there’s the shared features, which admittedly make things a bit more complicated with the new system. From the way it sounded, a “party lobby” can share the worldspace in a way that lets them “own” things (for lack of a better word) in their lobby, so you could for example build a base together. As the system is now, even if you share the space with the owner of a base you’re visiting, this does not mean that you can start dismantling his base by deleting blocks, because you don’t “own” it.
Even if that feature is introduced for lobbies that are explicitly formed to accommodate a party (which would be invite only, and possibly also mitigate things like friendly fire), there is no reason to believe why another party lobby that happens to come nearby and “merge” (I don’t think they would actually merge… I’d solve the problem by simply nesting lobbies) would share the same priviledges. They would only be able to interact with the base as a visitor, not jump in and build on it (much less take it apart).
The same will probably go for resources laying around. There won’t really be a “shared microverse” like e.g. in elite dangerous. Again, local changes will be synchronised inside a lobby, and if two party lobbies meet, possibly between them too. But that’s it. Somebody else could walk right by you like a ghost and notice nothing at all if the lobby’s full. Just like he wouldn’t be able to watch you build your base in real time, because changes that actually do affect the global scope will be synchronised only at certain points (right now when saving, but it’s possible they’ll have to find something more clever to prevent loss of data when several players own the same worldspace). This synchronisation could be done by something as simple as a REST-API, of which you could run a perfectly scalable one on Amazon Web Services for between 20 and 100 bucks a month, depending on the load. With 100 dollars being my upper-end estimate necessary to run something like this for even a well-played NMS API. And yes, I work with AWS every day, so it’s not just something I pulled out of my but. For 100 dollars you can easily run something that is capable of processing a few hundred requests per second at peak loads if you design it properly.
It’s possible that they’re already doing something similar. Dunno, I’d have to log my network traffic to find out. But I think so far they might be using platform APIs exclusively.

Anyways, the main takeaways from all this:

  • You’ll probably have pretty good control over who can do what with the stuff you own.
  • There won’t be a fully shared universe, only some shared features within the universe.
  • Sharing of local changes will only happen inside lobbies. If someone steals all the corazygen from your base, your game probably won’t ever know. Synchronising stuff like that would already mean central time keeping.
  • Speaking of timekeeping, it is well imaginable that time and weather will only be synchronised in party lobbies. Either that, or they’ll controll it via procedural algorithm seeded with the current miliseconds since epoch received by a timekeeping server. That would guarantee a synchronisation of any time-dependent changes without even having to share any data.
  • HG won’t have to maintain an expensive server infrastructure. The setup I described here is perfectly sufficient to achieve what SM described, and costs only a bit of pocket change to run (though I don’t know how steam and PSN bill the use of their APIs… seeing that players actually pay a subscription for PSN, my guess would be that at least on the playstation the devs aren’t billed at all).
  • Nothing in this setup requires any kind of online connectivity to play the game on your computer. There’s no reason to believe that there won’t be an offline mode.
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Imagine a game mode where…

One planet, one section of a planet, everyone responds on that one planet and everyone is on permadeath mode. The name of the game is basicly “hunger games”. Last one to survive wins. Lol.

Just a fun game I think I would play as an optionional “mini-game” aside from the actual game.

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Well…not necessarily. I would wager a guess that Creative mode would have full multiplayer without PVP and building cities/ super colonies would fall exactly in line with the style of gameplay which was intended with that mode. This would expand into people building and working together for larger organizations. I guess the benefit in this case would be fun with others.

For other modes, you have an excellent point with the numbers game with what the game would support and people trying to exploit that. I think the 4 player squad will help fix this as a limitation. Also if Unification day or the Spacing Guild gatherings have shown me anything about this, a second lobby of 16 opens before the first lobby is full. There would be a good chance that not all of the exploiting team would be visible at the same time. But who knows? Its all speculation at this point.

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yeah sorry, got caught up in IRL : P. Looks interesting right! The new… whatever they are.

Crusiers?

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Creative mode is pointless…nothing has any purpose…everything is free, nothing costs anything so building anything is pointless…there’s literally nothing to do…ever…because there is never any reason to do anything. If they leave PvP unrestricted in all the other modes other than creative as you suggest the game would be mostly ruined. All creative is good for is planning a base to see how it fits with the build cap before you spend resources and time to do it for real in a real game mode.

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I understand. Creative mode isn’t my thing either for the same reason, but not everyone finds it pointless.

My wife enjoys building and the artistic approach with creative mode. Building her ideas quickly without having to stop to gather more resources is the benefit.

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Yes! Can’t wait to see what they are/can do!!

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What I’m saying is that forcing people between creative mode or unrestricted PvP would be a terrible decision…it would not matter for anything…

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Thank you, yes! This! I really hope it’s a P2P setup… But then people will complain about lag, netcoding and demand dedicated servers… In this ideal scenario, anyways, I hope we still get to see “unsynced” players, above the 16 as orbs, too. Even if we stay locked at a “lobby-system” of maximum 2 VS 2 in co-op and PvP sinced gameplay.

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There is nothing inherently slower in a P2P connection than in a central server as long as you don’t have too many simultaneous connections (synchronisation can get a bit hairy in a system like that). That said, I have no idea about the architecture of for example steam, much less about PSN or whatever goes on on the X-Box. I would assume they employ something like a messaging service that helps with state synchronisation, but that’s not very different in concept than a peer-to-peer connection where one machine is designated master except that you avoid the roundtrip between master and negotiator.

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Set course for the dagobah system!

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Perhaps they should have advanced online features put into a new game mode.

Could be an interesting social media experiment like Facebook wrestling with self-governance and the rest of the world. Where will it all end?
I remember reading that book Lord of the Flies. The game could be a very interesting science on players’ changing habits.

I think though we all have to remind ourselves that it is a game after all. A complete fantasy. I like the idea though of a game that has no boundaries. It is a vast universe so we can all escape from what we don’t want to take part in. I’m sure there’ll be safe zones and Hello Games will be able to prevent abuse of game play somehow, for whatever reason.

Something like Lord of the Rings Online multi-play or Guild Wars works well in solo or multi-play. Both can be fun. NMS will be an amazing game. Be a hero or a pirate or a zoologist or total waste of space lol whatever something for everyone.

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