4 Aug

Ask the Players

Category: General

Something I’ve learned (possibly the hard way), over the past few years, is that playing games in a development environment is absolutely no substitute to playing the games against other people, which, at the end of the day, makes a lot of the decisions made personal. I can sit here for hours and say “Yep, they would like this”, but I’ve never really stopped to ask the question “But would they?”.. So, with this in mind, I’m hoping to extend an olive branch back to the community with some posts known as ‘Ask the Players’, where I chuck out general ideas, and you form them into something a little more specific, not only to see if we are on the same page, but to allow the creativity flow both ways. There may be some ideas which your thousands of game play hours may be able to contribute and have taken on board.

To allow for everyone’s voices to be heard, i wont be asking for technical implementations, or for users to produce code (I’ll be handling that myself!), but instead just general descriptions or if you’re feeling creative, a few images, and with a little luck, I’ll be able to generate something which meets most peoples need.

Obviously, I have full discretion on the features / functionality implemented, and may not be able to give feedback on every suggestion, and you may not see every suggestion plugged into the next produced game either, but I’ll endeavour to have the best suggestions implemented in some form or another, so when the new games come along, we’ll have something which is intuitive, accessible and easy to play for everyone.

The first ‘Ask the Players’ will be coming in a couple of days, so stay tuned!

Posted Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Filed Under Category: General
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8

Responses to “Ask the Players”

Crshburn || August 4th, 2008 at 11:35 pm

I’d love to see tracking of ip tools installed, proxies not allowed, smtg that removed doubt of multi. players. IMHO this has been a major downfall for DG. No accusations, no finger pointing, I just know the availability of this stuff, it needs to be able to be done, 2 cents worth, thats all.

Convertors implemented again.

Someway to get something similar to sector wars back, as the v2 code is now, by t1000 the game’s outcome is pretty predictable, by t1500 it’s pretty much done for smaller alliances, unless the smaller alliance is very “seasoned”.
Trying to say that when travel was different and sectors had to be “conquered” the first 600-1000 ticks was a game in itself then there was the second half where the stronger fought.

FrostyCoolSlug || August 4th, 2008 at 11:51 pm

Well, as far as it stands, DG is somewhat in the back of our minds as far as new games go, we have a few other plans coming before, and hope to see them come into their own before re-focusing on DG. When DG returns, there are going to be some quite major changes to some huge components of the game, we’re going to spend a lot of time re-evaluating things like navigation and combat (maybe), as many elements as we can find, and hopefully fine tune them.

The battle against multis is always going to be a hard one, people will always fine new and unique ways to try and slip around detection, and as such, we’ve dedicated a lot of time to easier multi-detection, possible ways to track people down easily and take care of them. We’re hoping to implement a lot of these methods in the upcoming games.

We’re also working on removing botting as a problem as well, again, we’ve been having long discussions about how to simply prevent bots from working, and keep it that way, so it’s all in-hand.

Hopefully these techniques will be put into practice, and it’ll become much harder for people to cheat!

Whilibarj || August 5th, 2008 at 11:13 am

A generic point about this kind of games (so it does not only apply to DG).

Economic development. I don’t have any idea nor solution off my mind right now, but as soon as you get to about 20 planets in DG, you spend way too much time queuing stuff on every planet. The more planets, the more painful it gets, and sadly this time invested does not provide much benefit.

It takes so long that it makes the game unplayable after turn 1000. Development requires way too much “human time”.

Imca || August 5th, 2008 at 7:45 pm

another thing to make people les interested in cheating is a limited babysitting option and a vacation mode. i know a lot of people dont like it when other players do babysit but if there is a supported limited option for players to let other players handle their account that would save a lot of trouble. a limited babysit account would also give clear bounderys about what you can do with someone elses account. the limit is up to you of course but it would make things more clear then they used to be in dg.

Mordread || August 6th, 2008 at 12:20 am

I think the problem that Whili said can be easy fixed… We just need “repeat” option in planet queues. (Could be not only planet but something else depending on the next game)

Supremo || August 6th, 2008 at 8:59 am

Hm… i’m not so fond with a babysitting system for whatever game, that can promote a lot of unfair gameplaying, like having a really good player playing on behalf of N players, and instead of fighting a group of N people, you’re gonna end up fighting a group of 1.

I agree with Crshburn thought, cheating is a real downfall for any game, and should be seen and treated more seriously.

About developments, i’d like to complement also something from Crshburn. A game, to be better then awesome, has to have that special “thing”. In DG, it was (for me) the navigation from the old code, more important then what ships you do, or buildings or limits or whatever, is how the game playing engine works. Whatever you do, make sure you add more tactical skill requirement.

Best example of a “downgrade” in DG for me, was this, the sector fighting (what i used to call the dogfight) was much more tactical and required a lot more thinking and study then it does now. Now, you have all systems equal same ETA’s inside system everywhere and so on. Just giving you the example from DG, but you can apply this principle to any game we’re talking about.

beurk || August 10th, 2008 at 9:00 pm

about babysitting: i think that if you allow a limited access to other people’s accounts like it was suggested by imca it has to be limited in a way that allows the “babysitted” player to have an advantage like ongoing growth but no advantage for the babysitting player like the ability to use other player’s fleets/weapons/whatever for his own attacks or his defense.
in dg terms that could mean people can queue buildings and ships (production) for you, but nothing else. especially no fleet movement, invasions or even kicking from the alliance.

Dolon || August 12th, 2008 at 5:32 pm

Hmm, from the sound of things, the new game is going to be a lot less tactical than the old. Fewer ships, no research, it sounds a lot like a game of Risk with more players. While I agree that there were aspects to DG’s combat system that were overly complex (especially when that part of the code changed every round, and once or twice in the middle of a round), but please don’t go so far in the other direction that the possible tactics are so limited as to make it dull.

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