Coming in a few days (sorry for the delay!)

Please ass character eye color change !!!

 

Like many other people have stated, how will you differentiate between plants in the same sector? Everything else sounds awesome!

 

Usually Armor Pen systems are in place to prevent absurd number scaling, characters doing hundreds of millions of damage and monsters having billions of HP. It is a good system, but not a very intuitive one.

With all that people have to learn on Starbound, having this system is just one more barrier for the player who's used to the more common "basic number" system of most other games. So it was either do what you guys are doing, or have an entire tutorial on that aspect of the game (Armor Pen, Armor Level, Monster level).

But I absolutely love what you propose... it's probably the best!

Also, character resets are precisely why we're here. To test things from the ground up and see how it "feels" each time, until it's fine tuned into the perfect progression experience.

 

I completely agree that reducing the level and planet variation from 100 to 10 makes things a lot more manageable and logical to your user. You've also got to think about the long term. Let's say you add level 11 planets down the line, what about level 20 planets? How do your numbers hold up against the far-off level 50 planets down the road. You've already expressed concern about seeing absurd numbers, so this is something that has to be kept in line with the potential of growing the game.

I think keeping the levels somewhat "hidden" and using a system of "easy/medium/hard" is a good call. It keeps the worlds feeling somewhat mysterious "All i know, is these are difficult for me", it prevents players over-solving the game "I'm level 5, this guy is level 7, i can math out the results", but it also allows your players to feel powerful when they see monsters that used to be tough and are now easy. I do think that 3 is too few though, maybe 5 levels of threat to the player would allow for players to define "worthless, easy, about right, pretty tough, and gtfo". With three, I feel like it would be difficult to differentiate between "i can do this.. but it will be tough" and "i should NOT be here".

Now, with all of that being said, I'm not exactly keen on the removal of armor penetration entirely.

Stats like "armor penetration" or any other extra statistics on an item provide a wonderful "bonus" feeling. When itemization comes into play, I think of item-focused games like diablo clones or mmo games, these games have mastered the item generation system and give us a few great lessons to take from.

Stats that can be viewed as "bonus stats" give your players a sense of excitement. A bonus feels, well, like a bonus. We all love bonuses and they make your player feel more powerful.

Keep armor penetration in, but give it a less prominent place. Make it fit your item bonus space. There are quite a few ways to do this.

• flat bonus damage : this is a boring bonus, and while it could work doesn't make for any real interesting gameplay
• conditional bonus damage : A bit more interesting, and could manifest in a few ways
  • Bonus damage to monsters that are higher level (or difficulty) than the current player. This allows armor bonus to factor in during difficult fights, but not trivialize equal level content.
  • Armored enemies that are susceptible to armor penetration : provides somewhat interesting play of using certain weapons for certain encounter, but will leave your players feeling like they are forced to carry a small armory to be effective. Also has a large impact on enemy development as you'd have to build "schools of enemies" i.e. armored/non-armored/etc enemies. Thus making this a very expensive change to implement.
  • "True Damage" - I'm not sure how your enemy defensive stats work, but having a true damage component could work out well. This would be essentially that "armor penetration damage always connects, and bypasses defenses". this would work well when applied in small quantities and would generally only be significant in situations where, presumably, it matters. i.e. a weapon with 20 dps and 5 true damage is always guaranteed to do 5 damage at a minimum.

In general, I think the best option is bonus damage versus monster level. I would hugely advise against having damage output do less than listed weapon damage without an extremely readable way of seeing damage that was resisted and for what reason. This makes your players feel like they are being punished and unaware as to why.

It's important to make sure that your players don't feel needlessly hamstrung just for the sake of falsely inflating your content. I say keep armor penetration, but make it a bonus to your players versus a necessity.

Bonus stats are good. But only when they are a bonus.

 

Fully support the balance change. The AP change/armor change seem absolutely great. I support it so strongly I've been giving a thumbs-up at my desk for over an hour and can no longer feel my hand.

 

I think that will make a lot more sense to players. I didn't realize at first that a 28 damage weapon with penetration 5 would do 100 damage to a lvl 1 monster (all those axes I threw away )

As far as the reset is concerned, it is beta and we we told it would happen so all good.

Awesome job guys!

 

Yay I get to be odd man out here. I actually really liked the system that is currently in place with the armor penetration. It was quick enough to figure out what it was about and it made playing with friends of various progression levels that much easier. Friend working on a level 3 planet? Put on my level 3 stuff and go play without overpowering everything by having 400 hp while things hit me for 10 while I hit everything else for 900. Friend on a level 12 planet? Same deal. I could revisit any progression point without being overpowered if I so chose. It was also really simple to work with:

Armor pen >= planet level? You're good to go.
Your armor average >= planet level? Good to go.

That was all I needed to know to immediately gauge my effectiveness on a planet. I could simply glance at 3 numbers. That being said I am not particularly looking forward to this new system but I'm trying to reserve my judgement until after I see it in action.

 

What does a character wipe even mean? Do we lose everything? Everything in the ship? Everything in our possession entirely?

 

Actually, once you're playing with steel bars you CAN store pixels in a sense.
The last update lowered most of the pixel costs for the first tiers and even removed them for others. Once you're playing with steel, build yourself a refinery and simply store extra ores and bars you won't be needing. When you need pixels for crafting time refine what you need.

 

You lose your characters. You will have to create new ones and start over.

 

I agree that the current system needs a rework. I reserve judgement on this current system until I actually get to play as I don't have all the info yet. That being said the fact that we are getting a sweeping change in the first week of beta shows that they will make the changes they have to to make the game work. This may not be the last time something like this happens.

We were told Phase 1 changes would come fast and often and they are. Nothing is nailed down at this point so identify the pros note the cons in a civilized manner and we will come out of this with an amazing game

 

I like the changes but i am a bit confused as to how the worlds work. If my character gets wiped does my whole universe get wiped or do i just start on another random planet in sector alpha? SHould i start hoarding everything from my ship and inventory into chests and write down the coordinates of my home planet or is that useless work?

 

i think you should make guns more common tiyuri becuase i cant find ANY!!

 

I like this idea way better than the present way it works, though I do somewhat like the idea of having to visit multiple planets in a sector.

The character reset is kind of unfortunate, but hey, it is a beta. What did we expect, really?

 

Actually, once you're playing with steel bars you CAN store pixels in a sense.
The last update lowered most of the pixel costs for the first tiers and even removed them for others. Once you're playing with steel, build yourself a refinery and simply store extra ores and bars you won't be needing. When you need pixels for crafting time refine what you need.

 

I love starting a new character so the wipe will be good haha! How do we delete characters we have made?

 

I enjoyed having the armor penetration stat on the weapons as it added more variation to the weapons, I feel if it is going to be removed there should be more variables to make each weapon more or less viable in certain situations as well as different in their own right. Maybe having some have damage multipliers against flying monsters or some that add a bit of defense for example on some 2 handed weapons. This way it keeps the depth in how we can equip our character to match our play styles.

Some ideas to assist people into understanding their equipment:
1. (Just to point this out) There is an official wiki now, there is a link on the launcher
2. A portable station you can interact with, that you can put in two weapons side by side and it shows you how much damage it does to a basic monster. Another idea being you can change the 'monster' to see how well a weapon fairs due to their (possible) variances.
3. A quest that guides you to a log entry which briefly describes how variables work.

With regards to the 100 levels being condensed into 10 is something I don't agree or disagree with but I did like having it at 100 since it really helped the universe feel that much more vast.

Great to see the Dev's working hard and taking into consideration the players ideas!

 

Configurable keyboard or it didnt happen.

 

U start from 0 bro. EVERYTHING gets wiped. Just how betas work.

 

Sounds good to me. As is the vast majority of stuff you find is completely useless - I've yet to find a weapon superior to the ones I've crafted myself.