Multiplayer completely broken.

Discussion in 'Mechanics' started by Mitroll, Jul 16, 2017.

  1. Mitroll

    Mitroll Pangalactic Porcupine

    1, Cheating: Until we have serverside characters, people can, and will, simply switch to singleplayer, /admin themselves whatever items they want, then return to multiplayer.

    Until this is fixed, Starbound simply cannot call itself a fully multiplayer game. Singleplayer is the full experience, multiplayer is a creative mode where everyone cheats whatever items they want (because everyone else is cheating). Playing on a private server with friends rarely solves this problem, it just makes them more sneaky about it.

    2, The Storyline: If you want to play a private game with friends, you currently have to do each step of the storyline once for every single person in the party (if you want to do it together).

    A more elegant solution would be to make everyone get credit for a single co-op run, but make the difficulty and loot amount scale by number of players.


    Recommendations:


    Add the following server option booleans:

    Serverside Characters: All characters are stored serverside.

    Co-op Story: All characters must be present for the story missions, and only have to do it the one time.

    No Cheating: Even the host can't enter admin mode (might be a bad idea if playing with online randoms).


    Add the following Commands:

    /serverinfo

    Shows what options the server is running.

    /playerinfo <player>

    Shows whether the player is softcore, mediumcore, or hardcore.
     
    Rookas and Trenix like this.
  2. Ainzoal

    Ainzoal Ketchup Robot

    Don't play with people you don't trust >_>
     
    rpek32 and Masiakasaurus like this.
  3. Roskii Heiral

    Roskii Heiral Heliosphere

    Why does using admin matter to you? This isn't an mmo and using admin harms no one. Suggesting less player freedom seems really silly to me.
     
    Masiakasaurus likes this.
  4. Mitroll

    Mitroll Pangalactic Porcupine

    That's not a solution. Even trustworthy people succumb to the desire to skip ahead with /admin, ruining the fun for everyone else.

    I play with friends, and inevitably someone vanishes to 'eat' and comes back with a suspicious amount of things. They have some excuse for why they suddenly have a full set of whatever armor, but everyone else gets frustrated because they were having fun competing with each other, and it all got nullified by someone cheating.

    The idea is that only servers that want serverside characters and no cheating mode will have it. Players that want admin mode and clientside characters can continue to play that way, they just can't join serverside servers with clientside characters.

    At least I assume that's what you were confused about, the other possibility is that you are suggesting that no-one should ever want to play a co-op game of starbound with friends without people skipping ahead with admin cheats.
     
  5. Roskii Heiral

    Roskii Heiral Heliosphere

    There's nothing to be confused about. No one is stopping anyone from playing a co-op game of starbound with friends without people skipping ahead using cheats. No one is forcing anyone to use admin mode, its a choice. There's really not even an "ahead" to skip to.

    Starbound is a big fun sandbox with tons of freedom, its not an mmo where things like balance/grinding/etc matter to the gameplay. So, if your friends are spawning the "best" gear in the game or mechs or whatever, its very likely that they just don't feel like grinding for that stuff.
     
  6. Mitroll

    Mitroll Pangalactic Porcupine

    You're being a hypocrite. Starbound is about freedom, as long as I play it exactly how you want me to?

    You're sort of right though, as long as there are no serverside characters, Starbound is objectively a creative-mode sandbox game in multiplayer.

    However, I would like a trust-free option to play this game as it was intended, without cheats, with other people on the internet (which isn't fun if they're cheating).

    There's so much that this game could do and be, but until there are serverside characters, multiplayer is just "creative-mode".
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2017
  7. Roskii Heiral

    Roskii Heiral Heliosphere

    No, starbound is about freedom as long as you play exactly how you want to. The only person on this thread advocating against players playing how they want to play is you. Since I'm pretty sure you're just trolling at this point, I'll leave this thread alone.
     
  8. Mitroll

    Mitroll Pangalactic Porcupine

    Exactly how I want to play is this: Without cheating, on a server where no-one can cheat.

    If they add serverside characters as an optional thing, then you can keep playing the way that you want to play, and I can start playing the way I want to play.

    Guess that makes me a troll? smh
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2017
  9. Combozone

    Combozone Existential Complex

    Don't worry, I agree with you.

    As someone who has played through the main game literally dozens of times, sometimes I want to skip through the story as fast as possible. So I /admin my way through whatever I have to do, and most of the time I promptly forget about that character.

    When the time comes to multiplayer, I take a look at my characters and go "hmm, he's not too far ahead of where the others are, I'll use him."

    And then when I join, everyone else has hacked in tier 6-7 armor and plays through the entire game without even farming cotton fibers, simply because it takes too much effort.
     
  10. Masiakasaurus

    Masiakasaurus Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    In addition to what others have said, I'm fairly convinced server side characters would have a performance impact. The game writes to the character files (both active and multiple backups) pretty frequently, and Starbound is not shall we say super optimized as it is. Add in multiple players and you're likely to get chuggy fast.

    Going to second the suggestion of not playing with jerks.
     
  11. sagenth

    sagenth Pangalactic Porcupine

    I think it might be best to give dedicated servers the option of taking character snap shots at logout/disconnect/timeouts and then remove any newly added items. Joining the server for the first time would provide a prompt saying your character will be restarted if you connect to the server (gives another reason for those storage directory backup files). This way you can keep your character(s) if the server in question disappears, and no authentication measures would be necessary to ensure the owner is the only player who can access a character.

    I don't like the idea, but that is how I'd change it to make it work better for the starbound community as a whole.
     
    Combozone likes this.
  12. Circle Cell

    Circle Cell Void-Bound Voyager

    There is a whole world of custom items on other servers who might not be that interested in the storyline.
    There's multi player compatible mods that allow you to edit JSON in game, and spawn everything in game as well.
    Multiplayer works fine in that sense.
    (except for the lag)
     
  13. Rookas

    Rookas Void-Bound Voyager

    I was planning on getting my dad into this game. Is this really the case?
     
  14. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    That impact could be drastically mitigated by using an SSD for storage.

    It really is a non-issue. Do the same quests together and there is zero issue at all. As it is is no different than any other online game.
     

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