Gameplay rebalance June 2019

Situation

The current gameplay is far too easy:

Statement from User:Peanut

I understand mods are added, so mods need to be removed. Like Day/Night. BUT what I have noticed on this site is how simple a new player can go from nothing to building a house with a gold block wall ! To many teleporters, open access to to space, androids, etc. Worse still, they get "drunk" on minerals , start ambitious projects they never will finish, use both our resources and the server resources. If you have to take "time" priv you must be struggling, I advise that you make it harder to reach resources that are frankly wasted. New player need wool iron and 1 mese block (space suit) to rape resources. It's becoming funny to watch. It took me months to dig and dig everything before I found out how players where building diamond houses!!!! Recommend, priv on teleporters and XP before you can "dig" off the earth. Otherwise, you will see the reAL "crew" leave and the site full of one time thrill seekers. (just my thoughts) Peanut x

I (User:admin/User:BuckarooBanzai) do agree with that:

The server should be pretty friendly and easy, but in the current state there is just far too easy access to overwhelming wealth...

Proposals

Here are a few proposals, feel free to comment/modify/add-to those

I read the proposed changes to limit ease of space access. I tend to agree with Peanut. But a part of me says keep the game fun. So I say to limit access to space mining based on XP and release the Xenomorphs! Only way to be sure.

I feel as though an xp restriction on travelnets is a good plan as well as an xp restriction on different space zones... it is way too easy to get a space suit, basic 3x3 tron, and make 10k from mese sold at spawn if you have the right asteroid. Maybe there should be an xp to tool level ratio like no diamond stuff till 25k xp and no mithril till 50k. Just a thought though. Also put xp restrictions on technic system to kind of slow down the game for new people. definitely need train fare! We would have huge player made networks soon that would aid in money gain. Also maybe you should add hostile environments like Rugglia said especially at astroids and mars... Have tiers of space suits: tier one is good for moon but above begins to degrade very fast, tier two is good above that, etc. I love the idea of hostile mobs in space... might keep noobs from exploiting the resources there as fast. Well thanks for reading my feed back. :)

I feel like these proposals make the game somewhat hard. I think newbs cannot use travelnets until 4K XP, until then, they can only use telemosaics. I do agree with User:sean on XP tool restrictions, but I don’t feel restrictions that high are necessary. I only have 4,613 XP at time of writing but I already have a diamond pickaxe that’s level 1. Perhaps mithril should be 5K XP, diamond is 3K XP, mese 1K XP, and newbs can use steel without any XP. There also should be hostile mobs on the moon and Mars of course, but please make them: 1. Not gray or black or white 2. Not shoot stuff at you! I don’t like it when I’m surprised by a mese monster and I get killed without a way to get back to my bones. At least give the mobs a sword. And speaking on mese monsters, change the loot to a single mese crystal, not a shard! However, I totally agree on the train fair thingy. Technic XP is kinda not fair, a newb might work hard to earn money, and buy something like a, say, their very own tool workshop, or a grinder, and get a switching station and all other materials just to find that it doesn’t work. Also, can you install terumet? I don’t really need this mod, but I would like bracers.

Travel restrictions

• XP Restriction on travelnets
  • For example: 50k xp are needed to travel to the moon / 100k xp to the asteroid zone

User:SX

I've been thinking about XP requirement based on diff from y 0.
For example something like 'can_travel == abs(target_y) < player_xp * xp_factor'
If factor is 10 then traveling to y 10k would require 100k XP as would traveling to y -10k

User:Ruggila

I like that, with a twist. E.g. for each n EXP you can go up to h distance horizonally and v distance vertically. For example, for your first 10000 exp you can go 2000 meter horizontally and 100 vertically. Between 10001 and 20000 exp you can go 4000 horizontally and 400 meter vertically. And so on. The numbers I used are made up, I need to think about them for real. The goal is that a new player can go inside the towns (New Town, Starter Town, Fruitlands). But not directly too Moon. Or Asteroid. Being able to go there would need some "sweat".  The same EXP limits could probably be used for /tpr and /tphr. However, I'm not sure how this will work with with telemosaics, e.g. the ones to the shops, or to the tutorials.

Nope, don’t agree.

• Travelnet fare
  • Make traveling costly: 1000 mg for 1000 nodes traveled
  • Or maybe buy some magical "energy orbs" to power the travelnets
  • Github-issue: https://github.com/pandorabox-io/pandorabox.io/issues/66

User:Ruggila

not a fan of this, but I'm generally not a fan of the shops and currency

User:SX

Not sure about this, I wont like that one very much especially if it is high value.
I think that we should not disable travelnets completely from beginners, this would just cause telemosaics to be used instead of travelnets.
ofc, same could be done to telemosaics but it will be a lot harder to get right as there's no ready made formspec for confirmation and telemosaics will throuw people back and forth.
Maybe add some fare when not using your own travelnet, if it is not yours then make it cost something.
Good thing about telemosaics is that they are already more expensive for long range travel. This could also be enforced even by simply disallowing travel just like how i proposed for travelnets.

Eh, I don’t like either idea, but if you must, please make the orbs somehow craftable with somewhat rare ores, like gold and mese.

• Travelnet outage/limit
  • Maybe a limit on how many times per hour traveling is possible would promote more "thinking before traveling" (just an idea)

User:SX

I would either stop carrying stuff and start sending everything around with tp tubes or stop building with many different materials as I bet building big things will otherwise be way too hard.
Possibly too much to change at once.

I don’t think this is a nice idea, this is more like a barrier than a booster to gameplay.

• Train fare
  • meh, trains are way too cool for that :)

User:SX

Allow players to sell tickets... well no. This is going to be too off topic.
Let it be as is.

I agree, train fare is a nice idea. :)

Dangerous mobs

• Let some xenomorphs spawn around the mining-spots (ore-nodes)
  • Github-issue: https://github.com/pandorabox-io/pandorabox.io/issues/4
• Or any other dangerous mob

This should lead to more ships being built with quarries on them..

User:SX

Yes for this

If xenomorphs are shooting stuff mobs, then absolutely not.

Dangerous environment

• Radiactive space-gas comes to mind
  • Github-issue: https://github.com/pandorabox-io/pandorabox.io/issues/181

User:SX

Yes for this too and some expensive ways to mitigate effects at least partially.

well, make a somewhat (not too) expensive way to prevent the effects ofc.

Asteroid resources

• There are still a few block-resources (diamonds, gold, etc) from the prototype asteroid
  • those need to be removed somehow, maybe some automated replacement

User:SX

Should get rid of these, i'd say there could be some diamond/gold/other blocks but not that much what I've seen new players getting straight away.

Privileges

• settime priv
  • I'm still open for suggestions about that one, maybe something that does not get abused lightly...

User:Ruggila

settime was actually not really a problem for some weeks. But then "nice players" started to react to "Day please" calls from newbs. And then newbs all the time asked this, as if it was their right. Eventually some people (this includes me!) got upset about this constant stream of "day please". But the whole thing only happened in the last two weeks before the settime priv revocation. However, I can perfectly play without settime, one can always do torches. Or simply not go to discovery when it is night.

User:SX

Max uses per IRL day/player + add logging for this.

Addendum: Time privs: Limit the number of times it can be used per session or day per player.

idc about this, I’m fine with night.