Remote miners being lazy

[Dinosawer]

So, this is probably not literally a bug, but:

 

I made a small ship, gave it a captain, outfitted it with two mining lasers and let it roam free mine in a system with a large asteroid field, thinking this would be a nice way of gaining some materials without having to mine it all myself.

However, then I decided to explore a bit while it did that, but I noticed that once I got one or two systems far my income of iron stopped.

Concerned, I headed back to the system ("did it get attacked by pirates or fly into an asteroid?" I thought) and as soon as I got there it started again.

I assume this is because (logically) systems stop getting simulated once you're not there, but it's kinda odd and de-immersing when it's mining it's doing.

Maybe some kind of approximation could be made for remote miners? X of whatever metal is in the system per second/minute, with X based on the asteroids in the system, mining gear and ship speed? That way you can give the illusion that your ships are still doing their work remotely without actually having to do anything but calculate one number and then add something to your materials regularly.

[koonschi]

Sectors with no players and no hyperspace gate connections to them are unloaded after 5 minutes. This is done to save resources on the server and prevent AFK mining in multiplayer (assign an order, log out, wait 2 days, log in, you're rich).

 

While testing this turned out to be a problem early on, since those ships continue mining until the sector is completely empty, making it very unfun for other players who join afterwards.

 

Before you suggest allowing miners mine only while a player is logged on, we thought of this too, but it doesn't solve the problem itself, it'd only make it slightly more difficult to do it. Plus we need the resources on the server. And we want multiplayer and singleplayer gameplay to be mostly the same.

 

We're aware of the situation. Once we find a good solution, we'll implement it.

 

In the meantime, you can change the config of your save to keep sectors around for a longer time.

In your server config (go to %appdata%, then Avorion\galaxies\[Your Savegame]\server.ini and change the value 'sectorUpdateTimeLimit'. This is the time in seconds (by default 300, ie. 5 minutes) that the server will update a sector once it detects that no players are present. If you jump around a lot, this might hurt the performance of your server though.

[Dinosawer]

The sector had a jumpgate, though.

Anyhow, I understand. Don't particularly care about fairness when I play SP though, so I'll just up that value and hope my pc doesn't catch fire  :D

 

 

 

 

 

[Volken]

One way of fixing this issue would be to make all of the building resources i.e. iron,titanium,avorion etc. take up cargo space in the ship. So you would need a very large ship to store a lot of cargo. Ultimately to build giant ships like capital ships and super capital ships you'd need tens of thousands of resources and you'd have store them at a big place like a large stations with ample cargo space(shipyards for example). Or you could slowly upgrade your ship as you mine more stuff, expanding your cargo space allowing you to upgrade your ships to bigger and bigger levels. I'd love to have that system in the game since the current one (having ALL the resources bound to the player) seems a bit unrealistic.

[koonschi]

We thought about this as well, but it only adds even more complexity to the game. What about the drone at the start? It has no cargo space. And it won't solve the problem that with a big ship you'll still be able to AFK mine.

[Volken]

We thought about this as well, but it only adds even more complexity to the game. What about the drone at the start? It has no cargo space. And it won't solve the problem that with a big ship you'll still be able to AFK mine.

 

-Introduce a new class of crew dedicated to mining

-Make them very expensive and have a high weekly wage / maintenence cost

-Rarer and more expensive materials are harder to mine with low-level mining gear

-Nerf mining lasers by: increasing their size, weight and power drain, reduce their effectiveness and range

(to balance this out for drones - make the drone slightly bigger to allow them to carry 1 low level mining laser and have some cargo space)

 

These measures should also balance out for rich players who have lots of income, if they try to have a lot of miners they would get overwhelmed by the weekly costs of the mining crew. Sadly the only way to balance the game is to add slightly more complexity to it. But it can be done right and without adding too much difficulty.

 

OR as an alternative remove AI mining completely and add mining stations for building materials which will generate resources depending on their level, while requiring players to supply them at a regular pace with mining eqiupment to keep them mining.

[gn_leugim]

-Rarer and more expensive materials are harder to mine with low-level mining gear

 

If I'm not mistaken, you can't mine with higher materials with low level gear, you can only mine +1 your material and bellow only.

 

-Introduce a new class of crew dedicated to mining

 

you have that already, miners, that operate mining turrets.

 

-Make them very expensive and have a high weekly wage / maintenence cost

-Nerf mining lasers by: increasing their size, weight and power drain, reduce their effectiveness and range

(to balance this out for drones - make the drone slightly bigger to allow them to carry 1 low level mining laser and have some cargo space)

 

This would also hurt alot whose you mine without going afk. mining is, probably the most boring part of the game I think, doing it like so, would kill it.

 

I think the "i'm on the sector, they're mining, i'm not, they are not" system is ok. you can easily stay in that sector because: 1) defend it against pirates 2) you can also be mining (doubling the speed of mining) 3) you can be doing some trading, 4) you can be ship/station building. and I believe you could go on.

 

I think it is fine as it is.

[Volken]

I don't have access to the game yet so I don't know what's in it and what's not :P The only other way I can think of to reduce the use of AI miners or atleast make it less easy is to make crew more expensive or add more types of crew like AI Captains which you need to hire or things like that.

[Dinosawer]

If the main problem is systems getting mined out, you could make resources respawn.

As for keeping getting resources while I'm doing stuff otherwise... well, that's kinda why I made the investment of a ship with crew and captain in the first place  :)  so I don't see what the problem would be with that. Being able to organise this sort of things to run independent of me was one of the things that attracted me to this game in the first place.

[RandomCommander]

AFK Mining can be a problem, yes, but it can also be a reliable source of mineral income when you are, say, running a sector with stations of your own, and you have plans to create an empire of sorts (which in the current state of the game, is really hard to do). However, before we can even THINK about running sectors and having proper player-factions, we could always have a short-term solution.

 

The short-term solution I propose is that these ships will mine only if the player THAT OWNS THEM is online, otherwise they will go in a pseudo-idle state, which they will return to normal mining when the player logs back on. This encourages players to do something else while these ships mine, but at the same time discourages AFK mining (especially when paired with a timer that kicks players from the server if they are AFK too long) significantly, not to mention said ships are even more vulnerable to pirate/hostile attacks.

[gn_leugim]

AFK Mining can be a problem, yes, but it can also be a reliable source of mineral income when you are, say, running a sector with stations of your own, and you have plans to create an empire of sorts (which in the current state of the game, is really hard to do). However, before we can even THINK about running sectors and having proper player-factions, we could always have a short-term solution.

 

The short-term solution I propose is that these ships will mine only if the player THAT OWNS THEM is online, otherwise they will go in a pseudo-idle state, which they will return to normal mining when the player logs back on. This encourages players to do something else while these ships mine, but at the same time discourages AFK mining (especially when paired with a timer that kicks players from the server if they are AFK too long) significantly, not to mention said ships are even more vulnerable to pirate/hostile attacks.

 

I support this idea!

[Cyprillius]

Well it looks like I arrived at this party way late. But I am really blown away by this game and I love the concept. As for the whole sectors unloading during player absence. Instead of upping the time from 300 seconds to whatever you want and risking the chance of using way more ram I was wondering if at all it would be possible to have for example a player designated sector? That a single sector can be chosen by a playet to be his(Everything up and running when player is active,Paused when he is not) and that any player can only have one sector at any given moment? Not very skilled with modding and so fourth so I was wondering if that would at all be possible?

 

Thanks in advance

[MetalX]

Well it looks like I arrived at this party way late. But I am really blown away by this game and I love the concept. As for the whole sectors unloading during player absence. Instead of upping the time from 300 seconds to whatever you want and risking the chance of using way more ram I was wondering if at all it would be possible to have for example a player designated sector? That a single sector can be chosen by a playet to be his(Everything up and running when player is active,Paused when he is not) and that any player can only have one sector at any given moment? Not very skilled with modding and so fourth so I was wondering if that would at all be possible?

 

Thanks in advance

 

I like this idea.  "Pay 100,000,000 credits, 500,000 iron(or whatever material is appropriate) and this system is now yours."  The 100m credits would be a founder fee and the 500,000 iron could be for the founding station that comes with the system, very much the same as the capital station you find in prime systems.

 

Then, from then on, that system is yours, for good, and it is always active.  Your stations always operate and your ships always patrol/mine etc.  Then with modding, we may even be able to ship asteroids to the system, for a fee of course.  So your ships have stuff to do while you are away.

 

And the system events scale with the player's.....  Ship?  Weapon tech level?  Artifact missions completed?  Hmmm...  I am actually not aware of any scaling in this game that has anything to do with the player, if any at all.  I don't think anything in this game does scale with the player...  But something, I am sure, if one gets creative, can be worked out so that the system needs frequent maintenance by the player, something to keep them coming back over and over again. "You cannot just found a system, make it awesome then never return ever again, while it simultaneously gives you everything you ever wanted or needed."

 

And as for AFk farming...  well, I don't much care for multiplayer experiences myself, so I don't really care about how others play.  BUT, server admins could potentially have a setting where they can turn the option to settle and own systems off.  Something of a middle ground?

 

I get the concern, I do, but the manner in which it is being dealt with seems "heavy handed", perhaps limiting in certain aspects, hurting the gameplay potential of this game in the long run.  Solving the issue, but hurting everything else. 

 

"I got a sliver in my finger this morning, so I cut off my hand and now my sliver problem is solved."

 

Also, I would like to inform you that if the players on a server are studious enough, they can mine the entire galaxy out in a week right now as it is.  In my single player game I have single handedly cleared about 10% of my current running galaxy.  Leaving only things that may have missed my attention, those tiny asteroids that yield only like 500-900, maybe they were hiding behind another asteroid or something.  Point is, unless you implement a respawn mechanic of some sort, the galaxies are going to get completely mined out anyway.  100x100 seems really big at first, but only at first.

 

If you were to get 5 players on a server, players like myself, in under a year there would be literally nothing left on that server, nothing, no scrap yards, no asteroids, no abandoned ships, nothing but random spawn in events, like Xsotan attacks, and maybe pirates?  Don't know about pirates though, could pirates be entirely wiped out?  Are pirate factions infinite?  If one went through the entire galaxy and destroyed every pirate station there is, would random pirates still spawn in?

 

It isn't like 15 years when we were just figuring this stuff out.  Gamers know how to farm now, we know the grind, we are experts at it now.  And those who are new to gaming now have wikis and forums to get them caught up and up to speed with the latest and greatest techniques.

 

The days where you could say "Let's make this big world and hope it takes them a while to chew through it."  are over.  The genie is out of the bottle and there is no way to bottle it back up again.