^ With draw, do players lose their ships? How long a match should last in your opinion?

Things like having fuel, or the thing that keeps spinning around my mind like that, the "glowing football that explodes", are "fake" ways of dealing with this problem and make the game seem not as cool.  The best way to fix it is through map size and the design of the ships.  You might allow one or two matchups where a faster ship might be able to stay at the map edge just to be a jerk just for the freedom of design of having those ships work the way you want them too, or you can go all out to fix the problem by making sure every ship has a means of dealing with it.  But that will require changing the ships, and wouldn't be easy to work out.  It is the really big slow ships that will have a problem with this.  That big ship I said I didn't like because it doesn't fit my style, and it's gun is kind of limiting is a perfect example.  I have a good idea for "correcting" that one for this problem, but I don't know if it's "flak guns" are an integral storyline aspect of the ship that it needs for that reason, for example.  But, I think it is called the Scyrve, the one with a Vux beam that can't turn while firing and has flak gun point defense.  That ship will have a big problem with smaller faster ships doing this too it, it's got nothing it can do about it.  I mentioned a "screen shaking rocket booster" would be a cool thing for a ship to have, and that is how the Scryve could address this.  It work's REALLY well for fun factor with that ship's weapon, as well.  This would make the Scyrve like a ship I liked a lot, it would be similar to my favorite ship in Subspace (the Leviathan of DSB Zone).  The combination of the rocket booster and that type of weapon is really fun, it feels like a "drill" as you rocket into a ship with the beam firing.  The rocket boosters also burn just long enough to catch a fast ship at the edge of the screen:-)

This is the way to address this problem in a "real" way.  The size of the map and the design of the ships.

I'd say draw / dual loss it'd be a roll of the cosmic dice on both sides.  At best you get your ship back & fuel it up after the end of the battle sequence.  At worst you lose the ship / crew / cargo / and some currency depending on how Stardock handles maintaining Cargo / Currencies during the exploration portion of the game.

For flat PvP w/ no effects happening to your Solo player fleet, I'd say both ships lost to the deep dark abyss that is space.

For the length, maybe 1-3 minutes per ship, much longer than that would get horrible especially if one/both sides have a compliment of ships capable of extended battle.  -- I also have a feeling people would start rage quitting if there were battles with low action at 5+ minutes per ship.

Can we get some feedback from Stardock on whether or not they feel that this is an issue?

I will kill myself if they put a timer on battles. 

Literally, worst idea ever. 

^ Oh, look who decided to show up.

If they won't put timer on MP battles I'll make it my life's work to make you suffer through hours of single match in melee. 

Quoting Hunam_, reply 31

^ Oh, look who decided to show up.

 

If they won't put timer on MP battles I'll make it my life's work to make you suffer through hours of single match in melee. 

This problem can be fixed without a timer.  This is really just a matter of the size of the map and design of the ships.  There is a reason that this was pretty much the first subject I ever brought up.  I knew it would become a very big issue, and that it is such a complex issue that nobody was ever really going to understand it.  This problem is just a tip of the iceberg type of thing, really.  But to simplify it all... the map can't be to big and each ship needs some means of dealing with a fast ship that refuses to engage.  You might decide to leave one or two matchups where this problem is not addressed for the sake of ship design, and just accept that this will be a problem in one or two specific matchups.

I think his SO was having a baby or something.

When you play against me, I bet I can get you to change your tune.

I thought you were very much a SP-only player. If so, why do you care what happens in MP? I am not advising a timer for the SP campaign battles. For those, feel free to cheese your way through every fight.

Haha, yes, you are correct - newborn in the house! Born October 22nd at 10:50am.

But I had to pop on and show my non-support for timed battles! Don't do it! Just be dealt about how you build the ships and the powers you give them. It'll work out just fine! 

And you're right again, I won't be doing MP much. But still want to be able to employ my own strategy, instead of rushing! Okay, vanishing into the mist again. 

If I can avoid or mitigate damage and there is no timer, I can extend the duration of matches indefinitely. What is left for me to not understand in this scenario? They aren't going to give everybody lock-on weapons. And if I am nimble enough to stay on your 3 or 9, you won't be able to hit me regardless of how small the warping arena is.

Congratulations!

Those are two different things.  If you are nimble enough to stay on my sides and there is nothing I can do about it, one of these ships is broken.  That shouldn't be possible.  Staying out of my range if you are fast enough too is the problem, and that can be fixed through map size and ship design.  Of course, if there are 6 different people all insisting that that a ship work a certain way that has nothing to do with this issue... then it can't be fixed.  But as long as you are free to design the ships to work with each other, and the map, then it is fairly easy to fix this one problem.  

When I say nobody is ever going to fully understand this, I mean the whole package of how this all works and not just this one range/map size issue.  It takes about three years of study and practice at a minimum to learn it.  I'm not saying the rest of you couldn't figure it out, I'm just confident that none will bother trying... and there isn't enough time to learn it all before SC is released anyway.  

Nemesis System.

And based on the ship ability descriptions, I am not convinced that they have. Nothing I have seen from them even shows that they took into account people playing the game maliciously. In fact, at one point they even made it easy to play the evasive game because they had multiple gravity wells in the battlefield to slingshot off of. And even now, they chose a wall-less arena because they realize that the dominant strategy would be to corner your opponent.

That's why I asked them if they considered malicious game delays to be a problem. I want to know how they plan on addressing it.

Weren't you the one who said that everything is based off SFB? This stuff isn't new to any of us.

I agree with you. We shouldn't need to rush. However, malicious play is one of the big problems you will run into when you play against some random dude off the internet. It will ruin your experience and you will never play MP again against random people. Not only do you lose out on that game mode, I lose out on that too. You leaving would be one less legitimate, rule-abiding player to fight against.

Having and maintaining a cheat-free, griefer-free online environment is critical to maintaining a thriving MP community.

We are hard coding in that if the player is IBNobody his ship blows up after 3 seconds of traveling away from the target. 

It's not that it is based on SFB, it's that there is a "2D ACM without gravity" that simply exists in nature.  We learned it through SFB, nobody else has every really had a reason to identify and learn it.  I am certain that their initial ship designs don't all account for this issue you have brought up, since they don't know how this combat environment works.  Almost nobody does. But from my perspective, this is all very simple.  Because it is just 1v1 dual on a closed map.  That's as simple as this gets, and I was the founder of one of the most successful tournaments, which is where we fully learned all of this stuff within the SFU.  The tournament system.  So this supermeelee, in particular, is really simple and basic from my perspective.

There are many different ways of addressing this "griefing" issue, I am just trying to give the best one.  The "real" one".  Which is to find the right map size and then design the ship specifically to work on that map.  This DOES limit the designs of the ships.  In the end, in this genre, most things come down to how those things limit the design of the ships.  In my own starship simulator, for example, that is so hard to make it work that the design of the ships is limited down to almost nothing.  The "illusion" of that game is that it can actually only handle a few different ship designs.  Almost any ship you might imagine... wouldn't work in it.

That will fail because I already planned on registering the steam code you give me to a different Steam account.

EDIT: Unless you have some awful thing like GFWL that makes me log in with my Stardock account. Yuck. Please don't do that. (The multi-login thing. I would get a kick out of you coding some anti-Nobody code because it shows that I affected development. :P)

But anyway... It's good to see you too. Please come to the forums more often and post.

And did you have people in the tournament attempting to play the game maliciously? Probably not, because people in tournaments play to win. Random internet multiplayer is an entirely different game with an entirely different crowd. 

So... Here we go... Should we design ships for SuperMelee, or should we design ships for Solo Play? My answer is that ships should be designed for Solo Play above anything else and balanced separately (if at all) for Multiplayer.

And either external systems need to be installed for MP SuperMelee to curtail the level of griefing that can occur. Or we just leave out internet matchmaking altogether and just rely on friend links to play.

Okay, I've had enough of this. SFB didn't invent any of this. Stop it.

Actually there is a lot of SFB influence in SC, but I am not really talking about SFB.  I am talking about the "Laws of 2D ACM" that govern how the space combat part of SC works.  Simple using a timer, or fuel, or an "exploding football" will work as a "band-aids and string" means of dealing with this problem, and is exactly how other game companies would deal with it.  I am just letting the devs know how to fix the problem in a "real" way if they choose to do it that way.

SC had this same issue.  But we played SC sitting side-by-side, or by modem with a friend.  So this was not an issue in the original SC because it was being played by friends who knew each other, and wouldn't do this to each other.  So it was not an issue.  On internet against random people you don't know, this is a big issue.  I knew it would be from the beginning, it was like my first post:-)

No need to reply to me, Kavik. Your reply to Vol shows me you understand the troll issue.

Just a side-note: the issue of potentially boring 1v1s is significantly reduced by multi-ship combat. And I expect, frankly, that if 3v3 or higher supermelee is available, then it will be the dominant form of play.

Continuing the tournament example, in that arena players new too the tournament would often complain that they felt "boxed in" by the fairly small size of the tournament map in that game.  Klingons and Andromedans, the really fast ships that fight in a stand-off style, would have a hard time with this at first thinking it gave them a big disadvantage.  Really, they were losing the advantage they were accustomed to having:-)

The classic way of describing the tournament map was as the "Boxing Ring".  You are supposed to feel boxed-in if you are a faster ship, that is the whole point.  It forces you to stay engaged and fighting, because you can't run far enough to be safe from being caught.  You can get out of effective weapons range, but not out of the threat of the enemy getting back into effective weapons range.

This is only an issue when it is combat for the sake of combat, as in this 1v1 supermelee.  Any type of objective eliminates all of these issues.  You can't take the base, rescue the hostages, whatever, by running away from the objective.  You can't defend it by running away from it, either.

I think ultimately it will feel weird to have fixed borders in space. Like, I'm able to suspend my disbelief in regards to cell borders in any land or sea-based game, simply because I understand that's a limitation of the tech. However, in space, it just...feels wrong if you can't travel infinitely in a direction (which the wrapping helps).

After thinking about this for a while, maybe the idea that people were talking about in another thread is exactly what is needed here.  A third "passive ability" for all or most ships.  Maybe the Dan Noth doesn't get a passive ability, because it's proximity torpedo weapon can deal with a fast ship at the edge of the map, and it has that awesome repel that is worth 2 abilities on it's own.  Any ship that has a problem with a fast ship staying at the map edge gets a passive ability to help it deal with that, any ship that can already deal with it get's a passive ability to add more flavor to what that ship already is.

I have the impression that the Scyrve is a very important race, like the Ur Quan of this game, and it has a big problem with a fast ship staying at the map edge.  But, since it is supposed to be the big, imposing, scary, extra-powerful big ship... it shouldn't be humiliated like that!  So it's passive ability is "inter-system warp" in Star Trek terms (or a "HyperWarp Skip" in PDU terms:-)).  Whenever the enemy is beyond a certain distance the Scyrve ship begins to "glow" (i.e. power warp drive), and after whatever "glow/delay" is decided upon... it simply warps out from where it is, and warps back in within gun range of the enemy ship.  This makes it probably better for the fast ship to just stay within engagement range, rather than get "jumped on" by trying to separate for an extended period.  It also makes the Scyrve that big, mean, extra-powerful ship it is supposed to be.

Passive abilities for all, or most, ships can both solve this problem for the ships that have it and add more flavor to the design of all of the other ships that don't have a problem with this.  Add more as you fix the problem, instead of settling for "band-aids and string" that detracts as a "compromise" to fix the problem.  What can I say... It's A Kind of Magic;-)