X-universe online

[Wolvan]

I will say it again, if you take away the ability to build stations/fleets, X ceases to be X. At least IMO.

X as an MMO is, in its current incarnation is unfortunately impossible, but with small server/LAN multiplayer there are other issues to be considered beyond SETA.

Other problems with X-Online that haven't been considered:

- When a player is offline, do their stations/ships remain active? Can I wait for a player to offline before I wage war on his assets when he is unable to respond to an attack. Do his UTs and station transports still clog up the servers processing power making him money when he is away?

- Price of assets: Play for a few days and you can easilly have enough money for a complex of fabs, or cap enough ships to have a sizable fleet of smaller ships. Obviously cappability of ships and the price of stations would need to be addressed. Maybe increase the cost of everything 10x to slow development of the galaxy and lessen server load.

- PVP: Without a really good PVP system X-online wouldn't be worth playing TBH. And I don't just mean combat, competing with other players for top dollar in the production/trading racket is PVP too. I think EvE does a good job of limiting PVP in 'safe' systems. An idea would be to make the core systems 'non-PVP'. That is, if you kill someone in a races home systems an uber kitted M2 from their fleet jumps (spawns) to your location and pretty much insta pops you with PPC fire. You can grief noobs if you want but be prepared to lose your ship when you do. Leave the outlying areas as 'PVP enabled' But of course if the game was run on small community supported servers it would really be decided server to server by the admins.

- OOS/IS As we all know there are some serious, almost game breaking differences with how the game is computed both IS and OOS which could easilly be exploited to give a player an advantage over his opponent in combat. Or the ballance of an OOS engagement could be thrown way out of whack because a noob making an E-Cell run passed through the wrong sector at the wrong time. Maybe calculate all combat encounters as IS with collision detection on? But again, this would be a major server drain.

- Player death: What happens when a player dies? Does he appear in his space suit in his nearest station? What if he doesn't own one yet? In the nearest station? What if he's 12 jumps from the nearest friendly shipyard? What if he's out of money, does he get a basic disco to start to rebuild? What's to stop someone from having a friend killing him over and over again and selling off all those discos for quick, free, easy cash?



Now that I look at it, LAN support would be relatively easy to implement if the game was designed for it, with a small ammount of players and an agreement on the rules. But the game just simply isn't designed for multiplayer, and to make it multiplayer it would loose some of its appeal. At least for me.

If you want an online sci fi experience, get an EvE account, and sate your thirst for empire building and grand scale fleet command with X. At least untill Ego makes a dedicated X online from the ground up.