My ideas/concerns about the future of Cyrene

Sorry, but this is going to be a very long read.


I love the way cyrene is developed, lots of diversity on the map, little stuff to discover, orignal ideas and so on and so on. But with hard launch coming soon there are a few areas i really feel the cyrene team should take some steps in, if they want to be succesful.



Testing


Right now we get releases that are full of small and bigger bugs, just look at the current bug thread from the latest VU. That is fine now, the people currently on cyrene like being pioneers and take finding bugs for granted. But when you are a live planet threads like that are a big nono, maybe one or two bugs per VU, not 50+ like there is now. Now i am aware that devoloping a planet probably isn’t some nice SCRUM or Agile project, but a lot more effort should be put into it. Lots of people will leave a game with too many bugs (just look at calypsoforum for example, people rage quit over a change in a single texture).



Location of mission givers


This is a tough choice, but what i really liked about the old cyrene is that there are loads of places where you could get new missions. You explore and discover and get a sense of achievement with each little discovery. It also makes the planet seem populated, not just a bunch of monster spawns. In the repopulation area it feels empty. All (ok 90%) of the mission givers are at the central area (which means they are easy to find, which can be a huge upside too). This makes the rest of the map feel really empty.


Storyline


We’ve been hearing for some time now that the cyrene storyline is massive. But ingame we only see scraps of it. We could really do with a background story, explanation of the factions, and if we’re going to unlock new area’s and missions give us a reason to do it. Why should i want to help the boffin’s? Or A.R.C. (can’t stand the guys, but they do give tokens…..). Who are the good guys and the bad guys? Right now it is all still to vague to really get people involved with cyrene.


Missions


I absolutely love the missions on cyrene, loads of daily’s kill missions, mining missions and EPIC missions. I am still think some new sort of missions should be added:

• Epic mission for low level players, let them get an S.I. H.E.A.R.T. as a reward. They aren’t in the trade terminal anymore and still a great fap.
  
  
• Better yet add another 8 epic mission chains after that, each will increase the health the S.I. H.E.A.R.T. gives by one. Talk about getting people hooked without ruining ingame economics.
  
  
• Introduction missions, the starting area is huge now, give us a mission to show us around, let us see the different factions, learn a bit about their history etc. etc.
  
  
• Missions that give us a sense of achievement, for example do some stuff so you can enter a new instance, or a room. Stuff like that is already possible with the game mechanics.
  

Mining and crafting


The thing with mining is that you want to use your mined resources in blueprints, and preferably even in high turnover blueprints. But on cyrene you can find mining resources there are no blueprints for. So you either have to include those resources in some blueprints, or you have to consider not letting those resources drop. One exception to this rule are the resources needed for crafting enhancers (unless you make cyrene specific enhances), you’ll need iolite, erionite, pyrite, dianthus, energised crystal and fire root pellet on cyrene, which I think still isn’t dropping.



Investments


I am off course a bit biased on this one being one of the owners of the still to be released cyrene stable. But when people invest in something they don’t like the whole world to change on them. Sure when you buy weapons or armor it is reasonable to expect that the markup on it will drop in the future. After all: new releases will come that will bring bigger and better items, and they are needed to because people get more and more skilled. But when people buy houses, booths, shops or stables they don’t like it when stuff gets moved around. Right now i dislike the new location of the supply depot, in fact i think the investment is worth 10% less now because of the new location. Stuff like that can seriously piss people off, so you should be really careful with it. In the end this isn’t just a game, it has real money involved from ‘investors’ and thrust is a huge issue there. If you want to get the economy going, you’ll need people managing shops. They are less likely to do that when there are trust issues.


Cyrene Mission Tokens


There are some missions where you can trade 5-15 pec of resources for a 1 pec token. That is fine and all if people value tokens high. But if MA will let you sell the same sort of guns that people get on caly for the combat mission tokens, then nobody will ever complete the missions or buy the guns, because there will be a big imbalance between the planets. So you’ll have to really think it through, also the rewards vs effort of the various token giving missions aren’t really balanced well at the moment.


Mining amplifiers


You really need to have higher level craftable mining amplfiers. Mining amplifiers are high turnover items, meaning there ingredients sell for a nice markup, and people can actualy put up 100 ped stacks for crafters instead of 10 peds stacks we see now that don’t get sold.


Mining finders


There isn’t a normal mining finder in the tt, please throw a limited one in there that uses 10/20 probes per drop.

 

i agree with most of above, but not all

i dont like those piles of NPC we got atm, but im not into running around the map looking for a daily mission vendor each corner. Id rather would like to see here the Daily and Iron mission terminals that ARK had, and now even Caly has.

 

Personally, my concerns outweigh my ideas (or my willingness to put ideas out there these days)...

Kris has been making a fairly good job of communication here I think, so that is not currently part of the problem. Unfortunately, Cyrene after the vu did not manage to hold on to me long enough even for this patch due to the number of placement bugs, mission bugs etc. I see that other people have gathered tps and left again already too.

I guess the idea I'd like to try is that someone who is still putting a lot of effort into Cyrene start a thread of things that have been fixed up against things that are still bugged, with a date of when the bugs occurred and when fixed.
For example, problems with the wrong height (or invisibility) of mission npcs started with the vu obviously, and may or may not have been corrected in the patch. The new tp added, however, seems to be bugged from the start too, i.e. the patch... let's see how long that takes to be fixed.
This way we would see both the mass of bugs along the way (not so good), but also the fixes (good) and may be able to see patterns emerge to be able to improve things in the future...

 

One thing you have to remember about 'bugs' is that it's not like the Cyrene folks can fix them, they are at the mercy of MA to fix them and we know how big of lazy asses they can be!

I sometimes am amazed at some of the bugs it's like how the F#$%#k did you not see that coming? Don't you EVER beta test this stuff? Then again have to admit I am not entirely privvy how the overall 'engine' works so don't know how difficult some of it might be. Finally you also have to remember that programmers are lazy asses too, make new stuff, oh NO problem...they love creativity... fix stuff you didn't do right the first time. ehh... bit of a problem, that's no fun... Ill get to it next week.

Cyrene has been doing a fairly good job of keeping us abreast of what is happening but I am sure they are having issues with comms with MA just like we can at times. I do like the idea of known bugs, fixed bugs and proposed status of fixing bugs but that can cause big problems too. Example, the mission counter, we were told it's an 'easy' fix that will show up in the next VU. It didn't? Why? Putting dates out, and missing them can inflame folks a lot more than just not fixing stuff; have to be careful on that.

Finally listing bugs...that can backfire. Cyrene has 50 active bugs, is HONEST and lists them, people see it and go oh they are AFU, I am not going there, and will run to Caly which has 150 known bugs, but don't list them and think it's sooo much better. You have to remember, some of the folks who play this game their lips move when they read a stop sign, information overload is a bad thing for them

I think the forum is a perfect place to 'hash' this stuff out. It shows the developers are concerned with what we have to say and are listening, unlike other places where the dev's are probably passed out somewhere and couldn't care less about our petty little 'issues'.

On the Cyrene specific stuff, that is a MUST. If you want people to come here you have to give them tools to use here, make it so it's worth their time to come here. Throw away ores / enmats are really bad, nobody really likes to TT stuff even if it is a big hit they still don't like TT'ing it. If I can find it on this planet there really should be something I can make on the planet that uses it. That keeps the money here and the people here spending.

One thing Id like to see, the Class D finder, currently needs Alternative Rock. Only found one place. Why can't Cyrene have a 'similar' performing amp that is cyrene specific and uses a similar ore found only here? Possibly using a cy amp gives a slight bonus to overall performance when used on cyrene? I know many people who dislike RT yet go there just for the alt rock they have to have to make the high demand finders. Why can't Cyrene do that? Not that we want them to not like it here, but make it so they 'need' to come here. Once they get here go, hey this place is cool, I think ill stick around a while.

Finally this leads me to, yep, you guessed it.. shops. You gotta give us ways to sell the stuff we make to keep folks here spending money, and AGREED, changing stuff around and moving it significantly can be majorly upsetting, especially if I had to dump 10K ped or more for a shop. Throw in a shop keeper and the other little 'stuff' and yes that is a significant investment that person made. Dragging them around like a stable horse is NOT going to go over well.

Ill shut up now.

Da slippery slug.

 

Well I think i read from somebody really smart a post the other day that things should be different on different planets and the more difficult stuff is the higher the markup. Now if only I could remember who wrote it

But Seriously the new area feels empty with the lack of missiongivers around. How about a middle way, go out to explore to find the mission givers the first time. And then when you have finished them once, have a mission terminal where you can get the follow-up (=the second day of the dailyes) where you can get the missions that have reset, But you still have to hand them over at the original questgiver?

 

Thats just making extra work really harmony. This is all kind of temporary anyways, sort of. I have a feeling when they roll out the other stuff again we will have plenty of missions.

sluggo

 

alot of missions are working properly now

 

How about centralize it at the area we are in now since room is limited, and as the old / new areas re open, the mission brokers are kind of sort of back where they used to be or close to it?

Maybe call em the 'City Broker' and the 'Wilderness Broker' You can pick which one to get your mission at. Kind of like how the IFN terminals work. There are a few located around town but all give and reward same missions.

sluggo

 

I decided to check the new planet out a bit, collect some teleporters. Truth is, the hasty job that was done here, showed a bit too much, stuff floating in the air, unreachable service stations because the door is halfway in the sand etc etc. The new area just doesn't feel like planet cyrene anymore. Also, why lie to the players? It's obvious there are financial problems. You could simply admit to them like Neverdie did. Anyway.. I explored and explored then when I tried landing on top of the inverted pyramid and I fell through I just had to leave.
I might return someday is all I can say. But not anytime soon if this is the new cyrene.

 

Spawn does have some valid observations.
I do have a question on them. Concerning stuff floating in the air and other obvious 'poorly implemented' or whatever. Does anyone beta test? I mean isn't there like a test server or something where you can put in your 'new world' and actually send someone to take a walk thru it and LOOK at how stuff is and go, oh sh#% we need to fix that, or are planet partners totally at the mercy of MA and their drunken elves?

If there is a financial issue, which I can totally understand, I can't imagine a planet was 'cheap' to buy, one needs to realize that, the longer folks dick around the worse off it is going to become as there is no real income coming in because everyone is it seems waiting for Cyrene to get out of 'test mode'. Yes you may have a hand full of hard core loyalists who will support you but they alone can't keep an entire planet alive. Just something to think about as you roll out the new and improved Cyrene.

As I have said in the past, I see tremendous potential for Cyrene, and would hate to see it become the next, NI, or Rocktopia due to neglect or feet dragging on stuff.

and of course, wait..... wait for it..... shops will help too

Just saying.

sluggo