Duel feature

It doesn't necessarily have to balanced, there wouldn't be any rating attached to it, apart from maybe a server notification about who won. It would just be a fun option for something to do. People can maybe even organize their own tournaments with it, but then they would set the rules about ships themselves, which could be left open from the game's perspective.

Side note. Early on in SE1 development, I joined a Multiplayer server where they restricted the map to a 20km radius. You could effectively see 90% of the entire map. It had active base sieges and ship battles constantly. It was a scoot and scurry server since you started out with that old yellow starter ship. It had asteroids. Perfect for a sunday battle royale. No design skill necessary, but useful!

But how would get enough resources for ships? Because I doubt that there would have been that many asteroids in 20 km range. Or was there some shop where you could buy it? I am proposing this idea to have in a "normal" survival server setting, where players can build their own base and ships, but also have the option to duel any other online player and are then prompted and teleported to the arena.

It was essentially a cage fight. The density of asteroids was high. Griefing, pirating and scrapping were the tools of the factions that ruled. Numbers and might. It was utter chaos. It was not about establishing yourself so much as having enough will, skill, and a group to faction up with. IF lucky, you might do some repairs, or protect an assembler while you get some more ammo made. IF you could even afford ship mounted guns! Space was grinder and handguns mainly. However, life was short. If you lived for awhile, you were hiding. LOL The real point was, like you say, battle. There was no farming or any real mining operations, though people did hand mine for sure. It was a place, like you say, you could go to battle because that was really all you could do; fight or die. The fun part, when lucky, was slipping through all the battles trying to find a momentary place to regroup.

Ah yeah, sounds like a good time lol. It's concepts like these that gave me the kind of inspiration. I've played on servers like that as well a long time ago and I know there's a big demand for some pvp action. So this is a way that can easily be integrated in any server without really limiting players ability to build and play normally.

An interesting thought, but removing the risk would take the point out of survival-pvp. I think this would be better off as entirely its own game type.

Uhm, don't get me wrong there would still be real pvp. This would just be an option to duel for fun. Some people will enjoy it for sure, and if you like risk/reward kind of stuff, there would be no reason to have any less of it with this feature.

@Gaz: I'm assuming in this case there would be a "balanced" mode and a "custom grids" mode so to speak. When setting up the duel, do they want to use pre-made grids or their custom grids. Let folks proceed from there.

It's up to players to choose a dueling partner anyways, so I think in a lot of cases players would know what they were up against. If they for instance organized a tournament, they could do something like set a pcu limit or weapon limit or anything else. However, to enforce this with a system would be counterintuitive imo.

I'd never expect it to fully replace classic survival pvp, I just think it would be better for it to be entirely its own game type.

-Rules-settings would be easier to play with, additional people could join and either spectate or participate as a crew-member on one of the ships (or there could be teams of ships, or free-for-all),

-Players looking just to pvp wouldn't have to hop around spending days at a time grinding from starting-pod to a full combat build while hoping they've joined a server where people will be willing to duel,

-Survival worlds wouldn't get bogged down storing people's dedicated dueling ships,

-Fewer "pvp vs pve" debates that inevitably leave someone feeling sour over either etiquette, a loss of resources, or an inability to compete with someone else's permanent overwhelming excess would result.

What. Every mmorpg had duelling and it would only be an additive feature that many players wouldn't even be able to find if it was just a subtle button in the players tab like private message and under that would be "duel". It doesn't have to be this or that or strictly "pve" or "pvp" it would just add more things to do with other players to the multiplayer experience because surely you know how rare even just normal pvp was on most servers.

I don't recall dueling in EVE or Dual Universe, and I'd have loved such a feature to be in either.

Anyways... SE isn't an mmo, you can't reliably trust that a random 16-player server you hop in to will have another pvp player, and PvE players can be almost as touchy about PvP'rs being in their system as they were in either of those games (I've had people threaten to report me for griefing if I had my turrets on if they ever flew by, and people try to talk admins in to banning me before I even had weapons because I asked about pvp).

I wont say that some PvP players don't earn it (if I were to host another server, I'd nerf infinitely-respawning grinder-monkeys out of existence), but between avoiding the otherwise inevitable toxic freak-outs people will have at the very thought that someone else doesn't want to care-bear it up, the ease of finding pvp if there were plainly a quick-pvp game type you could just search for, and the extra rules/features/optimizations having separate game-types would allow makes something like this better as its own fully fleshed out game-type.

Yeah SE1 pvp had a lot of flows. However, 1. SE2 is planned to have 64 players at normal performance, 2. I don't see how getting a copy of your grid in a friendly low-stakes duel is not care-bearing it up, 3. It literally doesn't matter if people actually want to pvp or not, because nothing else is influenced by this duel feature. It's not replacing anything, it's not required for anything. The thing is, you don't have to base your identity around being a "pvp player" to get to see some ship to ship action in this game anymore this way. It's quick, easy, fun and a perfect solution to having more player interactivity in multiplayer. It opens up a lot of potential encounters you'd have online, as opposed to, well nothing.

1. 64 is a lot compared to 16, but it's a rounding error in comparison to the populations of an mmo with a duel feature, and people weren't exactly chomping at the bit to find someone to duel in WoW when they could just join a battlegrounds.

2. And I quote: "No, I don't pvp because I don't have any practice.", "No, you're just trying to (long-winded way to say gather intel)", "No, you just want to distract me so you can offline-raid me while we fight.", "No, you pvp'ers all think you're better than everyone else because you (longwinded way to say win an unfair fight), and interacting with you isn't worth my time.", "You pvp'ers always ruin everyone else's game, so you don't deserve to have fun." ... Can you see where this is going yet? Sure, some random folks will be open to a fight or two if there's no risk, but plenty will just respond with hostility just because you dared bring to their mind the thought that its possible to lose their stuff (even if they can't lose anything in the duel and their argument makes less than no sense).

3. It does matter, because building a ship in survival takes a lot of time that would be wasted if you later learn that the list of people willing to duel you in a server is effectively non-existent. On the other hand a dedicated pvp server where you drop in spawn a print (within the server's rules) and go to town takes no time, you can trust that most if not all people there will want to fight, anyone can join, and it doesn't mess with anything else. Also, you should avoid bringing up "basing your identity around being X", we really don't need the political-arguments that thought can start on an otherwise polite discussion thread.

Anyways, I've said my peace. I think this would be best as its own full independent game-mode instead of just an extra in survival, Good luck to you.

I am just at a loss, the duel feature is something that can be declined if the other player is not willing to duel. None of your arguments actually oppose the feature in and of itself beyond that.

A duel feature just completely ruins the sandbox-ness of the game. Teleporting across the map with a random copy of your ship that doesn't actually exist is incredibly jarring to the atmosphere of the game, one which has consistently stayed as a physics oriented sandbox game, not an MMO. It sounds like a very interesting mod idea, but not a feature for a standard survival world. SE is incredibly immersive. Being able to teleport around and duplicate ships to play around em would be jarring and break the immersion for many, if not most, people. Even stuff like player respawning has a very reasonable in-game rationalization (just a clone basically); duplicating ships for free and teleporting players temporarily to them to participate in practice combat is just needlessly jarring for an immersive world. MAYBE it could be added as a feature that's disabled by default but can be enabled? But any server owner worth their salt that is interesting in making an immersive, larger-than-life atmosphere that most servers I've been on have been wouldn't enable such a thing, as it just devastates immersion -- unless theres some justification, like it being a VR system in game. Even then, many players like myself would rather not deal with annoying duel popups, so you should be able to disable such duel notifs

Much as we players like to think we're above 'atmosphere', SE is an immersive, realism-oriented sandbox game, not a Minecraft Hypixel knockoff or a cheesy mmo. There are ways to have practice duels against others, so long as you're willing to spare the resources, or even better, just take it off server to your own world. Frankly, I would be absolutely stunned if Keen added a feature as jarring as this to SE2, considering how much they want their game to be immersive and locality-respecting. But we'll see.

Well, sure, immersive, there's not too much going on. For me it's just not really a complete experience yet in terms of feature. You can call an empty sandbox immersive like an endless road can be immersive. Also.. just add some jump effect to the duel zone and have your ship be "repaired" by a crew after the duel is over and you are "cloned" again. How's that sound? You can also "buy" ships from stations that appear out of thin air and your "respawn ship" (immersive name) also appears by space magic lol.. kind of a long stretch to call a duel feature unimmersive while these features are already in place. The only difference is you're used to those, and the duel feature is new.

@Gaz My arguments don't oppose the feature because I'm not opposed to the feature, I'm indifferent. My perspective is that you want something that would be good were you not aiming for the feature to be so small.

Also, a VR pod you connect to an opponent's pod via antenna that you then can send/receive/accept duel requests from where you use a print loaded in your pod to duel whatever print they've got in their pod would be a lot more realistic/immersive than some random jump-effect sending you in to an instanced clone of your current ship because you clicked a chat-button.