Oh, we should address whether buyout-limiting should be a defealt feature. My feeling is that most players and gameops will want to restrict buyouts, and those who want to allow it understand the game well enough to get this setting right.

I agree on the limiting being the default, and I think that will be the most common setting also, but it is nice to have "retro games".

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

I agree, I think these need to be sysop-configurable limits.


I think you should leave the player limit at 500. I know there aren't that many players right now, but I can always dream of a maxed out game can't I?

I also think your overcomplicating things with ship pools. Why not just leave the ships on a first come/first server basis, but limit the max ships per player/corp?

1. Allow the GameOp to configure max ships up to 32K (Currently 2K).
2. Allow the GameOp to configure max ships per player.
3. Allow the GameOp to configure max ships per corp.

This would allow the maximum flexability for a GameOp to setup a game the way he wants. Also need to do the same settings for Planets.

I guess I'm not making this clear. There are physical limitations in the engine that require these limits. Allowing 500 players with 50 ships per player and 50 Corps with 500 ships per Corp would put the ship number over the 32K safe limit.

Does anyone ever set user count higher than the default 200?

The only time I see a lot of ships in a game is like a sub zero game where people are capping ships for cash, and all they would have to do is sell the ships when they reached the limit. Also, I haven't seen a server in years that would have more than 200 active players in a game, and that's where the inactive player deletion kicks in before it comes to the point where new players can't get in the game.

I suggest this:

Maximum ships per player (configurable) 1 to 20
Maximum ships per corp would depend on the number of players on that corp.

Examples:

Corp members = 5 and maximum ships per payer is 10
5 x 10 = 50 maximum ships for that corp

Corp members = 3 and maximum ships per player is 20
3 x 20 = 60 maximum ships for that corp.

Yeah, I'll make the caps configurable. I'm just saying that 25/player and 500/Corp is probably the max I could support, but that those numbers should result in no apparent limit on the players.

No-one currently has over 200 players, but there's a huge comeback coming
With 500 players the GameOp would just need to set lower limits. Also, you don't need to completely eliminate the possibility of a buyout, just as long as no individual player or corp could do a buyout.

But when does anyone have that many ships, unless they're attempting a buyout? Do people park ships all over the universe for some reason?

Of course I'd love to see a comeback. But I don't think it was ever necessary to have that many players per game.

I'll see how difficult it would be to dynamically cap the ships per player and ships per Corp based on this player count so if you choose to run a high number like that, you can. With the original settings, even at 500 players, there was still only 2000 ships in the game, so even if I said at 500 players there wasn't a private pool of ships/player, it wouldn't be any worse than it is today.

Exactly, there is no valid reason for a Corp to need to have 500 ships.

I've heard of people staging ships inside bubbles, because bubble fill scripts usually don't notice them, and then they can xport in, drop a fig, and twarp an invasion fleet behind the enemy's gate sector. But that'd be like, what, 50 ships per corp? I can't see anyone needing more than that.

That doesn't seem very honerable, now does it?

Hey... if people use dumb scripts to fill bubbles and it bites 'em, they had it comin'.

Another thread derailed by *me* lol

What were we supposed to be talking about?

instead of droping max player to 200, set the corp private pool to 350 and you'll be set.

2000 Public pool
12500 Player private pool (500 x 25 ship)
17500 Corp private pool (50 x 350 ship)
32000

or if you want to keep ratio of solo vs corp a little more fair,

2000 Public pool
20000 Player private pool (500 x 40 ship)
10000 Corp private pool (50 x 200 ship)
32000