Multiplayer Starting Areas...

[EnVenta]

Suck. Half the time it's a radioactive zone as far as the eye can see. The other half there are no minerals to be found outside of plain stone.

One time I found an abandoned drone base in the radioactive zone I'd crashed into which saved me from imminent death by radiation, but the base was full of hostile turrets and some scorpion critters much too difficult for a newly spawned player.

To reiterate: starting zones on multiplayer servers on a10.5 SUCK.

[TwitchyJ]

There is nothing wrong with starting zones. There issue is the server you play on hasn't set things up very well.
It's up to the server admin to tweak their scenario to suit their servers needs.

They can have players start inside a specific building that can be on a planet, on a moon, or in space.
They can have players fall in an escape pod and always land in one specific place on the planet, or they can have the escape pod fall at random spots on the planet.

It's all configurable. If it sucks then it's because it was set up to suck (or rather wasn't set up at all).

There are plenty of servers that use custom scenarios that give the player a start with a story line.

[EnVenta]

So the server admin is me. Just set up a multiplayer server today. Tried it out. First 4 seeds produced an escape pod landing zone that was a non-starter.

It's cool that it's configurable. Sounds like there's still a lot I need to learn about the options.

However, it feels like I was sold a car without a windshield and then was told later that I need to "do it myself." In my view, the default starting area should be hospitable for new players. If server admins feel they need to punish new players by landing them in a giant radioactive zone to ensure their early death, they can go out of their way to configure it that way (remove the windshield).

It's early access, so my feedback is this default configuration sucks.

[ravien_ff]

In the Default Multiplayer scenario, the escape pod will spawn in a random location according to the time of day, in that it should always drop you off at a spot that is in dawn on the planet. This is because if every player started in the same location, the area would quickly become picked clean of surface rocks or deposits.

If you want to alter this behavior, simply use the "Default Random" scenario instead, but be warned this scenario is *NOT* optimized for public online play and you need to make sure your gameoptions are set up correctly for it.

If you plan on hosting a public server, it's strongly recommended that you use your own custom multiplayer scenario and set it up as you see fit. This is because the devs can't possibly create a default multiplayer scenario that is optimized for every server's needs as there are way too many servers each with their own player counts and rule sets.

[EnVenta]

Sounds great, ravien, that there is so much flexibility. However I think the number of hoops to jump through to host a server will eventually be a detractor from people wanting to run servers or run servers that new players can get into (randomly difficult based on time day?), which in turn will scare away would-be players of the game and drain long term support for it.

The devs can very well optimize 80/20 for the noob scenario: the players who don't want insane difficulty and the server admins who don't have an unlimited time budget to learn, create, configure, and dote on it. I've run several multiplayer servers over the years -- 3 currently -- and this game is the only one that 'requires' me to create a custom scenario (whatever that even means).

[DivineEvil]

Multiplayer servers rarely adapt for the new players, because its a natural expectation for them to try to figure the basics out in SP. Next, many server offer different starting planets suiting different experience levels with associated Difficulty rating. Next, radiation is probably the least immediate hazard there can be. Temperature spikes, hunger and lack of Oxygen all represent a much greater concern. Starter planets usually have all the basic resources lying around, but in different biomes to be explored. Iron is mostly found in plains, copper in forests and swamps, and silicon in the mountains.

Now that you know how configurable the scenarios actually are, it is just silly to pretend like the way the starter locations are set up on one server or another has anything to do with the game itself.

I personally play a PvE-focused server called Space Life - it has starter planets for anyone, ranging from a fairly hospitable temperate planet up to the barren martian wasteland with almost everything staked against a player. Needless to say, the latter is where I prefer to be.

Looking through the default starting planets and available scenarios, I sincerely have no ducking clue what is your actual problem is.

[EnVenta]

Originally posted by DivineEvil:

Multiplayer servers rarely adapt for the new players, because its a natural expectation for them to try to figure the basics out in SP. Next, many server offer different starting planets suiting different experience levels with associated Difficulty rating. Next, radiation is probably the least immediate hazard there can be. Temperature spikes, hunger and lack of Oxygen all represent a much greater concern. Starter planets usually have all the basic resources lying around, but in different biomes to be explored. Iron is mostly found in plains, copper in forests and swamps, and silicon in the mountains.

Now that you know how configurable the scenarios actually are, it is just silly to pretend like the way the starter locations are set up on one server or another has anything to do with the game itself.

I personally play a PvE-focused server called Space Life - it has starter planets for anyone, ranging from a fairly hospitable temperate planet up to the barren martian wasteland with almost everything staked against a player. Needless to say, the latter is where I prefer to be.

Looking through the default starting planets and available scenarios, I sincerely have no ducking clue what is your actual problem is.

My actual problem is that the starting areas suck by default.

How many weeks of your life did you spend tinkering with your server? Some of us have, you know, jobs, lives, girlfriends, etc.

[Sparrowhawk65]

Originally posted by tigris:

How many weeks of your life did you spend tinkering with your server? Some of us have, you know, jobs, lives, girlfriends, etc.

Some of us don't have any of those things. lol.

[ravien_ff]

You can steer the escape pod in a pretty large radius, so there should never be a time where you are forced to land in a radiated biome since those biomes are usually pretty small and easy to get out of in case you do land in them.

The alternative is spawning players in the fixed starter biome, but that runs the risk of dropping them in the middle of the night with nothing to do but wait for day due to predators that would kill the player if they venture too far from the starter biome. And with no resources left in the starter biome, they couldn't even pick up surface rocks. So it's kind of hard to tell which starting option would be best so I think the devs went with the random start.

[Snipe]

There is no such thing as a "starting area" since the beginning area is the whole planet, and surely there is plenty of ore on the whole planet, especially if you're playing solo.

Weeks of setup? Not really, just pick the Akua single player scenario. No need to change anything else if you don't want. It's pretty easy to do. I've played almost 200hrs of that scenario with no problems. I think the default coop is better though, single player or not.

[EnVenta]

Very interesting perspectives. I'm glad I did a single player warm up before trying multiplayer. Will think on it a bit. Thanks for the thoughts.

[piddlefoot]

The more you read about editing yaml files, the more you will discover can be tailored to your preferences.
The game is very flexible in its yaml system and allows you to set up a server pretty unique to any others if you know what your doing.

Jump on HWS for 15 minutes and check out there settings, then jump on Venatus and check out there settings, so much is moddable, from stack limits, to what blocks go on what type of vessels to changing the recipies of items you make, so the more you learn the better your game can be for you.

[Kmordain]

Granted, my experience with multiplayer is limited to co-op servers with 2-4 players, but I don't have this problem. I setup a 10.5 co-op game last night and tried 3 seeds. Only one of the seeds was hostile, the other 2 were fine, I just didn't like the 2nd seed. The 3rd seed was close to water had plenty of resources and even ore deposits within walking distance of the crash site.

[Sephrajin]

Beeing the mean one now... maybe those servers were not set up for new players - but if they were (calling themself new player friendly), they're very poorly set up.

Either way, just as a general note, I think any and every new player should first start in SP.
To get the very basics before eventuelly getting mind blown my joining an MP community.
(it's one thing to get used to manage 1 constructor as a new player and a very different one to manage 4-24 constructors, and where to store which things and why.)

Since we 'now' CAN re-build everything from scratch, as the survival tool is free and can be produced in the suit constructor.
Before A8 there wasnt even such a tool, yet we survived this galactic empyrion... ;)

[ravien_ff]

Nothing wrong with hard starts, scenarios, or servers! If a particular server is too hard and doesn't offer any easy player starts, just find another. There's lots of servers that have a variety of starting planets.