tis a test, stop complaining

Er, that was helpful.

Again, the devs are THINKING about this stuff already, but there is much in the way of foundation to lay before it can be implemented effectively.

It's just not fun anymore.
The pirates have taken over the game and I'm WAY too poor to fight back.
There is next-to-noone willing to convoy and everyone is badmouthing everyone else.

I started vendetta to play a game, now it feels more like work.

Flame all you like, I won't see it.
I'm out. Gone.

Blue pirates, you know who you are, you're pushing players out of the game.
I no longer recomend this game to anyone. I've now stopped playing and I'll probably talk dirt about the game to anyone that seems even remotely interrested in playing.

Zathras/Scarab signing off.
Anyone want to send me a SERIOUS mail about anything or want to get in touch, drop me a line on vendetta<at>z0rz.net

Yeah, I'm pretty much thinking the same thing, except without the leaving part (I've been here too long to leave). I haven't been ingame for a while, though (I logged in yesterday for about half an hour, but I was just sitting in the station, chatting). If you're reading this, try giving it a month or two for everything to cool off...

I figured I'd come back here and check the thread out until it starts getting flamy.
I might consider coming back to the game in a LOOONG while when Scarab/Zathras has faded from memory and the anti-piracy uprising has begun.

If I see an uprising in the forums then I'll return to join it.
If there is no uprising I'll check back in a year or so.

I'm so utterly disapointed that everyone seems to be fine with the fact that only the really GOOD players rule, the medium players get slaughtered and the newbies quit after a few days.

This has the potential to be THE game. I'd consider doing nothing but Vendetta if I won the lottery and didn't need to go to work every day.

I remember "Way back" when my char 'Zathras' got help from X05<something> and just started to play. It was fun! Some pirate came along and blew me away and suddenly there were four goldies hunting him.

What happened to X05? THAT was a great guy. Gone.
Haven't seen UncleDave in a while, but then again I've allready been to work for 8 hours when I get home, so I don't feel like going to a virtua-job too.
UncleDave was/is a great player.

Seems like more and more of the people I like in vendetta are quitting and only the [opposite end of digestivesystem from mouth] are left.

I know I'm babbeling, but I think I'm making a bit sense too.
I don't know if I'm the only one feeling this, but:

There's nothing wrong with the game, the technology or the servers.
The problem now is the players. There is some work to be done.

A possible game-patch-solution is: Let there be a penalty to piracy! Let the bounty become the value of the ship destroyed, the cargo it held and the bounty of the player carrying the cargo in the ship.
That would leave some blue players with MILLIONS in bounty. That makes for a good target.

The player-to-player solution is to just make it morally bad to be a pirate. People go after pirates because piracy is not acceptable. If it's a great risk to be a pirate then only the elite pirates remain, and the game needs atleast 2 or 3 really good pirates to still be Vendetta.
Is a 'nationless player' possible? Outcasts?

I'm not saying piracy should be gone from the game, I'm saying steps should be taken to limit it ALOT.
Like "rules of conduct".

1) Tell the trader to jetison cargo before attacking.
2) If trader claims he has no cargo charge a fee for passage rather than destroy.
3) If the trader has no money and no cargo, then kill for the bounty.

Hope something like that comes along with a 'pirates guild' or something.

Until then, I might be on the forum if I'm not flamed by the pirating astardsbay, but not ingame. Not worth the processor time.

Demonen, you're not the only person to feel this way.

Hi, * here, before i stopped playing i noticed alot of pirating going on, me myself stop and tried helping but really theres nothing you can do about it...oh well

BTW i didnt stop playing because of this, i stopped playing because i have dial up now, sometime in the future ill be back on though

Have fun,
420

I only play when there's an update out. There's just too many people with attitude problems in vendetta. If its not grief from pirates then it's stupid arguements between vets.

UncleDave is one of those Elite pirates that make Vendetta a good game.
I have great respect for UncleDave because he's OK about it.

No need to badmouth people just because they can't kick your Alpha Sierra Sierra.

Besides, it's the number and attitude of the pirates that's the problem, not the concept.

I was a Neutral player so I need to go through s10 or s11 to get tho the profitable trading sectors.
FORGET IT! I'm spacedust before I've reached s7 and if I (by the Hands of Gods) reach s7 it's full of pirates too.

Some of the best fun I've had in Vendetta is running Pirate Blockades in a convoy, but a one-ship-convoy isn't a real convoy.
That's boredom that consumes CPU cycles and bandwidht. I can consume no processor and no bandwith watching paint dry, so that's the best of the two.

I hear your pain. There have been many good solutions offered to this problem. All are necessarily complex to code in order to work well. This game is not even a beta test. There are many, many things that need to be added in order to make it fun for everyone at the same time. While your enjoyment is a priority, other facets of the game-engine must be written, installed, tested, rewritten and so on before a "karma" system can be correctly implemented.

If Vendetta is stressing you out, you probably should take a break, but please do check back periodically.

Moderator has spoken.
Zathras obeys. :D

The problem is that if the devs don't think about this sort of thing NOW it'll be ALOT harder to code in later.

I've only written a million lines of code in my life (nothing even close to the size of vendetta) so I might be a bit off here, but the further I develop in one direction the harder it gets to fix stuff that should have been implemented pre-beta.

One more thing: I am not an experienced coder, but I am an experienced betatester. I've betatested everything from IP-phone apps to MMORPGs.
Every time I've found so much as a glitch in vendetta I've tried to recreate it, log it, check my system for any changes then recreate again etc. (Standard bugtesting, I've even done 'strace vendetta' wile figuring out if it was the graphics driver, Xserver or vendetta that caused the problem)

I see myself as one of the players Guild Software WANTS to play this test so bugs get reported, but lately I've been on vendetta maybe 30-40 minutes a day.
That's not enough time to discover the bugs. That's enough to cost some grifer 300k in rockets and see nothing but nice effects from rocket explotions.

I've even been blown to bits while SPAMMING say_sector with 'DO NOT ENGAGE ME! I'M TRYING TO RECREATE A BUG HERE!'

Some players have lost the 'test' and are just hanging out blowing people up.

I try to roleplay - squashed by being "the only one"
I try to bugtest - bugs in sector 9 are hard to recreate because of all the pirates. (That's just plain wrong)
I try to just play the game - I don't have the piloting skills to dodge rockets for 20 minutes in a maud.

Then I'm left with bugtesting the login and logout.

<sarcasm>
The 'Leave station' button seems to fill my screen with flares and then I'm back inside again. *strace, log, make bugreport*
</sarcasm>

Demonen, I hear your pain (kinda).

The problem with CoC and all is that you're asking someone in absolute power to voluntarily give up some of that power. Doing so is against his best interests, and would cost him money. So, a player in a amoral universe is not about to spare the little guy. The ones that stay turn into griefers themselves when put into positions of power (I'm one of those).

The goal of a reputation system is to put it in the best interests of the pirates to bypass certain characters (newbies, broke pilots). This would be monetary penalties, restricted buying, repairs, and ammo stocking.

However, all this does not exist atm. Right now your only hope is to switch to the nation of the griefer (it's not a bad idea to have more than one "main" character in this case) or team with another player or another nation to defeat the griefer.

Hang in there, with the guild system and specified chats coming, the reputation system can't be that far down the road.

People, trade in valks. Yes, it takes longer, but you will never ever be pirated again. Just train with the defense bots in other nation's home sector how to run from somebody. Nobody catches a valk.

Oh, FINE! We had a serious discussion going, and someone ("andreas") jumps in with his "anti-Valk" screed. He sounds like some sort of "purist." Someone who flies a Vult or a hog. That is perfectly OK with me. I will never critisise his choice of ship. But I do have two questions:

1) If you were building a house, where would you by your tools? Toys 'R Us, or a
hardware store?

2) If we listened to "purists" wouldn't we all be shooting at each other with sling
shots from hot-air ballons?

Just curious.

Anti-Valk screed? /me trades in valks all the time. Thats why I suggested it to others. /me likes his valk.

Beyond the flames, This thread is valid, Its extermly difficult to trade/stay-alive as any nation. And even harder if you use a charictor name with no built up reputation.

Fair enough pirates and greifers exist, However to test bugs I have teamed up with other players, and given full discolsure of what I am experiancing. They tend to be supportive and even try to reproduce it as well, just to confirm.

The trouble is, users will not, "voluntarily give up some of that power" (tnx Sircamps), if they dont understand. That may mean explaining in a message to 6 diffrent users before you test the bug just so that you have 5 minutes to test.
Even the most agressive players in the game will ussally take 5 minutes out to listern to a bug report or duel with you so you can improve your skills or assist with game development.

The thing you need to remember is that its just a game, At the end of the day even the best players die and get griefed, just enjoy what you can do for now, Stay homed in your teams home sector, ignore the sometimes border line role playing that can fustrate you so much, and know your limitations.

I hear and feel your pain. There's an overabundance of pirates these days, some of which have absolutely no respect for the people they pirate. Pirates become griefers and grief the few people who will even attempt to stand up to them. This is a situation I've come to know all too well. Time will tell if this situation gets resolved. I don't currently plan on leaving, but if things don't start improving soon, I may start to consider ALL of my options.

Semi-Amusing and relevant anecdote:

I'm home from college for Christmas. So the first thing I do, of course, is install Vendetta on the home computer and start playing. My brother sees it and is interested, so he makes a character and starts to play. I walk him through botting in s4, and after hes worked his way up a bit and gotten the hang of the controls (and most importantly, gotten bored of botting in s4), I show him one of my trade routes.

He's out there in an unarmed med/fast bus at this point. He does one run from s9-s11, docks, sells, undocks, and without any warning at all gets quad flare rammed by some guy in a hornet. He asks, "What the hell?" reply: "Ha, its fun."

This is a 1500 score bus. With maybe 100 bounty. Who the hell kills a 1500 score bus with no bounty without asking for a cargo drop first? Seriously, WTF?

I logged on as me and killed the idiot bus-killer a few times. He kept re-buying the quad-flare hornet, so I'm guessing that bus kill really cost him.

My brother, of course, decided to play something else. He might come back, and I hope he does, but to quote him: "There's no point in playing if I'm just going to get killed before I can learn anything."

Yeah. So stop killing lowscore buses, eh?

What I find really funny is that he needed a quad-flare hornet just to kill a bus in the first place. :P