Remove Maintenance on building

[Guyver1]

Not sure if this has ever come up before but maintenance and maintaining bases currently is only aimed at a very specific set of Epoch players at the exclusion of players like myself.

 

I play regularly on Epoch, 3-4 times a week after work for an hour or two a night (full time job and a family)

 

Playing as a lone wolf sniper as well as not being able to play every day, pretty much excludes me completely from any form of meaningful base building as I simply cannot maintain any form of base as I cannot play often enough to do so.

 

Has there been any discussion within the dev team about this?

 

What about other forms of deterioration of building materials such as an 'age' value whereby say a wooden wall section 1 day old would require a satchel to destroy, whereas after 7 days, it would require only a grenade, something like that.

 

Or just remove maintenance and degradation completely and give each building component a damage value, and add new base building components such as reinforced concrete (scrap metal and Cinder block) that has a huge damage value (almost indestructible, but can only be used for walls and not for floors/roofs)

 

Right now, I am missing out on a significant part of Epoch simply because I have a full time job and family and cannot play the hours required to maintain base parts. That to me seems like a poor way of implementing that mechanic of the game that excludes a certain % of your player base from ever building anything that will last with any meaning.

 

At least add in an alternative to the maintenance system so that server admins can choose between the two?

 

 

[Dwarfer]

Guyver1

 

Epoch has a setting to allow server owners the ability to change the maintenance window. I hear what you are saying as some of my players can only get on maybe once a week.  This is why we have a two week setting set.. in the case where people are away fro longer (we have people working on Riggs and such) they just let us know when they are off and and Admin will do it or player mate. 

 

I would suggest you look for a server with a longer maintenance window maybe 3-4 weeks I know they exits as alot of people are in your same situation.

 

Thanks

[Ninja2dan]

I mostly play on PvE servers at the moment, so my comments may not apply directly as PvP servers might be using different settings. So please take that into consideration.

 

Most of the servers that I play on have roughly a 7-day maintenance requirement for jammers, meaning you only need to pay base maintenance once a week. As a precaution, twice a week isn't too bad. I am also a pretty large builder, looking for new ways to design a functional yet appealing base layout. While my base designs are not usually overly-huge and I don't keep track of individual component count, a 3-level base with a fully-enclosed parking garage suitable for 4 vehicles and providing helicopter pads for 2, with ample shelving inside as well, requires roughly C200 to maintain.

 

Generally, I can loot just a few buildings and have enough garbage to sell to traders to earn that much. So I can make enough funds for one week's maintenance in less than 30 minutes, including the travel time to a trader. If someone is able to play for 6-8 hours a week, that should be more than enough time to do maintenance while still enjoying several hours of additional building, looting, or missions.

 

I'm a disabled veteran and full-time college student, so I don't get much time in game either. Some days I'll have more time available than others, with some days only allowing just enough time to log on between classes to loot some buildings and throw junk into a tipi to sell at a later time. But never have I had a problem with maintaining my base. Sure, some servers have better loot drops of building components like cinder and mortar, while others like many of the Bornholm maps make it quite challenging to find cinder and scrap metal. But overall, I find enough time to work on my base, even if it's just adding a single floor this week, shelves next week, etc.

 

 

I can also understand why the maintenance system is in place. Far too many times have I seen players join a server, start building a base, and never return. Stuff happens, some players might not be able to log in for a few weeks. Some players have personal or family issues that prevent them from playing for a while. Some players simply get bored and find a new game. But when those players stop logging in for extended periods, who's to know which bases are still in use and which have been abandoned?

 

The maintenance requirement allows neglected and abandoned bases to fall apart and disappear on its own after a set period of time, no player or admin action is necessary. If bases didn't degrade after failure to maintain, then you'd have tons of bases (some only partially built) all over the map. Admins would be busy going out and investigating if a base is actually in use or not and having to manually delete those left behind. And until those abandoned bases are deleted, other players may be prevented from building due to max server limits.

 

 

One option that is available, although not everyone will feel comfortable with using it, is to group up with another player (or players) that are willing to maintain your base if you can't log in frequently enough. You obviously want a player that is trustworthy enough that you don't log in to find your shelves empty. But there have only been a few servers that I have not seen at least one other player who may be up to the task. If that's not an option for you, then consider the suggestions I made above. As a "last resort" you can always talk to server admins to either extend maintenance periods, or maybe take care of the maintenance for you. Maybe you drop a tipi down and fill it with "vendor trash" which an admin can pull items from and delete in exchange for the maintenance. Just a few ideas.

[1Man]

Very good ideas, I just set mine to 2 weeks and since I made that change I went around and maintained everyone's bases because after the restart a lot of walls were severely damaged cost about 6k to do them all and I didn't even tell my players yet.

[Guyver1]

Thanks for the replys everyone, I'll go back to the server admins for the server I play on.

[Brez]

All I can say is I hope they tie in shelves/tipi's/lockboxes to the Jammer maintenance and do it somewhat quick.

[Guyver1]

one of the things the server owner/admin mentioned on the server I play on was this (paraphrasing)

 

If you remove maintenance then the server will get bogged down with all these unused abandoned bases and all those base parts will suck the performance out of the server.

 

 

At first I thought: well that's a good point I overlooked.

 

However, on reflection, I've thought why that should be the case.

 

If you remove maintenance completely and just have base parts strength (damage value) deteriorate over time.

You can then set in place a loot economy where there can only be x amount of each base building material on a given server to limit the amount of available base materials.

to get base parts into the economy again, you would have to blow up rival bases to destroy the parts so the materials can go back into the loot table.

 

This might have the added bonus of seeing rival squads engaging and raiding each other more often to get building materials.

 

Just thinking out loud really as the balance would be difficult, too few materials and you might not get enough people able to build; too much material and you'll bog the server performance down with abandoned parts that don't de-spawn.

 

 

either that or the maintenance system needs to be made much more reliable and stable. everything I read reads like some OCD user manual whereby you have to maintain every day, at least 1 after server reboot but not more than 1 hour before a server reboot, by the jammer/group OWNER not a member, and this is on a server with a 5 day maintenance cycle.

 

Even then its not perfect, the server I play on hit the fan 3 nights ago when a bug wiped out half the building pieces across all bases leaving all bases open and exposed.

It was a f**king looting party!!

Lots of REALLY unhappy people/donators.

[second_coming]

Why not just increase the expiresBuilding variable in your epochconfig.hpp to a much higher amount? 

[Razzmatazz]

I don't understand at all how base materials that deteriorate in strength over time is functionally superior to the maintenance system. Your situation only allows you to play once a week or so. Under the system you propose, your base would be easily breachable after six days. That system would also make it a HUGE pain in the ass to actively maintain a base. You would have to remove and replace every single component every seven days. If you have a larger base, you'd have to spend your one day a week playing just looting for replacement materials and rebuilding your own base.

 

These suggestions would have the effect of eliminating base building as a fun activity rather than modifying it in a way that would work for those who play less frequently. Just find a server where the maintenance window is ten days. That's not WAY longer than the one week default (so the server won't get bogged down), but it provides some additional cushion for people who only play once per week.

 

As Brez points out, the jammer doesn't currently maintain storage items, which is a big annoyance. Once that's fixed, the current system will work better for everyone.

[TheHermit]

Yeah, I haven't been able to play for a few weeks... had a little base complex that was fun, but took a lot of effort.

 

I'm not sure how I feel about maintenance. Maybe this game isn't for me after all.

Its just not a single player game. Not for someone who cannot make a commitment to play every week.

 

I do not like any feature that forces me to play. And sure no one said I had to build a base, I get that.

[1Man]

My thoughts on bases rather to have or not, if you don't need a base or play on a regular basis then use traders as your inventory. Most servers I played on had very good items to choose from and ATMs very close