Personal Feedback / Pirate Galaxy isn't engaging enough nowadays + ideas to counteract that

[Rainbowdash]

Greetings,

so, this is one of the games I keep coming back to. I've been wanting to post a thread like this or make a video about it for a while now, but I found the former option to be better and less time consuming. And I know it won't hold much value or weight to most, but I still wanted to get this off my chest, especially since I have this... I would assume unique position. You'll know what I mean soon enough.

So yeah, I wanted to talk about a few points here and there. Mostly catered towards the early and mid-game.

Questionable progression / Story difficulty spike
Funny or sad as it is, even though I have been holding this particular account since 2013, I have been playing on and off ever since. Well, to be fair, back then I was still rather young - as it can probably be seen by the user name and past threads. Or be easily distracted or expecting that the first gear of every new system works into the end-game. Well, the last issue I could fix. But the missions I *have* to complete in order to progress are catered towards groups and as I was able to find out a while ago, even with 2 more experienced people who were sitting at level 70 each, certain missions in Gemini were... let's just say had to be attempted 4 times in order to complete. I'm in Mizar now, big shocker, I know, I must be terrible. But some of these missions can become very frustrating pretty quickly which makes me turn around and try again a few months later if I find the energy.

I get that the end-game is the current focus, as most players are in that stage who pushed through the story elements. And I have been semi-actively following the dev shack. But hear me out, I would bet there are still one or more new players coming each day, discouraged by the time they reach Aurora were I had most of my problems back then as well. Perhaps an update should be dedicated to fine-tune the missions to be not just be possible alone, but have a lower fail chance because you have to escort a target or something like that. I would love to reach at least half-way into the end-game, the drive is there, just not the patience to fail missions on a streak.

Outdated Mechanics
It's 2024. Some mechanics don't need to change. The need for collecting blueprints for example feels perfect for this game and gives it this particular charm I like about it. But some others feel unnecessary. We still have waiting times between system travel, something that should be instantaneous in nowadays times. It adds no particular value other than making dying to something particularly frustrating. Equally, we are still running on energy collection. It's not that you purchase your energy via Kryonite, you collect it by hand, one by one. On some planets that's a tedious task. I mean technically the collector isn't particularly needed either, all the drops could be directly distributed, although that's more of a tiny thing rather than a big concern.

I like to account this under the category "quality of life". Where you improve little mechanics of the game which make a huge difference. So if even just the travel time and the energy mechanic were changed or removed, it would make a huge difference. And there are probably more of these around I haven't accounted for. Maybe because the last time I played this game for a longer period was about 6 months ago or so. So if I come across more things, I'll put them here as well.

Balancing, ship classes, rare equipment
At least from the time I have been playing, I have been playing mostly tank. As this was claimed to be the most powerful class up to Sol, that's what I have been told. And well, it holds true to some extend as my previous attempt to switch to storm/DD failed kind of by dying more often. But that isn't the only factor I found to be weird. Gold equipment: Rare drops that you partially need 11 parts for, spending hours and hours grinding together that one component. Just to note: A singular component you still need to purchase for a large price. Only to notice that it isn't particularly good. It overperforms for the system, of course, but you'd expect a hefty boost that carries you well into the next system. But that doesn't seem to be the case, at least it doesn't feel like it. So I stopped grinding for gold equipment since Gemini.

I feel like certain ship classes should be re-evaluated. Why does a tank have better damage capabilities than a ship meant for damage, on top of being able to last longer? Perhaps gold equipment also needs some more fine tuning, but that's more of a nitpick rather than "it needs to be done"

Effort-to-payout
Last point is the effort you have to put into the game in order to receive a significant payout. Later-stage ship systems aren't cheap and partially require a hefty amount of kryonite to be optimized. But the amount of kryonite you receive over time is rather lackluster. Perhaps it changes in later systems, but up until now, I don't feel like the amount I receive is significant enough, meaning I have to be very conservative with my kryonite and choices. There are Kryonite refineries I can purchase for gold / Real life currency but shouldn't be the basis for a healthy progression.

That's just my opinion and only reflects the amount received up to my current system/knowledge, but to my feel, Kryonite needs to be dropped in lightly larger quantities. That can also be tested with a global 50% Kryonite dropped boost for a period of like 3 days or so.

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That's a bit more than I wanted to write at first, but I hope it receives some attention and thought. I'll be watching this thread and I'm obviously open for discussion.

Kind regards - Aldemar (or rainbowdash in terms of my forum name)

 

[Vesperion]

No please not a post about the game and some mechanics that bear the risk of me going into talking mode... well to late can´t stop it anymore now... Wall of text incomming...

Questionable progression / Story difficulty spike

The missions from Vega to Sol are fine in most cases and in terms of Geminis story it was mostly known as the "Engineer System" due of the load of escort missions and stuff while Mizar had a good mix of the needed ship classes. Sol had from what i still remember nothing really special and was mostly easy when you did go for hunting the Sniper you could unlock at Moon and made most missions pretty easy due of armor bonus and devastating firepower for the system itself (you have to complete the Mars Missions before you are allowed to land on Moon).

Aside from that imo the real difficulty spike of the story starts with Draconis as we have to fly for quite a while with the Sol ships before we even get access to the Drac ships while TC takes it then to whole new level of difficult spike and much worse fail conditions for missions that take easily 10 mins up to 30 mins just so you fail before completion or the mid line and redo everything again and some TC missions are famous for being pure "time eaters" where one particular mission alone holds records of players who needed up to 50 attempts+ before they could finish it.

Outdated Mechanics

Belive me but such requests/suggestions where made a good couple of times and even i (who is to some degree known for suggestions) made years ago the suggestion that in terms of E-Collection at least we can park in an e-field and within 1 minute the tank is all refilled (regardless of the system) without collecting a single cell as they would only remain as indicator of "here is an e field" Here is the quote about this idea from the other thread that brought it up

The Formula
The only thing i´m not sure about is the E-generation itself inside the E-Fields but for the most easy way i would go for something like "Current E-Max/60 seconds = x E/second"
Translated for an Lvl 91 Pilot it would look then something like this:
11.250E/60 seconds = 187,5 E/second (rounded up 188 E/second)

The Benefit
Over this way a player would at max need 1 full minute ON EVERY PLANET IN EVERY SYSTEM to fill his tank from 0 --> max. The more E you have remaining the less time it takes to fully refill your E-Tank

In return that helps the high level players to help new players with missions cus they need the same time no matter the level and system what also helps a ton for events that play in every system and high level players need to leave for at least 3 - 5 mins the system to go to their current top system to fill their energy up again and then return to the lower system.

Another thing it would serve would be the "brb-moments" where we can shortly move away from the screen and then return with an full E-Tank again.

Balancing, ship classes, rare equipment

Well... no good news here cus you will have to farm the golds from all systems if you want it or not cus for the Sirius system you need to have the gold items before you can decrypt the Sirius items + you should prepare that you will need to be in a clan and calculate ~2 months until you have from that system all the Ring 5 BPs due of rndmized what BP will be available during the planets lifetime as those BPs then are also needed for the Tau Ceti BPs to decrypt them cus otherwise you are kinda stranded after the Draconis Story without much chance to progress at all.

Also class mechanics will more or less disapear as with the system after Draconis Split started to implement Hybrid ships that mostly are a mix of items from 2-3 ship classes and so allow whole new experience. If you have played the one or another RDX even you should know the Raven ships who are basically the Parsec equivalent but as Hybrid ships where some ships are nowadays the "Meta" of the game and a must have.

Effort-to-payout

The payment will not really get better + Draconis makes a massive jump in the formula by taking the prices of Sol ships x5 for the pure hull of a drac ship and Sol best (blue) item x2 just to buy the 1st blue item of Draconis while the payment of missions not really increases that much while the cryo values in drac not really increase to reflect the massive jump.

It only starts to get a bit better in terms of prices vs cry values after Drac but it still takes a lot of farming if you want to build the ships with best tech as the prices easly go into millions for a ship with all armors + best tech installed. Just to give some small perspective building a full Tau Ceti Parsec/RDX with everything top gold will cost ~9,1 - 9.5 million cryo while the units from the last planet drop mostly around 2k with some exceptions that drop up to 5k (without any cryo booster and only the cryo drone involved) and not taking Harvester farming or boss hunting into mind.

Sure you could hunt the R5 units in Siri with the TC tech but considering that you get the penalty in combo with respawn times of 10 mins Siri is not more really the farming system if it is purely for the cryo even if the units there drop easily up to 5x the TC units cryo but this is just my opinion cus i didn´t pay Siri a visit since a long time anymore.

 

[Rainbowdash]

Aside from that imo the real difficulty spike of the story starts with Draconis as we have to fly for quite a while with the Sol ships before we even get access to the Drac ships while TC takes it then to whole new level of difficult spike and much worse fail conditions for missions that take easily 10 mins up to 30 mins just so you fail before completion or the mid line and redo everything again and some TC missions are famous for being pure "time eaters" where one particular mission alone holds records of players who needed up to 50 attempts+ before they could finish it.

This kind of reads like it's only going to get worse, which I was hoping wouldn't be the case. From what I have seen, the game isn't going to get any more players around the lower-tier systems, and while I did have a few people on my friends list who would occasionally help me out, I didn't want this to be the common rule. I believe the game itself would play much more smoothly if the missions you had to complete weren't so drawn-out and luck-based occasionally. Let alone the fact that it's usually the best to first grind out the system to it's entirety to be able to have any significant impact.

This is an opportunity the developers could take, reworking the early-game and mid-game to play much more smoothly, so they (the new players) can enter the (likely) well crafted end-game much faster. I wouldn't see an issue with this, or any losses in terms of income.

As for the quality of life/outdated mechanics, I kind of assumed already that some suggestions regarding those have been made in the past already. I feel like Quality of Life updates however give a lot of benefit for what little you usually have to change. I mean the last time I saw a QoL update, I was so happy that doors opened automatically instead of having to open it manually with a click. It's such a minor change, yet it adds so much to the convenience.

To put it bluntly, you can feel this game is from 2009. It's not even the visual aspect, but the little things that seem like it was innovative back then but just appears outclassed by many other mechanics nowadays.

Well... no good news here cus you will have to farm the golds from all systems if you want it or not cus for the Sirius system you need to have the gold items before you can decrypt the Sirius items + you should prepare that you will need to be in a clan and calculate ~2 months until you have from that system all the Ring 5 BPs due of rndmized what BP will be available during the planets lifetime as those BPs then are also needed for the Tau Ceti BPs to decrypt them cus otherwise you are kinda stranded after the Draconis Story without much chance to progress at all.

That is actually really unexpected, as I have treated gold BP's to be an optional component in order to min-max your ships across all systems. But now having to read that those are mandatory for late-game progression makes me wonder: why? I mean like I said, farming gold BP's often results in little payout for a lot of input. I mean I guess the payout has just increased knowledge-wise, but certainly doesn't encourage farming for it, but makes the presumed optional component a chore.

I really don't know what to think of that. On the one hand I can admire the dedication the developers put into the game, wanting you to get everything. On the other hand, the aspect of free choices which you usually get in MMO's kind of limits on what ship class you're going to take.

Yeah, the raven dynamics event has not gone past me, but I have once again not really bothered farming those events as I tend to treat gold/turquoise BP's as an optional thing. In a grand scheme of things you're being taught this way of thinking early on with the two starter-equivalent gold ships. I can't remember their names. But the two ships you can farm on Kalabesh and Axiom I believe. Imagine if you had to farm those to get better ships... New players would quickly turn the other way.

I think putting less weight and value onto gold equipment, or having them be significant enough to grind for even outside of sirius progression would help greatly.

And the effort-to-payout topic, I also kind of expected to hear this response, but not in the kind of degree you put it out. This is one of the discouraging factors. Grinding in itself isn't bad, but if the grind is connected to a very drawn out and monotone activity, it gets stale really quickly and eventually acts as a deterrent. In a way, we're treating Cryonite like gold itself, except you can't just buy it. You get a lot in a technical sense, but a lot isn't enough if you need a whole lot paired with a ton more. And I wouldn't call myself lazy, but I do have to admit that I play games to escape the daily grind of life, not to grind more. Or at least have the grind be fun and engaging.

 

[Steel_Blue]

Well... no good news here cus you will have to farm the golds from all systems if you want it or not cus for the Sirius system you need to have the gold items before you can decrypt the Sirius items + you should prepare that you will need to be in a clan and calculate ~2 months until you have from that system all the Ring 5 BPs due of rndmized what BP will be available during the planets lifetime as those BPs then are also needed for the Tau Ceti BPs to decrypt them cus otherwise you are kinda stranded after the Draconis Story without much chance to progress at all.

I'll go check on the gold item requirements for the sirius items and the blue items in Tau Ceti... Just give me a moment...



Oh wait, you don't need golds to decrypt anything other than golds. Granted, you need all the lesser golds. You only need decryptions for blues when you get to TC content, and even then you don't need gold prints for decrypts of blue bps.

And a note about getting the sirius bps, you need to allocate a minimum of 4 1/2 months for safety to declare with certainty that a jumpship can find every sirius blueprint at least once. Boss prints drop about monthly, medium unit prints drop about every 2 1/2 months, strong units drop every 3 1/2 months, and greentails drop every 4 1/2 months. The jumpship needs to arrive at a new ring 5 planet every 1-2 days on average, where there's about 5 planets to visit every 7 days(roughly), which requires at least 2 jumps to occur according the the time schedule of the passing planets, which can be any hour of the day.

You might have made the assumption that your advice is geared towards free to play players. Well, the game is not built for that. It's built for a membership, a damage booster, an armor booster, an engine booster, a cryonite refiner, and maybe some bonus 3hr bp boosters. In less subtle words, this is the 'outdated design' you're talking about. (on a side note, modern game design yearns for an anime waifu gun pulled from a limited-run gacha) I don't expect players on the forum to agree on the realities of gameplay, however, because most of the forum users don't remember the realities of the game's mechanics.

 

[Rainbowdash]

You might have made the assumption that your advice is geared towards free to play players. Well, the game is not built for that. It's built for a membership, a damage booster, an armor booster, an engine booster, a cryonite refiner, and maybe some bonus 3hr bp boosters.

I do hope this is kind of sarcasm or a joke. Well, the "the game is designed for subscription" thing. Also Gacha games... Never touched one of those to my knowledge.

 

[Vesperion]

You might have made the assumption that your advice is geared towards free to play players. Well, the game is not built for that. It's built for a membership, a damage booster, an armor booster, an engine booster, a cryonite refiner, and maybe some bonus 3hr bp boosters. In less subtle words, this is the 'outdated design' you're talking about. (on a side note, modern game design yearns for an anime waifu gun pulled from a limited-run gacha) I don't expect players on the forum to agree on the realities of gameplay, however, because most of the forum users don't remember the realities of the game's mechanics.

Just fyi the only thing i do invest my money in this game (if i play it cus i´m currently on a break again from it) is ult mem mainly to stay away from E-Fields as long as possible and cus of no need to refill my drones "every 5 mins" and Cryo Vault. I may have used the other boosters in earlier times but did not really find them that good to keep them constantly runing so that i droped them way before Siri was even a thing.

As i also have stated you need to consider roughly 2 months for the R5 BPs under the absolut best conditions of the BP rotation since Split updated the system in Siri along with adding 2 Boss units. Just to give you the rundown of my estimated "optimal time it could take"

Considering that it took me 3 entire months to get all Siri Prot items (Rapid in December, Balanced in January and Long in February) the simple reason is that the Items of the units seem to have a rotation they follow and at some point they reach their starting point again.

Next to this because MU-CU only drop 1 BP/Planet and SU have 7 Items in their pool (2 from Vega-Siri, 2 from Antares-Siri, 1 from Sol-Siri, 2 from Drac-Siri) what translates into 99 Items in their pool with all variants.

Now take the 6 Planets that are alive for 7-9 days and it takes ~11-14 weeks until a drop will reapear since the last drop. In compare if you look at the bosses (Giza, Soris and Amrana) their rotation is much faster because all 3 have the same pool so that it´s 9 Items alone per planet = 54 items every 7-9 days so that it normaly just takes 4-6 weeks until the items show up again.

Also i must admit that it is now nearly 2 or 3 years since i had to decrypt my last Siri BP so i had to rely on my memory and the Hitchikers guide and there it also states that for the Siri Variants you need to have the Gold BPs of the corrosponding + lowerSystems what i also did remember until this point.

So that what i remember may really be outdated in regards of the Siri BP decryption but changes in the end not the fact that TC blue items need the Siri BPs to decrypt them and of course the TC gold items to need all Siri R5 variants + the lower golds except of the Rare ships that only require the Siri + TC blue BPs to decrypt them.