Calatin

I'm not sure if this is implied above, but "/afk" would be a nice alias for "/away", since "/afk" is commonly used in a lot of MMORPGs.

My objection with making it a drop is that combat is pretty awful as a TS in the early days. That single missile (L2 probably) takes a while to wear anything down. And Witberg isn't an obvious destination for a newbie TS. I don't know if everyone does it this way, but I think it's natural for a scout to focus on Explore & Prospecting & Refining until you get an L30 hull and decent core-gear; then come back to combat. Of course, if some low-level Boggies made a minor incursion into Proxima Centauri, that might work well.

I'd suggest having the items vendor in the TS starting sector sell the Monoceros device line, which increases reactor recharge. They make prospecting *so* much more effective, I'd consider them essential to any explorer class. And as it stands now TS characters have to fly to Jupiter to get them (or hope for a lucky drop) (at least, that's as close as I've seen). I know there's a lot of work to do on the new classes and their starting sectors, but that's a simple one that will make life easier for the starting TS.

Thanks for the answers C Del! I suspect a lot of the older threads on such topics got pruned or something.

Actually I'm not looking for answers in this thread; I'm suggesting they might make good topics for an FAQ. I'm still digging though threads for answers, and the questions seem like they belong in a "project mission statement" or something. It's hard to see the forest.

Here's something that bugged me in Live. When you had three different items/abilities/whatever that reduced your vulnerability, they added together directly. For instance, 40% + 40% + 10% protection = 90% protection. Soon there were combinations that gave numbers too high (e.g. 100%), so they instituted some artificial caps, e.g. "75% is the max". The problem with caps is that you optimize to just barely hit the cap; and furthermore anything that might help you once you've reached the cap is worthless. At times this even included bufs provided by players: "We don't need your help because everyone's already at the cap with their gear, sorry". Instead, I always thought such items should add together by reducing the remaining vulnerability. For instance a single 50% item gives you 50% coverage; a second 50% buff reduces the remaining vulnerability by half: 75%. A third 50% item would halve the remainder again: 87.5%. Mathematically it's the one minus the product of (1-buf) over all the bufs; for instance 40%+40%+10% = 1-[(1-.4)*(1-.4)*(1-.1)] = 1-(0.6*0.6*0.9) = .676 = 67.6% protection. Ordering doesn't matter -- multiplication is commutative. With this scheme, it always helps to have more (though the returns are diminishing) and you eliminate the need for an arbitrary cap.

First let me say thank you for the brilliant job of reviving EnB. I can tell you that in the first hour of playing I had a wide smile on my face the entire time! I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed E&B. I think there is a need for an FAQ for those of us that haven't been following the efforts all along. The FAQ on net-7 is good for "how do I get started", but I'm curious about things like: What is the long-term goal of the project? To recreate the original, or to go beyond it and modernize (Earth and Beyond and Beyond)? In the same vein, how much flexibility is there in updating the client, e.g. graphics, chat, markets, DX10/DX11, etc? Or is the development focused on server-only changes? What are the constraints? What stage of the project are we in? What stages are planned? Are there wipes expected at certain transitions? Are the dev teams looking for certain things in particular? (Printouts of item stats from Live? Particular skills in coding/art/etc? Testing of particular features?) Do you want people out there "drumming up business", e.g. posting to MMORPG discussion sites? Or should it be low key at this point? One of the creative things about the original was the way the game would change from month to month -- vrix invasions as an example? Will the universe be static or dynamic? There have probably been discussions on such topics, but I didn't spot them readily. Thanks for listening, and thanks for making this newbie-oldbie remember what he liked about this gem.