I like the idea of the slivven mechanic, but the execution results in reduced fun for everyone.

Just the other day I hopped aboard an aethership and we set out to find a vortex. Within thirty seconds of flying around trying to find one, we were infested with around five slivvens. We had to stop EVERYTHING we were doing and take them out before continuing. After that, we just decided to dock out of frustration. Because if that was going to happen every time we're going somewhere, nothing will get accomplished at all.

It hurts so good.

Um, forcefield?

Maybe the crew was just crappy. That's a REALLY good possibility.

Woo.

Quite. Also, forcefield is terrific.

Yeah. Either they didn't put forcefield up or they were getting physically hit by beasts, and if you're getting physically hit (In room attacked) by beasts while flying around looking for a vortex, the pilot needs a lot more practice.

Dysolis was pilot, Dowapaa was empath.

You guys be the judge. :|

Will they start malfuctioning right away? Because if it's just slowing chair balance a bit, on anything but maybe dragons you don't even need to chase balance to evade them.

And people should just have quicksilver up, and sip quicksilver when it does room aeon. <,<

Yes they will Lehki, the odds are really small and the empath can cure the damage but it -is- a constant damage drain. So if the empath keeps healing the infected module, now if you get two you have a different story which given time is going to happen, then you shouldn't really see the affects of a damaged module.

Now if you have five on a ship, if you don't kill them fast once a module gets up to moderate it is basically worthless because your misfire rate goes up.

My concern is the loss of speed, particularly when dealing with the spawns, which tend to clump in large groups, and which do have to be dealt with from time to time, especially now with more limited vortices. It's also not just about evading them, since the slivvens come from ranged attacks, meaning that being infected with even one on the chair will very likely cause you to be infected with more.

As far as the aeon, yes, I've now put in a trigger for the slivven attack, but in the spam from uh... flying the the darn ship... I initially missed it and it stuck once. Since the measure is to prevent afk, as the pilot I find it particularly annoying that I'd have to deal with it. Despite whatever scripts we might use to maintain a steady rhythm moving around a vortex, I don't think it's very often that the pilot is afk.

I believe Roark fixed or is still working on aetherbeasts never de-spawning so large groups shouldn't really be a common issue anymore.

And that last part confuses me. What are you like shooting them, then flying out of their range before they shoot back? If you're trying to get away from beasts to clear out slivven the chair would need to slow down a LOT before it became a big issue. Otherwise I'm not really seeing how it's a problem.

So what I'm hearing is slow down the rate slivven drain modules and slow the rate they reproduce?

Possibly lower the chance of hitting command chairs?

I think command chair should be near impossible to get slivvens, since you can't really AFK effectively as a pilot

You may also want to consider lowering the difficulty, upping the payoff from them, remove health-leech and aeon attack and replace it with something else.

If you must absolutely retain slivvens, I would suggest reducing their spawn rate and outright prevent them affecting command chairs since there is virtually no reason to make slivvens spawn there since you cannot AFKbot command chair and keep a crew alive.

One of my other ideas was making them not harm health to module-locked players, but instead leech aetherwill. Rethinking the ideas as I type this, though, it would not kill AFKers - just make them useless, unless somehow having low aetherwill unlocked you from the module. I don't know.


EDIT: MILLIONS X agreement with sentiments to make them worth something. If nothing else, you could make them worth a chunk of a single aetehrmob, making it possible for people to fulltime dedicate themselves to slivven duty while still profiting from the run.

Maybe have the slivvens cause you to use triple or more aetherwill after a certain time

It's not as easy, but pilot definitely can AFK as effectively as other people.



I think complaint comes from the fact that slivven does small frequent damage (I think you said it tics every 5 seconds? ) and just one tic puts a module in light damage where there's a chance, albeit small, of a module malfunctioning. And if you have that on multiple modules, empath will very quickly have a hard time keeping everything topped off.

I'd suggest either...
A) Making things not malfunction at all until moderate damage.
or
Give the slivven much slower, but much larger damage tics. Even if the over all rate was the same, that'd be better I think.
or
C) Make slivven spawn from ranged hits on a less frequent rate.

Longer they hit you, faster your aetherwill depletes. Or even have them give insanity after a bit if they're hitting you and you're locked in. Uncurable stupidity should put a wrench in your bot script pretty quick, I'd think. Just making them really annoying to kill isn't the only way of making sure someone is dedicated to it.

Heh. It's a good thing we're not married, Rodngar, because we apparently don't have the same mindset at all. From my viewpoint, the point is to reduce/eliminate automated experience gain. If the slivven are given an appreciable value, this encourages automated experience gain rather than discourages it. It's like having a personal bashing area for whoever your runner in which they can't be jumped, is of limited size, and only has one mob type. It would take all of 5 minutes for someone to automate bashing that.

Modifying spawn rate, ect, ect are all viable if it's really a problem.

I guess the aetherwill drain thing could be a workable idea as well, since there aren't a ridiculous amount of people that want to aetherbash at any given time, so if you exhaust peoples' aetherwill at an accelerated rate it would at least curb xp gain. But then you're not really discouraging automation, because I don't even need to unlock to kill them if they can't kill me. I just hit them until they die when they show up, and I might have lost a little aetherwill. That's just more nerfing xp gain, really.

Edit: Re: Sylphas - Stupidity, even uncurable, isn't really anything horrible to deal with. You just trigger the attack success message to confirm to the system you were successful. If not, attack again.