So does this mean you can siphon and still have the forcefield up? (and assume beasts can still hit when you are in the same room)

Dear creator of forcefield,
I love you!

A swarm of gorgogs twists about itself in the aether, creating a churning sheet of aetheric energy that flies out towards Archangel. It bounces harmlessly off an invisible forcefield.

Yay! Now i can hijack ships without worrying about blowing them up!

Assuming they have a shield orb (chances are low for not having one but still)

They quickly changed this so that the forcefield drops whenever a vortex is siphoned.

I really should actually finish building the ronseyder, I need another turret and a shield I think

I'm sad that it requires a shield module

Same here. I like my one room ship. I wish I could buy a version of the module that could attach to my command chair so I could keep my ship one room.

Couldn't you like, add a new room and then remove all the entrances to it or something?

I have no idea, did not even think about trying such a thing to be honest. Seems rather risky and hacky though to have a room that is not attached to any other room. While my ship description was designed to just be a single room I can always change it so it is not a big deal by any means, just an annoyance.

TL;DR: Slivvens need to go, be 1hit kill, not spawn as fast, or something similar. They are steadily becoming a roadblock on a highway that made a semi-crucial tool for gameplay much more accessible.

Honestly, I still think slivvens need to be looked at or removed entirely so the admin can go back to the drawing board about a 'solution' - since so many people are clamoring for one. I see no reason why aetherspace exp was such a big deal, besides the two or three Demigods getting indignant about how fast it was because they made the unwise choice of bashing it up years ago. To be quite honest, aetherspace is about accessibility - the speed of it makes a semi-crucial portion of combat entry and city contribution easily accessible.

As a non-Demi/non-Titan/non-Ascendant, I have no access to certain aspects of the domoth system, amongst a handful of other things. Demigod is no longer a bunch of 'perks', it is a status required to do battle in the Domoth Realms on whatever level it provides. I'm complaining about that, just like I did when the system was posted on the forums as a preview, for the exact same reason.

EDIT: Can somebody explain why getting Demigod 'fast' is in any way a negative thing? Are people that picky about the fact that they feel they 'earned' level 100? Honestly.

Yes to the above, just attempted a aetherhunt right now and stopped it after killing the slivvens. We maybe killed one aetherbeast before we got swarmed and decided it was safer to dock.Also the vortexs are now to few. There's like none when you enter ethereal.

You can't remove the last entrance to a room anyway, though you could conceal it with a tapestry or a concealment-stake.

Just so you know there are people who got demi via aetherspace that are saying it was broken/imbalanced. (I'm one of them.)

To be honest, most demigods have nothing to do with the Domoths. If you look at domoth control, there are only a handful of people that hold them all, and it has been that way forever. There are 90 people now that are demi or ascendant, with many more at Titan and about to roll over to 100. Probably 10-15 at most have any dealings with domoths, if that. Furthermore, domoths are a bit less useful when held by demigods as opposed to ascendants. Demigod is just a series of perks. You're arguing that it's required for combat in one sentence, but then saying it's not about the perks in another. I also disagree with the statement that demigod is required to be a successful combatant. One person I know off the top of my head that does well consistently is Marie who JUST hit level 97 the other day. She doesn't even have titan benefits. Does it make life easier? Sure. But required, no way.

Because it's the highest level in the game one can attain through non-ascendancy. It's game design. If there's no difficulty, then what's the point of having levels at all? Just auto everyone to 100. It wasn't impossible to hit demi before aetherspace, it certainly wasn't impossible pre-aetherspace nerf (aetherwill, ranged attacks, ect.), it wasn't impossible post-nerf, and it's still not impossible. Again, not saying what they've put in is the right choice, but it's better than reverting back to insanely easy amounts of xp.

Slivvens are ridiculously overpowered for the alleged purpose they serve (keeping people from being afk). They heal themselves, they give room-wide aeon, do room-wide damage, give various afflictions, and they're difficult to solo unless you're very high level (as in 90s+). They also infect and swarm a ship pretty much constantly, and oh, they multiply if you don't get there fast enough - which sounds like "oh well people were afking" except when multiple modules are affected this happens very quickly.

Aetherhunting is merely an exercise in futility given the existence of slivvens as introduced. You can't have a couple of people who just work on slivven patrol - they're worth pretty much nothing in terms of experience (so no one will want to do it exclusively), but more importantly with a room-wide damage attack people locked into modules will die since they can't actually see their health when locked in, just the ship's health.

So when the ship gets infected, everything stops dead. The empath has to forcefield since probably 2+ team members are affected. Then everyone with an affected module has to stop, unlock, and deal with the slivvens. Then everyone locks back in, and the empath has to heal up all the modules before they can get going again.

Rinse, repeat until people get frustrated and stop hunting, which is pretty quickly because why bother playing musical chairs every three minutes when you can bash or influence?

Perhaps their strength was somewhat intended to stave off the rash of "Lets take a bunch of level 10s and turn them into level 100s". I'm not really sure of their strength, I've heard varying reports from people, and haven't been aetherhunting myself in rl months, but I'm sure they're willing to tweak the numbers and what not if it's too hard. But keep in mind what YOU want to do with aetherhunting may not be what the administration wants people to do with aetherhunting. Perhaps they intend it to be more of a hunting ground for the upper levels like astral is. I dunno, I can never read their minds. Not a telepath.

Rate matters but only at the extremes. Clearly if it took 1 hour of effort to go from 1-100 something would be wrong. The time it takes to gain demi from aetherspace is not significantly faster than the time it would take by solo bashing. So at least for me it has never been the issue.

The "problem" is that multiple people can "earn" demigod by doing literally nothing with almost no risk. There are (or were) exactly two hard things about aetherbashing. First you need a ship and second you need a pilot. I am fully sympathetic to the arguments of those who have invested significantly in a ship that it should be useful. The problem I (and others) have is that character advancement should require near equal effort by all members of a group. This is not the case with aetherhunting.

I have no idea if the Slivvens fairly address the issue. I have yet to encounter them and I never participated in aetherhunting before so I have no baseline to compare to. Reading about what they do gives me the impression that they make aetherhunting more annoying, and require one additional awake person (other than the pilot) but do nothing at all to address the issue of others free-riding.

For me it has always been about the effort + risk = reward equation, not about the absolute rate of 1-100.

The design intention of having most active players become demi-gods is a separate topic that I will not go into here.

P.S. How about another tongue in cheek "fix"? Allow a teleportation device to be installed on a ship. If you are in the same area of aetherspace as another ship you can then teleport to that ship. Let all the gankers deal with afk players and put the NPCs back to their job of being targets

While funny, afk or not, you'd not survive a zerg onto your ship. Remember when you're locked you've no regular prompt, and unlocking takes balance.

Game design? You can only do additional things upon gaining level 100. There was no difficulty to begin with, besides perhaps the test of willpower involved with bashing or influencing and thus not doing something else more productive/more interesting. 'The highest level in the game' is a weak defense as to why it shouldn't be a more streamlined, accessible process that doesn't take so much time basically doing nothing - especially for people who have invested in credits. That is to say, aethership hunting is still 'doing nothing' - but it's a shorter amount of collective time doing nothing, so it is likely less discouraging to the person who just spent 100 or 200 or 300 USD to buy credits to have an established character.

I can understand goal-oriented gameplay, and how level 100 would be a rather large attraction to that form of approaching Lusternia - but honestly, the way aetherspace was really had no actual issues. What problems it had were completely fabricated/instituted by the playerbase. AFKing at modules was a problem that needed to be stopped - however, the completely opinion-based concept of aetherspace EXP being 'too fast' was completely contrived by mortal/player reasoning, not by any mechanical demonstration or even any Administrative 'nudge' to reach the conclusion.

Personally, I'm partially upset by this change also because it feels VERY kneejerk. Some people whined on the forums about how it was 'too fast', and then we eventually got slivvens.

Well you would just have an X second warning broadcast to the ship that invaders were coming. The reason why it is not serious though is because it would not allow any escape for the ganked targets. It would be jerk heaven.