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Setting of Verra and 'Node Infrastructure'
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
So to preface, in the futuristic MMO I play, my faction has had an infrastructure failure status in their Headquarters star-system for a few days now, affecting trade and 'quests' and security.
I was thinking about this and realized that I don't know what the quests/tasks for a Node would be in a similar situation (i.e. an 'infrastructure failure), by comparison, because the specifics of 'infrastructure' for the setting of Verra are unknowns, right now. There was some implied story/'quests' in Alpha-1 which I won't go into, that referenced things that are the equivalent to a... let's call the 'Terrorist/Warlord Attack' status for simplicity, and a probable resolution, but such states are both transient and triggered, in Elite, so...
I'm trying to figure out how to ask the most relevant 'question' related to this, later on this month, both for the purposes of an answer, and to make sure I ask a question that is useful for Intrepid to answer if it's chosen, and I can't figure out how to condense it so that it doesn't end up sounding like a lore question or end up with a re-explanation of the fact that Nodes and their Tasks can be affected by things like weather or natural disasters.
Best I've got so far is:
"Is there enough physical infrastructure in a node requiring some form of reactive maintenance, that we can expect nodes to have any form of 'statuses' other than those related to meteorological/geological events, which would generate dynamic Tasks related to them even though they are at peace and in no serious danger of losing any facilities?"
As you can see, it's too long, hard to formulate, and STILL doesn't achieve the goal. I can't add 'more information about how Infrastructure Failure works in Elite', it's unwieldy and not helpful. Asking about sewage backing up might be funny, but wouldn't necessarily help either.
Thoughts?
I was thinking about this and realized that I don't know what the quests/tasks for a Node would be in a similar situation (i.e. an 'infrastructure failure), by comparison, because the specifics of 'infrastructure' for the setting of Verra are unknowns, right now. There was some implied story/'quests' in Alpha-1 which I won't go into, that referenced things that are the equivalent to a... let's call the 'Terrorist/Warlord Attack' status for simplicity, and a probable resolution, but such states are both transient and triggered, in Elite, so...
I'm trying to figure out how to ask the most relevant 'question' related to this, later on this month, both for the purposes of an answer, and to make sure I ask a question that is useful for Intrepid to answer if it's chosen, and I can't figure out how to condense it so that it doesn't end up sounding like a lore question or end up with a re-explanation of the fact that Nodes and their Tasks can be affected by things like weather or natural disasters.
Best I've got so far is:
"Is there enough physical infrastructure in a node requiring some form of reactive maintenance, that we can expect nodes to have any form of 'statuses' other than those related to meteorological/geological events, which would generate dynamic Tasks related to them even though they are at peace and in no serious danger of losing any facilities?"
As you can see, it's too long, hard to formulate, and STILL doesn't achieve the goal. I can't add 'more information about how Infrastructure Failure works in Elite', it's unwieldy and not helpful. Asking about sewage backing up might be funny, but wouldn't necessarily help either.
Thoughts?
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
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Comments
My honest thought is that you won't get an answer that makes a whole lot of sense.
Questions like this need context, and the Q&A sessions don't really allow for it, generally speaking - as you have suggested above.
Probably the best I could think of would be;
"Are there buildings in nodes that will need maintenance done on them that isn't from damage resulting from sieges or monster coin events?"
Because really, that seems to be what you want to know - and keeping it simple is best.
While not bad, I would wager that the answer you would get from that would be about repair after a siege or monster attack.
When you watch enough livestreams, you tend to notice that Stevens mind usually jumps to the closest thing to an answer that he is excited about, not necessarily the actual answer.
I like this one, but it might not be what she wants to know, because our Infrastructure Failure triggered partially because we did too WELL too fast during the period after a changeover. Ashes doesn't have that exactly, but the main point is, it's a state triggered by something else and not actually constant.
I think given Noaani's preface that no 'very sensible' answer would be expected, this is still probably a lot closer to the best way. If Ashes was going to do anything on the scale of Elite in terms of statuses, we would either 'have heard about it before now', or 'it won't be something they could reveal yet anyway'. Since I mostly want to know about the dynamism, I would just need to find a way to phrase it so that the 'damage' and 'maintenance' concepts don't get too linked.
Other than that, we don't really know - which I assume is the point of the question.
This one is pretty succinct, actually...
It would at least get far enough into the system for the other part of what I want to know, to be hinted at. For context, my personal goal is related to RP. Within Elite, these states are pretty easy to deal with most of the time because most missions in Elite are on the level of what I expect 'Tasks' to be in Ashes. There are a bunch of underlying factors that you can use to come up with or directly support a reasonable RP (i.e. one set of conditions in a... let's call it 'Industrial Node' ... will generally lead to a specific subtype of missions or requests for specific commodity imports or bounty hunting requests).
So if I focus on just what I personally care about, I want to know if I will be able to get a similar immersive RP experience during 'peacetimes' in a Node. But I feel this is an unfair question to try to get answered in a LiveStream, the amount of potential confusion alone, isn't worth it for Intrepid's side.
If I start from the two simpler questions suggested:
"Are there buildings in nodes that will need maintenance done on them that isn't from damage resulting from sieges or monster coin events?"
"Will building degradation occur requiring reactive quests, outside of monster coin/siege events?"
Then I can get to:
"Will infrastructural issues requiring reactive Tasks be part of Node gameplay, outside of monster coin/siege/weather and natural disaster events?"
I don't want to change it from 'Infrastructural Issues' or to focus on Buildings, because I don't think the 'RP experience' question gets answered as effectively, then. Elite has lots of statuses, I don't think that merely 'Infrastructure Failure' or 'not currently Infrastructure failure', even if it was across multiple buildings, would be 'enough' to recreate the feeling, but depending on the question, Steven might be 'free' to answer in a way that gives more information than something related to just node Buildings, since I believe we already have hints of things like 'monster swarms' and such, and some mentions of an equivalent economic effect from the wiki:
The prices that NPCs sell items for will scale based on the economic activity on a server. Prices will rise to combat inflation and fall as a population diminishes.
This alone covers about half of the 'statuses' and such that I'm talking about, and I'd assume (though I hate to) that the interaction between those factors and the ones I'm asking about would mostly recreate the feeling.
Any really obvious improvements to the question, that I'm missing, or holes in it that I need to deal with... preferably that won't 'compromise the chance of finding out the underlying thing that I want to know'?
Corrupted Areas will likely be dynamic events that appear in the open world, and if left unaddressed can eventually lead to negative affects on the Node such as buildings and services being disabled - the main reason you wouldn't want this would appear to be due to the weaknesses it can impose on you during a siege if you are without all of your resources at your disposal.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Corrupted_areas
I feel like in actuality, if a corrupted area appears, players will naturally gravitate towards it, so in a way I don't want it to be TOO Easy to negate these corrupted areas, but at the same time don't want players to be neglecting it either.
Ah, yes, thanks. I was trying to remember why I wasn't asking about a different thing (Outbreak status).
The main reason I don't think too much about that one relative to the current question is equivalence. I wouldn't expect (again, maybe I should), that a Town node surrounded by Villages would see 'a sudden appearance of Corruption that needs to be dealt with' and then also fail to deal with it.
I can see ways in which Corruption events would cover the thing I'm asking about though, so I should probably figure out whether or not I 'need to include them in the list of things I'm NOT asking about', or if I should pivot to asking about the frequency of them (since if frequent enough, with specific 'reactive Tasks', the feeling could be similar).
A separate question about how Corruption events affect Freeholds might be worth it, too.
Also, can Dunir please summon beer kegs?
Thank you.
Not sure how fast the xp loss is and at what point stuff degrades. Don't think we will know or have a basic idea untill late A2 B1 time frame.