Physics

We know that the Mining Efficiency +5% ore extracted talent isn't working properly. Other threads have reported this, and NQ have said via twitter that they changed the talent. However they didn't say what they changed the talent to, even after persistent asking. Could it be +1% or +0.5% per talent level? It still says +5% in game, which is quite unfair to players who choose to train this, and who are unaware that it doesn't work.
 
In another thread in these forums, there were many wild ideas about what the talent did. So after rolling my eyes at this, @Billy_Boolaand I decided to do the obvious:
Scan a hex and record the ore value. Call this S (in kilo-litres). Mine a known amount of ore. Call this m. Re-scan the hex and see how much ore remains. Call this s. Repeat until bored.  
The data we recorded is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kIquhrbSAllViRFlCqtxtfS0SJCq76FWpgiyt1u6jr8/edit#gid=0
Yes we got bored fairly quickly. (Mining boring?!)
 
The talent as written says that
(S-s)(1+xT) = m where T is the talent level (0-5), and x is the (for the purposes of this experiment) unknown +x% level of ore added per talent level. 0.01=1%.
 
If the above is correct then we can estimate x via:
x=(m/(S-s)-1)/T  for any talent level >0.  
The data in the above spreadsheet does this for n=30 datapoints. The results are:
Sample mean = -0.0011 (4 d.p.) Sample standard deviation = 0.0060 95% confidence interval for the true value of x = (-0.0033, 0.0012)  
Conclusion: The Mining Efficiency talent most likely adds ZERO ore per talent level.
 
Notes:
There is some noise (rounding) in the data as scans report ore in KL to 2 d.p. and only more when the ore amount is low. I'm too lazy to attempt to account for this. We have no idea if the territory scan amount accurately represents the amount in the hex I didn't attempt to see if there were any variations via planet, ore tier, player(!) or a different +x% amount per tier level.

I’m sure the NQ ban hammer swings for intent. Not because someone reports an exploitable bug.

Territory warfare is territory warfare, if you're a solo player with 1 hex on some random planet that's your own fault. The point of Du being a civilisation builder was that people build up together and create their own safezones as countries, form alliances etc. But none of that happens or is needed with DU being half the game it is + the almost infinite safezones.

I brought your concern to the team, and they shared their thoughts:
 
"Missions have a predetermined source and destination points, yes, but that's no different than any other flight from planet A to planet B. Pilots don't have to take direct routes between the source and destination points. Also, a red warning message will appear if the mission leaves a safe zone, which should make strategizing easier. Try indirect routes, pay attention to the warnings and don't name yourself something conspicuous like "Mission Hauler" and you should be fine. "

As I've thought about it, I've basically come to the conclusion that the mission system is too little, too late.  The destruction of industry in the last patch basically resulted in mining being the major activity in the game.  For me personally this means by the time the mission board drops I'll be sitting on about a billion quanta or so.  So, hauling some one else's cargo for a relative pittance  isn't going to provide much incentive.  Folk's building and selling ships at the moment also don't seem to be suffering much difficulty in sourcing elements or other parts for those ships.
 
There needs to be more to do in the game.  At this point the only feature I see is an over haul of the combat system to something that doesn't completely and utterly suck and to give it a meaningful purpose like territorial conquest rather than just a means for some wanker to get his jollies ruining someone's day.
 
 

No risk to pirates ?? Pirates accept the same risk as anyone else including haulers since they can be attacked by anyone else... including other pirates not just military forces. 
 
So far vast majority of haulers out there are designed for 2 things, hybrid lift of weight and warp as cheap as possible. When people finally have a need to adapt they will stop hauling with paper airplanes 

I don’t see anything for pvp here. Just more warp jumps for cash. Why risk anything through contested territory when warp completely removes the risk.

I don’t see anything for pvp here. Just more warp jumps for cash. Why risk anything through contested territory when warp completely removes the risk.

Sorry but the whole argument that someone who is a pirate is just a griefer or psycho is just complete rubbish, will pretty much completely devalues your opinion.  Pirates are just players, the same as you, who have just as much right to be in the game and to ply their trade as anyone else.  Where is the risk to the pirate? it should be the security you have brought with you, if you decided to travel alone and unarmed it is not the pirates fault, they are a pirate.  

So people can just warp missions for cash? Seems like that skips the entire PVP game loop. Why would PVP folks even login right now? No PVP concessions made honestly. How will this create more non-warp traffic in space? I don't believe it will honestly. Also, why isn't there collateral both ways? The reward should be locked in too. Collateral for the one to accept it is a half answer...Picking up rewards at a players base is totally gameable as well. Start digging.

Still just going to be people warping everywhere without changes to warp mechanics/cost. Won't actually increase traffic in space.

Still excited for something new to do though ?

Honestly I wanted more, but at least they are putting something out I guess...

Haha, still no wipe as far as I know.

To Demlock - we've seen your post. It's being discussed internally. 

i do really like the look of this race track, must of taken a fair amount of work for it all to come together, nice work ?

You don't want to restart from zero, you want everyone else to start from zero. Everyone else says no. Stick to your backyard sandbox

Combat needs a different roots approach into how it works. Currently how combat technically performs, is just like peeling an onion. You just gotta keep shooting and shooting until you strip away the layers you need to get to the core. The difficulty between creating a ship that will get destroyed in either 100 hits, or 10,000 hits, is NOT hard at all.
 
THERE IS NO CUBE META.
Cube meta isn’t anything special in itself, it simply makes most effective use of how combat works. There is no cube meta, just shallow and undefined DU combat.
 
Regardless of their differences, and other very strange differences, weapons themselves all do pretty much the same thing, just at a different scale.

I don’t know what the NQ team imagines will ‘fix’ their problems, but you guys really need to be careful not to tip the scales. Any drastic changes need to consider both ends of the spectrum, being, weak cheap ships, to heavily armoured ships. As things are now, weak ships take about an hour to kill, and heavily armoured ships are immortal ammo eaters.
There is a MASSIVE disparity between ships on either end of the spectrum. Coupled with the fact that people can farm as they please and build what they want very safely, ships will always be at the top of their game, and the top of their strength. Ship designs won’t be out of necessity or purpose, but solely out of attrition.
 
WHAT IS MORE DIVERSE COMBAT?
Anything that isn’t DU combat as it currently is.
Do away with unrealistic arcadey damage types. No one really cares about resistances or ammo types.
Weapons need a purpose. Ammo, needs a purpose. The fact that things are separated by damage type and resistances, is pretty shallow and meaningless.
Weapons need a REAL purpose, a REAL function. Not a DPS count.

Ships in DU do not have set HP values like in other games where constructs cannot be handmade.
A dynamic system needs dynamic mechanics!

SUGGESTIONS PROPOSED TO MAKE COMBAT QUICKER, EFFECTIVE, FUN, AND CHALLENGING.
Halve the total HP of every voxel.Ship death on core destruction? I think not. Make Cores Impervious to weapon damage. (Explained further down)

Change what weapons actually do. Introduce penetration damage models!
Laser blasts and missiles may do the same thing, creating devastating explosions on impact, but the best way through armour, is through it. Cannons need to pepper ships, railguns need to be actual railguns, and create big holes from entry point to exit point, though lacking obvious things like tracking, rate of fire, huge ammo space. Armour itself doesn’t have to be useless, it needs purpose. Enough armour can still stop certain penetrations like cannons, but to a point where the armour needs be quite impractically thick where designers may opt for only certain parts of heavy protective armour. Though this doesn’t negate the need for armour entirely in which a ship would be incredibly vulnerable to blast attacks from lasers or missiles.

ENERGY MANAGEMENT.
 
I believe we all have a pretty good idea of what NQ may do for energy management.
Give ships an energy cap, and each element will take up a certain amount of energy until there may be no more that the system can energize.
I am suggestion a slightly different alternative. Lore around the fact that dynamic cores are a technologically advanced whatever, with unique power systems that can power ships or whatever.
The technical details of proposed core energy management:
Cores produce a certain amount of energy on their own. Enough to comfortably power a battleship if need be.
Cores are impervious to weapon damage.
Cores cannot function if they are generating too much energy. (If you have too much unused energy)
Cores will become disabled by prolonged use with too much energy unused.
In other words, to safely operate a core unit, you need to be using the energy it provides, else it can become unstable and explode.

HOW DO WE USE THE ENERGY?
As with the simple system, each element will provide its own energy cost. HOWEVER, a core unit will provide an energy cap that will easily supplement the biggest ships.
IF you are building a smaller ship, on a core that requires a high energy usage, you can use a new element, ENERGY  DAMPENERS. These elements will have different energy cost depending on size, and will do nothing other than REDUCE YOUR UNUSED ENERGY TO AVOID CORE DESTRUCTION.
So the whole deal behind this is that a ship can be destroyed if it has too much unused energy. How does this work in combat? Simple. Elements that are destroyed will stop using energy. Freeing up a cores energy capacity, and causing it to become more and more unstable, to the point there is too much unused energy, and the core explodes.
Energy dampeners don’t have to be expensive, giant, or cumbersome for builders, they just need to BE there. This way a ship will be destroyed from being disabled. Not after a 10 hour missile excavation expedition to the core.

This however presents another problem, adding or subtracting elements during combat. I believe NQ can work their way around that.

NQ could indeed also switch ammo types for every from what they are now to just, explosive, or armour piercing. others may be imagined up but these are the basics of what weapons actually do, and it makes SENSE.
 
Ontop of this, considering fleet battles. A typical strategy is for an entire fleet to target 1 ship at a time, and the fleet battle becomes a race against the other fleet, in which DPS is particularly dominant.
Getting destroyed within seconds because you're being targeted by an entire fleet is not fun. Without the ability for this to happen, a fleet battle flows more like an actual battle, rather than eve alpha DPS strategy.
My opinion of this comes from the latest battle feature many large core ships. We were unable to target individual ships correctly as a group due to ship names being all the same. This appeared as something that needed to be fixed by NQ at first, but after thinking about it, I actually had fun. Definitely more so than targeting one ship at a time with the entire fleet.

I get the idea behind 0.23 but it was never going to do any kind of economy jump start, just the opposite. Why does economy suck? Because the game loop is unfinished. Without risk activities involving pvp for profit, everyone is a builder and no one needs one.

I get the idea behind 0.23 but it was never going to do any kind of economy jump start, just the opposite. Why does economy suck? Because the game loop is unfinished. Without risk activities involving pvp for profit, everyone is a builder and no one needs one.

I get the idea behind 0.23 but it was never going to do any kind of economy jump start, just the opposite. Why does economy suck? Because the game loop is unfinished. Without risk activities involving pvp for profit, everyone is a builder and no one needs one.

Warp skipping will come to an end. Until then markets will remain good for buying finished products cheaper than the ore prices to make them and more and more items will become cheaper and cheaper. 
 
When it does end people will learn how to make haulers that can sustain attacks and not get destroyed in 1-2 hits out of pure necessity. When NQ was looking for a way to jump start an economy with 0.23, I think they was looking in the wrong place.

This isn't even remotely close to being true.  Have you seen the Talemai lockdown? we had many fights, yes a few haulers died, but in the end today one huge battle of over 30 ships, and possibly 70 people or so were all there to fight other well armed pvp ships.  
 
Wanna know what the people really want? FREEDOM.  We were sold on a game where the players make the rules, and "emergent gameplay"  Right now there is 0 to fight over as 100% of the content is locked behind safe zones where guns are disabled by the mechanics.  Like I cant literally even attempt to fire my a gun where 100% of the content lies.  
 
Here is another thing...this is an MMO.  If you are new/solo/ignorant to the landscape and politcs, you see lacobus and say to yourself "hey i would like to mine some gold", in what world do you think you are entitled to fly there in a fat slow hauler, to STEAL gold from a planet you do not live on?  You didnt take any attempt to find out who lives there, who patrols there, what the politcal climate is like there.  Sure you have the freedom to go there, but to expect to be 100% safe is just completely fucking asinine.  This is a video game and risk is what makes it fun, and the interactions and people forming communities/factions/politics/wars is where the "fun" is.   
 
Does that mean sometimes a hauler is going to die to well armed pvp ship? Yes.  Does it mean it can be avoided by "playing the mmo game".  Also yes.  Regardless if you are a pvper or not, people what the chance to actually influence how the game progresses, sometimes thru diplomacy, sometimes thru agressive negotiations.  But the point is, let the PLAYERS CHOOSE.

I dont even think you need to drop it at this stage.  If they just randomised the warp entry points and or made the safe zone distance move over time it would make all the difference.  Currently you can just warp past everything, if there was just a chance that miners / traders would land outside safe zone (or have to take off outside) then it would bring security into the game.  All of a sudden you open up loads of additional gameplay paths for a far wider range of players.

I LOVE DU but I will still only recommend it to 20% of my friends in its current state because the others require the sort of jeopardy I am talking about to make the game entertaining.  People need to understand that it is not only pirate who want some risk in the game.

With the current system players are able to mine and warp haul the rarest resources back to the safe zone triangle with absolutely no risk, just pure reward. This removes any need to tactically think of ways to haul these resources back, hire military escort services or scout their travel path. 

This of course will end with the release of Atmos pvp / territory warfare but this may well be a long time away. So I have a proposal that should be light on development resources that would bring the risk aspect back in to the game while also giving ways to avoid pirate warp exit point camping.
 
Warp cost change.
 
Currently the cost of warp is calculated from a formula that takes total warp distance multiplied by ship weight. You set the warp at A and are frozen until you reach B of which the warp cells used are removed from inventory on arrival and ship unlocks. 
 
A better way of doing this is for the Warp cost to start at 1 cell, the cost then increases while you are in warp due to warp distance you have covered. If you reach the warp cell limit of your inventory you will drop out of warp wherever you are on the line. Additionally you can now choose to exit warp at any time of the journey.

This allows players to change direction and move off the common travel routes without the need to slowboat. Doing this will also change your target planet / moon warp exit point.
 
Now finally until Atmos pvp / Territory warfare is introduced I recommend moving the warp exit points and warp interference radius of planets not in the safe zone triangle out in to the pvp area of space by around 5 - 10 SU. This will finally add some risk for the higher resource rewards from these planets.

One thing we can agree on for sure. 
It's very telling though that NQ seems to think that throwing a CM team willing to do the legwork at this will resolve their cultural (company, not regional..) and IMO structural issues..

Effective immediately, all mining and transport in and out of Talemai and its moons will cease.  Company Waste Management has taken over after reports of multiple OSHA violations and violations of the UMU (United Miners Union).  Independent organization named RockHoppas has been dispatched to Talemai to replace all current miners.  Only people with proper Mining permits are allowed to and from Talemai and their cargo will be checked for any contraband. 
For inquires about Mining Permits please contact JohnnyTazer with your reason and your fee ready.  Its 5mil per person, per week.  And 20mil for a whole organization.  Thank you for your continued cooperation as we take this time to sort out the mess on Talemai.  

- JohnnyTazer
  Waste Management Consultant