Oblivionburn

Well.. as a start, don't build an MMO on cloudfront.
 
Someone here said they shouldn't have worked on PvP. Well.... The first thing NQ (JC) said when after they finished their prototype is that they will be working on atmo pvp. They didn't of course.
 
The whole idea of the game, making cities, making a civilization, emergent sandbox blah blah blah... 
 
Why does a city get built?
1) protection against outside dangers
2) quick access to resources / commodities 
3) trading is easier and safer
4) social rules
5) a city is a bastion and safe haven that controls the surrounding lands
 
I can go on... The point is there are social / political / evolutionary pressures that cause people to get together to create trading hubs, towns, cities. The city exists because it has to, it has a vital organizational purpose, it doesn't just appear because someone wants to make a pretty building.
 
DU pvp is basically optional, there is no danger from anything. There's no pressure of any kind. People don't have social interactions that are complex enough to force them to start thinking about cities — because cities don't matter. 
 
Plenty of people have built fancy hubs. Some people have used them because they were fancy or somewhat convenient. But at the end of the day they are all empty voxel art, they do not matter, they do not affect anything. Every person in the game can build their own castle / city without consequence. The game is devoid of any necessary preconditions that makes social organization emergent enough so as to make cities necessary.
 
There's no pvp danger to hide from, there's nothing in pve to defend against. Resources are plenty, no one needs to rent a house at some voxel city, they can always build their own.
 
In short focus on pve elements, voxelmancy, making sure everyone gets what they want immediately... It devalues the sandbox and devalues what is made in the sandbox. Because it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
 
Ow... And don't build an mmo on cloudfront.

Get rid of Artificial Speed Limits. Makes the game boring to play -without alt-accounts. It’s hours of slow boating either to mission run, either to roid running. Slow boating is no activity. Besides VR a bit.
 
Ore distribution should me managed in regards of tiles. New players can’t find free t2+ tiles anymore. 
 
PVP should have different mechanics for hunting and defence including engine or warp disruption. But the Speer limit is a joke. 
 
DU needs more PVE content, better mission running, better looting with more interesting rewards, like skill books or skill points bonuses, etc. or discovery missions like if you explore a moon, a planet you can find something interesting. 
 
introduction of life system, like food, energy, rest - could improve skill point rate for example, if your char has a cozy environment. Like in RUST.  Could make housing, interior and base building more interesting. Energy farms, food farms could be possible and interior would get a function.
 
 

So for me, there were all sorts of small failures along the way (many in beta, some since) but they are all really just details next to the central problem.  One of the key features of the design for DU was that players would provide *all of the content*.  That meant that the game just needed to provide the mechanics and frameworks and literally everything else would be player driven.
 
Now players did actually try to do this.  There were people who created puzzles, etc for people to solve, created factions who fought each other, tried to build whole cities and many other interesting things.  The game and its developers seem to fight against content creators at every turn - recent examples being ship builders being put off because the stacked element checker means they have no way to know whether or not they are selling ships which will error 6 months later and warring factions being put off because nobody can shoot each other in battles.
 
Putting that aside though, I think that the one thing this game has proved beyond all doubt is that a game with solely player built content does not work.  You need to have some other content created by the game itself first in order to create gameplay loops that players can do when they aren't doing any group content.  A player needs to be able to just log in, play for 1/2 an hour, enjoy that time and profit from it.

So the one thing I would have done right away is add some background life to the game.  Put creatures in that might attack the player, make some basic challenges on the ground and in space, give players something to shoot at and reasons for doing so (protect base, get resources, whatever).  That would also give them a reason to team up, live in walled villages or space stations with a large shield, etc.  Some of this was in the original game design videos which were put out.  Then I would have built on it by adding more of a survival element to the game, adding PvE and NPCs to allow players to make their spaces more interesting.  I can build a huge space station but it has nobody in it at the moment, let me make it more interesting, make a bar where NPCs come and players I let in might be able to get missions from those NPCs.  I think that would have given players much more of a sense of shared purpose and struggle and a reason to come together into groups and play together.
 
As it is the game is, frankly, boring.  It's a game relying on player created content which literally deletes player created content on a regular basis made by a company which has no problem with breaking existing content and blaming that on the players trying to create it.  The world itself, and the constructs the game allows you to create, are fairly static and uninteresting too and it is difficult to come up with actual functions for many of the rooms in a construct.  I can add a bed but it has no use.  A lot of the cool stuff I see is just huge empty shell buildings with one or two rooms because people made them to look pretty rather than because they needed the space for things.

I know this idea has been thrown around a bit and there's older topics discussing the matter, but allow me to propose an argument before spamming this with messages about how annoying food mechanics are in games...
 
The core of this argument is simple: there's no reason to build anything except vehicles and factories, because they're the only things that serve a purpose in the game... none of which is even a real necessity that anyone has to do, it's simply done because there's nothing else to do (for the majority). Sure, we could build houses and cities and all this stuff we usually call "civilization", but we don't and we won't... because all that "civilization" stuff in real life mostly revolves around storing food, purchasing food, and places to consume food at. In history, the invention of agriculture is what really kick-started the rise of civilization as we know it since it created the need for things like trade, markets, and currency by virtue of having a growing supply that's in high demand (because you die if you don't have it).
 
Pros of introducing food into the game:
- More ways to play the game and things to do (e.g. agriculture, businesses serving food, businesses storing food, processing food, shipping food, etc)
- Reasons for factories that don't revolve around vehicles (e.g. processing raw food into products and a legit need for building supplies for storing food)
- Guaranteed essential supply chains when everybody needs food and not everywhere is capable of growing it
- A reason to build houses, cantinas, taverns, warehouses, grocery stores, and ultimately cities since survival elements like food create a demand for that stuff when people want to be close to where the needed supply is
- More social content and places to gather/hang at (e.g. I'm sure some of us would love to build some Mos Eisley-esque cantinas on not-so-habitable-planets for shady deals to go down at)
- Long voyages needing to be planned with food stocks in mind and supplying multi-crew vessels with enough food for everyone (yes this is a Pro because it adds to the complexity of travel which makes things more interesting... thus more "gameplay")
- Spaceships and buildings actually having a reason to have things like a mess halls, kitchens, dining rooms, bathrooms (makes more sense to roleplay bathrooms when there's consumeables), must-have storage that's not just for hauling shipments, or even something as simple as a table and chairs for people to congregate around for meals (more roleplaying stuff)
- Wars fought over soil rich planets/territories, because food has real value as a nessecity and thus is always high in demand... if you control the food supply, you control the people
- Pirates can disrupt food supply chains and cause a very noticeable effect on whoever the supply was intended for, which gives a reason for groups to form to protect the transporting of food and thus more gameplay
- "Food" doesn't even have to be limited to just things you eat and can easily be expanded to all sorts of consumeables once the basic "Consume Item" foundation code is there, which opens up all sorts of avenues for more content, gameplay, and roleplaying (e.g. beverages, healing items, poisons, etc, etc)
- Tons of things I'm sure I haven't even thought of yet that arise simply from a resource being a necessity and not merely in demand because players are bored
 
Cons of having food in the game:
- You occassionally have to consume an item and some people find that annoying
 
 
In Summary, DU is boring and lifeless compared to what it could be simply by adding food.
 

Some basic survival loops would be good. 

We really need more reasons for our base then looking pretty or working in the factory.  

So as I read through the forums I find the state of it all depressing. Toxic fumes are starting to engulf the whole of the forums and no one seems to care.
 
Instead of helping one another we belittle and degrade. So many post about the exact same subject from pure laziness. Instead of healthy debates we argue, fight, and bicker.
 
We need to resolve these issues before it is too late. some of this is our fault and some the lack of moderation we have. No i am not attacking NQ-Nyzaltar only saying he/she is but one person and we the community should not rely on him/her.
 
We should stop all the multiple post by pointing the OP to the original post about the subject and leave it at that. Maybe have the duplicate post removed? (pokes Nyzaltar) Ignore the trolls and put a stop to their fun. if you make it not fun for them they will stop. 
 
Personally I want the community to flourish and be one of the best, but how the forums are going I have stopped posting for these reasons and I am not going to continue to waste my time repeating myself on the same fights over and over again with the same counter arguments over and over again.
 
 

Let's preface this: I'm a scripter, I own minimal assets in the game, and my main enjoyment comes from scripting. The wipe has a very small affect on me, but that won't change my opinion on how terribly reasoned it is here and terribly unnecessary. 

Kurock's post says it all. They were so, so clearly biased in that post, it's like they already made their decision, and if our response is lukewarm, it will go through.

They ignore major, major points on the pros for the no wipe and partial wipe, and they put the full wipe with the most pros, but they all say the same thing: Simpler. 
Based on how they did the other pros and cons, all they should have said was:
 
Pros:
Simpler for us to do
Schematics are what caused so many people to leave, and they have left. Your comment on schematics probably revolved around the idea that removing them would somehow bring those people back. Newsflash, it won't. They have moved on to other games. Personally, I don't own a single subscription game where I would return to subscribing after so much time has passed. BS you say about a wipe is somehow required for removing schematics. They're just an item.
Complete BS that you say you can't revamp planets.
Even greater BS you say you can't rebalance the economy... do you even look at your in game economy? One update and 10,000 m^3 of honeycomb goes from 100 million to 10 million. That is where it should be. The economy is perfectly, perfectly fine.

As Kurock said, leveling the playing field is a temporary concept that will disappear quickly. It's an MMO. You think someone who plays the weekends or once a month will somehow be on the same level as someone who plays several hours a day, every day, who knows the game already? Don't be delusional, please.

DU is not like a game where wiping should happen. You've already implemented plenty, and many will say too many updates that make it so wiping is completely unnecessary. HQ tiles, tile tax and construct abandonment over time, just to name the ones that come to mind.. Those are systems that work.
DU lives off player content, which is essentially what you're advocating to remove with a wipe. It's like saying: I let you build up my limbs over the last two years so I can crawl, and now walk. Now, I will chop them off for you so you can rebuild them better this time.
Your post is not an unbiased opinion on pros and cons. Fix it. It is misleading. Some people who read it will not think critically about what you just wrote. Who the hell thinks no wipe will only satisfy "some" long term builders and traders... are you... actually dumb? A significant majority is a better word there. You wanna know something? Your wishy-washy response mostly advocating for a wipe is why some people don't want to invest time into this. And it is because you even brought up a wipe. You sour the waters and poison the air with having the idea about, even more so by your extremely biased post. 

You wanna see what I mean by a biased pro/con? Here's a great example:

 
As you can see, depending on where you cut the cake, you can say a lot and steer the narrative, bloating reasons and diminishing others. 
This is, essentially what NQ have done with their entire post.

This is all I have to say in this, post, I've spent enough time writing out the obvious. Kurock said it in a neater package, but felt I should elaborate.
 

A+ on all your points,  The shitty skybox is the easiest thing they can change but knowing NQ i very well doubt it.  I cant believe they changed it in alpha.  There is no way someone could think the nebula looks good compared to the old skybox they had.  
 
As far as civilization building game, ive said this for a long time, its not.  There is no civilization when everything is done by yourself.  No reason for cities, no reasons to explore, no reasons to take precautions or have risk traveling to an outer ice planet looking for rare ores.  Everything is safe, your avatar never dies.  All around just terrible.  NQ really needs to watch this video.  But the only actual hope we have in reality is if NQ loses the rights to DU and another company steps in to develop it and make an actual game.  NQ has proved incompetent time and time again.  As shown with something as simple as fucking up the skybox. 

Suggestion: add a grace period for inactive accounts of like 1-3 months before all ownerships/claims are removed, which will give scavenging opportunities and enable the active players to reclaim some of the clutter/resources/territory.