Taelessael

Goodness, it looks like people actually ran the Alioth Market VI 25q-coal bot dry X) Try sorting things by price instead of just running to m6, the bots have better prices at seemingly every other market in the universe. I was under the impression HQ tiles weren't supposed to be minable if taxes weren't paid, but ensuring HQ tiles behaving (aside from "isn't lost if unpaid") hasn't been the highest priority. Of course, it is worth noting that mining isn't supposed to be a huge money-maker, it is a source of basic-income. If you can't be on much, then you spend a few min each night calibrating your miners, and when you get to your off-time you haul it all to market, pay the next week's taxes, and have the surplus to spend on things like fuel or parts doing the stuff you want to do that you would have otherwise had to spend part of your time mining to pay for. If you are on more, and you want more money, then you do other stuff on top of mining.

I think you may want to try reading the whole post there Mr. Quixote, you most definitely missed a few important bits there charging your giants. I muchly appreciate the intent, but you must remember that everyone will be able to use the items in question. The reason we don't have a lot of cubes right now is because CCS ensures that heavy armor runs in to vastly diminishing returns defensively, and because they still have a much harder time catching anything than something that is just a strait element-ship with a thin veneer of a hull. People still do the math and make ships that have significant armor, they just aren't generally efficient enough to use often in piracy and have too much trouble landing a killing blow against faster pvp foes that can just run away. In the case of the gravity net, an interceptor wouldn't need to be fast, because the hauler wouldn't be able to escape the net, you could pirate in a nearly glacier-slow battle-brick just as long as it could control range in the net by pulling a half-g more than the cargo-laden hauler you are trying to catch. Most haulers I've seen also don't tend to go for heavy armor. They can, but they usually come up with some reason to not use it. No mistaking, I like the idea of having an armor-type material that is actually relevant, and the net, but we wont find the complexity we need in just supplanting gold voxel's spot with an even heavier voxel. We need considerations other than just speed, damage, and hp.

"Interdiction" is somewhere on NQ's to do list, I'd like them to hurry up with it a bit. If we were to stack your gravity arena on top of it then that would be interesting, It will however require some manner of limitation, such as the inability to have multiple such units overlapping their fields of effect, lest we end up with player-made black holes that just crush everything against a space-core in their center with an armed core nearby to blast anything caught. I like the idea of armor, and am quite aware of the issues with the game's current replica of eve's nano-tank. Unfortunately I do also very well remember the cube-meta, and how in the past battles between even small numbers of ships would drag on quite often until one side ran out of repair material/ammo/fuel. On top of that, cubes didn't need to move and keep up, they could get in to position and just sit because tracking was relative to the attacking ship's orientation, so all they needed to do was rotate enough to keep their target from having too much relative angular velocity, and let attackers come to them to try and wear through the armor. Finally, even if there was something to force movement as a part of combat, NQ has to my knowledge not yet dealt with other current movement-related exploits like fuel scripts and clang-drives that make some of the current absurdity even more viable than it already should be. CCS and tiny ammo-cans were implemented to stop cubes, hence the super-fast paper-armored SNES cartridges that are the current meta, trying to push it back to an armor-meta wont solve it. Having had a lot of time to look and consider how everything goes and is affected, and how continued tweaks to combat-related systems have proven relatively ineffective at substantially fixing and balancing things, it has become apparent that rebalancing weapons and armor/shields wont fix the underlying problem. To put it simply, combat isn't complex enough, there are so few variables that players can still do the math and work out a mathematical "best" to which the only counter is more of itself. We need things like power and heat-management, e-war, and elements that modify weapon and shield output at the cost of some other part of the attached ship's function. This is a good idea, though I might propose a few modifications: -There needs to be some manner of exception in the cargo-lock for things like fuel, ammo, and scrap, as large multi-crewed ships tend to find they need to be able to reload the ammo magazines, refuel the tanks, and patch up damaged components to keep them going just that little bit longer during a shootout. -Random element deletion doesn't need to happen. In my experience elements with lives missing tend to end up in either the trophy case or the scrap bin. If we need to encourage greater element loss in combat then it would perhaps be more viable to just add elements to the ccs math so that a few more shots are fired and take out more elements before the ship's core breaks. All but the largest elements tend to lack the hp to survive even a single direct hit from the smallest gun, and larger weapons often can clear clusters of elements at a time if they aren't all completely buried under thick voxel armor.

I understand the reasoning behind the "wipe" mentality, but going Thanos on the universe will drive off more players than the short-term rebalance will keep, we'd be killing the game in exchange for a short look at how things would have developed early on had the rules been like they are now back when beta went live. If I recall correctly, the tax thing was more to both deal with people grabbing dozens or occasionally even hundreds of tiles they were never actually going to use and just sitting on them for whatever reason, and to add an unfortunately much needed money-sink to the game. They solved the first part, the second is a fair bit more fiddly to handle. As for element loss, if I recall correctly anything that loses a life is no longer able to be sold on the market, and you cant bp a ship if any of the elements have lost a life. This makes it possible to get a ship mobile after combat and technically allows its operation to continue in full afterward, but pushes part replacement for builders and combat-players. Personally, now that CCS is a thing, I'd allow infinite lives for parts other than cores now with the stipulation that if the element was destroyed in combat, it permanently functions at half-power and is capped at half hp after being repaired, and cant be sold on market or bp'd (you can still replace it to get fun function again). As for crashing, it doesn't apply life loss because new players would lose everything way too quickly while still getting the hang of flight, and old players would get really ticked at how they need to replace a bunch of stuff every time someone left something parked somewhere that caused them to crash out of the game while they were trying to come in for a landing. Finally. as hull-loss is concerned, ships taken in pvp tend to have their hulls scrapped (if they aren't used as trophies), while those damaged but kept get repaired. Damage or loss of hull in crashes causes more issue than would element loss, as while it is still repairable, the act of doing so is not as strait forward as it is for elements.

I am not some master harvester in DU by any stretch, but in my experience outer-planets is a bit more of a bulk-thing. You cant just short-order ship the non-t1 ore to the nearest market on the same planet for bot-sales, and people are less likely to buy it for a decent price if they have to also ship it to where they need it afterwards, so you need to be able to keep paying without profit until you have enough to make it realistically worth shipping in bulk to Alioth, at which point you sell it all to get a lot of money to tide things over until your next bulk-shipping. As for somehow losing money on all of 5 t1 and 2 t3, my guess is that all of his tiles are in one cluster on an outer planet (an actual planet, not a moon, my guess is Feli), so he doesn't have any decent t1 tiles, and he is probably keeping all of his MU constantly topped off so he doesn't have the calibration points to spare to pick up the slack of his low-end coal tiles with better tiles somewhere else. I'd advise he pull out of his current coal-tiles and go find a good 3-set of 500s on a moon, toss 4 MU on his Sanctuary tile for the free t1 there, only calibrate any given MU no more than once every 4 days (as you still automatically bump it back to 100% calibration on day 4 even in a surrogate without trying), and let the petalite slowly build as it will until it is worth bulk-shipping while the rest of his tiles cover the costs of everything.

Animal/insect like wings are cool, and having them provide atmospheric propulsion without regular engines would make sense, but "fragile" doesn't really work as a drawback, as out of the 14 already existing wing-type elements only one has sufficient durability to survive even a single hit from the game's lowest damage per shot weapon. In the case of the suggested dragon-fly wings, I might suggest some manner of "low lift/speed" relative to their size. We should probably also work out their fuel-usage, though in that area it may be most practical to simply scale their usage to their output relative to a comparable wing-thruster combination.

Most people know that if they don't pay their employees, they are very likely to not have employees for very long, or possibly ever again afterward. You say I am a pirate not because of any actual engagement in piracy, but because I recognize that in a game, people like to play as heroes and villains, and that neither is all that possible if someone/something isn't playing the opposing side? You may want to actually go look up the definitions of both "action" and "pirate", the whole "people I disagree with are (insert name of real-world bad-guy-group here) because I disagree with them and not for their actual actions" argument is just childish, and anyone that pays attention can typically see right through it. I do however appreciate that you were so quick to drag the thread through the mud again with the "pirate" insult after I suggested that I don't like it, instead of trying to continue to defend your "take the fun from people I don't like" weapon. That you have responded in such a manner suggests quite strongly that you know your weapon doesn't stand up to logical scrutiny, and that you want to try to get me to leave this particular thread so I will stop pointing out why your suggested new wildly imbalanced weapon of mass destruction should not be implemented. Now I just need to to work on realistically feigning a vulnerability sooner, but that isn't the point of this thread... The point of this thread is that you were asking for a weapon the sole purpose of which is to take away someone else's fun in a game, because you don't like them doing something they are supposed to be able to do, even though you are already more than capable of easily circumventing their ability to do anything to you. This is not acceptable, and no amount of trying to spin it as "balance" or "risk" or "challenge" will ever change that.

Please don't insult me with the suggestion that I'd support real-life pirates. DU is a game, people respawn, stuff is easily replaced, and people are allowed to play pirate so that someone else can play hero. We've been over this, you can buy and fit weapons to your ship, or pay for security. You are actively choosing not to. They don't have lethal weapons for legal/insurance reasons, not because they don't like regular weapons. Neither insurance or law is an issue in DU. Of note though, regular weapons may be more difficult in real life to bring on a cargo-ship, but bringing nuclear weapon to blow yourself up with in order to take out some guys with guns in a speed-boat is just absurd. Also, please stop telling the guy that is telling you to bring guns like everyone else that he doesn't want you or anyone else to defend themselves from pirates. Still currently a mission-runner, still not currently an in-game a pirate. Again, the sole purpose of the device you are asking for is to take away someone else's fun in a game, to punish them, because you don't like them doing something they are supposed to be able to do. This is not acceptable, and no amount of trying to spin it as "balance" or "risk" or "challenge" will ever change that.

There's a difference between risk of picking a fight with an armed target, and the guaranteed loss of a construct that will result from trying to play pirate in a sandbox-game where you are supposed to be able to play pirate, but where near about everything you may ever want to pirate is armed with an instant-kill weapon. We've also been over the whole "risk" bologna. Pirates already face risk in the form of people shooting back. You are aware that you or allies can use the currently available weapons to defend yourself and force pirates to risk losing their ships, but you refuse to fit normal weapons, or get any kind of help from people with said normal weapons, and are thus actively choosing to remove the risk for any pirate that should go after you. Finally, piracy is a legitimate play-style in DU. It is a big investment to undertake, with a lot of risk, and the unique potential to have no reward at all. None the less, it is easily prevented with all of a few minutes worth of effort (at most), no guns, no expensive fuels, but it seems as though you don't want to put in even that much work in game to deal with them. The sole purpose of the device you are asking for is to take away someone else's fun in a game, to punish them, because you don't like them doing something they are supposed to be able to do. This is not acceptable, and no amount of trying to spin it as "balance" or "risk" or "challenge" will ever change that.

What you are asking for isn't a challenge because someone just gets blown up with no skill/luck involved. It isn't balanced because it is a single weapon that 1-hit kills anything while any other weapons typically take dozens of shots at minimum to just wear down an equivalently sized shield. PvP players like a fight, but this will remove that fight for the pirates. Someone will fire a shot, someone will trigger an ssd, and it will all be done. The issue with the ssd idea as you have explained it is that you just want an ill conceived method of guaranteed punishment for pvp players that shoot at you when you chose to make yourself a valid pvp target. There are currently already more than enough ways to easily avoid having to deal with pirates at all with almost no effort, risk, or investment, you don't need a device who's only purpose is to make the game less fun for other people because you don't feel like using anything you already have.

Those two scenarios were the bad ones, and they were obvious from the start, but it occurred to me that you may not have realized so I elected to point them out to you. -If you leave loot, the pirates will just use disposable element-ships to either blow up and kill you, or get you to kill yourself. This invalidates all existing weapons in piracy as anything more than a trigger for the ssd, as well as any reason to design a ship for piracy that isn't just a disjointed bundle of floating elements that constitute the bare minimum needed to run your slow hauler down and start shooting at it. -If you don't leave loot, you'll still be shot and/or blown up by people in disposable element-ships, but instead of people actually doing it for the fun of pirating or the prospect of loot (as you will be entirely invalidating the option of playing as a pirate with this, because the vast majority of anyone hauling will just bring an ssd instead of guns), you will be losing your stuff because they think its funny to ruin your day by destroying your stuff and/or because they have decided that a location is theirs and you aren't allowed to be in it. If you were just asking to blow yourself to bits, and your wreck was still loot-able then this would be a passable idea, the pirates would still have their fun chasing you, and they'd still have their reward for all of the time and materials invested in trying to catch you. As is though you are quite plainly just asking for a super-weapon to vengefully destroy their ships, and the amount of thought you seem to have put in to it looks as though it amounts to "I don't like people who shoot at me, therefore I should be allowed to destroy their ship(s) immediately if I am going to lose my ship."

That much is obvious, and that NQ has disallowed build mode during pvp (presumably to prevent bugs/exploits and keep people from entirely deleting their ships during combat so as to deny pirates any loot) implies that they wont allow this idea either. But, I don't think he's willing to leave the last post to a detractor of the idea (hence the insults he likes to throw when people disagree). Also I want to see what absurdity he comes up with next to try and justify a weapon that functionally invalidates all other weapons and nearly every pvp-related play style. Oh, and Hirnsausen... Scenario A (collateral): Two pirate ships appear on your radar, the first shoots the second, the second triggers the self-destruct you are talking about adding and blows your ship up with those two, then a 3rd moves in from its position a safe distance away to loot everything and deploy new ships if your mechanic leaves any wrecks to loot, and the 3 of them just taunt you in chat for flying so carelessly if it doesn't, because the only people that will be left regularly doing pvp in the way you are trying to make unplayable if your bomb was included will be either pirates (if there is loot), or those who's only goal is to just wreck your stuff and then laugh at you (if there isn't loot). Scenario B (no collateral): Two pirate ships appear on your radar, one shoots you, you self-destruct, the second moves in and loots the wrecks (if there are any) and deploys a new ship for the guy that shot you, then they move in to loot everything if your mechanic leaves any wrecks to loot, and the 2 of them just taunt you in chat for flying so carelessly if it doesn't, because the only people that will be left regularly doing pvp in the way you are trying to make unplayable if your bomb was included will be either pirates (if there is loot), or those who's only goal is to just wreck your stuff and then laugh at you (if there isn't loot). Any actual logical counter? Or will it just be another attempt at appealing to emotion in the hopes that nobody thinks too hard about it, along with one or more insults to myself (a mission runner btw) and/or pvp players?

Your mental gymnastics need work dude, way too easy to follow. Also, claiming to be strongly opposed to violence and weapons while simultaneously asking for a giant bomb to violently blow all the players you don't like to bits is an amusing argument, but a rather poor one.

If this triggers immediately, then this idea also runs in to issues with people needing access to their linked containers. NQ also wants the universe to look populated, so the pads cant be totally empty. If however it operates on some manner of timer and local construct count, then it may be more practical. Perhaps if it were to trigger if there were more than 2L/4M/8S/16XS ships on the pad (or some mixed fraction, like more than 1l +2m +4s +8xs), and only triggered on ships that had been parked there for more than an hour, and only as needed to reduce the numbers to an acceptable level. You may also want some system other than fetch, as I recall hearing that the fetch system isn't supposed to last to full release. Perhaps a variant of the "compacted prints" that can only be re-deployed at the market where the ship was compacted? -Docking is implemented the way it is implemented to avoid annoying glitches and construct-theft exploits that were a major problem before you joined. -Landing gear are a decorative item, like lights, mandating them for anything will just annoy the players that like designing their own landing-surfaces (or the ones that all together don't like the landing-strut/gear/whatever look and want to just stick with landing on a ship's belly like a shuttle in Star-Trek).

And here we are again, dragging this thread through the mud by strait out insulting people when they call you out because you are blatantly asking for a poorly thought out and exceedingly overpowered weapon of mass destruction with which to retaliate against anyone that shoots at you. Military helicopters aren't armed with self-destruct devices in the hopes that if they some how go down near a hostile, they can pull a "taking you with me". At most they may be blown up or set fire to in order to deny hostiles any salvage/intel. This isn't what you are asking for. What you are asking for is functionally permission to keep a nuke in your lamborghini so you can retaliate against some common criminals that might try to car-jack you while you drive carelessly through the worst part of town. Literally everyone that spends any time considering this knows it is a bad idea, and knows exactly why you are really asking for it, regardless of what you try to tell them it is for. Please stop pretending this has anything to do with balancing the game. If you don't want to potentially be a pvp target, stay in the safe zones, and only travel outside of them by warp. If you want the rewards only available to those willing to fly through pvp space, recognize that you can lose your ship, that this risk is very intentionally part of the game, and that your refusal to use the very intentionally included part of the game that would force pirates to also risk losing their stuff attacking you isn't a balance issue, it is your decision to make it so they don't have any risk attacking you.

Old arcade games are already a thing if you know who to talk to, people have been known to code them in LUA in game so that they could be played on screens.

I am fairly certain your advantage would be that you'd have a 3 month lead on getting your factory constructed and operating over the guy that has done nothing. As for the inevitable "what if they spent 3 months doing something else to make the same amount of money instead?" question, they'd then either have to spend a chunk of that to buy all the components for their factory, or spend a boat load of time making all of those factory components and chasing down all those prints themselves, ultimately leaving your dedicated factory guy with a lead in time, money, or both. A limited/capped skill point system (the 5/5 one you said you don't favor) would turn in to "grinding cakes until they're trivial", while the unlimited one with diminishing returns you specified would inevitably allow the person who realizes and acquires their skill points the fastest (assuming multiple parallel lines allow for that much more skill gain) or first (assuming speed of skill gain is not affected by having parallel lines) to price all of their local (and/or possibly distant) opponents out of the market by virtue of the fact that their returns, while diminishing, are not 0. This would allow them to always have some slim advantage they could use to reduce their prices that much more. The unlimited thing wouldn't necessarily be an issue quickly, particularly given the huge amounts of money some players have at their disposal to manipulate the market with, but it would be a thing eventually The capped version wouldn't have this issue, but it would feel like just adding more grind to the game for most people.

The pirates would only be mildly annoyed by this, as the shear volume of empty space in which to hide would make it almost meaninglessly easy to set up a supply depot outside the SZ for overnight parking and as a collection point for their non-pirate buddies/alts to come pick up the loot for storage/sale on whatever planet they then found themselves inclined to ship it to. The bigger issue would come from the inability of non-pirates to reclaim their stuff in the event that a member of a fleet got their ship blown out from under them but then managed to recover it.

Now that I've thought on it more (and taken a more recent look at the combat ships to refresh my memory), CCS might need some manner of mild direct or indirect fiddling as well. The copy-pasta ships I've seen were all thin and lightweight voxel with a shield, the people I've talked to all agree that once the shield goes down the ship is a write-off anyways because of CCS. They figure CCS burns down too quick for armor to substantially matter... Perhaps if there were to be some incremental-honeycomb feature, where the weight/CCS (and/or other stats) were applied in larger increments than single voxels and any value within a given increment acts as though it were all the same. The material itself would still behave in combat as it does now (hitpoints and resistances and all that reacting as they do to weapons impacts), but adding in extra voxel for aesthetic reasons wouldn't change the weight or ccs as long as the extras didn't push it in to the next increment. Add to that scaling the increment sizes to core sizes (because an L core will probably need bigger greebling than an XS) and when paired with the removal or reduction of cross-section related accuracy modifiers we could see some interesting designs. What do you think?

Faction stuff is fine as is. DU's issues stem from non-faction stuff, such as: -Power miners didn't want auto-miner only planetary mining (though several others did). -PvP players want more variety (combat is too simple, so all the top orgs are more or less flying identical ships because of meta-math). -Power builders don't like the rumors of impending complexity limits because they like having filigree on their filigree (regardless of how hard that is for everyone to load). -Market tycoons don't like that the new mining system has disrupted the value of their ore stocks (even though they still can throw around enough money to substantially manipulate prices). -Manufacturers don't like that industry takes a lot of money to really get in to (because if it didn't there'd be mega-factories everywhere that would lag). -People don't like taxes (without regard as to their necessity). -The map is hard to read because the system image is out of date (if it was ever accurate) and NQ keeps making the info-colors on the planet map ever more transparent. -Asteroids all respawn at once and in relatively limited numbers and only once a week and are visible to the entire universe, so if you are unavailable to play at that exact time you have a much harder time finding good ones to mine (NQ still needs to work on this). -There is only so much exploring to be done on the few planets the game does have (we need more solar-systems with more interesting planets and moons). -There is no pve combat for players to serve as pvp-lite or to try and cut their teeth on before facing the savagery of other players. -There is no atmospheric combat so if someone makes a major nuisance of themselves planet-side without breaking any game-rules players cant do anything about it. -RDMS is a fantastically complicated thing to wrap one's head around for how simple it is (so it causes a lot of "stupid user errors" that annoy people). -The game is buggy because it is still in development (but getting better). -The game has not hit the point in its development where system optimization becomes the dev's primary focus, so it is hard to run for some comps and is prone to lag under certain situations (last I heard it is on NQ's to do list, just ahead of full launch). -The game has several settings that either can't be altered, revert to standard after every log in, or should be there to be adjustable but aren't, so players have a hard time adjusting things to suit their personal preferences. -The game is still being developed, meaning what works well now has a fair chance of not working as well or at all later when things get updated (even if things get better when updated, people don't like change). -The game is not in full release and is not well advertised, so it doesn't have a huge player-base yet. -The game is focused on the sandbox-space-sim/builder niche, so even with relatively few competitors it has only a small portion of "gamers" it is competing for. -The game had (and still occasionally has) loopholes that some people abused heavily and did not later suffer consequence or even have what they gained taken from them (so people feel cheated because they have a hard time competing with the resources the abusers gained). -The people that get irritated with anything in game sit in chat and try to get others to be irritated with them (because misery loves company). -The people that play one way may often argue with people that play another over "how things should be" and it usually ultimately just irritates both sides (because that is how people are and there is nothing that can be done about it). -Trolls see the relatively low cost of getting in to the game and hop on to just sit in chat and irritate/demoralize people because they think its funny to ruin everyone else's fun. -And finally the flippin' trees on Alioth are still a pain in the rear to load. ...you know, just to name a few issues... DU is generally improving, but it still has a good ways to go. In general I'd have to say factions are probably the one area that NQ should avoid tinkering with for the moment, they have enough actual problems to solve without trying to drastically change a relatively clean, concise, and more or less fully functional part of the game in to a massive monstrosity of a gameplay component that would require reworking almost the entire game around it to properly accommodate.

We went over this yesterday, it works fine. By all appearances, I'd say bright colors, little to no risk of substantial loss, and obvious reward/advancement no matter how little time is put in (even if it is only a very small advancement) are the most popular. All of these are possible in a sci-fi setting, but are more easily achieved in fantasy. But if we are being honest here there's a whole lot of science that has already been done to determine this so as to best direct game development companies on how to make the most money they can. None of those is a faction system. This statement is wrong in almost every way. -A flying horse that you can spawn from your pack to move more quickly and that despawns harmlessly when you are attacked so that you can respawn it again after your fight is not a ship that you need to invest substantial resources in to have repaired or entirely replaced after you get in to a fight. -Dying in a fantasy world such that you either need to wait the 10 secs for a friend to cast resurrection, or run the two minutes from the graveyard back to where you were to pick up right back where you left off (assuming the graveyard isn't closer to your goal than you were when you died) with no risk of losing your gear or inventory is not getting blown up and losing both a ship and several hours/days/weeks worth of resources you had been slowly collecting. -Having to avoid riding a horse in to walls so that you don't look like you may have DC'd is not the same as having to dodge half-loaded space elevators so you don't get killed. -Having to periodically watch your abilities because you whacked enough boars in the forest to gain a level and are now better at everything is not having to work out the minutia of what an SStO starship needs so you can carry more ore between planets in a ship that handles almost entirely differently from your old one. Several very large alliances of small factions disagree with you, mine included. We operate as small groups when we feel like it, and large ones when we feel like it, and accomplish quite a bit. This isn't WoW, and there are actual substantial consequences to your actions. This is also not a faction-mechanic, and requires its own thread for discussion. We've been over this already too, your understanding of taxation and collective/governmental usage and resource requirement/expenditure is severely lacking. Please stop trying to argue it, it will never work the way you are trying to explain it as working without a wildly impractical amount of accountability-enforcement carried out by NQ on the player-base.

It weakens cubes substantially, but it still favors building heavy to absorb fire. You make a good point though... with CCS in the mix and cross-section-accuracy replaced by core size accuracy, people would build to the CCS falloff, but they wouldn't all be tightly packed boxes. May need to nerf the miss chances of larger weapons vs substantially smaller targets though, the old system before cross-section had a 50% miss chance against a core 2 sizes smaller and a 75% miss when going L vs XS, and while that may seem like a lot it tends to be immediately rendered irrelevant rather quickly by the larger core having 4 to 8 times the effective weapons range and twice the dps per gun. Its fine if L does a huge amount of damage to a small target on a hit, but the ideal anti-fighter weapon really shouldn't be a battleship's main guns.

...Your argument seems to have gone from "players wont cooperate on a large scale without the devs forcing them to" to "its too hard to cooperate on a large scale without the devs forcing us to"... I suppose I should point out that the argument of "these games in an entirely different genre with entirely different game mechanics were more popular" works better as an argument for buying someone a different game for x-mas than it does for trying to change a single mechanic in DU.

EVE is a good point of reference, and partially what DU wants to be/replace, but it has also had 20 years to get to that point while DU is not yet even in full release, it still needs time to develop. I use EVE as a point of reference when I say it didn't meaningfully push factions and did fine. DU can do the same. People don't play EVE because they want to join the Minmatar Republic, trust in the rust, and fight the Amarr Empire, they play because they want to command cool space-ships while being a pirate/pirate hunter/naval officer/miner/business magnate/ect... They didn't need major factions forced on them, and indeed often ignored them entirely. I know I did, just like I did here until I felt like joining a larger group. The faction I am in now has its own factories, its own bases, its own small cities, its people are organized in to a governmental structure of sufficient complexity to manage everything. We operate collectively to take advantage of the economics of scale, we work together to design ships and structures and run operations, and we participate in fleet battles when we desire. We didn't need an npc faction for any of that, and neither did any of the other major factions already doing exactly the same as we are. So, why do we need to be forced in to someone else's idea of a faction if all of the supposed benefits of doing so are what we already have in the current system? The faction system is fine as is, go join a better faction if you don't like your current one. As for "end-game content", that is a different topic entirely and needs its own thread.

Removing cross-section from hit chance and just linking it to core size again would just turn everything back in to cubes. Connecting max core stress and max shield-strength might do something, but I suspect there'd be a high probability of people just working out the sweet-spot for the hit probability to shield strength ratio, and then we'd just see a bunch of copy-pasta of that size. What we need is something that directly conflicts with building small in a way that isn't so easily math'd-out.