Taelessael

<Translation> -Clean up the markets by turning anything parked there for too long in to a compactified-construct-print stored at the market. -Hold another competition to design a "Fourriere" (foyer?) that shows off ships. </translation> If I remember the last time this was suggested, the person making the suggestion also added the stipulation that the construct can only be re-deployed at that market. I might add to this the additional stipulation that it only happens if the number of constructs near a market exceeds a set number, as having some stuff at markets and mission towers makes the world feel more occupied than it does when I fly to ones without anything nearby.

Yaaaa... No. This wont give good publicity, or good feedback, it will just flood the pts with trolls and hackers (same way it did and still does for other games that get big and then make the pts free).

I agree with the idea, but it wont entirely solve the issue of having to dodge poles and platforms, not that one should try. I can approve of removing the stuff that wouldn't be there if it weren't required by that specific rule to be there, but removing tall/floating stuff entirely would be eliminating too much epic stuff that needs to be tall or float.

An interesting thought... Depending on the ships involved shields are likely to take several minutes to go down once people start getting their hands on the big ones. Given the information provided, your issue seems entirely and immediately fixable, just not in the way you are suggesting. This is a "change in strategy problem", not a "change the rules to make a non-functional strategy viable" problem. Get friends or mercs to scout ahead/fly escort, or fly the route differently. I've flown dozens of missions. All of em' were through pvp space, several were when I'd expect people to be on and waiting to shoot at me (near about all hours through the weekend on more than a few runs), and I've yet to see anyone even make an attempt at chasing me (not that I see all that many people on radar when hauling). PvP in a game that isn't going to just hand all your stuff right back when you respawn is never going to be a "forgiving" experience for people that get themselves shot. Trying to change the rules to better accommodate careless/reckless players will just make conventional piracy a non-viable play style. The idea of dumping cargo to re-collect it later is an interesting idea, but the cargo would need a decay timer to keep people from just flooding space with single liters of dirt. Of note though... pirate players are not storm-troopers, they are not blind and/or stupid because of the dictates of plot. Odds are if you can dump cargo to scan down again later, any experienced group of pirates will know you can do that and will have a ship with the scanner to go look for that cargo. As warp interdiction goes, tis already a planned thing that NQ is supposedly working on, though with the added function of pulling people that try to warp through it out of warp. As for power interacting with things, I could see this as a way to escape interdiction (not enough power left in the system to keep the field going), but I don't see how power could be used in a function similar to the combat timer currently functions.

A nice idea, and one already planned as I recall, but very low priority for the moment.

The first is fiddly. On the one hand it is a thing that would make building stuff easier, on the other builders capable of getting weird stuff to happen more easily tends to help them sell their skills, so I am a bit conflicted there... Definitely want those last two though, they should be both easy to do and would very much improve things.

An interesting thought, and you are not the first to have it, but such usage degradation is a survival-mechanic that a lot of players are generally not interested in having. There are some to be sure, but most people don't want to have to take their starships in to get the oil and filters changed and the tires rotated every 50,000 km.

The game runs quite heavily client-side, it keeps the server load down, so totally unmanned drones would be more than a bit tricky. May be better off just using some manner of auto-piloted ship and paying noobs to stand on them while they fly.

I appreciate the thought, but this is supposed to be an MMO. You may just want to try getting friends or people you pay to watch the radar for you.

The general idea of some manner of core-cleanup has been posed and shot down in the past as I recall. A rather important part of the game was supposed to be the ability to leave things for a while and come back right where you left off. No mistake, I am very much for having cores parked at the market too long reduced to magic prints that can only be re-deployed at the market they were compacted at, but stuff outside of that kinda needs to stay if we don't want to potentially risk losing a bunch of folk that have to take off for a while (say, because they were in the military and deployed).

You are in fact very much asking for a DRM change. An alteration to allow a player to produce a print of a ship that isn't their own original design would functionally just remove the DRM system. A system that allows a ship to lose DRM protection its because its owner made a change would immediately be used to circumvent DRM entirely, people would just make the required alterations to some floating bits they'd add until DRM broke, then they'd remove it and have an exact copy of the original now DRM free.

Player content can carry a game quite a ways, but there needs to be non-player content for a while until the players get stuff started. It is an MMO, the entire idea is group play, and EVE has been running for almost two decades. It isn't a game for everyone, no game is, but a lot of people love it and have kept it going this long. As for how groups play, you will have small groups of friends that just play for fun and train wherever, and you will have empires built on taxes/slave labor, and you will have large organized groups that divide their skill training optimally and play with militant efficiency. It is multiplayer, it is persistent, someone will come out on top, and as such someone else will be on the bottom, and as a persistent-world MMO this can't be changed. <InigoMontoya>I do not think that word means what you think it means.</InigoMontoya> Crowfall may be an MMO, but now that you mention it you seem to be broadly describing RPG stuff, not mmo stuff. DU isn't an rpg, its a sim. People can like both, and games can include elements of both, but broadly speaking sim and rpg are meant for different audiences, and complaining that a sim isn't an rpg is just silly. I want more people in this game, but I also want to play this game, and not WoW. If this were just another WoW-clone with a few different features and a different skin, most of its player base would probably be somewhere else. I recognize that this game differs from the rpg you are used to quite extremely, and it makes this game seem needlessly hard (same way I felt when I went from WoW to EVE, except gravity and atmo-heating weren't also trying to kill me in EVE like they do in DU), but trying to simplify a simulation down in to an RPG isn't going to get that many more people, and it would cost near all the ones already here.

For the few factory games I've seen, they don't involve quite such potential complexity, aren't mmo, and can be attacked.

I have not seen any such ECU bugs, but if they are there then it would be something to fix.

Ya can't really fix what isn't broken. ECU was meant to be an emergency element for things like your pilot getting dc'd during a landing attempt or blown out of the seat when atmo pvp becomes a thing. If ya want to stop in space keep a spare space core (perhaps with some voxel), if ya want to stop in mid air or right over water... well NQ is debating tweaking things for that, because seeing a massive ship parked in mid air above a base is just cool.

A lot of you seem to be trying to combat predominantly well established completionists and industrial min-maxers in a game by adding more stuff. All this will do is move the goal-posts further for people that want to play industry and are trying to catch up to their more established competitors. You wont break mega-factory play by adding complexity. DU has no limits to how many industry units you can have running, no cap on how much industry you can stuff in to a hex, resources are too abundant, the player-base too small, everyone is working with the same numbers and the same end points, and there's no pvp where people are building them to incentivize not keeping all your stuff in one location. Even if you make things too big for 1 core, the factory-players will just plop a second down right next to it and divide the work between them. At the end of the day the only thing I can think of that might put an end to mega-factories would be to put a cap on how many industry elements you can have in a hex, such as by using the power system and some sort of solar-battery rules where a given hex only allows so much power to be generated. People would of course try to circumvent this by building either at the corner of 3 hexes (with multiple cores if needed), or assuming power can be transferred between constructs via fuel or battery invo items, by building their factory in the middle of a hex and harvesting power from all the near-by hexes to transfer via linked can range.

VR is cool, but it wont carry a game like DU long term. It will be a nice thing to add some day for those of y'all that can make use of it, but for now time would be better spent on improving existing features, or implementing planned ones, or coming up with something else to both hold people's attention and bring in new/old players in large numbers and for extended periods until the player population is high enough to do that on its own (more missions, exploration, npc combat, procedurally generated everything, ect...).

Add in farming after they work everything else out, the stuff you'd farm would be luxury items... like coffee beans...

Every time I hear the counter-argument that its to feed the "hauling missions" that are supposedly in our future. Sadly I have yet to hear of something that wont at least require you to surrogate in and move it all in to a container the haulers could access anyways, so you wont get to avoid the market even then. I would honestly be perfectly happy with a built in up-charge to have the stuff I bought at one market on a planet collectable at another, having the option of avoiding the districts when shopping would seriously reduce market issues. ...Now if we could only do something about all the stuff people just leave there (cargo-blocks, advertisements, ships that exceed the advert-size limit but get to stay because they "aren't me showing off my faction's bling as an advert to get you to join, I'm just parking it there temporarily... forever..." ...

Resources are plentiful. Territory is plentiful. Almost nobody plays for the benefit "everyone else". They play for themselves and their faction, and are only really interested in outsiders doing well if it in some way improves their own experience. The game currently suffers primarily from a combination of: -Hardware limitations (some people cant get close to majorly populated areas), ----I can only suggest things that might lower the system-load here, I lack the code and design knowledge to do much else. -A lack of content (I can mine and save, or I can mine and build, or I can mine and go run out of fuel and ammo shooting a cube), ----Player-made content is cool, but "because I can" and "for the art" isn't enough to keep them going, particularly when a "quick binge" reveals that there is nothing else there yet. The game needs procedural content (missions, places to explore, things to fight over that can actually be fought over). -General grindy-ness (non-mining people want to hop in and go explore, or blow stuff up, or build, or do other things, not spend a whole weekend mining to scrape together the funds to go do the thing they want for an hour next weekend). ----NQ is working on this with the passive mining stuff. More will probably be needed (Aphelia-missions or the like), but we'll need to wait and see how that turns out. Were these issues resolved, the player-base would probably be larger and there would be more buildings and ships about.

Assuming you are talking about the Select Voxel and Replace Voxel building tools and not just the stuff for placing and deleting new things with the Deploy Voxel tool (which the arrow/page up & down keys can move and holding shift for these can stretch and shrink). This would be helpful, although until it is added I might advise making use of the fact that you don't need to click just on voxel for these tools to work (a pack full of spare xs adjustors or fuel intakes make for a relatively easy way to help highlight where you'd like to highlight).

Ore The ore-nodes are "technically" running out in that there are currently a finite number of them and people are mining them, but at our current pace we are years from burning through all of that. I suspect that NQ will have not just released asteroids but entire other solar-systems well before our current system gets that close to running out. Effectively, this is an issue NQ is already working on and has more or less covered. Bots I hear that this is an issue, but last I saw bots were being taken out of the market for more ore less everything other than selling fuel to players (NQ realized people don't know how to bring enough gas for a return trip and think the game is terribad for not negating their poor planning). I'd appreciate if someone could actually point me to some manner of hard proof that there are any other major bots still in the game. Tunnel-Overload The best solution I can think of for this currently would be to periodically just fill in all the tunnels/caves/cracks with a planet-appropriate dirt-voxel on un-claimed hexes (probably during weekly or monthly down-time). Lore can be earth-quakes or other forms of erosion, it wont hugely matter. Having some manner of territory-control panel that allows players that own a hex to tell the system to fill in all the holes below a certain depth as if it were an un-clamed hex would also reduce the tunnels. New Players Allowing new players to spawn on other planets would help alleviate the issues they can have finding an initial hex to mine, but as there are only 3 minable planets and a hand-full of moons in the safety-bubble of what is supposed to be the starting system, they would probably run in to that problem relatively quickly again. Upgrading the starting Scoot-Puff Jr. in to a slightly more robust craft (something with an S container and just enough power to handle a full load of hematite) would help alleviate the grind new players feel when trying to mine and then fly back and forth from the hexes they can dig. I might also suggest some manner of uber-simple ship-mounted ore detector (only sees t1, only gives yes/no to the ore's presence and not distance, ect...), as it would help them avoid hexes already cleared of easy material. It would also be beneficial if there were some other manner of collecting decent starting-funds, such as Aphelia-missions hauling small volumes of material between markets. Allowing some manner of emergency-speeder access at the markets would prevent the rage-quitting that happens when a new player craters their only craft dozens of km from the alioth-respawn (say, a compactified xs hover-bike that puts the person deploying in the seat when they deploy it and permanently disappears when they exit the seat). I would also advise improving the piloting tutorial to something a bit more involved than just flying a painfully slow aircraft 50km in more or less a strait line, new players often need to learn to control a flying construct well enough to taxi around before ever getting in to the air, along with landing on something that isn't runway-flat, landing and taking off in crowded areas, and circling around without cratering the craft if they can't land or take off coming or going directly to or from one area to another. In regards to the tutorials, remote tutorial access would be a boon, there is too much that is too easily forgotten by new people between the lag-fest that is the current starting areas, and the areas they actually need that information in. This could be added in to a tab in the Knowledge Base (f1) section, perhaps with transcripts and pictures under each tutorial for if the player is only interested in remembering "that one part" in the middle they've forgotten. Dead Hexes In addition to the reasons given above, I do expect some portion of hexes clamed were picked up with the expectations of things like "being a land-lord", needing a defensive buffer for territory warfare (that NQ didn't announce wouldn't be on the planets we currently have until well after people had been building for it), or just for "keeping those darn'd starting-speeders of my lawn". A good deal of them probably belong to inactive accounts, and NQ's promise to let people come back with all their stuff still there puts a wrench in things. My only guess in this area would be an incentive to pick them back up, and then perhaps working the freshly placed ones in to the power-system some how when that gets implemented (perhaps they require fuel or fresh-batteries, with a list detailing their locations and "remaining charge" accessible like the constructs tab in the map. I can't advise making constructs in an un-owned tile become themselves unowned, as this would just result in people scavenging the valuable bits and leaving the lower-value components to continue taking up server-resources without any incentive for anyone (including the owner) to come clean up the rest of it. Better to have it stay on someone's lists if it isn't blown up. There was as I recall also some manner of plan to involve "stealth building" where in someone would drop a TCU in a pvp area just long enough to get a core down before picking it up again so that the claimed hex wasn't broadcasting to the whole universe "shoot here".

Deeper nodes would allow for more ore per hex (just stretch the nodes' spawn areas for everything downwards, and continue the "the bigger nodes are lower" layout). They need to be careful about how deep they do this though, if it goes too far down they risk encouraging people to build bases that deep. The reduced work involved when the ore is "right there" combined with the defenses inherent in being too deep to shoot at in a hex nobody else can dig would make it a relatively common thing that would not sit well with the pvp-player-base once planets that allow atmo-pvp were released. While I can admit that it is theoretically possible every hex has been scanned at least once by "somebody" at some point since the start of alpha, I seriously doubt that any one faction has scans for all 800k+ ore-containing hexes in game. Given the size of the player-base, it is also unlikely that anyone has the man-power to maintain even vaguely up to date scans on all of that. Yes, technically there is currently a finite amount of ore, and were the game to continue running for long enough without NQ changing anything (ya know, like adding the asteroids, or new planets they tell us they are working on, or putting on a Vader mask and pressing that big red soft-wipe button in the NQ death-star that turns all of a planet's constructs in to compactified prints in their owner's invos while "performing a factory-reset" on all the dirt and ore voxel) we could theoretically run out of it. But, to put it plainly, there are not enough people playing that are that dedicated to mining such that we are likely to have to worry about running out of ore in the next few years. I can buy a t-scanner for less than the cost of a pair decent of xs-interceptors (whole ships, not just prints). It may take some work for a player trying to go solo in this mmo starting from nothing to get one, but they arn't that hard to get. Those scanners are there to be used by people looking for properly high-tier stuff that can sit more than a km below the surface and has a very low spawn rate. They are kind of needed if we don't want the players that prefer farming that material and selling it to the rest of us to instead chuck their comps out the window and then leave those of us that don't like mining to try and find it ourselves.

First, I need to apologize. I allowed real-life stuff to get me overly heated over a game and subsequently spoke poorly, and I shouldn't have. Second, I was not aware that the "if you don't want it then ignore it" had any issues in a sand-box-ish game like DU. I fully admit my head just isn't screwed on strait, so if something isn't obviously game-breaking to me at that particular moment then that particular argument seems quite reasonable to me. It could just be my particular luck, but it seems like more often than not hunting megas has more or less the same total-time efficiency as just taking everything. The only differences that I've observed is that while scanning I can put my focus else-ware (such as home-work, chores, or watching shows), and that we (my faction) can save on the time new players would spend digging randomly looking for lots of little nodes by just handing them the cords to a big one while collecting resources for faction-projects. As such I still fail to see issue with it in this area. If you are willing to explain it to me then please feel free. Anyways... avoiding more established and larger groups of people entirely clearing a hex is perhaps a reason to actually keep megas. Before they were implemented players had less reason to spread out. There was more or less just a slowly expanding ring around the starting areas where older players had just dropped their bases as close as they could stand to said starting areas and then began mining up absolutely everything (if they were polite, the rude ones would leave a tiny sliver every few nodes so it looked like there was something still there). This would subsequently cause issues where new players would think they were doing something wrong because they either couldn't find anything, or they'd blow a few hours chasing slivers, decide the game was terrible, and quit. That I am no-longer seeing daily questions in chat of "I'm new, what am I doing wrong that makes me unable to find ore?" or "why does anyone play this terri-bad game when it takes an hour to find enough material to make one run of pure iron?" seems like a very good reason to me to keep people spreading out in search of megas. Tunnel reduction is looking more and more like its own issue. While I do know some clowns that just dig at random and hope to get lucky if they know a mega is present (did that twice myself just to see if it was faster when I saw it done, it was not), most of what I've seen creating an excess of tunnels has either just been people not having a good grasp of the strategies one should use in finding ore underground, and/or someone going for literally everything and so constantly changing direction at the drop of a hat whenever a hiccup in the game even slightly messes with which ore shows up as the closest node. Unfortunately the mining-game isn't the most intuitive I've seen, and seeing how the mining tutorial isn't the best, and how even what it does teach isn't hard to forget in the flurry of other things you need to suddenly understand when first getting started, particularly for those without mentors. There really isn't a good fix I can think of for this particular problem that doesn't involve major changes to the DU mining-game (such as auto-mining/harvesting, periodically filling in all the holes with dirt/sand/ice on un-clamed hexes during the periodic server-maintenance shutdowns, or making the search go more like how it does in space engineers). What is RSI? As for the "argument works both ways", there is perhaps the singular difference that for as much as I'd like to avoid mining all together it is currently the only way I can collect sufficient resources to do what I want to do. It isn't the only way to collect resources, I just currently lack either the skills or time required to make the other ways work, so unfortunately if I want to play at all I need to mine, and mining the megas has proven to be less taxing on my desire to play the part of the game I want than mining just the regular stuff. I hope this changes in the future.

Cubes arn't meta in atmo, they are just lazy. more interesting configurations that still use as many (or more) engines are a thing, you just don't see them often because nobody wants to put in the effort. XS hovers would have non-existent thrust (v-boosters are significantly stronger for size, and the smallest v-boosters require several to lift most of the feather-ships I've seen them on. I agree we need XL atmo engine and XS space tank, along with L and XL wings/ailerons/stabilizers/adjustors.