Taelessael

I think the thing you are looking for there is a cap on max-sp per avatar. People would have to specialize rather than going generalist and still maxing everything. This would be acceptable as long as there was a way to re-train. (Perhaps once you hit the cap, you need to que up talents to un-learn at the same pace you learn new ones?)

Mining is amongst other things supposed to be the go-to for new players looking to make some cash if they either want to start the game from the bottom and work up, or have yet to join a faction that can get them in to something else (assuming they ultimately want to do something else), difficulty is in fact the thing it shouldn't have. If you want difficulty in mining then go after higher tier ores on planets with larger hexes and wider ranges of spawn depth, and leave the megas for the people that still want them. Alternatively, you may wish to just wait for asteroids so you can take up combat-mining. If they want to reduce tunnels, then they either need to get an automated system in play to fill them in once players are done with them, a system to remove the need to dig at all, or they'd need to reduce the number of nodes and the volume they occupy (which would probably for balance reasons involve also increasing the amount of ore obtained for a scoop of a given size, and increasing the time required to harvest said scoop, making everything play less like regular mining and more like "all nodes are mega"). It should also be noted that this scenario does not remove megas, nor does it require megas to be removed if it happens, it just makes them take up less space in the ground just like all the other nodes. Could you please explain how megas get in the way of reducing tunnels short of entirely removing the need to dig for mining? Also, in the digging not required scenario, please keep in mind that this will very likely involve scanning down a good hex, dropping your harvester, and watching it work for hours/days, turning your t-scan-and-dig game in to a t-scan-deploy-and-sit game, no skill, no difficulty, and doing even less. While I personally wouldn't mind as I don't much care for mining (I dot it because I need supplies, megas reduce the work and time I spend for a given amount of supply) and it would allow me to focus my time else-ware, it would seem to run contrary to your suggestion of making them more difficult and less boring. If I recall, the point of megas was to be that rare thing someone finds and says "jackpot" on, tis a lot of work to mine but it is far less work over all than mining an equal amount of ore from smaller nodes. Presumably they expected a player would be more likely to get friends to help dog-pile the thing and get it done much more quickly. Taking them away just seems to be sacrificing those that like them and those that mine them co-op to improve things for those that don't, and while space-building-mmo is already fairly niche, NQ still wants (and should want) to "cast a wider net". People that don't want megas can still play just fine with them, they can avoid them if they don't want them, so why remove them if they aren't removing the mining mini-game entirely? I am not interested in knowing the obvious "the game can be played without them" or "they aren't needed if we remove the mining-game entirely" I want to know specifically how removing just the megas while leaving the other nodes will improve the game for everyone. Not just you, or your play-group, and not just the "there are more that do X than Y because I said so, therefore we should toss Y under the bus", how does it improve things for everyone? (And please skip the "you can't please everyone" argument, nobody cares that anyone can nit-pick the countless flaws in the English language, explain to me how it will be better for everyone).

I am aware someone will always leave (or threaten to) if something changes, but aside from disproving the "the universe will run out of ore next month because there are fewer mega-nodes" argument for the... how many months has beta been going? The argument has been disproved that many times... Anyways... With or without mega-nodes there's always some clown spouting about how their "math" says that if "everyone" went mining we would clear planets of all their ore (and possibly all the dirt) in less than a month, and then they start saying the game is horrible because NQ isn't re-filling the ore or procedurally generating more or some such and that the entire universe will run out in only a month... because their "math" says it can happen, therefore it is absolutely guaranteed to happen... This argument has been made more times than I care to count in the past already, both when there were and when there weren't mega-nodes. Again, if you remove the mega-nodes you'll just chase off the players that don't like playing without them, and then you'll still be listening to clowns spouting about how their "math" says the universe "will" run out of ore next month, they just wont be using the mild difficulty in finding mega-nodes as their point of reference. I'd rather have a few more of the clowns paying to play, along with all the folk that don't try to make the argument but still find mining non-megas too tedious, because they still contribute to NQ's ability to improve things for the rest of us.

A simple idea, allow an element to be replaced with variants of the same element (ex: swapping Basic Atmospheric Engine M with Advanced Military Atmospheric Engine M). The purpose behind this would be to allow someone to upgrade a pre-existing ship or structure with higher-tier elements without having to either re-link everything or re-doing potentially difficult element placements. I'd personally like if it returned the element being replaced, but even if it didn't this would still be a very helpful addition to the game.

Additional depth is something most certainly appreciated, and as I recall there is plenty of research saying in a game offering a buff for an action you want people to perform will be far better received than penalizing them for not doing it. At the same time, making it game-breaking isn't advised, it would need to be limited to things like tiny buffs to material usage efficiency our output volume, or possibly larger buffs to something like production speed. Again though, as I mentioned in my previous post, you can't currently really do anything to mega-factories that isn't just going to cause even greater burden to the more specialized factories possessed by smaller groups, the player-base and variety of things to make needed to produce the demand for that level of specialization just doesn't exist in DU right now. As for maintaining production facilities IRL, the exact amount of maintenance required can vary from one type of facility to the next, and as tech improves that amount of required maintenance is always going down. Even food processing facilities make use of self-maintaining machines, some needing no attention at all for weeks aside from keeping the hopper topped off. Some (non-food) facilities I've worked in have even reached the point where the equipment would suffer more wear-and-tear from weekly or monthly maintenance than it would from just being left to run unattended, the maintenance guy literally just shows up once a week (or month) to watch the equipment run and more or less look for any spots where the security has accidentally tripped and scratched the paint on something with their gear, and the facility manager just schedules a shutdown every year or two to have some stuff replaced and get the paint-scratch punch-list dealt with (assuming they arn't in one of the facilities where things run so well it is more economically feasible to just keep security outside and not hire a maintenance guy at all, while literally just waiting for the machinery to fail before paying to have it quickly replaced).

Item-swapping would also be nice, if only for an easy way for players to swap a basic engine used initially used in a design for a more advanced version obtained at a later time/date.

A simple "section-print" allowing for the storage of bits to be pasted in to things we are building without having to have a copy on a core near-by to constantly run back and forth to C/P from would be nice.

While it certainly doesn't apply to everyone's style, a lot of the folk I see going after megas tend to strip them clean fairly quickly and move on, either selling them or taking them back to a base somewhere (often by this point well removed from the location they mined it) to be processed. As for ore running out, there are still plenty of regular nodes, and even many of the hexes on moons without megas (or that have had the megas mined out) have on average several times more ore per hex than ----------------------------------------------------------- REDACTED (NDA) ------------------------------------------------------------- spit without hitting one, but that was more the exception than the rule. You wont solve crazy by removing the part of the game being fixated on for how it is disappearing, you'll just chase off the people that are so obsessed with them as to think the game is unplayable with their loss, and I'd like to keep them paying NQ to help continue improving the game for the rest of us.

As linking across cores would potentially be a nightmare, it may be simpler to implement some manner of alternate core sizes where said "linked cores" are in-fact just one core of larger size with reduced volume (until cores are added to bring it up to its max). If I recall, the game already runs in to issues when you try to have single cores larger than L size (it is possible, and the markets may be that size), so we'd probably want to restrict individual structure maximum dimensions to those already available in the ways people are currently building them.

Some degree of research game-play would be a nice addition, and making the researched prints both reliably creatable, and having limited uses would help to ensure people aren't just collecting the best and then having nothing to do afterward.

Would you care to link this post please? The wide assortment of quantities that are distinctly not the 2,000,000+ volumes that didn't change when you sold to them that made the bots most easily recognizable in the past seem to be lacking here.

...Unless I missed a post by NQ somewhere, those 23-25q buy orders are from players, not bots. The system wasn't perfect right from launch, so there were things folks could do to collect some fairly large chunks of change. Some players (I repeat, some) do actually have that much money to throw around in buy orders. The Black-market idea would be interesting, hiding things in shops that don't show up on the map in pvp-space... selling to them though would currently be a little silly given the lack of any kind of police/security/smuggling-related stuff at the regular markets, and NQ trying to keep most of the market stuff player-operated.

The bots hardly payed squat for mined material (2.5-ish for t1 as I recall). Currently though it looks like all the buy orders in the market (for the stuff I glanced at) are players placing buy orders. Players paid more for stuff than bots for a while now because they were willing to pay to get material faster than mining it themselves, and because bots were intentionally set with terrible prices that players could easily out-do for anyone wanting to do business with them. Camping will happen on any small valuable location in pvp space, avoiding the camps will involve playing smart with whatever is there (finding it first and doing what ya need before ya get found, hiring an escort, or setting up a distraction)... A constantly rising price on something risks quickly turning in to a blockade-event with a large faction fighting to hold as long as they can while their cargo-captain sits on the market with their finger on the sell button. Also, having bots out-bid players would probably just annoy a lot of people. Missions and space-harvesting will certainly help things as long as they get implemented right, but it may take something quite a bit bigger to get people properly in to it all.

As I recall, ship-mounted mining hardware was expressly being avoided with the intent of keeping new player's mining abilities at least slightly comparative with an older player's abilities, thus ensuring a new player has something they can contribute (ya know, un-like SE where a new player has a hand-drill that lets them collect 4,000 iron ore a minute to their pack, and an old player has a wall of drills with engines that lets them collect 4,000,000 iron ore a minute directly in to their ship's cargo). Opinions are of course changing on this (NQ has realized that a lot of players find mining tedious), and they are under new management as it were, but I wouldn't expect things to change quickly. As for how it might function, my guesses are either EVE's planetary interaction system (except you place the stuff manually on the planet's material-hotspot), or something like the game's current combat system, except you are locking and firing at an ore node instead of a ship, and your weapon is a mining-gun of some type.

Perhaps if this were to be made the equivalent of a "ship-dispenser", where here you activate it (probably not being the owner of the printing-construct itself), it asks you to confirm its usage (like dispensers already do), and then if you click yes and still have available core capacity, it spawns the ship in for you from a print and parts in its own invo (possibly with the skills of the printer-owner and friends applied)... ...The ship could technically exist immediately once it starts printing, but have some manner of visual effect that makes it invisible and then has it fade in to view from one end to the other, the whole time the ship's elements cant be interacted with until the ship was completely visible...

1. Fighters are as effective in Starwars as they are partially because plot requires them to be (because if you look at the numbers too hard for anything in Starwars basic logic causes the universe to fall apart), and partially because it was based off of WW2 combat (where there was a gravity-imposed cap on how much armor you could put on something before it either sank or weighed too much to move with available motors). -Aircraft in real-life maintain their effectiveness against heavier targets by virtue of being able to mount up-sized weapons (hint, that thing NQ should have just nerfed slightly rather than almost totally in to the ground like they did), because their weapons in real life generally are designed to penetrate a target's armor rather than expending all of their energy in to its surface (as they currently do in game), and because there is still a gravity-imposed cap on how much armor you can put on something before it either sinks or weighs too much to move with available motors. -Finally, hover-seats mount fewer weapons because there isn't an XS radar, if there was then we'd see just as many xs weapons per gunner seat on an XS ship as we see L weapons per gunner seat on an L ship. I'd like if NQ would add an XS radar (100 cap-cost, 37.5km lock range, 20-ish hp, 20-ish L volume, 90-ish Kg weight, at least 1 level in "Radar XS Target Upgrades" required to lock a target)... and fix the capacity cost on S lasers... 2. Tracking on larger ships is generally abysmal, but seems to be based on the target's angular velocity relative to the attacking ship. At the ranges larger ships fire at it usually isn't hard for the ship's pilot to just re-orient the entire ship to compensate for the poor tracking of that ship's weapons (the pilot of the larger ship is compensating for poor weapon tracking). 3. The weapons are more or less hit-scan as far as projectile speed is concerned, the randomized bits are chance to hit and location hit. It would be nice if it were possible for an XS to choose (to some degree) where to land that hit, but I don't think linking that to where they have the mouse pointed when they fire would be at all practical at even the ranges of XS weapons in space. The best I can come up with for making such targeting work would be to have some manner of "targeting scanner" that permits a gunner to have the weapons try and focus on specific types of elements (perhaps with some manner of drawback to rate of fire and a cone of effect that would require it's placement to leave it easily vulnerable to return-fire). 4. Range and speed are fine(ish), the issues are mass/acceleration. Large ships accelerate way to quickly, resulting from voxel weighing next to nothing (less than 2-ish percent the solid weight of a material if I remember right) and being easily produced en masse. I need to wrap a sizeable ship with a narrow profile (making the armor shell weigh that much more relative to the interior) in 3 meters of armor all around just to make the steel voxel get close to weighing as much as the elements. If voxel weighed a lot more (say 10 times as much, putting it in to the 10%-20% solid weight range), fighters with their thin-ish armor would still be quite fast, cargo and exploration ships that already just have a skin of lightweight voxel would keep most of their speed, and the war-ships fielding armor thicker than a fighter is long would be slow enough to give the fast combatant niche back to smaller craft.

This would very solidly just be grindy. Mega-factories require a sizeable chunk of change/work to set up, so most of them are probably in the hands of large groups. Adding some level of grind will slow them down, but it will probably hurt smaller factories more by forcing the small groups or single individuals that own them to set aside a larger portion of their time relative to the time available to larger group in order to keep things going. If you really want to force such factories to go away in favor of such specialized industrial structures, we'd probably need: -A large enough player-base to reasonably support this kind of economy, -A limit (such as power) placed upon the total number of industrial elements in a given area (not just per core, but per hex or other large unit of space if you don't want just dense strings of smaller factories with someone doing a daily linked-container pass off), -A method by which to increase the limit of industry elements in an area if they are all producing the same thing so as to allow industry to continue to be a major thing a player can focus on rather than just having a million players going "and here's my token industrial building for the hex" It isn't impossible, or a bad idea, but it works in real life because we have both limitlessly greater complexity, and probably one or more orders of magnitude more people we can have doing everything to squeeze the gains out of spectacularly tiny margins. Implementing something to alter industry/the market in this way without pulling the wrong piece out of the industry-layer of the jenga-tower that is DU is currently risky at best, and would require both great care and finesse.

While I have heard about stuff like this exactly once (reading through something in alpha), I was under the impression that this would eventually be one of the small things they added near/after release in the form of different suits, although in that instance it was less script-element-related and more "this suit will have more pack space, this suit will have more hp for AvA, this suit will augment your mining abilities, ect...". A script-suit could be interesting, although beyond messing with the basic hud and/or producing scripts that would quickly become required to keep up in the mining industry I am uncertain as to what you'd use it for.

Keys are a little on the buggy side, most of this is just something that requires a bug report. If I recall correctly the documentation for how it was all to work was released back in alpha (when the feature came out). Re-releasing it in a non-NDA thing may be a decent idea. As for the DRM stuff, there are RDMS settings that allow someone full access to your ship (edit, copy, make bp, ect...). While I'm fairly certain it doesn't let you entirely transfer DRM rights, it should be sufficient for every scenario I can think of except "a player selling their core-size placement skills to newer players" and "a player selling total & absolute rights to a design forever to another player". These are not invalid scenarios, but not huge either. Right now I would personally put them somewhere on the list of things to do below "improving construct visuals in this game", which itself should be rather low on the list given how amazing stuff looks already. As for extended token time, that may need some work to keep lag down. A lot full of already skilled ships that can be sold to any joe that walks up isn't a bad idea, but as you can just sell whole ships via dispensers to anyone with the linked container space and get skills from skilled people with a quick trip through some drop-down menus, I wouldn't give it the highest priority either...

As I recall, keys that can't be used by their owner and/or dont disappear after the time expires are glitches/bugs that are supposed to be reported to NQ. This isn't a game feature needing update, just a bug to be reported (when it happened to me they fixed it fairly quickly once I got their attention).

A lot of people would like this feature, as it would make it easier to upgrade bases or certain ships.

Odds are static cores will have access to every kind of power-system, plus possibly some static-only things (geo-thermal/wind), but will have relatively low usage so that they can generate power to supply dynamic craft with the surplus charge. Specific/intended core function adding benefits and drawbacks to this system could be applied to statics and space along with the previously mentioned dynamics to get people to construct specialized buildings much the same way we were discussing specialized ship designs earlier in the thread.

I am aware of just how large space is. As I've said previously, I've done this before in DU. Your choke points are the planets/moons people are leaving from and the standard paths they take. As for the "they can fly around my 2 SU radius" argument, they can fly around a 5 SU radius too, and they can use your "net only radar" to spot you just as easily as you could use it to spot them. (If you are not aware, piloting and using L guns/radar are not mutually exclusive actions, its just more difficult, the same would apply to your nets) At best you'd just be giving them that much more time to evade and run after they hit you with the same net you hope to use on them. If I can pirate other people's ships with a 15km range weapon and no net, you can to. If you want to catch them, build (or buy) an interceptor. If you are having trouble designing or finding an interceptor for sale, I have dispensers that sell full ships here: ::pos{0,12,34.7224,-77.3662,3.3846} (bring an M container or 3 S on a hub to link to if you want to buy one, they don't fit in your pack). As for rails...when were they ever the meta? People are addicted to them because of the range, but they are not the be-all-end-all of weapons by any stretch. They were just a point of reference as the longest range weapon currently available. Something to slow people down once you already have them would be nice, it would help your buddies flying slower ships catch up, but it doesn't have to be so overpowered as to become mandatory hardware like a 5 SU range radar and a 5 SU range weapon would be.

Many of us eagerly await power's implementation... other complexities will be dependent on how they'd be done (having power and cpu and capacitor in EVE just felt redundant, so perhaps a "heat" mechanic?).

I do agree that the game could benefit from some manner of tractor-beam/stasis webifier/net-launcher, but... 5 SU is a bit much for range when you can't spot targets on radar until 2 SU... Also, as a point of reference, the basic L railgun (the longest range basic weapon in the game) w/basic ammo and without skills has an absolute maximum range of 320km... I know skills, higher tier versions, and ammo can boost this substantially, but putting the equivalent of a net-launcher anywhere near the effective range of the equivalent of a sniper-rifle just seems wrong. Personally, I'd vote it should be somewhere near the optimal of missile-launchers, but that's just me. As for trying to (presumably) pirate people that are running from you, the general idea is to be a lot faster at getting up to speed than they are, or just able to get up to speed before they pass you. I've done my share of pirating in DU, and I know from experience that it isn't hard to catch non-warpers leaving planets that arn't in the AMT bubble well before they get up to speed, you just need speed yourself. Don't try to pirate in a "mighty glacier" of a ship because you'll never catch anything, use something you'd take to a drag-race with guns (and pick your battles, a cargo-ship is a good target, a war-ship is not). Finally for the interdiction of warp-ships, it has been on NQ's to do list since the start of beta. Most folks seem to think it will be an EVE-style bubble, but until they actually get around to adding it in we can only really guess (although again, having a range greater than radar range probably wont happen).