Taelessael
-
Posts
367 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Taelessael
-
-
2 hours ago, Walter said:
Once NQ made a stress test with plenty of bots these can be the pilots and gunners and NQ needs to script a flight path and create some sort of turret that autofires why is this not feasible?
While I am by no means an expert on how these systems work, and I can't guarantee even that what I've seen was good info, the few images I've seen when referencing their stress tests make me suspect that NQ's "stress-test bots" probably weren't all that complex by most folk's standards. If I had to guess they were either mimicking commands (one person presses w, a hundred avatars walk forward), or running exceptionally simple loops of commands/actions. I'd be surprised if they were even as complex as the SPRT scripts Keen uses for Space Engineers.
I could very easily be wrong, and I'd even like to be in this instance, I want NQ to add some pve ships to get in to a shootout with (they could make it a mission, or spawn them near asteroids), but with how things run now I seriously doubt it can happen short of some fairly significant changes to how things work.
1 hour ago, Walter said:I have built already what I wanted to build until next PvP meta change. Alien cores are secured by our Aliance keep getting Plasma and t5 ores each week. Have a few bases on them factories running that I feed with ores I get from Mu's that's Endgame. And that there is nothing or no one to shot just makes this endgame to anyone that want to pew pew unattractive. And that is a NQ problem
As for Legion having nobody to fight, that seems like a "universe is too safe and small" problem. EVE in its prime had quite a few star-systems that would barely see more than traffic passing through, it took time to jump through all those systems if you needed to get somewhere. At the same time it wasn't at all safe, if you didn't have a cloak your opponents could scan you down no matter what part of the infinite void you were hiding in.
Meanwhile in DU you can warp from near about anywhere to near about anywhere faster than you can get food delivered irl, all while being absolutely safe. And if you don't feel like warping, you get 12+ SU clear of the pipe and you may as well have a cloaking device.
Legion controls all the best resources, their supply lines can't be seriously attacked, the available force-projection lets them put everything they have in to any fight near about at the drop of a hat, and the only option anyone has is functionally to try a frontal assault. Much like when a group dominates in any other persistent-universe game, nobody is going to put up much of a fight against Legion right now because they very rightly don't think they can win.
So, enjoy the quiet at the top. Until NQ gives us something bigger than this kiddie-pool of a solar-system, something so big Legion can't maintain control of it all, the only decent battles you're going to get will be out of each other.
-
Long story short, "clear the pipe and afk-drift for 4+hrs" is really boring, and there needs to be some stuff added in or changed to make Aphelia missions not be just the screen-saver someone lets run for quanta while they're off doing other stuff.
To that end I'd like to propose that surrogate-station use not unload the physics of the construct to which the surrogate station is attached when it is used, thus allowing players that would otherwise be stuck afk-ing in a chair for several hours to do more interesting things while their ships drift through the void. The ability to explore other player's constructs or surrogate in to their own structures to work on a build would be a significant improvement over being stuck sitting in their mission-ship for hours on end as they are now.
-
Mining units are supposed to be basic-income for casuals, and a post asking to change them was made 2 days ago. You'd probably get better results attempting to get MU changed by joining that thread so NQ sees it is a popular topic of discussion and pays attention to it. You'll find it here:
Industry does not scale well to "alts", they can get you some small amount of extra cash and skills faster, but big factories tend to be the work of actual groups of people putting their collective resource-gathering abilities together to feed the system until things are large enough to supply said groups with all the stuff they want. Also as a lot of people currently see the system as imperfect but passable (and have yet to come up with a better idea themselves), it would be helpful if you could perhaps come up with or point out a system appropriate to a persistent-world construction/design-based mmo.
Your system would need:
-To not turn factory-management in to a job, as people already have jobs in real life, and making DU a job would just burn people out,
-To not involve some manner of maintenance/minigame on every single element in a factory, because calibrating thousands of elements even on a monthly basis would make DU a job,
-To not involve shrinking the factory-game so much as to make it in to something everyone does, because we've already had that in a previous version and while the poor implementation of the patch NQ removed it in annoyed a lot of people, things are far better without everyone owning (or needing) their own mega-factory,
As for missions, they need improvements, but that topic deserves its own specific thread.
-
1 hour ago, Walter said:
I like your first idea but second idea does not work because you are not able to shot in sz
<sarcasm>The dreadnought's name is "Legion", it was implemented a while ago.</sarcasm>
Jokes aside, the neither of your ides work because the game runs primarily client-side, someone would need to be on the ship for it to have any physics. Players have been asking for NPC targets to shoot at about since NQ gave us weapons to shoot.
No mistakes, its cool and I want it, and npc opponents in pve and pvp space would probably vastly improve things and draw a significant number of players, but they can't work with how NQ currently has things set up.
-
2 hours ago, RugesV said:
But the goal is to make pirate ships less desirable.
...
Also one of the goals of a system like this is the soft removal of items from the game.
To achieve this particular outcome you'd probably do better to assign the reputation to the pilots/crew and have it put a bounty on the ship said crew are on (collected via coring the ship) equal to 25% of the value of t1 ore used in the construction of the elements/voxel that were destroyed during the fight (value based on the assumption that max skills were used in the making of said elements and voxel, and the assumption that the elements destroyed were of the 3-lives variety). This would give people an incentive to shoot the pirates, but always result in a net reduction of stuff in the universe by never returning the full value of elements lost even if the pirate just has his buddies shoot him over and over to collect the bounty repeatedly.
Trying to apply that reputation-system to elements wont exactly do much other than annoy people with meta-data, as pirates that for whatever reason need stealth to catch a target (this is presently rare, as most competent pirates can easily run down anything they want to attack) will manage just fine by obtaining low-cost tacklers, and those that don't probably wont be parting out their ships for sale all that often.
2 hours ago, RugesV said:What about a module that does 500% damage to pirate ships?
That would be extraordinarily overpowered. The difference between a full rack of the lowest dps S weapon and a full rack of the highest dps L weapon isn't even 400% at max skills. Also, affixing combat multipliers to the reputation of a player or ship will just tick off the pvp players, especially if there isn't any kind of counter-element that levels the playing field.
-
18 hours ago, Palis Airuta said:
Change the current pools to a 6 month finite amount of ore per pool before random regeneration.
6 months would probably be too long, 3 or 4 at most would be better. That said, auto-miners are supposed to be a source of basic-income for the players that aren't on but a few hours a week so as to supply them with fuel and building materials. As such, I'd think it would be best if the t1/t2 ores didn't change so that the casuals get what they need where they like to play while everyone that wants to go out scanning has something to scan after every so often.
14 hours ago, Yoarii said:I'd rather see the entire ore system be revamped such that you can get good at prospecting and mining, not just wait for a timer to count down, rinse and repeat until you get lucky. Let us build mining rigs that requires actual *player* skill and understanding of the system, not just a talent that needs to be trained. Add some randomness/variation into it so that there's no silver bullet to min/max without some thought and work. Utilize the building system that is in game and expand on that.
A tile/area doesn't have to be equal to all players, depending on how you do your prospecting you might not find all things available in the tile, bit someone who does it at a later time and does it differently will, or maybe find different things. Let tiles change hands more often; limit the amount of ore available, like in the old days of mega nodes, but let tiles regenerate/reset such that there is always a possibility that a tile might yield something.
I know this is asking for a lot, but we need more treasure hunts and game play that is engaging and rewards the time spent playing the game.
While I fully agree that the mining-side of the game needs more engaging and involved play, I'd think it would be better to apply it to asteroids than hexes. Auto-mining hexes is supposed to be what new players and casuals do for some basic cash, while asteroids are supposed to be for more involved/advanced players to work their way to. The asteroid system as it is now is painfully simple, and somehow manages to be even more boring than old-school mining was while simultaneously giving an even smaller reward. If we are to have a more advanced and involved system of mining with better payout, it should be in space where the more advanced miners play.
-
10 hours ago, RugesV said:
They should have different icons in the radar. Which would allow players to decide if that ship is a threat or not. (granted sneaky pirates could create fresh meta unclassified ships to sneak gank merchant ships, atleast once per new hull before it becomes flagged as pirate).
Even if you can force this tag to stick to elements in a way that doesn't just annoy people by flooding their invo with meta-data'd elements, smart pirates will just use fresh ships (a solo pirate can get a passable t3 ship for ~6mil, a fleet will probably have org-funding and only needs to keep an even less expensive tackle-ship fresh). I'd give it maybe a month before experienced or intelligent players treat anything on radar in pvp space they weren't expecting exactly the same way they'd treat them now.
10 hours ago, RugesV said:Introduce role specific modules. Modules that increase merchant ships, cargo capacity, max speed, that are only for merhcant ships. Same thing for military ships, role specific modules that only work on military ships.
Functional elements that do new things will always be interesting, but connecting their function to a tag that may be prone to permanently changing in the middle of said element's operation seems like asking for trouble.
10 hours ago, RugesV said:Next up is the debatable part. I think to spice things up a bit we change some zone rules. Pirates can attack merchant ships. in any space zone. Pirates cannot attack attack military ships in space safe zones. Meaning if you are a pirate ship and get caught by a military ship in the safe zone, you could get destroyed without being able to fire back. Military ships can attack pirate ships anywhere. And of course deep space no rules apply (except flag changes as I said in the first post).
Well, you're right about people wanting to debate this one with you...
In short, no. This should never happen, because it will only serve to drive players off.
Not only does this fail to make even the barest logical sense (why would a criminal refuse to break the law or hack their own hardware to enable weapons somewhere they expect to be shot?), but mechanics that entirely disable a player's ability to fight back against an attacker for short periods when they cost the attacker something are annoying, making one disable their ability to fight back at no cost to an attacker that endures for the entire time someone is in a safe-zone would just make people quit. If you want pvp, there can't be an Aphelia-enforced "one side wins" zone, it would take all the fun out of it for most people.
On a related note, the whole "let people shoot pirate flagged ships anywhere" thing has been suggested before. It fell apart when people pointed out that it would take players about 5 min to circumvent this system via:
a) Pirate ships could get disassembled in to non-pirate-flagged carriers for protection,
-and-
b) PvP space is functionally an infinite void in which to set up a station to hide a flagged ship, and while a 2-SU radar may net you the ability to search a very large sounding 268,082,573 km^3 at a time, that is still an almost uselessly small detection area when you need to search an infinitely large environment.So, I don't think this is a good idea. It would take far too much work on NQ's part for what is at best next to no gain for the players/game. If you want to know what you've spotted on radar you'd do better to ask for a scanner-element that spits out data on a target's weapons, shields, maximum acceleration, and top speed.
-
I'd have to disagree with you about their current usage, but it would be nice to not have to repair them in the event of a crash.
That said they couldn't be invulnerable in a pvp scenario, so they'd probably have to just get deleted by weapons-impacts the same way voxel does if we toss their current hp-behavior.
-
On 6/19/2022 at 1:42 PM, BonemanJones said:
It's a "what could have been" outline, because I believe the game in it's current state is too far gone to implement this. All of these systems would have to be implemented at the same time, in addition to 2-4 other large content drops in order to not saturate one facet of the gameplay offered.
...
I don't believe the system I've outlined above could be implemented now. It would need to have been included upon launch of the Beta, alongside every system in-game now and more.
Why bump a thread in a section of the forum for stuff that people want NQ to consider adding with something you don't believe can be added? Should not such a post instead go somewhere in here: https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/forum/10-general-discussions/ ?
On 6/19/2022 at 1:42 PM, BonemanJones said:4.) [Special Resources] Introduce resources that cannot be mass-farmed cheaply and must be actively acquired. For instance, isotopes of certain ores that only exist under specific circumstances. Ores with short half-lives that must be immediately processed into an alloy, or will degrade. Materials obtained from new features...
I can appreciate the addition of a new game-play loop, but as NQ only sets the market-price of T1 ore, players themselves would determine how "cheap" something is to obtain. In the case of an item that degrades quickly with time there would be significant pressure to use/sell it quickly, and so players are likely to undercut each other often in the hope of getting rid of their item before it decays, resulting in an relatively low price unless the item is exceedingly rare (in either scenario, large groups more likely to both find it and actually have the infrastructure in place to use it).
On 6/19/2022 at 1:42 PM, BonemanJones said:5) [Specialization] Through the existing talents system (should be redone from the ground up as a system that rewards active use of skills, not just passive investment) you could specialize in mass production, or artisanal production. Solo players and small orgs of artisans could get bonuses to efficiency/production time etc. Would rank up and progress through actively producing high quality parts.
You seem to miss-understand how large groups work in simplified game-environments. What stops 500 people that decide to play cooperatively with each other from still being 50 groups of 10 guys that then collectively outperform the actual small group of 10 players? This is a persistent-world MMO where players have the capacity to play cooperatively and move items between characters, there is no even vaguely reasonable way to force "conservation of ninjutsu" on to players. What 1 guy can do, so must 100 guys be able to do 100 times as much of.
The idea that a solo or small group can specialize in to something a large group can't mass produce in a game-simple environment is much like negative numbers irl, it exists on paper and as an idea in people's heads, but you can't make an empty box weigh less than the weight of the box by taking more objects out of it.
-
Interesting, but why? At the moment this just seems like adding meta-data to elements without a reason...
-
It would be nice to get a time-frame on when the HQ tiles will start to go unclaimed, it is quite a nuisance trying to pick up half-buried constructs or realizing someone that doesn't play anymore is sitting on a tile you'd like to have.
-
6 hours ago, Zeddrick said:
Could it be that NQ are actually thinking that they want stuff to be available on day 1 after a wipe and that's what this is for?
Wouldn't a wipe make a bazaar useless for at least a few days by deleting everything that anyone would have to sell?
-
5 hours ago, Hazaatan said:
ok, ill see where this is going. I stopped at .23, then came back to see changes and already canceled my sub. I have spent about $90 on the game. And a lot of time. Fun time, until .23
I'm not an alpha tester, or DAC holder.
Your move.
So... lets see if I have this strait...
You're sitting here in this thread advocating for everyone that plays a game you don't intend to play yourself to lose all their stuff because this will somehow auto-magically cause new people to become interested in the game... and because you have decided the game is dying (it isn't great, but it isn't exactly gone yet either) this makes mocking/insulting the people that disagree with you because they don't want to lose all the work they've invested their time in acceptable?...
Once lost, neither trust nor reputation is easily regained. NQ said beta was soft-launch. While they may lose some old players on a full wipe, enough will stick around (at least for a little while) that any new players gained will learn not to trust promises that their stuff wont be deleted. DU has its problems now, and a wipe might fix a few, but can it really afford one? "All your stuff that took hundreds or thousands of hours to get might be permanently deleted to try and fix a bug or two and undo some poor development choices regardless of the developers saying you'll keep your stuff" isn't exactly a great thing to have a reputation for.
-
14 hours ago, Hazaatan said:
What are you doing here? Flexing your Trekkie muscles? This is the wrong place and the wrong time. If you read my whole post, the point I was making with ion engines is to upgrade from wings and liquid fuel to actual futuristic space ships. Go home Trekkie your drunk.
I was attempting to make a point about doing 5-ish minutes of research on a popular topic before using it as an example in a more polite manner than just repeating some variant of the rather blunt "do your research" comment while simultaneously pointing out that having multiple energy-sources and multiple drive-systems makes sense. Things tend to get more complicated as technology advances, not less.
Also, the game needs some manner of significant balance mechanic that can be tweaked without breaking people's immersion. Do you want batteries/reactors for a power-system, or radiators/heat-sinks for a heat system? Except for where you'd might put them they'd be more or less the same. (I'd like both, but the devs probably need smaller steps to manage)
As for using energy-powered sci-fi propulsion to replace other forms of propulsion, ion drives are a modern thing, gravity/inertial drives would be sci-fi.
14 hours ago, Hazaatan said:You are comparing a loan to a purchase? Because he paid $80 and got 2 years of the service he paid for. That is nothing like a loan... My response was based on him crying over getting 2 years of service for ONLY $80.
And mine was me crying over you crying over his crying over NQ potentially reneging on a very simple and reasonable promise, what's your point? Do we need to dig up some goblets and poison so we can get some Princess-Bride shenanigans going to explain it?
14 hours ago, Hazaatan said:PVP needs to be thrown into BG's, or put on a shelf. It's terrible. Mastering networking and basic factory, building, mining, is more important.
PvP may be far from perfect, but unless NQ intends to start implementing substantial environmental hazards that can either damage voxel and reduce the number of lives an element has, or destroy elements and voxel entirely, the game needs pvp to at least be a significant part (not penultimate, just a significant) so as to serve as the game's element/voxel-sink.
Also, there are people that still pvp because they like to pvp (even with the sub-optimal state pvp is in). They don't need to be the game's primary focus, but we shouldn't hang them out to dry either. They are still part of the player-base that we want to keep/grow.
-
12 hours ago, Hazaatan said:
We are playing a futuristic space game. The thought of slapping a bigger alternator into my space ship just does not compute.
The Enterprise runs on ion engines....
The Enterprise at sub-warp speed runs on what are functionally fusion-rockets. The ship normally draws power from the warp-core while it is active, but has alternate sources of power for when the core is shut down in order to maintain antimatter containment and/or restart the core. It may occasionally run on plot, but under all the tachyon-neutrino-plasma technobabble it still has a sci-fi alternator and battery.
Also, ion engines use both power and fuel, but the relatively light weight of things they need to move paired with needing only relatively miniscule changes allows them to be efficient about it.
10 hours ago, Hazaatan said:You have been paying for 24 months. that's 10 for 3 months. That is 8 payments of 10 dollars, which is $80.
I am going to make the assumption that you are a man. I am also a man. I don't know how old you are, but I am in my 40's. I can look back to when I was 16 years old until now and I can say that I have spent significantly more than $80 at one time on dumber things, more times than I can remember or am willing to share. If you're a man, so have you.
If $80 got you 2 years worth of gaming and it is too much, your priorities are in the wrong place my friend. This game the least of your problems.
So you wouldn't mind then if someone promised to repay 80$ you loaned them but never did? What about another 80$? And 80$ more after that? NQ can technically do what they want, they do not so far as I understand it have any legal obligation to not wipe and restart the server at any time and for any reason they see fit, but that doesn't mean people are required to be happy/indifferent about it, or that they shouldn't call out NQ for breaking people's trust by going back on what is a fairly reasonable promise.
Also, you don't need everyone starting fresh to get new players. The people that wont play until after the wipe are generally either the ones that don't want to feel they've wasted their time on work that will get deleted by a launch-wipe, or they're the ones that wont play long after a wipe because the moment they think someone else gains an insurmountable advantage over them (such as the teamwork of a large faction surpassing their solo-ability, or a multi-account whale vs their single account) they'll quit. A full wipe wont solve any problems, it will just annoy existing players enough that some will quit.
If NQ wants more players, they need to get more meat in to the game.
-PvP needs more complexity so that there isn't just one obvious winning option for ship design, as well as a universe big enough to ensure that the largest faction in the game doesn't have the man-power to maintain solo control over all pvp resources without risking spreading itself too thin (people are less inclined to fight if they don't think they can win, and more inclined to fight if they think they can, regardless of the reality either way).
-Exploration needs more sights to see, different looking moons/planets/asteroids, rare artifacts or bits of lore hidden in distant corners of the universe that take time and effort to find (note: people work together, and gamers are a very very driven group when they feel like it, time and effort to find something must account for this), asteroids that must be tracked down with something more complex than the depressingly uninvolved "follow the waypoints through an empty void" minigame.-Mission runners need more involved tasks than "pick up at A, clear the pipe, accelerate toward B, afk-binge youtube, dropoff at B", and more varied scenarios that don't incentivize 1-size-fits-all hauler usage.
-Construct designers need more than fuel, cargo, and twr for complexity (not to make it too hard for others to do, but to give the advanced players more goals to work toward and things to perfect), and more scenarios to produce specialized designs for (I have no M or L core ships because my S-core can handle all the missions and 98% of what I haul easily, so why build bigger?). -
5 hours ago, Hazaatan said:
Then why have fuel?
Fuel or power, but not both. Makes no sense. Unless power is a tier 5 upgrade to be superior to fuel but with limitations on ship design. Not both.
Fuel feeds your engines, power feeds your shields, adjustors, radar, brakes, the motors in weapon turrets, the motors in ailerons, doors, electronics... and you probably need some minimum capacity spared for your engines' ignition/control/cooling systems.
More importantly, it will break people's suspension of disbelief less than arbitrary complexity or element caps that tend to show up in build-your-own-ship games once said game's devs realize players like to ignore the "why not" in favor of "because I can", and it will serve as a balance mechanic for pvp.
-
On 6/5/2022 at 5:30 AM, Jinxed said:
— XL Cores? YES PLEASE. <--- This is apparently beyond the capabilities of the devs and has been explicitly stated will not happen.
Unless NQ changed something in a sneaky manor, XL static cores are a thing, they just aren't available to players. Find yourself a planetary market and look at it with radar.
-
On 6/3/2022 at 12:26 PM, blazemonger said:
What's not right with it from my perspective though is that is puts everything in the combat PVP basket and it assumes that PVPplayers should "do it all" themselves, which IMO is precisely why I do not agree. The content should incentivize players NOT interested in combat PVP to venture out for the rewards as they are worth the risk. ANd yes, that woudl then in turn open up opportunity for combat PVP players.
That would be asteroids. They may not be great when compared to other options, but I know pve players that go after them still when they need the materials. You may not consider them worth the risk, but some people do. That said, there is no arguing that the asteroid system could still use some work, it functions in the most literal sense, but it could be a lot better.
On 6/3/2022 at 12:26 PM, blazemonger said:I honestly believe that the compare with EVE does apply here. In EVE, the PVP players do not go out and run high tier relic and data sites or combat sites to get the loot that is needed for industry to produce the components that are used to build the modules they need for their ships to go fight. They may hunt the players that do, but those are two entirely separate loops which generally do not meet until he puts the modules on his ship. If you translates these sites to DU, it woudl be like there is a legion fleet at every superior sleeper cache waiting to kill the specialized ship to run that site.
Sleeper-sights are exploration-related, they'd be closer to asteroids than alien cores. Alien cores are quite overtly more like EVE's player-owned stations (towers). A relic plasma collector (eve's moon harvesting array) collects materials that are either processed in to useful things by the controlling faction's factory-guys, or are hauled to a market to be sold. Taking the site requires laying siege to the station to bring down a special shield that makes the whole thing invulnerable for a period of time mid-siege to allow the defender's faction time to get their act together and bring in more/bigger guns. Again though, the system is rather obviously currently imperfect, and would benefit greatly from some more work/planning.
On 6/3/2022 at 12:26 PM, blazemonger said:This is not meant as a dig against the PVP contingent in DU, it is basically saying that I feel DU is way to shallow and lacks the meat on te bones to be called a MMO at this point.
I agree with you that the game needs more meat.
-
10 hours ago, SvarogZ said:
Stealth zone can be big enought for only small ships.
My favorite ship is a small core with an L shield that can pick 2.5kt of weight off of Alioth with 3 large containers, and has an external space for 4 more large containers. It wouldn't be hard to build one that can do even more, but I like the look of this one. Limiting stealth to small-core ships will not do much.
10 hours ago, SvarogZ said:Stealth can be disabled if any object close enought. Say 100km.
If stealth is disabled at 100km, you'll never get close enough to steal the plasma, the core's owners will see you coming from a long ways off and either shoot you, or swipe the plasma themselves before you get to the core and then shoot you.
10 hours ago, SvarogZ said:If developers are not familiar with their code and can only tag the items, they cannot build something like DU. You are talking as a coder with his manager. To represent everything too complex
I am oversimplifying, but my point is if you want something, it is easier to get it done using existing stuff than it is to make whole new things for it. Changing fuel like NQ said they would sounds easy, but there are a lot of steps to it (I can think of a dozen changes to the code it would require if they didn't write things to be easily changed), so it wont happen for a long time.
On top of that, both making fuel a bit easier and making plasma more easily pirated will provide almost no actual gain. Most people stick to one kind of fuel, and most competent pilots shipping the plasma would easily avoid pirates 99% of the time.
In short, you're asking for a fix to something that isn't a problem. This particular feature's sole purpose is for big factions to fight over the resources. It may need to be a little harder to get to until the game grows (to limit excessive force-projection), but it doesn't need to be vulnerable to the little guys.
8 hours ago, blazemonger said:The problem here is that al lthis is focused on combat PVP gameplay, while the Alien cores IMO should have the harvesting of resources and bringing them to market or use in industry as core purpose. That there are opportunities for combat engagement along the way of that purpose I woudl see no issue with.
Suggesting that transport of plasma effective must be done with non warp travel kill the entire purpose of the cores as it only caters to the combat PVP focused players and eliminates the rest. DU is not and should not be a combat PVP game first as it is well established and well documented that combat PVP in general is not a main driver in agame's long term success.
The point of alien cores is to be a reward for pvp players to encourage large-scale pvp. NQ hopes people will risk a lot of stuff for a small amount of good stuff, thereby both creating pvp play for the pvp players, and encouraging pvp players to obtain replacements for the stuff they lost from the factory/mining players. SavrogZ's idea for needing the plasma to be slow-boated would incentivize pvp a bit more, but not enough for it to really do anything significant (other than annoy the current plasma-haulers).
9 hours ago, blazemonger said:The mere fact hat a single alliance was able to grab and control the cores in game so fast, with so much ease and be able to maintain control with little effort just shows both how broken the whole mechanic is and how it is misrepresented an /or ill conceived by NQ
It still seems to me like it is more an issue of available force-projection in a relatively small universe. A prepared faction can warp from any resource point to any other resource point in under an hour without any risk of being intercepted. If the Alien cores were farther away from everything so that they couldn't be directly warped to from anywhere, then it would be a bit harder to control them all, but at the end of the day with a large faction's capacity to simply string warp-beacons in to a path, it wont do much in a universe as small as DU.
-
3 hours ago, SvarogZ said:
I agree, it's easier to make the behavior similar to Aphelia's packs. However, I don't think it's a good idea to base the game on bans. Using conditions is much better. I don't think all three mechanics described in my post are too difficult to implement.
I am going to go out on a limb here and assume that English isn't your first language, my apologies if I am incorrect.
"Ban" is most commonly used to either refer to permanently preventing an account from playing the game (the objective being to prevent the account's owner from playing), or to refer to an action that if performed would be punished with a ban on someone's account.As far as preventing people from warping with a package goes, the game itself doesn't allow it. If you press the button to warp with an aphelia-mission package in your cargo the game just tells you that you cant, and nothing happens. It works quite well, and the people that complain about it tend to only be the ones that also think players shouldn't be allowed to play as pirates or attack anyone that doesn't want to pvp.
3 hours ago, SvarogZ said:1. Make the plasma "unwarpable". Just remove all plasma from all containers before warp. Easy.
2. Prohibit possession of alien cores. Easy.
3. Spawn plasma in the conteiner located in the alien core. Also easy.
4. The hardest part is stealth, but it's not outstanding effort compared to the work already done on alien cores and PvP. It will be implemented anyway.
There's a saying that fits this quite well: "Easier said than done."
NQ isn't an experienced game development company. DU is their very ambitious first game, and while it has some truly amazing features, it has its flaws too. One of NQ's plans has been to make all the kergon fuels in to one single fuel that can be made four different ways. It sounds easy, but here we are two years after they said it and it still hasn't happened. I'm not saying it won't happen, but I suspect if it were that easy they'd have done it already just to call it a fulfilled promise and to appease the people that have asked for it.1. Making the plasma get removed from an inventory during warp is an entirely new mechanic, the closest things right are the use of warp-cells during warp, and the act of checking to see if an aphelia-mission package is on the ship before warping. It sounds relatively short and easy, but it would probably involve more steps to add in than just adding the tag on mission packages that prevents warping to the plasma items and updating the line of text explaining what you can't warp with.
2/3. You've probably never had possession of an alien core, but it behaves like a static core on a planet. You need to own it so you can build on it and deploy mining units and a plasma collector on it. But even if it didn't need to be owned and just put all the plasma and t5 ore in to a container anyone could access, do you really think a large faction that can hold the alien cores like they can now wouldn't just build a structure around it on other cores? or keep a fleet around it and either have someone waiting to just empty the container or kill and steal from anyone that came up to empty it?4. If they ever get around to adding in stealth (people have asked for it for a while now), it would be too powerful if it could be used to stay within linked container range of the core long enough for someone to steal the plasma. With stealth like that players would never get pirated anywhere unless NQ added some major drawback to using it. People have wanted it for a long time (I am one of them), but it needs to be balanced by other mechanics and features or it will just cause balance problems.
The whole point of the alien cores was to be something big factions would have big fights over, not something little guys can sneak up and steal. If we try to push away from what it is now in favor of letting everyone have a chance at it, then we'll be making it just like asteroids. I'd like if my faction could come up and pirate some plasma from Legion, or if we had a way to manufacture exotics without having to go through whoever controls the alien cores, but right now the issue is one of the big factions having too much force-projection available, not of an inability to pirate their ships.
-
On 6/1/2022 at 1:15 PM, Samedi said:
To be a little contrary, I've always thought that the centre-of-mass property of container hubs was super-weird, and made designing ships way too easy. I can accept a certain amount of simplification in the physics model (eg the separation of thrust and torque), but being able to shift the mass around like that just makes zero sense from a lore point of view.
Not that it's alone in that. So many aspects of the flight/space mechanics seem to be arbitrary, with zero lore explanation, and transparently exist to either simplify the game implementation or the gameplay. The whole thing is a hot mess.
Well... I don't exactly see how they'd make an mmo out of KSP...
In all seriousness though, I wasn't aware of any significant lore aside from the trailer/intro vid, and that concessions would need to be made to game logic/playability is a bit of a given.
On 6/1/2022 at 1:15 PM, Samedi said:FWIW instead of container hubs I'd have some sort of transfer unit that could balance mass between containers, but in a way that took time and where you had to set the parameters (eg 20% mass here, 10% there, and so on). I'd also like a similar fuel pump unit.
A fuel-hub of any kind would be amazing, but if players have to manually balance the hubs then there'd be almost no point in allowing them on dynamic constructs. It would probably be better to yield to what most people expect of hub'd cans before they learn otherwise and just have the game evenly distribute the weight amongst all the cans actual locations.
-
On 6/1/2022 at 3:00 PM, SvarogZ said:
One powerful corporation controls all the alien cores. To fight them, the other players must ally with the same power. Thus, we will end up with two or three corporations controlling all the cores, or only one monopolist with no competition. At present we have one monopolist.
Warp allows such force-projection that any large faction can theoretically put everything they have on any alien-core they own near about at the drop of a hat with relatively little effort, while the invulnerable period station-shields have grants them more than enough time to move. Simply put, the universe is too small, the alien-cores are too close to everything, and managing to both take and hold them against a universe-dominating faction is going to be a very large and very long game of attrition that wont be feasible for smaller orgs to attempt.
Its an mmo, "conservation of ninjutsu" can't apply. In a game like DU large factions will dominate, and absolutely nothing can be done to prevent it that wont crater the game in relatively short order.
On 6/1/2022 at 3:00 PM, SvarogZ said:1. Plasma
a. The plasma should occupy more than the maximum volume of the jetpack and perhaps even the S-container.
b. The plasma must decompose during the warp. Thus, it can only be transported in the usual way.
Result: Plasma can be intercepted during transport
This would be an interesting way to do things that would help encourage some pvp in theory, but it is far more likely that the faction with control of the core would just set up a station to process everything at the core in to finished product that they could then ship to wherever normally and at their leisure.
Even if on-site processing was somehow prevented, it isn't hard to fit an M (or L) container to an XS core, and any competent mission runner will tell you that the odds of a smart pilot being intercepted outside the pipes are next to non-existent.
On a final note, it would probably be easier to make the plasma just behave like aphelia-mission packages that prevent warp instead of making it decay during warp. It would achieve the same function as making it decay, but provide significantly less work that wound need to be done before implementation and thus get the feature deployed faster.
-
This is indeed very much an annoying aspect of the new containers, though I understand its purpose. The containers are not unusable, but they probably shouldn't be linkable to hubs at all if they are going to lose their only purpose for being used/existing when linked to them...
That said, a "gravity inverted hub" that can only be linked to gravity inverted cans (and vise-versa) seems like it would be an adequate solution to all relevant issues without needing too much work...
-
16 hours ago, Catarix said:
game is dying as I see. without a big change it definitely will be closed. I as a new player i can say that there is no any danger anywhere except couple high-end places. i can build full T4 economy without a single battle in PvP game. it is absurd. it is amasing game and i want it to develop not stagnate
No argument that it could use more pvp, and I'd agree that things probably shouldn't hit t4 quite so easily, but dropping safe-zone protection from a bunch of stuff that people built believing those planets would stay safe would cost DU a lot of players, and barring some major jumps forward on the pvp side of things (and some rather creative and substantial advertising to get the average pvp joe interested without giving them unrealistic expectations that get them to quit in their first month) it wouldn't draw enough pvp players to compensate.
If on the other hand they want to add in some more planets with better resources and no SZ (perhaps a whole new solar-system of such), then people would gladly pvp there, and DU wouldn't lose the non-pvp crowd. NQ still needs to improve the pvp though...
A menacing Dreadnought patroling the space between planets
in Idea Box
Posted
I'd suspect zero's suggested nerf would be a little heavy-handed, as a 6-hr cooldown would just annoy all the pve players that enjoy warping between planets instead of slow-boating for hours on end, not that I've got a better option short of NQ both adding some manner of interdiction like they once said they were thinking about, and somehow forcing warp-choke-points to prevent easily avoiding interdiction.
That said, the goal of whatever eventually gets done wouldn't be to break Legion's will to defend, it would be to limit the force-multiplication that results from warp. Legion is big enough right now that nobody can take its whole fleet, and because of warp it can put its whole fleet on any site it needs to defend functionally at the drop of a hat. Sure, Goonswarm could theoretically just decide to roll in from EVE and overrun everything, but then we'd be right back to the exact same issue against them. But I suppose I've gotten off topic now.
PvE combat against NPCs would be cool, and I want it, and I want all the players such content would draw to join DU. Unfortunately I don't think the game is even remotely capable of doing that right now without major changes, so it probably wont happen for a very long time, if ever.