Taelessael
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Posts posted by Taelessael
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Amusing as the chaos would be, that would probably drive more people away right now than it would bring in.
If you want to get some proper pvp, your best bet would probably be to try and take one of the space-resource nodes (you have a list of them and their coordinates in the system map).
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The two weeks for requisition seems fair to me, as it provides a reasonable time for the owner to come recover their construct in the event of unusual circumstances. That said, the ability to eject a ship from a station's immediate vicinity without needing a waiting period should be a thing.
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I'd think the tier system does quality rather well. For elements builders need raw materials of higher quality if they wish to produce higher quality elements. It is expressed as hard tiers that people can easily grasp instead of having to learn the values of a potentially more obscure system, but in the end it does the same thing. On top of that, people don't typically buy just an engine from McLaren, they buy a whole car.
Voxel-mancy and scripting are the "artisan skills" in DU. If you can design a beautiful ship with some solid and beautiful scripts, then you can sell the ship for a lot more than some average joe trying to sell flying bricks that run the default auto-config.
As far as schematics go... well, we really could do with a research system that lets us get our hands on them with some work rather than by going to a market and buying them...
The bigger issues that separate DU from real life-esq McLaren vs Ford are that this is a game, and certain allowances must be made:
-Do It Yourself-
In real life most people can't spend an afternoon picking up rocks that their backpack transmutes in to a bunch of motorcycle-parts while they work so that they can slap a motorcycle together by hand when they are done... most people irl can't build a toaster from a box of prefabricated parts... but the ability to assemble things yourself makes it a combination of pride and cost for the average player. Why pay a lot of money to someone else when you can do it yourself and show off that you are good enough to play without the help of others. Obviously some people will still buy stuff, but we've got a universe full of vehicle-mechanics, things wont sell like they do irl.
-Simple Mechanics-
MMO economics can certainly mimic the real world in miniature, but there are limits. A car has an enormous number of parts to it, and I am not aware of any single real facility on this planet where a dump-truck rolls up to one end and dumps loads of ore in, and whole new vehicles of any quality come out the other side. People specialize and innovate and build factories that can do well enough to make them money off of incredibly small margins of improvement, but DU can't be that complex. This is a a game about building stuff, but if it was as complex as real life almost nobody would play, and by making it less complex to get more players we reduce the number of intricacies that can be capitalized on and/or specialized in to.-Small Population-
Even if people couldn't do most of the building themselves, and the mechanics were complex enough to allow for the previously mentioned small increments of improvement and specialization, the game's population is tiny relative to the real world. In 2018 Ford sold a bit over 500 cars for every one McLaren sold. At that same proportion in game with DU's population and the extra requirement of every player buying a new ship every year, and the McLaren vendor would have sold around 10 ships to this year's population. In a game like DU were everyone can build their own stuff and they don't need to buy a new ship every year... well, I'm sure you can see where this is going. In short, the average player is building Fords, and anything that actually sells at all is McLaren.
As for upkeep, people are good with paying for fuel or repairing things when they crash or get shot, but having to repair elements from plain old wear and tear quickly turns in to a grind, especially on larger constructs with hundreds or thousands of elements. People play to have fun, not to spend hours changing the fluids and filters on their stadium-sized starship every 50,000 km.
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Three days may be a bit much, but it definitely needs to be longer than it is. Seems like every time I check the special missions there's always a few not even with looking at because there isn't enough time left on the mission to actually fly it.
I'd say 36 or 48 hours.
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9 hours ago, LeoCora said:
Which orgs.....there are not 'a lot of PvP orgs' in the game..nobody is warping armoured ships around at the moment.only light nanos..
I keep seeing Legion and CVA trading alien cores in the map, so I'd be willing to bet they are atm. I've also seen it brought up several times in an assortment of threads (pre athena) when someone was pointing out that pvp is not risk/cost free in response to whatever the anti-pvp crowd has posted.
9 hours ago, LeoCora said:The reason people don't set up on outer planets is because it's not cost effective to make stuff there and bring it back to Alioth to sell as the costs involve mean you can't compete with that market.
Funny, I seem to be doing just fine harvesting my T2/T3 on Lacobus and bringing it back to Alioth.
9 hours ago, LeoCora said:EVE has free warp...I don't think there would be as much movement around if warp was expensive (relatively) as it is in DU.
EVE is on a different scale than DU. Its a good example of how people congregate via their own choice because within high-sec said choice is normally the only limiting factor.
If you want an EVE example of people spending money to move around, look at cyno/jump. People do that plenty, they are more restricted by fear of losing the associated craft than they are by the use of fuel.
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They'd probably need to have some manner of cross-section negation on top of the weight negation so that players aren't stuck trying to build their ships without obstructing the elements on their element needle...
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NQ-placed wrecks only allow any given player to take a limited amount of stuff from that wreck. something like 4000L as I recall. A lot of elements are larger than that, and the game only lets you take them if they are the first (and subsequently only) item you take. If you grab so much as a carbon voxel before going after anything larger than that 4000L cap, then you wont be able to take that large item. Was a bit annoying, but I didn't know that NQ was still spawning those... I don't recall any of them I found/got-invited-to as being worth the time to go after...
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On 5/18/2022 at 2:45 AM, LeoCora said:
... Also for pvp, the cost of moving armoured ships around (which have been make redudant now with the radar changes) is prohibitive...
A lot of pvp-groups disagree with you, and burn egregious amounts of cells scouting for people to shoot.
As for there being a lot of people on Alioth... If I had to guess it is more because travel between planets is easy, and resources are relatively close. Near about anything that is for sale can be found on Alioth, so all the buyers go there (in turn attracting even more sellers). Look at EVE's star-map, you'll see a lot of systems with next to no activity (even in high-sec space), but Jita will always be a crowded mess because that's where people have decided to buy and sell their stuff. Alioth is our Jita.
On top of that, if someone needs to go to any other planet in the system it is only one jump away. It is functionally the center of the system, from there you can go anywhere if you want.
New players also tend to collect there, as they are not limited to just operating in their own sanct/haven tiles and the shuttles allow them to go back and forth without having to learn/manage interplanetary flight.
Cell-cost is fine. If you want people to spread out then you need to give them a reason to do so.
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2 hours ago, Msoul said:
In my experience both as an FC and forward scout, a local coms channel that lists everyone in an area makes combat engagements and related activities really boring. The instant feedback and wealth of information it provides is just too powerful. Instead I suggest a slight modification, whereby players only show up in local chat if they choose to speak (similar to WH space in eve online). This still accomplishes your goal but also adds a lot more unpredictability which in turn can lead to hilarious situations. Now players are forced to think. Are those radar contacts enemy reinforcements? Alliance members? Aliens? A third party looking to party? Are they using multi-crewed ships? Are they skilled veterans or a bunch of newcomers? Is it just one guy chucking out random unmanned constructs to try and distract/intimidate you?
The game doesn't currently show who's in chat anyways, and you do make a good point for keeping it that way.
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There are some tricks for finding elements on a dynamic construct in that scenario, voxel tends to be more difficult (and both are a pain on larger static or space-constructs). That said, some manner of "disassemble" feature that just disassembles the construct in to one's linked container or nanopack (like the deployment of a BP in reverse) would be nice.
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While private chat channels certainly allow for communication between allies in space, they are not terribly useful for either pirates who may be more interested in getting their pray to pay a ransom, or people being pirated that may want to try and bribe their attackers to leave them be.
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17 hours ago, Skeletmaster said:
I can think of a dozent other lua scripts that give you an edge in a fight. If you can not programm then you should just buy a script. I dont see a Problem here.
If you cant build a ship, you also have a disadvantage in PvP. Should NQ give out perfect ship blueprints to everyone? Else it would not be fair!
If you have lesser number, you are at a disadvantage. Should NQ add Bots to help you fight?
So how do you define fair in a sandbox? I would say, if everyone had the same possibilities, then it would be fair!
Never said it actually made any kind of sense in an mmo, just that they had said it. To quote my pastor: "Fair's a place where you get cotton-candy. I don't see any cotton-candy, so I guess this ain't gonna be fair."
So...
It would be a useful feature for newer pvp players that may not have either their own scripts or purchased ones...
And it would be a useful feature for casuals that want to go hang out with their pvp buddies every so often but likewise don't have scripts...
And it would keep with what NQ said in the past specifically about scripts...
But it doesn't sound terribly difficult to get a script for this (I don't care enough to put in the effort to try right now, and probably wont hugely care either way anyways), and NQ has substantially more important things they should be working on at the moment.
If they can quick-fix it with three lines of code in as many minutes, then go for it, but if it would take any significant time to add then I'd rather they put their efforts toward more useful things like optimization or adding in the balance mechanics that they've said they want to add such as power (in spite of the fact that they seem to think the game needs to be balanced before they add in the balance mechanics...).
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Given the amount of client-side stuff in this game, any attempt at forcing unique names is going to be more or less impossible.
As for making construct-id visible in the default auto config windows... well, I do recall NQ saying something along the lines of "custom scripts shouldn't result in major pvp advantage", and making that ID visible in default would seemingly solve the issue...
Then again, with NQ's record I suppose it would be more productive to just find a free script with the appropriate features and link people to it...
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2 hours ago, Kormolos said:
hello, I think it would be a big mistake to remove the schematics in the game.
if no shema, everyone will again want to make their gigafactory to be able to manufacture everything in their corner as before the shema.
so no more interaction between players, it will be like playing civilization solo in an MMO.
Agreed
2 hours ago, Kormolos said:you need a system that consumes quanta, such as the breakage of PVE elements for example as with 0.23.
Element decay mechanics like that tend to just annoy people with tedium, which is why a lot of games with upkeep mechanics eventually drop said mechanics for common things (people play combat games to blow stuff up, not to debate the cost of ammo vs a target's bounty, they play building games to build, not to scrub the floor clean so it doesn't rust, they play piloting games to fly, not to check that the fuel hasn't decomposed in to something that will clog the engine in mid air).
It would be better to come up with some system that consumes elements from your inventory, such as removing only t1 schematics, stopping bots from selling any schematics, and adding in a research system that consumes t1 elements from an inventory to produce a t2 schematic with a limited number of runs, consumes t2 elements to produce t3 schematics with a limited number of runs, ect...
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The whole "make voxel alter shield hp" thing has been requested for a while, and I still support it.
"Mandatory Minimum Voxel" would just be annoying, as someone who is designing a ship that is forced to use an up-sized core for length/width/height on a ship that is abnormally long in only one dimension would then need to potentially find places to hide the extra voxel that wouldn't mess with their design. People use M/L cores the way they do because weapons are size-capped, shields let them not get instantly destroyed, CCS makes large armor-buffers pointless, and and the new weight-speed cap has made voxel detrimental to faster ships.
Generally speaking, those people willing to fly element-only-needles probably don't care about looks, odds are they'd clip a solid block of sodium/lithium voxel through the middle of their ship's elements and call it good if there was a minimum voxel requirement. If you want these people to fly proper ships with voxel when they shoot at you then you'd need to provide them a "why not" scenario, such as making voxel below a certain "decorative minimum" not apply its weight/ccs/cross-section to the rest of the ship.
If you want people to fly proper ships in general without just bludgeoning them with silly arbitrary immersion-breaking rules (like core-size-capped weapons or weight-speed-cap) then more natural mechanics are required.
-Shields increase a ship's cross-section or reduce acceleration/top-speed when active (proportionate to shield-generator size? these things already ignore physics so who knows...),-Add heat/power in to the game requiring large solar-panels/radiators be affixed to a ship's exterior sufficient to handle the needs of the elements on a ship,
-Make a ship's maximum possible acceleration some function of its weight and CCS (can't hit 20g if the structure fails and the ship folds in half at 10g). -
Not bad, but not great either. Close in fights like that look cool, and as Blazemonger said it would work in a "fan-made story" kind of way, but it does not look at all like actual DU pvp, and care should probably be taken to ensure prospective new players do not mistake it as such.
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Hit enter like you are going to type something in chat, then hold your cursor over the text of something someone typed.
As far as making the time-stamps visible constantly and without requiring you pointing your mouse at them, I agree this would be a nice feature to have, perhaps as a checkbox in settings somewhere, -
On 4/30/2022 at 6:32 PM, Italicus said:
1) The Voxel system: they're copying the Everquest Next Voxel system. this is fine as far as I'm concerned. I played that sandbox for a year and there system was perfected, this system isn't yet. You have bleedover from one voxel to the next. You put down 2 squares then a 45% and then 2 more Squares and that 45% angle will distort or even change to a square. the individual voxels aren't perfected yet. The Smooth Voxel Tool is a mess. Try and use it and your angles that your trying to curve looks like a close up of a Jimmy Dean Sausage, I'm she there's players that can get it to work, about 1% of use. its a really bad tool. I forgot the name of the Tool you us to make long angle with but after using it for an hour trying to make a ship with a small noise and rounded edge's I realized that tool should have many levels to it. You can't attach another voxel to what your making, it distorts it and you cant repair it without choosing even more damage. again, I no there some players that are just dam great at it but, most players like myself cant work it and that's going to be most new players to this game.
Voxel system needs to be perfected and made much easier.
Is there an idea here? Or is this just a request for NQ to move "make voxel behave better" to a higher spot on their to do list?
Also, try the "vertex precision tool", it helps a lot for those of us not skilled in the ways of voxelmancy.
On 4/30/2022 at 6:32 PM, Italicus said:2) Seriously, let us be out of body like 99% of all other games. a Must!
You should probably elaborate on this one, as not everyone will know what you mean (I certainly don't).
On 4/30/2022 at 6:32 PM, Italicus said:3)PvP aka: Space combat is rather boring...see Star Citizen.
While a good deal of people will agree with you that pvp could be more exciting, you really should elaborate more on what exactly you want it to do. While people can certainly go look up videos of SC, they don't typically provide enough contextual information for everyone to know what it is you are specifically asking for.
On 4/30/2022 at 6:32 PM, Italicus said:4)You really can't get the Planets and Moons to orbit? 20 years ago I took and astronomy class and we met in a planetarium, they had a program that did just that so it's old tech.
There's a massive difference programming-wise between spinning some marbles in a private 3d environment, and spinning colossal spheres of interactable voxel that people are constantly editing in a predominantly client-side single-shard mmo.
No mistake, this is a cool idea and a lot of people want it, but it isn't a practical goal at this time.
On 4/30/2022 at 6:32 PM, Italicus said:5) Minning: Honestly, the worst system I've ever seen in any game. The Minning Units produce at best 123L of whatever ore in 1hour, completely useless unless you have multiple territories which is expensive. honestly, to make Pure Aluminum you need 585 Bauxite to make 405L of Pure Aluminum. So it takes 4 hours to mine the ore then produce the 405 Pure Aluminum that's not enough to make anything. In the time it takes for the miner to mine 123L of Bauxite I can pick up 20KL of it off the ground, which is MAJOR BORING!
You need to increase the output of the MU by at least 10 fold. 1,230L per hour makes much more sense 123L an hour. this way we can actually do something. also, tier 2 we should be able to drop a MU for each ore, not just one.
Auto-mining is meant to be a "basic income" kind of thing, providing enough ore over week of operation for the casual-player that only has a few hours each weekend to do stuff. If you want 20 KL an hour to feed some mega-factory then you'll need to do what other people do: drop a ton of units and hire people to keep them calibrated.
If you don't want to have to deal with managing the better part of a dozen other people, then I might advise taking up alternate sources of income, such as missions, or asteroid mining, and leaving auto-mining to its supplemental-income roll.On 4/30/2022 at 6:32 PM, Italicus said:6) reduce the taxes from 500,000 a week to 100,000 a month. in order for us to make money to grow our industry we need to make money which the terrible Minning system wont support unless we get multiple territories which then cost 500,000 per. say good buy to most of your new players right there.
This was a major topic several months ago when they were first implemented. You may wish to go look up the old threads related to it to see why things are they way they are.
On 4/30/2022 at 6:32 PM, Italicus said:7) PvE..... without it you'll only get a small following of players. PvP games draw few players, PvE games that has PvP in it draws the big crowd. if you don't have PvE your shooting yourself in the foot!
I am going to assume since you were not more precise here that you mean combat-play against bot/npc constructs. A lot of people want this, but the game's client-side anti-automated-gunnery mmo shenaniganry can't currently support it.
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On 4/26/2022 at 3:18 PM, Hirnsausen said:
This is identical to my suggestions that I made months ago...
Wolf's post specifies that you have the core bp where yours does not. People are more likely to agree with their suggestion than yours because odds are if you have the core bp then you are either the original designer or someone the designer has entirely sold their rights on the construct to.
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1 hour ago, blundertwink said:
Exactly my point, though....if Eve Online of all the MMOs in the wild is more accessible than DU, that spells serious trouble for NQ.
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I don't necessarily disagree, but that time has come and gone. Athena is their last major update after over 8 years of development.
This idea that DU will be fine if only NQ has a bit more time to "add content" is puzzling to me. They've had the time. It's come and gone. People have been waiting for that magical content for years and years and years now. ...
EVE has had 2 decades to work out their "accessibility".
I'm not saying NQ will magically solve all their problems if you give them another month,
I'm not saying that DU doesn't currently have what appear to be unfixable weaknesses when compared to EVE,
and I am definitely not saying that they haven't made some egregiously stupid decisions that have done a lot more harm than good (like ticking everyone off with this ongoing wipe-stupidity).
It's not in great shape, there is obviously a significant chance that it will all just go belly up sometime in the next twelve months, and for all the grand oversimplification we get up to in these threads I do recognize that there's no relatively quick and easy solution to its problems, but it isn't dead yet.
If you decide you're done waiting and you'd rather go else ware, then that is your decision and I wish you the best of luck. Seeing as I have the time and little better to do for the moment (and they've already got my money), I think I'll stick around a bit longer and see if they manage to fix the ship before it sinks.
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14 minutes ago, blundertwink said:
...Copying features from a 19 year old game (as DU has done in multiple places) isn't generally wise...
I'd disagree, if its managed to keep going for two decades then they've obviously done something right. The trick is being sure you're copying the good mechanics and not forgetting to add in your own stuff that makes the game better.
19 minutes ago, blundertwink said:...It's hard to compare with DU, which is lacking a lot of the core elements that make Eve more accessible to mainstream players.
Accessible... right... (you set yourself up for that one)
I didn't get in to EVE until it had its legs under it already, but as I recall hearing at the start it didn't have much. Some cool ships, one massive shared universe to explore, and enough content to keep people interested while CCP worked on more stuff.
-Mining was boring (to me), because it involved sitting and shooting at rocks for several minutes at a time,
-Hauling was boring (to me), because it involved picking up a package, hitting the autopilot, and going to do chores for several minutes (or hours) at a time,
-Combat missions and belt-ratting were fun, because I got to go blow stuff up,
-Working out what to fly with what fittings was fun, because I like building/functional customization,
-Exploration was fun because there were new things to see, great rewards, and the universe-size paired with site-respawn made it so that odds were if I found something I was the first there to loot it, but still had to be quick and careful to make sure someone else didn't come in and kill me while I was working.DU is far from perfect, but it has potential, NQ just needs to get it sufficiently playable with enough content to keep people happy while they work at adding to and improving it (and quit wasting time trying to balance everything in pvp so as to force their idea of what combat should look like before they add in the actual balance mechanics like power/capacitor/heat that would make the desired play a natural thing).
-The visual improvements are nice,-The missions are annoying (because I was flying those) but they needed what NQ did to them for a while now,
-The stasis-gun and alien-cores are welcome additions to pvp stuff (still need more, especially power/heat),
-The speed nerf seems a rather poor solution to a problems resulting from the simultaneous additions of shields that were as powerful as they were and a CCS mechanic that made people feel armor was irrelevant on top of the already existing issues resulting from core-size-capped-weapons and a lack of any balancing mechanics like power/heat to prevent people from just building an engine-wall with guns,
-The adjustor-speed nerf seems an overly heavy-handed solution to tracking being near irrelevant because of how fast people can turn (I get that you don't want people swinging battleships about like a kid with a sugar rush pretending a flashlight is a lightsaber, but you've just taken the fun out of my favorite multi-purpose s-core by making fly in atmo like it thinks its a fully loaded L-core freighter).
-We still need more to explore (nine planets and a bunch of near identical moons doesn't take much to have gone and seen all of. A gas-giant, a lava-planet, and something larger than Alioth with mountains and mesas so big it becomes easier to fly between them than it is to fly over them in the planet's abnormally high atmo would be swarmed by older players even if the resources were trash just because they'd want to see new planets). -
Picking up from yesterday...
-warp needs to have its visual toned down (try cutting its opacity in half),-the speed-lines/particles need to have their transitions smoothed out (quickly zooming out in 3rd person results in a very visible transition at low speeds),
-adjustors need some work with the new rotational-speed cap, ships with the adjustor-power to quickly (but not instantly) hit the cap result in a rather sudden stop in acceleration that makes it jarringly visible that they are just hitting the game's rotational cap instead of reaching any kind of more natural limit. (either slow the acceleration as rotational speed approaches the cap to smooth the transition between the acceleration-phase and top speed-phase, or remove the acceleration altogether and just let constructs rotate at their speed cap from start to finish if they have the adjustor-power to do so).
-missiles probably need some love, as they are now not only the shortest ranged weapon, but also possess lower sustained dps than railguns (except at large size) even though you can fit equal numbers of both to a seat at maximum skills.-alien cores that get renamed should probably still show up via their original designations in the "space resource spots" lists of the people that don't own them
20 hours ago, Cergorach said:Look at the list of mission names, above there, there are two tabs/buttons "Classic" & "Special", you on "Classic" by default. Hit "Special" and you see the goodies list...
Much appreciated, thank you.
9 minutes ago, ADCOne said:...
2) My ship is not turning as flat as before so it angles up or down depending weather I am turning left or right and I'd spent about an hour the other week adjusting them so it would stay flat...
That isn't the adjustors. NQ altered the weight of several elements, which has subsequently altered your ship's center of mass.
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• Extra-Small Adjustor: 22kg > 25kg
• Small Adjustor: 42kg > 100kg
• Medium Adjustor: 200kg > 450kg
• Large Adjustor: 1000kg > 1550kg
... Perhaps I am missing something here, but it seems like this just encourages spamming dozens of XS and S adjustors in place of using a singe larger one on any size ship (subsequently increasing the amount of loading that need to be done), as now on top of having 4 that fit in the same footprint and match the power of the next size up, and being better able to fit any given space via their lower profile, they now collectively weigh significantly less... What exactly was the purpose of this weight change? And why do you think a bunch of min-maxing gamers wont just go crazy on an L-core with S adjustors?
• Command seat changes • Fittings capacity: 125000 > 175000 • Large weapon slots: 0 > 3 • Element Mass: 158 > 3500
I suspect that this was done to allow hauler-pilots to fly and shoot at the same time if they didn't know about using a remote-controller with a gunner-seat, but if this is the case then I'd suspect that people really would have just preferred to be allowed to configure gunner-seats for flight like hover-seats, it would have given them more decorative options without adding more weight to ships that weren't already going to fit the associated weapons.• Integrated a brand new 3D system map with new interactions. • Overlays and displays for the planets, safezones and constructs on the map. • Improved map performance for large amounts of constructs.
I very much appreciate the new map, but there should probably be a slider in there somewhere to enalrge the icon/name sizes for the planets, not everyone is young enough to easily see/read the new map. The "target-plane" setting is a cool feature, but the visual could use a bit of work as well, it would probably look a lot better with sharper/more distinct lines and no color gradient filling the spaces between said lines.
• [Rendering] Introduced new skybox background.
This needs a brightness slider or something, as some people I talk to find it now too dark to see at night again while others find the skybox to bright. Having a separate slider that alters how brightly constructs/terrain are illuminated may also be worth considering, as anything not made of plastic that sits in a shadow (or even just at a less than optimal angle relative to the sun) becomes quite hard to make out details on.
• [VFX] Updated VFX when warping.
As the server is actively having a panic attack that prevents my constructs from loading their physics while I type this, I'm going to assume this is the same visual as was in the pts, and re-state my opinion that its opacity needs to be turned down by half.
• Some Aphelia hauling missions are now considered "special" missions.
• Players will see only a subset of special missions for a given day. A different player may not see the exact same special mission.
Were all of them made "special" or something? None of the missions currently available (to me) involve packages larger than 35kL or traveling any further than between a planet and its moon...
The rest of it looks fairly good for the moment, although proper testing and observation of the deployment of other new features will obviously need to wait for the game to be playable again.
Add a "quality" stat
in Idea Box
Posted
Wouldn't that time-scale negate the point of having a decay feature? If it takes months or years then all it will really by doing is annoying people who forgot to do the upkeep before dismantling it (or whatever else requires it to be topped up).
Agreed.
Unfortunately it is not just a game, but specifically an mmo, the "law of conservation of ninjutsu" very explicitly can't apply. If one person or a small group is capable of producing something, then a proportionately larger group must be proportionately capable of producing even more of that something. It would take an unrealistic amount of complexity to make it possible for a small group to have any area of production where they could out-perform a large one. NQ could add a thousand different skills today that each take a month to cap, and by this time next year several of the major orgs would have at least one member that had level 5 for any given one.
Where'd be the fun if I didn't? X)
Scripting perhaps, but anyone with patience and an understanding of physical shapes is a voxelmancy-wizard now thanks to the voxel precision tool. Either way though, if just anyone could make a McLaren by letting a couple of timers run for a month or so, then it wouldn't really special, it would be just like Ford, but with a different decoration on the front.
Until NQ weighs in with a bunch of hard numbers, opinion is all any of us have.