Taelessael

-New skybox is much better than the old one, though still a hair on the bright side as I recall (could make this a slider in the game-settings?). -New water looks decent, but may need some level of fine-tuning near the shore-lines. -New warp effect needs its opacity turned down a lot, and may benefit from having a version of the old warp-lines (cut down to a third of the current lines at the time of this post) overlaid on to it.

I suspect a wipe is irrelevant to such a feature, it would be nice to have with or without a wipe.

Ah, you a trying to feed your ship-dispenser from an automated factory instead of manually loading it, I see why that would require more links... I'd be curious to learn why NQ allowed only one link to a dispenser, but barring some manner of game-breaking cheese I'd have to agree with you now Coyote.

You can do this quite easily with container hubs. This takes a bit of cheese with transfer units and additional containers, but is possible already. That said, it would be nice to not need so many extra elements to do this. Seconded. We still would like these items.

If you look at t1 prices, you may notice that with the exception of a small handful of orders, the prices have essentially hit the floor set by the bots. T2 and T3 aren't much better. This has resulted from near about everyone and their dog running auto-miners and flooding the market with all the ore they have easy access to. Allowing people such access to T4 and T5 would probably do the same for them. While I can very much appreciate the desire to find high-tier ores (no luck on my end either), I suspect that all something like this would do is de-value them on the market. While this would allow people to know where has or has not been scanned yet, it would also be functionally forcing the cooperation of everyone that scans tiles. The universal availability of scans would subsequently in turn let people grab every last liter of high-value material (and I have seen people claim tiles over a single liter in spite of the non-profitable output). As such I suspect that universal scan availability would replace the potential pretense for some that nothing is left with assurance for everyone that nothing is left.

I'd think a research-system/industry for producing schematics might work better than talents, as it could be serve as both a resource-sink and gameplay loop. -Let everyone with the appropriately sized industry elements create t1 without a schematic, -Have an element that eats a number of t1 elements along with some additional materials to produce a t2 schematic of the elements you've fed it, -Repeat with t2 to get t3, ect... so that players can produce the schematics themselves, -Give all schematics a limited number of runs so that people aren't just using the system for a bit until they have their schematics and are good forever, ---Allow existing industry units to pull new schematics of what they were set to manufacture from containers the same way they pull ingredients so that factory people aren't spending all year reloading their factory's individual industry units with schematics.

An interesting idea, and I could certainly see use for a link allowing a transfer unit to drain a parcel-container, but as the game currently requires each package created by a given player to have a unique name from all other packages that player currently owns (to prevent exploits/shenanigans), an element that puts things in to a package would need some method of generating unique package names without nessicarily having immediate access to the element-owners list of currently existing packages...

Other people do play cooperatively. We have a few guys on factory-duty because they are skilled for it, a few guys on ship-element placement because they are skilled for it, and a whole lot on mining/piloting/gunning, because they are skilled for it. Given the current complexity of industry and the amount of quanta required to set up the enormous chains required for factories to produce the more complex or higher tier items, major factories are typically (though not always) group-projects, and do not require an additional set of skills or other limitations to force them to be such. As such, I don't think a per-avatar industry limit is required. Dakanamer's post was relatively harshly worded, but he is still entitled to disagree that the proposed limitation is needed. More to the point though if you intend to call someone out for the tone of their post, please be sure that you are not responding to them in a poor tone yourself. Responding to rudeness with even more rudeness makes the person you responded to look like the more reasonable party.

Right... Where to start with this train wreck... Talk about curing a head-cold with decapitation... People didn't like schematics when they were released because you just suddenly stuffed them in to the game after people had already established themselves and effectively kicked a lot of dedicated factory players just about back to square one with the only way to continue their chosen style being "go buy something only aphelia sells". Advanced warning that you were going to do that would have taken some of the edge off, adding the schematics but not requiring them for a few months would have helped take the edge off, adding a research system that lets people make the schematics themselves (even if spending the same amount of wealth via material-costs) would still make them annoy people less... Schematics were added in to cut down on the server and connection loading produced by everyone having their own private mega-factory. If you want to cut out the schematics for all the t1 stuff (since we already make that in our nano-packs) then go for it, but if you drop them all without a system to replace it then you'll be regretting it again later. Its' called a roll-back. You keep a copy of how things are right before a patch, and if someone finds an exploit in short order then you get rid of it and re-load that un-abused copy with a patch to fix the exploit. People generally don't mind losing a few hours of play too much if you have a good reason such as fixing an exploit that would destroy the economy. Or if you kept a log somewhere, you could just quickly close the server down for a bit while you went through it and deleted the the resources produced by the exploit. Or you could have gone after people for abusing the exploit and kicked them from the game. Or you could do another partial-wallet-wipe like you did back near the start of beta (without any forewarning to ensure people don't just move assets around to avoid it). This whole fighting chance for new players thing is absurd, and if we're being honest here repeating it is a bit insulting to the people that have thought that one through and explained it a dozen times now. -Someone will always have more money than someone else. -If you wipe the server clean then the returning players will still have more money than any new ones you somehow attract five minutes after the server opens just because they will know how to get it faster (you point this out in your post), -The power-players will still have more money than the casuals because they will be putting more time in to it, -The people running mission-alts or playing cooperatively will still have more money because this is an mmo, and conservation of ninjutsu must not apply, -Everyone will still have a lot more than any brand-new player, because they will have had any time at all to get it while the new player will not. The only thing this gives to new players (and only the competitive ones that don't think too hard about the existence of beta-players) is the sense that if they want to compete then they wont start far behind anyone else for that first week or two. For all the rest of the new players all you are really doing is clearing the universe of anyone that is willing to give them a head start with free stuff, pay them to run jobs or perform tasks, or inspire them with grand and epic constructs that show them "players can design and build this themselves". You left out the pro of keeping people's trust, and if you don't wipe and just drop schematics you probably wont lose as many players as you will by wiping the universe clean. If you want to be really nice about it you could even make Aphelia willing to buy the schematics back, (and before someone complains about the exploiters getting money by selling schematics they picked up during the exploit-sale, please consider whether or not that would constitute a significant gain for an exploiter's wallet, and the possibility that she could buy them back at a reduced price for the happy middle-ground between refunding lawful factory-wizards and throwing a few more quanta at people that already have exploit-cash). That said, I still don't think you should drop most schematics from the game, I don't want to have to pick my tile claims based on how many mega-factories other people have deployed close enough to lag my game out when I'm just trying to build, fly, or work my mining units. You left out the pro of keeping people's trust, again. You forgot the con of the loss of non-factory-players ability to use an established market to advance. Also, you've done resets of planets before with things like magic prints and admin-construct excavation. so I must ask that you please refrain from inferring people now need to choose between keeping their stuff or having good looking planets. This will annoy the market-players, and the factory players, and the ship-sellers, and the wipe-monkies because someone somewhere may still have more stuff than they do, and a lot of other players because they'd be losing some of their stuff. In short, this will probably annoy the most people, but you'll still be able to claim that you didn't negate the whole "beta is soft-release" claim made way back when beta was starting, and people will be willing to see it as a reasonable compromise. As for old bugged constructs, try opening a thread and listing the specific bugs, I'm sure players would gladly offer input on potential fixes (could always add an "old" tag in the code of old constructs and prints that prevents operation/docking/BPO creation until all elements are moved with the move element tool or picked up with the deploy element tool). Just be sure to not warn anyone if you decide this, otherwise people will just shift their assets around to try and avoid it, and don't forget to make sure people have something to keep their taxes paid and their fuel tanks full for a bit while they get the economy running again. On one hand, if you simply didn't apply any new patches to the legacy server then most people would probably eventually migrate over to the new stuff on their own as you enticed them with cool new features (assuming you come up with said features). On the other hand, such division of population would initially be potentially quite substantial, and would risk making the game seem "too empty", and you'd need to re-run procedural generation of ore distribution so that people don't just pull ore-coordinates from one server to be used in the other. Of course you could probably take the 3rd option people have presented here where by the two eventually become linked as the previously promised extra solar-systems, but that would probably entail eventually allowing old resources in to the new system, at which point we'd be on the same track as having never wiped, so you'd probably be better off just not wiping if you did this so that old players could still help uplift new ones. I've already been over the schematic and planet points in this post, but until you make missions have a random start and end location for each and ever person each and every time they take them, I'm going to say this wont fix that particular "economic loophole". As far as cons go you forgot: -Loss of the trust of a lot of people that believed NQ wasn't going to full wipe after beta-launch unless it was absolutely nessicarily for the integrity of the game, -Bad pr along the lines of NQ being willing to nuke the entire universe to make their job easier in dealing with a few exploiters and/or patch implementation, -Temporary loss of old players' ability to uplift or inspire new players, -Loss of established-market use by non-factory players to advance in to doing what they want to do without waiting for factories, -Temporary loss of established player's ability to identify/test mid/late-game loopholes and exploits in a time-frame that would still allow rollbacks or "targeted maintenance" to limit the damage they could cause. So, what's it going to be NQ? The longer this debate goes on, the more people are just going to get frustrated at it all and question whether or not they should just go else-ware, and the worse DU will look for it. Time to make final call quickly and stick to it, you don't want the pr from all this fence-sitting on something as major as a universe wipe still hanging around when you get to full release.

As a side-option, NQ could make it possible to pay the tax for a hex by interacting with the TU, using an RDMS-mechanic similar to container-inventory interaction where it becomes possible to set RDMS so that someone standing at the unit can see and add to that hex's balance, but not subtract from it... That said, it would be nice if I could pick up adjacency bonuses from my friend's tiles.

Safe-zone asteroid mining was never supposed to compete with MU, it was supposed to supplement it for those players that actually manage to use that much ore and provide safe practice for people to get the hang of what they are doing before they go after pvp-space-rocks. CoyoteNZ has a point though, it is part of the "grind" to help slow things down a bit... not that it works terribly well (I have mine set to cycle all at the same time, and just surrogate in every few days, start the calibration, and just exit because base-gain is good enough and I find harvesting surface rocks to be less fun than not playing)...

The pvp bit was specifically because I was talking to Hirnsausen, he hates pirates and would make piracy a bannable offense in DU if he could. Recycling would not significantly advantage pirates and pvp players over everyone else, so I'm not actually worried about that. Unfortunately the market is already relatively flooded with resources because of automining, adding something like recycling as an additional source of materials would only make it worse.

Its the same reason you or anyone else likes flying a good looking ship: because they like having a good looking ship. Art in DU is not irreplaceable, people make blueprints they can redeploy from if they are damaged or destroyed, and resources are quite plentiful with which to produce replacements. The only thing stopping some people from doing it now is that they have the option to choose between small numerical bonuses or decoration, and they'd rather "win" just a bit more often, so they chose the small bonuses.

-Post moved to FTUE feedback thread-

We'd need some method of ensuring those manager-units continued to consume calibration-points to avoid massive land-grabs and flooding of the market with even more resources. It would probably be better to just suggest that the skills for calibration-points instead set how many mining units a player can have while asking to remove calibration entirely.

As logical as this sounds, I'd argue that the game would be better off re-naming the recycler in to something else so that people stop asking for it to be able to recycle things. The current universe is already fairly saturated with stuff, and needs more material-sinks. Allowing elements/voxel/cores to be recycled would have the same effect as adding a new source for those materials we'd be gaining. ... And because I know what you think of pirates @Hirnsausen, I should point out that allowing anything to be recycled would allow pirates to have an even greater reward from anything they kill, as they'd be able to recycle the elements or voxel they wouldn't otherwise normally have a use for. And before you pose a "pirates aren't allowed to use it" suggestion, if NQ did that then the player-base would see it as blatant favoritism, and that would annoy both pvp players and objective 3rd parties more than just silently ignoring this thread's suggestions would.

If shield hp were tied in to how much voxel a ship had via a mechanic like ccs, then it would have an effective falloff curve above which people wouldn't get much more hp. This curve would keep people from just filling the build volume with voxel. While less artful individuals would just add a block of material over everything to reach their desired hp, there are plenty of people that would use it as an excuse to fly something that looks at least a bit nicer than your average brick or disjointed element string. Regardless, I still think that if there was a voxel weight/volume floor beneath which the voxel did not alter a ship's mass/ccs/cross-section, then players from either side of the pvp line would have fewer hinderances in having at least some level of decoration on their ships.

If it is as I recall Sanctuary being, you can't auto-mine t2 there, but you can surface-harvest t2 rocks. As there is also a shuttle to an from Alioth it is entirely possible to either use the market to obtain fuel, or use the shuttle to get a mining setup going on Alioth.

Perhaps if it were simply to be a bulk-system, where all the tiles shared one large singular tile-wallet (or could be divided in to groups of such as the owner saw fit)... Having to manage the upkeep for a dozen tiles for my personal mining units is annoying, I'd have to be in charge of an org's upkeep with dozens or hundreds of tiles...

100/66= ~1.5 so flight time has increased by 50%. If we were flying at 50% speed then flight time would have doubled instead. As for flying needles and what is or is not my business, my issue is less with it being a needle and more with it having neither voxel nor anything resembling an attempt to make it look like a ship. I would suspect it makes for poorer publicity when videos on YouTube show a substantial part of the pvp in a space-ship game involving fights between things that are rather clearly just a "the rules don't say I cant" attempt to min-max some imaginary numbers. I am not in charge so I can't actually make anyone do squat, but seeing as I want the game to be the best it can be and continue for as long as it can, I find it to be my business to at least voice my opinion on the matter so that NQ can consider (and accept or reject as they see fit) a point of view that they may not have had otherwise.

You should probably put new ideas like this in their own thread, stuff not in the first post is likely to be missed by new readers that skip the middle of a thread, and people that have already responded to all the ideas in the first post are less likely to look if they think all that's needed saying on the starting topic has already been said.

People with auto-pilot scripts disagree... and the rest of us generally really don't care about whether or not our aim is perfect enough to shave 5 minutes off a 6hr flight. I appreciate that steering clear of the pipes and course-corrections can take a bit of time (as can acceleration/deceleration if you have bad twr), but odds are any argument that can so easily be construed to mean "the math for an average person's flight time is useless in finding an average person's flight time because it doesn't take in to consideration how I personally fly" will not be seen as a great argument. They Increased everyone's flight time by 50% (assuming they used to fly at top speed), so everyone running big missions will average roughly 2/3 the quanta per hour they used to manage. Most of those big missions were 90% coasting, so nobody is going to see you as excessively disproportionately hard hit if the missions were 95% coasting for you. The issue for missions that NQ was trying to resolve was the amount of money the big ones generated. I would have personally preferred if they had just stated that they needed to nerf missions and then cut the payout down, but they needed to do something about the nano-ships and thought they were taking two birds with one stone (they didn't, I can still take a mission, get moving, go to work, and then turn the mission in when I get home for the same pay). As for the rest of Athena, who knows, maybe we'll get lucky and finally stop seeing disjointed element-only L-core needles, but I don't think I'll hold my breath on that one.

TL/DR: we need some manner of minimum-voxel-budget for ships so that pvp players (and soon everyoneelse) stop flying around disjointed element-only bundles. The up-coming Athena patch will quite handily destroy the nano-M/L-core meta with the speed cap. Unfortunately it will also provide players even more encouragement than they already have to have no voxel at all on their ships in order to keep them as light as possible for speed-cap reasons. As such I would propose the introduction of a minimum voxel/decoration budget, where by an amount of voxel below a certain threshold (based on core size) does not increase a ship's weight, CCS, or cross-section, as this would encourage players to have an actual decorative hull on their ships without substantially altering the game's balance. Any thoughts?

This would be one way to circumvent the use of alts for skills, but a great many of them are also used to run missions or calibrate mining units. Agreed. This used to be a thing, and bots still buy and sell certain materials, but NQ has been notoriously bad at getting it right. They may try again later, but there are more important things to work on for the moment. Players broadly hate this idea, as it would involve far too much grind in this type of game. You'd have better luck proposing NQ just raise the hex-tax. Games like DU heavily encourage the use of math, and there are orgs that would be more than willing to take advantage of something like this. If it gets implemented people will do the math to find the optimal return of ore put in to ore extracted in the area, if it can result in an overall gain then we'd just be adding more resources to the universe instead of draining them, if there is no net gain available but it isn't mandatory to use then it will be ignored, and if it is a mandatory drain then it would just irritate everyone and you'd have an easier time again just pushing higher taxes. A "research" system that destroys a large number of elements for a chance to produce one with improved abilities is a good idea. Fair is a place where you get cotton candy, DU pvp is a place where you consent to play for keeps in an anything goes match by being there. Also, destroyed voxel is gone forever, and elements broken by combat can never be sold on the regular market again or used to create blueprints, and elements that get destroyed this way too many times can't be repaired and must be replaced, so it is already a thing. Mining units were added in to save on server space (we used to dig to find ore on planets, and it was a massive waste of server resources), and to quiet the maniacs that kept screaming "we'll be out of ore in a month" every month to try and demoralize people. More asteroids would obviously be one possible solution, but interplanetary flight is not a "first-week" skill for most of the new pilots in this game.

That would work fine on almost anything, but again with the novark speeder example, some things aren't worth the time to salvage. The salvage/deletion mechanic we have now is annoying for getting rid of your stuff if you take a few months off, but it currently does what it needs to quite well.