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Taelessael

Alpha Tester
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Everything posted by Taelessael

  1. It seems you are suggesting there are only extremes: either find a way for everyone to keep everything or delete everything when someone unsubs. The current salvage mechanic is most definitely to save on server space and keep popular areas from needing a regular cleaning by NQ, and allowing players to loot the abandoned stuff is just to score points with the remaining players. Problem is players don't take everything, nobody wants the bits to a thousand novark speeders. If they are going to allow players to salvage abandoned stuff then they need to eventually do something with all pieces that aren't worth most people's time to loot.
  2. I'd suspect removal has less to do with not wanting to keep constructs for server-costs and more not wanting to keep "trash" for server-costs. I've seen a lot of constructs that go abandoned get quickly stripped of their valuable bits, but never completely "cleaned up", leaving low-value voxel with access holes in it, low-cost decorative parts, xs elements, and the destroyed core.
  3. I'd suspect the pvp issue is less with disjointed stuff (nobody will much care if you go protoss and build the golden armada), and more that people are using disjointed element-needles with battle-ship-shields and interceptor-speed. In all likeliness, this patch will just make it worse, as now people will want to cut weight even more. If their vision for combat is to have epic-looking battle-ships slugging it out in big slow broadsides while swarms of smaller craft dogfight in the middle, then they will need to come up with a reason to have skin on a ship, a reason to not just fly a needle for cross-section tank, a reason to not have the biggest defensive element in the game on anything and everything smaller than a battleship that still has the build-volume to accommodate it, and a reason once they have all of that to mix in more resource efficient fighter-craft without negating battleships entirely (again). I suspect what we need isn't a quick change-the-numbers fix for pvp, but rather the inclusion of more complexity. -Solar-panels to generate power or radiators to dissipate waste-heat can take up a good bit of space on a ship's exterior, potentially requiring designs to simply include additional geometry/cross-section to allow for the needed greater surface area. -Power generation/storage equipment tends to be big, heavy, or both, and the added mass would help cut in to the acceleration of super-high-twr constructs. -If they changed voxel so that instead of affecting your CCS it affected your shield (more voxel toughens your shield, still with the falloff curve) then people would use some voxel if they wanted more defense. If they put the falloff at different points for different core sizes then they could manipulate how much mass was optimal for defense and thus encourage different core-sizes to mean actual different ship sizes. -Shield-modification elements (stuff that trades max hp for resistances for vent-time for vent-recovery-speed for e-war resistance) could add additional mass or space requirements that would slow and enlarge more defensively oriented ships. -Shields eating in to the the top speed of the ship they are attached to would make people chose between heavy defense and high speed. -E-war equipment, much like guns and armor, take up space and add mass. So essentially, they want people to pvp with a variety of ships that look like actual ships. The problem is that we are gamers, and if you give us a simple problem with one right answer, we are going to go for that one right answer. To fix it the pvp game needs to be more complex, to make sure there isn't just one right answer. The stasis-gun is a step in the right direction, and the speed-alterations are an extra variable to account for (albeit likely a poorly thought out one), but odds are quite high that we will need more.
  4. -I am interested in seeing what the station-hardware does (and what the materials it produces are used for). -Speed will still be an issue, a lot of the combat ships people are flying are already exceptionally light-weight for their core-size, (they'd be flying s-cores if weapons weren't capped). You'd probably get pvp to be more in line with what you desire it to be by capping speed to shield-size. Still, I suppose we'll see what you've got here. -"Mission-Balance" for hauling missions will be a fiddly thing to manage so long as everyone can just look through the list, work out time-money value of a flight-path, and go after it repeatedly with the alts of their friends. Also, while it would annoy people, if you want to balance missions you may do better just saying "hey, we need to change the payout for balance-reasons". -There was something wrong with voxel?
  5. I don't personally have my hand in major factory-stuff (only got a fuel factory for my mission-runner, and a voxel factory for my ship/structure designing), so I don't hugely care if it is properly cheaper or not. That said, as schematics already exist it would be easier/faster to implement them as research rewards than it would be to invent even more stuff (so we'd get the research mechanic sooner), and it would provide a method of obtaining schematics that doesn't require going and buying them off the market for those stubborn people that want to do it all from nothing themselves without the markets.
  6. If you caught the line about needing to make anything you've researched publicly available within a week to avoid losing it, you may come to the conclusion as I have that this is less about creating a research-system and more about indirectly suggesting a way for NQ to add in a bunch of stuff that he wants and pushing anyone that gets their hands on it to sell it to him. I would however appreciate NQ adding in a proper research-system to allow players to produce element/material schematics. Even if it costs as much in materials to to research as it does to just fly to market and buy one, it would at the very least introduce said research-system to the game. If they went and under-cut the market-bot's cost by enough and made the high-tier stuff have a limited number of runs then they could even pull said higher-tier schematics off the market and get players to sell them to each other without ruffling too many feathers.
  7. In this particular case, IRL-logic would be removing Aphelia missions entirely and just letting players make missions for each other... But as I'm sure we'd both agree that would just suck, I'd rather hand-wave it by equating them to a lot of real-life retailers and saying they don't have the back-room-space to store it in bulk for extended periods.
  8. I was under the impression that procedural missions when suggested by myself or others were not in any way linked to anything anyone else did. The general idea is that the game would just generate them individually for each player. Nobody could hoard all the missions (and swarms of mission-runners couldn't run them dry) because everyone would have their own missions, and they couldn't stack a dozen alts or even constantly repeat the same loop because there'd be different start and end points for each person's mission each time they took it. If they shortened up the time to deliver enough (say to within a day or two of start, preventing loitering until lots of missions line up) and refreshed what missions were available every few days (to keep people from being forced to do missions they don't want to run after hitting all the ones they do). As far as keeping larger mission-haulers relevant goes, they just need to add even bigger packages than they already have with appropriately higher payouts.
  9. ED is cool, but I suspect that the systems are currently too different to attempt to copy any relevant mechanics more complex than the piloting hud.
  10. I suppose either I am explaining it poorly, or this is simply something we can't agree on, but long-term teamwork does not require splitting resources 20 different ways if you have 20 different people who all have the goal of advancing the team. Not everyone wants or needs "their cut" when playing, plenty are content with simply being part of a larger whole. As for one person and their alts somehow being sole owners of a moon... well, I lack the administrative access to DU required to make properly sure one way or the other without being a member of the org in question, and there are more than enough trolls to ensure I won't just take someone's word for it. That said, just because nobody else has done it does not mean they lack the means, just the desire to waste that much time and quanta. Frankly though, when DU goes in to full-release and people are paying for their alts, as long as they aren't claiming so many Alioth tiles as to make it too hard for new players to get started, I'm not going to care if someone wants to pay for all the alts to run all the simultaneous missions to make the 80-ish million quanta a day they need to own a moon. Sure, they could mess with the market short-term or buy more stuff than they could reasonably actually make use of, but if they over-do it then it will quickly turn in to them vs every other player in the market game, and nobody has enough alts to win that.
  11. You really seriously think that out of all the people that were willing to fork over the money for that, that none of them may just continue to pay for all those accounts? Sure, it will bring and end to some of them, but plenty more wont care, plenty more trolls will still troll you by saying they are doing it, and someone or some org will still have so much more quanta than you and everyone else as to make your head spin. More importantly, this is an mmo, and the large groups of people that actually play together cooperatively are going to continue to do so, they will continue to outperform the alt-whales like they are already doing, and if they feel like flexing then they will eventually just buy another moon while all the solos, small groups, and casuals sit there wondering how they could get so much quanta.
  12. Please explain how a single wipe will stop someone from having 20 alt accounts. Also, I appreciate that you are so in to solo/small org so hard as to believe that larger orgs can only be just a few guys and their army of alts, but 20 actual people aren't that hard to get in one org (one of my orgs has more officers than that, never mind the rank-and-file guys, and we are far from the biggest), and 20 actual competent people will handily out-perform 1 guy with 20 alts. Procedural generation to prevent alt-mission-stacking would be nice in that it would get all the "missions are OP" people to find something new to complain about, but someone (or some org) will always have more money than everyone else (more or less like I already said in point 4), and nothing short of entirely removing money and resources from the game will change that for more than a few minutes.
  13. TL/DR: Top speed should be based on the size of a ship's shield generator instead of its mass. The long version: NQ currently planning to limit a ship's top speed based on that ship's mass in an attempt to keep engine-heavy pvp ships from easily out-running things they attack (preventing people they attack from finishing them off if they start to lose). I suspect this idea results from all the people that see M and L cores on radar when they get pirated, and fixes based on such limited information will only annoy everyone by slowing them down without actually solving the real problem. Most pvp ships I've seen were built on an M or L core to get access to the size-capped weapons, but were little more than thruster-packs with guns and an L shield and would have fit in to an S core's build volume. As such, they already weigh (relatively) next to nothing when compared to the stuff they are attacking, and will still be significantly faster than most anything they attack after NQ implements the mass-related speed cap. Because the goal at its most basic is to have the most fragile ships be the fastest, I would instead propose that a ship's top speed be capped by the size of shield generator it has equipped, thus preventing the fastest ships in the game from also fitting what is supposed to be a battleship's defensive hardware. Everyone would still be able to hit 30kkph in a ship with no shields (or possibly with only an xs shield), so people hauling stuff wont be annoyed by having to spend twice as long making their trips if they choose, it wouldn't break immersion quite as hard as capping speed just by weight, and it would help improve the overall balance of pvp by making combat ships choose between speed or defense. On a side note: If a shield-based speed cap is implemented, the act of placing a shield on a moving construct in build mode needs to be disabled to prevent potential exploits. It may also be necessary to cap the speed of ships serving as carriers for a ship with shields to likewise prevent exploits. Any topic-relevant thoughts or criticisms?
  14. This whole wipe/no wipe thing is just absurd, and fundamentally seems to revolve around a few things: 1) New players trying to get good hexes. -If you are here to champion having a monthly wipe so new players always have access to market-side hexes and t5 hexes and the like, please say so. For the rest of you, please explain to me how having just 1 more wipe is going to allow new players access to the best hexes after people have a month or two to claim them all again. Everyone can see where the markets are, if someone wants to claim a market-adjacent tile, they don't need to scan it don't, they'll just take it. I can solo-run 19 scanners at a time off an S core quite easily. Setup, scan, takedown, move to the next area to scan, all in less than 30 mins per cycle. I am not any sort of scan-maniac, I play with guys that pull twice as many scans as I do in the same amount of time, and my org would gladly make good use of teamwork get us all those scanners asap. People won't claim all the best ore-tiles instantly, but give it a couple months and DU will be right back to where it is now for claimed hexes. 2) New players trying to compete in manufacturing. -If you are here to champion having a monthly wipe so new players always have the ability to compete in industry with their ability to manufacture things, please say so. For the rest of you, please explain to me how having just 1 more wipe is going to allow new players to compete in the market a month and a half after the wipe when some org's industrial-guys have gone and collectively maxed their industrial skills again while their non-indy guys have gone and amassed the wealth to rebuild their mega-factory. 3) New players trying to compete with money/resources. -If you are here to champion having a weekly wipe so new players always have the ability to compete in the market with their available resources, please say so. For the rest of you, please explain how a new player will be able to compete monetarily a day after the wipe when an org of old players have used their pre-existing knowledge of the game's mechanics to blow through the tutorials to collect all the money there, then combined it all to slap together a factory for territory scanners, claim/mining units, and group mission-haulers? I was on Symeon 4 hours after beta was live (delayed by download speed), while new people were still trying to get the hang of stopping their speeder without crashing on Alioth. My org was making hauling runs between the different planets on day 2 while the new players were still trying to get their constructs to fly. This isn't WoW, the learning curve will cripple a new guy's ability to compete with old players no matter how often you wipe. It may technically take a few months to max certain skills, but it isn't hard for experienced players working together to divide the work when trying to get something done. And while it will take solo players a bit to get back to where they are now, this is an MMO, and there are in fact large groups of people out there that trust and cooperate with each other, and they will always out-pace all the new guys. ... Oh, and... 4) Old players with exploit-money. NQ should have done something about this a while ago back when they were dealing with said exploits, but now its had too much time to get distributed. That said, if you seriously think we need to nuke the entire universe and take out all the non-exploiter's stuff alongside the exploiter's stuff to get rid of some extra cash... Well, that debate tends to circle around to point 3 above, so I'm just going to point you back to it. We'll lose old players if the game wipes, people don't like getting punished for someone else's transgressions, especially if they didn't actually have a way to prevent the transgressor from doing what they did. But in spite of that we wont lose all the old players, someone will still have more money than the new guys, and someone will still be upset that conservation of ninjutsu doesn't apply in a way that lets their new solo-ness effectively compete with a large old org. Fair's a place where you get cotton-candy. DU's a place where limitless extractable resources, lots of cooperation, and time lets your org buy a moon while all the solos, casuals, and newbs wonder how you ever got that kind of money. If you really want to help the new guys, figure out how to improve the FTUE in a way that doesn't risk giving the game a reputation for pressing the reset button like a child flipping the game-board because they were losing. "Hard" is already enough to turn off a fair number of people in this age of "easy-is-too-hard gamers". "Randomly deletes all your work" is not something a game that wants to attract people should be known for.
  15. If it were done by having large sheets/areas of transition where you hit the access point on one side and it moved you to a random location next to the connected sheet/area on the other side then it wouldn't be as bad as moving a planet's worth of voxel, but that would still be an egregious amount of work for next to no return.
  16. Ah, a sensible desire, though part of the issue there results from people being uncreative in their engine placement... Larger engine elements or this suggested multi-engine to a single thruster idea would both help.
  17. Stasis weapons are used to reduce the maximum velocity of targeted ships, a measure towards bringing better balance to PvP. Big armored ships with powerful space engines will no longer have the advantage that allowed them to easily escape more agile smaller designs. I appreciate you listening to the community on this, it will help bring some much needed complexity to pvp. We are also altering the behavior around a construct’s maximum speed. Constructs’ mass will now impact their speed; the heavier the ship, the less its maximum speed will be. Thus, smaller ships will be able to catch up bigger ones despite the latter having bigger engines than the former. Barring a truly absurd speed-mass line (like stopping 1kt or heavier ships from exceeding 20kkph) this seems near pointless. Most of the M and L cores I've seen for pvp were effectively fly-weight given the sizes of their cores. The ships it sounded like this was meant to nerf have this bad habit of functionally being 4-10 engines with a fuel tank, a shield, guns, and a control chair, so they tend to be lighter than they stuff they are out-accelerating anyways. Sure, it will help pirates catch haulers out in deep space without needing those haulers to be in a warp-pipe, but it wasn't exactly something they needed help in or that will improve their returns by much. Not being spotted has always been a far more effective way to avoid pirates than hitting top speed. You'd probably solve the issue more effectively (and in a way that brakes science-immersion less) by capping top speed to shield-size. Unfortunately, no, M core constructs do not have a smaller cross-section. There is no minimum size mechanic for cores, hence why people keep seeing M or L cores on their radar when they get attacked, but if they get a good look at their attackers they realize most of 'em would fit on an S core and only have M or L to get at the weapons. Capping shields to core size (without other changes) will just result in M weapons and an L shield on an L core that would fit in to an S space. They probably need to add in a power/heat mechanic if they want to try an bump up cross-sections, using it to get people to put big solar-panels/radiators on a ship's exterior as would be appropriate to handle their giant engines/shields/weapons. Amusingly enough, the maximum speed of a thruster's exhaust in real life does not determine that thruster's top speed, only the speed at which it can accelerate. The explosion propelling the thruster is not a fixed point in space, but rather a physical thing with mass that is itself moving while it pushes the associated thruster forward. Its essentially like the "throwing a ball while standing an the bed of a moving truck" thing, except your thrusters are (hopefully) accelerating for longer than just the second it takes someone to throw a ball.
  18. If you are talking about something like "instances" where the planet exists in its own separate pocket-universe and just somehow having the access point for the instance being some invisible moving sphere with a planet-model in the middle, it would still require an immense amount of work even if you were just planning on putting an indestructible bubble around each planet with only a few access points (that would probably operate like the landing-pads in Elite Dangerous). Its a cool idea, but it just isn't practical for this kind of game at this point in time.
  19. Millions of voxels would be relatively easy, a single L core has more than 133 million voxels in volume (and NQ is working on keeping people using such numbers from breaking network-connection related things). Even if planetary voxels are ten times as large as construct voxels the number of them on a planet will still dwarf the voxel count on a construct by several orders of magnitude. As for not loading the entire universe at once and just functionally showing you a colored sphere, the game already does that (if your connection is bad enough it wont always load distant planets properly, and the unusual visuals that result look really cool). Depending on your connection-quality you can watch it load the different spheres and even catch when it switches to voxel. At a distance the game wont care, the problems would result from getting up close enough to the planets while they are moving to fully load the voxel, up close it would be constantly trying to recalculate an absurd number of points, and solving that would require such an immense amount of work for such a relatively small return as to make it wildly impractical.
  20. You seem to misunderstand what would be loading the system down. Adjusting GPS coordinates for someone's game to find a single moving point isn't hard, the game already does that for friends that lock each other's locations to find each other. The problem comes when you need to adjust the coordinates for every single voxel a planet is made out of (and without causing desynchronization between the clients and the server). It isn't impossible, and again it is a cool idea and I want it, but it would not be worth the effort required to make it happen.
  21. It would be more accurate to call what we have now "thrusters" instead of engines, but I don't see why you'd want to make them require an exhaust-element. Could you please explain the purpose/advantages to such?
  22. A proper hybrid engine like that would be cool, and quite useful in cutting down how many links some things need, but I suspect we will be stuck just using rockets for that for quite some time to come.
  23. See, this is a useful contribution to the conversation, you have identified what you consider to be an issue with the initial suggestion. So, do you have any suggestions on how to make this more balanced for all players? If you don't and you just think that this specific planet can't be made appropriately balanced for all players, then say so, as that would be valid input as well. (Note: a universal "security status" to try and penalize pvp players does not balance this planet, as such would be a game-wide effect instead of only effecting this planet's use, the objective of the thread is to balance this specific suggested planet, not to try and alter the entire universe. Likewise taxing people more for using this planet is not balance as that just encourages people to not use the planet at all. )
  24. I recognize that technically if you drive all the pvp players from the game then anyone who remains will have an easier time avoiding said pvp players. It is however worth noting that NQ almost certainly isn't going to try and drive off all the pvp players just because you don't like them, because the pvp community collectively pays for more subscriptions than you do, and driving them off to make life easier for the non-pvp players would be akin to trying to cure sinus congestion with thermite. As far as whether or not it would be harder for everyone if they couldn't fly and shoot at the same time, solo pvp would be limited to the lowest damage weapons, requiring them to fight for that much longer to win against a target, while haulers and mission-runners would would lose access to the advantage longer-range guns would provide them over what are soon likely to be much faster pirate opponents.
  25. ...Are you attempting to preempt your own argument? This thread is on tax-free planets, not pvp. I suggested pvp as a balance option because I believe it to be the best option, but that has not changed this thread's purpose from the discussion of tax-free planets to a discussion of pvp. If you want to discuss your ideas for punishing pvp players, go start a thread for them. If you have anything to contribute to the discussion of the topic specifically of tax-free planets and how to make them a balanced part of the game, then post that here. Posts on pvp-related security status or other similar mechanics that are not directly related to making a tax-free planet a balanced part of the game do not belong on this thread.
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