Taelessael

A new map is already on NQ's to do list for the next big patch. As for the idea in general... -It can't be fuel-free. We'd need some kind of substantial cost (fuel) associated with its use. -It shouldn't be as fast as warp. Quick-travel is fine, but the speed of warp is already pushing it a bit too hard given the low cost, and if you make it cost more than warp then nobody will use it anyways.. -It shouldn't allow mission packages to be moved. Part of not being able to warp packages is because it would allow people to make mission runs too quickly, and part of it is so that pirates can have targets. Much as I wouldn't mind the same or more cash faster with fewer Legion and Anarchy ships to avoid, the pirates do need to be able to play too. -It can't just have 1 point of contest in pvp space. Having only a single point of contest for pvp players would just allow the org/alliance with the biggest navy to concentrate all their forces at one spot, destroying smaller competitors that would try to attack said locations. Multiple points of contest (such as relay stations that need defending along the travel route in pvp space) would allow smaller groups to try and do their thing without having to first fight through the entire navy of a much larger org all at once.

People are using scripts and radar to pirate and calculate trajectories, warping to a beacon while someone with that script was watching you would almost certainly lose you the beacon if you didn't move it immediately.

An amusing thought, but in all likelihood a tax-free planet's method of stopping people from just claiming all the hexes would be territory warfare and atmo-pvp. If they do want to throw in atmo pvp though, then I'm all for it.

The issue is less one of fearing armed haulers and more one of a pvp favoring player that has been in so many arguments with players that think pvp should be banned that their first reflex to someone asking for a "counter to pvp" is to assume that person is the stereotypical care-bear trying to get a "turn pvp off button". Everyone that believes pvp should be a part of this game also generally agrees that it needs to be more complex, that non-conventional combat needs to be a thing, and that for any given offense there needs to be a counter (that isn't just a larger amount of that same offense). If NQ were to increase radar range, then for balance reasons they also need to increase weapon range, engine output, and (as you suggested) maximum non-warp speed. This would in turn require some manner of clamp-down on missions so as to prevent runners like myself from going ham and destroying the economy, such as a cap on how many Aphelia missions can be run in a day (perhaps via a point-system relative to the package-size or mission payout so as to avoid crippling newer players that run a greater number of the smaller missions). It would also necessitate an increase in the distance required to travel to reach asteroids to stop people from burning those all up too quickly. I would very much approve of this. Stealth mechanics are cool, but they need to be a lot more involved than that, and given desync and potential scripting exploits I'd advise putting mechanics like this on the back burner until we have more practical things like e-war and heat/power management dialed in properly. I like the idea of having the ability to cyno a fleet in, but the game is not at all big enough yet to allow that degree of force-projection, particularly since pirates would be using it too as a preemptive measure in preparation for their target potentially doing the same. It would annihilate the small orgs. Capping shield size to core size will do the exact same thing as it did when they capped weapons to core size: it will raise the price of L cores and make anyone that can afford it use them just to have access to the size capped items while still building to more or less S-core volume. What they need to do in this area is to remove the cap to weapon-sizes, and then do as you suggest in the second part and just implement some kind of power/heat system so that if people want something big they need to have the appropriate power and/or cooling systems to make use of it. Altering the CCS curve to buff the use of armor on larger ships as many here have suggested also wouldn't hurt.

Then why did you bring up the suggestion to introduce it to pvp? And when you are done explaining that, did you read the first sentence of my post? Or only the second?

I admit I don't have a warp-beacon and an alt to test with at the moment, but based on a friendly beacon I occasionally warp to I am fairly certain you can do that already, the permissions just take time to propagate through the rest of the game.

Most experienced pilots wont go pirating in a battleship, they wouldn't be fast enough to catch anything. Typically they use interceptors that are protected with an L shield and some wet tissue-paper. If you armor your hauler up, match the interceptor's weapons, and keep them in your sights, then your hauler will in all likeliness out-last the interceptor in a slug-out. Note: cross-sections are still important, don't neglect them when designing a battle-hauler. There are no guarantees, only statistical probabilities. Statistically, if you avoid the pipe, and watch your radar (atmo and space), and change the direction you are going toward to avoid the pipe after your radar is clear of contacts, then you will avoid pvp 99% of the time (I run pvp-space missions all the time, never lost a ship, only times I've even been shot is when I was being lazy about avoiding pirates). Stealth is cool, we all want that, and your decoys are your buddies just hopping in to something and flying around for 10 min to distract the pirates while you clear the pipes, they don't need to follow you the whole trip, the chances of being caught between planets when flying a dozen or so SU totally clear of all pipes after making sure nobody saw which direction you were going in order to clear the pipe are statistically so low that you are far more likely to be insided by someone you thought was a friend/ally. The pirates can and will use all the same hardware you have access to, and most of 'em wont have an issue bringing an extra guy along to fit a full rack of stasis guns on a chair (if that's a thing) to eat in to your speed just as much as you eat in to theirs.

These are called transfer units, they already exist for static and space core constructs. Given the Tardis-level storage that ammunition containers achieve, and the relative caps on your target's hp resulting from ccs and shields, you may find it most practical to just have 1 ammo can per gun.

@blazemonger There are in fact plenty of anti-pvp players. Unfortunately I've gotten in to arguments with them often enough that the moment someone says they need a "counter to pvp" it is something I've just come to assume. As regards pursuing an objective that is itself in pvp space, escorts, guns, and scouts are still solutions for that. If one wishes to pursue such objectives solo then there are more involved strategies for that too, but old-school mining generally makes me hate myself, so I lack enough personal data points with which to base a "you will avoid pvp % of time" claim. We can talk about those strategies as well in discord if you'd like, though as they involve trying to ninja something that is supposed to be a pvp objective, odds are that there will be much higher risk to it. A significant part of pvp-areas is risking being attacked, and planning/equipping accordingly. You don't leave your weapons behind while entering an area you are going to need them in. Haulers can fly heavy, they can fit more armor under their shields than an interceptor can, and so are capable of winning that fight if they bring the same firepower. If you can't bring the same firepower then you need to properly out-smart them, you need a plan ahead of time to ensure your survival. @Shreddder @VandelayIndustries That is indeed just me tagging in NQ to try and get their attention, they didn't say that themselves. AvA is tricky, you can more or less work it on the ground at avatar-run-speed, but all the client-side stuff makes it exponentially harder to do as velocity increases. At only 3600kph we are talking about just over a tenth of a second of desync being the difference between landing on a maximum-size L-core or missing it entirely. One must also contend with finding a way to both allow a hostile to "dock" to a ship while preventing people at large from building spatulas with which to abduct constructs from the safe-zone. No mistakes, it is a cool feature and I want it, but I find perfecting CvC to be a more practical goal.

Right... where to start... @NQ-Wanderer : A bit more info on the nature of how the pvp rebalance / speed changes / stasis weapons / alien cores would allow players to provide feedback and or points of view on things that you may not have thought of. Sooner rather than later may subsequently make any potentially required changes of plan a bit less short-notice on the devs and less likely to outrage the player-base if you missed something big. @The anti-pvp players: I am a mission-runner, I have run well over 100 missions solo in pvp space in a ship that wont win against a purpose-built pvp ship, never lost a ship, only been shot at twice (both relatively recent, both when I was being lazy about avoiding pirates). -You can just watch radar and fly clear of the pipe, it isn't hard, you can avoid pvp entirely about 99% of the time doing this. -Your cargo-heavy hauler will never outrun a purpose-built interceptor regardless of speed-caps. -You can typically fit heavier than an interceptor and rely on your combined shield/hull hp to win the fight if you match their weapons. -Your requested "security status" attribute would be more quickly achievable by banding together to put up a watch-list/bounty-board for the people/ships that attack you. -If you don't want to use weapons, or make friends with/hire an escort or scout, or put in the 10 min of flying and maneuvering and watching radar to go around the pirates, or pay for the cells to warp past them, and still think you deserve the rewards of flying through pvp space without substantial risk of being a pvp target, you may need to reconsider what you expect from an area the player-base at large refers to as "pvp-space". -If you wish to discuss methods to avoid/overcome pirates in pvp space with me then DM me on discord and I will answer when I can, but don't expect a "push button to disable pvp" answer, you must expend some level or both time and resources, and everyone gets unlucky once in a while.

In so far as elements just touching, that is what I am referring to when I say NQ is working on it. Touching and stacking (clipping things in to each other) are two different things, I know that, you know that, NQ knows that, but the system to detect it is still imperfect, so NQ is still working on it. In the end it should only go off when things are inside one another. As far as buried elements goes... When NQ accidentally dropped the airbrake-patch on the pts, I was flying a ship that made use of internal-brakes. I liked that ship, I thought it had a good retro-look to it, but when I realized it wasn't going to work any more I took a print I could toss in a museum and built a new ship that did near just as well (or better) in all the same areas, and didn't make use of internal brakes. I like the new ship, I think it looks good, and if NQ drops a patch that makes it obsolete then I will toss it in a museum next to the old one and design another. The real issue is that NQ should have fixed it sooner, but I still stand by my statement. People have known certain elements would eventually need to be on the outside since before beta launched, we cant start making exceptions for old players, it would just get people to pre-emptively deploy stuff abusing old mechanics before it got patched and come across as letting old players continue to use exploits. This is a game where people know rules and requirements are still going to be added, when they change we will need to adapt our designs or come up with new ones. So long as the rules updates are reasonable and we are given fair warning of their impending implementation, we should have little issue admiring the old as stationary art while still producing new art to fly.

If you have a spy amongst your asteroid-mining group, you wont slow them down much by stopping someone else from locking them, they could quite easily just tell the people they are feeding info to what rock you are at, and let them dsat it down, or how far they are from 4 planets so that it can be easily triangulated. Also, people both fly things larger than XS with radar all the time, and can fit cores larger than XS along with a radar and chair in their pack. If you have a spy issue, then you need to run operations in a way that lets you figure them out. Also, don't forget that pirates don't need the rock's exact position, if they can see that it was just discovered then they can opt to track it down themselves the same way you did before the whole universe gets its gps.

The CPU issue isn't an issue with NQ not assigning you enough cpu. The game runs mostly client-side, meaning the cpu-overload is happening on your computer, not their servers.

The primary issue with this suggestion would be the ships that already exist with stacked elements. If people know that existing ships using an exploit will get to keep them after nobody else can build them, then it will strongly incentivize the deployment of as many such ships as possible before a patch prevents further such deployments, thus resulting in both exploiters still having their exploits, and non-exploiters thinking that NQ is just allowing exploits "for older players only". A new element that cant be deployed on the old ships would help some, but short of some massive advantages it isn't going to solve the problem. Element Collision obviously needs work, and they are working on it, but people have known since before beta that element stacking and internal brakes weren't going to last. Having to adapt to new rules is part of playing a game before full release. Complaints and criticisms are needed because they tell NQ where improvements can be made, but everyone needs to be playing by the same set of rules, we can't start making exceptions just because someone refused to recognize that things would change and wants to throw a tantrum. As for the "ugly elements" argument... It would be more practical to try for a realistic outcome, like trying to get skins and variant elements, with the understanding that the program will ultimately have some limitations somewhere and that players will need to work with those limits.

It is already just shy of free ore, having to recalibrate once or twice a week isn't that bad, especially since you need to go periodically collect all the ore anyways. If they want to tweak it any further then I'd just advise increasing both the ore per hex and the tax per hex so as to still have the same output from the same number of mining units for the same average in taxes, but spread across fewer cores and requiring fewer hexes overall. Need to leave room for the new players, and encourage cooperative play (why have allies/orgs claim sub-optimal tiles if you can already pick up enough of the best ones solo to get enough adjacency bonuses?)

This would be epic, and I would love it, and it would take an enormous amount of coding for a relatively low priority feature that would annoy a lot of people with navigational issues stemming from things like the coriolis effect. No mistakes, I want this feature, but it would be way too much work for far too little return at this point in time.

NQ has been reducing the effectiveness of defense for a while now, too much defense makes the pvp-side of the game run irritatingly slow (hour long 1v1 cubes...) while also bogging the server down with all the data it needs to pass around during fleet engagements. Where they are right now isn't bad, but it would be nice if there was some variation (heat, power, e-war, shield-variants, shield skills). That said, the number of weapons on a ship is the result of a few skills and how many gunners the ship has available, and capping that arbitrarily isn't going to solve your problem. An arbitrary cap on total weapons on a ship is going to annoy the pvp players, push people toward solo-play in an mmo, and get you shot at with whatever the new "best" is by the same number of people spread across that many more ships. If you are having problems with pirates, make some friends that can keep an eye out, or hire an escourt, or build a ship around the speed and defense you need to escape, or just outsmart them.

Back when beta started, hit-an-run was a reasonable combat style, as was building to try and burn through a target's armor or cripple its external elements with an up-close opening salvo... ...Now we have shields... Combat has shifted in to a game of damage output over time and range-control. -A ship with rails will land shots at even the longest ranges, but has the lowest sustained damage, -A ship with cannons needs to get up close to land its shots, but does the most damage over time, -A ship with lasers offers a solid middle-ground between range and sustained damage, -A ship with missiles looks cool, but it isn't going to win a fight unless they're "punching down" and firing at a target they'd have beaten regardless of weapon choice. Yes, a missile-ship can fire more or less backwards, but by the time it's gotten close enough to land a shot the laser and cannon ships have either come to a stop so they can put all their effort in to just tracking it and letting their superior dps win them the battle, or they've accelerated to a speed such that the missile ship cant manage quick maneuvers, and are now drifting while putting all their effort in to tracking it, and still letting their superior dps win them the battle. Make no mistake, I don't want an uber-weapon, they very much need to not be able to win every fight, but their only win conditions shouldn't be "the opposing pilot is incompetent" or "couldn't lose the fight regardless of weapon choice". As such I'd like to propose a few options. 1) Boost the damage: If the weapon's range is to remain as egregiously short as it is, increase its sustained dps accordingly. Close-range weapons in a game really shouldn't be matched or exceeded in damage output by longer range weapons when being used in close range. 2) Boost the range: If the weapon's sustained damage output is to remain where it is, increase its range so that it isn't being hopelessly out-ranged by weapons that also exceed its sustained dps. 3) Make them weird: If the weapon's damage and range must remain as they are, then let them do something unusual, like having the ability to use any of the 4 types of damage instead of just being locked to 2. What do you all think, I'm not just missing something here, am I?

Thank you NQ for keeping us in the loop. Have you considered a system with which a legate or super legate could use the construct list to see elements/materials on any given org construct? It would assist them in making an informed decision as to what they should chose to remotely abandon in the event they found themselves needing to do so in order to cut the core count down before the random-abandon deadline. It might also help if org-constructs and private constructs had their own folders on the construct list (and if org constructs were separated in to sub-folders by org).

Broadly speaking, people generally dislike this kind of idea as it adds a level of inconvenient tedium to the game (I know nobody that enjoys having to take their car in for service). Your automatic service module and the destruction-timescale you propose would certainly help reduce the tedium, but the idea that someone could take some time off the game (say, for military deployment or disaster response) and find the first thing they need do when they return is patch all their stuff up will still annoy some people. It may also annoy casual players (on for a few hours each week) that they need to maintain their stuff just as much as someone who spends all their time playing (though if it didn't you'd risk incentivizing not playing to avoid decay). These increments... why? -Checking data on hundreds or thousands of elements (my s-core has 200+ functional elements) every 5 min of interaction will just generate unnecessary lag spikes and element data, particularly if the period it is meant to destroy items over is months long. -I still use scanners. -4 different fuels is a thing because it annoys a bunch of people in to quitting when they move to a new planet and discover they are stranded because they can't manufacture fuel, it has nothing to do with "price equalization". Fuel-sales bots weren't always a thing, but they are now more or less required to solve the issue given core placement mechanics. If you want to argue for the removal of X2-4 though now that the bots sell fuel, be my guest -Requiring months to push an item to the point of replacement is unlikely to substantially augment the market-need for items. -There is already a need for elements on other planets, it isn't just new people buying things. Player-driven economies have this habit of eventually picking one location to congregate in to. All the buyers go there because "everything is there" so they don't waste hours flying around to a dozen markets, all the sellers go there because all the buyers are there, the cycle snow-balls until finding equilibrium in a 7-11 vs Walmart kind of way, or something prevents people from going to the chosen market-congregating area. -Ore prices seem steady (if low, since everyone is auto-mining), and only ever seem to dip on weekends because of the asteroid rush, but they come right back a few days later.

I'd have to agree with this on all parts except for container contents. If containers are permitted to store things when players package them, then it could lead to some rather ornery bugs and/or exploits that are better just avoided entirely.

You either didn't read all of my post, or you misunderstand it. I am not proposing coming up with some new system for a bit more ore and then doubling taxes to balance it out, I am proposing doubling the number of mining units that can be deployed on a single hex, with taxes proportional to the number of extra MU. This shouldn't logically involve a lot of programing, just telling the ore-mapping system to double its current output number. One hex would give you twice as much ore doing the exact same thing you are doing now, and so cost twice as much.

An amusing concept, but tokens decay after an hour, though for that hour they are not on your list if I remember right. NQ could obviously tweak this, but I suspect we are more likely to get packaging or 1-click deconstructing first...

I greatly appreciate the re-adjustment of numbers, they should provide more than enough slots now for most individuals and groups. Thank you. I do however echo the sentiments of several others on this thread in the belief that an org's super-legate should be able to view who is donating core slots, how many any particular individual is donating, and should have the option available to them to prevent the use of slots from individuals they don't trust, and that either a "disassemble" or a "package" option should be available to allow constructs to be with a single click either rendered down in to their inventory parts, or stored in a compacted bp-like package with mass and volume equal to the mass and volume of their constituent parts and materials. I appreciate the idea, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that whoever came up with that phrase had at the time neither experience managing large numbers of children, nor an internet connection. Not to say that it is always wrong, it proves true often enough, but rather that one should never neglect to consider all possibilities, and make their decision after carefully considering all available evidence. In this instance though, I do suspect NQ goofed.

Many players have a dozen or more cores deployed just to operate mining units. This is because they have the skills to support a large number of MU, but can't effectively use more than a few of them on any single tile because the tile does not have sufficient ore available, and because a single core can't be placed at a tile-edge and used to operate mining units on multiple tiles. As such, in order to reduce the number of cores individual players use I propose that the both the ore available on all hexes and the taxes on those hexes be doubled, as this would allow players to concentrate their mining units on to a smaller number of cores, reducing the number of hexes and cores they'd need while still maintaining the current balance of taxes to ore.