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Dupont

Alpha Tester
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  1. I almost forgot to say this: A game need to be consistent in it's core concept. For a space battle game, that implies lots of ships and lots of weapons fire. The building portion of DU is pretty good, but that's not enough for me personally. At any rate my focus here is on the space battle part of it. There is a fundamental impedance mismatch going on. __gameloop__ __Creation__ ___Destruction___ ___time and effort to recover loss___ ___metaphor___ type A low cost high loss of ships low - just more output from a production line ants type B high cost low loss to ship low - no mining just to play again Ferrari racing DU very high cost very high loss high - endless mining to replace voxels and elements rich teenager driving a Ferrari See the problem? Patch 0.23 completely reversed the creation side of the equation coupled with limited lifetimes of components. Quality of life sank by an order of magnitude.
  2. As I was scouring the internet to see what essential element DU is missing, I ran across Valheim. Wow, it is so much fun. Then I started thinking why? I believe the answer to fun is the ratio of simplicity of use vs. the depth of the world itself. Now, that definitely doesn't mean that a game should be simple, no not at all. What I found was that for everything that you do, every decision you have to make, every task.. the world gives back much more. When the behavior of the world around you is novel, interesting, and most of all surprising, it gets fun. This requires AI, which for some reason JC stays away from. If it can't be in animals, then at least have it in non-living things. For example, in Valheim when you chop down a tree it can fall on you and injure or kill you if you don't get out of the way. Also if you build a campfire inside your home without ventilation, you get smoked out and take smoke inhalation damage. Now, that's depth. Depth is when your choices have implications and consequences. The world reacts to you in some way to acknowledge your existence. Depth for mining? - pollution, depth for schematics? - research to tweak stats. Depth to overbuilding? - collapse of structures. Quality of life: Good quality of life is when things go smooth with the mechanics of the game towards your goals. Poor quality of life is dealing with irrelevant roadblocks over and over again. I am not talking about in-game challenges but rather like trying to read a book when the person next to you is farting. Its distracting and takes away from the experience. _______ UI complexity World Behavioral Depth Quality of Life DU high low low Valheim low high high I really like DU and probably have spent thousands of hours on it. I sure hope they can right the ship. As I was writing this, my computer restarted on its own. This tends to happen within 10 minutes of logging out of DU. So now I have to fully shut down the computer after a DU session to clear it (every time). I upgraded my graphics drivers, etc. Example of quality of life that's not so great. I don't think I will log in anymore for a while until that is fixed at least.
  3. Feels like a memory leak in the graphics card code to me. If I have had DU running, my computer needs a full shutdown to clear it within 5 minutes of exiting. Rebooting the operating system without power cut to the graphics card isn't enough. Yeah, doesn't happen with other graphics intensive games. Graphics card coding is very hard, and debugging it is even harder. Might be a while before they fix this...
  4. I would go for that if I could keep all my expensive blueprints that I have spent countless hours mining for. And talent points.
  5. If they wiped out all my hard work in mining and construction, I would first go ballistic then give up completely. Once trust is broken like that it can never be regained. The existing player base would move on to try other games, perhaps Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous, or No Man's Sky has matured a bit since I last tried them. Any new players just won't have the same vision to build the amazing building cities, spaceports and giant ships. New players would be entering a barren landscape and the vision would never take hold the same way it did for the early players. Even magic blueprints would require a lot of work to put everything back together. No, any fairness to right the wrongs will have to be done moving forward. There is no going back.
  6. The problem is simple. The gameplay has no purpose right now. Even in a sandbox survival game you have to work to survive and overcome interesting challenges. We don't even have that. Gimmicks like esoteric puzzles, "wrecks", and mission systems for the handful of people who have money to burn (from market mishaps) don't fool anyone and are not sustainable for most. That's just more window dressing, no meat there. Comradery, Accomplishment, and Discovery is what is needed.
  7. I, for one, am eager to see the details of your thoughts. Sounds intriguing so far.
  8. lol! , no been around since before alpha 2.0, just a closet optimist. They did come through for mining UI and market UI improvements, but that was a while ago.
  9. I can only hope NQ is doing something really cool behind closed doors, and we just haven't seen it yet. That's my only hope. If I was to consider the game as it is right now, I think I would cry for all the time I have invested.
  10. oh....yeah. That's a really good point. Hmm, where to get that persistent compute power...
  11. I agree that if shooting AI ships was the only activity it wouldn't be that much fun. Where I was going was to have AI ships defend some of the great asteroid mining spots as a baseline. It would be as if a rival organization found those asteroids and is defending them. The PvP aspect kicks in when one organization wants a particular mining spot held by other human players. The mining areas need to have a very wide dynamic range of desirability. A few of the areas need to have enough ore to warrant defending it for a month or more. The nomadic nature of surface tile mining won't work for PvP. Not enough ore in any one tile to justify the cost of defending it, as it is much easier to get 5 people to come in a strip mine it for a few hours, then the tile is done. I totally agree that human to human medium and large scale battles is the way to go, but we need a training ground and somewhere to practice between those rare battles.
  12. It seems to me that one of the underlying assumptions of the game design is that players are available 8 hours a day, every day. Also, It is clear that there is a lack of demand in the markets, many items just sit there for weeks. The only way I can think of to get the markets moving again is to have a lot more space combat with something to fight for, not just for sport. The idea of "combat on demand" is either limited to occasional weekend events or trying to steal from and murder some poor guy in a transport ship (which is not real combat). So how to find more opportunities for real combat? AI bots. Use the exact same PvP mechanics that are in the game and planned to be in the game, but controlled by some AI. This way I can get my fix of combat anytime I log on. I don't want to be a pirate, but I do want to try out new tactics and combat ship designs when I have an hour or two to spare.
  13. If NQ enacts poetic justice once in a while, it would go a long way towards people thinking twice about abusing an obvious exploit. Otherwise its a free-for-all and credibility of the game drops to near zero. Credibility of game integrity is very important for a game in which people decide to invest months of effort.
  14. Well then you will end up paying the same amount for that schematic as everyone else. If you really need it then keep it and use it. If you purchased it for making illegal profit and laundered it at a discount then oh well. You either get to pay off the discount or stop using that account. If you are truly in the business of buying and selling schematics then you should be aware of the prices. Your argument is kinda weak.
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