Dupont
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Posts posted by Dupont
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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 highI 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.
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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... -
3 hours ago, Verliezer said:
They don't have to wipe at all.
Just create a new solar system with a new economy (and currency and ores, etc) where players can go to through stargates (or wormholes kinda things). When traveling through stargates you can not tak ephysical stuff with you (just an idea). Players then can choose where they want to 'live' or play the game :).
you basically have unlimited options in a new solar system (exactly the same as with a reset) without anybody has to loose a thing (if you choose to because you can always stay behind).
I would go for that if I could keep all my expensive blueprints that I have spent countless hours mining for. And talent points.
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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.
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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.
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1 hour ago, teso91 said:
Work in progress....
This will prob take a day or two to fully get all my information here. Thanks for listening.I, for one, am eager to see the details of your thoughts. Sounds intriguing so far.
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5 hours ago, SirJohn85 said:
...you seem to be new, can that be?
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.
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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.
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2 hours ago, Daphne Jones said:
Combat needs to be drastically improved before subjecting all players too it, but, yes, some NPC pirates, preferable in non-PVP areas would be fun once combat works right.
But I don't think DU's design would allow it because the physics runs in the client and NPCs have no client. And NQ would need a much larger budget to build that game.
oh....yeah. That's a really good point. Hmm, where to get that persistent compute power...
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5 hours ago, Xennial said:
... We can slowly start the process then of just removing the whole player made , player run concept from the game because like every other game out there it will just come down to loot tables.
No thanks. If territory wars, and the fighting over asteroids does not create enough roll over in the economy they can always just add wear and tear to elements so they simply must be replaced as they are used over X time.
Lets not dress up another call for "I need something to shoot to be entertained, and a simply kill X get Y game mechanic to be happy" as somehow improving market demand.
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.
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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.
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5 minutes ago, blazemonger said:
The question here is how will NQ prevent a mission giver from trolling the mission taker and still give a low score on a perfectly executed mission, effectively lowering the chances for the mission taker to get new missions?
Simple, you need a rating system for raters.
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I'm waiting for the Courts & Lawyers module. I can only imagine the "yes, I did it" vs. "no, you didn't" fights. Now, there's a version of PvP that requires no mining.
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Just now, Haku0814 said:
Mind you, my play time is mine, mine along, who the heck should have shiz to give about wtf I'm doing, if I'm cheat or otherwise...
Perhaps a multiplayer game isn't for you then?
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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.
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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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I believe the easiest, cleanest, and painless (for the innocent) way to deal with the "low cost" schematic debacle is to simply reverse the transactions from the market logs.
For everyone that purchased an affected schematic during the time when they were 1/100 of their normal price, simply subtract 99% of the normal price from their account. If the person still has that schematic, then they can sell it on the open market.
If they don't have the money in that account anymore due to money laundering, then it should be allowed to go negative so they can work off their greed.
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Not clear on why you need one or the other. You can have both easily. It's simple to add PvE - just plug in AI bots to the mechanics of PvP in places like asteroid belts.
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1 hour ago, Aaron Cain said:
Yep and exactly therefor it is kinda unforgiving to let this go by with a simple, we do nothing.
If a select few made indeed 200Billion Quanta over this per individual, Then with nothing done we can really just stop playing or pretending this is fair.
Simply, there is no way in DU to make up for this and as in normal life the rich will become richer and the poor will stay poor. Its not just a small handout, Hell if i get 200 Billion today in DU i cannot only build what i like i can Own the place. just needs some strategic deployments and some good market buyings. And do nothing radical, just let the cash grow and start owning stuff and Territories.
This indeed does not kill the market, it kills the foundation of DU. Build civilization just became Own civilization
I'm sure they have logs of the transactions. All they need to do is subtract the balance from the account that bought it. If the quanta balance goes negative, oh well. That account's owner will have that wealth somewhere. If they greedily sold it away at a discount then it's their problem. They can either work off their greed or self-ban their own account. Seems like poetic justice in my opinion.
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I don't think they fully understand the implications of this boneheaded maneuver. No industrialist is going to spend any more money on expensive schematics until the damage is known. Completely ridiculous for me to spend 90 million on setting up a pipeline just to compete against someone who can do it almost for free.
I have no choice but to wait a month or two for the markets to settle and if I keep playing just to hoard up my cash until then. When all industrialists do that, the shortage of elements that people are complaining about will just get worse (except for the ones with "free" schematics). If people can't buy the stuff they need, then they quit too. The cascade effect of this is really pretty bad. JC should be pissed, as his vision for the post 0.23 economy just got flushed down the toilet.- Xntryk1, qwertyboom and hdparm
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If they were smart, then every schematic purchased would have a timestamp and ID of the purchase event. That way it would be very easy to pick out a window of time that a schematic has changed hands. I can't imagine that anyone would try to implement an economy that is so important to the game without double-entry bookkeeping.
Any database developer that knows SQL could have identified the faulty transactions with an hour or two of labor. Really, there is no excuse not to invalidate those transactions or drop a negative balance on those accounts if the money is gone.
No need for a rollback. Just a few hours of following the money trail. Seems like that would be worth keeping the trust of many players, wouldn't you say?
At least tell us which schematics and how many were purchased for almost free so the poor fools that are industrialists won't spend the money on those. Tell us which elements are tainted so we don't end up competing against somebody that has 100x more industrial capacity to build them. Or just take those schematics off the market. Do something!
I just spent the last two hours watching videos of upcoming space MMO's for 2021 on youtube. The DU concept still could have the best future, now if NQ could only stop screwing up..
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OMG... All that agony and players lost to the debacle of patch 0.23. All for nothing....
One careless NQ person really messed up the game bad. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
Now that there are hundreds (thousands?) of super expensive schematics in circulation there is absolutely no point in investing the time and energy to buy schematics anymore. By the way, why is there a pool of 2 million schematics available for a 47 million quanta schematic??
Isn't the whole point of the high schematic prices to limit how many factories can make an element? Then why have 2 million of that schematic available? If they had 10 sell orders each, then this massive blunder could have had limited damage.
I just spend two weeks of grinding T1 ore to buy something that is now worthless. An expensive schematic is supposed to be like a patent, it is supposed to limit your competition. You pay the extra cost for limiting the population of your industrial competitors. Now, there is no point in being an industrialist for months until the economic dust settles.
Why do I feel like I am in an abusive relationship? Perhaps I need to take up some other vice like drinking or start dating a really large mean woman with two teeth.
- Mornington and HangerHangar
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12 hours ago, Detroitdregs said:
but she’s moved on and doesn’t trust NQ’s ability to understand the consequences of their decision or how to achieve their vision
Yeah, there doesn't seem to be much consideration from NQ of the time and energy people have invested into building up their assets and estate. When you betray that trust, many people never come back because it can easily happen again. If you lent your car to a friend and he trashes it and doesn't even apologize, are you likely to loan them your car again?
If they spent a little bit of extra effort into thinking of how to preserve people's existing infrastructure, and make sweeping changes only for new things (like in the new star system), then players would not have been so alienated.
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It's an easy thing to happen for game developers in general. They live, breathe, eat and sleep in that universe so they start thinking that everyone else playing does too.
In the attempt to be as realistic as possible, the game design makes certain false assumptions. For example in real life, if you are faced with challenges you can't just quit and do something else, so you are pretty much a captive audience to reality. In a game that isn't the case and you can easily walk away.
Game development requires a keen understanding of how much hassle is too much. At what point does the pain overcome the fun? Violations of trust lowers that inflection point quite a bit. -
1 hour ago, Daphne Jones said:
... that's a problem with the suppliers' confidence.
Now I understand. Thank you. Yes, I agree with you on that for sure.
At the moment, I am personally deciding if I want to put a 10 million quanta element on the market - the tax and storage costs aren't free if it doesn't sell.
The relationship between UI, world depth, and quality of life
in General Discussions
Posted
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.