Dupont

Another important factor related to this is the lack of economic growth. PvP is the icing on the cake, but cannot be the sole core of the economy for the following reason:
 
The difference between a PUSH economy and a PULL economy.
 
In a PUSH economy:   When overall wealth comes from the lowest/first activity of the value chain, anything that follows it  along the creation chain is a luxury (meaning not a necessity)
                                        Thus, demand for complex goods happens only where there is excess capital and can be afforded.
 
In a PULL economy: The last link in the production chain is vital to the survival and profit of the main activities. In this case, there is a much larger demand pool because the entire                                                         production chain is needed to create the income and vital to providing the defense of income-creation equipment.
 
 
This is why making money from PvE rewards is much, much healthier for the economy than mining.  When overall demand is low as in the PUSH economy, all prices will eventually drop to the level of barely above the cost of input raw materials. This is due to an overabundance of supply competition.
 
The price premiums injected by the high cost of schematics will eventually fade away as it is only a fixed cost, and once people have recovered their initial investment, then excessive supply competition will force it down. The only long term fix is to increase demand.
 
 

To clarify my earlier post:

PvP is inherently a zero-sum game or less.  It is a net loss due to fuel consumption and repairs, even if you win the battles some of the time.

PvE on the other hand can be a net gain because enemy space bots won't get burned out on losing big or rage quitting.  PvP is best used to control who gets the best hunting grounds for PvE, and defending lucrative turf. As it stands, there is nothing worth defending in the game as almost everything is available elsewhere. Because mines are single use and don't refresh, even the best meganode has a limited lifespan and the costs of defending it or attacking it could reduce its value quite a bit.
 
I don't think that bragging rights of winning a PvP battle is a sustainable reason to spend the huge gobs of time and money that it takes to win it on a large scale.
 
In EVE online, there was lots of PvP, but there was also PvE to practice on, hone your skills, and walk away with more cash than you came in with. At the moment, there is no point to DU outside of crafting pretty stuff.  Even when the PvP gets revamped with new mechanics,  it may still be missing the most important ingredient - a purpose.  Control of generic territory is not a purpose.
 
Since renewable mining nodes are not available, then control over great (and renewable) hunting spots is something worth engaging group vs. group PvP.  Individual PvP for stealing other people's cargo just isn't sustainable. Because mining nodes wear out, everyone is basically nomadic at the moment. Renewables make a specific geographic location valuable and worth defending.
 
Only when humans stopped being nomadic did civilization truly begin.
 
I'm mining and staying active with the hope that someday there will be more adrenalin-inducing content, comradery in battle,  and a purpose to this grind. 
 

A classic case of vision getting in the way of good game design (also known as fun). This is a post about what civilization is / can be in Dual Universe, and perhaps what went wrong. Before diving in, here are some of my assumptions:
 - JC is a scientist, not a game designer
 - JC is a micromanager
 - JC does not want to listen to his devs (some of which worked for Ubisoft and know a thing or two about good game design and mechanics)
 - Because of the assumption above, I also assume there's a degree of conflict between devs and JC
 - I assume a lot might change up to release since this is a beta, but something tells me... not really, given the track record so far of very good ideas being thrown away or not listened to (classic examples include bot market orders screwup in beta, this was talked about extensively by Blazemonger and a slew of other people in the community, was completely ignored, and the results are clear)

Lets get the whole "but it's a beta" shtick out of the way... if you can't, just pretend that you can.
 
To the point:

The game suffers from very bad game design choices. My stance is, if this game was really about civilization building, the mechanics of the game would be very different than they are now. What is civilization?
organization of individuals into social bodies due to selective pressures characteristics of civilization include: social structure and hierarchy, efficiency, work organization, supply of needs, development of more efficient technologies selective pressures that create civilization include, but are not limited to: resource shortage, non-uniform resource distribution, geography, weather, proximity to neighboring civilizations, war, dangerous environment, dangerous neighbors  
I'm sure a lot of you have seen (or were part of groups that tried to build) cities in DU. Some have actually done so. The problem is, they are completely useless and empty. They look nice, there was tremendous effort in making them, but they are completely nonfunctional because no one needs to be in a city. And that is due to the fact that there really are no selective pressures for civilization at all. There is no reason to be in a group because there is no danger. There is no scarcity of distribution of regular ore. We have safezones on all planets, and a big giant safezone around three planets. Why would anyone live in a city? There are no "white-collar" and "service" game mechanics that characterize cities.
DU has no danger element at all (even in pvp zone, if you don't fly in the pipe, you're pretty much golden) DU has no progressive tech tree DU has no progression, it has quanta gates for elements that anyone can acquire and use given they have the quanta for it I can go on, but for an analysis of "civilization" just read this discord post: https://discord.com/channels/184691218184273920/304455542162587649/80629454165311491
I know this is wishful thinking at this point, but DU would be much better off with actual game design:
Better Talent System: scrap the Eve talents system (some things should really not be copied), instead have a tech progression tree where you unlock technologies you can use. And have the skill grow based on your activity in the game, not a set amount of points per hour. It's gamey , it's simple, it's fun, it's very intuitive. And you can always add more tech to the tree indefinitely as the game grows. This will allow whole orgs to gravitate towards a direction in the tech tree so we actually get diversity in org playing styles. For example, one org can develop their pvp armadas with ballistics (machine guns, gattling guns, big bertha weapons), another org might focus their armada pvp tech research into laser or electonic warfare. The same can go with unlocking building technologies. The same can go for politics and leadership styles within an org. Have it all be a research tree. There are countless ways of adding diversity and different paths to a game using this mechanic instead of the Eve Talent Points system. Safe Zones: seriously.. is Sanc Moon not enough? The game lacks any danger and people just stop playing because of tedium and burn out. You won't believe how hard it is to convince people to gather into PVP events in this game because they're just too bored of it, it has zero consequence. Sanc moon is a sanctuary moon. That is its purpose. Better Consequences: This game has the wrong consequences. What seems to be happening is a bunch of nerfing to create more consequences in the game, such as talk about nerfing linked container distance, brakes, mining, this whole permadamage to elements, etc. How about actual danger, not the tedium of fixing and replacing parts? How about lowering the cost of building guns and ammo? Halfing most of the voxel HP? How about designing the game so that more people can get into pvp easier, and if they lose, the cost isn't too great that they are discouraged from ever trying it again? JC should actually listen to his devs and game designer (if he has one): lets face it, economists, mathmeticians, scientists, or whoever NQ may or may not consult about their game.. they are not playing the game. WE ARE. What we are witnessing is the result of the disconnect between how gamers play and how JC thinks a game should run. And it is our wallets that are paying. This means JC should listen to his devs. This means JC should really hire a game designer, they are a rare species and it's difficult to find a good one, but if you do, please listen to that person. JC may know stuff about robotics, but as I see it, he has no clue about human psychology, especially gamer psychology.
My rant is over. Catch me outside how bout dat.

Where to download social drivers

At its current state DU is nothing more than a game prototype. All this talk about civilization building where the game mechanics are nothing remotely about "civilization building"... and no, ability to build cities with voxels does not qualify. A city is not a bunch of buildings, it's the social aspect and the reasoning behind living in a city in the first place.

DU does not have social drivers for civilization, DU does not have selective pressures for civilization organization (no danger, no scarcity, pvp is just flying space castle sieges, no technological progression system at all)...

The common plight of big universe games (Elite Dangerous I'm looking at you) is they are going for scale, not depth. In Elite, I can basically play the whole game loop in less than 2 hours, you just have millions of planets and systems to play that game loop in. I feel like DU is going the same way. A new system will not fix the current problems as it will only make the universe larger but will not add depth. It's a common and frankly silly mistake, especially in DU context. What I am proposing here is focusing on depth, which requires a massive amount of content (what we've been asking for since... forever). You get the depth right with a fun game loop for the majority, you can then extrapolate that unto new systems.
 
I know that this whole thing is wishful thinking at this point of the "beta" that should be an early alpha, but here goes:

A way to simulate "civilization" in DU would be to scrap this Eve talent system (some things really shouldn't be copied) and do an org-based technological progression system.
NOTE, not a skills tree, a TECH tree:
 
You have to be in an org to even progress in advanced technologies... Or there should be more technology branches available for group context Solo players should have basic technology progression available to them to facilitate solo play, and maybe a separate tech tree. Solo player tech tree should not be an afterthought, maybe it should have some cooler stuff than org tech trees. But the higher tier advanced stuff should only be in group context. Tech can only be progressed through when you are actively doing actions that facilitate skills /numbers that unlock a tech path  (you have to play to progress) Vast technological skills tree that unlocks stuff on an org basis. This automatically creates groups of people that progress through technology differently and this adds a ton of variety to orgs. an org can choose to progress through a more electronic line of skill, while another one might focus on plasma, another one might focus more on laser tech. an org may choose to develop agricultural skills for resource generation, or more mining, or more building.. debatable topic here but it's not hard to imagine that with this system orgs will specialize As you climb  further and further up the tech tree the branches have wider distance from each other, meaning that it's a lot harder to cover the whole tree (you need to specialize AS AN ORG in a certain area of technology) This should be a background systems with interesting skills (so you don't have to feel like you need to hit a rock X number of times to gain a better skill in idk... pooping). Skills progress organically based on actions, the difficult part is making the grind not grind for its own sake. You can have org waypoints (for example, some skills have multiple options and the org has to choose what type of said technology they want to unlock, they can't have both). IMPORTANT - this system gives devs a ton of room and opportunity to add more stuff to the tree whenever they want to, basically an unlimited system.  
An example of a skill tree from Path of Exile:

 
Granted this is a different mmo and all that (do not comment on path of exiles, irrelevant to the topic, I'm just showing a tree, could have used a different game), but the principle remains the same. As you go out to the outer layers of the tech tree you are forced to specialize because it becomes much harder, even impossible to cover everything on the outer branches of the tree in a group context. Skill training is done organically in group context, you simply focus on what you want to train and do those activities. In my opinion this system simulates "civilization building" much better than the Eve talent system which only focuses on the individual anyway, with few skills in group context.

The main thing with this tech system is it gives devs plenty of room to add more features and technologies to the tree, and as an mmo, new content is always important.
 
Anyway, what do you all think?

And before someone says "I specifically joined DU to avoid doing x number of stupid quests to gain a skill point", this is not what I mean by this tree. Tech should be acquired organically, not through some lame quests. Valheim for example has a really nice organic skill generation system, you don't even spec skills. You CAN'T. You automatically gain skill based only on what you do. I think this is a good system. I think it will encourage people to group up, I think it will add a ton of variety into orgs, and I think it will greatly increase specialized fun.

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.
 

Lol that clown JC actually has a PhD in AI and wont even do anything for this game?
 
Honestly players are not devs and we can only really use the tools we are given. Who in their right mind wants to go to somewhere to check out someones playschool playhouse you cant do anything with vs fighting some kind of AI alien armada, npc police force, npc vendors, npc military, npc dungeons, fight creatures in all those tunnels we dig vs what players make you cant do anything with?
 
Hell JC right now could just as well give NPC access to the same talent tree, same skills, same mining bot, and use auto piloting, and building, and whatever really and just ask the community to help build more AI scripts and we could easily have AI running in this game.
 
DU is boring, stale, and sterile for no other purpose other hten JCs wet dream of some giant EvE battles that will never happen because there is absolutely nothing to this game that isnt locked behind 27 years of que to finally have any kind of fun. There really is not much to the game as is and will continue to be no matter what they add. New solar system? Its going to get ransacked 10x faster than this one. Guild wallets, mission systems, and the other time wasted systems that have no real effect on this game unless AI is present since nobody will pay more than just doing things themselves and it changes nothing but dead on arrival mechanics. Gems? Whats the point when everythings been mined and nobody is going to really go splunking to find them. DoA too.
 
They could have spent the little resources they had actually developing a game and thought they knew better but guess not. They litterally could have probably done anything differently and it could actually be fun. But I guess they hate all the best parts about space exploration, sci-fi, high technology, aliens, and anything worth exploring, fighting, and pretty much anything resembling an mmo with a space theme for no real reason.
 
 

This is the biggest irony, since JC really has a PhD in AI ....
 
Relying on "player content" alone is a huge fail for the game. Player content can never "create" Aliens, monsters, beasts, interesting quests, old civ ruins, cultures, the urge to actually explore the bloody universe ... it puzzles me immensely that people (JC) don't get this.
 
I mean, for crying out loud, we just flew God knows how many billions of miles through space, spent thousands of years to finally reach a solar system with habitable worlds, a new exotic place - but there aren't even freakin INSECTS to be found on any of those planets?!
 
Where is the attractiveness to all this? Where is the need for exploration? Why would I want to explore dead, boring planets which offer nothing, absolutely nothing worth of finding or even looking at? Where is the "I wonder what I could find if I finally manage to fly to that very distant planet"? Where is the AWE and WONDER?
 
Is the definition of a "fun game" the process of producing crap, that everyone else can produce, and then sell that crap in order to make money, just for the sake of making money??
You do not need space game for that - you don't even need planets, ships, anything - you just need a bloody smartphone and can slap together a mini game where you produce crap, sell it, rinse and repeat, make money, then what? produce more crap of course ... because what else is there to do?
 
Do they even realize how BORING this is?
 
As I said - future, distant space, planets, a whole universe before you ---- where is the AWE and WONDER, where is the spirit of exploration? Where are the exotic and fascinating things to be found and seen? Where is the mystery?
 
BTW, I have talked EXTENSIVELY about ALL OF THIS in ALL of my DU videos on my channel - but since I am not a shill, or an "influencer" naturally no one watches my videos so it all falls on deaf ears.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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.
 

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.
 

 

Sup DUveans,

Just stopping by here to say my final farewell to everyone here, in discord, and in game that I had the privilege to be acquainted with or some, to even call friends. 

I had a blast being along side everyone of you these past 7 years, watching this community grow from literally 0 members to a whopping 50,000+ of you. I had many fond memories building premature alliances, making in game hostile moves, watching orgs rise and fall, overall, nerding-out over every aspect of Dual Universe.

However, all good things must come to an end. I'm sad to say but due to recent announcements and the overall direction of community aspect of Dual Universe is partaking, per say, I must state my farewell from the community and Dual Universe completely (as a player and as Moderator, in Discord and other platforms). At this point, I'm not enjoying being part of a community that's not being nourished at its fullest or been ignored for so long. (That's just the tip of the iceberg) Regardless, I leave on good terms, hope you all have fun, wishing the best to everyone and Novaquark (Here's hoping for a fast recovery, community-wise) 


As always,
Catch everyone on the flip, but most importantly; Have Fun!

Remember: Comfort: is the enemy of progress
 
o7

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.

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.

We are getting tired of the only real content in the game being pretty vanity constructs which aren't functionally superior. The much-promoted space elevators are functionally inferior to element elevators. There is not much reason at all to hold and maintain space stations. Twitter, twitch, reddit and forums are all full with pretty looking ships that aren't being put to use for the lack of a greater purpose. We can't attack the much-advertised freeports and the big cities. There is no reason at all to get together, introduce bureaucracy, get organized. The only group of people who are constantly rewarded and marketed are those who are willing to put in hundreds of hours to make a few construct pretty. This game has no room for greatness for empire builders, pirates, mercenaries, warlords,, explorers, and most others who don't want to be patient architects. Just a look at the official twitter would confirm this.
 
Sandboxes are grounded on ecosystems where there is a risk/reward balance. Rewards are positioned in a way that you get more if you risk more; and the risk is typically conflict with other players. NQ seem to be inexperienced with this kind of game design but they need to focus on ecosystem-building and now. They need to make hires with ecosystem-building as the greater purpose. Entire teams need to be allocated to this. This should be prioritized over less important quality of life things like mining bots, voxel editors and such. Even mechanical PvP improvements are inferior to a functioning ecosystem. The current early implementation of PvP would keep us playing it if only we had people to shoot at thanks to a well-functioning ecosystem which makes them take risks.
 
The game needs rewards to fight over. Ore (especially high tier) should have been way sparser, more permanent in tiles, and we should have been able to fight over it (over tiles). Even if they introduced territory warfare today, there will be nothing to fight over with this implementation of mining. A meganode expires in a day, and that is the timeframe in which a hex is valuable. If asteroids will give us things to fight over, we need them today. But they need to be implemented in just the right window, so they are not too abundant which leads to zero conflict, and they are not too sparse which creates monopolies. 
 
We need things to discover, explore. The JC's "Ready Player One" approach to puzzles leads to bad implementation and waste of dev effort. The game doesn't need one major headline-making puzzle chased by only a minority of people. It needs puzzles, events, exploration rewards that are constantly respawning, that are inclusive to many players, and that don't expire; so people log in everyday and have something to do besides mining, factories and building. The rewards should be abundant and persistent enough for many others to participate. Even WoW in beta in 2003 managed to put some herbs here, some surface ore there, a treasure chest behind the waterfall to make people look for things on the map. There is no such activity in DU except mass territory scanning, which is mostly an unengaging afk activity. Wrecks didn't cut it. Again, NQ needs to get the sparse/abundant ratio right with these things.
 
We also need things to shoot at besides consenting PvP'ers. New ways to get caught while doing valued work (eg hauling) needs to be introduced. NPCs would have been a great source for this as well.  Just keep respawning a few NPCs between planetary routes and that would create content.
 
The game has so many rewards to distribute in the aforementioned activities. Blueprints and quanta could have come from exploration activities instead of inorganic daily login rewards or the bot orders.

Industry update failed to create the interaction and specialization it was supposed to create. People are mostly back to their gigafactories and t1 elements are again being sold at a loss. The update just made people go mine some meganode to raise initial capital, visit some planets for blueprints, and build some higher tier industry machines. In a functioning ecosystem such as Eve Online, trade comes from the scarcity and uneven distribution of source material (such as ore, blueprints); not from capital requirements to go into industry.
 
We should have been forced to make machines to do proper mining (or even building) too. The nanosuit does too many jobs which could have been done by interesting constructs. Making dynamic constructs for underground mines or to build our static constructs would have been an entire area to excel at.
 
There are plans for further mistakes such as taking contracts from Eve and misleadingly calling them "player-made missions". A "mission" implies there is a backstory, a unique purpose, some new experience and unraveling for people who go through it. "Put X amount of ore in my container Y" is a contract. It's a shallower activity. It might be an alternative way of making money. It's not a mission. It's not an "experience".
 
Another mistake will be invalidating miner work and opening up great fields to RMT'ers by introducing passive income via mining bots.
 
Meanwhile, everyday I see JC tweet another pretty-looking vanity design and say "possibilities are endless". And I ask myself if I should keep trusting this game's future. If he wanted a cooler-looking Minecraft then why spend so much money to design it as a single shard persistent universe at all?

When the game was first pushed out to the public, it was everything that No Man's Sky wasn't and more.
However, with how is the game has been developing over the course of 2020 the picture of DU that was painted is completely opposite from the reality of the game in it's current state.
 
As a result, those who've walked away from the game are either gone due to overwhelming burnout, resentment from disappointment, or are simply waiting for Novaquark to get this game back on track.
While this game provides "Unprecedented Freedom" (per the latest youtube commercial) the path to getting there and the grind feels ... nearly fruitless. 
 
While most content is player created, Novaquark seriously needs to consider taking a more active role in making NPC content, bots to help bolster activity on both PVE and PVP front and create more for a burned out community to engage in.
 
Sure, there's still people who play the game and use the markets and enjoy the game for where it's at. However, the .23 patch rubbed a sizable portion of the populous the wrong way. Now, you have bad word of mouth and a larger sullied populous of people unhappy with what's been done to the game.
 
Asteroids are a great start, however it is similar to giving a hungry 12 year old kid a lolly pop expecting the child to not be hungry for real food later.
 
The real food resides in creating:
  Frequently Randomly generated NPC PVP ships and haulers that people can attack Activity is low and the remaining PVPers are beginning to fade out the door because the fullfillment and drive just isn't there. Giving us constant food will keep us around longer than Randomly generated asteroids ever could It will be the first legitimate source of continuous content for the community and something worth playing the game for It will be something worth advertising as you will see more and more battles take place in space on much larger scales than ever before People will begin to believe you're turning the game around for the better and the Positive word of mouth will begin to spread Frequent and plentiful NPC Generated Missions for the Mission System Again, another source of content to engage in because the community is too burnt out to create the content on a continuous basis. In addition there's not enough activity, drive or even sources of income to support making missions all the time It will be yet another legitimate source of content for people to get immersion in better word of mouth More stuff to advertise Asteroids Regularly patrolled by NPCs Players are burning themselves out by having to mine more than they PVP. As a result they get pissed and walk away. Break the vicious cycle by auto-generating NPC ships that keep people busy and that way we can salvage them instead of eachother. Again more content for us to engage in more to advertise about People will definitely come back to the game New system Event Make events that will allow us to discover parts to construct a galactic probe for probing new systems and even parts to construct a Stargate. Don't do like you've normally done and lean so extreme to one side and make it next to impossible for people to engage in or have fun. If you start any feature on holy $#!7 mode then only 10 out of 1000 people will try it. Too hard or too tedious = not fun = not profitable = no money for NQ and no subscribers. NO LOCK AND FIRE FOR AVA Starbase and many other games do not use it. Lock and fire method of PVP was fun for ships at first but then just became excessively boring. Seeing the same crap for AVA will only stand to piss people off and drive them away. This WILL hurt your notoriety and eventually your $$$. Find a way to make a real 1st person shooter possible and this game will have more activity than NQ knows what to deal with. It may even lead to another round of investing because of the increase level of activity NQ has to deal with. Please please please get away from Lock-n-Fire for AvA for the Love of all things holy DON'T DO IT.  

Yeah, loved it at the Dutch dragons.
It was a fun game but NC killed it in favour for aion that they later gave away to gameforge who made it into goldsellers griever heaven. I led the Divine Order there for Years and Years, we had some nice PVP there. When talking about PvP here i always think this will never achieve the greatness of the PvP there where you walked every open map with caution, every fortress battle you went with hundreds of players is not more, and the spoils were not that great but the fun was. For both winner and loser.  The fun in PvP here i still fail to see as it is a one sighted fenomenon. Any good PvP should be fun for both sides or atleast not be game breaking for the loosing side.

For someone with a PHD in AI and robotics, JC (NQ) is mysteriously resistant to the concept of AI in DU.
 
There are many great applications for NPCs that would enhance the emergent possibilities and round out the lack of options with PVP....instead, the only AI we get is ore bots. 
 
"Everything must be run by players" isn't a real design, it's an arbitrary aspiration that wasn't really thought-out.
 
Even the most fundamental aspects of this aspiration were left on the drawing board (like how to inject fresh currency supply into a game with no NPCs). 
 
It also makes the game thematically dead. We all survived the death of earth....now we land on a planet with a bunch of identical cities linked together that have zero residents, but a home-depo-esque showcase of various materials and doors...? I know many people don't care at all about theme or lore -- but it does add dimension and immersion which DU lacks. 

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.

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.

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.

Simple, you need a rating system for raters.

Whatever you do put up a test server for this and open it to everyone. 
 
pushing to live new systems barely tested and/or tested by people who don't actually play the game like the average player would is going to end badly.

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.

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.

If they have the necessary metadata, part of my little essay questioned whether they have. This is why this is so disturbing, it transcends the event itself and gives us an unsettling insight into what is and is not possible, obviously the decision making speaks for itself but that is damned disturbing too.

This isn't a game issue, this is a company issue and that is worse in my opinion.