Mordgier

Illusion of content.
 
Before many felt like they had nothing to do  - they had a factory that could produce everything and they just needed to sink in hours mining to throw in the ore to get the stuff out on the other end.
 
Now - they need to sink in months of mining to get the same factory running again. They have a 'goal' now - to get back to where they were a week ago - or they can quit.

.

Amazing hot take....
 
DU runs WAY worse on my PC than cyberpunk...
 
Troll elsewhere - all your posts are moaning about how bad CP is...I've sunk 36 hours in so far and can't complain...

Illusion of content.
 
Before many felt like they had nothing to do  - they had a factory that could produce everything and they just needed to sink in hours mining to throw in the ore to get the stuff out on the other end.
 
Now - they need to sink in months of mining to get the same factory running again. They have a 'goal' now - to get back to where they were a week ago - or they can quit.

How dare you?
 
Cyberpunk is actually fun and I'm having a great time with it. 
 
I cannot say I ever had a great time in DU. It was a lot of mining to achieve goals that once achieved became pointless.

How dare you?
 
Cyberpunk is actually fun and I'm having a great time with it. 
 
I cannot say I ever had a great time in DU. It was a lot of mining to achieve goals that once achieved became pointless.

Yes, it is. Especially after last update. Am I supposed to dig-dig-dig all the time? Now, after last update I have nothing to do, but dig. To be able to produce now I have to buy a recipe. This is total bullshit! There are plethora of games, where I should dig a shit out of a planet so a game starts to be interesting after a MONTHS of real gameplay. I do not want another such game. I have it enough in EVE. I suppose to stop playing DU, if things not change. This is sad. I had a hope, that DU will be different...

Illusion of content.
 
Before many felt like they had nothing to do  - they had a factory that could produce everything and they just needed to sink in hours mining to throw in the ore to get the stuff out on the other end.
 
Now - they need to sink in months of mining to get the same factory running again. They have a 'goal' now - to get back to where they were a week ago - or they can quit.

Dude digging into voxelmancy made me hate everything about it.
 
The tools we have to work with feel like playing a game that has intentionally clunky controls like surgeon simulator, I am Bread or octodad. 
 
Voxelmancy as it stands is torture to me. There is nothing that feels fun about it. It infuriating and unpredictable and much of it basically comes down to hours of trial and error till you are able to get the shape that you want. 
 
There is no sane way to defend the current state of the voxel tools. It's not even fair to say that they are unfinished - they are not even tools. 
 
Making good looking ships in DU is about as frustrating as doing needlework while wearing oven mitts.

Illusion of content.
 
Before many felt like they had nothing to do  - they had a factory that could produce everything and they just needed to sink in hours mining to throw in the ore to get the stuff out on the other end.
 
Now - they need to sink in months of mining to get the same factory running again. They have a 'goal' now - to get back to where they were a week ago - or they can quit.

Dude digging into voxelmancy made me hate everything about it.
 
The tools we have to work with feel like playing a game that has intentionally clunky controls like surgeon simulator, I am Bread or octodad. 
 
Voxelmancy as it stands is torture to me. There is nothing that feels fun about it. It infuriating and unpredictable and much of it basically comes down to hours of trial and error till you are able to get the shape that you want. 
 
There is no sane way to defend the current state of the voxel tools. It's not even fair to say that they are unfinished - they are not even tools. 
 
Making good looking ships in DU is about as frustrating as doing needlework while wearing oven mitts.

You guys are really weird.
 
Cars without windows and doors are way more fun.

 

Funny enough that was the reason the game didn't have creative mode in the first place.
 
I think creative mode is a mistake and solves a problem that they created with yet another mistake.

locking everything in industry behind schematics is dumb  id be okay with locking special schematics behind currency but in its current state im done 

Have your devs play the game , from the start with no god mode 
 
They will learn more from that than any hand picked forum

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

Don't worry. They have no clue either.
 
They just said it'll be tied to a zone and will come after territory warfare which is slated to arrive...........¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While I'm sure he's an absolutely brilliant AI engineer, JC is utterly incompetent at game design.
 
With pvp as broken as it is, there were really only 3 attractions to the game: mining, industry, and building. There's a reason everyone was building their own giga factory. There's simply nothing else to do.
 
You could mine and sell ore then buy elements or mine and build your own industry. Most everyone opted for building their own industry because it's both easier and a more efficient use of time.
 
They noticed that markets weren't being used so instead of adding more content to allow players to do something other than mining and industry they simply took away industry. You can't immediately remove 50% of a game's content overnight and expect everyone to be happy. I'm honestly shocked that NQ/JC either didn't anticipate the backlash or simply didn't care.
 
What do we have now? Mine for ore, sell it,  then build stuff. There's literally nothing else in the game. No way to make money besides mining. This patch should have been deployed after implementing additional mechanics for making money. As it stands now, you mine to sell ore (at continuously dropping prices thanks to supply & demand) or you do... nothing.
 
I'm actually impressed. I haven't seen this kind of incompetence in game design since no man's sky and even that was arguably more fraud and deceit than incompetence.

Have you, or do you plan to,  actually evaluate the game experience for new players?
 
Have you considered that the marketing around DU is now misleading?
 
 
 

Yeah - too bad the person whose vision the game is doesn't play the game...

Aww - you think they care what we think - that's cute.
 
https://dualuniverse.featureupvote.com/suggestions/122819/recipes-as-items-industry-balancing
 
Read through the feedback for the proposed schematics change from October - they totally cared what we thought.

Yesterday I made a ‘top of my head’ style post of how schematics could have been made good, achieved the goals of creating industry specialization, expanding the gameplay loop while not crippling the existing players.
 
I’m going to expand on this now as much as I can.
 
 
Goals:
 
Maintain the ability of solo players and small groups to stay self sufficient for the basic ship building.
 
Create a gameplay loop around schematic development that does not involve bots.
 
Create a use for ‘damaged’ elements.
 
Create a progression system for developing schematics.
 
Inject a finite number of end game schematics that will allow the owners to maintain a market nice.
 
 
Games we are basing the mechanics on:
 
SWTOR Research system.
 
Path of Exile Divination Card system.
 
 
Tier 1 – Basic Technology
 
This is current stage of human technology that is publicly known.  For a contemporary example – think the “Internal Combustion Engine”. You and I may not know how to build one off the top of our head – but we can easily find full blown instructions and even schematics on google at no cost.
 
In the game, the vast majority of elements we have currently fall in this category. We do not need to buy a schematic or research one – we know how to build space engines, we know how to build atmospheric engines and so on.
 
 
Tier 2 – Advanced and Proprietary technology
 
This is the pinnacle of human technology that goes beyond common and public knowledge. There are two categories in Tier 2 that require schematics:
 
Propriety Technology and Advanced Technology.
 
Propriety technology is NPC created unique items that players do not know how to build and cannot research due to licensing restricitons such as patents etc. For a contemporary example – an Internal Combustion Engine with variable compression rate – we know some companies have developed the technology, but we don’t know how to make it ourselves. We would need to license such technology to build from it.
 
Things that fall into this category and require purchasing a schematic from the bots:
 
AGG, Warp Drives, L cores and so on
 
 
Advanced Technology is player created by ‘analyzing’ Tier 1 items. When an element is ‘analyzed’ it is pushed to it’s limits until destroyed and knowledge is gained about how it can be improved. A brand new item can be analyzed, or a partially damaged item.
 
The difficulty of developing an item will vary on the complexity of the item being analyzed and the results are unpredictable (but can be steered, more on that later)
 
Example of how it could work.
 
I have a Basic Space Engine S and would like to develop and Advanced Space Engine S.
 
The Space Engine has a complexity rating of 20.
 
I toss a brand new Basic Space Engine S in an analyzer and the following formula is applied to identify the progress made towards a BP:
 
 
((100-<Complexity>)/50)* RNG(1 to <Analysis Skill>)*<Item Repairs Left>
 
The Basic Space Engine S has a complexity rating of 20.
My analysis skill is at 3.
 
So the formula results in:
 
((100-20)/50)*RNG(1 to 3)*3
 
Let’s say the RNG gods bless me and I roll a 3 – the result is: 14.4 points progress.
 
I’m sure NQ could come up with a better formula for this – but you get the idea.
 
Once you have accumulated 100 points in the analyzer you get a schematic for a variant of Advanced Space Engine S which is 10% improved in a random trait. For example, we may get a Responsive Advanced Space Engine S which has faster warmup time.
 
Which schematic is generated the first time is entirely random.
 
We can further steer the direction of research to ensure that we do not get duplicates. To ensure we do not get a duplicate schematic with faster warmup time, we have to feed an engine with that trait into the analyzer – we can do this with multiple engines. For example if we are seeking more power and already have engine variants with all the other traits boosted to 10%, we can load them all in and be guaranteed to get a 10% more power engine as the end result.
 
Finally, we can research an “Pinnacle Space Engine S” which has 5% improvement to all stats by feeding every single variant into the analyzer.
 
 
The above system is not limited to just ship elements, it can be applied to all elements with stats, anything from containers that hold more, to assemblers that work faster and so on.
 
 
Tier 3 – Future Tech
 
This should be introduced with the new solar system. We are the first humans in that system, but someone was here before us. There are technology fragments that can be found when mining in asteroids, deep underground or in wrecks. Completing a full artifact and analyzing it will produce a tier 3 schematic. These cannot be further improved.
 
Some artifacts can be extremely rare and the number of them seeded should be finite with more added as the game progresses. The number fragments that you need to complete will vary depending on the element – an XL engine could have 100 and an XS just 5 and so on. The fragments can be sold and are rare enough that it is impractical for an individual to find all the fragments to complete a set without trading for some.
 
There is a finite number of fragments and not everyone or even every org will be able to get one. The players that can get one will have limited competition on the pricing of the final items. If any one org is able to gain a monopoly on a schematic or they exit the game via inactive players, more are injected into the system.
 
Not all Tier 2 items have a Tier 3 counterpart.
 
 
Tier 4 - Alien Tech
 
This is ultra-rare technology that can only be acquired through in game events etc. This is the actual alien technology that we are trying to replicate in Tier 3 – except this is the real deal. These can only be acquired through events etc and are a cosmetic upgrade from Tier 3. Ultra exclusive, ultra rare, and largely a cosmetic bragging rights item. 
 
 
 

Yesterday I made a ‘top of my head’ style post of how schematics could have been made good, achieved the goals of creating industry specialization, expanding the gameplay loop while not crippling the existing players.
 
I’m going to expand on this now as much as I can.
 
 
Goals:
 
Maintain the ability of solo players and small groups to stay self sufficient for the basic ship building.
 
Create a gameplay loop around schematic development that does not involve bots.
 
Create a use for ‘damaged’ elements.
 
Create a progression system for developing schematics.
 
Inject a finite number of end game schematics that will allow the owners to maintain a market nice.
 
 
Games we are basing the mechanics on:
 
SWTOR Research system.
 
Path of Exile Divination Card system.
 
 
Tier 1 – Basic Technology
 
This is current stage of human technology that is publicly known.  For a contemporary example – think the “Internal Combustion Engine”. You and I may not know how to build one off the top of our head – but we can easily find full blown instructions and even schematics on google at no cost.
 
In the game, the vast majority of elements we have currently fall in this category. We do not need to buy a schematic or research one – we know how to build space engines, we know how to build atmospheric engines and so on.
 
 
Tier 2 – Advanced and Proprietary technology
 
This is the pinnacle of human technology that goes beyond common and public knowledge. There are two categories in Tier 2 that require schematics:
 
Propriety Technology and Advanced Technology.
 
Propriety technology is NPC created unique items that players do not know how to build and cannot research due to licensing restricitons such as patents etc. For a contemporary example – an Internal Combustion Engine with variable compression rate – we know some companies have developed the technology, but we don’t know how to make it ourselves. We would need to license such technology to build from it.
 
Things that fall into this category and require purchasing a schematic from the bots:
 
AGG, Warp Drives, L cores and so on
 
 
Advanced Technology is player created by ‘analyzing’ Tier 1 items. When an element is ‘analyzed’ it is pushed to it’s limits until destroyed and knowledge is gained about how it can be improved. A brand new item can be analyzed, or a partially damaged item.
 
The difficulty of developing an item will vary on the complexity of the item being analyzed and the results are unpredictable (but can be steered, more on that later)
 
Example of how it could work.
 
I have a Basic Space Engine S and would like to develop and Advanced Space Engine S.
 
The Space Engine has a complexity rating of 20.
 
I toss a brand new Basic Space Engine S in an analyzer and the following formula is applied to identify the progress made towards a BP:
 
 
((100-<Complexity>)/50)* RNG(1 to <Analysis Skill>)*<Item Repairs Left>
 
The Basic Space Engine S has a complexity rating of 20.
My analysis skill is at 3.
 
So the formula results in:
 
((100-20)/50)*RNG(1 to 3)*3
 
Let’s say the RNG gods bless me and I roll a 3 – the result is: 14.4 points progress.
 
I’m sure NQ could come up with a better formula for this – but you get the idea.
 
Once you have accumulated 100 points in the analyzer you get a schematic for a variant of Advanced Space Engine S which is 10% improved in a random trait. For example, we may get a Responsive Advanced Space Engine S which has faster warmup time.
 
Which schematic is generated the first time is entirely random.
 
We can further steer the direction of research to ensure that we do not get duplicates. To ensure we do not get a duplicate schematic with faster warmup time, we have to feed an engine with that trait into the analyzer – we can do this with multiple engines. For example if we are seeking more power and already have engine variants with all the other traits boosted to 10%, we can load them all in and be guaranteed to get a 10% more power engine as the end result.
 
Finally, we can research an “Pinnacle Space Engine S” which has 5% improvement to all stats by feeding every single variant into the analyzer.
 
 
The above system is not limited to just ship elements, it can be applied to all elements with stats, anything from containers that hold more, to assemblers that work faster and so on.
 
 
Tier 3 – Future Tech
 
This should be introduced with the new solar system. We are the first humans in that system, but someone was here before us. There are technology fragments that can be found when mining in asteroids, deep underground or in wrecks. Completing a full artifact and analyzing it will produce a tier 3 schematic. These cannot be further improved.
 
Some artifacts can be extremely rare and the number of them seeded should be finite with more added as the game progresses. The number fragments that you need to complete will vary depending on the element – an XL engine could have 100 and an XS just 5 and so on. The fragments can be sold and are rare enough that it is impractical for an individual to find all the fragments to complete a set without trading for some.
 
There is a finite number of fragments and not everyone or even every org will be able to get one. The players that can get one will have limited competition on the pricing of the final items. If any one org is able to gain a monopoly on a schematic or they exit the game via inactive players, more are injected into the system.
 
Not all Tier 2 items have a Tier 3 counterpart.
 
 
Tier 4 - Alien Tech
 
This is ultra-rare technology that can only be acquired through in game events etc. This is the actual alien technology that we are trying to replicate in Tier 3 – except this is the real deal. These can only be acquired through events etc and are a cosmetic upgrade from Tier 3. Ultra exclusive, ultra rare, and largely a cosmetic bragging rights item. 
 
 
 

The sad thing is none of these suggestions are revolutionary - all of these are rehashes from existing mechanics in other games.

Countless games had item fragments you had to collect and trade to get a complete item - path of exile cards are a prefect example of that mechanic. You will almost never complete a set of the rarer cards yourself but you would  trade for them with other players to get a complete set.
 
The scarcity can be tuned easily on the server side to inject blueprints early on or slow down the progression to create scarcity as needed. It's pretty easy for the game to have mechanics in place to keep seeding BPs until there is a set number of completed BPs and they are controlled by at least several different orgs to prevent monopolization of any one BP to maintain a healthy economy.
 
If the goal is to force industry specialization - the only way to do this is via limited BPs.
 
JC's argument of "You won't make your own iphone!" is silly because the reason there aren't 500,000 random factories making iPhones is patents. If they could get away with it,  they'd be selling $400 Huawei 'iphones' at every corner.  Limiting BPs creates the same situation where only certain entities will be able to make certain things.
 
 
Mining ships are nothing new. Empyrion has them Space Engineers has them.. The fact that DU does not have mining ships continues to blow my mind. 
 
 
Like - how is this NOT a thing in DU?!
 
In Empyrion you could only mount drills on a hovercraft which meant that a mining op involved flying your capital ship with some hovercraft to a planet, landing, unloading the HVs and mining with the HVs. While your capital ship was landed on the planet it was vulnerable due to capital ship weapons being less effective in atmosphere. So often you'd actually end up having to have a friend drop off some HVs, hide the capital ship in deep space, come back in a small ship and help mine in a hovercraft before going back to bring the capship to scoop everyone up and return to safety. Or you would leave the capital ship on the planet but also unload some defensive hovercraft which had strong atmospheric weapons to defend the capital ship. Handmining in Empyrion was what newbies did for the first day - and then never again.
 
In Empyrion our 'mining' hovercraft were basically tanks that could also mine to ensure that if we did get caught by some hostile players we wouldn't get slaughtered. My luckiest mining op resulted in finding a landed capital ship while piloting my hovercraft and blowing it up. Less lucky one ended with me running into another hovercraft and taking an artillery shell to the face....but that's what made it fun.
 
 

You're only allowed to build civilization as JC sees it.
 
Everyone having a mega factory was too civilized. People building their own iphones from scratch?! What futuristic nonsense!
 
Now get out of your space ship and go hand mine that ore....