IvanGrozniy

oooof.. how their tune has changed...

In just one post we learn that toxicity is a binary designation you are the arbiter of truth and reality old farts are toxic you represent newbies (presumably by election) ...... Jokes aside, okaaaay? If you notice, I generally don't talk about players when I'm criticizing DU, I talk about the game. It is game design that facilitates, encourages, and provides incentives for certain actions, even if the said game design is unintended or not apparently purposeful. Blaming people for playing a certain way in a sandbox is counter to the sandbox. Calling players toxic doesn't help, it's quite embarrassing actually, it usually means that when someone throws an "fu" at you, you are too weak to throw "fu" x 10 back at them (expression shamelessly stolen from a Siberian intellectual). Not all newbs are the same, they are here for different reasons. Most people here are very helpful to them if they need help figuring things out. Sly remarks about "admitting x" and "you know it but don't want to admit it" silliness doesn't help either. Those things are generally summarized in a term "not an argument". If you have one, provide it so we can discuss the argument. Discussing players is a slow burn to garbage drama.

I see what you mean. That depends of course... if we're talking pvp meta ships, no, this statement is not true. Those things are really expensive to build. And they are expensive to repair. I'm not sure people comprehend how much mining and man hours it takes to build one of the golden ships from Boo's Gold Armada. I'm not sure people understand how much it takes to repair them after a "battle". No one wants to lose one of those, so pvp battles tend to be more about whoever gets pushed out into the safezone first, battle of attrition. Additionally, if we talk about piracy as an easy win card, it's not like piracy is profitable, it mostly does not exist and the "piracy" you can do is very aids if you ask me, you'll spend more on fuel and waste more time and quanta pirating than if you were digging holes in the ground and selling to bots. I don't think it makes much sense to divide people into pvpers and builders... pvpers are also builders, whereas you're probably talking about a subset of players that are purely builders I'm assuming. PvP builders are just more specifically focused on indy buildings, ship building for pvp, and station building rather than purely builders who want to avoid pvp. Have you looked at the Foundry for example? That is a station built by a pvp group. There are also others, some really fancy. Talents don't matter too much in meta pvp, again it's mostly about ship stamina rather than who can shoot further. Repair talents help though, repair engineers are really important in fights. Smart pvp ship builders make ships that last longer and take more shots.... but they also mine a lot in order to repair. I see. And I agree. If that's where the conversation headed before I mentioned this was a civilization building game then no comment. If it was the case though... then... I think games should (and they do) take inspiration from real life but they should not mimic real life. And I'm mainly talking about the fact that in real life things are cohesive, there are causes and effects, stuff just doesn't appear out of thin air. In a game, this happens all the time, but it only makes sense if it is cohesive within the world it is trying to build. The cohesion is where I make the parallel between real life and games. I do not like that some games mimic real life where it becomes a second job. In terms of DU and civilization mechanics, this is why I already mentioned elsewhere on this forum that before you set out to make such a game with such "grandiose visions", maybe you should start with first principles and ask what civilization is, what are its characteristics, what are its causes. Once you have the key ingredients, then you think about choosing a few important ones that you can actually gamify and make a cohesive yet fun system out of. And I'm simply saying this never happened. It doesn't feel like it did anyway, since the game exhibits absolutely no civilization building mechanics or progressions. NQ should probably rethink that "vision"

I am not a proponent of the current pvp model whatsoever. However, if someone fails to understand basic DU ship and pvp mechanics it's on them. 1) never fly in the pipe. Using this sekret anime technique you will encounter pirates 0.000001% of the time. 2) Do not build naked haulers if you want to fly in the pipe. Yes that is more expensive. So are meta pvp ships. But if you get killed by someone in 10 minutes that's your fault, you made a crappy hauler, you failed to research how one would build a meta hauler, you failed by flying in the pipe. This does not mean I like #2. There needs to be a way to retaliate. Shields. Guns, etc. I for one do not like the rule that you can't use L guns on s or m cores. I also do not like that you have to use gunner seats in order to use big weapons. There's a host of barriers to entry for a good pvp ship or a hauler and these limitations do not help the situation but rather exasperate it. If you were hauling and you had the ability to have 3-4 L rails on your ship without a gunner seat, anyone would think twice before attacking.

This to be honest... I love how absolutely every communication from NQ is "business as usual" which is all the more cringe. The CM who actually tried is now in a better place (on earth ) and good for her. Some creeps at NQ CM management like to put chains on people and then gag them. I hope they're gone or else the communication problems will continue.

I fail to see why permadeath (character death) is brought up in DU context though, it doesn't exist in DU. I'm also not sure what this argument means "they (presumably pvpers) are fine with destroying the creations of others.... but not their own creations (the character itself)"... ?? Character? I don't get it. If someone pvps they are risking their own creations (in DU context, it is their ship / ammo / guns / whatever is on board). Not sure what "their character" has anything to do with it? I also fail to see what's going on here... I was merely saying that the whole premise of the game was civilization building. And that the game has nothing to show for it in terms of that particular vision. It's just another mmo tech demo with voxels. As for evolution of the game, sure I'm all for it. And if they are going a different direction they should say so. Until they do the "vision" remains the same and the game makes no sense. Not sure where you see the irony of me failing to recognize possibility of game developing into something else. Currently it isn't developing in any direction whatsoever. We'll see with the upcoming patches though. With new management the game might take a different route. At any rate NQ has a massive recuperation mountain to climb.... more than 20 million dollars later.

I like how territory warfare has turned into space territory warfare because we already have space castle sieges.. now we just need bug giant empty space cubes to fight over.

I'm not sure where you're going with this here... I wasn't even talking about perma death or full loot... I was mainly offering a rebuttal to your statement that "After all if we are being super-realistic you only get to lose at PvP once - and very few folks are up for that.". That statement is simply false. What are you even talking about? Where is this coming from? Like... why? What realism? Why so antagonistic about pvpers? Sounds like you're grinding your axe there? Kickstarter is important because backers paid a lot of money to support this game, and last I checked JC's "vision" for this game remains the same, this whole game was meant to be a civilization building game with 6 pillars. This is taken directly from their marketing (timestamped to relevant part): As for your statement here: This is absolutely true, not necessarily in terms of complexity but in terms of selective pressures that generate civilization. These things can be gamified and progression can be done well to facilitate actual civilization building. None of which exists in DU. The game is basically just another mmo with an outdated inefficient voxel "feature" that does not scale for an mmo population.

Eh... false.... A lot of veeeery popular games should have died by now using this logic, meanwhile the reverse is true. Just look at Rust steam charts for example. For all the hate and dismissal that game gets even from numerous people in this community, it's very much alive and growing. Just one example doesn't prove much, but, there's that. I think people downplay the factors that attract people to games that these people don't agree with.... From the Kickstarter (also from numerous JC interviews): If civilization building does not imply evolution (which is just incremental iteration) then oranges are actually alien eggs. Address the actual points raised in terms of how and why cities are built, because necessity will drive players into one, or to develop one eventually. MMOs typically have hubs for this reason premade by devs for socializing, organizing gear, buying and selling. etc. If the DU universe is to be player generated, then one of the outcomes for a civilization building sci-fi mmorpg is player made cities. Why does this imply evolution? Because the converse is stagnation. Cities evolve or devolve, that which is preserved is what we call a historical reenactment or a museum. The natural ebb and flow of civilizations involves evolution and devolution, rise and fall of cities / city states / eventually countries of multiple cities / etc.

A lot of people have built a lot of cities, the problem is.... they are useless. And they are namely useless because they are not necessary. As long as DU remains a game where a stronghold / city is not necessary, it is not a civilization building game. Civilization doesn't just come out of nowhere, there are some very important selective pressures that generate civilization: geography, weather, environment, neighboring tribes... war, scarcity, uneven resource distribution, etc etc... None of this is in the game. Placing higher tier ores on different planets is a bit of a lazy way of doing things, but so far that's the only attempt at a civilization driving factor, even that is done poorly. There is no danger at all, apart from game bugs or someone too asleep at the pilot seat to realize they're about to smack into a planet. Cities don't just appear, there is a process by which they did appear out of necessity and natural growth. Just because someone placed a few constructs on the ground with fancy voxels and lua doesn't make it into a city. Empty museum, sure, not a city though. Moscow was not built as Moscow... it was an intersection of war and trade paths that necessitated a trade hub and then grew into a stronghold and then into a sprawling city, again, by natural necessity. The result of years and years of strife and trade was a bustling city with input and output, supply lines and social hierarchies and distribution etc etc.. Driving factors. Selective pressures... they don't exist in DU. It's mostly rp and rich players making "plans" and building empty voxel museums. You would think that if the visionary scientist would have set out to build a civilization building game maybe he'd start off with first principles and ask questions like: what is civilization? what factors cause it? What are its characteristics? And when these questions are answered, maybe the important / realistic causes / characteristics can be picked out and gamified into a coherent system. Something screams at me that this process never happened. It was.... oui... cities.. civilization.... lessss goooo sacrebleu! More than 20 million dollars later we have what we have. Fundamentally DU is a tech demo purported as a game because it's treated like a game (payed subs). There are expectations of a game that is treated as a game, especially when people are paying for it.... meanwhile still a tech demo. As far as I see it, the premise of this 50 concurrent player quota single shard mmo mining simulator is that its vision will be accomplished when there is a player generated city bustling with players, with supply lines constantly feeding it, and top tier production exported as product for the general population to use, organizational and governmental structures, etc. If DU can actually achieve that, it would be a good score. Perhaps it can't and the devs will hire level designers to "build" cities for the remaining playerbase. But at that point you can't call this game a "player-generated" content game... you'd have to clean out and erase a lot of marketing and the whole premise of the kickstarter. All this to say, pvp is necessary as a driving force for civilization generation Along with geographical differences that matter... along with weather... along with horny T-Rexes roaming the jungles of Alioth and eating innocent virgins...

Ahem... and there we have it... blame the players, not the game! Best strategy ever.

what would be nice is a dense asteroid field AND player made markets..... so that someone could plop down a space trade hub sorta near the field.

Could be. They did use TW in conjunction with space to feel the ground so to speak (pun intended). Nonetheless TW is delayed, AvA is delayed (not even happening ever I expect). Did they just realize that building an mmo on cloud flare is expensive?) In terms of PvP idk... it's so broken that adding more systems to it will only increase bugs. If your baseline combat system is not smooth and, most of all, fun, then adding stuff to it won't make it fun either, only more tedious imho. When a rifle is trash adding fancy scopes, lasers, and pink guerrilla camo skins to it may deceive the average newb but it won't improve the rifle.

Lol Snipey... It's like you woke up, put on a left sock, got an alarm that the Staff of Wisdom struck again, and just ranted some crazy nonsense no doubt connected to your dreams of Blazemonger terrorizing you witb chopsticks and voxel checkerboard... and then you went to have a smoke on the balcony and realized you were butt naked.

Imagine the thousands of new players coming in based on NQ's marketing of schematics...

Ugliest ship I've ever seen in my life holy cow

Coherent UI has databinding... But I doubt they'll go there... currently the html is redrawn every frame / tick, that is of course costly if there's a lot of it. Databinding allows the html dom to stay in memory and only redraw values that change. That's one of Coherent UI's powerful features that isn't being used. Of course you'll get bad performance redrawing the whole DOM all the time.

How was your commute today?

Could have used MyBB, ph2B, etc.. those are free and open source and offer plenty of options that are better than this....

You must realize that NQ sank more than 20 million into the project. How in the world will this cost be recuperated? This is debt... just financial, not even talking about technical debt. NQ didn't even make 60K in 2020, meanwhile Eve made $28 million for the first half of 2020.... something is really really wrong here. Technically DU is still an alpha prototype with only the voxel system working reasonably well, even that is still far from feature complete.... so a comparison with Eve isn't very justifiable, but I still make it for the sake of comparison of the analogue from which DU is taking a lot of mechanics. More than 20 million gone and idk, 50 players playing this single shard mmo at any given time?

Fifteen minutes on youtube also shows the state of the world and leads to the conclusion that termination is a preferable outcome. That's not an argument for anything. NQ is advertising that which does not exist.

nope.... Lua is slow depending on what you're doing and how you're doing it (although it isn't exactly a language you want to compare to C for example )... Couple of examples: the json parser NQ is using is really slow, there are much better alternatives. While loops are generally slow in Lua, so everyone who is using while loops in, say, coroutines, will suffer performance loss. For loops that are ipairs or pairs are significantly slower than numeric loops, etc. Lua has some.. lets just say, holes, but if you know what you're doing it can be just as good as any other language for whatever you want to accomplish. As far as JS, ow boy... JS can be fast... very very fast, especially when you consider it is non io-blocking and is event based, allowing for maximization of cpu and memory usage. It all depends on how and what you code. Ruby programmers should just switch professions. As for your comments about HTML being heavy.... well... duh. They literally refresh the dom on every frame / tick. Again, see here, they prob read the C triggered JS bits and forgot about databinding (you know, the super duper efficient and performant method as it only updates values that need to be updated, NOT the whole DOM... it's the same method I use for updating quadrillion table data rows in dom without crashing a browser. C++ triggering JavaScript, Javascript triggered C++ (heehee) https://coherent-labs.com/Documentation/cpp-gt/d9/d2b/binding__c_x_x.html AAAAND databinding! https://coherent-labs.com/Documentation/cpp-gt/df/dfb/_h_t_m_l_data_binding.html

that's what's up.... NQ using a violin to butter toast. Take a look.... It's called Data Binding C++ triggering JavaScript, Javascript triggered C++ (heehee) https://coherent-labs.com/Documentation/cpp-gt/d9/d2b/binding__c_x_x.html AAAAND databinding! https://coherent-labs.com/Documentation/cpp-gt/df/dfb/_h_t_m_l_data_binding.html So many options to improve performance by a lot... it is inconceivable that a game should refresh and send the whole DOM on every tick or frame... yet NQ did it. Every nail is stepped on.

I'm just here waiting for another epic @Eternal post.