Samedi

Including placing in containers and using transfer unit for ease of feeding.

I think the new schematic system is an improvement, fewer schematics to deal with and players can contribute to manufacturing in another way. I don't like that you still have to put them into each machine, schematics should just be another component of what you are crafting.

I think it matters a great deal how big or small your industry is. The impact is minimal for a small setup where you are just making a few things yourself. Sure it is annoying, but it is almost back to where things stood pre 0.23.
 
For a large factory, the impact is huge. It is not impossible to do a large factory, but it is so tedious it sucks the joy out of it.
 
Try out the FTEU and start building from scratch. The schematics are not bad on that scale. I sure hope they address the need to put the schematics into each individual machine before we get too far beyond release, because people are going to burn out on that fast.

I would love to see a personal UI LUA section/item where one can change their avatar's HUD.  Then some of these talented coders would be able to compete for best avatar HUD in addition to best construct HUD.

Yes, yes!, Lots and lots of things like what you suggest are needed, but to be frank, the entire UI needs to be revamped into a more modern and leaner variant with less modal windows.
 

So we're at the end of the beta, there are a whole bunch of changes going into the game just before release, and a lot of people aren't playing because they know there's a reset coming.
 
My first fear at this point is that the servers are going to fall apart of the day of release (when was the last time they were solidly stress tested by us all trying to log in at once?).
 
Once we get over that, my main fear is that the economy will once again go south because things like the industry changes will turn out to be unbalanced or not to work as planned. This will only become apparent when everyone starts playing again, and that's not going to happen until launch.
 
This, it has to be said, is not an ideal way to run a software project. It's almost as if we need another beta...

Something I've been working on: https://samedicorp.github.io/2022/introducing-modula/.
 
Not completely ready for prime-time yet, but I'm interested in any scripting community feedback.
 
 

Bumping this thread a little but a quality system, tied to a few other systems could be seriously engaging, AND difficult for megafactories to monopolize. Here's an outline of my thoughts. I'm using T3 Atmospheric Engines as an example. It's a "what could have been" outline, because I believe the game in it's current state is too far gone to implement this. All of these systems would have to be implemented at the same time, in addition to 2-4 other large content drops in order to not saturate one facet of the gameplay offered.

1.) [Streamlining] Element tiers can remain, but the "military, freight, maneuver, etc" designations wouldn't. Higher tiers would still require higher tier ores and parts to create.
2.) [Quality] Introduce "Quality" stat. Creating a T3 L Atmo Engine from the standard recipe yields a 1* quality. Creating a T3 L Atmo Engine from the standard recipe, and including additional parts yields a 2*-5* quality, offering stat bonuses and aesthetic differences.
3.) [Stats] Introduce stat bonuses from aesthetic/accessory modules. For example, the standard flight seat offers no bonuses. A flight seat of 2* quality that includes tanned and dyed leather (4a), or custom woven textiles (4c) that improves comfort/morale and offering the pilot "sharpness" that manifests as a 10% bonus to maneuverability.
4.) [Special Resources] Introduce resources that cannot be mass-farmed cheaply and must be actively acquired. For instance, isotopes of certain ores that only exist under specific circumstances. Ores with short half-lives that must be immediately processed into an alloy, or will degrade. Materials obtained from new features.
4a.) Introduction of animals could be a way of adding materials tied to them. A form of silicon that only exists on the shells of certain creatures or exists as a biological by-product. Leather from harvesting animals.
4b.) Material formed under intense heat and pressure from an asteroid impact.
4c.) Organic fibers or other material acquired through farming specific plants.
5) [Specialization] Through the existing talents system (should be redone from the ground up as a system that rewards active use of skills, not just passive investment) you could specialize in mass production, or artisanal production. Solo players and small orgs of artisans could get bonuses to efficiency/production time etc. Would rank up and progress through actively producing high quality parts.

Application
A megafactory as it currently exists does so because of a near limitless inflow of minable ores and deep coffers of quanta. They are able to mine through a network of passive miners and players, and purchase materials through the market. Under my system they would still be able to do so, but by following only the standard recipe, their T3 L Atmo Engines are 1* quality, offering only base stats for Tier 3. So while a 1* T3 L Atmo Engine requires only base ingredients, wouldn't they be able to create a 2* with the same process? No.
A 2* T3 L Atmo Engine would require a specific alloy made from an unstable isotope of iron not able to be acquired from passive miners. Individual players would need to acquire it by prospecting for asteroid impact sites (4b) that yield enough of the isotope for 2-7 complete 2* engines. (This is a potential vector for on the ground combat based PvP).
A 3* would require this alloy in addition to a silicon isotope gathered from a predatory chitinous animal that only spawns during specific weather, and so on.

Economics
What's to stop the rich DU oligarchs from buying all of these special materials off of the market and having 5* quality megafactories? Here are some potential solutions.
1.) Character bind special materials. A heavy handed approach that I do not prefer, but would force megafactory owners to do their own legwork.
2.) Gathering special materials solo, the effort required to get enough to run 5 lines producing more than 1* T3 Atmo Engines would far surpass the factory's ability to output product. Ergo, a megafactory with 50 production lines, would not be able to exceed the production of a solo player or small org with on 3 production lines based solely on material acquisition time.
3.) If these materials are sufficiently challenging to acquire, players will either hold on to them for their own artisan production, or sell them for a large profit. A megafactory owner COULD purchase the iron isotope alloy from the market, but the price would likely be far in excess of the cost of a single 1* engine. With realistic production constraints from requiring a scarce component, megafactories output of 2*+ elements would be low, and they would have to charge very high prices to make the effort worth it. The inconvenience of doing the legwork is a deterrent for players used to their factories doing the work for them.
4.) On the other hand, a solo player or small org going out to acquire the iron isotope gets to price their labor as they see fit. They did not spent any quanta acquiring it, only time. This makes it much more possible to undercut the megafactories without taking a loss. Megafactories MAY take a loss in the beginning, but the high prices for higher quality elements would chew through their coffers. This is the financial deterrent. Making artisanal elements is easier to do as a solo player or small org where ACTIVELY engaging in gameplay elements is what rewards you with the needed material. NOT simply having a massive factory infrastructure and deep pockets.

Parting Thoughts
I don't believe the system I've outlined above could be implemented now. It would need to have been included upon launch of the Beta, alongside every system in-game now and more. As I said in the intro, the problem is oversaturation of gameplay elements. In the early days of the DU Beta, almost every single person had their own factory pumping out all the elements and parts they needed, which made the market unnecessary. Industry was the single most fleshed out gameplay element (arguably the only one) there was, so everyone flocked to it immediately. Upon the release of 0.23 players were left with nothing to do, and left. Fast forward a year and a half and aside from a couple of additions like missions, the content situation still looks a bit bleak. Were my ideas alone implemented now I believe 90% of current, returning, and new players would flock to it immediately, and when everyone is an artisan, nobody is an artisan. Completed, quality parts would flood the market in weeks, and the people who wanted to make artisan products (not the people who did it because there was nothing else to do) would be left in a situation akin to the markets right now. Where raw materials cost just as much (or more) than finished products, and the time investment of playing the new content didn't make the effort worth it.
The only way I could see this being implemented now is if it also pertained to other newly introduced gameplay systems I haven't mentioned here.

Nothing new. This is just NQ continuing to behave like NQ always has, and the reason why this game is in the state it is.

What's especially "unconventional" in my opinion is the drive to both work on performance fixes and bugs and continue to push new features in advance of release. 
 
As anyone that's worked on software at scale knows, these two concepts work against each other...
 
Every feature change can have vast, unintended consequences on performance and will spawn numerous new bugs. 
 
Bugs tend to be magnified on release when more players storm the game...minor flaws become major ones if the game scales.
 
I'd argue that beta pops are so low right now, they have no meaningful data on how the game will perform once live. 
 
This speaks to "unprofessional" because this is basic software engineering standards. Granted, I don't know their release timetable; maybe they have plenty of time before release and don't need a feature lock yet...
 
But I highly doubt they do real load tests, and without a beta system with meaningful scale, a lot of issues will fly under their radar and ambush them on release. More so if they believe they have enough performance and stability to keep pushing feature changes! 
 
It's almost like this marathon feet-dragging about the wipe has sabotaged their ability to test at the most critical time in their history... 👀

@Leppard
@Hazaatan
Alright guys.
We understand the "Wipe" topic is an heated one and everyone has the right to have his own opinion.
Being passionate about it doesn't prevent to remain respectful towards each other.
Please cool off a bit.

Thank you for your understanding.

I hope NQ actually moderates a bit, because this sort of post is so needlessly hostile and arrogant and so clearly against the terms of use. 
 
You aren't capable of determining who is a cheater based on the tone of their post. You don't get to silence people because of your puzzling, evidence-free belief they are a cheater. 
 
Stop with the personal attacks -- there's no reason to get so angry and certainly no reason to attack anyone like this. It's hard to believe any of your "arguments" are based on anything other than your emotions with reasoning like this. It's just plain rude. 

This has to be some kind of record for how fast someone can make their own post worthless..

(old-geezer-voice)Back in my day even the worst market on Alioth had 3-5 players moving about.  I remember the constant roar of the engines like it was yesterday.(/old-geezer-voice)

I think you may have a very different concept of "relative stability" from others - because what I recall is people being unable to log in and unable to finish the tutorial because of the crippling lag...

I have no problem with the risk aspect of asteroids. I go in fully expecting that there may be a person there already or that I may be interrupted after a few minutes of mining.
 
All that said, the system as it works now doesn't make sense, and that is like a splinter in my brain. What is in game reason that people with this magic DSAT know when an asteroid has been found? Are the DSAT and the asteroid sharing some psychic link? It makes little sense.
 
There are so many things lately with this slapped together feeling and no explanation for why it works this way. If we had deep space radar that could detect activity in the region of asteroids, then create a mechanic for that. At least this sort of mechanic could feed into other new features.
 
An alternative would be some sort of hacking feature that would allow players to hack into a DSAT network to locate where a DSAT is actively scanning.
 
These sorts of things would create additional conflict, make some actual sense, and require a more active role to be played by the hunter. There is way too much passive gameplay now as it is.

The fact DU makes it so easy for anyone to track someone else is why so many don't go out and risk out in PVP zone. NQ doesn't seem to understand that, they keep trying to make encounters an easy thing to see if players get involved in PVP without realizing this will only end up with the PVP space being a place exclusive to PVP players, with nobody else wanting to get into there with risk of being camped/scanned/whatever.
 
I'm not even bothered if some PVP org decides to claim one asteroid as theirs or camp it waiting for players to come there and gank them, that should be valid gameplay, same as if someone wants to patrol the areas around asteroids or hunt down someone carrying good cargo, but like everything else PVP and piracy should need active work from players and not only consist of someone looking at the DSAT middle column and saying "ok boys, let's go to this asteroid because someone just landed there". Why should I, as a miner, be forced to spend 40 minutes slow boating to some asteroid plus a extra minutes trying to pin-point its location and even more extracting its contents, which takes some time for T3+, while on the other side some random kid can just automatically know I set foot there and come directly at me to take my stuff, without barely any work on his part other than camping the DSAT screen?
 
DU needs more PVP interactions? Definitely. But pushing players into it hoping they will start participating more will just end up with the opposite effect.

The good:
 
- limiting the amount that a single person can build is good
- letting people trade away their building allowance for money, or for influence within an org is good
- having in effect a "building tax" is good, as it gives NQ another economic lever
 
The bad:
 
- almost everything else about this design
 
Discussion:
 
You can see the ability to create a limited amount of schematic copies as a "building allowance". I think that's a good thing. It gives people uninterested in building something that they can trade. It also means that people have to combine in order to build a lot.
 
The fact that making schematic copies costs money is good in some ways, since it is a mechanism for tuning industry. However, I think the cost is being levied on the wrong people. It should be levied on the person doing the building, not the person making the schematic copies.
 
How it should work:
 
- People should have a building allowance which is just another form of currency/points. It should build up over time with no user intervention. People should be able to trade this allowance. Orgs should be able to hold a balance in this allowance.
- Factories should be powered by these points. Individual machines shouldn't need "loading" with them. Either a single machine should need loading (for the whole factory), or the points balance of the factory owner should be automatically consumed.
- Consuming these points should cost some money for each item they build. This can be justified any way you like - as the cost of the power used, as a "tax", as the cost of Aphelia converting the points somehow, whatever.
 
All the other stuff - having to micromanage which schematic copies to make, having to keep manually making them, having to manually load them into individual machines - that's all tedious nonsense. It adds nothing to the fun, and it is just another boring game mechanic which looks like a naked attempt to force users to log in every day. There are vast numbers of users for whom that's impractical, or unattractive. In its current form it will simply discourage people from industry, which will damage the game economy and push the power further into the hands of big orgs.
 
 
Side note:
 
- Can we at least have a better name than "schematic copy"? In English, it's awfully clumsy. I realise that English may not be the first language of some of the game designers, but I was hoping that by release time these sorts of bits of clunky language would have been cleared up; there are a number of them, but this one is particularly egregious.

Has there been any MMO launch that didn't have server nightmares?  The devs can estimate demand and plan server count still to be blown out of the aether  by being more popular than anticipated.

When I first got into this game, it was under the promise that it was a open world, sandbox type game. A player could come in, and if they wanted they could join up with a large organization and enjoy the benefits of it, or they could either join up with a small group of friends, or go it alone. And although joining with a large org would definitely have it's benefits, playing the game with a small group or without any obligation to a large org would be possible. It would take longer to achieve certain things, you wouldn't be able to have many bases on many different planets, etc...but you would be able to play & enjoy the game if that's what you chose. We were also promised that, although there would be  wipes, they would be minimal at best, and they would never reset our talent points or wipe the money we had made.
 
By the time the first of these promises were broken, my small group of friends had managed to build up a respectable business. We had a factory for our personal use, we were able to build most of what we needed, as long as we could feed it. But we had also managed to work out some beneficial trade deals with several orgs in the game. It worked out well. We met some really great people, had fun organizing mining runs to different places, fulfilling orders for different materials, and had managed to bank a tidy sum that was helping us grow our org. We rarely if ever used the market, but that was because we were able to conduct our business bartering for what we needed. And we were trading things all the time.
 
So the first big wipe comes along, and we find out that not only  are we going to lose the structures we had build, that materials we had accumulated, and the ships we'd built, but they were going to reset and wipe the accumulated talent points, and wipe all the money from the game.  So everyone started over from 0. All the work and effort we had in the game, thousands of hours of play time, all wiped out with nothing to show for it. Didn't like it...in fact...hated it...but fine...whatever...it's a new game and there  is so much potential, so we'll bitch & moan, but we'll start over. We built it up once, we can do  it again.
 
Like everyone else we start over. We start rebuilding what we had lost within the new parameters. As we start to get back to something resembling sustainable, here comes schematics and another wipe. Revamping mining, changing the way factories work, making it so it's extremely hard & expensive for anyone not in a large organization to fare. So we rebuild...again. Now, after spending hundreds of millions of quanta on schems, hundreds of hrs redesigning factories so they'll work, and trying to get back to where  we can actually create a service that can be  sold or traded in game we are once again screwed. Factories have been revamped, schems have been completely wiped and again...we're having to start over with nothing to show for our work, time, & effort.
 
I get that it is a game in development. We all got into it  know that there would be hiccups, changes, and unforeseen circumstances that may make parts of the original vision of the game unattainable. However, you don't continually bend over your player base, break promises, change fundamental aspects of the game, and refuse to compensate for those loses without expecting to take a serious hit on the number of people logging in. And if fewer people log in, fewer are paying your subscription...which leads to problems affording to keep up servers. This game was never going to compete with WoW, however you have/had a chance to make a very good game, with a very respectable player base. The more this game changes...the more it reminds me of another sandbox MMO that was very popular in the early 00's, and it went down the same path of changing things up. They got greedy. They forgot that they were a niche game and that while they would have a dedicated & avid player base...it was never going to rival WoW. Ask Sony how Galaxies worked out for them.
 
I refuse to be forced into joining a large organization just to be able to play the game. I enjoyed interacting with the other players and organizations without having to be in one. I'm tired of starting over. I'm tired of re-learning basic aspects of the game. I'm tired of building things up just to have them erased with absolutely nothing to show for it. And most of all, I'm tired of being lied to. And yes, whether intentional or not, the players were and are being lied to. And anyone who doesn't think they knew this latest wipe was necessary months before it happened is kidding themselves. They just  didn't want to deal with the anger they knew would ensue beforehand.
 
I don't know if I'll continue playing, if I'll just log in once in while to ck things out, or if I'll try and start over...yet again. This isn't a 'I'm mad and going to quit' rant. This is a 'this is BS' rant.
 
/rant off

Why has NQ's technical leadership apparently failed to push back against designs that were never, ever scalable...? Or have they done so, but NQ's pie-in-the-sky CEOs refused to listen...? 
 
Their CTO was (for a short period) Högni Gylfason, an ex-CCP vet that has had a ton of experience going back into the late 90s. They lasted less than a year (11 months) and left in 2019. 
 
Now, it's someone whose only previous job was as a 4 month engineering intern. Please let that sink in for a bit...
 
NQ's CTO is someone whose only real experience in engineering is with NQ itself.
 
Their specialty is graphics rendering...hardly a simple field, but not someone that has experience building or scaling an MMO (or any online software for that matter - they've only had the 1 job at NQ and a 4 month internship lol). 
 
When it comes to scale, practical experience matters a lot. Someone with experience knows how even one tiny change can crash servers at scale...and knows why and where things break down at scale. Techniques that work with low pops or traffic simply won't work at scale. 
 
So when NQ talks about how much server costs they have, keep in mind that their technical leadership really doesn't have experience in this domain.
 
Ultimately, this is the person responsible for making technical choices and no matter how bright, they will be severely limited by experience. 

The EULA is pretty clear regarding what you get when you enter the beta. You got to play a beta version of a game for two years. The privilege was yours. All of the people receiving a pioneer pack spent money on the game at some point. You played for free. 
 
If all free beta accounts were given this reward, you would be back here complaining that alpha backers that received beta keys were getting multiple rewards, one for their main account and more for their alts playing on beta keys. That would be the conclusion if we followed down this path of backwards logic and the end result would make zero sense at all. to either NQ or the testers.

When they say that people with X amount of months of subscription get X rewards, do people with unpaid subscriptions (beta keys) get these rewards, or no?

There has always been something off with NQ. The pace of dev, the tone deaf community interactions, the extreme manager overhead and still complete lack of sound strategic decisions made etc.
 
Like when they hired Hrafnkell Oskarsson back in 2018. And then he left after 8 months, which is more or less as short a time you can realistically stay at a company when it involves moving to a new country and then find a new job before you leave again. And in comparison he worked 16 years at CCP before that and is now closing in on 4 years at 1939 games, so he does not appear to be your typical frequent job switcher/career hunter.
 
And the same goes for many of the key developers that were tasked with building the core technology for NQ, not there anymore and instead we now have people who started in junior or basic roles being lead <some fancy title> after a few years.
 
And interestingly there was hardly any change at all after JC left, so what is it? And I personally hope that someone will come forward and tell the real story, after NQ collapses in a year or two (three?).. If nothing else but to give us closure on this whole mess.

And with that.. we have identified the problem ..