Samedi

As a coder I am biased, but instead of “IF IT’S BROKE, FIX IT” I'd rather hear “IF IT’S MISSING, LET THE PLAYERS ADD IT”.

I get that most players in the long-run may be more interested in using stuff than building it. I also get that you may worry that opening up more flexibility is a Pandora's box that could lead to game-balance problems later. However, to quote that well-known fan of open-world sandbox space simulations, Voltaire: "Perfect is the enemy of good".
 
This is still a beta. You have a finite number of designers and coders at NQ, and a lot to do. You have another army of both out here in the game: stop trying to do everything yourselves! If you give us more API hooks and better tools, we will prototype things for you, and we will fill in a lot of the gaps for now, whilst you focus on the infrastructure.
 
With a modest number of additional hooks I'd say that we could have a community-run mission system and player markets already; they wouldn't be perfect, but they'd exist! If the community adds something and NQ later replaces it with something built-in, few people will complain as long as it is an improvement... and if it's not an improvement then arguably you should be spending your time on something else instead.
 

I agree that this is a dilemma. Do I spend time experimenting in the PTS, or advancing my actual progress on the real server?
 
A suggestion that would help for those of us who build things: implement a JSON interchange format for blueprints, then allow us to copy/paste them, so that we can move them between the servers.
 
This would allow people to spend time building potentially complex things in the resource-rich PTS environment, then deploy them in the real environment. We wouldn't gain any material advantage - I could build a palace in the PTS, but I'd still only have a blueprint on the real server. However, the time on the PTS would become productive time, and we would be able to experiment with exotic materials, so we'd have an extra incentive to be there.
 
You could probably achieve this with another mechanism for moving blueprints, but I would suggest JSON because from time to time there are bound to be incompatibilities between the two worlds - a text based format is flexible enough for us to hand-mend things. Having a JSON format for blueprints would also open up a whole range of possibilities for external tools (material swapping, for example).
 

As a coder I am biased, but instead of “IF IT’S BROKE, FIX IT” I'd rather hear “IF IT’S MISSING, LET THE PLAYERS ADD IT”.

I get that most players in the long-run may be more interested in using stuff than building it. I also get that you may worry that opening up more flexibility is a Pandora's box that could lead to game-balance problems later. However, to quote that well-known fan of open-world sandbox space simulations, Voltaire: "Perfect is the enemy of good".
 
This is still a beta. You have a finite number of designers and coders at NQ, and a lot to do. You have another army of both out here in the game: stop trying to do everything yourselves! If you give us more API hooks and better tools, we will prototype things for you, and we will fill in a lot of the gaps for now, whilst you focus on the infrastructure.
 
With a modest number of additional hooks I'd say that we could have a community-run mission system and player markets already; they wouldn't be perfect, but they'd exist! If the community adds something and NQ later replaces it with something built-in, few people will complain as long as it is an improvement... and if it's not an improvement then arguably you should be spending your time on something else instead.
 

I'm glad NQ is acknowledging the poor quality releases; meaning the obvious broken behaviors in new and changed features.
 
I'm hearing a huge reliance on the PTS for farming out play testing, but I'm not hearing anything about what is supposed to motivate players to spend their time and energy in PTS. At the moment, I will never play in PTS when I could be "earning" with my time on the live server. I hope there are enough souls with time to spare to cycle on PTS changes for the thrill of bug hunting; may you be blessed.

I had a big factory so 0.23 affected me greatly. But that does not mean I was against it in principle.
I am not so sure the schematics solves anything in the long run as it is just a one-off investment cost. I will help get a more healthy market, but it will also make high-tier industry exclusively for early adopter big organisations. Organisations that want to get into it later will find it very hard to build up the investment and to compete on prices. So do solo-industrialist. It will stimulate organisations trying to dupe new players into being their 'mining slave' (I have seen some of that already), but will it make healthy and active player-interaction? I am not so sure: missions you need to do in a group, PVP and other cooperative activities work much better for that then Industry.
 
But aside from the downsides of the schematics: In my opinion the most imported market improvement in 0.23 was actually the destruction of elements. 

The 'fixes' now proposed make matter worse instead of better in my opinion:
 - Setting up a Tier one factory is already possible (I managed), so that did not need fixing: it will only increase oversupply on an already slow-moving market.
 - By removing the breaking of items there will be an even lower turnover on the market. That has been the biggest market problem from the start: if you can endlessly reuse and repair items, only new players occasionally buy something. You need a healthy amount of destruction to get a healthy throughput on the markets. PVP alone will not do that.

Why is the destruction removed again? 0.23 stimulate people to start with smaller ships and more T1 elements, and build up over time from that. So the destruction fits: those ships are not that hard to replace or repair. 
People should not fly large core 20-engine monsters until they know what they are doing.

So for me this change removes the good bits of 0.23, and makes the bad bits of 0.23 worse. I think the result will be even less healthy markets.

Update (after the patch): I stand corrected: they did not only lower the schematic prices on Tier 1, but across the board. Making a big factory is still a serious investment and not something to do casually, but it is not only achievable for big organisations anymore.
I still think we need to get the destruction back to get more activity on the markets. People should just fit an ECU and enough breaks and they survive a disconnect. Most of the people disconnect on purpose to save their ship: that is an exploit in my opinion. But they prefer to wine and complain :(.

Hi,

I completely agree with that.

The prices on the T1 schematics have been fair for most items (probably not for furniture). At least it gives a real challenge and goals, and you can start and progress from scratch and slowly evolve to get bigger and bigger. Making it easier now  would just undermine the 0.23 update very purpose imho.

I produce modestly ship parts and sell them to the market. The item destructions allowed at least a good turn-over and good demand on those ship parts. Removing it (but for PvP) would kill some businesses, and that new born economy.
Beside that, the 24-25 quantas bots buying ore (temporary), just kill the market. Basically it is much more profitable if I would sell my non-refined ore to the bots instead of spending the time and efforts to invest in schematics, industry building and hours manufacturing, or even trading.
I think the more you try to control the player-driver economy, the more you may ruin it.
 
I don't mind adapting to new rules. I appreciate the efforts, the intents NQ's team brings and what they achieved so far. However nothing would revert and heal what the 0.23 patch did, but time. It is better to move on, and to continue on a mostly straight line instead of reverting, and possibly hurting back those who tried to adapt.

Thank you for reading.
Keep on the great work!
 
edit: to be fair, new T1 schematics prices (those from today's patch) look good. It has not been really undercut badly, while the reimbursement seemed to work. Good job!

Nice changes, but reimbursing only high price schemes is going to hurt a lot of people, especially merchants.
 
What do you consider a high prices scheme btw?