Zeddrick

This is getting really miserable now. I have to move about 20 wings. I have absolutely no idea what's wrong with their placement as they don't look like they're overlapping. Every time I move or move an element the red highlighting disappears. I tried spacing one out. The top right one above. I moved it until it went blue, clicked and it placed. Then when I went to move the next one I made them go red again and the wing I moved is still red. I waited a few minutes just in case but still red. This is a terrible experience. Building used to be one of the things that the game really got right and now it's just a frustrating waste of time. This collision stuff has been in the game a while now and it just doesn't work. Remember that this started out as a way to catch cheaters who used multi-boxing to place elements right on top of each other. And now it's just ruining the whole experience for everyone. Whoever wrote this obviously lacks the ability to deliver something which balances usability with the required level of correctness checking. Take it out now NQ before you end up with a huge list of negative steam reviews complaining about the building experience.

I have discovered by chance that if I hit tab, bring up the element list, mouse over the element type I want and then hit tab again the overlapping ones go red, making them easier to find. So that's useful but not really very discoverable for a new player. Why don't the overlapping ones just go red when I enter build mode given that the game obviously has the ability to do that? My radar went red because it is obscured.

I built a brand new ship this week. It worked fine and then the next day I logged back in and got into the seat and it said 'elements have been disabled because they are overlapping'. For a freshly built ship with no tricks used, just placing elements next to one another. The element being complained about was an adjustor and there seems to be no way to know which adjustor it is. Nothing is highlighted anywhere except on the element list. So I had to spend a miserable 20 minutes just moving adjustors around randomly to try and make the error go away, which it eventually did (although not immediately so I still don't know what was wrong. There was nothing obviously overlapping. So today I'm trying to make one of my existing ships work. It was purchased from a well known ship-builder who does not use any sort of Janko on their ships. I have the 'overlapping' error on one or more of 36 wings, 6 vertical boosters and 35 atmos airbrakes. And no obvious way to see how to fix it. I don't even know where all the elements are because I didn't build the ship. And isn't that the whole point of buying a ship, that you don't have to mess about with this stuff. This sort of thing might fly in a beta but, franky, this is not good enough for a release. My pre-existing ship will, admittedly, be wiped so that will be a solved problem but a lot will not be and the ship I built fresh was a post-wipe ship I intend to use. Brand new players are going to come into the game and build ships and this is going to be their first experience (after the dodgy element placement which is a lot worse than it used to be and errors about clashes when the item is blue, forcing a miserable trial-and-error which sometimes ends with the element jumping a few voxels after you place it. I understand why this was added into the game, but after all these months it still can't tell the difference between 'our game is broken and put something an imperceptible distance inside another element' and 'Sneaky Snake put 57 engines on top of each other to make his Rifter go really fast'. This is not rocket science and should be really easy to code, erring on the safe side rather than making some flaky thing which tries to be perfect. Then just permaban people who deliberately stack elements. Frankly, either get it right or get it out of the game before release because this is a terrible experience. And right now it seems pretty far from being right even after all the time which has been spent on it.

Just a guess, but were you perhaps in build mode (where you see a pale blue grid around the speeder)?

It wouldn't be a challenge if you could just use an autopilot.

Well my ass is, indeed, smart but that's besides the point. Point is when told there was a sub you said you weren't going to play. So I was wondering what answer you were hoping for? Or did you just come in here to tell us you aren't going to play?

Did you think you would be able to continue playing for free forever with the Beta account?

You can still buy a game time code for 1 month at Markee Dragon's site. You get to avoid Xsolla and the price is in $ too so depending on where you are it might be cheaper per month too.

I had been assuming this was exploiting, but even for an exploit these are big numbers which would represent a gigantic amount of time spent exploiting. If they are genuine surely someone at NQ would have noticed that, for example, someone was averaging 1 mission per minute when they take hours to run. And surely they have some sort of internal audit which would alert them to huge jumps in the amount of money in-game and suchlike?

Actually now I've looked at it again, this number is impossibly big and can't be correct, can it? If there were 100,000 active accounts it would represent an average of over 30,000 missions per account which is over 50 per day. Although if the number is anywhere near this one then the in-game economy would still be toast.

This is a fantastic argument for a wipe! You really should have lead with this stat and it would have saved us 46 pages of discussion ...

Perhaps instead of buying 12 types of ore and manufacturing the 16 materials you can, instead, just buy the 16 materials from the market instead? That seems like a much quicker way to go about things and it would be less talent-point-intensive too as someone could specialise in making each material and you can specialise in the talents which speed the actual warp cell production. Alternatively if you're making everything yourself from scratch it seems to me that the effort of making the schematics will be much lower than the effort required to mine all the ore and collect it on one place.

OK, I'm not going to rehash the old arguments (or post quotes out of the alpha-NDA forum and get them deleted by NQ like others have) but there were things in writing which are stronger than you are making out (although not a promise not to wipe). Also people were given the definite impression that the start of beta was the start of the shared history and persistence of the world. There's lots of evidence of that which is hard to argue with if you go watch some of the JC videos. Also the fact that a monthly sub was charged was a strong indicator of the start of the game. Space-lawyering aside, though, the point I'm trying to make is that a significant number of people (myself included) did not want to start playing a beta, but wanted to play DU from the start of the world rather than 1+ year in and felt they had no choice but to start playing 'for real' when the beta started. I'm pretty sure I posted things to that effect several times here during the early beta whenever people made "it's just a beta" types of posts. Those people are now frustrated at having to start all over again, and many don't want to. I think this is understandable.

Except that NQ explicitly said that the start of the 'Beta' was going to be the last full wipe. So people who wanted to discover that new game in a fresh state from day 1 felt like they had to begin at the start of beta because it would never be that way again. And that's why some people are annoyed now -- a lot of people were already playing what they considered to be the 'full' game (and paying a monthly sub for that) and were playing 'for keeps'. Two years is a long time to play and have everything erased.

Give me a rainbow avatar suit!

Opinions on Reddit are more negative? Who saw that coming ....

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=Alioth+Exchange

Well, people said that. Some of the parts of the event were visible in Alpha but the problem was not solvable and, I believe, more pieces were added after alpha. As I understand it NQ expected the event to take years to solve while it actually took about 6 months and this caught them by surprise. But it wasn't particularly well hidden. I'm fairly certain that at least one of the objects was right next to one of the districts or a commonly used market on Alioth. There were also public forum posts about it and it was discussed on the discord. Accepted that some people don't engage with these things but this was meant to be a group puzzle solved by a group. And if you aren't engaging with the wider DU community it's true that you would miss out on these things. There really wasn't ever very much of it at all. Just one node to mine. I agree that making it have an actual, valuable use now would be bad because what there is of it is either in tiny quantities or held by people who didn't earn it. But there's no real reason why it couldn't, for example, be a voxel with non-useful properties (make it very heavy with low HP, resists and CSS perhaps). Then it can be used for decorative purposes only. That doesn't really break anything and would, IMO, be a well-deserved finger-up to anyone who RMT'ed it (IDK whether or not anyone did). As a game which is meant to be a persistent-world MMO where your actions are persistent and matter I think keeping things in the game to make trophies is actually a good thing. A good use of a city, for example, would be a place where people could display the trophies they earned while playing the game.

I certainly hope they will fix that one! It has been in the game for 2 years and actively used (often by accident) so it shouldn't come as a surprise to the devs ...

Wasn't one of the monoliths right next to one of the districts?

Well, I have to disagree with the 'mis-guided' part. The story of it is similar to the story of a few other things in DU -- a group of players got organised, put in a LOT of hours of grafting, wrote LUA scripts to help them, and thereby acquired clues quicker than everyone else. Eventually they solved the puzzle while the rest of the clueless masses were blundering around and complaining in discord that it wasn't fair, they couldn't compete, we must be using hax, there was an NQ employee helping us, etc. Which should sound familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to certain other discussions. In fact they were just on the losing team. Some people weren't aware of the puzzle at all, but that was one of the things that made it so much fun to solve. The whole thing felt very 'ready player one' at a time when JC was using that reference a lot and it made the first few months of beta a lot more interesting. Preserving the Thoramine wouldn't really hurt anyone because there's nothing that we can do with it anyway. I'd really like to be able to make mine into voxel and create a statue with it. I'd make one of JC and put it somewhere so the whiners could see it and tell me how mis-guided I am! It would be hillarious. And not much work for NQ. Most of the players who had some have permanently left the game though and I think a lot of it was sold to someone who wasn't involved so it's not a great loss.

It's not perfect, but these all sound like great things to advertise at the Alioth Exchange. Assuming new players are going to be funnelled into that anyway if all of that content is up and running and advertised at the exchange then that's what winning looks like IMO.

You'd think it would be to talk about the launch (+ date). But NQ have a longstanding habit of totally ignoring the elephant in the room and talking instead about something completely different while pretending that they are communicating helpfully. See the last 12 episodes of 'ask Aphelia' for example. I'm going with an announcement about pets.

Serious question: Will the rewards for subscription, etc be transferable in any way? I have two main characters which I played with extensively over the time. They're on a single contributor account so one will get a rare and one will get nothing. I also have 3 alts which were on paid subs for over 12 months, so they would qualify for an exotic pack each. But I don't want to play on my alts. Can I swap these over somehow?

Imagine my surprise.