Zeddrick

Carrying BPs between alpha and beta was 'put it in your inventory or it gets deleted'. None of this detailed clever stuff.

There's no way that schematic refund is going to survive a wipe! Some people bought them at 1% and received huge payouts for the refund. Even some of the ones who didn't buy them at 1% cost got game-breaking amounts back from the refund (they were able to earn the money through the old mission system). Only reason they're doing it, IMO, is that they know they're going to delete all the money later so don't want to bother arguing about it now. Also talent points. After all the times they objected to resetting them and all the good reasons given for not resetting they just reset them out of nowhere for a vague, waffly and obviously BS reason. I mean, they didn't even bother to make up a proper excuse. They just outright tested the post-wipe-talent-refund system.

Yes. But then they'll probably be surprised by the outrage the decision causes and back out of some aspect of it, annoying the other half of the players as well. I can imagine the conversations at NQ now. "Our game relies on players creating content for one another, but they aren't playing. What can we do? We already tried deleting the content the players created, making them spend most of their time grinding quanta instead of creating content and when that didn't work we tried competing with the players by creating our own content instead, duplicating what they're trying to do. But nothing's working! I know! Lets delete everything and start again! That's bound to get people to create more content ..."

IMO a wipe (of everything except talent points and core BPs) is pretty much a certainty. It's hard to see how they could do anything else at this point and they have been acting like this is going to happen. They aren't even bothering to hide it any more really. For example they wiped everyone's talents without even taking the time to make up a plausible reason and in the last update they handed a bunch of players billions of quanta in schematic refunds despite some of those players having bought the schematics at 1% cost some time ago.

Wow, I didn't know it was that small. That's what, 10 people employed for 1 year with no equipment at best? What did people expect to be able to get done with so little money?

Yes, but the kickstarter money is gone. You didn't get what you were hoping for. But kickstarters are all a bit of a punt anyway and at least you actually got something playable. We need to move on to what works, what is achievable and what is fun. Nobody cares what JC wanted to do 6 years ago even if we all wish that was the game that got made. It isn't. And you can't magic up the game you wanted because the money is spent now.

IMO that's not a very smart way to do software development at all. You need to look at what the people who are actually using the product want. Looking at what the original backers want is, of course, relevant but many of them backed the product something like 7 years ago and may not have played the beta at all. Some of them might not even play video games any more. DU needs a lot more players than there were original backers and if NQ just ignores what the players want and just present the original version, unaltered, regardless of the opinions of the actual player base then it might be a very short-lived game, and that's not good for anyone. Even the original backers might not like the original game when actually presented with it.

Not since 0.23 broke the markets. But before then there were enough players that all 10 districts were busy enough to support a market, and not all 10 were well supplied in all things. So it was possible to play the 'build big and sell at district 6/7' game or sell less frequently at the others for higher profits. I have no idea if people transported goods between them but it certainly would have been doable and proffitable. Even some of the other Alioth markets were viable on their own and markets off Alioth were starting to develop too. Now the player count is too low for that but as the game scales up having more marketplaces provides more opportunity for more people to get involved with selling and that's a good thing.

I have posted many things here and have yet to receive any hint that any of it got read by NQ (except once when a post was censored but I can't remember what I wrote anyway). Sometimes I wonder if what I said influenced a decision but there's no way of knowing if it even gets read. Schematics definitely did not work as intended. While each player interacts with the market more now the player count fell so much that the net effect was that the market has never been used as much as it was before the patch. I used to have 500 orders across 10 districts and sell hundreds of items per day. 9 of the 10 districts are completely dead now and district 6 sells a lot less than before. The vertex tool is nice, but was probably implemented to get rid of complex, uncompressable voxel libraries to save storage costs on the server rather than because of player feedback. Shipwrecks did nothing for PvP. Alien cores are good in some ways but they are a particular type of organised PvP which is quite niche. The broken radar made it hard to take advantage of though. Asteroids and missions were great PvP drivers but mining units and mission nerfs undid these and the net effect is a lot less PvP now than before. I would love you to be right about the wipe but looking at recent actions and NQ behaviour in general it is hard to avoid concluding that a wipe is already certain. And the number of people asking for unrealistic things before release like atmo PvP and pets really worries me. You must surely realise that no e if that is viable in the timeframe. I think the best we can hope for here is that NQ starts to listen and make positive iterations which increase the user base to the point where they can grow and be able to do some of these things.

It must be hard to be NQ though when it comes to feedback because there are so many different types of players with contradictory ideas. This was a core part of the original vision after all! Look at the main forum page. I can see a thread which says there should be no PvP and another suggesting taking away all the safe zones. The fact that loads of different player types can play different games together is one of the things I love about the original vision. It's one of the things that gave eve a very long life. But the skill here is listening to all of the feedback, balancing all the different wants and needs and making something which appeals to everyone. At the moment we get a mix of great things which do this (asteroids, missions for example) and things which everyone hates (schematics when announced, construct limits and territory taxes) combined with things which undermine past gains (mining units undoing the gains from asteroids, failure to iterate fast in missions breaking the economy, wipe talk drivignaway users, etc).

I think even an implementation is not enough. Software development is a process which goes on for the life of the product. That process involves making something people want to use (which is harder than the idea as you say) putting it into their hands and getting them to use it (which is harder than just making the thing), then looking at them using it and using that knowledge to make a better thing, replacing what you made, getting more people to use it and iterating. It doesn't matter how optimistic the final product is. In fact I'd argue that the optimistic vision of what DU could one day be is a big part of why we are here at all rather than in some other game. It's therefore a useful part of the iteration loop. You mention Twitter, and Twitter did scale badly for years (IIRC it had a postgres in the middle?). But quickly they made a thing people wanted to use. When people used it they gained knowledge and used that to make a better twitter and get more users, iterating to the point where scalability was a 'nice problem to have'. For DU I'd argue that there is an end goal, and they have produced working implementations, but they forgot to listen to what the players want and make a better thing. Instead we got a combination of hits and misses as they made what they want to make for their own reasons instead of making what the players want in order to grow the user base. The result of this broken iteration is a game which loses more players than it gains over time and this in turn reduces feedback, reducing the quality of future iterations. What is really valuable is an idea with an implementation *which is being used by a lot of people* because it shows a company can execute properly.

This *is* the alpha phase of the game. It doesn't matter what NQ choose to call it. What they're doing and the sort of changes being made are alpha-level changes. Stability is alpha-quality, etc. If it quacks like a duck it's a duck.

I used to hit my TV all the time. It worked and didn't break the TV. Eventually I replaced it with a shiny new flat screen. My son hit it once after losing at FIFA and it smashed. I don't even know what the lesson is here but it sounds like there might be one somewhere.

I actually like these schematic changes. Doubtless they will get some fine-tuning over time but I think they are going in the right direction with limits on a character's manufacturing capability and requiring actual effort to maintain mega-factories which increases with factory complexity, size and alt count. It will force people to stop and think about what they do and don't want to make rather than flooding the market with every possible thing because each individual line is low effort. It's a shame this is happening now rather than 1 year ago when the schematic haters were still paying attention! I still think that NQ have missed the point about 0.23 somewhat. You said yourself that players were making their own backyard industries and you wanted to stop that. That was the mistake. The game is about players creating a civilisation and civilisations evolve and develop. NQ should have looked at what the players wanted to do and enabled, encouraged and built on it rather than trying to tell players how to play the game and trying to force market centric gameplay. There were a lot of players who came from games like minecraft or survival games like Ark where the default is to do all of your own industry. That's the sort of game they wanted to play and when you took it away a lot of them stopped playing altogether and won't come back without that gameplay. But it wasn't true that these people weren't interacting with each other. Some were also using he market too sometimes. A lot were in orgs doing mining ops, building cities, talking in discord, etc and when those people stopped the other players who were playing with them lost a lot of interactions and they quit too. The markets were actually a lot busier with the larger population than at any time since. You didn't have to chase these people away by telling them how to play the game. You could have just said anyone can make anything but it costs 3x the materials if you have no schematic. I think people would be OK with that and it gives plenty of space for a market to evolve. You could still do that with your new system by making inefficient copies which can be created from nothing instead of being copied. Don't be scared by people not using the market. At the moment industry gameplay is one of the good bits of the game, so people who do industry are more likely to be playing. Like with builders. If you want 90% of players to just use the market you need to give the non industry players more to do. Add more exploration, accessible casual PvP, perhaps PvE or even huntable space-whales! That will attract non-industry types and they will be more market focused. It will develop over time. /rant

They will be wiped! Introducing a new schematic system was the primary justification for a wipe, the argument being that updating schematics and keeping the current ones is too hard. Now here is an article about schematics without a single mention of what happens to the existing ones. After they already tested the talent point retention after wipe system in the latest update. Why they don't just admit it is beyond me. It has reached the point where it is outright insulting for them to pretend they haven't decided to wipe.

That's cool, but I'm more likely to want to go the other way (Where is the Sentinels' stall) rather than 'what is the front middle stall' because I can just go and look if I want to know that.

Some nice ships parked here.

Somebody moved me. Happy days!

Hmm. Haven't played for a while and thought I'd check it out. None of my ships worked because of the element collision thing. Took all the voxel off a small one, took all the brakes off, put them back in exactly the same position. It looks exactly the same now but now it actually works. Except the lua doesn't work any more. Put an older lua script in which just about flies it with a load of warnings. Good to go. Fly to the exchange. It actually looks really nice outside. Fly around and try to land, but I'm out of practice and using an old lua so I crash into another ship. Now I'm stuck inside someone else's ship and my ship has bounced about 800m away. No problem! I'll just use 'unstuck'. But it says that it can't find a spot within 100m to put me! This is the view from the window of the ship I can't get out of, I think I can see a suitable spot. So I ask in help, but nobody helps. I could force respawn but then I'd have to fix another ship in order to come back so perhaps I'll just give up now. On the plus side there are actual people logged in here, which is better than at the districts, and I have a good view of the fireworks people are occasionally setting off. And it looks nice from the outside.

I suggest you just assume it will be a wipe but BPs and talent points are kept. Then you can stop worrying about it and plan.

It's hard to believe anyone with an MMO would be stupid enough to let people get out of the habit of playing it and hope they come back at launch time. But it's not impossible. Perhaps there will be advertising. And perhaps it will actually attract new and old players. And perhaps that will even get back the ones which were lost. Let's hope so ....

Yeah, right. So 90% of players stop playing because no decision on a wipe is made. You are not going to wipe. But you don't want to say so just in case 'technical reasons' so you just sit there and watch the game literally bleed to death. Just in case. That would be totally nuts. The whole game is completely empty now. I just played for a 1/2 hour (mostly because I needed to do some talent point things) and went to some busy places, including market 6. Didn't see a single player the whole time. The markets are dead, most of the people I still talk to are not playing. And it's all because of the lack of a wipe decision. If the only reason for that is "we didn't want to say "no wipe" just in case technical reasons" then they will look like total and utter fools. Actually they look like total and utter fools right now so who knows, you could be right!

Really they have made a decision at this point whether they like it or not. After all the discussion, all the aggravation, all the people who quit because of going so long without the answer, imagine if the answer which comes out is 'we decided not to wipe anything and we will just launch as-is and continue'. Is that really even credible at this point. Wouldn't it annoy even the non-wipe supporters because of the massive damage which has been done to the game over the time when no decision was announced? I think at this point we all know more or less what will happen (wipe but keep talent points and BPs) so, in effect the decision is already made, and probably was some time ago. People who are happy with that are still here, most of the rest are probably already gone and not coming back whatever (like with 0.23, it has been too long now).

Right now asking for balanced feedback is a complete joke! There might very well be some people with positive things to say, but I have none at all. I stopped paying into the game months ago because NQ are clearly and obviously misleading us about the wipe and am angry about that. I could still play but don't really want to because of that. I am also really angry about the fact that most of my constructs are *still* broken by the thing that was meant to stop people cheating with overlapping elements. None of them have overlapping elements (at least they were not built with the cheat and don't look like they do). Nobody has fixed this after months of time. So no, I don't have any positive feedback for you right now. Best I can do is that I like that these podcasts come out regularly and communicate. I just don't like how you ignore the one question everyone has despite having obviously decided already *and even tested the mechanism for preserving talent points post-wipe* like you think we're morons.

I fixed that for you.