Zeddrick

I was just looking at how many words are in this thread and thinking the same thing. Try as I might I haven't managed to walk away though, which sort of proves this right ...

I think missions are better now than they were pre-nerf, but I do agree that they were over-nerfed and need a buff now. Risking 4 hours in PvP space just to make 7 mil does seem like a bit of a non-starter for most players. Of course, with the radar bugs any attempt at mission running now would be interesting (unless they fixed it since I last played, but I don't think so), and it might be that rather than the rewards which is putting people off. Someone could be following you out of atmosphere (or just still see/track you at 2su distance with an atmo radar) and you might not see them at all. They'd probably need to fix that first to see for certain how many players are prepared to spend 4 hours in PvP space for 7 mil.

My money is on special AvA arenas or something like them where people can go and effectively be doing AvA in a different game.

That's not completely true though, because generally there will be a small number of marketplaces that everyone actually uses. Various people will be competing to be the one which everyone uses, and being able to blacklist people (or just offer them lower taxes like you can in eve so they can undercut people) is a really valuable thing. But anything like that is a form of PvP. And just like blacklisting, etc could be used to counter actual spaceship violence, the opposite also needs to be true, so spaceship violence can be a counter to blacklisting. eve online actually has most of the answers you need here -- it has a (mostly) balanced way of dealing with the ability to take town a market you don't like while also forcing you to put some skin in the game (yes, it could be better but the idea is good). It also has a way of dealing with things listed on the market so you don't lose your stuff when a market explodes and the market owner can't steal it. But it took the game years to evolve all of that and I don't think DU is really ready for it. They haven't even managed dispensers which give money and take an item yet.

Blacklisting pirates is a great feature (although it doesn't work too well because of alts), but there does have to be the opposite feature -- if you blacklist pirates they have to have the option to be able to destroy your station or in some way interfere with what you're doing. Otherwise you can mess up their game and they can't mess up yours, which is not how an MMO should work.

Kickstarters are always a bit of a punt though aren't they? Nobody expects to get 100% of what they backed every time and everyone is aware that when they back a kickstarter it might or might not ever get to the end of the project. Particularly in software engineering -- software engineers are notoriously bad at knowing in advance how much effort is actually required to make something. It should be obvious to everyone that whatever kickstarter money DU had is gone now. We can stamp our feet and quote the letter of the promises as much as we like, but if the money is gone then the money is gone. NQ devs can't just say 'oh yes, you are right, we won't pay ourselves any more and will work for free to make that'. What we have now is what you got for your kickstarter money. You might not like it, you might quote the original words from 6 years ago, but the money has been spent and this is what you got for it. Space markets would be cool, but I think the game would need to change quite a bit to enable them (not having all markets in one list, for example, and also answer questions about people being excluded from key player run markets without the recourse of being able to destroy them).

There's a huge amount of DU players? Where to they hang out?

They haven't told us one way or another, but I think at this point everyone is just assuming that there will be a full wipe. Good to know at least one person will be playing, your name may turn to be prophetic though. I'll probably stop if there's a wipe. You can have my stuff. Oh wait ...

OK, I actually agree with not having DAC in the game for similar reasons. In general, though, it is always possible to buy in-game money for real money as this 'service' is offered for a lot of games by botters and the like. Having something like a DAC does two things -- it legitimises the sale so people don't need to be 'cheating' in order to do it and it sets the price in such a way that if too many people try to pay to get quanta the price of quanta goes up a lot, discouraging them from doing so. But in DU, the DAC is there because it is a part of what was promised in the kickstarter. It being there, it should be available to everyone not just a lucky few. Presenting the game world as 'new' is not, I believe, a particular advantage which is high on most peoples' lists for the wipe. Most people, in fact, think that blueprints should be preserved because it is an advantage for new players to be able to see things which have been built, buy ships from other players, etc rather than being in a game with nothing to do and everything being made from scratch. Regardless, if someone can suddenly become rich in a way others have no access to then I think that will break the game world. I've personally put a large amount of hours since day one of beta into accumulating a few billion quanta and some ships, stations, etc. and the wipe will destroy all of these things. Then I'll have 3 DAC. But some people will have 40, 80 or even 160. There's no way I will be able to catch up with those people no matter what I do, they will own the markets very early on and make it so it's not even worth me buying schematics because they will have made back the costs of theirs (and lowered prices accordingly) before I even get far enough to buy any. For me, that's a non-starter. If some people are going to have that many DAC, I should be able to buy some for RL money and compete.

This.

It's not evil. It's just not a level playing field. Clearly they could use it in various ways and it wouldn't matter, but the fact that they have he option to monetise it very early on and nobody else does means that it is not a level playing field. Why should someone who, for example, paid 3 subs for 2 years have all the value they got from that erased in the name of creating a level playing field when someone who spent less money on a rugby backer account, say, and contributed nothing ever since gets to have a big advantage? If DAC were on sale for actual money then I wouldn't really have a problem with this. Anyone who wants to could choose to buy a big pile of DAC on day 1 for money and so the playing field is level - everyone has the same opportunity but at a different cost. But as it stands the backers will have a unique and limited resource which everyone else will have to pay quanta for. Quanta which just got erased in a wipe. And I think that's very unfair. Not evil. Not undeserved. But not fair and definitely not a level playing field. One way to fix it would be to give everyone DAC in exchange for the talent points and quanta being wiped, but I doubt NQ would do this at an exchange rate which matters because it means nobody would be paying subs after the launch for months.

Now the wipe discussion makes a bit more sense actually. I wonder how many wipe-backers are gold founders or above who stand to be rich again very quickly post-wipe in a game world where everyone else is poor and struggling for quanta?

OK, so I don't want to knock anyone's entitlements or say that people don't deserve what they get. I just said it was broken! The whole idea is that the game will be wiped to create a level playing field. How can there possibly be anything like a level playing field if eveyone gets wiped and then someone gets 160 DAC on day 1? It doesn't even matter if there are only 6 of these players, they can probably end up with double-digit billions within the first few weeks, hire people to scan for them, rush warp beacon production or whatever and disrupt the game in exactly the sort of ways the wipe was intended to prevent. Saying that we need to wipe to create a level playing field and then giving some players 160 DAC is just completely broken, right?

IMO it's because they are dishonest and want to take as many monthly subs as they can right now regardless of whether or not that is the right thing to do. They know people will cancel their subs when a wipe is announced so they keep putting the announcement off and claiming to be still discussing it. IMO of course.

Wait, there are people who will have 160 free DAC at launch? That is soooo broken!

Some of us are just hoping for the game to get better and move more towards where we wanted it to be. But have still moved on to a large extent and are now just keeping an eye on things just in case. Someone in another thread described it as an abusive relationship where you keep asking someone out and they keep not saying 'yes' but not saying a hard 'no' either ....

- look at forum, see if any wipe announcement. - look at reddit. - check discord. - play X4 instead.

Wait a few months and they will wipe the game. Then you can restart the tutorial with the rest of us.

You haven't done any PvP in DU have you?

This is the mistake a lot of people make about MMOs. Even if other people don't pay or add anything specific to the game their just being there creates a world for me to play in. When I'm paying a sub I'm paying to play with a lot of other people. Otherwise I could just play X4 or space engineers or whatever with no sub. Those people who don't create ship designs (or whatever) are the *audience* for the ones that do. They're paying to make stuff and, for a lot of them, they're doing so either to sell it to other players or just so other players can look at it. Scare away those other players with a price hike and you start to undermine the reason why the builders want to play while at the same time hiking their sub fee. Really I think it's about the numbers at this point. More players makes a better game. And that will attract more players. Once it gets past that critical mass where there are a lot of players and the game works well, feels busy and has a functional economy that's the time to start hiking the price IMO. The one good thing which should come out of spending all that dev time reducing the server-side costs instead of adding features is lower sub prices after all? Why else would you prioritise cost if not to keep the cost down?

When I first played it was $9.99 / month (or Euros) IIRC. Then it switched to £s and became £9.99, which was a price rise for us UK people. Then I think £11.99 was next and that was when people I knew started quitting and citing price, but I wasn't playing much then. I lost track of how many price bumps there have been since then. Perhaps I'm confusing £11.99 and $14.99 and think that's a price bump when it's just a different bunch of people in a different discord complaining about the same one? I had stopped playing by then and was just lurking and chatting in discords ...

I wasn't really interested in the exact numbers. The point I'm making is that there is a lot more there which you get for your money than DU has. And there's a lot of loyalty so eve players are more tolerant of this sort of price hike. That having been said, most of the people I played with when I was playing quit as a result of eve's previous price hike. I also know people who quit because of the hike before that. DU really really needs as many players as it can get. Much more than it needs money (after putting all that effort into cost reduction). I don't doubt that they will put the prices up, I'm just saying it will be a really really stupid and self defeating thing for them to do. Sadly that is not out of character for them.

Yes, they need to let a community build by supporting what the players are doing and letting them do more of it. Not constantly limiting players, removing functionality they like and trying to make everyone play the game in a different way. I'm pretty sure it's too late now. I'm one of the ones who survived since the start of beta (with a few months off after 0.23) but have been angry about where things are going for a while now and it's getting worse all the time. I'm at the point where I'm about to just completely walk away from the whole thing for good (and perhaps to check back in a couple of years). I know other long time players who are talking about walking away too (whether they actually will or not remains to be seen). So much for the snowball.

That would be really crazy. Current price is high IMO. Eve has lost a lot of players by going from 14.99 to 19.99 and it's eve. With 20,000 concurrently active players at the peak every day. And players with 10+ year histories.

DAC certainly can be pay to win. Say, for example, you and I have an argument or perhaps you blow up my ship. I can spend a ton of RL money on DAC, sell it and use the quanta to hire players to blow up all your stuff. (We will ignore the safe zone for now). Or perhaps I could find out what schematics you have and use the money to undercut and saturate those so you can't make money from them any more. Either way I paid RL money and could be argued to have won. It might not be your definition of a win but I only care about my definition. But there are limits on the pay to win because there have to be enough people wanting to do the oposite (play to play) to match you.