Zeddrick

Saw this. Haven't even read it yet. Came in here to ask if there will be a wipe at launch? And why are you even bothering to talk about anything else?

Last time I tried connecting multiple radars to a gun seat (admittedly before the last patch) it worked in that the gun seat script could read from all the radars, but it didn't allow me to identify targets and select them from the radar output unless it was from one specific radar. In other words one of the radars was magic and the only one the guns would work with. That would stop the use of multiple radars on one seat if it still works like this.

The logic here sounds right, but it misses the fact that players don't like not knowing the answer to this. There is clear anger on the forums this week (some of it is mine) about the subject. Allowing that anger to build right up to October sounds like a recipe for a flop-launch to me because a lot of players will have hit breaking point and walked away before the announcement even happens. If, on the other hand, people know in advance they will probably stop playing but a lot will plan to come back for the release.

Putting radar on the outside is a really bad idea because once a ship's radar is gone it can't do any more PvP. Whatever fight is going on will end at that point because without the radar you can't shoot at anyone. Unlike things like engines there is only one radar for each gunner and they don't have all that many hit points. It will be much better for actual fun PvP if the radar elements can be protected so they are one of the last things which go. That way fights can go on for longer rather than turning into 'first one to kill the others radar wins'.

I think 'completely failed' is a bit strong. There are some very bad design decisions in there (client side simulation of objects is really stupid and probably used more resources than server side simulation while being intended to do the opposite). There also seems to be a large amount of premature optimisation in there, particularly cost optimisation and some attempts to roll their own DB instead of using dynamo to make things cheap, which is when the game started to slow down and get stuttery for me. But I don't think any of this is fatal and it should be able to improve over time. Probably what it needs is a new round of investment which is hard to get without the visionary CEO and without a launch ...

People who *really* understand how the eve skill system works will disagree with you here. The thing most people don't get is that the skills in eve multiply out. So you have, say, a 5% damage skill, but then also a 5% tracking skill, a 5% falloff skill and a 5% rate of fire skill. If you get them all you do 5% more damage 5% more quickly, hit 5% more often and do extra damage through falloff or can hit further away. Also you get multiple skills which hit the same attribute and those stack, so if you have 50% from one skill and 100% from the other you get an extra 50% from having both. Put them all together and the difference between all 4 and all 5 is a lot bigger than you think it's going to be. In eve it's big enough that without having most of the relevant skills at 5 you can't really successfully 1v1 against properly trained pilots and you really need about 6 months of training to be properly effective. Even in fleet fights the setups are usually optimised so much that the ships don't really work properly unless most of your skills are at 5 (even though the 'gate' is level 1). But DU is a bit different because you have build and operational skills and so long as you can get ship boosts from a maxed out player you're halfway there. And that means that if there's a wipe without a talent reset those experienced players will be 100% necessary to do PvP for the first 3 months. So it won't be possible to make a new player org and compete, you'll have to go to one of the existing groups. I agree that a new player can catch up a lot of the way in a few months with some dedicated training (existing players will have a lot of different ship sizes/weapons trained) but that might not matter. If a new player *thinks* they can't catch up a lot will quit. The first thing a new player will realise is that they can't sensibly manufacture anything at all and sell it without making a loss until they get about 20 of the tier 1 manufacturing skills to 4. And that's just the tier 1 skills. They'll be competing against players with 60+ skills at 4 minimum, many at 5, and will get priced out of the market right away. Are those people just going to train skills for months and wait patiently to get into manufacturing (while not training anything else)? Or are they just going to conclude that this is a part of the game that only the beta players can touch? If it's going to be a wipe then, IMO, it has to be a at least a partial talent point wipe too. The way I'd do it is to let everyone keep 5 million talent points and 1/4 of whatever they had above that. So the oldest beta player is 6 months ahead of a new player at the start of release.

I just logged in for the first time since the patch to try this out. Of the 7 ships I looked at, 5 are reporting stacked elements even though none of them have any (3 of the 5 are ships I made myself and I know I didn't use any exploits). If I were still playing at the moment I'd be cross about that and filing bug tickets but why bother at the moment if it might all get wiped anyway? I'll just wait on the wipe decision, see if I feel like playing again and file tickets for anything I plan on keeping. Also it seems my factory contains stacked elements now. That's just ridiculous. The whole point of this stuff was to stop people gaining PvP advantage (or similar with mission ships) by making small ships which had a large number of elements without paying the size/cross section penalty for that. How on earth does that apply to a *factory on a static core*? That's just insane. What possible justification could there be to apply this type pf rule to static constructs at all? Is nobody managing the developers and asking questions like 'what is the benefit we get from inconveniencing and annoying our users here?' And now I'm cross and logging out again.

Seems to me that with client-side simulations of objects it's going to be really difficult to implement pets in any sort of a sensible way unless they were just part of the avatar model rather than following the avatar about. I imagine this sort of thing is quite some time away technically, and wouldn't you rather have something like NPCs or killable critters rather than just pets in any case regardless of whatever was promised in the kickstarter?

Ok, I was talking about the PvP groups who don't even try to take battles they are unlikely to win, even when it would gain them valuable PvP experience, help develop FCs and tactics, etc. And it's because of meta gaming and loss aversion. I do get that not everyone is a PvPer.

The matrix is real! Seriously though ....

What NQ owes us is a roadmap and a decision on the fundamental question of whether the persistent universe we play in started 2 years ago or has not started yet. All other decisions should stem from that rather than compete with it. How about we stop talking about anything else except 'when will NQ get their **** together and tell us if they are or are not going to wipe'. Then after that discussions like 'I paid for $XXX of DAC' would have a lot more meaning and substance. Lets make every. single. thread. on the forum about 'when will you get your **** together and tell us about the wipe' and make it so every single post is about that and nothing else.

...er...um......er....after 6 months we really are still thinking very hard about whether to wipe or not...we want to make the best decision honest...it's not so we want to wait until the last possible minute before you unsub...honest.... It's exactly like ccp ....

Really, you're going to keep arguing wipe-vs-no-wipe after 40 pages of discussion on the original thread rather than uniting around 'FFS just get it done'? I'm sure you are as aware as I am that very few people are playing the game at the moment because most people are waiting on a decision (and possibly the wipe to happen)? It doesn't matter whether or not I think a wipe is a crap decision or not. I think delaying the announcement of a wipe is a crap decision because they will launch a game where new players rock up and see a bunch of annoyed vets ranting about a wipe and all the other things players rant about when they're annoyed about something. It's a crap plan. And they need to get a better one.

IMO nobody wants to fight for one reason and one reason alone. They don't want to lose. There's a lot of BS about exploits, they get our stuff, etc but really lets face it, all of us who like to PvP are still rich from missions and we don't really care about the cost of losing a ship or the value of the ship our enemy might get. It's just that we've picked up the eve metagaming nonsense from the nullsec eve crowd who have trashed one game and need another. So now instead of going out and having some fun fights and enjoying the game everyone is worried that they'll get trashed on blackbriar (or wherever) for losing some pixel spaceships they bought with a morning of mission running so they won't fight unless they know they can win. In the immortal words of Craig Charles, "Just get out there and twat it!"

OK, so I didn't get past the first 40 seconds of this video before heading over here to give feedback. I hope you'll forgive the profanity here and take this as honest, genuine feedback from a frustrated log-time player and leave it for discussion rather than just deleting it so I have to waste my time putting it up on reddit instead. NQ you are really starting to take the piss now. At this point there is basically one question people want answering. Nobody cares two hoots about anything else unless they're living under a rock and don't even know that a wipe is on the table. You know this, and we know you know this, because you chose to talk about it at the start of your video rather than pretend otherwise which makes it OK and relevant for me to come in here and say this. At this point it's essentially a binary decision here. You are trying to paint a picture of a company which is examining every detailed nuance of the decision before attempting to make the very absolute rightest (and yes, IK that isn't a word) decision about the wipe. But really there are 3 possibilities: - you think that the 'no wipe' arguments outweigh the 'wipe' ones. In this case we would know now. - you think that the 'wipe; arguments outweigh the others and have essentially decided already but don't want to say so for whatever reason. Perhaps because you're just milking the ones who will stop for a few more months of sub money before they do so? - you really can't decide because the wipe and no wipe arguments are approximately equal. If this really is the case then you've walked yourself into an awkward corner but there isn't a good or a bad answer. Just two equally good/bad ones. But in this case delaying the decision is just making everything worse. I'm sure you want to talk about whatever other interesting things are in this video than the wipe. But even you know that the wipe is the thing we all care about. If there's no good and bad choice then just make one of them now and we can move forwards. Flip a coin if you have to. You have had plenty time to think about this. So I hope you'll take it in the spirit it is intended when I say 'FFS just get on with this and make a decision before the game is dead'.

I think what is live on the main server now is essentially the game as it will be at release. So to that extent is is being tested by whoever is still playing. NQ have said that it we have had the last big update and only small changes will go in between now and release. Perhaps DAC still needs to be done (we're waiting on the announcement) but that's not something to be tested anyway - you have to get DAC right first time.

Yes, it's fairly obvious there will be a wipe now and if it was me I'd want to make the announcement as far away from the actual release as possible. I can see why it would be tempting to delay it so people keep playing and don't cancel their subs, but on release they will be relying on the existing community to welcome the new players who come and provide a fun environment for them to play in. If they announce the wipe right before the release everyone will see that for what it is, because we aren't stupid, and people will be annoyed about being strung along and milked for extra subs. Others will also be annoyed anyway because a wipe will upset a lot of people wo don't want one. If it was me I wouldn't want to market and launch a game only to have players turn up and find a bunch of angry players raging about how bad NQ are and not playing.

I don't think you can deploy ships from blueprints within 125su of the alien core can you?

You can't have a garrison because ships are not safe when docked inside the shield. So you go to bed and when you wake up your whole garrison fleet got exploded.

No they don't. Poses had them but citadels have manned guns only. Eve just uses multiple timers but it does have some of the same problems where you can keep making people show up to defend things.

People would attack their own cores in order to have a defense at a convenient time followed by a week of combat free.

These are interesting ideas but you're suggesting turning DU into a completely different sort of game now. Minecraft players still have minecraft and Roblox players still have roblox. For DU to compete against these games they would need to be offering something better and that's not what DU is. DU is not a better minecraft than minecraft and it isn't a better roblox than roblox. What DU was meant to be is a persistent world MMO in a sci-fi setting g. That's something completely different from either of the games you mentioned and is going to have a completely different audience. Eve online, on the other hand, is a persistent world mmo in a sci-fi setting. It's not a completely stupid place to go looking for potential DU players.

BTW is it wrong that I keep wanting to use the question document linked above to ask 'will there be a wipe at launch'? At least it would pass the time while they're bike shedding about other things.

Ah yes of course, I forgot about this part. We still have to go through the phase where they make a decision, a lot of people get cross so then they change or nerf their decision, making a lot of different people cross instead.

Something I think is obvious from the 39 page megathread this issue has already generated is that nobody can agree on the correct thing to do here and there probably is not going to be a good answer which pleases everyone. Perhaps there isn't even a good answer which pleases the majority of people. That means that we're in a position where you're probably going to have to make a bad decision eventually in order to move forward. And making a bad decision now is better than making an equally bad decision 6 weeks from now. IMO the right thing to do now is for NQ to show some leadership, make a decision, sell it to the userbase and move forward. All the continued uncertainty is doing is undermining everyone's confidence in NQ's capability to create a workable vision for the future of the game and bring that to life. The longer the uncertainty goes on the more players will get frustrated with it and stop playing altogether because they don't know whether the persistent world game they've been playing started 2 years ago or has not, in fact, started being a persistent world yet. And the one thing the history with the 0.23 release and the loss of players should teach us is that the longer players get out of the habit of playing for the less likely they are to come back and play again when the situation is resolved.