Zeddrick

OK, so I can see where you're going with the 'delete schematics and wipe' thing. Around 0.23 the playerbase was a lot larger and it the thing which provoked most of the players to leave at that time (it probably wasn't the only reason, but it was the push) was the introduction of schematics. I can see how tempting it must be to try to 'undo' that mistake and try to go back to where things were before it and to that extent this is a clever play -- get rid of the problem feature and wipe so those players who left feel like they can come back without having fallen so far behind in the meantime they can never catch up. The problem is, IMO, that this would have been a clever play about 9 months ago but it is now far too late for this sort of thing. The players who quit after the 0.23 update quit about 15 months ago now (some perhaps a month later as a result of there not being people to play with any more). Many hung around on the forums, in discords, etc waiting for things to get sorted out and eventually they just accepted their disappointment, left and moved on to other things. The ones who stayed, on the other hand, either liked schematics, didn't care or have accepted them in any case. Most who played since then have made large time investments into obtaining schematics and are now invested in the system to an extent where they don't want to see it removed and lose the advantage they obtained with their efforts. You can see this in these forum responses. There are a lot of "I don't want to lose my schematics" and "What's wrong with schematics anyway" types of posts, but where are the "Yes! I've been waiting for this to happen for a long time and will definitely start playing again if you wipe+delete schematics" ones? They're not there because those people aren't even on the forum any more. They're gone. And by and large they aren't coming back. I circulated your post on a discord which had a few hundred active and semi-active people pre-0.23 but has been a graveyard ever since. Even 6 months ago I see occasional posts on there from people coming back, complaining about schematics and leaving again. Now, however, the org leaders which made the discord have themselves left it, the majority of messages are people leaving in dribs and drabs and the only response I got to my post was from someone who is still playing and has already commented in this thread. I think the players are gone and you are too late to get them back. IMO if you wipe+schematics reset you won't regain these players but you will clearly lose a lot of existing ones based on the opinions expressed here. I think you need to build on what you have and start adding new things without breaking old things, restricting or taking features away at the same time and slowly growing the playerbase like that. Also, since we are about to get the last update before release, isn't it a bit late to remove schematics now? Doing so without having anything to replace it with would just break the economy like before by rendering the act of making things valueless so only huge-scale players can profit from industry. Trying to fit a new solution to that a few months later would surely lead us to another situation where it's hard to introduce the fix without a wipe. Really I think you need to settle on a 'final' solution which works before release and if schematics aren't that then the game is not ready for release because it will take months to find out if an alternative solution actually works. Full marks for the mission nerf on the PTS though!

That depends on what you mean by 'at any time' and what happens to the goods when the market is blown up really doesn't it? Right now the biggest risk for a player owned market would be that the owner would unsub and someone would IAR the whole thing. If the market had a 2 week timer before being finally blown up that wouldn't be very different.

IMO player-run markets don't really work in a 100% safe zone because markets are part of the PvP game and if somebody's market is undercutting me, giving preferential treatment to my competitors or whatever I should be able to get some friends and try to blow it up. Given that we're only just getting started with static constructs in PvP space I think this NPC-run space market is a great addition. In the last PTS iteration I visited it and it looks really good, although having an 'open air' space market is an interesting choice. On last PTS release there was no short-parking limit when parking a construct next to the space market though. Is that going to be added, or is the market going to end up completely surrounded by constructs which spawn in suddenly as you get close to them, making it harder and harder to approach over time?

Cool. That's actually cheaper for a lot of people as you can pay in $ without the $1 == £1 conversion.

The issue here is really how much gain one gets with the 20 accounts. If 20 accounts let someone make 5x as much money per hour, for example, I'd be fine with it. But as things are 20 accounts literally allow you to make 100x as much per hour (spent playing) than you could with one account because of the way missions multiply out by taking multiple missions at once and the way the effort per mission goes down because taking 100 packages is not really harder than taking 10.

While taking away beta accounts will change mission running I certainly don't think it will fix it, in fact I think this will get worse after launch. There are probably loads of people out there who don't have any beta accounts but would like to make a ton of mission cash and have, for example, money for 20 account subs for 1 month. Right now they aren't going to want to spend the money because there's the threat of a wipe, but after the launch those people will have no reason not to sub 20 accounts all at once and make billions for a month. It will cost less than the price of 2x 1 year subs to do that. Also the speed nerf isn't going to fix this either. At the moment it stops at 20K, which is 2/3 of the current limit. 2/3 of billions is still too much money and missions aren't limited by the time taken to actually fly them either because a lot of people do them AFK or semi-AFK. Same for reducing the rewards. All that does is put off the small-scale pilots. If I have 3 characters I might not bother for 2/3 of the reward but if I have 20 it's still a lot per day. Weekly limits per character would be quite punishing for regular players who want to grind up some cash. It would stop mission running from being a trade you can do, you would also need to do another thing too. I did write some suggestions in another post, but I think I used too many words because it didn't attract as much interest as this one.

What would happen if you tried this is the same thing that happened when the bot orders were buying voxel at a high price. Experienced players with high manufacturing skills would buy up all the ore in order to manufacture the items and sell direct to NPC orders for a profit. Since they can do this as much as possible, and they can have as many machines as they want, the experienced players would buy up as much ore as they can in order to do this, creating shortages and pushing up prices. Fairly quickly the ore would be priced so high that the newer players are now unable to make a profit manufacturing items. At that point you have to put up the price of the bot orders, which will keep driving price inflation forever, or leave them alone in which case you're back where you started. IMO the 'use less material for manufacture' skills are bad and cause this sort of problem. I think they should be 'make these things faster' skills instead, except that with the ability to run an infinite number of machines nobody really cares how fast they can make things (with the exception of things with an expensive schematic). They can just use more machines to make things faster.

Well, there is a limited ore pool I agree, but it has been shown to be so much higher than any sensible level of demand that it probably won't end up being a limiting factor. And even if it is now, there is a lot of spare capacity there and asteroid mining will add more capability. Schematics do not limit anything. There are millions of each type for sale and they are a one-off cost. For most items the cost is trivial, for the higher tier items (which are a lot less likely to be lost to random PvE destruction) the schematic cost is trivially met by the huge amounts of cash made mission running. Number of machines is essentially unlimited, you can have thousands on one core and it works fine. People have multiple cores with thousands of machines on each. One can always add another core and get another few thousand machines. This is not really a practical limit even for one character. When the energy system comes I imagine it will be just as effective as my umbrella is at stopping all the chocolate from raining on my head. There is not even a hint of an energy system on the roadmap. FFS, there isn't even much of a roadmap really. No amount of imaginary features are relevant to this sort of discussion no matter how long you've been hoping for them. Same for destruction of industrial units. In any case, all that does is adds an extra material cost to building something. It doesn't change the fact that if I'm building 20 things at the same time I can always add another 20 things and have them going as well. There is nothing practical stopping me from having as many machines as I want really. I get what you're saying about destruction, but the amount of elements which can currently comfortably be generated in the game is so huge next to the amount that PvP would ever sensibly consume that it's a bit like shooting a firehose into a bucket and saying 'we need a bigger bucket to hold all this water' IMO.

Agree, but these things were fixed, and the way it is now is the way it is on the PTS, which has the last update before a full release. Stuff which is unfixed now has a good chance of staying unfixed for a release unless we highlight it and it will come under a lot more pressure when we're in the release game than it has up until now.

These are all interesting, but the only way to balance *infinite* production (meaning that the game can always produce things at a faster rate) is with actual *infinite* destruction, meaning that you can't avoid it no matter what. If you make an engine and sit it in a box for 3 months it decays even if never used. Then the rate of consumption will always increase with the rate of production. Anything less and items are guaranteed to stockpile eventually and undermine the player driven market. Of course, limiting the rate of production by character seems like a much more sensible solution but for some reason it doesn't seem to be a popular idea.

These are all interesting, but the only way to balance *infinite* production (meaning that the game can always produce things at a faster rate) is with actual *infinite* destruction, meaning that you can't avoid it no matter what. If you make an engine and sit it in a box for 3 months it decays even if never used. Then the rate of consumption will always increase with the rate of production. Anything less and items are guaranteed to stockpile eventually and undermine the player driven market. Of course, limiting the rate of production by character seems like a much more sensible solution but for some reason it doesn't seem to be a popular idea.

The game has infinite production. It doesn't matter what you do to increase the rate of destruction of elements, there will always be too many elements on the market because infinite production is, well, infinite and means that production will always expand to provide a bit more than is needed. To make the market work both production and consumption need to be fixed and balanced against one another. The only way to balance against infinite production is infinite destruction which would probably look like 'elements have a decay and your ship needs to be completely replaced once a month'.

As good as the 'Andrex wipe' sounds when you say it quickly, any sort of partial wipe would just end up being gamed by rich players. Leaving constructs behind? Lets put 50x rare XL engines and 3 warp beacons on each one! There are already genuine ships which have 30+ XL space engines on them so it won't be as easy as you might think to spot this if it's done intelligently, particularly for a game which can't spot the difference between Janko and elements which are just next to each other. What about 'everything but talents'? The people with talents will get up and running so much faster than everyone else and it will take new players many months to catch up. Wipe elements and leave voxel? That sucks if you're voxel planet and everyone fills their constructs with huge chunks of voxel to sell post-wipe. I keep trying to think of some sort of partial wipe which would actually work, but they all have their problems. IMO the choice is between no wipe and a full wipe like we had at the end of alpha, with everything including talent points reset. Anything else has problems which defeat the object of the wipe by giving pre-wipe players huge advantages.

Isn't the point of it being an alien core that it's something which is present but which we don't know how to create more of? If they were human-made, isn't it a bit immersion-breaking that there are a small number to fight over and we can't just make as many of them as we need?

I've been trying out the PTS and the changes look great. There's more there than I was expecting there to be and the PvP changes look like they really will change the meta which I'm excited about. But one of the things I was hoping for in this release is something which would place more limits on the (currently ridiculously large) amount of quanta which can be made by farming missions. The speed changes do place some small limitations on mission running but they don't really do anything at all to address the current imbalance and the container changes might actually make bulk mission running even easier and raise the limits on what can be done! Currently on the PTS the speed changes stop at about 2Kt and a speed of 20K, which is about the mass of a single package and 2/3 of the current speed limit. That means that all mission running is limited to 2/3 of the current speed regardless of whether the player is running 1 package or 200. As on the 'real' server, if one is running missions there is absolutely no reason not to make the mission ship bigger and take more packages, the only limit being the number of packages available to take. There are some speedbumps at certain sizes but generally speaking if, for example, I'm running 50 packages and someone comes along with another 10 for me to run there's no reason not to make my ship a bit bigger and take those too. At the moment the worst abuses of mission running are probably being limited by the impending release and the threat of a wipe. People with beta accounts can run a lot of packages but people paying a sub probably don't want to spend too much subscription money doing it in case that money turns out to be wasted. After release, I think mission running is just going to turn the whole thing into a pay-to-win game with peoples earnings only really limited by the number of subscriptions they want to pay for. Since this is the last major update before release, time is running out to fix it! Personally, I've been playing with 6 accounts. After release I was originally planning to buy 6 of the 1-year subs and continue to do the same thing. However, with missions being the way they are there is a different option available. With the same upfront cost I can just buy 2 1-year subs and spend the rest of the money on 25 1-month subs I never intend to renew. Now I have 25 characters for mission running. But mission running is boring and a lot of work, right? So instead of running all those missions I can just find a mission runner and offer them 1/2 the reward to take my packages for me. This is a complete no-brainer for them -- the reward is about 100mil/mission and all they need to do is make their ship a bit bigger to take it so it's money for almost no downside. Now all I have to do is pick the missions up and turn them in at the other end. Depending on the setup there might be some shuttling of the packages to/from a station too. I've been running some missions and am fairly certain that turning in one set of packages and getting another set ready can be done in about 40 minutes using 2 computers and a third GFN session running autopilot. So 40 minutes of effort gets me about 100 mil after paying the mission runner their share. But why stop at one mission? The mission system lets me take as many missions as I like, so I can just find 5 mission runners and get them all to take my packages at the same time. Now I'm making about 500mil every time for about 3 hours effort. And if the mission runners can find a few more people like me they're all making similar amounts on each run. It's probably too much to suggest I can get 5 sets of packages taken every day and keep up the 3 hours of work per day it would take to turn them in, but it's certainly not unrealistic to suggest I can get 15 runs in a week done and make around 1.5 BILLION every week. So my 25 1 month subs are going to let me pay-to-win to the tune of around 6 Bn quanta. What can I do with 6Bn quanta? At 100mil for a high end PvP ship I can troll around and do as much PvP as I ever want without much risk and without needing to care about alien cores/autominers/whatever. But instead I could, perhaps, go straight into endgame industry content (after 4 weeks), buy a 3-line warp beacon factory and pay someone to boost it. Then I can easily make 800 mil every month forever (assuming too many others don't do the same). Or perhaps DAC will be introduced and I can spend 2.5Bn on 25 DAC so I can do the same thing again for a second month? This type of thing will push the price of DAC right up so the only people who will be able to buy it for quanta at all are people doing this kind of thing and it will introduce a second way to pay-to-win -- buy DAC and sell it to the people doing mass mission runs. There are probably a bunch of people thinking "Don't tell them that I'm making loads of money from missions", but IMO the system is completely broken and this will eventually break the whole game because why bother with empire building, civilisations, etc when it's so easy to just farm massive piles of money. And it's because: - being able to take multiple missions at once lets the alt-farmers multiply up their earnings but is not really useful to small-scale players - no real cost to taking more packages means every mission runner just goes bigger and bigger over time and ends up taking packages for other people - missions are not tied to the player driven economy at all, allowing them to flood the game with quanta and cause inflation if too many are run Some suggestions for easy ways to balance this without making massive changes to the game: - Make it so each character can only have one Aphelia mission at once. In my example above that would really hurt the ability to make money. - Make it so most (75% for example) of the rewards for missions are paid in items rather than quanta. These could be 0-mass 'schematic licenses' or something which are required to build the new items and consumed in the process. Perhaps they could even be required to build some existing items too. Different missions could give different sets of items so it's not possible to just run the one mission that gives the one item you need. Since adding players increases demand but adding alts does not this would mean that as more alts run missions the rewards go down, encouraging people to do something else instead. It would also make it possible to alter mission rewards by controlling the market, optimise results as the 'best' mission changes over time, etc and this is what a player driven economy is actually supposed to look like. It could also be set up such that if everyone runs the 'big' missions the smaller ones get more and more valuable as they're needed to make the smaller items, etc. By making the smaller missions have higher % cash payouts one could reward individual players while not rewarding alt farms (as the shorter runs spend a greater % of time logging in/out). - There needs to be some 'cost' to making mission ships bigger and adding more packages. I think a good cost would be increased risk of PvP, because more packages should mean a larger organisation which should in turn mean a greater need to protect things. One way to do this would be to slow ships right down to 2K/s if they get really big, but that would be really boring for the mission runner and force people to run them AFK. Another would be to have a probability for ships to be briefly (30 seconds at a time, say) detected on radar at ranges higher than 2su. This might look a bit like the recent PTS bug did. Make it so that the range ships can be detected from *and* the probability of detection go up as the mass of the ship goes up, so a 10kt hauler will probably never get detected but a 200kt one will light up like a Christmas tree from 75SU away. That would mean that large loads need protecting, small 'ninja' haulers can get through blockades and medium sized hauls can chance it, getting through sometimes and providing red meat for the PvPers on other occasions. Lots of different types of gameplay could come out of this -- blockades/taxes, white-knights and pirates might all have some fun here. This turned into a longer rant than I meant it to, but I think this is something which really needs to be addressed before launch so we can have a sustainable game. Wipe or no, if people can make 6 Bn back in the first month then the game economy is going to have huge problems as players need to choose between: - have a lot of alts and do missions - run a lot missions for a lot of peoples alts - buy DAC for $$ and sell it to mission runners - be poor And I'd like to see a more balanced and interesting game.

Why not just let us make it into voxel so we can make a sculpture out of it or something. Would be a shame to just delete it.

We all know which one it is.

Yes, if I didn't know better I'd start thinking that whoever wrote that doesn't really understand the way PvP is actually done. Nobody really uses armoured ships very much now because of the core stress change. It certainly isn't relied on as armour the way it used to be. It will mean an end to the slowly escalating 'put more XL rare space engines on it' meta and that's a good thing but I think most PvP ships will probably still weigh aroud the same as each other (somewhere around the 0.8-2kt mark) so they'll probably have similar top speeds anyway. As you say, the real losers here are going to be the non-pvp ships running ore between planets (or whatever) who were fairly easy to hunt before and will now be ridiculously easy because they'll be so much slower than the ships hunting them. So it's just making easy kills easier IMO. I think it would have been much more interesting to go the other way, so high mass gives a higher top speed at the cost of reduced acceleration (particularly at the higher speeds). Then there are some real costs, tradeoffs and tactics to balance against each other rather than 'lighter is always better'. Do you want to be able to maneuver/accelerate or to be able to go faster in a straight line? That would mean that large haulers, for example, could outrun pirates if they're lucky but if someone gets them with a stasis shot they can slow them down and then they're caught. Also if you get someone's vector then they'll be easier to catch as with reduced braking and acceleration it would be more difficult for the prey to change vector without slowing down and being caught.

IMO things should go the other way and there should be no artificial core size limitations at all. We should be able to put any item on any core size, dock an L core to an S core, etc and all the costs/balances/etc should be done based on things like size and mass. It made sense at one point during PvP's evolution where there was a penalty for large ships shooting at small ships which meant that small cores with L core items on them was OP. But now there's no difference to shooting at an L core or an S core provided the two have the same mass, cross section and velocity so why would it matter whether or not we put L guns, shields, etc on an S core instead of an L core? I do like the idea of having more variability in the designs though. At the moment, though, the L shield is the right choice more or less all of the time. What would be interesting is if the price, mass and physical size of the L shield were increased to make it less attractive to put on smaller ships and if the hitpoints of the smaller ones were increased to make them more interesting choices. Perhaps they could use some other characteristic like the time in between resistance updates so the smaller the shield the more frequently we can change resist profile?

I disagree with more or less everything you said there because this is a game where the players create the content and we will need a lot of player created content in order to attract new players. Do you really think there are tens of thousands of players waiting in the wings ready to join up in the first 2 weeks after a launch and surface gather/run missions until their eyes bleed? I think you're dreaming! This is a niche game and a lot of people 'in the niche' will already have tried the game. I'm sure there are lots of players who will one day play but I think those players will join slowly over time rather than in one big burst. Also, what sort of experience is a new player going to get at release after a wipe. All of the existing players will already be way ahead of them (no level playing field here, we'll all be min-maxing missions from day 1!) and most will be too busy to help them onboard. There won't be any cities to visit, shiny ships to buy, asteroid mining runs or PvP to join in with, just a bunch of people semi-afk while their ship earns back their money. And as for the broken market with material surplus, this is caused by fundamental problems with the way the game works (infinite production and talent points reducing the cost of production, for example) which mean that even after a wipe the market will be very quickly filled with surplus everything before any new players have had a chance to find their feet. Organised groups will re-form and own asteroids, etc just like they did before. The people with giant factories will quickly get these back up and running. And new players will be reduced to being paid to fly missions for the more experienced players, surface gathering and handing it over, etc until the game gets established again. Far better, IMO, to bring the new players into an established world with new player PvP training programs, asteroid mining missions to join in with, mining units set up which people can use their charges on, cities to visit, ships to buy, etc.

But a lot of those players left because they didn't want to play the quanta/market focussed game that schematics forced on them and preferred instead to gather their own resources and build everything themselves. For all those people nothing has changed since then. Actually for some it has got worse because it's harder for them to gather all the different types of mineral now. I'm still in an old discord for an org which was active pre-0.23. Every now and again someone comes back, complains about the schematic cost of setting up to build everything themselves and leaves again. Others I know have sold their assets for Starbase money/RL money/whatever, given away accounts, etc and moved on. I think the reality is that most of those players are gone now and are not coming back. Some might, but is it going to be enough to offset the loyal players who *did* stick with the game through the bad times and are still playing it *in its current form* but who will not stick around if they have to start from scratch? And what is it which will make the ones who already quit one time stick around a second go rather than just quitting a second time?

Giving notice of a wipe is another "damned if they do, damned if they don't" problem though isn't it? The less notice people get the stronger the negative reaction will be (nobody likes to wake up to find their stuff deleted) but more notice means that either more people will game the wipe or more people will cancel their subs until after it. But the longer we go without a decision the more cumulative effort there is in the game (and the larger the cumulative subscription money paid gets). So the 'cost' to the players of a wipe is going up and up all the time. Last year I felt like I was OK with a wipe, but today when I saw talk about one in September I realised that I have too much invested right now to want it deleted and by then I will have invested even more and will be even more against it. So somewhere between last year and now I crossed the line and now I probably won't play after a wipe. Had someone announced a this-September wipe last year I would have been OK with that but I'd have mostly stopped playing the game (and paying subs) until then. And over time more and more people will be tipping into the "I've come to far to start again" camp. Like you, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a sudden, possibly partial ninja-wipe later on down the line which some people were able to see coming and protect themselves against, everyone else gets annoyed and a significant number quit. It would be history repeating itself.

I think at this point delay and inaction has put the game in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" type of situation WRT a wipe. Really the game has been going for too long to wipe it at this point. Some of us have been playing continuously since the start of beta, not used any exploits and a wipe would represent the deletion of thousands of hours of effort. On the other hand the long beta and generally being slow to correct mistakes (or just not bothering to address some of them at all, *cough*schematics*cough*) have resulted in quite a lot of imbalance in the economy and a lot of people who feel like they don't want to play unless everything is reset back to a level playing field. The OP here clearly won't play unless there's a wipe. Personally I have been playing for a long time and have a lot of hours invested in the game. Wiping would erase all the things I've done. There are other games I'm interested in playing and I don't think I will bother to do another playthrough of this one from the beginning if it wipes (particularly since I think the first part of the game is less interesting now without the planet mining and industry gameplay loops) so I will probably stop playing at the point where a wipe happens. So they're damned either way really but the longer it goes on the worse it will be. IMO the best answer is to stop delaying, communicate the long term plan and if there is going to be a wipe do it *right now* so the problems don't keep on getting worse. For those of us who will quit there's no point stringing us along for another 6 months, let us go do something else now and let the ones waiting in the sidelines come in and play instead. Or go the other way, let them go do something else and let us play properly without holding back in fear of our work getting deleted.

Of course not, but you misunderstood what I said. If *your* construct is requisitioned by someone else then *you* get a blueprint of that construct. Even if someone else has the DRM. It was reported while the feature was being tested but nobody did anything about it. That means that if your alt requisitions your constructs then the alt gets the construct and you, as the original owner, get a blueprint to rebuild what you lost. So you can use the requisition feature to copy DRM constructs. NQ does not appear to care.

If you have a second character or a friend you trust you can probably have them take the tile which holds your construct and then requisition it. I believe that will generate a blueprint of the item for you when they requisition the construct, and they can just give you it back.