Zeddrick

But you will likely need at least 150 players to donate slots to get that!

Mining units can generate quite a lot of ore. I have some Acanthite tiles which generate a little over 1 million Acanthite per month. That's probably the equivalent of a couple of hours' mining every single day and quite a few asteroids worth and it's very low effort. It wasn't very hard to find the spot so there are probably a lot more like it which other people have. And now they're giving me 30% more capacity so I can go look for some other ore type as well.

One of the big problems at the moment, IMO, is that autominers are generating too much ore which is causing the markets to crash due to oversupply. Already there are T3 ores selling for less than T2 and some of the T2 prices are getting close to the T1 prices. These changes will effectively give everyone the ability to run 30% more mining units (because of the 48->72 hour thing) and will make it much easier to run more units at high efficiency by removing the requirement to use charges every day. Isn't this going to lead to even more ore on the market, producing even more downward pressure on prices?

Yes, I think everyone is expecting this to be a huge nerf to the solo orgs we all made to get around the too-small core limits disguised as a feature. I have over 50 constructs deployed and could see that doubling over time and making me undeploy a bunch of them to get under a limit might be the last straw for me. I get the desire to keep the server costs down but at some point you have to ask 'If this many cores is all a sub buys is this game even viable at all?'. A huge part of the game was meant to be players creating content for each other and that is already being nerfed hard by the deletion of unsubbed constructs. If active players have to delete stuff too then where will all the interesting places to visit come from? NQ certainly aren't creating any ...

It does sometimes feel a bit like I imagine Second lLife would be with no player hitpoints/fall damage/etc, no way to lose a ship, etc. But that's really because, as you say, they only really got the 'Second Life - like' parts of the game really right. I guess I'm a bit biased because I came for the original vision and have an EvE background so I probably would never have come to a game which was pitched as Second Life in space. I'm not even sure it would be as big as you say it would -- sci-fi themed things are always going to be a bit niche and wasn't the whole point of SL to be something which could appeal to everyone?

Completely agree with most of what you say but you lost me right at the end there when you started talking about Second Life and EVE. Both of those games are old, established and still running and you can go and play them if you want. The whole selling point of DU was supposed to be bringing together elements from these (and other) games into one game. And it was always meant to be a game. True that second life has no PvP (although I'm sure I remember reading about flying penis attacks?) but the makers also claim it isn't a game. And IRL corporations invested real money in it too. I don't think it's sensible to make DU a 'game' without challenge, and in a game with no developer-generated content you will always need to have player conflict, i.e. PvP, in order to make it an actual game and not just a theme park generator.

One of the reasons there are so many constructs in the game at the moment is that there is no easy way to un-deploy constructs. To do this at the moment requires going into build mode, removing all the voxel (which can get tedious if you miss a small one), removing all the elements (sometimes small ones are hard to find again) and then picking up the core (which I think some people fail to work out how to do given the number of core-only constructs I see around). I understand the original reason for not having this feature was that constructs was intended to be permanent things not things you could magic up when needed, but with the recent devblog talking about automatically despawning constructs for inactive players does this still make sense? Are constructs really permanent things any more? It seems that one of the development goals at the moment is to have fewer constructs in the game (for whatever reason) and it seems to me that having a good un-deploy feature would be great for this. There are certainly a few constructs I could tidy up if it were easier to do so. It would also make it much easier for people who want to take breaks to do so without having to worry about moving all their constructs to sanctuary, etc. It would, of course, need something like s 30 minute timer after deployment to prevent abuse in PvP, etc. In theory this could be used to make it easier to transport ships, buildings, etc in haulers rather than carriers, but this would be balanced by the loss of all buffs after despawn/respawn and the inability to respawn an un-deployed construct you don't have DRM on without buying another BP. If un-deploying is considered to be too easy/fast, perhaps this feature could be built into the repair unit? It can already revert a construct to a previous state, it should be easy to make it revert a construct back to just a core which can be picked up? So how about it, can we have an un-deploy construct feature please NQ?

Mission runners hit those places more than once a week so it's hard to imagine them going because of this. They'll probably get bigger and uglier though -- if my construct is temporary and might despawn if I get bored I'm probably going to make it out of a ton of 'container L' to keep the price down and not bother to use voxel. Mission runners might even start using modular ships where they pick up one container bundle, dock it and drop another as they go around so they'll probably look like they were thrown off the side of a ship rather than being nicely placed under the pads.

The article doesn't say whether this applies only to dynamic cores or if it will apply to static and space cores as well? If it applies to static cores, what is the point of having HQ tiles and if it doesn't what is the point in deleting someone's dynamic cores from their base but leaving the others?

Whilst I think the market changes are good, I think 7 days is a little too short and will catch people with family emergencies, computer problems, unable to start DU because of some wierd problem and waiting on a fix from NQ (e.g. GFN users a few months ago) or whatever. When I had COVID last year I stopped playing for about 10 days. My whole family had it at the same time so 'I'd better log into a video game and move my internet spaceship so it doesn't get deleted' would have been pretty far down my priority list. I think 3 weeks would be a better number and would still result in far fewer constructs at them than there are now.

A lot of people misunderstand the GDPR like this. There doesn't have to be a way to map the ID back to a person in order for it to be personally identifying information. It only has to be true that there is only one real human who would be generating that particular piece of information. So if the EULA says one character is only allowed to be played by one human then the character ID is personally identifiable information even if there isn't a way to map it back to the specific human. A credit card number, for example, is personally identifiable information. I have no way to get the owner's name, address, etc from that credit card, but the card number is only supposed to be used by one person so it's personally identifiable.

Can I have your stuff?

Yes, as I said above, " I know atmo brakes have some other problems but this is a good enough example of the problems here for now". This is simply the most convenient screenshot. Atmo engines, vertical boosters and wings are having the same issues.

We can expect NQ to be respectful of our hard work and not needlessly break things that took hours of time to create though. Given that *every single ship I purchased from someone else including the NQ ship shop* has the problem I think this will be *very* common. This type of thing is not rocket science though, it's trivial to make a check which accounts for tiny adjustments like this and it's not unreasonable to ask for that. IMO It's also reasonable to expect that NQ might have run some trials on this before pushing it out in order to estimate the percentage of dynamic constructs in the game which will be broken by this and to keep iterating on the feature until only a small number get hit by it.

Here is an example (and yes, I know atmo brakes have some other problems but this is a good enough example of the problems here for now). I have a ship like this: That's a set of atmospheric brakes. Some of them are OK and the others aren't. I didn't build this ship but it's fairly obvious that the intention here was to put a block of brakes next to each other. None are overlapping and there isn't any obvious difference between the ones which are working and the ones which aren't. This isn't a 'janko' ship or anything, just one in which some glitch in the game caused the elements to end up in a position that the game doesn't like now. I can't see how disabling these elements is in anybody's interest at all. It won't make my ship behave differently, it just creates work for me to have to shunt the elements off and then back to where they were to get them all to be OK. And I have quite a few ships like this. This ship alone has well over 150 red elements which need this treatment. Surely we could de-sensitise the check so that examples of truly overlapping elements are disabled but ones like this, which may overlap on paper but which don't actually really overlap, get allowed.

If that works on your constructs then more power to you. Sometimes it will and sometimes it won't. I have a warp shuttle design I made by putting down a warp drive, then arranging elements around it in an optimal (for cross section) way and then finally I built voxel around the edges (some of it from custom stretched voxels, etc). The warp drive is showing as overlapping, as are about 1/2 the elements around it. I can't just 'move it a bit', I will have to shunt a lot of things around and then perhaps re-make the voxels. There is no stacking here, I just built a ship in the normal way. I also have another ship which has 30 engines, all of which are now overlapping. Moving them all 'a little bit' is going to mean fewer engines fit onto the ship. Just because it isn't a big deal to you doesn't mean the same is true for everyone.

I found one and have salvaged from a couple of others. The ones I've seen were at surface level, mostly but not completely underground. You wouldn't find them through digging unless you got really close and looked through the ground. Easiest way to find them was (and probably still is) with a remote pilot and repair tool to make them glow. Also I believe you could (and probably still can) find them by diving at the ground and having them render before the ground detail did. You are correct, though, that there wasn't really any value there given the effort (I got 2 million quanta for over 10 hours of searching) and really they're a curiosity for people to stumble on now.

I think you might be lucky. The way I built ships was to start with elements and add voxel at the end. Most of my elements were placed against one another directly (not stacked). I don't think this was a bad thing to do though and isn't, IMO, a good reason for breaking ships. Also I have bought ships from Captains Customs and Aerogics, both of which told me no stacking was used. Every single ship I bought from someone else is now reporting stacked elements, including the one I got from NQ's ship shop! This is really silly and doesn't benefit anyone. I also support fixing of actual stacked elements, just not genuine cases of elements with an insignificant overlap. It should be fairly easy to disable elements in one case but not the other.

Yes, it does seem a bit over the top. I get that NQ wants to tweak the bounding boxes for these things and make improvements, but I don't really want to have to redesign my ships to accommodate this sort of tiny change because doing so is time consuming and unrewarding. I think banning actual stacked elements like engines, containers, etc on top of one another is a good change (where players knew what they were doing and it was obviously broken). But what we have now has, IMO, gone way too far. Tiny changes to bounding boxes now mean that legitimate ship designs which were allowed at the time of making now need a fair amount of work. With the exception of 3 ships (2 of which were build in January) every single ship I have ever built or bought is now broken in some way! Many will need significant changes to make them work again because the voxel shells were designed around the element placements. None of these ships are gaining any real advantage from the overlaps. They don't perform better, have smaller cross sections or whatever, they are just the way they are because that's the way they were built at the time. I can't think of a good reason for breaking all these ships. Why can't we have the checker check ships using a subset of the new and old element shapes? Then ships with actual stacking would break (they were never correct designs) but ships which were OK when built will still be valid?

Colliding with someone in warp is a thing?

What would be even better would be to use stuff like this to make an actual proper player driven economy with actual diversity (as opposed to the current one where every item is made from the same 20 things which can all be collected in the same way with no bi-products). How about making things like exotic weapons, engines, etc depend on specific components which can only be obtained by salvaging ships, and when salvaging a ship you don't know exactly which components you will get and in what quantity. Then the manufacturers and salvagers have to actually use the market to trade with one another.

I'm pretty sure that's way out of date and at best misleading now. Perhaps you can find the link ...

Will there be a wipe on release? I know it's slightly off topic but it is the big question we were hoping would be answered with the roadmap update ...

This is the sort of thing people say when they haven't actually *tried* PvP. It's true that getting killed by a pirate without bothering to figure out how to fight back or escape requires very little skill but once you actually try to either get and keep someone in your optimal, evade another ship to escape, get out of someone elses optimal while staying in yours, maneuver to get the best hit chances while minimising someone else's or whatever you'll realise that there actually *is* skill there. It just isn't the sort of skill you're expecting when you just read about it. No you can't. If someone can get you identified and shoot at you before you can get into warp you can't warp away and are stuck in the fight. You would know that if you had tried it. Also missiles aren't really a thing in PvP right now. No you can't. A lot of PvP is about speed. If you ram a core full of as many guns as you can it will be slow and require a lot of players to man the guns. You're better off putting those players onto more smaller ships. Same with ammo, bring too much and you can't shoot it all but it will still slow you down so your target can get away. Again, you'd know this if you had tried it. I suggest you actually go out there and try doing some PvP before writing it off like this. It's true that PvP isn't perfect but it is there, it is fun and it is slowly getting better over time. What it really needs is more people doing it and un-informed comments like this are really unhelpful IMO because they just put people off.

So don't mine bad T2+ hexes then? I've got plenty of T2 and T3 ones which are easily making enough quanta to pay the taxes even at the current prices.