Zeddrick

I hope we don't go back to 'mining to bot orders online' again. The game is supposed to have a player driven market. If that isn't working then something needs to be rebalanced. Perhaps increase the ore requirements for industry or nerf the quantity of ore which is generated by autominers so that the amount of ore generated by automining by a typical player is less than the amount consumed by a typical player by ship building, turning into honeycomb, etc. If all that happens is the bot orders come back for higher tier ores then IMO that's an admission of failure of the player driven markets.

Lua is a scripting language with a standalone runtime which you can just download and use to run lua scripts on your local machine. Poke about on www.lua.org to find the appropriate download. You won't get the DU API calls, etc with this, but you will be able to write generic lua. There is a project which has a bunch of mock lua objects to address this (https://github.com/1337joe/du-mocks) although I haven't used it myself and have no idea how complete/up to date it is. But it would allow you to write code which manipulates some DU specific things and test it stand alone.

OK, so if someone is prepared to throw hundreds of $ per month into a game there will always be a way for them to gain a large advantage from that, even if they either pay someone RL money to grind for them or just use RMT services. The big difference with these types is there won't be very many of them, at least not with a large, healthy playerbase. But the issue with the beta accounts is that people aren't doing that. Some backed the game with a lot of money at the start but I think a lot of the people with large numbers of beta accounts just collected them from friends/orgmates who left the game or just weren't using all their keys. So those people are just playing for free and when the beta ends they won't be any more. So there will still be some whales spending a lot of RL money but most people won't be like that and we won't have nearly as many people with game-breaking numbers of characters at their disposal. Eve works a little differently. They made (IMO) the mistake of making it easy to self-fund an account with very little playing time by training skills, extracting them, selling them for ingame money and using the proceeds to pay for the account for another month. That means that for a few minutes a month you could have an account with 3 characters which could do various other low effort money generating things like PI and industry. Since they paid for themselves anyone could have an army of characters if they wanted. I hope DU doesn't do the same (autominers + DAC could do this if autominers didn't have the calibration part).

Calibration ore can definitely spawn in places where you flattened the ground. It messed up my base with random ore splats I wasn't interested in harvesting and I had to stop calibrating mining units on the tile because of it.

Aren't pocket ships really meant to be atmo ships deployed on planets? What about just saying 'compact construct doesn't work in the PvP zone'? People could deploy one if they really want but then they have to take it back to safety manually. Then the problem would be solved and I wouldn't have to put up with any annoying timers when I force-respawn to a district and want to fly to my base to get a proper ship.

The VR mission change was a direct nerf to the people using large numbers of beta accounts. Also the taxation system decouples the cost from the number of alts you have (if they didn't chicken out and add HQ tiles). That would be nice! But where will these hoards of players come from? How will they get to know about DU and why will they be playing then and not now? Please don't say they're waiting in the wings but not starting because they're waiting for a wipe ...

Oh, and do you really think there will be a wipe? So far NQ have backed away from every decision which would negatively affect the assets of the mass of former players out there, including backing out of the org changes, going back on the element stacking changes multiple times and more recently a stealth-nerf to the territory taxing mechanism which means that almost all of the stale territories out there will be preserved and unclaimable forever despite their owners not even bothering to log in and mark their tile as an HQ tile. Does that sound like an organisation which is brave enough to completely wipe their persistent world MMO 1 1/2 years after they said they wouldn't in the hope that the players will come back and build a whole new world from scratch?

No, I think we will have a new and different mess a few weeks after a wipe, particularly if it comes with a switch of beta accounts into paid subs. Honestly there can't really be any balance in the game when some people have got 60+ beta accounts which cost them nothing and others are playing with 1-2 paid subs. How could the game ever work properly and balance both of those types of players together. At the moment attempts to curb the 60+ account players are, IMO, driving the more casual types out of the game completely by over-nerfing, over-taxing, etc them. After the beta accounts become paid we won't have the problems you describe where players can lock up loads of land forever. But we will have the problem that the organised groups can beat everyone to the good stuff.

Yes please! I will be carrying a mission package in my PvP ship along with every other PvP player ...

Only if it died laughing! SC is on a completely different budget. It has hundreds of people working on it and a lot of those people are creating actual *content* for the game, so players rock up and have a large, detailed universe to explore and a wide range of things to actually do. It also has NPCs so it doesn't rely on other players being there to provide something to 'play against'. There is no way a small studio like NQ is ever going to be able to create content at anything like the same rate, particularly not when it is still focussed on the core technology and trying to get the server costs down, something which SC probably doesn't have to worry about at all!

True, but only until the game releases and then they'll have to pay a sub for each of those 60 alts.

But it costs a lot of money to block the good tiles. 1 million per tile per week. If you block 300 tiles that's 300 million *per week*. Yes, you might be able to profit from them at some later point, but it's a risk. The value of the tiles will always be limited by the ore cost and that's low right now. If it's still low in 6 months someone will have invested many billions keeping those tiles waiting with no way to ever make that money back. Which is why taxes work against the large-scale hardcore players. They just don't work well against the smaller and more casual ones.

For someone who has hundreds of billions, the effort/reward ratio of automining is all wrong. Automining hundreds of tiles is going to require playing the minigame for hours every day in order to make what is a relatively small amount of money for someone who has that much already. There is deflation at the moment, meaning the value of a quanta is steadily going up. IMO the best way to have a lot of money right now if you have hundreds of billions is to just sit on it and do nothing.

The point is well made. Changes made to stop large-scale hardcore players from breaking the game are driving away the smaller players in quite large numbers. And there were other ways to change the game which wouldn't have done that.

I've been seeing this too. This sort of thing used to happen a lot and then it got better for a while. Since Demeter released I've had whole stacks of industry units just stop and today two of my mining units I set running 4 days ago were stopped, having mined a lot less ore than they should have.

Yes, impounding+despawning constructs parked for too long at markets is a good idea, but I don't see how it would help here because the construct is floating far above the market. I've had problems with these at other markets and on one occasion a 618 element ship was 100% destroyed by flying into one. Also those tall thin towers cause similar problems and these are worse now that the game doesn't seem to spawn them in from as far away as it did before. For a while now I've wished that these would at least fall out of the sky once they cause someone a problem. And ramming them would be fun.

OK, so moving on collision would only apply to ships not in contact with the ground. Although 'district 6 bowling' would be a hilarious way to keep it clean of junk.

IMO there's a simple answer to this sort of thing. Two changes: - no static constructs are allowed more than 1km off the ground height (like no soil is allowed 100m above it). All things higher get converted into dynamic constructs. - If someone collides with a dynamic construct that construct starts moving (based on a conservation-of-mass type of calculation based on the two relative masses of the construct). It doesn't take damage and the colliding ship does, but both keep moving. So then you would have a solution to remove that menace. Just get into a ship and crash into it, making it fall.

I think this mechanic is only for static cores is it not? Even if you claim the tile you still won't be able to claim dynamic cores which happen to have landed on it. I don't think there's any way to 'salvage' dynamic cores.

That has a ring of truth to it.

Actually I would be happy with this too, provided the compensation is 1 for 1 (i.e. 1 DAC for each month each of my characters was training skills). Unfortunately I'm not sure NQ would because it would mean that we would all be able to play for free for quite a long time. I think one of the reasons for release is to start getting subscription money from the people who currently have beta accounts. As with the people who want to keep talents, though, I'd be happy with this because I know I can get back into a good position again fairly quickly if I have enough DACs ...

Without full chair boosts, which take well over a month to train, PvP ships will be seriously gimped. While the groups with existing talent pools will be able to get competitive PvP ships right away. Similarly with industry someone with all-5 industrial skills can sell at a 30% profit and still be selling at a price which would mean new players are making a loss! It would completely imbalance the game! It is true that organised groups will spread out training and get back quicker, but guess what? New players are just as useful to that effort as older ones. With a talent wipe smart orgs will want to attract new players and involve them in the skill training effort either to get boosts faster or just to have more options in case people quit. Without it everyone will want existing players but new players are just a drag on time and resources and will only be useful if they can be convinced to grind and give the proceeds to their org.

This. I think most of the people saying 'a wipe is OK if I keep my talent points' are saying it because they know they can get back their position again fairly quickly so long as they keep those. But isn't the point of a wipe to reset and disrupt things and give the new players the ability to compete with the older ones? What is the point in doing that if established players can re-establish much more quickly than the new players can? One way to do it would be to give everyone 0 talent points but let the existing players train at 2x normal speed until they have reached the number of talent points they had pre-wipe. That way people get to keep their advantage they paid for but they have to stay in game and re-sub for a number of months (anout 9 if you started at the beginning of beta?) before they actually get it all back and there isn't such a disruptive imbalance right at the start.

Given NQ's financial position and the active player count right now, well over a year after they claimed there would be no more wipes, if NQ is doing what suits their interests then they are very bad at that!

No, *because missions will cause inflation again*. The small trader economy is never going to work until the game gets a lot bigger. With a low player base, infinite production and high upfront costs to industry (schematic buying) the economy will inevitably end up with a single trade hub dominated by a small number of very rich people. And a wipe won't fix that. A wipe with skill wipe will hide it for a while, a wipe without skill wipe probably won't even do that very much because the previously-wealthy will have all the skills and can sell at a price where most people are already making a loss. There is no way to balance this without massively limiting the ability of the large players to produce or adding a huge number of new players (a 5 digit number) to the game to balance them out with massive consumption. And without balancing it a wipe will just temporarily fix things.