Zeddrick

But would that unit count be per tile (in which case how do you deal with multiple players on a tile, how do you have cities, etc?) or is it per core (in which case how do you stop someone dumping down 200 cores)?

OK, so that's a completely different problem. Energy for brake walls, etc then sure (some things might need a rebalance to be useful, XL brakes, wings, etc). Although I'm a huge fan of brake walls myself but I'd adapt. But I don't think it would work for industry on static constructs because it would be too easy to overlay a bunch of static cores on top of one another and get around it.

That's just changing the production cost of an item (the cost of whatever fuel is consumed is just extra input materials). It won't really fix anything. If you could find a way to scale up the cost per unit by the number of elements in use it could work. If people couldn't just make lots of constructs next to each other and split the load that way. Just limiting production directly seems more sensible to me though.

That's interesting, *why* are people asking for energy management (at the risk of derailing the thread)? What do people hope it will achieve? I've spent many years writing software and often users ask for things they shouldn't want because they think it will do something it won't do ...

Not all MMOs work like that. I come from Eve which had a fully functioning player market and production which actually worked for many years before introducing any of the sorts of mechanics you describe above (which do exist now in eve but are a minority thing which sits alongside the markets). OK, I'll propose something. The way to limit production is quite simple (as I have said a few times before) -- just put a limit on how many industry machines a player can have running at once (where a machine in maintain counts as running). Make it something small like 20 to begin with, trainable to something like 200 if someone invests 3 months of talent training into it. Also change the talents which currently reduce materials required for production so instead they make production happen faster (because reducing input materials stops more casual players from entering the market as they have to train to 4 before they can make a profit). Doing that would mean that people could still operate mega-factories, but they would need an actual organisation with lots of people working together, just like you would in the real world to operate a mega factory. People would also need to decide what they want to buy in and what they want to make in the production chain, which would add value to things like pures, screws and fixings, etc which currently people just make but which collectively cost a fair number of production lines in a factory. Then they can easily balance the game -- assume there are X players, make a basket of the typical expected monthly consumption of things for a player (or several for different player types), work out how many things the economy will make, assume how many players will bother to do industry and to what degree and then set the production times/material requirements accordingly to give entry level opportunities for everyone (perhaps refining right off the automated miners?) and better opportunities for everyone else. With the right balance things will ebb and flow so some items will be overproduced, resulting in others being underproduced. Finally schematics -- I'd make these optional and make them give a bonus to the production speed of an item (quite a big one). So everyone can make things, but if you seriously want to make a lot of money you eventually need the schematic to speed your production up.

But there *is* at least some demand. And if demand were to suddenly skyrocket, things would look good for a little while but inevitably the demand would tail off again at a higher level (because you can't keep increasing demand forever). At that point production would inevitably catch up again because we have unlimited production capability and the period of growth would incentivise more production to be developed. Inevitably the economy would end up back where it is now with bargain-price stacks lingering on the market and nobody who didn't 'go big' able to compete with the ultra-low prices. And at that point there would be people on here saying 'what we need in order to solve this problem is more consumption'.

No, if it creates a massive inconvenience for loads of players while not actually solving the problems then it's not better than nothing. Was the 0.23 patch better than nothing?

Well, in theory it could, but in practice I think it wouldn't. I think people would just put up a lot of constructs to get around it. To actually make it bite you'd have to make it so punishing that anyone who isn't doing the 'go big or go home' thing would end up being able to make hardly anything at all.

So you think that nobody will ever notice that and set up T3-4 engine lines? Not even the people buying them at sky-high prices? And that when they do and make a load of money they won't set up more of those lines? And that eventually more than one person will do this and then they will saturate the market and drive the prices down?

IMO the biggest problem with DUs economy is unlimited production. Consumption is always going to be limited (unless we put in bot buy orders for everything, which would be worse). But people can set up as much production as they want just by making more and bigger factories. It is inevitable that with limited consumption and unlimited production the production rate will grow until it is a bit bigger than the consumption rate, at which point the market will be full of very low priced stacks of things which aren't selling fast enough. That's about where we were until very recently, when consumption increased and suddenly the markets became a bit more fluid again. But production will definitely increase as a result of this (people probably turned factories off and will now turn them on again). Increasing consumption would help, but unless you make consumption unlimited (and bot buy orders are the only way I can think of to do that) production will always grow to outstrip it and we will inevitably end up back where we were recently with massive oversupply of the market. The only way to make the in-game economy work properly is to limit the amount of production capability that each player can have. Convince me I'm wrong ...

That's not entirely true is it? Asteroids *are* the solution to higher tier ore regeneration -- they contain the higher tier ore and they respawn on a regular basis. Also I think I can spot the new player experience on there if I look hard enough. So they're listening to the carebears as well as us brutes! In terms of collateral/reward for a mission, it sounds like you (or whoever) are creating terrible missions. I agree that it would be pretty stupid to take a 300M collateral/100K profit mission, so why would anyone put up something like that. If you want your 300mil of stuff hauled in perfect safety (as in you are guaranteed to either have the stuff or 300 mil) then surely you want to pay someone a bit more than 100K. Put 3 mil as the reward instead, it's only 1% of the value ...

I wonder if NQ have logs which would allow them to go back in time and observe this kind of thing. It would be very funny if they could, for example, suddenly and permanently delete every single item which has ever moved more than 20km while being transferred from one container to another and was not moved back again for 1 hour. The best way to stop people from cheating like this is to demonstrate that you can catch and deal with this sort of thing after the fact. Then anyone who exploits has to wonder if they might one day get banned or suffer some other punishment even if they seem to have gotten away with it at the time. Unfortunately what they actually did in the past was to just allow people to keep whatever they gained at the time (schematics bought at 1% price, for example). That encourages the exact opposite -- people trying their luck whenever they see an opportunity because even if they get caught it probably won't matter.

You and I play Eve Online very differently! I played for 12 years and never really cared about empire development at all, even when I was a CEO of a corp in a nullsec alliance. These are sandbox games and you can play them any way you like, and IMO that's what makes them so great. You can certainly join some large org which treats you like a generic work unit, slots you into a role, tells you what to do and how to play and that's a perfectly valid playstyle which a lot of people enjoy, but it's not the only way. You could go off and join (or even start if you can't find one) a small, group which is all about supporting individual development if you want to. Or you could solo, or be a pirate, or join a 'lone wolf' type of org full of people doing their own thing (yes, these exist in DU too). Admittedly DU currently lacks a lot of things which are needed to enable a lot of the types of corp you can find in Eve Online, but it's getting there and the next set of features based around PvP should open the sandbox up a lot more.

Sounds great! Are there any approximate timescales for this?

Well, it depends how many characters you have doesn't it? If you have 2 because, say, you are an alpha backer then you can have 2 orgs. And a lot of backers have 5 subscription-free accounts at the moment I think ... 400 for me is with 2 orgs, one on each character. But, again, that's not the point I was making.

That's a very good question. This is the official forum so you'd hope someone reads it. How about someone from NQ like or reply this post so we know you're listening?

I don't think the org changes are anything to do with the number of cores. I think they're trying to achieve balance for their upcoming mining changes where you have these clash-of-clans style units that you just put down then collect the stuff out of on a regular basis. More tiles = more units = more money per day. So it's all about the territory really. Also it's silly that there are a lot of players who could literally claim entire moons and the only barrier would be the time taken to do it. In terms of number of cores, each player can effectively have hundreds of cores by making their own org. I personally will still be able to have 400 cores after the org changes. There will be no effective limit to the number of cores as the difference between 200 cores per player and 2,000 cores is essentially meaningless. Nobody will make that many cores as there will never be any benefit to doing so. There are definitely individuals with 100s of tiles claimed right now though.

Sure, but that's not the point of what I'm saying. What I'm saying is orgs are being limited to one org per player to limit the amount of territory that can be claimed by one person (among other things). But if all you have to do is subscribe for 1 month, create an org, claim territory then unsub and you keep that territory forever then the people with the most money can have the most territory, which is the definition of pay to win. I'm not saying if you have real money items, micropayments, etc it will always be pay to win. There are plenty of examples of games which manage to sell things and not fall into that trap (although personally I find it immersion breaking in eve, for example, when a t-shirt or paint job for a ship costs 1000x more than a 1km long dreadnought because of the real money items). I'm just saying that this particular idea of NQs risks falling into the pay to win trap.

Take it back to alpha. Announce that there will be a wipe sometime between now and release and a new beta cycle. Go away and make the tough, core decisions about what sort of game this will be instead of tinkering around the edges (in the last company I worked for we referred to what NQ are releasing at the moment as 'rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic'). Decide what the main gameplay loops will be, how they will interact, how they will balance with each other. Set limits on everything (it's an MMO) so no more unlimited production and sell/buy orders. Work out what place PvP will have in the game, which gameplay loops it will interact with and how. Which areas will be 'safe', what does 'safe' actually mean? What about griefing, scamming and other types of unusual player-created content directions? How will resources like territory get reclaimed from players who leave the game? How does 'all ships are materialised all the time' square with the market junk problems? There are a lot of these decisions to make. What about the survival type of gameplay? Bootstrapping from nothing during the alpha by mining, making more things, using them to mine more, etc then trying to get into space was one of the most fun parts of the game for me so far and it's a shame it was trashed with the schematic addition. Then try them out in an alpha where it's possible to make disruptive changes without upsetting the players. Get the balance right. Make sure there's enough there to entertain people and that the game is balanced with multiple possible roles which don't crowd each other out or invalidate each other. Get rid of the bot orders and schematics and let the players make or ignore the markets as they like. Then wipe it all and let civilisations emerge. And I'd add some pink furry dice to hang in the cockpit of everyone's ships!

I think this change is definitely going in the correct direction, more limits in the game are needed in order to make it a proper MMO rather than a game with a small number of players with huge assets which nobody can compete with. And having infinite orgs as a way to circumvent limits was just silly. I think one superlegate role per player is perhaps going a bit far though. Something like 3 or 5 (you can only ever be in 5 orgs) seems more sensible to me because it would allow for experimentation, community projects, etc and then just balance the game around that? Or perhaps we could have a special category of 'sub-org' which has a parent org as a legate but which shares whatever counters NQ don't want to scale infinitely (shared new territory cost, etc). Also NQ if you're reading this, what will you do about unsubbed accounts? Will players lose their stuff after unsubbing because their personal org got disbanded or will we still be able to have as many orgs as we want and manage them as a tree like we do now so long as we create an army of unsubbed alts to sit in the superlegate role of each one? If the latter the IRL money cost of, say, 20 one month subs to make 20 unsubbed alts would really make the game pay to win -- some people will be able to easily afford that while others will just have to put up with one account. Or do you have a cunning plan to fix this problem?

Unlimited territory ownership with no upkeep, such a good idea! I think your meganodes might get obsoleted, destroyed or otherwise rendered useless when things move to automatic clash-of-clans style mining units anyway as the amount of ore in the ground doesn't seem to be related to the rate at which the mining units generate it. I don't even know if we will be able to mine tiles on planets the old way once these are in the game? GLHF though.

Could it be that constructions with a detection zone get 'touched' by anyone who walks past and are therefore not deleted automatically as idle constructs?

Can you buy what you need at the moon markets? Or are you just selling ore into bot orders? Last time I looked the moon markets were mostly dead with very little on sale. AFAIK the reason people go to district 6 and 7 is that they will be able to buy everything they want for a reasonable price. 6 in particular has more or less every item in the game listed for sale and most are at very low prices (below cost in a lot of cases).

Sure, having full-pvp would destroy a game like DU. What happens is PvP becomes net-negative when the PvP players can't get any fights. Then they see all these targets in the safe zone and think "if those players weren't safe then I will have more targets" so they ask for changes to the game which forces people to accept PvP risk when doing other things. While PvP risk is great and can make a game better, forcing a lot of people into it who don't want to just makes them do something else rather than PvP and if you make it so they *cannot* avoid PvP while still playing a fun game a lot just quit (see 'the blackout' in eve online for an example). But that doesn't mean PvP is a net negative. It just means it can be a net negative if implemented badly or forced on people inappropriately.

But it doesn't have to be like that does it? The fact that you had to work for a ship just adds weight to the PvP experience but it doesn't have to be like you said. People will come up with cheap PvP ships that people can build after an hour of mining. People will then take these out and go have some PvP fun, fighting other people in similar setups and trying to avoid the bigger ships. Sometimes they will get yanked but mostly it can be fun for everyone. I'm not saying that works now, the game doesn't have the right balance to allow fun PvP to happen right now because cheap setups are not viable. But the fact that it could work tells me that PvP is not inherently net-negative. Also, with the right balance, new player orgs will emerge to help aspiring PvP players. I used to run one like this in EvE - new players were given free ships and advice in how to use them and were then encouraged to go off into a dangerous part of space and pick fights. They got killed a lot. They got a new one and did it again. Everyone had fun and a lot of them ended up getting kills or just getting 'the shakes' eventually. It definitely was not net-negative.