Zeddrick

How much mining will it take me to catch up with the guy who got 112 warp beacon schematics at 1% of the normal price? I make that over 100BILLION quanta ....

Yes, the delivery missions would be useful here. But you go to market for the raw minerals anyway, right? Or are you just making stuff from whatever you can mine? With tiered manufacuring everyone would be adding an extra cut, which would increase the base price for the final item. You could make the final item instead and take a bigger percentage markup while undercutting everyone, but the amount you could make like that would be limited so you have to choose what to make yourself and what to buy in. I also think the 'this talent reduces the amount of stuff you need to make something' talents are broken and need to change into manufacturing speed talents (which mean more if you have a limited manufacturing capacity) but that's a different discussion ...

. oops someone necro'ed another one and I didn't notice.

I think 'needed the boot' is a bit strong! The problem seems to be that he didn't listen to anyone else. Sounds like he just needed a good editor/producer figure to challenge his decisions and make him more collaborative which didn't happen because he was in charge of everything. Could it be that he just needed a boss?

OK, so it's an MMO. It needs to have some sort of limits on each player, you can't have 1 player having 10,000 times the production capacity of most others. Have you ever played the mobile MMO games where they let players grow arbitrarily powerful (usually via Pay to Win but that doesn't matter). What eventually happens is everyone else leaves the game (or moves to a different server but a single shard game doesn't have that option) because they don't like living in a world where they can't compete with a few unassailable individuals. Putting limits on things isn't destroying one player type to fix a different one. It's putting limits on single players so they can have fun but not be more powerful than, say, a 200 person org (it happens, I've played mobile MMO games where a single player was more powerful than a 500 person org). That's just making it so that the game will still be around in a couple of years time and it's just common sense. And it doesn't really stop people from getting big and powerful, it just means they need to empower other people in order to do so. If I can have unlimited production capability as a single player then what's the point in ever building an org? What's the org for? What does it do that I can't just do on my own? Small specialists aren't what I'm talking about here. Do you have more than 200 machines running simultaneously? Could you do away with the ones refining, etc and buy in a higher level of goods and still do more or less what you're doing now? You probably wouldn't be affected. The ones who would are the ones who can literally make thousands of everything and flood the market faster than the whole remaining player base can consume the items they're making! As for alts, yes you might be able to do 2x or 3x what a solo player without alts can, but how many alts is someone going to pay for? 10? That's quite a high monthly spend and if someone is going to throw that much RL money at a game they're probably going to find a way to pay to win anyway (even if it's employing people to play for them).

Interesting that the paperwork pasted here says the change happened on March 24th, which is nearly 2 weeks ago now (the later dates people have posted are when the paperwork ended up being filed with whatever authority French businesses have to file with). You'd think this would also have been in discussion for a while before it happened. To me, the lack of an immediate announcement means it feels like someone trying to move things forward in a positive way rather than trying to shut things down. If you weren't going to try to continue moving forwards why would you incur all those costs of server running after you made the decision? Sometimes when people put money into a company they want to put their person in charge so they can make sure it's spent the way they want it to be ... JC's vision is the reason I started playing DU and I hope he's still involved and able to bring it to life. Hopefully this will help move things forward in a positive direction as others have said. There's plenty of feedback out there which they could listen to and IMO there are some fairly easy things NQ can do to start to make a functional game community again and start moving on.

I think it would be less good at keeping orgs from going OTT, but then that's the point of an org isn't it? I don't have as much of a problem with a massive org having massive power. Generally speaking in other games where there are big orgs, the people who are good enough at doing orgs to create an org that big and stay on top of it are also smart enough to know not to completely strangle out smaller groups, solo players, etc because that's where they recruit from. And it would force the bigger orgs to involve more people in the actual industry than they do now, creating more content for more people. Single players, on the other hand, tend to just go for it and make something as big as they have the time/patience/enthusiasm for. And some people have a *lot* of these things if you let them expand forever! At least it would be relatively easy to try out and monitor without massive changes to the game.

But if the number of jobs someone can run at once is limited, specialisation comes naturally. You might be able to 'specialise' in everything but if you can't then use all those specialisation at the same time what's the point? Why specialise in refining, say, whennyou're making large space cores and every refining line you use takes away one large space core line? I'm not saying it would 't all need to be balanced properly with this in mind, but unlimited production removes the need to pick and choose what you make and if we removed it then people would need to choose. Make a small amount of everything or specialise and make a lot of something.

But also this is what I'm talking about with limits. People who are doing this sort of thing won't be affected because they are using multiple players to do stuff. If they can convince players to train talents to 5 then start jobs for free though, that's because starting a job costs nothing. If you had a limit on the number you could run, those players would want something in return for one of their slots being used ...

For most items you make the T1 and T2 costs are nearly the whole cost if the build because the bot orders have distorted the market so much. So if you get those to 5 you can keep the others lower and still have a well priced product. And you can have all the T1 and T2 skills at 5 already.

IMO the bigger issue here is what sort of game do you want? Do you want to have a game where people log on and have space adventures in a risky environment where unexpected things happen, people do good and bad things, create interesting stories which you can tell people about, people lie, scam, steal, you need to be careful and earning trust really actually means something real. Or do you want a game where everything is guaranteed. Your stuff is 100% safe if someone says its safe, nobody can ever scam you, everything takes place in walled gardens you control and if someone pushes the boundaries of the game mechanics a bunch of space-lawyers pop up with 10-point questionnaires (with sub-points!) trying to work out exactly where the walls should be and anyone who gets creative runs the risk of getting banned. I'm not involved with either side here, but personally when I read stories like the Elias VIlld one I think that sort of thing is fantastic and I want to play in the sort of world where stuff like that can happen. But then again I thought it was a fantastic story when that person stole a whole market but the GMs don't seem to have agreed ...

I disagree that limiting production would increase the gap between a lone player and a big org. Perhaps it would hurt a few lone players who have huge, game distorting amounts of power at the moment (and yes, there are players out there with massive factories they run more or less on their own. Anyone want to own up in the thread and show off how many you're running?). Even in the orgs which run these things there are usually a tiny number of players who have access to the actual factories with the rest just mining. And the talent points required aren't that high for someone dedicated to making huge industry setups. I had all the T1 and T2 skills at 4 before the 0.23 reset (as well as other talents) and have 2x as many talent points now so could be well on the way to all-5 T1 and T2 production. But what it would do is open up the market. At the moment manufacturing has no value add because there is no opportunity cost to it. There's no reason whatsoever for me to buy, say, a basic screw instead of making it myself. I can have an unlimited amount of machines and buying raw ore is a lot less complicated because the basket becomes smaller (buy 8 things for all of T1 and T2 production). Because of that there is no market for the intermediates. Why would you sell these as nobody is really buying them and even if they were the effort/reward ratio would be really low as there would be no profit in it? But if production has an opportunity cost then making those screws instead of higher level components might cost you money and you might be prepared to buy in those screws. For a lone player they would need to think hard about what they want to make and what they want to buy in, but it should be possible to turn a decent profit by playing cleverly. They could also use the intermediates market which would inevitably develop in order to reduce their talent requirements for making things, allowing them to focus on what makes the best profit.

Actually, I don't think that's a problem. At least not as big of a problem and it's sort of the way they want the game to go anyway. Say one player has a 10,000 machine factory. They can make pretty much everything and all they need is to make a lot of money *for one player*. Divide up the amount of profit they need by the amount of things they can make and it ends up being tiny, so they can sell things very close to cost and end up being OK. They can also afford to sell some things below cost until their competitors give up, etc. Now take that into an organisation. Say you need to train for a total of 3 months to get the 200 machines. And you need to train efficiency skills for the things you're making, etc too. And there's the possibility of the people running the jobs stealing so you need to set it up properly. Oh and you need 50 of these maxed out players running at 100% efficiency to equal that one factory from above. That's all pretty unlikely, there will be player churn, burnouts, imperfect skill training, etc and so you'll end up needing a few hundred people in that division. So now you need to make a few hundred times as much profit because those players aren't going to do it for free. And their org is going to want to make some profit for itself. And other orgs are going to want to try to pinch these profitable players for their orgs, etc. So suddenly that's not such an easy thing to do any more, and arguably those players deserve to profit from their ability to co-ordinate. And the need to supply hundreds of players with a reward for their efforts will balance things out and mean that the goods can't sensibly be sold at barely above cost any more. An org can try to undercut everyone else, but everyone knows that the org needs to pay their members, etc so can wait them out. tl;dr giving one single player control of an unlimited amount of production is game breaking and distorting while building a big org to collectively produce huge amounts of stuff is fun and the game working as intended.

No, because power and energy requirements will be *per construct* and you can have an unlimited number of constructs. So you'll still be able to have an unlimited amount of machines. It's possible there will be power per tile requirements, but there will always be people putting a base on the join of 3 tiles, etc and making that work. The best way to limit what players can do is to actually put direct limits on what players can do. It's baffling that these sorts of limits aren't there at the moment really -- those limits are present in all the MMOs I've played except for the mobile based 'pay to win' games where paying a ton of RL money to get game-breaking amounts of power is the whole business model. It clearly isn't the model here. There are limits on guns on a PvP ship, for example, so they must be aware of this sort of issue.

I think you could make it so a player can only have a certain number of machines running at once. 200 say. Then industrialists have to choose what they use that for instead of being able to just add intermediate production for free. It would give a lot more value to, say, being a screw seller because by selling screws you reduce the number of machines the buyer needs to make things. And you could still make all your own stuff, just not all at once.

Can you not blueprint the construct to save the LUA contents? If something goes wrong just deploy a new copy and it should still have all your code.

Another interesting idea would be to base the maximum speed of a ship on the core size so the smaller ships are faster than the larger ones. That would mean that, say, an XS core ship can catch up to a M core which is trucking between planets, although it will find it hard to kill said M core when it gets there (if the M core is a good setup). But if it can then take out engines, etc and stop the M core to allow pirates in an L core to catch up then the XS core ship has a fun and interesting PvP role.

You removed my comments? If you hadn't pointed it out I wouldn't have noticed. I wonder what I said? Or was it someone else's post?

Actually in EvE's engine all ships are just 'balls' with no particular orientation. The game engine draws the ship pointing a certain way but in the server it's just a sphere. That's why the physics of orbiting doesn't really work (If I orbit you and have a gun on the right point in my ship, the tracking should be 0 (i.e. my gun always points at what I orbit) but in eve the tracking is very high. In DU, tracking could be made a lot more interesting because the game does know where the ships are pointing (I think) and you could do an orbit where your gun is stationary but their gun is having to move a lot. But also in EvE the guns can shoot 360 degrees while in DU they point within a cone, so you'd have to keep your ship pointing a certain way. I played about with doing an eve-style 'get under the guns' orbit (with a ship which had the engines specially placed at the sides) and it's harder than you think but could be fun if it worked. I think an interesting possibility for asymmetric ship combat is to let the smaller guns directly target the larger elements on a ship. So if I have XS cannons and you're an L core I can individually target your engines, guns, etc. Perhaps with manual aiming or a sub-targeting system. It would still be hard to kill a L core with an XS core, say, but it would allow a sort of tackle role where you try and shoot out the surface elements to stop a ship running away while trying not to get hit by their big guns. Also giving the larger guns a minimum range or some other penalty when shooting at much smaller ships would be interesting. Of course in DU there's nothing stopping a L core ship from also having some smaller guns to shoot at the smaller ships so long as people are manning them (whereas in eve the slot layout limits that). It's hard to think of a way to stop that from being an issue in small vs large combat. Perhaps some sort of e-war like feature for small ships which has more effect on the large ships? Or take advantage of that asymmetric tracking thing (the bigger ship will find it harder to turn and optimise tracking)?

I didn't notice it was an old thread, it was at the top. Some forums lock old threads to stop that sort of thing from happening. And I thought I was being constructive. I'll stop.

I do agree schematics are one of the things which limit progression, but I don't think they are the only or even the worst thing. IMO The worst thing NQ has done in that regard is to put 'materials required reduction' types of skill into the game while not creating a market for intermediates. That means that in order to make anything you need to train a large number of skills for refining input, refining output, materials input, materials output and basic components in order to get the material cost down to sensible levels. When combined, these skills add up to more than a 50% reduction in the material requirements for any given element. They got away with that for a while but eventually people got those talents up to 5 and were then making things at maximum efficiency. Now if someone has a 50% material reduction and is only making a 10% profit, how is a new player ever going to compete with that, schematics or no? They have to train skills for literally months before they can even make the thing as cheaply as others are selling it. Combined with limits to production lines, I'd change all the material skills to 'time to manufacure' ones. That way they still have value as they effectively multiply up the limted production runs you can do while still allowing a new player to come along and be competitive (they can't make as many items per day, but they can make the same 10% proffit per item as an experienced player).

It's an interesting idea, but like the original schematic solution it doesn't actually fix the problems with the game. Industry in the game is fundamentally broken because there are no limits on what a player can do. If you put no limits on things, some players will take things to the extreme and spoil it for everyone else. Imagine you allowed a single player to have an unlimited amount of guns fitted to a ship (so long as you can actually put them on a construct) and fire them all while flying. What do you think the hardcore players' PvP ships would look like and what do you think would happen to everyone else who tried to PvP against them? Industry is just the same -- they allowed players to run an infinite number of production jobs all at once in an MMO. Most players just had fun but a few hardcore ones made factories with literally 1000s of machines running at once. So NQ notices this and says 'No single player should have that sort of production capability' and introduces schematics to fix it. But schematics only fix things for the 'normal' players. The hardcore ones just bought a large number of schematics (through a combination of building a ton of things in advance of 0.23 and selling them cheap afterwards, mining to bot orders a *lot*, getting lucky with the cheap schematic blunder or just plain working hard at industry). Now those people have huge megafactories again, but the rest of us can't have our smaller factories back because we're unlikely to make back the money we invest in schematics while competing against those megafactories. Meanwhile the megafactories just get bigger and the gap gets wider. I don't really think the suggestion above fixes any of this. The very wealthy mega-factory owners will be able to adapt to it easily and still flood the market with barely-above-cost items but everyone else will still struggle to make back their initial investment. They could fix the whole thing with one simple, easy change - put limits on the number of production jobs which a character can have running at once. Make it so you can only have 20 machines on 'run' or 'maintain' at any one time, trainable to 100 with a month of training and 200 with another 2 months. No character can ever be running more than 200 machines at once. People could still have their factories that make everything for their ship building (or whatever) if they want to, they'd just have to start/stop machines as appropriate or write LUA to do that for them (and be logged in to run it). But if you want to have 5,000 machines running at once you'd better have at least 25 max-skilled friends to help you, which makes sense because that's a 'large org' type of production capacity. Solo industrialists will need to choose between making fewer lines or buying intermediates from the market instead of making them, either of which would be good for the market. It's likely the change would create exactly the sort of market for intermediates that NQ want but which the schematic changes fail to generate (because if you're buying the expensive schematics you might as well buy all the much cheaper intermediate ones too so you can guarantee your supply). And you wouldn't even need to reset or wipe industry -- the game could just keep going after a 2 week warning. Mega factory owners get time to make a ton of stock to keep the market running while it adjusts to the change and to help them recover some of their money back. Have the game buy back schematics at 90% of sell price to let them cash out too.

Eve is a good example of what I'm talking about here. In eve every (properly fit) ship is a min/max optimised setup for doing one particular thing. So if you want to PvP you need a PvP optimised setup and if you don't have that you basically want to avoid getting into PvP at all costs. It's one of the things people learn early when playing. The imbalance between being PvP and non-PvP fit is so big that on several occasions I've solo'ed non-PvP battleships with PvP fitted frigates. But because everyone is either PvP fit or wants to avoid PvP at all costs, PvP becomes either arranged fights, stratiegic battles or cat+mouse hunts of non-PvP ships which bolt and run at the first sign of trouble. Nobody wants to be an easy target so the vast majority of non-PvP ships stay in places where they are safe -- 85% of players stay in hisec and most of the ones which venture outside join the huge nullsec blocks where they have lots of warning about incoming threats. The usual response when presented with PvP is to dock up and wait it out. When people can't stay safe they literally stop playing the game -- try doing hisec wardecs and you'll see that most hisec players just log off for a week until you're gone. The way the numbers dropped during the blackout (where the devs took away the safety people had and made them risk being an easy target in order to do non-PvP things) shows it's not just the hisec players who are like this. I think DU will be just the same -- if you force people to either fly PvP only ships or become easy targets then everyone who is an easy target will avoid any area where PvP might happen unless they have a fairly reliable way to run and avoid the PvP. Because nobody wants to make themselves an easy target. Change the game so some activity makes people take risks and most of them will change their activities or just log off if they can't have fun without becoming a target. I just think it would be cool if DU went a different way from eve and tried to make a game where there isn't such a hard 'PvPer / target' distinction and people might actually fight you when you interrupt them mining an asteroid ...

True. I'm just annoyed because the game was shaping up really well but has been so utterly disappointing since 0.23 dropped. Yesterday I flew around for 20 minutes (alioth districts so it should be a busy place), I only saw 6 people the entire time and those were all in district 6 as I waited literally 5 minutes for the platforms to appear so I could land.

How many of them are actually playing DU while they socialise?