Zeddrick

Not really. I like PvP and have actually tried to solo in DU but the game doesn't really support that game style yet and the culture in the game is such that just blowing people up for a laugh is frowned upon. But if I'm not doing PvP I don't want to put myself in a situation where PvP might interrupt what I'm doing if I will have 0% chance to inflict any meaningful damage in return. And so will other people. But if I can have a chance to actually win (or just cause a lot of damage) in the process that's fun. I'm not talking about idiot designs with no armor here, they're just target practice. But I should be able to make a ship which is good at, say, hauling a lot of stuff but which can still be competitive at PvP. Or build a ship I can fly solo which can be competitive against a gang of players if I play the fight cleverly. It doesn't seem like that's possible at the moment because of the very severe restrictions on what you can do while flying the ship. And yes, you can play in a group, but there won't always be a group around and a game which is only good when there's a group is one which is not going to be easy to play at offpeak times, etc...

PvP doesn't have to be ganking though does it? You just need to design things so ships can be good at non-pvp roles while still being able to defend themselves properly against gankers. DU should really be good at that as you can build your own ships and invent ship classes like 'combat hauler'. If the game ends up forcing specialisation (with an energy system, say, which makes you take off guns in order to put on containers) then you get stuck having to fly a gankable ship in order to do non-pvp things and then you need a bunch of big safe zones because nobody likes to get ganked with no chance of fighting back. Making the safe zones smaller won't magically make people go into pvp areas more often. People stay in the safe zones because they don't want to get exploded. Shrinking the pvp zones will just make people play in a smaller area or perhaps quit. Want people to PvP more you need to give them more of a chance to win (or perhaps just to avoid loss while costing the attacker money).

Nonsense! There are also tons of creations which aren't at all sci-fi related.

But who would you socialise with? I'm in an org with over 200 members and whenever I log in I'm literally the only one online. I spent 20 minutes flying around the districts today and the only time I saw any players at all were the 6 players on the radar while I was hovering over a field for 5 minutes waiting for district 6 market to render any pads at all so I could land. Adding communication tools at this point is just shutting the stable door.

Not really. My talent points are just a function of how long I've been in the game. And blueprints are OK if you're someone who has been making a lot of things and wants to make them again. I do have some blueprints I've built up that I would take and they do represent some effort. But most of the effort I put in was into manufacturing and trading and that would all be lost. I would have more or less the same as someone who played 1/10th as much if just blueprints and talent points are counted. Someone who was mega-active mining and selling to bots but joined 2 months ago would get next to nothing ... It won't magically replace my quanta will it? I don't like this sort of 'holding former players to ransom for their stuff' type of behaviour. Eve did that recently and as a result there are players who lost all their stuff (which they had left safe) while absent and players who didn't. The ones who lost all their stuff are pretty unlikely to resub IMO and for the rest of us that would be a big signal that NQ does not value the effort we put into the game trying to build up our assets! Really if they want people to put a lot of effort into civilisation building they should be showing us that they respect and value the effort we put in rather than constantly devaluing and eroding it. Yes, at the moment a lot the 'civilisation building' types of people are inactive and it has become 'mining to bot orders universe'. Perhaps some of the new features will get people back but I suspect they'll just break stuff or let peoples' bases get blown up while they're inactive (unless they come back and mine to bot orders to be able to afford to defend or move their stuff). Once it's all sorted out and they think they have a balanced game, a wipe and some free game time for the ones who had assets would be a great fresh start for those who were alienated and could kickstart the civilisation building again.

This.

While that sounds bad, if there are a small number of them and they can't transfer it/turn it back to in-game money then it doesn't actually affect the bottom line does it? It's a decent way of removing the advantage given by the gains people have without erasing the results of peoples' efforts. And if a small number of people profit because they cashed in at the right time and are rich then so be it. They're not going to be able to break the economy with their free game time so it doesn't really make much difference to me. Perhaps some sort of decreasing reward for huge amounts of money (i.e. linear reward increase for exponentially increasing asset size).

Wasn't the schematic change all about stopping people from having mega-factories? So that went well.

I put a lot of hours into the game already on the assumption that I was building up a base to play from for years. If a wipe is needed then a wipe is needed (and I get why it might be in order to start everyone from a fair baseline again) but it would be nice to get something back for the effort I already put in? Perhaps they could turn the assets value into DAC or some other game time voucher so it wasn't all for nothing? Handing loyal customers who put hours in more free hours at launch time isn't a terrible idea anyway ... Also perhaps announce it properly and let people discuss what they might want in exchange for the assets they built up which doesn't imbalance the game? Also perhaps schedule it for after all the disruptive changes have been made, everyone agrees the game is fun and viable and all the bad economic interventions, urges to tell people how to play the game, etc are out of everyone's systems first so it's the last wipe?

Which discord is that?

Warp beacons already have a purpose -- so the devs can hand out expensive schematics to a select few who just happen to log in at the right moment ...

Unlikely. Selling them like that is not a very bright thing to do (mind you, buying 112 of them isn't all that clever either). If there are 112 people making these there will be almost no profit in selling them. You'd want to keep them for a while so you can built beacons and sell them at a big markup then sell the schematic later when the proffit starts to drop off ...

No, it's a 'big number patch'. It has to also contain some sort of well-intended-but-completely-gamebreaking surprise change as well as some things which sound good but end up being a little disappointing. They still have a few left -- power changes which could completely break most of the ships in game would be a fun one. Perhaps they could temporarily disable the safe zone for a few hours and let whoever gets online first blow up a load of peoples' stations then just switch it back on so they can't retalliate? They have territory warfare of course, which could completely upend and ruin the game depending on how it gets implemented, forcing people to unbuild everything and move it somewhere else.

Perhaps you can create a mission which says 'get me a warp beacon schematic for 8 million'?

No, that doesn't matter. An IP address is considered personally identifiable information and that can't be used by an arbitrary person to trace back to me. It is personally identifiable information if it can't be used by *somebody else*. If there is only one person using something it's personally identifiable. Similarly my credit card number is personally identifiable because it's mine and nobody else uses the same number. But if you have it you can't trace it back to me. Again, it doesn't matter. It's a number only used by me so it's personally identifiable. Yes it is. Go read the relevant laws. And it is always the case that the intended use of the in-game name is for one RL person (go see the EULA). Sure, two people could *pretend* to be one person or someone could hack the account, but that's true of literally any piece of information about someone including their name and address. It's still personally identifiable information. Somebody somewhere knows how to map it back to me. Even if that someone is me! Not true. If the IGN is mine then clearly it identifies me. If you see me twice in game two weeks apart you know that you saw the same person twice in game. And you know you saw the person writing this comment. That identifies me. There is no requirement for you to be able to map me back to a real world person. I'm pretty sure the game's privacy policy doesn't say that arbitrary players might use the game to collect personally identifiable information about me and my real life activities and share it both inside and outside of the game for profit. So no, I didn't agree to it being collected and stored for that purpose. Sure, it's unlikely anyone will actually care but anyone who, for example, collects information via a progboard, exports it outside of the game with my in game name or ID number and stores that somewhere needs to ask my permission first in quite a lot of countries. And in a lot of them they need to state what they're storing, how long for and what they will use the information for. Not if they only store aggregate information. I actually think that's a great bit of emergent gameplay and I'd like to see some of the stats. But from the original article it sounds like they're using this to do things like help orgs screen people who apply. And that means they have a record somewhere with my in game name on it and a bunch of other information about me stored ( a list of orgs they've seen me being a member of, for example). They need to be careful about that because they might be breaking real world laws and at some point some computer nerd will get cross about being refused entry to an org and start making trouble for them. Again, not true. If you don't believe me go look it up. That's like saying it's OK for me to store a log of IP addresses accessing a website because there is no way to tell who is behind those addresses. All that matters is that there is only one individual who is associated with the information being stored. Me. The player using the name.

Thinking about this some more I think people in here are misunderstanding what 'personally identifiable information' actually means (at least in the European context of the relevant real-world laws). A character name is clearly personally identifiable information in this context because there is only one real-world individual who is using that player name. It doesn't matter that you can't actually get to the real-world information for the person, all that matters is that only one person in the real world uses that in-game name, so the in-game name identifies one real-world individual. It is personally identifiable information. I think people have to be careful what information they store along with in-game names in this context. I don't really know what the rules would be for in-game information being stored together with this (a list of orgs I have been in, for example). IMO abusing in-game information about someone is pretty similar to killing someone in-game, it's all part of the game. But if they store any information which can be used to derive real-world information about the individual uniquely identified by the character name then that's clearly going to be covered by a lot of real-world laws. One obvious example would be saving my character name together with the date and time at which I passed by a particular point. Now you have a list of dates and times when I, the uniquely identifiable indivudual in the real world, was sat at my computer playing a video game. That's tracking real world activity of humans whether you like it or not. And it might not stay in-game. Say, for example, I'm playing games when I'm meant to be working and my boss catches me. They might get my character name from my work computer then go pay whoever is collecting information in-game real-world money for a list of the times I was known to be playing. At that point it's not really in-game information at all. In Europe, at least, they would have to get my permission before keeping a list of information which has the potential to be used in this way, telling me why they have it and offering me the option to have it deleted at any time. But it all depends where the person who is collecting the information lives, what they store and where they store it.

IMO this type of gameplay is great and should be encouraged. But there should be some counter-gameplay as well. If I don't want to appear in the logs, what can I do about it? If I want to disrupt their operation (by interfering with the totems or otherwise interfering with the org) there are not many legitimate in-game things I can do about it. I can't jam the detection zone, blow up the totem, feed it false information, etc. Also I don't think being able to have structures sat at marketplaces should be a thing you can for free. Otherwise eventually there will be 20+ totems sat there outside every market entrance all collecting the same thing. There should be some sort of parking fee involved which escallates over time with the punishment being that the construct gets impounded and removed from the pad. Not sure if the totem owner is reading this -- it would be cool to publish some daily aggregates of people visiting markets over time so we could see what the in-game activity levels are like ...