Zeddrick

I almost quit the game today because of this. It was working for literally weeks. It worked well enough for me to pick up a bunch of packages. Then it failed silently and took a lot of troubleshooting before I even knew what was going on. It turned out over 50 elements are now overlapping. 50. Including 3/4 of the atmo brakes and about 1/3 of the wings. I ended up abandoning it and am now the proud owner of a VHagar and if that breaks in the same way I probably will quit for good. At the market I saw someone using a diligence. It was a bit more modded than mine but the core elements hadn't been moved. It looked like it was working without stacked element problems. It's just a complete shitshow really.

It could just be a tickbox in the RDMS permissions surely? 'Prevent Theft'.

We need this!

I came back later and tried to force respawn in order to buy a new ship to finish the mission with. Tried to deactivate the res node. "This element is colliding with another and cannot be used". Of course it is. So I hit force respawn and respawned onto it anyway. Really? I can't deactivate it but I can still respawn to it. Of course I can, the game is determined to make me mess about in build mode in a ship I bought so I wouldn't have to mess about with ships in build mode. Beta was better than this.

On closer inspection, my ship suddenly has a double-digit number of overlapping elements all over which have been working fine up until now. Including 19 wings which appear to have been randomly selected from a stack of 58. I haven't any time left to fix this as it looks like it will take hours. I will lose all my packages. Thanks NQ.

I think this is the third time I've posted about this and now I'm really annoyed about it. I have a ship which has been working for a long time. It's a diligence without any modifications (besides those made by a very enthusiastic ally when I entered the PvP zone). It certainly doesn't have any Janko'ed elements. So today I get into the ship (which worked when I landed it) and have no error messages, but mysteriously the space engines don't work. Try to land again but some of the brakes don't work either and this is when I find out. Boom. Rep a bunch of things. Run out of the lunch break I was playing in but have to keep going or my packages will expire. I'm sure work won't mind if I just play a broken video game some more. Eventually I try again, try lots of things like resetting cache, using a different chair, etc but nothing is working. Ask for help in the help channel. There are some pretty nice and helpful players in there who tell me there are no GMs and I'm basically SOL. I land without crashing this time (because I'm expecting it). Now we're well over an hour into my quick 15 minute 'set it flying' play session. Then I go into build mode and then, and only then, do I get the message "some of your elements are colliding and have been deactivated". FFS really? How long have we had this 'feature' and how hard is it to get this stuff right on a ship which has never had any janko'ed elements and is basically a design from the start of beta that has been working ever since. Seriously NQ. DU was never perfect, but this is a lot worse than it used to be. Things like this really spoil the experience for people who are just trying to play the game and seem like overkill compared with the small problem of cheating by element stacking.

The whole concept of sanctuary and, to some extent, haven seems broken to me. The only reason I have a Sanctuary tile is because the STU in my inventory was annoying me so I went and put it somewhere. The problem with Sanctuary in particular is we are playing an MMO, which means interacting with other players, which means being somewhere where other players are so the market is stocked, there are things to look at, you see other people out and about, etc. Sanctuary breaks this by being an 'exclusive' space where most people can't have a tile, which means that there won't be many other players around. That makes it a bad space to use for developing any sort of base or whatever (nobody will see what you make, markets won't be stocked, etc) so nobody really lives on these tiles, making the problem even worse. And they made they sky a horrible orange colour. Haven is pretty similar actually. People can settle there, but the large number of claimed tiles means players are far from markets, making them bad places to live. Nobody can sell, unclaim or transfer their tile so a lot of the ones nearer the markets will be used by players who have stopped playing or who are alts, making the claimed area a bit stale. I have a nice Haven tile and would like to use it, but the area around it is empty and making use of it is pointless so I moved near the districts like everyone else. In order to be useful the areas around the moons will need to be more like the tiles around districts, able to eventually be reclaimed if someone leaves the game to keep the area around them fresh and actually used. The 'I can leave the game and keep my constructs safe here' feature is OK up to a point, but you can't move your static constructs back to the safe moons anyway and this functionality could be enabled some other way with a special aphelia-owned long term storage tile which hides unused constructs or whatever.

Yes, you need to identify. Remember the radar handling skills that make the radar better. Weapon skills, handling skills, ammo skills and using long range ammo will help a lot here, as will higher tier weapons. I'm pretty sure a good L rail setup can hit out near the 2SU radar limit? Also remember falloff, which lets you hit beyond the optimal range but with a lower hit chance. I have a ship with rare M rails which can do good damage at 1su for example. I think it's a big jump to assume someone will be using something like this. Some will, some will use different setups completely. S cores are most common, but an S rail setup can shoot you at over 0.5SU. A lot of 'pirates' are actually hoping for other pirates to fight so might be set up to beat the S cannon setups. People will typically try to get within their optimal, match your speed and stay there rather than doing a flyby so what matters most is the acceleration and top speed of the ships. If they have cannons and you have rails and they are a lot faster than you they will come in close and kill you quickly. So you want to be fast to keep your distance so you can extend the time where you are hitting them but they aren't hitting you. Probably not enough to kill someone without having to move. You might get lucky and someone has an S shield or something. They will know you're shooting back. Not sure there are so many of A. At least if you think people will attack you then run just because you fired a gun then that's probably naive. You'll have to make it look like you can win the fight in order to scare someone off and even then they might try to sit outside your gun range and wait for their friends. IMO L weapons aren't a very good idea unless you know what you're doing. You will be in an L core (because you need an L core for L guns). You will be a big shiny target that isn't all that fast. The attacker will probably know they can try to kill you then disengage if you're winning so you're low risk to attack. They will have a go and call in friends to hunt you if they can't kill you alone. You will probably also be bigger and slower than the people you shoot at, giving them something of an advantage when it comes to following you. Generally you want to decide what your goal/plan is and design the ship around it. If the goal is to evade then make the ship small and light with high acceleration and a good top speed. If you want an L weapon ship the goal is probably to beat or chase off attackers, which is quite hard to do IMO. The more things you add the heavier you get, meaning you accelerate more slowly and have a lower top speed so build the ship accordingly. Top speed and acceleration are often more important than tank and DPS.

I have a random text generator which is more believable. Two dead end technologies rammed together with word salad does not a product make. You might convince some naive people to invest money, but then their expectations will be that you can turn nonsense into money, which is a hard expectation to meet.

It wasn't a third person game, original Elite was first person like E:D is.

No, the things you mostly pay for are number of servers and amount of data stored (or storage available depending on what it is). Networking does cost money but typically less than the cost of the nodes generating the traffic, although DU might be a special case. So when they deleted half of the planets, for example, this would have generated a significant cost saving as it would reduce the data storage required. You have to wonder, then, why they made it so all those landers and starter would end up strewn across haven and never get looked at again.

A friend of mine once said "Never attribute to malice something that you can attribute to incompetence", and I think that holds true here. It seems pretty unlikely that someone set out to break the game here, because that would be counter-productive for everyone. But incompetence? That certainly sounds believable doesn't it? With the mining units, though, you aren't really meant to calibrate each mining unit every day. 24 hours was always the minimum but the intention was that you would calibrate after the efficiency starts to drop, which is a lot less frequently (Can't remember exactly, 72h?). I expect they just picked 24 hours because it's a day and nobody complained until now because everyone was just picking them up and re-dropping anyway for the high tier and ignoring the calibration game for the lower tiers. Seems like 22 hours would work better and not really change the max yield much.

People would have one pay-to-play account which owns all their territory and runs the indy jobs all their alts would be f2p accounts. In my case this would be about 6x cheaper and I wouldn't lose any functionality at all. At least it would solve the problem of 'how do the normal players compete with someone who has 10s of alts?'. Everyone would have 10s of alts!

Thanks, I had no idea I qualified for a pet at all and the game didn't bother to tell me I had one (unlike the outfits where it showed me them when I logged in). Turns out when I hit 'P' I can turn it on and this thing is flying around behind me now. If I force respawn, will the pet die too? I feel bad about that ...

Both of them!

"stack for 3D Blogging" sounds like word salad to me. What even is that? Does my toilet count as one?

You might be mistaking cause and effect. I have been wondering if DU is failing because the company is trying hard to find something to replace it with instead of trying to make it better?

Today my characters received an e-mail entitled 'Unlock new pets and skins now in Dual Universe'. When I open the mail it shows a picture of the new outfits and the text 'New skins, new pets, new emotes awaits you in Dual Universe'. I was briefly excited because I didn't think these characters qualified for any of this stuff, but when I logged in I found out it was just a pack of lies. I am not able to unlock any pets or skins and no skins, pets or emotes were, in fact, waiting for me. Does anyone else think this is just outrageous clickbait? If you're going to make a release where half the content is only available to alpha backers, send this message only to the alpha backers and send a different one to the rest which talks about blueprint snapping, recycling and, well, whatever else there is.

Biggest problem I have with it is if I recycle an element then I have to manually place another one in the same location. I can replace the element with a new one instead, but then it doesn't get recycled. Really I want a 'replace and recycle' type of operation which will allow me to recycle dead elements on my ship without having to become a ship builder and place lots of elements by hand. NQ's law in action again.

OMG There is so much crazy rambling in this thread!

The starter ship prices in the UEF store don't, though, because the player driven market is only part of the markets in DU and NQ likes to create bits and pieces outside of it to replace player driven content. As the ore prices go down the ships in the UEF store, which are meant to be starter ships, effectively get harder to obtain for a new player. New players can make money from the daily challenges, though, which are also not connected to the player driven economy and are therefore worth more and more as the ore price drops.

Yes, when quoting prices for ore one needs to do it for a market where there a lot of buy and sell orders. That's D6 or possibly Aegis for some of them. You can't expect to sell your ore on whatever market is next to you any more because the bots are gone, you have to either move it or list it and wait for it to get picked up, which may take some time. There is definitely a lot of ore for sale now though. If people are using automining to build perhaps you can tax the tile for 1 cycle, automine, then leave them untaxed for a cycle or two so you only get enough to use for manufacturing.

How exactly? I'm doing some now and the seem the same as before.

Lol, switch to mission running like the rest of us! Group up with others if you have no alts. The more people there are running missions the quicker they will get nerfed!

The wipe was a much needed levelling pass because: - some players had used large numbers of beta accounts to make billions from mission running, preventing the game from having a sensible economy - players who left felt like they wouldn't be able to catch up and wanted a wipe to catch up again but: - players are once again making billions per day from mission running. The economy is going to be just as broken again - the wipe worked when it comes to getting players back. But there was a reason most of them left and the game is arguably less of a game now than it was then. Online player counts are crashing hard now (game peaks at a little over 200 now in steam vs 800 at launch) So the wipe was a total fail and, as many have predicted, we will shortly be back where the game was before the wipe happened due to the apparent total ineptitude of the people managing the game. A cash shop is just putting lipstick on the pig at this stage, frankly, and will not work. In order for a cash shop to work there has to be a sensible number of players who actually play enough to want the in-game items. In any case, when you have a game where everyone is mission running and the number of characters you have determines how much money you make, most people will find it hard to justify paying for that silly dance move (or whatever) when they could spend the money on a 1 month sub for another AFK mission character. The wipe was a second chance. But the thing about second chances is you have to actually take them instead of repeating past mistakes.