Zeddrick

That's because the distribution doesn't matter. All you need is a 1L tile of each high end ore type to take 6 digit quantities of ore per day in calibration ore and this is crashing the high tier ore market.

Oh god! Becareful what you ask for here. It's bad enough that the highly important dev time during early months of the game is wasted on the sort of innane useless trash it has been. We don't want to get another 'roadmap' in march where 'third person view' is the new titanic-deckchair-rearrangement feature and the important things are yet again untouched.

Yeah, this has the ring of reality to it. Based on past experience: - schematics will be a lot harder to make than they are now - schematics will be a lot more expensive to make than now - with max skills (which take a long time) schematics will end up being a bit harder and a bit more expensive than they are now with them hoping that this will stimulate demand for people selling schematics on the market but with the actual end result being that only alts are viable for schematic research (because mains can't afford the time to train the skills) and people doing industry continue to use alt farms for this.

The thing about electing representatives is that we, the players, get to choose who we want to put up there to be trusted to perhaps receive inside information and not act on it. Right now there seem to be a bunch of informal conversations going on between the developers and whoever they have struck up conversations with over the years, which is a far more flaky way to do things and far more likely to end badly when it comes to confidential information handling. If someone needs to be in the position to receive this sort of information (and I think they don't this point) who would you prefer to choose them? The players or the people who picked the ATV (at least some of whom definitely misused the 0.23 insider info)?

The NQ website doesn't specify what other projects there are but implies DU is just their first game and that it is the prototype for some sort of 'metaverse' type of thing (which IMO is very different from a game and different again from an MMO. Voxels are a great basis for a game but a really bad idea as the basis of a metaverse IMO).

The problem is that what they're working on is small scale, disappointing and not going to address the gaping hole in the game's design, which is that there isn't any actual game beyond building stuff and showing it off. That's probably all NQ is really interested in because they seem to want to use DU as some sort of technology showcase to promote (and perhaps fund) other projects. But for most of us we want an actual game to play. At the moment I think the current game has a few months in it for most people after which you have built everything you want to build, seen all the cool stuff and then there's nothing to do. IMO the original suggestion here is a good one. We don't have to create a CSM or ATV or whatever, just a small but diverse group of player representatives which NQ trusts and can run stuff by. They don't even need to have access to insider info. For this week's announcement, for example, it would not have hurt anyone if such a group saw that a week early and got asked 'how do you think this will go down?'. They can say 'I think it will make a lot of people cross' and explain why. Then NQ can iterate, plan and communicate better. Same for the stream. Clearly everyone was expecting a senior dev to go talk about how well the launch went, perhaps give us some numbers and then talk about the new stuff in detail and the big picture exciting things we can expect over the next year. Instead we got Shamzie having no information and doing a walkabout of the cool stuff. That is good content in and of itself and probably what NQ wants to showcase in order to show off the engine but I think a lot of people felt it wasted their time. I didn't need to stop work to watch it, for example. Personally I would feel better if there were a group who would explain this stuff to NQ and actually be listened to.

Try the 'commodities' channel in the official discord.

I had a look at these over the last few days and I think the removal of planets and resulting mission changes have undermined the mission nerf which was done to stop large scale mission 'abuse'. In the beta the 10 mission routes didn't really line up and your character would usually get 1 of these long missions so if you had 10 characters you wouldn't get many duplicate routes. In the release game, though, there are essentially 3 'areas' for long-haul missions -- Jago, Teoma and 'the safe zone'. The long 'Teoma to Jago' route doesn't seem to be used much in missions (I'm told it is used but have never seen one on the live server) . So you effectively have 2 loops from safe->Jago/Teoma->safe. From experiments over the last few days it seems that most of the time a character will have one long mission on one of the two loops. They won't all be on the same out/return and they won't all be to/from the same safezone planet but none of that really matters because they share the same long trip through the PvP zone and that's the challenge of the mission, right? So if I have 10 alts, I can plan to run a loop from safe->jago->safe and the chances are I will get 5 of the largest packages to haul. Some out and some return. With a typical payout being 6-7 mil I can get 30 mil just for running these packages. No complex organisation, no co-ordination with other players, just me and my alts flying a loop to Jago and back once a day. That will, at current prices, buy me 3 DACs. Then I can do this for a week. Now I have about 20 DAC. Not only did I just pay for my 10 alts for a whole month, I made enough for another 10 alts. Now I can run 10 packages over that loop and make 60 mil per day (as the OP suggests.. But there's no reason to stop there! I can just keep on adding alts and buying DAC until it becomes really expensive and hard to get hold of. With each toon making an average of 3 mil per day I could pay well over 50 mil for each DAC and still be making silly money like this. Time to stop the calibrations and build me a big fat mission ship!

OK, so there should and I'm trolling a bit here. But IMO there should be limits to what's available in the safe areas of the game. If you put a large amount of really good territory in the safe area people can claim it and keep it forever. And nobody can ever take it from them. For me that's a huge advantage for people just because they started the game first. Really the vast majority of tiles should be contestable in some way to prevent people from sitting on them forever. Perhaps not PvP, but then there needs to be another way for me to contest your tile. Perhaps I can force a tax auction for it or something?

There shouldn't be any good tiles in the safezone.

I wasn't aware ore griefing was a thing, although it does sound like fun! Are you sure they really are griefing though rather than wanting to sell that tile to someone (which is valid gameplay not griefing IMO)? Did you contact them and try to buy it? Even if the flowers are blocked, though, you still have all the calibration ore so I think as a tactic trying to block orgs from getting ore this way won't work. I do agree with the comment above about having no way to challenge a claim though. The game really needs territory warfare so if someone does 'ore grief' you then you have something you can do about it.

When people start to quit the game because they don't want to pay subs, were planning on grinding quanta for DAC but can't keep up with the mission runners it might seem like more of a problem.

Luckily this time we also have calibration-only mining generating huge piles of ore. People are making a similar value per day doing that. If we're lucky the two might cancel out and prevent both the crazy broken inflation we saw last time mission runners were making too much money and the ore price crash which came late in beta when automining generated too much ore. Mission runners generating too much money and buying the too much ore generated by calibrations.

They might be more upset when those accounts are able to self-fund using DAC and permanently play for free at the expense of non-mission-runners not being able to afford to buy DAC for quanta.

I don't think it's supposed to be easy to bootstrap up a T3+ industry setup and make everything yourself. I like the factory gameplay, and I like making things for myself as well as for the market, but the planning and complexity of it is part of what I enjoy about it. I wouldn't want a button to instantly create all of the factory units, partly because it would make the game too easy and partly because everyone would have these factories so there would be no value in making things to sell to other players. Also part of the skill with industry, IMO, is knowing what to make and what to buy. On launch day, for example, you could buy a couple of S containers and M assemblers then use the nanopack to feed them and have a factory relatively quickly. Those advanced mining units might be expensive but the machines you need to build them are available on the market at a reasonable price. Same for the advanced machines (accepted if you did this a few weeks ago they weren't but that's just a bootstrapping thing).

With calibrations! Shut down all but one of your tiles, move all the mining units to one tile and do calibrations on them. You will have one tile tax to pay no matter how many people you share the tile with.

A lot of people go out into the PvP zone and provide pirates with an easy kill. Then they assume that PvP must be easy because it was easy for someone to kill *them*. But just because you are bad at PvP doesn't mean that everyone else is too. Not all pirates are friends, a lot of the time when you go out looking for a fight you find other PvP groups who will try to kill you. Often that's what people are hoping for. Nobody will turn down an easy kill if you provide it but it doesn't mean all PvPers are gankers or doing something easy just because you did it badly.

We'll have to disagree on that one. I think there definitely are enough people with enough charges to abuse it and they will. And it will mess up the economy and by the time it does it will be too late to easily fix it.

I don't think you actually read the thread before jumping in did you? What's being complained about here is not that missions and mining make too much money. We're talking about 'calibration only' mining. You can make similar money to a big MU farm but all you need is one mining unit and one tile. You put the unit down, calibrate, pick it up, put it down, calibrate again, etc. As you say, running a proper mining unit farm is a lot of work but the 'calibration only' method is really easy and people are getting hundreds of thousands of KL per day of ore with it. It means that all that hard work that you put into your mining farm is worth nothing because someone with a mining units and a bunch of alts can get more ore than you with less effort. tl;dr: Pay attention before commenting

Don't worry, it doesn't look like anyone is going to fix this until T3 ore is selling for under 50h again and everyone has a massive pile of ore. You can keep on mining as much as you like, just don't expect it to hold any value ...

With T1 and calibration-only miningnI was making well over 100kl of T1 ore every day on my tile. It was taking about an hour a day. It never ran out, I could have whatever mix of ore types I wanted. I could have sold to bot orders for millions per day. Needing to pay 500,000 per week in tax is completely irrelevant because the tax only scales with the ore if you need to find additional tiles.

And as to the PvP part -- I'm not talking about forcing people anywhere. There are a lot of players who will go to them. But if calibrations generate more ore per hour than asteroid mining why would they bother?

But the way the mining units are intended to work means that there is a limit to the rate you can generate ore at. In order to generate 300K of T3 in one go you would need a lot of different tiles which would mean lots of mining units, storage, hauling and logistics, scanning the tiles down in the first place. And the tile tax would scale with the amount of ore you generate meaning that as the market gets oversupplied the bad tiles get less and less viable, which is what an economy should look like. With the calibration method all I need is one tile, one tile tax, an XS core, a mining unit, a ship that can hold the ore and some alts or calibration talents. It's completely broken.

Oh yes. Everyone will use this. I will use this. I'm seeing the giant piles of ore others are getting from their calibrations and feel like I have to join in in order to compete. I have procured a T3 tile with a small amount on it. My one T3 autominer is cooking. Tonight I will head over there to run 150 calibration charges and generate 300K of T3 ore in (probably) about 3-4 hours. If you can't beat them ... But generally speaking we want to be in an MMO with a balanced economy rather than one where something is so much better than the other options that everyone just does that over and over and over (*cough* aileron parts *cough*). And when something like calibrations has no limit to it then that is eventually going to break the game by making it too easy to generate large amounts of ore. Ore prices crash. Nobody goes to asteroids any more so PvP players have nothing to do and stop playing and it goes downhill from there.

No. Because I can use calibration only mining to generate a lot of quanta (until the ore markets crash). I can use that to buy DAC and have more accounts (until the DAC price gets inflated). SO I can have a lot of alt accounts. Each one has 3 HQ tiles. People can just HQ them and set them to inactive in case the game rules change.