Zeddrick

You can buy a DAC for 7 mil. Using calibration only mining on a T3 tile you can make that back in a small number of days. And you can do this as many times as you want! No need to find new tiles, have infrastructure, etc. Just keep selling, buying DAC with the proffit and making new characters. Your single tile can generate an infinite amount of ore! The only limit is how many calibrations you can run before your eyes start to bleed!

I see NQ have updated the client so it doesn't allow calibrations on inactive tiles any more. So they must at least be actually reading this stuff. But that just makes it worse. Instead of having one tile each it's actually more optimal to share with friends and have fewer tiles than it was before. If I have a 1L gold tile and so does my friend we should leave 1 inactive and both use the other. It will cost 1/2 as much tax and we can get exactly the same amount of gold from one through calibrations as we can from 2 because there is no limit to the number of calibrations which can be run per tile and the tile's quality has no influence at all on how much ore a calibration yields. Does anyone else think this is just encouraging people to do calibration-only mining?

But is that because you got a good Sanctuary tile early on? My haven tile is a 'front row' one directly next to a market. If I had been given my STU at launch I could have had a good Sanctuary tile too, but now not so much. It's true that you can get closer to the markets on Sanctuary now than on Haven but that assumes the player didn't claim any Haven tile early on.

I don't own any flowers or T4-T5 tiles BTW. I own one T3 tile with a very low yield which I can use for calibrations and have access to tiles other players hold to calibrate different types of ore. It feels way too easy and a bit game-breaking, but if everyone else is doing it ....

What I'm concerned about is that this feature creates too much of the higher tier ores, massively reducing their value. This is what happened in beta -- mining units were introduced and the value of the ores dropped massively right afterwards. T2 sometimes sold for less than T1 (because no bot orders). T3 priced under 50h, etc. NQ have reduced the amount of ore per tile, reduced the number of high-tier flowers and taken away planets to limit the amount of ore generated by mining units. Presumably this was, at least partly, to limit their effects on the economy and try to balance things a bit more. For the moment it's pretty healthy with people doing asteroids, etc. But people are scanning a lot now and the cat is out of the bag regarding calibrations. We even have someone from NQ up there at the top of the thread telling us the calibration-only method is OK. So now those changes to limit the amount of ore mining units generate are completely meaningless. A single tile with a tiny amount of T3 can easily generate hundreds of thousands of L of ore per day so the player base can trivially collectively generate a lot more high ore than the game can use. I think we're headed for the same situation we had in beta where all the ore values drop too far for certain activities to be viable or appealing, people stop doing things like asteroids, flowers are not worth very much and everyone has to constantly run missions to make money or constantly calibrate to get ore. How many Aileron Parts do they really need at market 12?

I'm using alts. But I think you can get that many per day with talents on a single character too?

Upvote. I have some things I want to deploy which need this.

Are you scanning for ore on a planet or moon? All if the underground ore was removed some time ago. Now if you want to mine ore this way you have to go to an asteroid.

It depends on how you define 'profit' though. What you can do with the 'calibration only' method is: - pay no tile tax! You don't need an active tile for calibrations - manage a small number of tiles. One of each type of tile is all you need. It doesn't even have to be a good tile. - share with a group. You can all use each others' tiles essentially for free. - generate large amounts of ore on a rubbish tile. No need for a good one, adjacency bonuses, etc. - reduce upfront investment. If I want to do 20 calibrations per day on an advanced, I should, at minimum, need 20 mining units with an upfront cost (currently) of 40 million. Right now I can just use one. - reduce transport. I used this method (after it was confirmed not to be an exploit) to bootstrap industry by calibrating T1 on a single tile. I could just generate the ore right next to my factory and scoop it right into the input container. I could choose the ore type and spawn in/collect 50k of it in well under an hour. If I wanted to efficiently use 20 calibrations per day 'the right way' I would have to have about 80 units on 20 tiles? They would all have tile tax. I would be doing a *lot* of hauling and I might have problems when the bot orders run out. Sure, there are pros and cons here. But this just feels a bit game-breaking to me because it reduces the value of various other ways of playing. 'flowers' are worth less, for example, and the value of ore from PvP asteroids goes down if people can trivially spawn in large quantities of it on planets. Preventing the 'pick up/put down' method would certainly limit the worst effects of this on high tier ore. More ideally there would be a limit on the total amount of ore per tile per day which calibrations can generate and that would be linked to how good the tile is, adjacency bonuses, etc.

Thanks for letting us in on the thinking behind this. Are you sure that this is a good idea though? I could get a tile with 1L of gold on it. Then I could use a single mining unit and 20 calibrations per day to make a lot more than 1L of gold per hour. There isn't much of a tradeoff there. I could also charge friends, allies or whoever else I want to sell access to for the right to come and do calibrations on the tile because it costs me nothing and an unlimited number of calibrations can be run on my 1L gold tile. If I trust the person doing it then I can even share the mining unit with them. For them it is a way of using their calibration charges with no tile taxes and without the upfront cost of buying mining units. And people are doing this. I have actually stood in a queue on a tile waiting for my turn on the mining unit to do my calibrations.

I don't think we really want unlimited amounts of safezone ore flooding into the game from asteroids do we? At some point the ore has to 'run out' to give the economy value. Otherwise we're back to 'mining to bot orders' because so much ore is being generated that the price would drop to almost nothing if the bots didn't consume it. This is a game we're playing isn't it and games are supposed to have some sort of challenges to overcome. Unlimited safezone mining (or at least enough that everyone can find and mine stuff all the time) is not really a challenge at all. NPCs would provide a challenge, but the premise of this particular game has always been that other players will provide the challenge. If people don't want to fight other players in the PvP zone then how else is there going to be a challenge other than racing for limited resources against other players? And clearly some players are embracing this and doing it. There are some great comments in here giving advice on how to compete better. A question NQ needs to answer, though, is what are they replacing the casual planet mining loop with? Sometimes people just want to log in and play for an hour. Mining on asteroids isn't going to be available to them. Previously a lot of people would have done planet mining at that point. Perhaps cut a chunk out of the meganode they're working on or just go out into unclaimed territory somewhere and dig. There does seem to be a void here where certain types of player have nothing to do.

I have been wondering the same actually. There's no reason why haven couldn't have been renamed to sanctuary and the backers just given an extra STU or two. It's not like they weren't already deleting whole planets. I can't see any difference between the Haven tile I have now and the Sanctuary tile I had before. Since fewer people can have a Sanctuary tile it will be less populated, markets will be less used, etc. But does haven have the same guarantees of permanent asset safety when unsubscribed that sanctuary does? Or might it be that in a year they might start reclaiming inactive haven tiles?

If you think this will fix the economy in any meaningful way then, IMO, you are very naive. It's like filling a bucket with a firehose and complaining about the bucket overflowing then trying to fix that by making holes in the bottom if the bucket. It is doomed to fail until you make a hole so big that the bucket becomes useless. But it does seem to be working now, I crashed yesterday and some elements went to 1 life.

But your Haven tile is the same is it not? And Haven is much more populated so you can actually buy things on the markets, whereas the limited availability of the STU means Sanctuary has very little activity so after that break you're miles away from a market.

Agreed. It's an example of a problem which would have been best fixed at the time when it actually mattered. If NQ is actually reading this, I'd take a DAC instead of mine ...

I have an inactive HQ tile which I'm using for industry. Although autominers are disabled you can also still calibrate them collect the ore that spawns when the tile is inactive.

But the surface rocks don't respawn. You'll get like 2,000 units of it and then it will be gone. I agree with the rest, I didn't get an STU either. But if I get one now I don't know if I'll even drop it. Perhaps we should ask NQ for something else instead?

Would you even use it now? Surely almost everyone will have moved off there by now and the whole moon is a graveyard?

And this is a high effort comment?

No. My comment was not directed at everyone who disagrees with my opinion. Whilst I do understand some of the frustration, I would like to filter out single line, low effort, nonsense "game is gonna die' types of comments which add nothing and just make everyone feel worse.

See I knew there was a reason I was using Reddit more instead of this forum. This forum has no way to deal with obvious and useless troll comments like this one! Give us a downvote button please NQ!

Shameless cross-post from reddit because the post was cross-posted too and I wasn't sure of the best place to reply. I actually think NQ have some 'breathing space' at the moment -- everyone is busy building back up to where they were before, developing the market, developing space stations, building PvP ships, large haulers or whatever, setting up personal bases. That will keep everyone busy for a few months. What they should be doing now is coming up with a roadmap so in 2 months time when the game is starting to run out of road they can put the roadmap up to keep us all excited and release new things every 2 months or so after that. Some of your suggestions are saying 'remove existing gameplay and replace with XXX'. IMO that's the mistake NQ have been making so far -- they need the number and breadth of activities to increase over time and that won't happen if new gameplay replaces old gameplay. Asteroids are a great example of this -- they added some really good and badly needed stuff but ground mining was removed at the same time. What's needed is to add new gameplay loops which don't interfere with the old ones. IMO the thing which would add the most 'bang' would be to add whatever is needed to make the universe feel 'alive'. I watched my son playing minecraft recently -- he was out exploring caves, discovering abandoned outposts and all sorts of other interesting things that the game had randomly put there. DU should have that same feeling of discovery and exploration -- I should be able to go scan territories and have the report tell me that an underground base was detected (or perhaps I just find an abandoned surface one?). Space exploration should be similar -- if I just fly out into the black there should be things to find out there (more than just the odd wreck) and there should be ways to find these things beyond blundering about (like you suggest above). Also to make things come alive there needs to be a sense of danger and actual *life*. Not necessarily full-blown NPCs but animals and natural hazards. The player should have health and there should be things that can kill us. I love the idea of 'space whales' which can be hunted for resources and which will occasionally attack and damage your space stations, for example. Finally to really make the world come alive give cities a purpose to exist. Terraria does this (have never played it, just watched others do so) by allowing players to create places where NPCs (yes, I went there!) can live and provide useful services. Perhaps if you make a bar there might be NPCs who will sell you a location to go scan in order to find an abandoned ship/base/whale/whatever? Other services can then coalesce around these (casinos, ship shops, player markets or whatever) and cities with an actual purpose can be born.

Now that is interesting ....

That worked, thanks. The ship hung up on it.

I think you can walk and fly through these ones?