Zeddrick

Sounds great but I want this game to survive launch and that means all hands on deck fixing the game breaking bugs that are still in play.

I built a brand new ship this week.  It worked fine and then the next day I logged back in and got into the seat and it said 'elements have been disabled because they are overlapping'.  For a freshly built ship with no tricks used, just placing elements next to one another.  The element being complained about was an adjustor and there seems to be no way to know which adjustor it is.  Nothing is highlighted anywhere except on the element list.  So I had to spend a miserable 20 minutes just moving adjustors around randomly to try and make the error go away, which it eventually did (although not immediately so I still don't know what was wrong.  There was nothing obviously overlapping.
 
So today I'm trying to make one of my existing ships work.  It was purchased from a well known ship-builder who does not use any sort of Janko on their ships.  I have the 'overlapping' error on one or more of 36 wings, 6 vertical boosters and 35 atmos airbrakes.  And no obvious way to see how to fix it.  I don't even know where all the elements are because I didn't build the ship.  And isn't that the whole point of buying a ship, that you don't have to mess about with this stuff.
 
This sort of thing might fly in a beta but, franky, this is not good enough for a release.  My pre-existing ship will, admittedly, be wiped so that will be a solved problem but a lot will not be and the ship I built fresh was a post-wipe ship I intend to use.  Brand new players are going to come into the game and build ships and this is going to be their first experience (after the dodgy element placement which is a lot worse than it used to be and errors about clashes when the item is blue, forcing a miserable trial-and-error which sometimes ends with the element jumping a few voxels after you place it. 
 
I understand why this was added into the game, but after all these months it still can't tell the difference between 'our game is broken and put something an imperceptible distance inside another element' and 'Sneaky Snake put 57 engines on top of each other to make his Rifter go really fast'.  This is not rocket science and should be really easy to code, erring on the safe side rather than making some flaky thing which tries to be perfect.  Then just permaban people who deliberately stack elements.
 
Frankly, either get it right or get it out of the game before release because this is a terrible experience.  And right now it seems pretty far from being right even after all the time which has been spent on it.

I built a brand new ship this week.  It worked fine and then the next day I logged back in and got into the seat and it said 'elements have been disabled because they are overlapping'.  For a freshly built ship with no tricks used, just placing elements next to one another.  The element being complained about was an adjustor and there seems to be no way to know which adjustor it is.  Nothing is highlighted anywhere except on the element list.  So I had to spend a miserable 20 minutes just moving adjustors around randomly to try and make the error go away, which it eventually did (although not immediately so I still don't know what was wrong.  There was nothing obviously overlapping.
 
So today I'm trying to make one of my existing ships work.  It was purchased from a well known ship-builder who does not use any sort of Janko on their ships.  I have the 'overlapping' error on one or more of 36 wings, 6 vertical boosters and 35 atmos airbrakes.  And no obvious way to see how to fix it.  I don't even know where all the elements are because I didn't build the ship.  And isn't that the whole point of buying a ship, that you don't have to mess about with this stuff.
 
This sort of thing might fly in a beta but, franky, this is not good enough for a release.  My pre-existing ship will, admittedly, be wiped so that will be a solved problem but a lot will not be and the ship I built fresh was a post-wipe ship I intend to use.  Brand new players are going to come into the game and build ships and this is going to be their first experience (after the dodgy element placement which is a lot worse than it used to be and errors about clashes when the item is blue, forcing a miserable trial-and-error which sometimes ends with the element jumping a few voxels after you place it. 
 
I understand why this was added into the game, but after all these months it still can't tell the difference between 'our game is broken and put something an imperceptible distance inside another element' and 'Sneaky Snake put 57 engines on top of each other to make his Rifter go really fast'.  This is not rocket science and should be really easy to code, erring on the safe side rather than making some flaky thing which tries to be perfect.  Then just permaban people who deliberately stack elements.
 
Frankly, either get it right or get it out of the game before release because this is a terrible experience.  And right now it seems pretty far from being right even after all the time which has been spent on it.

Perhaps instead of buying 12 types of ore and manufacturing the 16 materials you can, instead, just buy the 16 materials from the market instead?  That seems like a much quicker way to go about things and it would be less talent-point-intensive too as someone could specialise in making each material and you can specialise in the talents which speed the actual warp cell production.
 
Alternatively if you're making everything yourself from scratch it seems to me that the effort of making the schematics will be much lower than the effort required to mine all the ore and collect it on one place.

I get it and I'm not trying to tell anyone that they shouldn't feel upset over how it played out.  The distrust and pain of the community is squarely on NQ's shoulders for how they've handled things.  I have also been vocal on these forums with my perspective trying to help some understand that everything I was seeing screamed "Beta is Beta,"  and a ratcheting probability of a wipe for Release.  NQ could have been more up-front to prevent some of the trouble.  We don't know if there were any background obligations (i.e. investor NDA, contracts, etc.) that prevented them from being fully transparent or if it was just poor choices.

Well, people said that.  Some of the parts of the event were visible in Alpha but the problem was not solvable and, I believe, more pieces were added after alpha.  As I understand it NQ expected the event to take years to solve while it actually took about 6 months and this caught them by surprise.
 
But it wasn't particularly well hidden.  I'm fairly certain that at least one of the objects was right next to one of the districts or a commonly used market on Alioth.  There were also public forum posts about it and it was discussed on the discord.  Accepted that some people don't engage with these things but this was meant to be a group puzzle solved by a group.  And if you aren't engaging with the wider DU community it's true that you would miss out on these things.
 
 
There really wasn't ever very much of it at all.  Just one node to mine.  I agree that making it have an actual, valuable use now would be bad because what there is of it is either in tiny quantities or held by people who didn't earn it.  But there's no real reason why it couldn't, for example, be a voxel with non-useful properties (make it very heavy with low HP, resists and CSS perhaps).  Then it can be used for decorative purposes only.  That doesn't really break anything and would, IMO, be a well-deserved finger-up to anyone who RMT'ed it (IDK whether or not anyone did).
 
As a game which is meant to be a persistent-world MMO where your actions are persistent and matter I think keeping things in the game to make trophies is actually a good thing.  A good use of a city, for example, would be a place where people could display the trophies they earned while playing the game.
 

Well, people said that.  Some of the parts of the event were visible in Alpha but the problem was not solvable and, I believe, more pieces were added after alpha.  As I understand it NQ expected the event to take years to solve while it actually took about 6 months and this caught them by surprise.
 
But it wasn't particularly well hidden.  I'm fairly certain that at least one of the objects was right next to one of the districts or a commonly used market on Alioth.  There were also public forum posts about it and it was discussed on the discord.  Accepted that some people don't engage with these things but this was meant to be a group puzzle solved by a group.  And if you aren't engaging with the wider DU community it's true that you would miss out on these things.
 
 
There really wasn't ever very much of it at all.  Just one node to mine.  I agree that making it have an actual, valuable use now would be bad because what there is of it is either in tiny quantities or held by people who didn't earn it.  But there's no real reason why it couldn't, for example, be a voxel with non-useful properties (make it very heavy with low HP, resists and CSS perhaps).  Then it can be used for decorative purposes only.  That doesn't really break anything and would, IMO, be a well-deserved finger-up to anyone who RMT'ed it (IDK whether or not anyone did).
 
As a game which is meant to be a persistent-world MMO where your actions are persistent and matter I think keeping things in the game to make trophies is actually a good thing.  A good use of a city, for example, would be a place where people could display the trophies they earned while playing the game.
 

Well, I have to disagree with the 'mis-guided' part.  The story of it is similar to the story of a few other things in DU -- a group of players got organised, put in a LOT of hours of grafting, wrote LUA scripts to help them, and thereby acquired clues quicker than everyone else.  Eventually they solved the puzzle while the rest of the clueless masses were blundering around and complaining in discord that it wasn't fair, they couldn't compete, we must be using hax, there was an NQ employee helping us, etc.  Which should sound familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to certain other discussions.  In fact they were just on the losing team.  Some people weren't aware of the puzzle at all, but that was one of the things that made it so much fun to solve.  The whole thing felt very 'ready player one' at a time when JC was using that reference a lot and it made the first few months of beta a lot more interesting.
 
Preserving the Thoramine wouldn't really hurt anyone because there's nothing that we can do with it anyway.  I'd really like to be able to make mine into voxel and create a statue with it.  I'd make one of JC and put it somewhere so the whiners could see it and tell me how mis-guided I am!  It would be hillarious.  And not much work for NQ.

Most of the players who had some have permanently left the game though and I think a lot of it was sold to someone who wasn't involved so it's not a great loss.

Serious question:  Will the rewards for subscription, etc be transferable in any way?  I have two main characters which I played with extensively over the time.  They're on a single contributor account so one will get a rare and one will get nothing.  I also have 3 alts which were on paid subs for over 12 months, so they would qualify for an exotic pack each.  But I don't want to play on my alts.  Can I swap these over somehow?

Serious question:  Will the rewards for subscription, etc be transferable in any way?  I have two main characters which I played with extensively over the time.  They're on a single contributor account so one will get a rare and one will get nothing.  I also have 3 alts which were on paid subs for over 12 months, so they would qualify for an exotic pack each.  But I don't want to play on my alts.  Can I swap these over somehow?

Imagine my surprise.

Imagine my surprise.

There's no way that schematic refund is going to survive a wipe!  Some people bought them at 1% and received huge payouts for the refund.  Even some of the ones who didn't buy them at 1% cost got game-breaking amounts back from the refund (they were able to earn the money through the old mission system).  Only reason they're doing it, IMO, is that they know they're going to delete all the money later so don't want to bother arguing about it now.  

Also talent points.  After all the times they objected to resetting them and all the good reasons given for not resetting they just reset them out of nowhere for a vague, waffly and obviously BS reason.  I mean, they didn't even bother to make up a proper excuse.  They just outright tested the post-wipe-talent-refund system.

IMO a wipe (of everything except talent points and core BPs) is pretty much a certainty.  It's hard to see how they could do anything else at this point and they have been acting like this is going to happen.  They aren't even bothering to hide it any more really.  For example they wiped everyone's talents without even taking the time to make up a plausible reason and in the last update they handed a bunch of players billions of quanta in schematic refunds despite some of those players having bought the schematics at 1% cost some time ago.

IMO a wipe (of everything except talent points and core BPs) is pretty much a certainty.  It's hard to see how they could do anything else at this point and they have been acting like this is going to happen.  They aren't even bothering to hide it any more really.  For example they wiped everyone's talents without even taking the time to make up a plausible reason and in the last update they handed a bunch of players billions of quanta in schematic refunds despite some of those players having bought the schematics at 1% cost some time ago.

Two reasons, people will quit the game and it will destroy the history which has built up over the last 2 years. 
 
I have a ship which once carried Thoramine, a ship which was first to find one of the event ships in the ship hunt, a ship I built in the first 2 weeks which I used to make by first billion quanta before 0.23 broke the market gameplay (and modded over time, learning to make it better as I did so), a massive ship with 60 EXL containers I stole during the first set of requisitons and various other things I'm attached to.  None of it is going to give me any particular level of advantage, but it's all history which I like.  I certainly won't be rebuilding any of it after a wipe - most of it doesn't even fly any more  because of the broken stacked element thing.
 
So for me a wipe is just getting rid of all the things which happened over the last 2 years of playing.  I'm not particularly interested in starting from scratch, particularly since the gameplay loops are less interesting now, the game lacks that feeling of discovery a second time around and the feeling of bootstrapping is, IMO, broken since planet mining was taken out.
 
 

Wow, I didn't know it was that small.  That's what, 10 people employed for 1 year with no equipment at best?  What did people expect to be able to get done with so little money?

Yes, but the kickstarter money is gone.  You didn't get what you were hoping for.  But kickstarters are all a bit of a punt anyway and at least you actually got something playable.
 
We need to move on to what works, what is achievable and what is fun.  Nobody cares what JC wanted to do 6 years ago even if we all wish that was the game that got made.  It isn't.  And you can't magic up the game you wanted because the money is spent now.
 

The problem I see here is that NQ seems to not want to let go of ideas and move on from them when they see the signs of the idea not working or going to take way too much time/resources/effort. The result is a half done idea, with a lot of fallout in the surrounding mechanics. And we see that happen in DU a lot.
 
NQ does not iterate fast enough and they never have..  "Fail often, fail fast" is a truth that you really can't do without..  
 
And this is why the game effectively is still really in early Alpha.
 
 
Is the potential enough for DU to become a good game? I do believe that is areal possibility, but I also think that NQ lacks the ability to make that happpen because they are to attached to their "ideas" and by now have wasted enourmous amounts of resources trying to make them work anyway. And I believe ther stil lis no central project manager, which is simply going to be a blocker for a comnplex project like DU to become a reality. 

It must be hard to be NQ though when it comes to feedback because there are so many different types of players with contradictory ideas.  This was a core part of the original  vision after all!
 
Look at the main forum page.  I can see a thread which says there should be no PvP and another suggesting taking away all the safe zones.
 
The fact that loads of different player types can play different games together is one of the things I love about the original vision.  It's one of the things that gave eve a very long life.
 
But the skill here is listening to all of the feedback, balancing all the different wants and needs and making something which appeals to everyone.  At the moment we get a mix of great things which do this (asteroids, missions for example) and things which everyone hates (schematics when announced, construct limits and territory taxes) combined with things which undermine past gains (mining units undoing the gains from asteroids, failure to iterate fast in missions breaking the economy, wipe talk drivignaway users, etc).

Right now asking for balanced feedback is a complete joke!  There might very well be some people with positive things to say, but I have none at all.
 
I stopped paying into the game months ago because NQ are clearly and obviously misleading us about the wipe and am angry about that.  I could still play but don't really want to because of that.
 
I am also really angry about the fact that most of my constructs are *still* broken by the thing that was meant to stop people cheating with overlapping elements.  None of them have overlapping elements (at least they were not built with the cheat and don't look like they do).  Nobody has fixed this after months of time.
 
So no, I don't have any positive feedback for you right now.  Best I can do is that I like that these podcasts come out regularly and communicate.  I just don't like how you ignore the one question everyone has despite having obviously decided already *and even tested the mechanism for preserving talent points post-wipe* like you think we're morons.

Really they have made a decision at this point whether they like it or not.  After all the discussion, all the aggravation, all the people who quit because of going so long without the answer, imagine if the answer which comes out is 'we decided not to wipe anything and we will just launch as-is and continue'.  Is that really even credible at this point.  Wouldn't it annoy even the non-wipe supporters because of the massive damage which has been done to the game over the time when no decision was announced?
 
I think at this point we all know more or less what will happen (wipe but keep talent points and BPs) so, in effect the decision is already made, and probably was some time ago.  People who are happy with that are still here, most of the rest are probably already gone and not coming back whatever (like with 0.23, it has been too long now).

Right now asking for balanced feedback is a complete joke!  There might very well be some people with positive things to say, but I have none at all.
 
I stopped paying into the game months ago because NQ are clearly and obviously misleading us about the wipe and am angry about that.  I could still play but don't really want to because of that.
 
I am also really angry about the fact that most of my constructs are *still* broken by the thing that was meant to stop people cheating with overlapping elements.  None of them have overlapping elements (at least they were not built with the cheat and don't look like they do).  Nobody has fixed this after months of time.
 
So no, I don't have any positive feedback for you right now.  Best I can do is that I like that these podcasts come out regularly and communicate.  I just don't like how you ignore the one question everyone has despite having obviously decided already *and even tested the mechanism for preserving talent points post-wipe* like you think we're morons.

I fixed that for you.

I fixed that for you.