Kezzle

For those missing my point: see the emphasised portion of the quote from Deckard's announcement. They have announced that this decision has been undecided. What other decisions will they undecide? And how far will they go? Magnitude and competence of execution isn't relevant. My confidence that the game will be something I'll want to play in the future (low) hasn't been raised one iota by this announcement, but it's peripherally interesting to watch the twisting and turning of the stricken.

I think maybe they had the right idea in shutting down the "ideas" section. At least partly. Their priority "should" be: 1. Finish the announced feature set (y'know, little jobs like AvA, TW). 2. Iterate the existing feature set to make an interesting game. 3. Add new features. Ideas for how to do the first two are relevant. The third, less so. Then again, they've just announced PvE, which was also "never gonna happen"... So who knows?

The cynics would say, perhaps: "Becuse NQ don't have the tech or development talent-hours available to make something less simplistic work."

There's a possibility that pigs may sprout wings and fly... At least that genetic experiment has a concrete description of the end goal... Nobody even knows what "3D blog" is, so integrating DU into it would be... challenging, even if NQ have any care for the Helios setting.

That would've been a bit of a wierd sell with their original conception of schematics as being a one-off purchase for a given machine. And by the time they rowed back from that disaster (which drove off more players than any other single "feature", I get the impression), they were schematics but just had to be bought every time. And they'd still make zero sense. Possibly less than that, given the proposed lack of mats needed to create (and why aren't those mats just included in the cost-to-make...?). No, the industry model just doesn't support such in any coherent way. Partly because the industry model is largely incoherent anyway, so it's hard to develop anything "credible" as an extra layer on top of the hot mess of "nanotech and matter-condensation, but you have to mine ore" that forms the basis of the "model".

No one has yet demonstrated what a "3D Blog" even is, let alone why anyone would want one or what function it might serve. All that word-salad seemed to do was suggest that DU is an example of one (???), and that they think that the "incentives" in DU are enough to get people "3D Blogging". Pie in the sky.

I don't think Sanc can be used as any measure of how many "old guard" have stayed in the game. I don't believe any of my Org, who're all pretty much Alpha players, some with a couple or three "backer" accounts have placed STUs on Sanc Moon. The problems with issuing STUs mean that Sanctuary tiles have no distinct reason for grabbing and are only being claimed by a few old timers who like the place specifically, or are doing it "because they can", or any other personal reason. In similar vein, I don't think any of my org-mates are using actual money to play the game; that's all been paid up-front, years ago. Might be a couple of "discount annual sub" alts in there, but mostly running on DACs they bought with packages. I have never seen a player from another Org. I've seen their ships and statics, but never actually managed to bump into one in person. I don't go to the busy markets, but back in beta, there were always bods around-and-about on Madis. Either the necessity of leaving your hutch has reduced, or the numbers are well down on that period.

Aye. Spikes/canyons like this are pretty much unavoidable when the market is as small as the DU one is. Just the nature of the numbers. I'd contend that it's still not out of alpha.

Wait. What?

Realistically, what are the chances of either of those two things occurring? Especially the latter.

No, we have no TW because it's too hard to program in their unfortunate tech environment. Since when have they not done something because it would kill the game?

Are the TW rules going to be identical to the space station PvP rules? I'll answer that for you: you don't know.

Big assertion that. Got any actual facts to back it up? I can conceive of plenty of ways that TW could be set up so that it won't be worth (either 'ever' or 'if people set up right', depending how it's done) anyone's while to assault a territory that's just "nice buildings". You may well be right, given the facile approach NQ have historically taken towards game loops, but it's not a certainty by any means. The problem with such prognostications is that we don't have any good idea how TW is actually going to work: what the costs of initiating and defending will be. This appears to be because NQ have no clear vision of how the underlying "permission to raze" mechanics might work. Which is sad, but not going to change any time soon. Cos if they floated a detailed picture of how they think it might work, it'll be pulled apart by the community and they don't seem to be able to cope with that.

Effectively, yes. That's what Territorial Warfare is all about: taking land that other people don't want you to have. TW has been an "intended design element" since the very beginning. The fact that its chances of materialising given the current approach of NQ to development, and the underlying problems with architecture and technology choices, are vanishingly small doesn't mean that people aren't thinking about it and hoping it one day comes to be a pillar of the game. There's another bunch of people who are vehemently against TW ever being a thing in a game they're playing, who would rather walk away from the game than have their stuff taken in this manner, and their concerns are as valid as the concerns of those who see the "rough justice" of TW/FFA PvP as being the only way that exploiters and griefers will get their comeuppance. There will be safe zones, and TW will, if it ever happens, probably not really be concerned very much with the T1-5 ores, but rather with something else that can be set up outside the existing safe areas (including all planetary surfaces) as a new facet of the game. So, in the end, TW can't be relied on to be a fix for monopolies on T1-5 ores...

The sensible thing to do was to announce 1.3 after 1.1 came out. But this is NQ.