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.

I think the concern about people not building things any more if the ore moves around is overstated. If ore pools move around, and it's too onerous to keep taking down and rebuilding factories, we'll just have to get used to shipping ore around, whether from our own dispersed extraction facilities, or from the cheapest market. It could even be argued that it would be a good stimulus in the direction of people finding niches to occupy. It's important, I think, for those staying with this game, to understand that it's still an alpha, however NQ want to spin it, and even if a given pillar (like "building") is complete, its place in the gameworld has yet to be set in stone, because the rest of the pillars aren't done yet. Still, there's always going to have to be something "static" that people need to have, in order to provide a focus for the mythical beast of TW. Until NQ officially give up on making Territorial Warfare, they'll build their game loops around static resources. If ore becomes a labile resource, they'll introduce something else that doesn't, and factories will cluster round that instead of ore flowers.

Word. It's not feature-complete and many of the features that are "done" aren't; they're tentative frameworks for placeholders.

It even happens while you're building a ship: sometimes you can nudge an Element into place, and it still looks legit and blue, but when you hit <Return> to drop it in place, you get an "Elements are colliding" message. So the visial guide is using different criteria to judge collision between elements to whatever goes on when you "drop" the item in.

Thanks for speaking up, @ZeroPainZeroGain. Eye-opening organisation, that. Disturbing in some ways that it's possible for such a small number of players to fully map a world in half a day, but then, if you look at DU's tech base from another angle, it's entirely appropriate for a survey to take so short a time... It's consequential, too.

It's lousy scifi. Largely because its acquaintance with science is no better than nodding, and its fiction is no more original or thought-provoking than Mills and Boon. It's not even, really "Space Opera", for me; that genre generally has some sweeping grandeur to it which DU doesn't even begin to approach.

Oh, I'm sure it is. They just removed the ore, they didn't stop us digging like moles, if we wanted to The underlying tech didn't get any better, or better optimised. Filed under "too hard".

I think the craziest symptom of this oversharing is the way you used to be able to see all the tunnels inside the planet you were digging in, if you managed to clip your head through a tunnel wall (which wasn't as rare an occurrence as you might hope...). What's the point of my machine even knowing about things that are entirely outside my ability to perceive or affect.

The lore that is presented as part of the game is a laughable "sophomoric" exercise in not-very-creative writing. It has little or nothing to do with how the game was always going to pan out. Using it as an argument for pretty much anything is a waste of effort. Likewise, trying to justify anything based on the tech available in the game. TW and Piracy are and pretty much always have been, key pillars of the game. Safe zones were "added", not inherent from the beginning.

It's not much of an addiction... I'm feeling zero pangs, or urges to log in... These forums tho'....

In summary "Game over, man. Game over." Not disagreeing: what's the point of microstransactions in a game with no players? No growth means no futire.