Kezzle

Which is particularly ironic when the in-game tech base is entirely capable of completely eliminating scarcity of material resources...

I would think they already largely were. Ore, you can get by dint of effort. Schematics, you have to make effort to get Quanta or you're limited to your daily dole.

I'm given to understand that last time they introduced Talents, they made it so that the "pre-Talent" level was what you got with maxed out Talents. Best to wait and see what 1.1 (tomorrow?) brings... It's for sure that they are already committed to whatever changes they're going to fob us off with this time. Maybe they'll be "sane", but I'm not optimistic, personally.

And then we won't have any Quanta, won't be able to make any Elements and will have nothing to do. May as well stop playing the game entirely... I'm sure that's what NQ want. Yeah. Definitely.

Paraphrasing: "We spend our lives doing Missions we detest to make Quanta we don't want so we can make Elements we don't need..."

It was, but then someone brought up the other factors that need considering. Who was it now? Oh, there we are: Which is simply untrue. Element prices have to include the schematic cost which certainly does not decrease as the income a beginner gets from their ore production plummets through the floor.

Just having <Enter> do something in the schematics bank transfer dialog would be a start. But half the design intent of schematics is to discourage industry, so making them easier to use isn't top of their development list. We "eagerly" await the Talents for schematics, to find out whether they will improve the situation from current, or, alternatively, make the current setup achieveable only with Lv5 skills in all those Schem Talents. I gather there's historical precedent for the latter option being NQ's preferred approach.

Just means the machine is on and logged in from getting up to going to bed... doesn't mean eyes have been on the screen (or even the window was at the front) for all that time...

Power systems done right would be an interesting new problem for builders to work with. Contstraints like that breed ingenuity... Unfortunately, I think the prospects of it being done "right" are very slender under NQ's current development paradigm. Slightly less chance than it being brought in at all. TW is, as of the end of Beta, a very difficult problem. You can't introduce it on existing terrain that's already occupied, without shafting a high percentage of current players. You can't introduce it in some places not others, since there would be no point wasting resources on fighting for things you can get elsewhere. If you bring in something new to fight over, you risk further fragmentation into the "haves" and "have nots" as early adopters monopolise whatever new resource you introduce. If you geographically separate the TW and non-TW areas, you risk splitting the "community" into two, effectively separate games, each of which gets that bit closer to non-self-sustaining.

Oh, and to return to the OP's point: There's nothing inherently good about change. Change can be either good or bad. Change for the sake of change* is almost always neutral or worse. A more generically true statement is "Change is hard". And NQ aren't great at managing change so it's "least hard", as has been proven over and over again. Change management requires, at minimum, basic communication, but ideally requires persuasion and buy-in from stakeholders. Not something NQ has a great track record of securing. * Not that NQ are doing that, in the case of the MU and market bot changes, but it remains to be seen whether they are suffering from the delusion that any change that shakes things up is necessarily good; I'm looking, with trepidation, at the Schematic Talent introduction with 1.1.

Sell prices are always higher than buy prices. It's the price of hope. Sell prices can be thoroughly notional, as well, since those are the prices that haven't been successfully sold. They could be very far divorced from the prices people are actually paying.

Hey, mission running isn't the only remaining faucet! We gets our daily handout, too! I'll get my coat.

Not just the devs. The entire staff should be playing. That way, the people writing the public patch notes can, from personal experience, highlight things that are important to the player about how new developments impact play, just for starters.

Sounds good to me (if I'm understanding correctly how the "whales" are gaming the system, i.e they're sending umpteen packages belonging to multiple logged-off-on-the-freighter Alt accounts, so that they can collect the fee for completing umpteen hauling missions in the time it takes to fly one mission).

Exactly. It's more a sign of lurching from band-aid to tourniquet (Not round the neck, NQ!!! Not the neck! The arm! It's the arm that's bleeding!)

Deckard: Really? We're meant to be impressed by the "feature list" in 1.1? This is a fairly stark demonstration of the disconnect between DU's aspirations and those of the player base. As our pixellated colleague says: the headlined changes are peripheral at best to people's game experience, and amount to no new gameplay worth mentioning.

It's probably worth bearing in mind that the "original balance" was "tuned" (read "guesstimated") to be generous to allow alpha and then beta folk to test the mechanics and possibilities of building and flying. There's space to allow that reducing the input of raw materials makes a bit of sense if you think the game was meant to be more of a "struggle". Of course, this is an issue that should have been developed out of before release, not 6 weeks in to people who thought they were paying customers having made fairly pivotal decisions about what they want to do in game. And it certainly should have been altered alongside the development of other things to do in the game to replace the active diggy-diggy hole gameplay that was so popular.

And the biggest choice that's made it socially hard (as in "people will ragequit in their droves") is that they started without it.

Oh God. So if we mine too much stuff, they'll increase the amount of stuff needed to make ting. It's all our fault for being too efficient and focused on resource extraction.

Pretty much 100% a hard "no", there, I'm afraid.

The universe has hardly expanded at all over the years to date. Currently, it's contracted. And NQ have said words zero about why the deleted planets have not reappeared as scheduled. Perhaps it's because they don't think there's enough of us to make new planets busy enough. Perhaps they don't have the money to spin up the extra server resources needed. Perhaps something about those surfaces has stuck in the craw of whatever process they've used to "redo" the terrain. We just don't know, and since every announcement just seems to get backtracked on, we're starting to think they don't either.

Oh, be fair: they haven't had asteroid mining online for six years yet. What they need is more rosemary, and garlic, to go with the roast lamb... A lot of the "lamb to the slaughter" status of miners in PvP-space is down to the simplistic scanning model. Lurking on the surface of an asteroid orter make your ship largely impossible to detect, from very far away at all, and completely impossible to detect from "some" directions. Sure, we can posit a sensor model where physical obstructions make no difference to detection chances, but where's the fun in that? Seems like NQ didn't really think about "fun".

Oo. That would be rubbish if you're seeing what you think you are (not denying, merely agreeing it needs further testing). Might give this an 'experiment' tonight. Ought to mean that a VR presence should always make a machine run like it's not been placed with any skills at all, if it's as screwed as you're thinking it looks.

The facile approach to economics evidenced in their statement seems to forget entirely about schematics and inactive accounts or anything other than territory rent as quanta sinks, Makes it sound like everyone should be running NPC missions to pay for their schematics, because ore bots were only ever meant to cover rent. Which is arrant nonsense. Having NPC missions be essential to the economy of a game with no NPCs.... no disconnect there, nosiree!

And if you have to spend your daily stipend on materials, what are you going to buy your schematics with? Since T1 ain't so hard-to-get, whatever higher-Tier you're shelling out for will need schematics just to turn into Pures, then again into Product, and further into Elements. Profit margins are not large.