Kezzle

Interesting consequence: the cost of Schematics inflates prices on the Markets because the producers have to recoup the cost of their Schems as well as that of their mats (and their profit), while notionally reducing the money supply. Which just makes things more expensive for the poor schmos (Guilty, y'r'onner) who are bumbling about, finding things out, working ad hoc and scraping by with rent and a few schematics, without materially affecting the ultra-industrialists who have Plans For Everything and Spreadsheets Up the Wazoo (and all kudos to them for that; those mega-factories are impressive pieces of work, and keeping them Schematiced must take scrupulous record keeping and attention to detail), since they have worked their way to the point of having enough cashflow to continuously stack 5 slots of scores of batches of the Schematics they need, so they don't even need to pay us poor Schmos for our precious, limited schematic slots. Now, this may sound like the tiniest violin: "Oh, won't somebody think of the little people!? Life is so hard for them!" but that's not the point I'm making. The point is: if schematics are meant to inhibit the growth of industry, their efficacy is going to depend on the proportion of industry that's run by "mooks like me", against that run by "scarily efficient magnates". Having seen the size and complexity of some of the industrial complexes, I think the super-efficient folk run orders of magnitude more machine-hours per player-week than doofuses like me. And that makes me think that schematics are going to be no use at all in throttling industry's server load.

I like this idea. It might even be worth requiring the maintenance to be in the form of Parts (the ones that would go to make up the Element in question) rather than a built Element...

Trouble is, schematics are the cause of the need for the quanta faucet to be quite so wide-bore. Their initial design purpose was to impose a throttle on the amount of active Industry by gating it behind paywalls that were unbreachable by any but the largest of orgs (who could do it fairly trivially, thus cementing their position as the Kings of Commerce, and being the only game in player-town that counted for anything; everyone else just quit). So they rowed it back to being "cheaper to get into, but an ongoing expense", which meant that everyone and their dog just sells their spare T1 dross to the game to be able to afford to run their industry. We've yet, I think, to see whether the industry that is forced to lie idle by the combination of quantum choke and players' inability and unwillingness to wrestle with handling Schematics for large Industry setups will save the servers from a premature stroke. If it doesn't (and I fear it won't) then the chicken/egg dichotomy doesn't really matter, either.

This. Any new world should start out with exactly zero markets. Aphelia's resources should be tracked as if she's a player, and UEF shop ships should use up the resources. She should offer bounty missions to supply her with elements and honeycomb as well as all Tiers of ore, Pure and Product. And she should use those to send players with Magic Blueprints (which will only activate at the designated waypoint) to build new markets on the new worlds. All the elements and cores Aphelia uses should be available for players to build, too. Player-built Markets were one of the pillars, way back, weren't they? I'd rather see Aphelia guiding the building like this, since "building a civilisation" seems more key to the game's initial conceit than "exploring the unknown". But some 'splorination options would be good too. And possibly lower-hanging fruit.

And having to familiarise yourself with what machines and parts need which Schematics... And find the spare ones that are in a different machine (of potentially a different size) to complete the run in the machine you've got set up. Are there LUA hooks into every machine's Schematic Bank so someone can at least create a visual aid for knowing what you've got in a given Construct, at least? It'd be great if such a utility already existed, but I have a horrid feeling the information isn't accesible to script.

Unfortunately, that tedium is about half the design intent and 3/4 the actual game effect of the mechanic. Take that away, and all they are is a quanta sink, but since the quanta faucets are practically limitless, they merely reduce the rate of inflation.

Trouble is, they're a symptom of NQ's approach to "developing" the game. And they're inexcusably poor. They're just busywork.

Not gonna disagree, there. And that's probably the biggest worry (if it really can be counted as a "worry") for the future of the game. NQ just don't seem to have the ideas, or the wherewithal to implement them. It's not giving me optimism that the game's potential will be fulfilled.

Surely, building a deliberately difficult-to-see, shipbreaking obstruction in a high traffic area in the safe zone counts as exploiting a mechanic to grief players outside the PvP zones? In the same way as you'd get censured for building an insta-stop ship and being a mobile roadblock, forcing people who can't stop as fast to crash into you. Apparently not. Which sucks.

Yup. 'Tis a pitiful and inelegant mechanic. Better than "You have to pay upmty million Quanta to start your machine" that was the first iteration of schematics that drove me instantly out of Beta. But "making players do busywork" isn't adding to the USPs of the game that might raise it above the competition. Yeah. Scaling doesn't seem to have been a consideration in the implementation of the "stop the servers dying from overwork" mechanic. I guess a thousand facs of 100 elements each is just as server-killing as 10 facs of 10000 elements.

I don't think you can "just get rid"... I believe the servers were creaking under the load of all that mega-industrial development back in beta, because of the aforementioned flaw in the way they deal with industry, and that's not going to go away now we're in the era of "proper paying customers", since server capacity and degree of hyper-industrialisation are both proportional to the player count. No, some other mechanic, beyond the frankly laughable "make players do busywork" approach of schematics needs to be in place before schematics can be retired with a bullet behind the ear. Something like an energy use/cost per machine running (dependent on type, obvs), and a limit on energy use per Construct, even if it's as simple as tying it to core size, without any (initial) complications like "extra reactors". Tie the maximums of all the core control and machnines-per-construct to what you expect the servers to be able to handle per subscription. Make sure you don't have any exponential growth scenarios where having twice the people means 4 times the server load or somesuch other avoidable catastrophe.

Schematics just need to vanish. They have two purposes: they are a money sink; they put a restriction on the quantity of running industry in the 'verse. They function poorly as a money sink, since people in need just pump harder at Aphelia's "Quanta Aquifer", and the money flows faster. And why do we need all these Quanta anyway? If the game's servers live or die on the industry that's idled by lack of schematics, there's something wrong with the underlying architecture.

Wuh? Discord, I could understand. And/or a post on the forum (preferably linked to from this thread). Because those are the things you get to from their own webpage under "community") And something on their own website front page, or at least under "news". But Twitch? As the only medium? I guess I shouldn't really be surprised at NQ's flaky comms strategy.

I forget: how much notice did we have of the "head start" when it went full-time Beta? Was it more than 12 hours? Markeedragon have presented the 13:00UTC time for tomorrow; even if that was "from the horse's mouth" as it were, how much notice would/will we get from NQ that it's not going to happen? I'll see when I get home from work, whether it's live yet...

I agree that's a concern. There had better be some pretty big "This is a taster, representative to a degree, but not completely the same as the persistent server." warnings (popups when you do things* the "easy way" on the demo server, for example, which tell you what the point of difference is) or the tears will be torrential and, on this occasion unlike so many others, justified. * Which of course is not going to happen. Those who essay the demo experience will be lucky to see any disclaimers from NQ at all.

Thanks. I get your meaning now. I believe we get a Small Static Core as part of our starter construct. How do you feel about cannibalising (or just adding on to) that, for your beginning production line(s)?

The trial server has to be different, really, because your experience there is time-limited, and you won't have much, if any, community support. So, I'd expect there to be a lot of time-savings either by flat reductions in time taken for things, or via simplifications.

Starter industries? Do we get industries handed to us at start? Or are you meaning the industries you'll be making within "minutes" of hitting the harvest button first? You're not going to rush through the tutorials for the free Talent Points and Quanta?

ROFL. Should have saved this excellent joke for April 1!

Novean tech has reached the level of matter-energy conversion. Stuff gets teleported, compacted; energy comes out of pretty much nowhere. It's harder to imagine why we'd need to be digging resources out of the ground than it is to justify creating elements out of nothing.

For me, the issue isn't the grinding, it's the missing "pillars" of territory warfare and AvA combat. And a bunch of other stuff I can't be bothered honing into a scathing indictment of game development a la NQ, so I've deleted it. I've three DACs and if it's not worth the money (howevermuch that is) by the time those run out, I'll not be paying the dues. There's enough interesting stuff for a while, but their pace of development doesn't make me optimistic that they'll get any more of my money.

D'oh. Of course. Still. Teeth were definitely gnashed, and wails heard, due to unexpected scheduling,even if I forgot the precise reason why

When you're using shift-drag to split a stack, have <CR> (aka <RETURN> aka <ENTER>) apply the number that's entered into the quantity field of the dialog (if it's a valid value) rather than requiring a mouse-click on the "OK" button. Similarly with Rename Element dialogs. It's pretty much default Windows behaviour, why step away from it to make life harder? There are probably other dialogs where it'd be appropriate, too.

I recall the beta launch (I think it was the beta launch - not long after the free-play weekend that convinced me to contribute...) which got postponed by something like 5 days, enraging some of those who'd booked time off work to spam the servers to death on Day One... There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I'm glad one of my org-comrades reminded me of that when I mentioned I was thinking of taking time off for launch... NQ has "previous" on this.

Anyone know why the location of a construct has to be known to the nearest 1/10th of a femtometer*? I can't think of a situation where that order of precision would have any effect whatsoever on the game. Even at 120FPS, zoomed in as far as you can on an 8k monitor, you wouldn't be able to detect the difference. Visual resolution comes out to what? 0.25m (a voxblock filling the screen, say) divided by 8k (pixels), so 10^-6m? So the game could drop the last 6 orders of magnitude and still have 4 leftover for catching pesky rounding errors. Maybe I'm mistaken, but doesn't excess precision in calculation cause unnecessary overhead? Perhaps it's part of the "optimisation" process that such operations will get reduced in their precision once the game's general flow of operation is better understood (as it now may be). Surely handling such unnecessarily unwieldy numbers adds size to comms packets and storage requirements, even if it makes no difference (or rounding adds more overhead because of the native methods by which the calculations are performed) to the platforms doing the sums (all the client PCs, AIUI). Insights, anyone? * I'm taking this from the Infinity Corp LUA tutorial vid where you can see the Altitude displayed to 16 d.p. (at the 10:10 mark) The vid is a couple of years out of date, so maybe this has changed**, but it still seems a strange choice to this layman. ** Yes, I can pop the LUA into a control chair and find out; I just haven't yet... Might update if the subject isn't done to death by the time I get around to it