Kezzle

Sorry but discussing NQ motives and stuff is not usefull, they dont listen nor change. But doing this well after release after first telling it is a feature, thats just running a bad business

This game has been dying for a long time. Heck some of us started to see the patterns even before beta.
And the simple fact is that as long as NQ continues to behave like well.. NQ, then this game has no chance what so ever.
 
Or to quote Albert Einstein
Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results
 
And by now it should be clear that the lights have been turned off at NQ for a long time. And the few people still actually working on DU are just punching in hours to get the next pay check for as long as possible, and nothing more. Or to be more precise, when looking at how NQ operates is seems like they have been doing this for years and not just lately.

Yeah, you can. It depends on what you liked about the game way back then. If Diggy-diggy-hole was your bag, then the hurdles you have to jump to get that game "experience" nowadays are significantly higher than they were. If casual indy was what you liked to tinker with, Schematics have just shot your game experience in the face. I'm not sure how anyone could fund casual ship design either, these days, since you'd pretty much have to buy all your Elements and Honeycomb off the markets with your "daily stipend", due to the barriers to casual indy that make "diy" more challenging. Maybe you liked the lack of artificial constraints on what you could fit to a ship.
 
It doesn't crash and glitch as much, sure. And having asteroids you can mine is novel. I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff that's better, too, so it's honestly arguable and subjective whether it's better or worse.

Spamming something to several threads isn't really very good practice on Forums... Certainly doesn't make it any more true.

There is always Roid hunting... of course for anything useful, you risk being blown up.  Thought shields would fix that, but of course, they way they were implemented leaves you to receiving 75% of the damage unless your on your ship and manually tune.  That of course, only works for awhile, but that would be expected.  And, all it takes is 2 attackers using different weapons and your toast.
 
But All Hail the PVPers!  They are the engagement center of design for the game.  NQ has repeatedly bowed to these players and are now reaping that reward.  I actually supported the concept of a PVP zone, an arena where players could go to strut their stuff, but that wasn't enough for them.
 
Its all very depressing.  I'm 64 years old and have been actively engaged since early 2018.  I'm the "Pleione" that wrote the 30+ page FAQ I supported pre-0.23 that helped hundreds of people and ate countless hours of my time engaging on the Discord channel to learn what people were having problems with and writing up guidelines to help.  This was suppose to be the "Eve Online" experience that I could enjoy from the beginning and spent the next 20 years, if I'm so lucky, to play.  And today... I see it dying.
 
Recently spent 3+ hours of travel time scrolling around in F2 sorting my talent queue.  Even after deleting ~100 items I was still left with over 1300 days of training (almost exclusively in Industry and Crafting).  I found myself laughing at myself when I was down to pushing the 7 day skills ahead of the 19 day skills... thinking "I should be so lucky for the game to survive until I get to this point".  I find that sad.  (Let ignore that a single button called "Sort by time" could have saved me those 3 hours.)
 
What depresses me the most if the lost opportunity.  This should have been a great game.  Too old now for anything else to replace it (If tomorrow "Space the Game" was announced, I'd be pushing 70 before it hit the market...  I'm literally out of life time to see this happen).

Spamming something to several threads isn't really very good practice on Forums... Certainly doesn't make it any more true.

Make missions reward dynamic.
E.g. lower the reward for specific mission for everyone, when someone delivered it, and make the reward grow slowly by time when no one does them. Also with this you can remove the hard cap of 1 package per account to make big hauls accessible by everyone.
They will balance themselves out very quickly this way.

'Sokay,. Thanks for being gracious. Likewise, sorry for the counter-snark.

The company providing the servers is Amazon...I wouldn't be shocked if an increase is imminent with them doing layoffs and adjusting for inflation, but I'd expect it to be small. 
 
Keep in mind that auto-scaling servers are vastly more expensive than reserved instances...so the more that people actually engage in random events like battles or races that mandate auto-scaling, the more expensive it is...and this is rather unpredictable.
 
Regardless of the cost issues specific to DU, the only way any sub-based MMO can survive is through subscription scale.
 
Subs have crap revenue no matter how you slice the server costs unless you have a critical mass of players...which NQ doesn't yet have. Nor are they close. 
 
I am unsure how NQ intends to get this market share they hope for....they haven't bothered cultivating a social presence after this many years, nor do they care to do so today. No one on their team can be bothered to post to insta or Twitter -- they just don't seem to care. 
 
For how much they insist that they are "indie", they don't care to engage on any channel that indies typically utilize. There are countless small indie studios that spend hundreds of times more effort in promoting their game organically than NQ does. With far fewer resources and staff. 
 
They have little hope of a positive-ROI paid campaign with churn rates being high and having to compete with AAA games that have far more budget (and often have an initial purchase price, so they can afford an extra $10-20 per conversion hat NQ never can). 
 
It's like they expected Steam to do all the work and bring them scale in buckets, but that is obviously fantasy. 
 
All I can imagine is that NQ literally doesn't care how well DU does for some reason, because otherwise I don't understand the general lack of effort in trying to promote the product even in free channels like social media. 

Fetch also works when you've buried your wreck 100m deep in a Haven tile you don't, and will never, own...

I'm starting to think they horribly screwed the pooch on their server architecture. Given that Planetside had massive FPS combats the decade before last, it shouldn't be that hard to get AvA going with modern server tech. They must've made some choices early on that they now can't unpick and which are hard blocking any short distance action. All their precision selections seem 'off' to me, and they've made a rod for their own backs with things like Talents that shave fractions of seconds off the "tick time" of some things, so they are required to have very frequent checks in order to keep things lined up as they "ought" to be. The load on the server is thusly massively inflated over what a "good game" really needs.

One bit of inconsistency that catches me out every time is that the different categories of things you can build aren't ordered the same in every place they appear. Without logging on, I can't be certain, but I'm pretty certain that they're differently presented between schematics and machines/nanocrafter.
 

Having artificial money sinks is certainly a great way to take the air our of a player-to-player economy. At any point, there needs to be a balance between money in and money out of the system. And the money supply needs to grow along with the size of the economy, or deflationary difficulties will arise.
 
That's not the same as the "easy money" scenario with full-on Q-faucets and abyssal Q-sinks that we currently have.

Thx. yes. that's what happened to me. I got the "add time" error and went to activate a DAC and got the message.

Grid snapping, and Schematic Talents?
 

'Sokay,. Thanks for being gracious. Likewise, sorry for the counter-snark.

It'd be nice if it distinguished between pilot and placement bonuses, too, where they're both relevant.
 
 

DU's materials science is a 20 minute placeholder*. Same as so many other things.
 
* By which I mean they spent 20 minutes chucking something together as a placeholder in alpha and haven't done any proper thinking about how it should work to enhance gameplay and worldbuilding since.

It's a good thing NQ takes player feedback with a grain of salt and carefully considers what the best course might be. Because most of you guys have a shaky assessment of the meta.

S-core cannon boats are good, yes. But only when piloted well(which most players seem unable to do), and only in small scale fights. Believe it or not, they are not the ultimate meta ship. I'm not going to tell you what is though. I'll show you later.

Railguns are the best weapon in the game. Players just aren't using them right. Every rail pilot I've fought has done nothing to try to stay away from my cannons. They just blindly point at me and fire until I'm right in their face. Rails take twice as long to kill a target, yes. But they have the incredible advantage of range, which can't be overvalued - especially in high-speed S-core fights. You have to be patient and set up good situations to fire out of effective cannon range. Get more accel. Use it properly.

The range of rails also allows them to focus fire better. The more ships you have, the more potent rails become. Rails are and always will be the king of fleet fights.

I'm honestly against the distribution of free quanta.
This does not reflect the actual contribution of a particular character to the economy of the universe.
Especially since it's not my job to come up with game mechanics for free))). They still don't read us.
But. An economy with an NPC at least in the form of Aphelia looks much more viable. In addition to issuing quanta in proportion to the contribution to the economy, people could be occupied with useful things.
Don't just buy resources. And to buy resources for the construction of stations. For example. First there are markets on Haven. The rest is just platforms.
And the goals of the community are to collect resources for money.
We collected resources - another market appeared. Etc. This would give insight into the purchase of ores and materials. By the way, it would be possible to buy products in the same way. Not just like that, but for something.
There is a lot of room for creativity here. But these are only dreams and will not come true.
The same with the transportation of resources to the planets and into space.
Under this, it would be possible to organize the clearing of space from rabid xenos (and the guys on the initial ships would have someone to shoot at).
But who cares...

Vote No on schematic talents....vote no on schematics.  There are so many people like myself who love to play, build, and explore...Territory fees are way to high.  Mining is completely bonkers now...  Your completely throwing out a player base who only wants to play 5 to 10 hours a week.  They dont want a full time job trying to pay for territories and schematics.   Quite a few tiles are going inactive already in just a few weeks ...real money is gonna dwindle for DU.   Not trying to be a jerk but if you wanted it to be a co-op game with large groups...should of been advertised that way. 

All you need to do is keep coming back to calibrate the MUs that feed the factory...
 
Edit: Oh, and an infinite supply of schematics, and some money to pay the rent on the territory... So probably not going to happen as "abandonware", unless someone wanted to do it for the the shiznitz.   Which is a shame. The idea of a planet that's been cored out by one factory to create a similar volume of "spaceships" up on the surface, just clanking away, aeon after epoch, popping out a craft every time there's enough minerals been scraped out of the hollow world...
 
 

The size (as in "area presented to the shooter" of the target "ought" to have something to do with how hard it is to hit (along with its maneuverability, and loads of other factors).
 
I have a suggestion, several, but let's start with one. I didn't originate it, but it seems reasonable: shield leakage. As it stands, ships don't need voxels, because they have shields. If shields didn't stop all the damage, you'd have to put some voxels in your design to give yourself at least some core combat strength, otherwise the first point of damage leaking past the shields would pop your core, leaving an eminently salvageable, hardly damaged wreck. It doesn't have to be much. One percent leakage would do. You could have larger shields have a "threshold" so that some (smaller) ammo doesn't cause leakage. Forcing combat design to have some voxel to have any durability in combat opens the door for design decisions: more voxel slows you down, but lets you stay under the guns for longer. So you can choose where on the spectrum you want your design to sit. You'd probably want to limit Shield size to core size in the same way as weapons are, too.

The size (as in "area presented to the shooter" of the target "ought" to have something to do with how hard it is to hit (along with its maneuverability, and loads of other factors).
 
I have a suggestion, several, but let's start with one. I didn't originate it, but it seems reasonable: shield leakage. As it stands, ships don't need voxels, because they have shields. If shields didn't stop all the damage, you'd have to put some voxels in your design to give yourself at least some core combat strength, otherwise the first point of damage leaking past the shields would pop your core, leaving an eminently salvageable, hardly damaged wreck. It doesn't have to be much. One percent leakage would do. You could have larger shields have a "threshold" so that some (smaller) ammo doesn't cause leakage. Forcing combat design to have some voxel to have any durability in combat opens the door for design decisions: more voxel slows you down, but lets you stay under the guns for longer. So you can choose where on the spectrum you want your design to sit. You'd probably want to limit Shield size to core size in the same way as weapons are, too.

I knew my cynic detector was going crazy for a reason!