Kezzle

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

Letter to the Creative Director
 
 
Firstly , recycling is a good addition but please don't make us require schematics to do it given we already had them to create it .
 
But I think perhaps you should think about changing the games name from Dual Universe to Do Admin.
 
 
WHERE IS THE FUN IN ADMIN!!!!
 
 
Some others posted that taunts/pets are not a priority. I agree but if the pets add bonus skills then that will be acceptable.
 
Someone in DU seems to think that time gating and maintenance gets subscription duration. I just think it loses players and eventually you will close.
 
WE WANT THE GAME BACK!!
Focus on things that are more game play than admin/maintenance and the obvious time gating to get subscriptions.
You need to make some changes that address how much time is required to admin territories and schematics as this is not fun.
a) if we have to have schematics why can't schematics all come from one schematic bank. Remove the need to go to each machine.
b) why can't territory payments just come from a person or orgs wallet.
 
Some other things you could have done instead of pets and taunts.
rotating engines?
balance products cost they are the main issue, t1 product should be free like all basics
Scanning %harvest ore left on territory by type. 
Territory Scanner time reduction skill please
T2/T3 availability on alioth is to low
Player avatars , can we have one where the player does not show the arm raised or an option to turn it off.
the UI could really do with some work. it really doesn't flow well. EG: escape should close a window when its open for everything.
 
 
The community was quite capable of creating the content/gameplay , what you did is reduce the capability of this unique gameplay to everyone  by introducing some game mechanics that require to much admin time and not focusing on playtime mechanics PVE/PVP.
 
 
Mucus

It's particularly puzzling when one of the "USP"s of the game is its sophisticated voxel handling (compared to other MMO space 4X games). You have all these tools to make stunning looking ships, but making them look good gimps them...

Yes, but when NQ provides a platform for communication,  and seemingly don't use it, I fail to see the logic in asking for another platform for communication.
Seems that starting of by using what's already there would be the best option.

And is all (of the things you've listed) coming not in the "next" update (1.1, a couple of months away) but in the one after that (1.2 - who knows how long that'll be delayed from it's currently-notional March next year, and how many of the "promised" features will actually make it in).
 
1.1 is only planned to include (and will inevitably miss some of):
Kickstarter backer rewards Grid snapping for bloops Steam Achievements Element recycling Schematic Talents And that's it. Zero alterations to any game loops or additions to them. Largely lipstick on pigs.
 
Looks like I'm three DACs and out until they make an actual game to play. At least now I have enough info to save the ones I have left til actual features are released so I can check them out in the real 'Verse without further outlay. I'm okay with that never happening; beta was fun until they shot it in the face and I've had my money's worth.

Oh god!  Becareful what you ask for here.  It's bad enough that the highly important dev time during early months of the game is wasted on the sort of innane useless trash it has been.  We don't want to get another 'roadmap' in march where 'third person view' is the new titanic-deckchair-rearrangement feature and the important things are yet again untouched.

And is all (of the things you've listed) coming not in the "next" update (1.1, a couple of months away) but in the one after that (1.2 - who knows how long that'll be delayed from it's currently-notional March next year, and how many of the "promised" features will actually make it in).
 
1.1 is only planned to include (and will inevitably miss some of):
Kickstarter backer rewards Grid snapping for bloops Steam Achievements Element recycling Schematic Talents And that's it. Zero alterations to any game loops or additions to them. Largely lipstick on pigs.
 
Looks like I'm three DACs and out until they make an actual game to play. At least now I have enough info to save the ones I have left til actual features are released so I can check them out in the real 'Verse without further outlay. I'm okay with that never happening; beta was fun until they shot it in the face and I've had my money's worth.

I expect it to be as late as possible and still conceivably be at the "end of the first month". So maybe 31 days after they started taking game time off our credit. Plus a couple of weeks for "apologies for the delay".

This is true, too. But then the megafactories would kill the servers. If they aren't already.

Well, the concept of an "energy system" for constructs has been floating around for a long time. Generally such an approach could arguably add interesting design constraints, and be managed by the game designers to produce results that improve the game generally (like making megafactories more challenging to create and therefore rarer, thus reducing server loads).
 
I vehemently disagree with some of the proposals:
things that currently consume, erm, consumables (fuel, cells, ammo, to an extent) should still do so, and such systems should not use (much, if any) of the energy budget of a Construct. There is economy game to be had in the production of those commodities, and that shouldn't be struck down. schematics should be obsoleted and removed as a game system entirely by the implementation of Energy budgets for constructs individual Elements should never use "energy currency" directly, they should use the energy budget of the Core of the Construct they're in, once that Core has been energised by delivery of the "energy currency". High energy components like Shields that don't have existing consumables mechanics should use lots of Core Energy, rather than being powered directly by Quanta.  
For me, the very name of our existing currency implies some connection to energy. How about if Quanta actually are energy, or at least the gateway to it? As a bit of "pseudo-lore" to give a conceptual framework for how the mechanic might work, how about the following?
 
Every Construct has an energy budget provided by its Core. That Core requires the input of Quanta in order to start generating the energy that constitutes its energy budget. Quanta as we currently see them are the "electronic currency" representing the value of the "real, physical Quanta", which are actually some [space magic] special component that allows things less than a metre across to generate enough energy to power high energy weapons, shields and serious Industry. Maybe they're flecks of Antimatter in tiny magnetic bottles. Maybe they're some esoteric trans-dimensional micro-wormhole that allows tapping into the Cosmic Energy Field. Maybe they're flasks of Zero Point Energy Catalyst.
 
These realQuanta (rQ) would need to be fed to every core you want to be active in order for it to run. They'd be physical things that would need moving around. TUs would need feeding with rQ in order to continue to keep your claim. Any construct not being used would, by default, power itself down so as not to consume the rQ that had been fed into it (and once the rQ are in a Core, they can't be gotten back out), but could be set to keep awake and burning rQ to "keep the lights on".
 
Aphelia would (at least to start with, and possibly indefinitely) be the only source of rQ. Maybe the technology to make them exists only in the Arkship. It'd take some serious development by a player Org to get to the point where it might be considered a candidate to begin construction/research into being able to create rQ. I would think it's the kind of thing that should be explicitly beyond the capabilities of solo or even small corp players.
 
Whatever they are, Aphelia will "produce on demand" one physical quanta for every quanta you have in your wallet, and will take any physical quanta you have and keep it safe, while crediting you with one eQuanta in your wallet per rQ you deposit.
 
 

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.

A lot of people go out into the PvP zone and provide pirates with an easy kill.  Then they assume that PvP must be easy because it was easy for someone to kill *them*.
 
But just because you are bad at PvP doesn't mean that everyone else is too.  Not all pirates are friends, a lot of the time when you go out looking for a fight you find other PvP groups who will try to kill you. 
 
Often that's what people are hoping for.  Nobody will turn down an easy kill if you provide it but it doesn't mean all PvPers are gankers or doing something easy just because you did it badly.
 

Reading the posts here, it's clear that calibrations shouldn't give any ore bonus. Just keep the unit at 100% and passive hourly income only.
 
Yet again, NQ creates a game mechanic rife for abuse and economy breaking exploits.
 
Have they ever consulted an economist?

I see NQ have updated the client so it doesn't allow calibrations on inactive tiles any more.  So they must at least be actually reading this stuff.

But that just makes it worse.  Instead of having one tile each it's actually more optimal to share with friends and have fewer tiles than it was before.  If I have a 1L gold tile and so does my friend we should leave 1 inactive and both use the other.  It will cost 1/2 as much tax and we can get exactly the same amount of gold from one through calibrations as we can from 2 because there is no limit to the number of calibrations which can be run per tile and the tile's quality has no influence at all on how much ore a calibration yields.
 
Does anyone else think this is just encouraging people to do calibration-only mining?

They killed planetary mining to save their servers. Asteroid mining is just the dregs of that system tossed back in with some additional "Good for PvP" sauce and reheated.
 
And planetary mining killed their servers because of deep flaws in the game/server mesh architecture that will continue to hinder the development of the game.

I really don't get  why the delay.
They know who is who regarding pledges, backers, etc... since the rewards were delivered at launch.
They have the log of all inventory transactions from all players, hence how to know who got the STU or not.
It doesn't take that long to cross both.
 

It's absolutely not an exploit, because NQ have repeatedly said it isn't. They've known that this is how it works since Beta, and they're "happy" to leave it as it is. I mean, it's had to make an Element retain "memory" of when it was used when you pick it back up into Inventory, innit?
 
Cruddy design? Sure, arguably. But hey, it's NQ. Expecting them to appreciate the consequences of their game systems is starting to become a naive standpoint. The "eruption" of ore ought to be proportional to the abundance of that ore in the tile, so recalibrating on a 1L/hour tile gets you 1% of recalibrating on a 100L/hour tile. That would make intuitive sense. You could make Haven an exception so newbies aren't shafted by such a change.
 
"Duping" constructs or Quanta is a whole different realm of exploit, and while you could argue that it's just as bad for the economy, replace-recalibrate has been drawn to NQ's attention enough by now that we can be confident it's just their usual nonsense.

They killed planetary mining to save their servers. Asteroid mining is just the dregs of that system tossed back in with some additional "Good for PvP" sauce and reheated.
 
And planetary mining killed their servers because of deep flaws in the game/server mesh architecture that will continue to hinder the development of the game.

Me too!
 
If I should even have one. I just assumed I wasn't due one, though I got one at Beta-start due to having rushed to sub before the end of Alpha. Should I have been feeling hard-done-by this last couple of weeks?
 

It's absolutely not an exploit, because NQ have repeatedly said it isn't. They've known that this is how it works since Beta, and they're "happy" to leave it as it is. I mean, it's had to make an Element retain "memory" of when it was used when you pick it back up into Inventory, innit?
 
Cruddy design? Sure, arguably. But hey, it's NQ. Expecting them to appreciate the consequences of their game systems is starting to become a naive standpoint. The "eruption" of ore ought to be proportional to the abundance of that ore in the tile, so recalibrating on a 1L/hour tile gets you 1% of recalibrating on a 100L/hour tile. That would make intuitive sense. You could make Haven an exception so newbies aren't shafted by such a change.
 
"Duping" constructs or Quanta is a whole different realm of exploit, and while you could argue that it's just as bad for the economy, replace-recalibrate has been drawn to NQ's attention enough by now that we can be confident it's just their usual nonsense.

Oh, absolutely. The quanta faucet needs to get turned right down. But that's fine, too, since one of the purposes of schematics is as a "Quanta sink".
 
Again, couldn't agree more. NQ really need (they should have done this ab initio, but it looks more like a string of kneejerk reactions and poorly-considered transitions between game test modes have led us to the current pass) to put some thought and work into how the economics system is going to run. In the end, Quanta exist solely as a means of allowing us players to exchange goods without having to figure out whether a T3 Space Engine L is worth 0.3, 0.4, 3, or 4 or 4.5 or 50 T4 Shield S Elements. The fact of NPC interactions involving Quanta is purely there as a pump-primer, but some of those aspects have gotten out-of-hand, so a sink is necessary.
 
But that's not going to happen, or if it does, I have little confidence NQ will produce anything more than a half-assed, fouled-up mess any more. And, to be honest, I'd rather they actually developed something new rather than rehashing Industry again. If they did, it might be some indication that the team could, if given the schedule space, come up with a decent economy.

*facepalm*
There are 'game mechancis' that you need to consider:
#1 If you want high value minerals in pvp space, you don't stay for an hour unless you're heavily armed!
#2 Maybe see if there is some sort of frequency for asteroids mining in save space...
#3 Be already in place relatively close by when that happens, in a fast ship...
#4 Quickly get the higher value ore, take the time with T1 ore in save space...
#5 There's a LOT of T1 ore in save space asteroids, if you mine that, sell it, you can buy higher Tech ore from the market...
 
Stop expecting NQ to make a game just for you, they are making a game that (they think) appeals to different kinds of people. Learn how the mechanics work, and play with those!
 
I'm not into pvp myself, but the potential that it is there is what attracted me to DU (and EVE). During beta I spend a LOT of time between planets in pvp space and getting that working correctly is it's own challenge to figure out and I like that puzzle.

There should not even be NPC missions in this sandbox, they also should be phased out just like the npc bots on markets

That would at least replace schematic as a money sink. But it wouldn't be the intended bottleneck for production because you have only 5 schematics slots but you can have virtual infinite industries. In order to keep the original purpose of the new schematics system you would need to implement a maximum number of industries running in parallel per account. I don't think that the community would be amused about that.
 
The problem could be solved with proper implementation of energy management. But there we would again have the inconsistency between NQ and "proper implementation".

Again: if they make automation tools for schematics, they instantly remove half the intended point of them. Not that I think the mechanic actually works: those organised mega-engineers whose awesome, monstrous hyperfactories running 24/7/52 are the ones really beating the heck out of the servers will be organised and driven enough to manage their schematic needs. It's the mere humans who'd never collect enough machines to trouble the servers who will suffer.