Kezzle

Ideally, they should have a UI setting for whether you want to see UTC or local timezone... and maybe a mouseover function to show the other one anywhere the time is displayed (by the standard UI - if custom UIs want that, they can code it  ).

Oh @DannyUK. The surprises are much deeper.
A prime example is fuel tanks. Atmospheric tanks T1 scheme. And space tanks, consisting of T1 components, for some reason have a T2 scheme (naturally with a different cost and a different time).
And now the cherry on the cake. There are such things as Zone detectors. They range in size from XS to L. But they are all made with the same T3 recipe and on the same machine. With the same amount of time. Only here is the detector L. It has a schematic T3 L. Again, with a corresponding cost and time commitment.
As a result, we get an absurdity that the cost of components for a detector is a hundred times less than the cost of a schematic for it. Why is this? What is the deeper meaning besides the lack of testing and banal common sense? To make it clear, the circuit for the L detector will cost as much as the circuit is valid for a military advanced space engine.
P.S. I stopped playing on the beta because of the schemes.
If you want to get money out of the production workers, just make a tax on the machines.
And if the production "loads" the server for you - increase the number of batches of especially small elements with an increase in the production time of the batch.

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.

Please don't put such ideas into their heads! Yes, it could work if implemented correctly. But this is NQ. They would reduce the "given number of batches" to a point where a factory needs to run at full capacity just to produce its own spare parts.

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 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...
 

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.

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.

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

The person who came up with all the schematics thing can be credited for almost, if not truly, killing this game.
 
The way it was implemented was the worst possible way and a big eff you to all. 
 
All big streamers left after .23 and the game lost all it's relevance on YouTube and twitch. 

You me both... twas the 0.23 exodus of players.  I was 2 days away from my warp beacon to start cooking and came back to discover a 800,000,000 (yeah, if memory serves, it was 800M, later reduced to 200M) schematic fee to start up the warp beacon factory.  Left the game until a few weeks ago after that point.
 
Only good news:  once you start racking in quanta, just start making 12 hours of schematics before you call it a night.  Those T1 Product smelters will run for awhile is you load them with 500 schematics each.  Still feels its a crappy solution that just adds distraction and worse, frustration, to the game.  e.g.  it makes the game less fun to play, not more.

Let's set aside for a moment that wiping beta player constructs at launch was always unfair, given past commitments. NQ have now heaped insult on injury with a number of stealth nerfs at launch:
 
Alioth T2 Distribution: 
I did 80 territory scans on Alioth at a ~3 tile spacing and found zero T2. None at all. Zip. Nada. No T2 - after spending 3 days building the XL assembler and scanner. This is a broken gameplay loop. Combined with the removal of Malachite from Alioth, the stealth nerf of ore distribution on Alioth resulted in a week of wasted effort. Forcing effort with no payoff is not gameplay. 
 
If NQ had been transparent with us before launch, said they were going to nerf T2 on Alioth, I wouldn't have wasted that critical week. I would also have rebuilt my base before launch so the BP wasn't made of 500,000M3 of Copper. Now, to deploy my BP I have to swap copper for another honeycomb, and then go back and untangle where the new material has blended with the same material already in the BP. More rework, on top of the wasted time.
 
1000m Build Height: 
This was self-evidently dumb. By choosing a 1000m cap instead of 1128m, it's impossible to build a 1000m AGG pad without placing your foundation core at an exactly multiple of 128m (since you won't be able to place the top core if there is less than a 128m gap.) Even then, you can put nothing on your 1000m pad, no elements, no structure. And you have to either use smaller cores for your top layer (increasing server load) or build your base from the top core, down - which means tall temporary scaffold structures first to place top cores and work back down - while others complain about griefing the entire time. 
 
A large number of pre-launch bases had AGG pads at or slightly above 1000m. All these pre-launch base BPs are now bricked.
 
This misstep demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of their game's own mechanics by devs, and poor understandng of players. To make matters worse, the change wasn't even included in patch notes. The only place it was mentioned - just wks before launch - was in 'Ask Aphelia #12. Few players had any opportunity to fix their builds before launch. This mistake (1000m vs 1128m) would easily have been picked up if players had been warned.
 
In summary, not only did NQ reneg on prior commitments to honour our builds in their 'persistent' universe - the only compensation being retained blueprints - they went on to stealth nerf the BPs we kept. 
 
[EDIT: Because this rule is not yet being enforced, and it is still possible to place a core above 1000m, this will create even more pain for players uncertain or unaware of the rule - should NQ decide to delete structures after they are built. And for as long as the rule is unclear, it is impossible to safely place the foundations of a tall structure.]
 

 
Missing STUs for 'Contributors' (and Surface Natron):
By making Sanctuary the only place with surface natron near Alioth, Alpha contributors already had a significant advantage at launch - since natron is needed to make many popular elements: screens, lights etc.. NQ then messed up further, by jacking up the distribution of STUs meaning only some Contributors received them. ~10 days later, this still has not been fixed. This means a small number of players, purely by chance, have the only access to surface natron near Alioth.
 
HTML/SVG nerf and Indiscriminate LUA Changes: 
The disabling of HTML screens was long rumoured, but took so long to be done it appeared to have been abandoned. Waiting till launch to tell players all SVGs and HTML are also now bricked is also poor form and counter-productive. Because a large number of ship BPs from pre-launch contain screens using HTML, and virtually every factory monitoring set-up, any player flying these ships or running these factories, will now simply go to settings and re-enable HTML, to be able to play the game - undermining the point of the exercise to phase out HTML, and prolonging the inevitable pain and frustration when it is finally done. This pain is now unavoidable given the original misstep of building a new API with zero compatibility with HTML/SVG. (The new API should always have been implemented in a way to minimise the effort of reworking existing content for players - rather than forcing ground up rebuilds of all screens. Better still, existing content should ideally have been ported on behalf of players.)
 
Combine this with the frivolous renaming of a number of LUA cmds, additional rework has also been created for players to reimplement scripts written before launch - for no apparent reason. 
 
STILL No Static BP Placement Snapping!: 
We asked for this in the Alpha Trello 3 yrs ago. It was poorly implemented on day one - snapping new cores only. Hundreds of players have asked for it to be fixed for static BPs over the years. It never made sense that new cores snap into place, but static BPs work of a bizarre raycast that doesn't even align with the player camera and - annoyingly - nudges by 2 voxels instead of 1. This feature was already long overdue, but now made more critical since it is essential to redeploying any mult-core construct after the wipe. Finally... finally, it was coming! In the launch livestream it was promised for launch here, at timecode 35:38:
 
Instead, we now learn this was skipped, rendering all multi-core static construct blueprints useless. 
 
Summary:
 
- Forcing players to constantly rework their builds is not gameplay.
- Reworking existing content is a poor proxy for new gameplay loops.
- Player input is invaluable. 
- Last minute, uncommunicated changes rarely if ever have a positive outcome.  
 
The culture at NQ of disregarding the time and effort of players, and lack of consideration of impacts on our gameplay, is worrisome. More worrisome, is the tendency to continuously rework existing content - mechanics, terrain, boolean noise - rather than develop significant new features, many of these features requested years ago. NQ are still missing the winning strategy of successful 'player generated content' franchises like Minecraft, where the focus of the first several years was on adding new gameplay loops - as opposed to continuously reworking existing ones. Reworking existing content decays player satisfaction by forcing the constant rework of our own builds. And making changes by stealth only magnifies the problem.
 
Until this is understood, the future of this franchise is fraught. 

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.

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.

Main Pillars of DU:

Exploration: the game is "ready for release" yet its first of the main pillars is COMPLETELY MISSING. There is nothing to explore, because there is nothing to see worth your time or effort. Barren wasteland, nothing to find, no aliens, no ancient civilizations, no real artifact, no unique planetary features worth exploring. Move along.

Building: so-so ... the question is why though? There is no purpose behind building anything really (besides maybe ships) because there is no system dependency. You can build a fake garden out of plastics but you don't NEED to build it, because there are no dependent game mechanics tied to it. So you are wasting time and energy for something that is completely pointless and nothing will change whether you build it or not, nothing will be risked, nothing will be gained. Also, it's fake so nothing will grow in it. Move along.

Economy: lol

RPG: wait, what? Ooohhh so that's what the end of this acronym ("MMORPG") stands for .... I see. Well, nothing to see here, move along.

PvP: another lol ... or wait! Maybe, you know, if you had built a garden which happens to be in that specific spot of land with its unique features, and the only place known where the produce is 900% higher than anywhere else, thus making that garden extremely sought after, so you have to defend it with everything you got, because some players might try to attack you and occupy your land where this garden is ...... oh, I forgot again, there is nothing of the sort here. Move along.

Social: Ha!
 
 
 

After 8 years, the game is now ready for release.

Voxel won't do anything for S ships. Shields down = S dead or disabled.

Anyway, artificially limiting elements by core size is the wrong way to go. Better to have an energy system that limits elements by forcing the builder to make trade-offs. If a S-core wants a L-shield, it can only fit a partial set of S guns. If a M-core wants a L-shield, it can only fit one set of M guns and one set of S guns - not two sets M guns, with two L radars.
 
Fit limitations based on an energy system would be much more dynamic and interesting than just shoe-horning ships into specific builds. Until we get something like that, I'd prefer it if element selection remained more free. I don't even see a reason to limit gun sizes to core size right now as well, since having L guns doesn't give an inherent advantage like it used to.

Do you know the ingameprice of one DAC?
No?
I dont know either, because the price depends on how much Quanta other players want to pay for playtime.
If players dont want to trade DACs, the price will be very high. If the players trade DACs a lot, the price will be very low.
So it depends on the players, and the players only how the DACs are used, traded and priced.
Its just a chance for players who have not much RL money but a lot of time to work ingame to play the game. 
Is it pay to win, when you need to work ingame for it?
I say definately No! You cannot "Win" in a creative sandbox when there is nohing to "Win"
It is Play to pay!
People who say, DACs are pay to win, have no clue how DACs work...

DACs had a monetary value quoted in the alpha packs, 18 euros, which partially justified the price.

So now they are only worth 7-9 euros? Are backers going to be given an increased allocation due to the devaluation?

I have been saying that DU should be "Easy to understand, hard to master" for years. And if you look at the things that actually work in the game, like building, scripting (to a certain degree), piloting etc. they are exactly that.
 
Take for example building. Anyone can easily build something in this game since it is easy and relatively straight forward. But making something that make heads turn and players open up their wallet, requires dedication, skills, know-how and creativity. And this is the type of game mechanics that is rewarding and makes players come back for more year after year.
 
But on the other hand there is running around like a headless chicken pressing the same buttons over and over again to complete some pointless task, that does not make players want to stick around.

A balanced MMO is about more than sinks and faucets. The economy doesn't exist for its own sake. It's meant to drive fun. There should be a reason to buy and sell things. Getting a deal, making profit, buying new stuff is supposed to be part of the fun. 
 
Maybe this will add more sinks, and maybe that helps with balance...but if it also introduces more micromanagement and grind, that reduces engagement. The economy exists to support the game, not the other way around. 
 
This doesn't make people want to engage with the economy, it just makes quanta vanish. Not because you bought something fun, not because you're investing in your ship or your org, but because of more grind. 
 
NQ is designing a game, not an economy -- the economy exists to support the engagement of the game. NQ vacuuming up your money for the sake of having more sinks isn't engaging. 

If you want to limit the number of schematics and therefore factory processes a single player can run, but also plan to introduce talents to increase the number of schematic copies a single player can produce, why not just go directly to talents controlling the number of industry processes a single player can run, and skip schematics altogether? 
 
Make it work like construct slots. Some for personal use, some to donate to an org for org industry. It would be consistent with a mechanic that already exists in game, and explicitly invokes cooperation via organizations. 
 

Wot? You mean like the marketplaces and Districts that existed by magic before a single player had left the Arkship? All of that is "something no player or org would be able to do in the time frame we are talking about."
 
Get a grip.

They're working on this. It's hard, is all. The BP system is in its very early days, I'd say.