CptCabalsky

After all the things. actually i'd just leave if there was a wipe. seriously, look at teh mega factories. The investments in the schematics. The time and faith of the community to provide content.
 
Resounding naw, Im out. Gimme monies back pls.
 
The billionaire things was fixed with athena I think and the new "way" for more schematics and rarity of plas.
 
anyway. pick right.
 

Most important PRO's missed... 
 
Hundreds of paid accounts no longer paying.  Less money for NQ
Empty worlds with no constructs... sounds fun.
Many existing players offer help to new players in financial and advice... gone.

I started playing with a friend about 10 days ago. We have had a lot of fun sofar. Although the "old" mining system was more boring than watching paint dry, doing it together and chatting a bit, made is slightly less mindnumbingly boring. We have built a little base for ourselves, created an organisation that claimed three adjacent tiles.
In building all this up we have not built up any stockpile and therefore at the time that Demeter dropped, we had empty ore containers and 168 Quanta between the two of us.
We somehow managed to get 4 Basic L mining units up, generating 194 units of ore with a current value of 7.865 Quanta, per hour. In three days time we need to pay 3 milion in taxes.
 
This we cannot pay. Considering our current income, it would take 381 hours to mine that. And this bill is recurring every week. In other words we are bankrupt.
 
I just wish that the taxrate would increase with each additional territory (and possibly give the first one or two tiles for free), just like placing each territory control unit gets more expensive. we still very much are n00bs in this game and the learning curve is already very steep, but from our point of view the Demeter patch has killed any chance for new players to get a foothold at all. I would have loved to see space and other celestial objects and perhaps even some PVP...
 
Anyway, we really had a lot of fun, but right now there is no point for us to continue playing. Our small base is at ::pos{0,2,56.5535,-170.9944,32.7241} it should be free to loot in a few days.
 
Goodbye!
 

Checkmate NQ.
 
I think it summed this situation up when Pann said we have two groups asking to delete scans or keep them and we dont want to wipe their hard work and we have a situation where are are caught in the middle and dont want to cut the baby in half. To which I say you might not want to cut the baby in half as you are attempting to strangle it in the crib when in reality its not even born yet and all of it is hypthetical to begin with.
 
Demeter exposes fundamental critical flaws in their initial flawed game design under JC's helm that pretty much developed them into a corner that is game ending to the point that it will require a complete rework if not ground up rebuild to make DU feasable going forward.
 
Why? (TLDR version)
 
JC had a failed vision and hired a bunch of yes men/women who followed him and continue to keep following his misunderstanding of what is was they were trying to emulate and not make it their own. Going with a voxel game not bothing to do the research that it sounds good but is still not technically feasable in terms of data costs, internet bills, and performance and not knowing it would limit a space game to a single solar system since any additional solar system basically compounds the problem rather than using a hybrid of static mesh worlds you can build voxels onto in order to have enough performance to justify expansions. Then inviting the building communities of the failed games the tried Voxelization with the promise of Space Landmakr combined with Space engineers. The builder community killed any chance of PvP and the PvP community killed off the builders along with new players. Setting unrealistic expectations for mega orgs by feeding them and not establishing factions instead and doubling down by constantly feeding then misunderstanding that not limiting them and being forced to put out feeble attempts to slow them down while crushing everyone else with misguided updates that take out more then is added to the game. Because of all of that now needoing to pivot and remove and limit mining in order to cut costs to up performance, add a vertex tool that takes from that performance, and then fill it back up with hundreds of thousands more TU's, miners, containers, transfer units, machines to produce them, and making the world more desolate. At the same time not understanding that Taxes didnt work in the first place with the Finite Resource pool then turning it Infinite when the game was not designed for it which forced the Ore to be made more "Rare and less Propigated" which further compounds the issues since anyone 6 months from now that comes back will likely never play anything higher than a T1-2 version of the game since that is the only ore they will ever get and the progression they will experience. Taxes yet again meant to slow down mega orgs that further creates unbalance since NQ wont get rid of scans and they will instantly take all the tiles worth anything and make more than they are taxed while everyone else experiences the full weight of the tax and forced to pay for it with T1 mats which wont be worth anything since everyone will be doing the same thing with dwindling returns and a limited production of ore since there are more sinks than influx to the system. NQ now making the game based on Ore Per Month to align with their sub model which makes it as such as you now have to mine asteroids once per week or run missions to cover tax, and log in to use charges and beyond that there is no reason to actually play the game. Because of that it makes it so that production of consumables like space gas, warp cells, and even scrap will be in short supply since people will need to sell ore for tax and they will be the only thing worth anything since this update completely negates the need for atomospheric parts since spacestations are not taxed and all content is space based now.  Ore transfers will take a year of subs to get a full container of ore so PvP will suffer even if people are forced to slow boat between planets except for this with ore monopolies which will use warp cells with their ship scanning scripts on XS ships to hunt for anyone to kill until nobody goes between planets except for VR. When people start to default on their taxes and the month after demeter goes live and those people have nothing to come back to there is no need to play at all and they will tell their friends to write this game off. Which will force NQ to knee jerk forced updates like Territory wars since nobody is playing, building, moving ore, traveling, fighting, and those with ore monopolies roll over everything that still remains its game over since there is litterally nothing left and you let them win the game long ago.  
There are no moves left NQ is willing to do that can take them out of checkmate, they simply just dont have a budget to rebuild the game from the ground up. They have developed themselves into a corner starting with the conception and direction JC took this game down.
 
And with the comment of we dont want to cut the baby in half it shows that NQ will never reign in mega orgs that have and will continue to kill the game since NQ knows where their bread is buttered and keeps feeding them. Funny since most of them are likely alpha backers who will never pay them a cent through their packages and armed with 3 beta keys that wont pay them until launch.
 
The taxes are aimed at them since they have been spoon fed this whole time by the devs who dont know how to punish them properly to slow them down and arbitrarily do things like say "hahaha boohoo you dont want to pay taxes" and at the same time hand them all the resources and prevent everyone else from getting them going forward or progressing beyond a T2 version of this game since the ore is rare and even sparse then before and all the metadata they are using is based on them with a flat tax when misunderstanding they are handing them all the T3+ ore which makes all their tiles profitable since everyone else will be sitting on T1 tiles and lucky if you can even find a T2 ore tile and stuck with all the taxes aming it not worth putting down a TU.
 
The real issue nobody is even considering is that because the planets and moons are all voxel based and not a static mesh the Voxel construct of the planetary bodies no longer matters at all and it was the sole reason we are stuck in a cramped solar system in the first place since it is not feasable to have anything beyond it and so we are just grasping at straws and trying to punish ourselves even more for no reason. If there were multiple solar systems, deep space, or a universe to spread out in none of this would matter. But the plan was always to ransack this solar system and then open up jump gates you can spawn camp so that mega orgs could have their own solar system to themselves and wield infinite ore against the server anyhow which always sounded dumb to begin with when everyone is stuck with a picked over carcass to fight back with.
 
The only thing that will save this game is a full rebuild from the ground up but seeing the mediocre dev team they have and the things they are deadset on actually making seem to me they are incapable of doing that unless they clean house and bring in actually MMO developers.

This is an argument for NQ to stop advertising the game as in BETA and start advertising it as in ALPHA
If I had done thousands of scans, I would be pretty upset right now.  Even though I understand why NQ feel they need to do it.
Many players were very upset with .23 even though many understood why it was necessary for the vision of the game.
I feel much of the disappointment is justified because the game is in BETA.
As far as I am aware, most peoples expectation of BETA is that the game is complete but needs stress testing and final balancing which might take several months.  Then the game will launch.
So, if the game was in ALPHA, I feel that most players would have little issue with these changes because everything would be done with the expectation that it will probably change at some stage.
It seems pretty clear to me that the game is really in ALPHA.  ie. extreme performance issues, many features far from implementation, current major rebalancing with more to come, etc.
I feel that NQ should just say "everybody we stuffed up by launching BETA too soon.  We are returning to ALPHA.  Everything in the game is subject to change.  If your happy with that we are happy to have you"

I would argue the game is already dead. Everyone I knew that played the game, has gone.

Ok, usually i am not negative but the balance of Demeter on the PTS server has some severe problems.
 
1. Territory costs of 1m per week:
this will lead to almost nobody claiming any tiles any more outside of the sanc moon unless the territory can produce some serious income. so all "player made content" will disappear after some time
 
2. Scanning results do not get deleted and show l/h for mining units
this will lead to ALL really valuable tiles being claimed within the first 24h after demeter goes live, as it is really easy to identify  the most powerful tiles for mining units if you have containers full with scanner results.
so after day 1, the fun is over and the "mega tiles" will be claimed by those players/orgs that have all the existing scans.
 
NQ, as demeter is balanced on the PTS, it would kill the game if it goes to the live server
 
- New players some days later would not have a chance to find income opportunities despite missions.
- earning quanta will be a lot harder, so people would stop spending.. this would kill industrialists workflow.
- the imbalance between experienced players/orgs and new players would get worse and even more players would demand a wipe or simply not enjoy the game

please reconsider your decisions.

Hagbard.


 

The problem I see with the territory tax is what happens if you cant play the game for a few weeks to months. you work takes up to much time, you get sick, you just need a break from the game.
 
Does that mean that you loose your territories?
 
Also a clarification on the resources in the territory. If there going to re-randomize the ores how can old territory scans be of any use?
As I understand it, the mega node, witch I have a scan for, will very likely end up as just another average node.
Is the term mega node going to be relevant after the update.
 
will a mega node be something with higher then normal extraction rates.?

Who gets the tax revenue from the territories in the end? Didn't you want to build the game on a player basis, a player-driven economy and player-based decisions? Now they are imposing a fantasy tax on us players just to take Quanta out of the game? I find it unimaginative to just impose this tax across the board. I could understand it if you had to fight for planets, whoever settles there pays a corresponding tax to the ruling alliance/organisation,....but just taking quanta out of the game across the board without a player being able to defend themselves against this tax or influence it?
In the past, territories were distributed to settlers - that didn't cost any money - and in the past, people simply took land and claimed it, which also didn't cost any money or taxes. Why is something like this demanded in a game as something self-evident or normal?
 
 

First off, Kudos for acknowledging the absolute mess that is crash to desktop issues, along with telling people to not use VR due to bugs. Though, it wasn't communicated very well and has caused major issues because of it- still kudos for trying to communicate with the community better vs staying silent.

Myself and others have been "Bugged Out", no skills seam to be applying now after using a VR station and crashing to desktop. Can't use industry. Can't mine efficiently. Can't deploy my ships with boosted skills.  No mention of this on the login screen, or in game- and the announcement didn't get published to all the discords mirroring announcements- so few people saw it. 

Crash to Desktop issue announcement? Awesome, thank you NQ for acknowledging it- though it's hidden away in an announcement within discord. and in discord discussion people were told by an employee to "not fly their ships if they're at risk of crashing", aka- stop playing in general discussion. 

NovaQuark should not have to rely on Discord(which not all players use!) to push announcements to the game- and the in game pop-up misses a ton of people as if you're not logged in when it's sent you wont see it..... Literally, a simple pop-up/notification at the login screen could have saved a lot of heartache this week.

If it wasn't for these serious, show stopping, game breaking problems- 0.26 would have been a solid update with content and quality of life improvements(better FPS, interface improvements, and little baby asteroids that took almost zero player input from PTS). I hope the dev & GM team, and most likely managment that pushed the dev team to go live- learns from this. Also- get a couple more GM's for the weekends when the player base is most active like any other MMO with a subscription model has.... and a pony, yes- I want a pony too... well I mean pets were promised in the kick-starter after-all...  Who am I kidding? I'd just settle with a game that works, and I can play.

RIP Dual Universe. 
 
It was fun while it lasted.
Kind of?
 
I remember accidentally stumbling across a video of Dual Universe, the alpha feature showcase running ~50 minutes long. Boy oh boy was I impressed. In the past I've played things such as starmade, and empyrion, and always loved the idea of a space sci-fi and as a star wars fan myself, always building large scale stuff like star destroyers and blah. As fun as these games were to play, they always suffered from having next to no major interaction in multiplayer. As you can guess, the whole idea of Dual Universe being a space sci-fi sandbox in an MMO setting was an incredibly grand and alluring idea. I had plenty of fantasies and imaginations of how awesome DU could turn out to be, as many many others had too. Unsure of what exactly I can say without breaching NDA, I'll keep it vague. Playing the Alpha build was pretty frustrating lol. However, the community made up for a lot of DU's pitfalls. I had discovered a sort of 'role play' civilisation building community that spanned over years of living under a shell of tight NDA alpha development, which was quite interesting. Everyone was eager for DU to enter beta, and to get serious. To let go of needing to 'Role play' and just be able to take their metagaming to the next level in the persistent world of Dual Universe.

The Beta launch was certainly a real mouthful. Everyone rushed out the gates to make their mark in the world, a race to cement their existence into DU's solar system. Damn were there a lot of people, compared to the current population it's almost unbelievable. Even NQ didn't expect such a huge influx of players to jump in. This caused a lot of dumpster fires during the start of beta, and a lot of NQ's efforts were directed toward putting them out. It was choppy as hell, but it seemed like DU really had a major ingredient to succeed, player population. Regardless of the hugely buggy nature of the game which many people criticized as being no way near beta ready, especially paid beta ready, people still trucked on hopeful of what DU could be. One extremely common phrase among critics and players alike, was that DU had so much potential, and every one of them were right. 
 
With the introduction of larger than alpha resource nodes amongst all of the planets, and meganodes for each ore, DU experienced a huge boost in progression, as everyone grinded their brains out to collect as much ore as they could. Mega factories popping up left and right, in every nook and cranny. Production and resource exploitation at an all time high left NQ worrying about the fast paced progression they seemed to be quite uncomfortable with.
 
The idea behind DU was that it was oriented to group play in such a way that people would build organisations, alliances, countries, and civilisations. Unfortunately, apart from marketing efforts DU wasn't really setup to encourage any of this. Being weary of needing to RP to really do any of this, most older groups began to grow uneasy. The cause for this controversially being the implementation of safezones, and lack of territory warfare, which was a desired addition for the beginning of beta. Initially, the idea was that the only safe place in the solar system would be the Sanctuary moon. The absolute only reason for its current existence. Instead of a creative solution to allow organisations/nations to create their own safezones, their own mark in the solar system, we were given a very, very lenient absolute safe space. In my opinion, the sole existence of any safezones aside from the sanctuary moon works only to remove any incentive or encouragement for a nation or country to emerge in any part of the solar system. Everyone joined into DU with their own dreams, and their own desires of creation. And everyone was very much free to move about and do as they wished, on their own. It's likely NQ were forced along this path due to simply not having enough time to develop critical gameplay mechanics, coupled with problems among the studio itself, with none of the original team who initially worked on DU no longer even working at NQ. DU now has effectively turned itself from a promising civilisation building MMO, into a quiet, enormous and extremely overpriced museum for sci-fi voxel creations.
 
The PVP, and effects of it are nothing short of Pitiful.
 
NQ's move to stifle progression and control it's rate among DU, backfired miserably and completely decimated DU's saving grace, its player population. The introduction of update 0.23 unsettled and enraged SO many people, eesh. If you're reading this and your opinion is that 0.23 was a great patch, you clearly don't see the incredible damage that it's done to DU, NQ, and their PR. Enjoy your giant space museum while it lasts. NQ certainly took a major step back in communication in the aftermath of update 0.23, which only further annoyed the playerbase.

Recently a new Community Manager that went by NQ-Naunet was hired, and made strides in engaging with the remaining DU community. Only just recently, after only 4 months of working at NQ, Naunet has left NQ without a word. Naunet was much appreciated by the community, and her departure left a gaping hole in the communities confidence in NQ's ability to manage a community, sparking a recent freefall dive (absolute shitshow) in NQ's temporarily completely unmoderated Forums, with only NQ-Naerais left to hold the reins on a fragile and wavering community.
 
Another recent incident involving NQ deciding to completely remove ingame support, and discord support has also caused unease and frustration throughout the entire playerbase. Leaving the only form of support to the ticket system, which is famous taking up to a month or more for a response, and often the responses were extremely unhelpful. The removal of NQ's ingame support system basically blew up any players hope for help in navigating DU's buggy and problematic nature.

The ingame support team did an incredible job of handling many of the problems thrown at players, most of which simply made no sense to wait months for. Most of the tech support workers have left NQ after this move.
Their names are:
NQ-Wokk
NQ-Blacksun
NQ-Gallion
NQ-Astratum
NQ-Samaritan
NQ-Stargazer
NQ-Orion
NQ-Reaper
NQ-StarFire
NQ-Xeno
 
Apologies for anyone I've missed, but they've singlehandedly been through the rivers of buggy shit to ensure that players had the best possible experience in DU.\
 
Now that the support team is gone, Naunet is gone, any Liason between community and NQ non-existant, most people just want to see DU put out of its misery. Was a fantastic concept, but it seems like it'll just never work. With the whole idea of DU having millions of players, but only being attractive to a very niche group of resilient and hardcore players, and the recent decision of NQ, DU has just lost it's much needed momentum, and as we can see with numbers pulling out of NQ's roster, including more prominent and notable names, faith in NQ's ability to deliver DU as advertised, promised, and pitched, are at an all time low.
 
Even JC's in rough shape after 0.23, poor dude.
 

 
As for JC himself, mad respect for the dude. Starting a brand new company to develop and handle his dream game (as was ours), was bold and brave of him. We all wished him the best in his endeavours, and are all sad to see what is to come of DU.
 
If you're new and wanting to get into DU, I'd advise against it. If you have friends to play with and wanna muck around DU, all power to you. DU isn't really that pricey, probably won't last for another 3 months anyway.
But for anyone looking for what DU was pitched as, it's looking like a hard skip. 

And now some random memes to dust off the post.


 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


RIP, nobody wanted you here. Except for maybe your competitors, although they probably feel guilty about it now.

Sup DUveans,

Just stopping by here to say my final farewell to everyone here, in discord, and in game that I had the privilege to be acquainted with or some, to even call friends. 

I had a blast being along side everyone of you these past 7 years, watching this community grow from literally 0 members to a whopping 50,000+ of you. I had many fond memories building premature alliances, making in game hostile moves, watching orgs rise and fall, overall, nerding-out over every aspect of Dual Universe.

However, all good things must come to an end. I'm sad to say but due to recent announcements and the overall direction of community aspect of Dual Universe is partaking, per say, I must state my farewell from the community and Dual Universe completely (as a player and as Moderator, in Discord and other platforms). At this point, I'm not enjoying being part of a community that's not being nourished at its fullest or been ignored for so long. (That's just the tip of the iceberg) Regardless, I leave on good terms, hope you all have fun, wishing the best to everyone and Novaquark (Here's hoping for a fast recovery, community-wise) 


As always,
Catch everyone on the flip, but most importantly; Have Fun!

Remember: Comfort: is the enemy of progress
 
o7

Alrighty, let's talk about today's DevBlog!
 

What do you think of the plans so far? Is this a good starting point or are there additional functions you think wallets will need?

How will the scoring system work ?

My only concern...Point/Reward/Scoring system. How do you reward somebody knowing you can abuse the system since day 1 with alts, org alts, friend's alts, friend of friend alts, etc?!!?!

Scoring/Value system will have problems if with 1 account you can Create Missions and Vote multiple OTHER accounts on daily basis. How will the scoring system work ?

I kinda understand the OP in terms of the meh.... Seriously, what has changed in this game since last summer? Have any of the core mechanics been improved? Any much needed QoL features implemented? Any new game loops introduced?  Not really.

This game has stagnated with ancient bugs unfixed and new bugs only being patched after they are used by people to gain massive advantages over others... JC and his crew are seemingly content to apply band-aid after band-aid to the broken basics and allow rampant disparity between those who noticed certain bugs and... ahem.. unintended price points...  remain un "punished" , fostering bad will and FOMO among the player base.

However, between 150,000 ℏ per day and JC's ridonculous bots sucking ores out of the game for market-crippling, stupid-level money, there is no excuse for being poor, really.
 

Wth are those operations xD
+5% on 4000l is 5(4000/100)=200 so 4200l total.
 

Hahahahaha glorious
 
100$ on NQ not doing anything 

There are at least two types of players.

Those who like pvp and will engage in different stages of pvp and write stories.
Those who dont like pvp and want to build and create cities and read stories about those who are living outside safe zone.

We need them both for the game to be complete And bubble is needed. This wont be Rust or Ark 2 with no safe zones, etc.

The main problem with a wipe, is that DU has active subscription players. So if there is a wipe in a game where players are paying for content that is supposed to be permanent, do the subscription players get a refund? And if not, then what exactly did the subscription players pay for?
 
There is also the problem that a wipe would probably lead to a mass exodus (even more so then 0.23). Speaking for myself a wipe now would be the final death knell for me at least. JC said there would be no wipe in a stream some time ago (can't be bothered to find the exact one), and I have proceeded accordingly. In later streams he has revised to saying they will avoid a wipe if possible, which basically means the same thing. In my opinion the last opportunity NQ had for a global wipe, was the last test release they did shortly before the beta release with subscriptions.
 
And lastly, what exactly will a wipe achieve beside from reducing the already dwindling player count?
I hear a lot of talk about how a wipe will save the economy etc, but I fail to see how. Large org's will do large org things regardless, and 0.23 has only made the divide larger. There has already effectively been a industry reset for all players. So how is a global wipe supposed to 'save' the game? Solo players and small org's will never be able to compete with larger ones regardless. And the titans will soon be able to dictate large parts of the game wipe or no wipe. Especially in a game like DU that has a small player base.
 

You failed to provide information why a wipe is needed . Also the Developer said there wont be wipes. That is what lured people in the game. Thats why subs are running.  There is nothing wrong with the game atm and atmo pvp is few months away. Lots of ppl will leave if they wipe the server because if you are a big org and you lose the progress for no reason, you wont have a reason to play.

Take a break, take few steps back and enjoy Christmas if u r bored.

You are in a middle of a wipe atm, soft wipe but its still a wipe.

The Extraction Cartel is proud to present an in-depth, maintained, and (mostly) accurate view into the DU markets.   On this site you will be able to get a snapshot of the entire market, which local markets have the most activity, a detailed look at prices, moving averages, and volume for the Ore and Pure market, an overview of refining profitability, and base price calculation on many market items.     Please visit http://www.extractioncartel.com/

Big problems :
1) bots are selling the indy schematics which are very expensive, and drain the players moneys => money are heading out of the economy.
2) players have to sell ores to market bots to make money to buy >1)< leaving them to little to buy components to mantain the economy. If they buy schematics and sell ores to make money for schematics => vast ore quantities are heading out of the game economy
3) Players cannot generate revenue in many ways.
 
Possible solution:
I. Make Aphelia an real entity (innaccesible org) ingame, held by devs - which stores both money and ores from markets > money in a wallet and ores  in market bins. Both assets remain ingame .
 
II.Corresponding To each market district, at a certain distance not to *clog* to much the area, factory buildings (Held by Aphelia) should be placed by developers. The actual fun starts now. 
 
-*APHELIA OWNED FACTORY CONCEPT*-
 
In each factory there is going to be an certain number of production lines, each production line will have one job, which will be available for players. 
Job can be implemented as a mini-game consisting in players choosing one element to build -lets say M atmo engine from the element list. In order to build the element, players will have to chose sub-elements it is built from and take those in his inventory. After that he will chose a construct tool and brush the frame engine, an animation apear (maybe similar to space engineers? ) on how that element is constructed, thus in an certain time ( usually several seconds maybe half of minute, depending on the element) the finite engine will be constructed. Engine will go to Aphelia inventory and player will be rewarded with an small sum for each unit constructed.That sum of quanta is related to how expensive that element is on market. Each unit constructed by players will end up in market, sold by Aphelia so the number of sold elements will be linked to how many elements were constructed by players. 
 
III. The factories will have inventories which require to be fed with ores from the market bins in order to produce elements. In this regards there will be issued missions to carry the bulk ore from the markets to factories in ships. Carried ore cannot be stolen or interacted with, it is simply loaded in one site, and offloaded into a factory. Same mechanic is apply to elements constructed in those factories. If elements either ores or components stays to much into an cargo container they will automatically return back to initial spot. 
 
IV. Factories are upgradable depending on how much success each factory have on producing elements. They can become very large, can start from 4 players using them and going to  
more than 20 players. The reward per element and per day will increase with the factory level giving incentive to players to contribute to its development. An balancing factor may be that an fix sum per day can be rewarder per player. 
 
Ofc, some new gamecode have to be written to enable those features, but hail to the development time. 
 
This rough ideea *MAY* adress *SOME* issues:
 
-money and ore will return to players in different forms
-created elements by players will go to markets. This can address some elements shortages.
-diversify the range of activities from which players can make money
-creating enganging new activities and trade routs from markets to factories and vice-versa, string of cargo hauling missions -may create better pilots-
-allowing novice players to understand what industry will require if they want to build it and familiarize them with the notions of elements recipes. 
-Aphelia owned tiles in the spawning area will begin to look a bit more realistic, with multiple structures on them, ships going from one district to another.
-animations made for the mini-game of element constructing can be added to actual elements placing when a player is constructing a ship, adding a nice construction effect to the game.

Fundamentally mining will still be the base of all game loops, but its required for realistically sustain the economy until players settle down huge production batches.

Look, the majority of your player base does not like this patch. and you should be more than aware of it. There were things that could have been done, things that have been suggested on here a multitude of times in the past. This patch... despite your Discord Q&A, and all of your live streams, all it showed us is that you simply did not listen to your player base, or their ideas. We are the beta testers, and we have given our feedback on so many, if not all of the currently available  aspects, and tools of the game which could increase the enjoyability for everyone.
 
your testers are leaving. I've seen several people  cancel their subscription, myself included. My sub ends on JAN 11 2021, and from how things are looking, I do not think Ill be resubbing after that date. However it isn't too late. There are other updates which could fix this, patches that can draw DU's community back to the game. After watching your discord, the forums, and talking to so many other players from in game, and on other discord servers. I think I can summarize the changes needed which could bring some the faith back to DU's community.
 
1: SCHEMATICS: Now I want to say this first. Schematics are not inherently bad, however the way it has been implemented is the biggest problem we have here. It was implemented to bring value to intermediate parts, and to suck money out of the world. You want to have players buy them off of the market. you want the market to be used, correct? There were better ways to handle this problem. 

Schematics can stay, but not for everything. By placing them on absolutely every item that we can produced through a factory unit, you have effectively placed a ransomware on your own game. We cant do anything anymore without forking over absurd amounts of cash to get access to the game. This is not a model for any level of play. New comer's will be turned away from this, and more experienced players will simply give up on the game, which they have done.

Basic Items of all types should be free of schematics. Doing this allows everyone to at least experience the core  aspects of DU. we can build, fly around and explore. DU can feel like a game again, and not a second virtual job. 

Schematics can be on everything else. Military engines, advanced, or uncommon parts, advanced weapons. Everything that isn't tier 1 should have a schematic in order to give your player base a goal, a reason to want to improve, to invest time into DU. (but maybe release tier 1 weapons as civilian weapons that need T1 and T2 ores only.  just so that newbies can get the feel of how combat works in this game, yea?)

2:RECYCLERS AND SCRAP: recyclers are sitting In a weird spot, right? they only have 2 uses. To make scrap, and to pump out gasses. These two simple jobs makes recyclers relatively useless in the grander scheme of the game when compared to all of the other industry elements. What if they didn't have to be? what if they could be redesigned to be one of the most important industrial units in the game, and provide a way to fuel the economy in way we currently cannot reproduce on our own through emergent gameplay? What if.... they could... Recycle? 
 
Scrap as it stands now was an OK Method to repair our elements in the earlier days of this game. but those days are long gone, and you need a reason for the market to exist, you need a reason for people to sell small parts, intermediate parts on these markets! Ok. We can do that, and recyclers are the answer. Allow recyclers to break down elements, and damaged elements with less that 3, or 5 repairs left. Allow the amount of "lives" of an element determine how many intermediate components a recycler can pull out of any particular element. Allow it to be random in which parts are chosen. For example, if you recycle one space engine, you get the ionic chamber, and a few screws. If you recycle a second one, you could get the reinforced frame, and a burner or two. It could also produce scrap still!  Scrap can come in the form of a useless item that needs to be further broken down to remake pure metals. But wait. what will we use to repair our elements if  scrap becomes useless? INTERMEDIATE PARTS!

look at Space engineers for inspiration. we use components to repair their broken blocks. You do not need to equip the parts you need, the welding tool simply pulls the correct parts out of your inventory, and applies them to the damaged block until it is repaired! Its simple, its elegant, and immersive. Doing this creates not only an actual engineering role for crew members, but it creates salvagers, recycling plants dedicated to breaking down old parts. It creates jobs in DU that people can take their roll in, and  enjoy. This can be even furthered with skills to make recyclers more efficient at pulling out parts, and breaking down elements faster.
 
Intermediate  parts will be in high demand  on the markets after this because they are NEEDED to repair elements as opposed to scrap. 

PS: make cores repairable with intermediate parts too. larger dynamic cores are already hard to make, having the ability to restore them with the rare parts they require would be a nice thing to have. 

 

A problem for builders in the game as it stands currently is the lack of viable ways to generate lift and how inconsistant they are. For example many smaller lift surfaces having better weight-lift-cost ratios over single larger elements. Or there being no large wings/ailerons. With this being the case you are either required to stack wings, engines or both and in many cases using smaller lift elements is far more efficent then larger ones leading to some odd design quirks that can be painful to design around.
 
This limits heavily ways to make nice looking heavy cargo ships by forcing you to design around this limitation or to "brute force" the issue with more engines and/or stacks of wings. Additionally it encourages AGG useage as a primary means of lift, an element we know is getting nerfed soon tm. 
 
Are there plans in place such as you adding more ways of generateing large amounts of lift i.e sci-fi repulsors, larger wings, additonal lift surfaces, Voxel lift elements ect. Barring that perhaps looking at changing current element values. Or perhaps even incentiviseing non AGG elements with for example fuel tanks in wings as is done irl? Or even wing/engine combos.