First let me say I support PVP completely. But its gotta change and asap in DU. Right now PVP in DU is nothing more than griefing other players, for the sake of griefing. I've watched a few streams of people get destroyed today in PVP. In all 12 encounters I saw, they were all dead before they knew what was happening. This is not fun. Fun PVP is a fight, where ships and skills are tested against one another. Someone wins and someone loses. The PVP moments I've seen and experienced in the game are not that at all. In all cases I've seen, PVP has been utterly one-sided and over in moments. There was so little opportunity for response, that I wouldn't even classify it as PVP at all.
There's no way in DU to understand or become experienced in ship-to-ship combat other than PVP. The people who got into PVP before you are so much better, with ships so much more focused on your death, that there's no real ramp up. You just die, and then get set back days or weeks. And the only way to improve is to do it again. That's if it's consensual. You might just want to progress in your projects, and need copper. Too bad. You're now engaged in PVP. Oh - you didn't dedicate yourself to learning PVP? Reset 2 weeks. Reset 10 days.
Nothing is engaging about this. It's so one-sided and bereft of interaction, it might as well be a bug or a glitch destroying your ship.
This has to change. If it stays like this, DU will be catering to an extreme niche of people who aren't nominally there to make use of all the creative tools - but instead will min/max ships designed for the sole purpose of murdering other people as efficiently as possible. That's fun only for those people. There aren't enough of those people to support the success of an MMO. No one watches two weeks of work put into a ship build disappear in an instant and thinks, "this is so much fun!"
Things that absolutely must be changed for the game to be successful.
Weapon ranges needs to be reduced to no more than 2.5k. This forces all parties involved to have to actually fight each other in a proper battle.
Weapon damage needs to be reduced by 75%. Right now it frankly doesn't matter what material you build your ship out of, because weapon damage is too high, and chews through everything. It makes building anything other than a layered box ship pointless.
Space safe zone should be permanent and never removed for any reason. This will allow trade and civilization to grow. Players should not be forced into PVP if that's not what they are interested in.
Planets in space safe zone should never have PVP either. For the same reasons as above. Players should not be forced into PVP if that's not what they are interested in. Having a single safe moon, is frankly a stupid idea. Lets put everyone to a moon, force them to deal with lag, over population, etc. Nope...people will legit just leave the game.
Ship and Base shields need to be a thing. So players have proper defense.
Ships moving over 10,000 should not be able to fire weapons.
Unless some serious changes are made to PVP in DU. The game will not be successful. As the CEO of NQ has stated on many streams this is a civilization game, not a PVP game. The Devs need to start making players fully aware of this. Unregulated PVP will completely ruin the game we all want.
Just look at what's happening now, players building walls at warp points to grief players using warp. This also needs to be fixed, and the players suspended for 30 days for doing it. NQ you need to draw a line in the sand when it comes to these issues now and set the place.