Cergorach

Eh... Don't know about you, but I spent quite a bit of time at beta launch on Sanctuary. Eventually moved to Alioth via shuttle. You can claim a tile there as your HQ tile, you can build structures, just not mine or manufacture there. You can still build from your backpack and on Sanctuary. You can share a tile with other newbies, but if you absolutely want to do it solo, it will take longer and more effort... Can they do it the same way we did at the start of beta, hell no! But it can be done. Don't want taxes but manufacture outside of sanctuary or your backpack, get into space and place a Space core.

Not necessarily, just because an activity is currently no longer 'profitable', doesn't mean people leave. If that was the case, EVE would have died out over a decade ago. They move on to another activity that is profitable. And there are other activities then automining and pve missioning...

How familiar are you with EU consumer laws and regulations?

Just before the Demeter launch a bunch of players already abandoned their tiles, I picked up a couple of them. As pre-Demeter tiles have a 13-14 day tax free period, then the abandonment process starts. But indeed, previously my 4 accounts held 7 tiles, now it's 100+ tiles. I expect that when we hit 2022, it's more like 150-200 tiles and eventually around 350-400 (and depending how certain concepts go, maybe significantly more). I feel like I'm playing a cross between Civilization 5 or 6 and Slumlord Simulator 2021... 😉 The problem some people had was that so many corps/people claimed tiles once and never touched them (or released them). With so many people having left active DU play, that means a huge number of tiles are never going to be used again, but no one can ever get to them until Territory Warfare is introduced when hell freezes over... With Demeter this has been fixed. If you're not generating quanta (some way) you're not going to keep claiming those tiles. With Demeter less then a week live, we're already seeing huge price dips. Natron is making a dive for the floor, 30%+ lower prices, X-1 Fuel 20-30% lower prices. I'm seeing similar things happening with T1 ores as well (currently not really interested yet in T3+ ores). There comes a time when automining for quanta isn't going to be very profitable anymore, especially when you're mostly doing T1 ores, and don't have max skills. People will drop out of the automing loop at that point. Less supply, higher prices, people step back in, rince-repeat. Eventually you'll get a balance that people are not mining for profit. Or can only do that in big efficient setups with max skills. That is when you'll see a lot of land freeing up again.

A: Why I (after 1+ years of paying for subscriptions) would leave DU permanently if a full wipe happens and would look at the possibility of taking legal action for the lost time=money and actual lost money.

People have of course different points of view, just as I have. But reasoning isn't a POV, unless you want to argue philosophy. If someone is drowning and wants more water because (s)he's drowning, how do you want to explain that reasoning as a 'different' POV? You don't like change X/Y/Z, because a/b/c, that's a POV. As for frustration, I certainly have some regarding NQ. But way more due to certain posters in here, you included that are shouting the hardest as if your POV is the only one. I'm just trying to level the playing field by playing the same game. As for stomping on people, when the OP starts threads with opening statements like: Don't expect people that use alts to be friendly to you, if you talked about them like that. Being accused of exploiting (aka. cheating) in the game does not make you friends, it makes you enemies. We checked with NQ before using multiple accounts, it was fine as long as not used in pvp. And again, if this was the only instance where (s)he is insinuating that people are exploiting the game using mechanics NQ approves of, but Creator doesn't agree with... Hint: It isn't the first time.

When you decent into the toxic hellpitt to confront the screaming vocal minority that there are other opinions then their own, you can expect to be a little corrupted as well. Be warned! 😉 We all know college is p2w! 😉 Boored! 😉 But seriously, the problem here is that instead of stating problem X and discussing how to solve that problem. It's stated that I want Y, because I have problem X. The problem is literally that people don't do the math, if they did, they would know that the 'solution' they want doesn't actually solve their problem, the opposite happens as it worsens the situation. @Vonboy Has the actual solution to the problem. The problem is that you don't want to a daily grind. You already don't have to. There are two types of skills. #1 increase how quickly mining charges regenerate, #2 increase the amount of mining charges you can hold. #2 increases the amount to max 10 charges. Without training the #1 skills, you get a new charge every 6 hours, you can store 10, thus 60 hours, that is every 2.5 days you have to logon. Even with max #1 skills, charge recharge goes down to every 3.5 hours one charge, thus 35 hours to get all 10, that is every 1.5 days. If you want to change that system, you do not increase how long a single mining charge will allow a MU to run, that just means that people doing their daily grind get an even bigger advantage (over twice the ore at less then an 25% increase in costs). What you need to change is to be able to store more mining charges. That can be done a couple of ways: 1.) Double the basic 5 to 10 charges stored and let every skill increase add 2, for a maximum of 20 charges stored. With no #1 skills trained that would mean 120 hours of mining charge regeneration or 5 days. So you could do the last mining charge Sunday evening (8 charges regenerate over the weekend) and on Friday evening you'll have 20 charges ready again. 2.) Add another skill that adds another 5 storage capacity to the charges. 3.) Combination of the above. I am totally FOR more storage of mining charges, as that doesn't force the 1.5 day grind. What I'm not for is being able to do the same daily grind and automining 2 million liters of ore per week, instead of just one million for just a 20-25% increase in costs (taxes/mining facilities). The issue still is, that IF you want to do it optimally you want that 3.5 hour recharge rate (for 48 charges per week), I don't see 35-50 mining charge storage capacity happening. The question is also: do you want to do the mining mini game 48 times a weekend? Please keep in mind that different people find different things fun, relaxing, enjoyable, or satisfactory... 😉 When people refuse to do the math or just can't seem to do it well (or frankly, at all). They make assumptions that are not based in reality. Then they make proposals that just don't make sense, and worsen the problem they have with DU. If that happens once, sure, I can be a nice guy, I can patiently explain. It can happen twice, trice, but this has happened way, way more then that. Just look up posts by Warlander, Creator, CptLoRes, etc. At a certain point, being a nice guy just doesn't work. NQ has shown that if a small vocal minority is loud enough, they'll bend like a reed in the wind. Scan results deletion is an example, but certainly not the only one. So if that vocal minority is allowed to scream without any opposition, that might just happen again. You're not seeing much opposition in this toxic hellhole of a forum, because it's a toxic hellhole of a forum. How many people do you think looked over the edge and went "Oh hell! I'm not going in there!"? A LOT! Not everyone wants to min/max the game, but be assured that there are quite a few who do. And if you don't keep that extreme in mind when proposing willie-nillie changes, the problems you have with DU will only get worse. The proposed changes from the OP would have resulted in an even more massive influx of Ore on the markets (by those same min/maxers). What happens when you increase supply drastically? Prices go down. How exactly did you want to pay for those tiles again? I dislike most of the changes that have been made in Demeter. Let me be clear on that. I liked to mine in the planet on occasion, it was very ZEN! But there are people that absolutely hated the mining mechanic and love the automining. That same vocal minority that wanted all the current rich/inactive tile holders gone, are the same vocal minority that complains about the tax system that is getting rid of the rich/inactive tile holders. They keep spouting inaccurate information, they keep proposing insane changes they don't understand the consequences of. But when someone calls them on their BS in the same condescending tone they are using, they get huffy about it. If you can't take it, don't dish it out. The issue most people seem to have is that they can't continue to play as they previously had. They can't. It's that simple. The underlying problem isn't that things change, but if enough things change at the same time, not many people can adapt. And that's what we're seeing in DU, too many changes at the same time. And instead of forcing NQ to change it again in a plethora of nonsensical ways, we need to adapt to the new situation and realizing that the old way of playing is gone. Just as with 0.23. And there are ways to adapt, just many are to stuborn to change (whiny voice: I want it MY way!). You want to mine old skool? At one of the player 'markets' there is a public asteroid scanner you can use and find one of those asteroids (Shamsie mentioned it yesterday on his stream). Don't have a capable space ship? Ask some other players nicely if you can join them on an expedition, they might say yes. There are a ton of very helpful people in DU, many would even go out of their way to help you along. But I personally draw the line at loud arseholes, I'm not sharing the secrets of getting space rich with them, I leave that for the nice people... 😉

Let me leave the arsehat at the door and give you a harsh reality check. 1.) Paying for multiple accounts isn't really p2w. It's more like pay more to play more and get more. I might have four accounts, but I have to spend 4+ times the amount of time on the game/activity to get the full benefit from it. That is not truly p2w (pay to win), what is truly p2w is RMT (Real Money Trade), which as far as I know is not allowed via the EULA (something I haven't checked recently for DU, but I assume). Paying RL money and without any real activity ingame, getting quanta (or other stuff) in return. In EVE there is a legal way to do that, it's called PLEX, buy for RL money and sell it ingame for isk. In the KS it was stated that DU would use DACs in the same way, it's just not a feature they implemented in the Alpha/Beta, but will be there on release. I have no clue how this is going to work exactly in DU, but in EVE it has virtually NO impact, because if you spends $10.000 on PLEX, you get 308.000 PLEX, which is around 860 billion isk, sounds like a LOT doesn't it? But in reality it really isn't, and without actual knowledge and skill on how to play the game, that ingame money can be gone in a second, due to pvp or even pve. But that $10k spend by a single person is equivalent to 77 year subscriptions. And what is more, that one person is paying so that 77 other people that can't afford EVE RL, to play for a year, because someone has to buy those PLEX ingame for isk. I'm currently also paying for four subscriptions in EVE (same characters 😉) , but in the past 16 years I've had periods where I had 10-20 subscriptions going paying not with RL money, but with ingame money (isk). I could do way more then folks with only one account, but that took a lot of time, effort, and risk as well. Not something I want to repeat, nor something I could sustain for long (I would like to keep my sanity, thank you very much!). The same is true for DU, If you think that I'll be login in daily to do automining and missioning on four accounts for the next 16 years, you're not living in reality. 2.) Escaping reality to take up residence in an MMO is a foolish endeavor. Because you're not really escaping economic inequality, poverty, hardship, rough/taxing jobs, you're escaping other people. Before you object, let me explain what I mean. We all see wealth and sometimes wealthy people, but we never see, nor interact with truly wealthy people. What you see as wealth, the people with $100.000-$1.000.000 jobs a year don't get that for free either, those need to work hard as well. I've worked with those entrepreneur and manager types that people consider wealthy. Those folks generally have a certain amount of work addiction and generally work way more then is healthy, I really don't want to be them! What does this matter? People like that just don't have the time to spend on 40 accounts in DU (or 80+ accounts as previous claims have been), using 40 accounts to automine or mission is a day job or more. How does that compute? I suspect that there are no RL multi milionairs in DU that are running 40+ accounts, maybe a few folks that are retired and have enough money to pay for multiple accounts. No, the people who have the time to run 40+ accounts in DU are the folks that aren't rich in RL either, nor have 'made' it in RL. Power corrupts, etc. So those poor slobs in RL, 'make' it in DU and behave in exactly the same way in DU as the folks you're trying to escape. There are always exceptions to the rules, but generally they are more rare then true saints, especially in MMOs. So the folks you want to avoid in your virtual world might be here, but certainly aren't running those 40+ alts day in day out. Those would be the students that should be in school, the jobless, the disabled, the retired, etc. How can they afford those accounts? The same way some poor can live in squealer, but still afford two packs of cigarettes a day and two cases of beer a week. And as said before, there is a suspicion of RMT in the game... But just because power in DU is held by the Real World poor, doesn't make DU Socialist State 2.0, they do the same sh!t ingame to you as the others in RL do to you in RL. 3.) DU is not Socialist State 2.0, it could never be, even if advertised that way (which it never was). The game is still made by a company, a for profit company, with investors that want to see money, employees that want to get paid. You get that by people paying you, and with services (what an MMO is), you have more valuable customers, less valuable customers, and undesirable customers. Depending on the state of your service, you might want to keep all three to benefit from the economies of scale. But at a certain point, undesirable customers are just not catered to, and eventually just no longer welcome as a customer. No customer facing employee will ever say that in public, but that is the reality. When a customer takes up more resources (including employee time, etc.) then it brings in, it should be shed. In the startup phase (like NQ is in with DU) that generally doesn't happen, but in profitable services it does. Because then you want to increase profitability by reducing costs. One customer spending as much as 77 other customers is more valuable, not just because (s)he is spending way more, but also because that customer is taking up way less resources then 77 individual customers, just look at it from a customer support perspective. Even with my pitiful 4 accounts, if I have the answer to a question, I can apply it to all four of my accounts. But the others need to ask and get answered four different times. There are also other factors, like only being able to actively control one account at the same time, players with multiple accounts generally being more dedicated, thus looking up stuff more often themselves and contacting support less often. If you want to escape reality, don't play MMOs. Get a library card, read books, play some good single player games, or play games with (only) friends you actually like. Try some board games or pnp RPGs. But escaping reality hasn't helped anyone. Change your lot in life, it isn't easy, you might need to change on some fundamental level, but it certainly is possible. Others have done it before you, and others will do so again. If I had followed in my fathers footsteps, I would now be an introvert working-class truck driver, breaking my back, making way too many hours for a horrible salary, and certainly not playing DU. But most folks are not motivated enough to change (their lot in life), that's not an issue of the poor, but also of the rich. When people have found a spot, they are not easily moved. But playing DU certainly won't change it. Don't take my word for it, just take a look at some of the people that have changed their lot in life.

7 HQ tiles instead of 5 would be nice, but certainly not neccessary, you can easliy make a five tile HQ patch. Honestly doesn't matter to me, I'm good either way. Drop off after 7 days instead of 2. Absolutely NOT! NQ please don't bend to the whiners (again)! This seemingly minor change would have massive impact on the amount of ore people can automine and how many tiles people would optimally need. Over twice as much ore and 25% more tiles needed. Would lead to 25% more quanta sink/sunk. Bad, bad idea! What I do request of NQ is that they implement a basic math tutorial in DU, because way to many people don't have even basic math skills and still complain that the game is broken because they can't do some basic math! That also means you @Creator!

The tile tax rate, is just like the schematics prices, not dynamic. So deflation is, at this time only good for those have billions sitting in the wallet (not me, I spent way too much), for everyone else it sucks! But deflation will only happen if there is more quanta leaving the economy via quanta sinks (like NPC sell orders, schematics, sales taxes, and tile taxes) than enters it via quanta faucets (daily reward, mission rewards, NPC buy orders). That might happen when everyone is bussy with automining and NQ nerfed missions, but when everyone has setup their automining operation and mitigated the mission nerfs, things will go back to 'normal'. Lower prices for products isn't necessarily inflation (as taxes and schematics won't change), there will just be more supply. The next few months the economy of supply and demand will be messy, for many reasons. Most of which I won't mention because it'll be way more profitable for me if others don't get wise to it... 😉

Why, when the answers we get are as undependable as F! So is NQ having a Christmas party?

I suspect that everyone is currently too bussy with setting up their autominers to bother fixing their trade routes (missions), so income is gutted until people have their autominers in place (I suspect the weekend). Another week before the setup is running optimally, meanwhile, next week people will start to fix their trade routes and get their quanta income stream up and running again. People will be scanning and claiming for a while. After that the next landrush will happen with territories being abandoned. The issue isn't is that people won't have the quanta for that, but that they don't have the time for it for a while, too many changes at the same time that require player attention. I personally expect that after the first month of Demeter I'll have a 150-200 tile domain with quanta to spare (after paying all my taxes), that is without actually selling any of the ores I mined. I actually don't want to flood the market with ore, I'll be producing product and consumables that will be sold (or used myself). I'll be converting a tile to a quanta bathtub just to swim in all the quanta... 🙂

This does not apply to new TUs placed after the Demeter patch hit. Pre-Demeter tiles have a 14 day no-tax period.

I just paid 60 million quanta in tile taxes, I'll expect to pay significantly more in the future... See the wealth evaporate! 😉

You keep forgetting: Time=money, so that time you spent on the game is effectively money you spent on the game. Depending on how much you earn in RL, that can be a little, that can be a lot. But you're equating paying more for getting more out of a service as a negative experience that influences your gameplay experience. How about graphics, if people buy expensive computer hardware they can get a better performance and better graphics, they effectively have a better gameplay experience then others that can't afford that computer hardware. Should we then all have basic graphics and horrible performance to make the baseline equal for everyone? I think not! IF you have 40+ alt accounts, you'll probably have access to every talent at max. Refining/production will probably be maximized for everything, just as with placing structures. I suspect you have dedicated miners, dedicated PVPers, placers, manufacturers. You want to explore it for quanta... With 40 characters? That is a PAIN in the butt with all the logins/vr sessions, that sounds too much like work! 40 characters doing 7 mining charges every day is just 6-7 hours per day of dedicated mini game! Doing the missioning system with 40 characters would have been a pain in the arse using the VR system, running multiple routes and VRing 40 toons in would have been a fulltime job already. That takes dedication, time, and effort to do on a regular/daily basis! What's your problem with that? Is that because you don't have or want to spend money=time on doing that as well? Or do you feel you need to do that to 'compete'? Then the question becomes: Could you compete with the person running a single account mining T3/T4/T5 mega nodes 100 hours a week? I sure as hell couldn't (nor would I want to)! I play my main with three alts, one dedicated ship builder (elements), two dedicated pilots, and my main is the refiner/production/miner character (with a bunch of other talents sprankeld in). Those four did missions, two traded routes at the same time and VRing in to do the drop off and pickup. After I setup proper AP, landing pads, infra, testing, etc. The flying was not that involved (and was working on making it even easier). What took the most effort/time was the VR sessions and the re-logging of characters. I might eventually consider a fifth character. But 40 or more... Hell NO! 😉 But I pad $80 => €70 per year of game time per character, that's the price of a new computer game these days. Worth it for me at the time at this time in my life, there were times where that absolutely wasn't worth it. Not everyone's circumstances or resources are the same, expecting that they should be is naive imho.