Novean-61657

Well... I didn't have much of a choice... Now had I! I have done involuntary PVP in DU! 😉 Heck yes! I'm bad at PVP, but no excuses about that, I suck at PVP! But I am decent at math and math tells me that unless I bring a far larger fleet or way more guns/armor. I'm not going to win from a fully skilled level 5 combat pilot. What is this 'friends' thing you talk about, can we buy that in the NQ store? In games like DU and EVE I'm more of a builder, trader, explorer, miner. I'll shoot another player if I absolutely have to. But beyond that, life and let life. In EVE I only won when I flew a weird arse fit that didn't fit in the meta and pirates where dumbfounded (and their fits didn't work as expected). In DU I don't even bother equipping my ships with guns. I did do some math on it and I didn't get happy with what I found. Then the meta changed again and the whole pvp thing was fixed in one direction, but a mess in the other (fitting guns on haulers wise). Later patches didn't improve matters at all... I prefer my pilots to be level 5 in all the practical flying skills first, now actually starting to look at the combat skills (after 10 months of skilling)... By Handling character (placement for ships) still has a couple months to go before touching radar/weapons... I'm primarily a solo player, and being a good little boy, I haven't touched pvp with multiple accounts. No workarounds via Geforce Now, etc. I really hope NQ changes it's stance on multiple accounts in pvp after wipe/launch, because as a solo player you can't compete unless you also cheat!

This is the reason why I haven't 'fixed' my constructs before, I saw this happening a mile away! The shipbuilders assured us that they fixed their ships, nice! Then a few patches later I see warning signs again... Then I see the warning signs shift to different elements within the element, depending on when I look... Yeah, not touching this with a 10-foor pole! They'll either fix it, roll it back or leave it completely broken as it is. No reason why I should spend precious time messing with it now... We'll see what the wipe brings... Even if people can bring in BPOs, large parts will need to be redone or are already obsolete due to more drastic changes... @RiptoseHow do you think a wipe will fix this? The problem is, you build something and according to the new build placement it is fine, then later you get warnings it is no longer fine. Unless they've finally fixed that now, I'm not seeing that spontaneously fixed after the wipe... We might not have immediate issues after the wipe due to us no longer having any constructs and building the BPOs we have is still a long ways off. But that isn't a fix imho. Even if they wipe BPOs as well, new build constructs will have the same issue!

Mission running has been dead since the 14th of April, the wipe announcement... Why grind/consume energy when the chances of a wipe are now huge? After a wipe missioning is interesting again, but needs a complete rethink by the mission runners. Do you have multiple accounts (after wipe/launch, no more beta accounts)? If so, how many? Enough to regularly have more then one mission available to you? If not, you can probably get away with a far lighter ship to do the interplanetary trips. No more warpdrive, no more atmo stuff, might not decrease your weight that much, you might still do max speed with a smaller ship... You might place small space stations above the planets and use larger ships to move the cargo up and down (they don't need max speed). You might want to use warp shuttles between those small space stations to move to the next mission. You could still do 3-4 high paying missions per day, 4+ days a week (Friday and the weekend gets more dangerous). The small spaceships would be a lot cheaper, you could leave them at the destinations eventually picking them up again... Use a somewhat larger space craft to redistribute them with warp if the distribution is off. If you have a ton of chars, you might have enough of the special pool to do multiple runs with a single ship, even if you're ship is slower, it won't go below 20k, increasing the trip by ~50% time. The longest trips would go from 3.5 per day to maybe 2.5 per day... You could run multiple PCs and you could run a GeforceNow (paid and unpaid are both options) client on each PC, making more and more quanta with each additional session... Issues: how many cores can you place? Workaround: Small ships should be easily disassembled and stored in a box at the space base, redeployed easily from BPC. As long as you hold the BPO of the ship, that shouldn't be an issue... I might do some experimenting in the dead-phase of DU (waiting on wipe) with small ships, space bases, etc. The mission rewards might now seem 'not worth it' but that is in the current quanta saturated market. That will change drastically in the post wipe/launch market. Especially when they kill all the Schematics...

Look at the list of mission names, above there, there are two tabs/buttons "Classic" & "Special", you on "Classic" by default. Hit "Special" and you see the goodies list...

What about the AM mini game? (UGH!) Or picking up all the rocks that drop via the mini game? (EWW!) Or all that pvp during the now slower boating missioning? (ACK!) Imho, we're doing all the waiting and all the UGH! EWW! ACK! for the building and maybe flying some cool aircraft/spacecraft (for a short while). DU is mostly (time) grinding...

Are you one of those people that, if they don't see it, it doesn't exist? You work in a nuclear reactor without any protection because you don't see the radiation? The 'reasonable prices' and the 'ore inflation is over' is a direct impact of the 'super rich' (in ore and quanta). Example: Let's see, if after the wipe I can produce 5+ million ore per week, that would pretty much flood the market when there's not much quanta in the economy. When I mission 100+ million in quanta per week, I have way more quanta then the regular DU player who is struggling to mine enough ore to make his starting stuff. You can easily control the ore market and with that, a lot of the element market. How exactly would you compete with me? So producing stuff would not be very profitable, if at all. You build a couple of containers to sell, I race you to the bottom with a 100 fold of your items, when we reach the bottom I buy your stock with all the quanta I have and reset my prices high again... Now imagine being one of the first corps to get your hands on the first DU weapons, you can control most asteroids, alien resource nodes, and probably the space routes. There goes all the asteroid mining outside of the safe zone (higher end ore), missioning outside safe zone becomes dangerous, etc. Being the first to Warpdrives and warp beacons, the first to alien resource points, etc. You don't see it, but it has a big impact on the game. Your first issue will be that things aren't as cheap anymore as you're used to. Some stuff might not even be available or in a price range you can afford the next year or so. Things like warpdrives... Good slowboating to another planet, especially if it's outside the safezone...

If you think that, you're foolish! It has had huge impacts on players, from market pvp, to actual pvp, etc. It's just not directly visible. The moment those players interact with players or stop interacting with players it can have an impact. The scope of misuse of some of the exploits was massive. It might be mitigated by the possibility that many of the people that misused the exploits left the game a while back... Even legitimate game loops that where poorly thought out like the missioning system or the huge (returning) NPC orders devalued the quanta enormously. The Meganode mechanic created huge stocks of ore that weren't sold, with the introduction of autominers the potential of that was hugely underestimated by both devs and players. We now have very cheap ore. Quanta and ore value have a huge impact on the average player (either positively or negatively). I also think that people overestimate and underestimate the effect a wipe will have on them. I suspect that the players complaining the loudest will have the hardest time after an ore/construct/quanta wipe, and the folks that are already space rich will have get even richer faster. While the missioning system will change after the patch/wipe, it can still be very heavily used to earn quanta. The automining system has had no changes, beyond limiting core counts (limiting the amount of mining locations you can exploit), but it's still very overpowered if you know what you're doing and are dedicated... Everything changes, it all stays the same...

The only real thing of substance here is the BP preview, that is SO HUGE! I really hop it'll work well. The rest I might like or I might not (in certain situations), but imho it doesn't change game play... @CptLoResA very persistent algae that showed up after one of the patches our AI implemented... But I suspect it's a mutated foot fungus that one of our fellow settlers introduced...

#1 If you talking about the start of beta, ores didn't run out anyway. Surface ore kept respawning, this might have been a bug. #2 For anything other then the more rare ores, finite resources didn't matter, there was just so much of it. Although not always as easily mined as meganodes... #3 The game wasn't ready for finite resources (besides the permanent storage requirements for tunnels of all the mined out tiles), it would mean that if/when resources run out in the actual game, there wasn't a mechanic in place to expand to other resources. Like moving to another system, exploration, warpgate building , etc. So when the resources are gone, the game dies or the resources need to be reset... The game mechanics also just don't support finite resources in the core mechanics. Stuff can disappear, either through destruction, deletion or consumption. We also have no way to develop alternatives, like water based space fuels, etc. Also keep in mind that the amount of resources per player is relatively limited compared to anything close to the real world. A normal human consumes a tiny amount of resources, a DU player consumes enormous amounts of resources. If every human on the planet would own a couple of Mammoth Tanker, it would be a different discussion... There have been so many compromises with any form of reality to make a game (instead of a very boring simulation) that the old way of finite resources would be unsustainable. That doesn't mean the current system is all that great either, but there is more room for improvement and probably easier implementation. I do miss the ZEN of planetary mining!

If we're using standard definitions for development cycles, they've redefined the initial release state and all the other 'promised' features will be added in expansions down the road... If you look at it from that pov, it might be a 'full release'...

Jim! I'm a text render engineer dammit! Not a game designer! Do you want your house painter fixing your car? Do you want (in this case) the programmer designing your game loop? I personally think that is a bad idea, I think the reason we're in this mess is because too many people that aren't game designers designed the game. On the other hand, we wouldn't have DU in the first place if it weren't for those same people... Too many people on these forums fashion themselves (undiscovered) game designer talent, often their designs or 'fixes' have the depth of a pool of rainwater. Game designer is an actual job, requiring experience and insights! Some get lucky and fall into it due to innate talent, but there are actual game designer courses (that are actually quite interesting), some even part of Bachelor programs. I think that expecting more game play loops before, during or just after launch (beyond what's already been announced) highly unrealistic. To be honest, I expect that if DU doesn't achieve their expected post launch income numbers, DU might not reach the end of the year before they pull the plug permanently...

I don't disagree with your take on that it's some form of p2w. How do you feel about me taking a week of work to play DU, so I'm 'paying' a weeks salary to play more DU and get an advantage. Now I totally see people actually arguing that when you don't get something, you don't pay for it... So let me take the correct approach: As an employee I would get a bonus in money that I could get payed out to my bank account or buy additional vacation days with (this is quite common here). If I buy those vacation days, and use them to play more DU, is that p2w? Now also think about the situation where multi account isn't allowed, that would impact the people who care about what NQ says is allowed and what is not. But the people that don't care about that, would totally have a huge advantage then. Just like what is now happening in pvp, people who cheat have a huge advantage over those that can't. But imho this discussion is totally MOOT, because during the KS it was already apparent that NQ was going for a p2w model, with DAC. Even if multi account isn't allowed, people still can buy DAC and sell it for ingame stuff. That is direct p2w! In a game like EVE Online that really doesn't matter. Does it matter in DU though?

Several PCs isn't a stretch in this day and age and free services provided by GeforceNow allow you to run two clients on a single PC. You might even be able to run several GeforceNow clients on a single machine with VMs... I agree that a LOT of the stuff I mentioned can be done by several people in a corp, but those people want a share of the loot. You don't have to share the loot with the multiple personalities you create when running alts... 😉

That depends on how you do it... Examples: Training, you can train x times faster, certain characters can do thing 1, the other thing 2, the other thing 3, etc. I have two dedicated pilots, everything to lvl 5, one dedicated Element placer and one industrialist. You could train dedicated gunners, split up the Industry stack across multiple accounts, etc. You, as a player, can do everything well (it might just require a different character). Automining, allows you x times the charges to automine, allowing you to mine more ore then a single account. Use for your main account. Missions, gives you multiple valuable packages to transport. Makes more quanta you can use for your main account. Multiple accounts can't run on a single PC, but they can run on multiple PCs. Which is allowed by NQ, as long as you don't use multiple chars in PVP. One PC flying missions, one PC doing other stuff... Multiple accounts do make the progression of the 'collective' faster. More quanta, more ore, cheaper production, more profit, better ships/industry, etc. This snowballs quickly!

Even if they give details on wipe, I wouldn't trust that statement as the endstate of the wipe. NQ is famous for changing 'it's' mind at the last minute...

To be fair, NQ never claimed they were wiping to solve inequality, they were solving issues they never fixed during beta. Like people exploiting bugs and not rolling those exploits back. Making systems (like missioning, automining, etc.) not 'balanced' with the rest of the game, slow an half-baked fixes, then again waiting months to do anything about it and then 'fixing' it with a wipe...

Erm... This is DU in a nutshell, or do you have everything at your base? I certainly don't! You don't want to know how many trips I made to my outer planets base(s) just to get everything there I needed before building stuff there that was more efficient to build there (instead of hauling from the safezone. Even as a new player (back when beta started), I had to buy stuff I didn't have enough of or wasn't mineable on Sanctuary (T3+ stuff). And going to market was a thing, you brought stuff to sell and spend your quanta on stuff you wanted. These days you have way more options as a new player to do or get stuff, the limitation is Schematics when you go beyond backpack production.

Missions, doing it with 10 alts means all the money is for you, doing with 10 friends you split the money. As for time... The flying you can do AFK, if you're not doing it that way, you're doing it wrong! The time is in the logging in the 10 characters. Missions: Fuel up ship Make sure everyone is onboard (they should already be there) Fly to pickup point (on autopilot) Pickup cargo Log in 10 alts doing the same (takes a while) Fly your route to delivery point, slowboat style, outside of the pipes (on autopilot) Land on autopilot. Deliver package Log in 10 alts doing the same (takes a while) Transfer profit to main Repeat I don't know how many trips you make per day, but if it's one, you're doing something wrong if it takes you hours. Unless you add in the actual transit time you're running on autopilot... If you do this 4x a day, it might take a combined ~2 hours/day, but it would make you ~250M/day, if you run a more complex route it might take you ~2.5 hours/day and make ~375M/day. You could make more per day running multiple PCs/clients, but then it quickly is going to take up a lot more time flying around with warp shuttles handling all the pickup/delivery. I've been flying around for months doing 3-4 trips a day, doing 4 missions each time. 4 days a week, making 300M-400M/week. I was working up the infrastructure to up that to 1B+ with the same crew (more complex route and an additional PC). But the more talk about launch and wipe, the less motivated I became to do something with it...

It's easy! Look how I scribbled how it should work on this napkin! 😉

That doesn't fly for me. NQ made the game experience a huge grind before you can do certain things the last year and a half has been an experience of additional limitations with every patch, most of us working hard to overcome those limitations, just to run into another wall that suddenly appears randomly after another NQ patch. That doesn't mean I didn't have any satisfaction in the game, I did have some satisfaction when I reached a milestone in my (master) plan. Let me put it this way, I've been crawling along DU, every time I started to get up a bit, NQ kicked my legs from under me with their changes. The wipe will be NQ coming out with a machete to cut my arms and legs off and telling me that worms should start over... Imho NQ has been hard at work making DU more grindy then is necessary or fun.

Since beta launch, how many of these redesigns have been forced due to changes?

Have you... I'm just suggesting that every character could take only 100M quanta in wallet into the post launch game. If you don't have that... No problem. If you have more, anything above that is converted into loyalty points and you can do 'something' with those. I certainly have more in my wallets then 100M quanta, but one of the arguments is that missioning has been misused, that will probably mean that there are some people with significantly more quanta in their wallet then 100M quanta. Or you could make it more complex like: For every month a character had an active subscription in beta, 10M quanta can be taken into the game post launch... What's your problem... With this...

Wait... Correct me if I'm wrong! You're on Sanctuary, you go to the local market, if not there you take the shuttle to Allioth. Then you take the teleporter to Alioth 6 and walk or use the compact-able ship to go to Alioth Market 6... Side note: Maybe I'm 'special' but my characters can craft wings in their packpacks... XS and S...

"we're going to do everything we can so that we don't have to go through a wipe again" is the message they pushed at Beta launch. Imho the flat text doesn't do justice to how much a full wipe at launch would be very unlikely, even their (streaming)partners pushed this message. (For everyone that was new to DU atleast.) This is imho the reason why DU suddenly became so popular over night with a certain (streaming) crowd. And also imho they don't seem to have done everything they could do, it almost seems that they did everything they did to do a full wipe at 'release'. I see that as misleading at best and false advertising at worst. In business terms I would call it improper management, and with the large turn around of CEOs, I might not be the only one. I'm also of mind that NQ has other options then a complete wipe. Reimbursing people for Schematics would make quanta pretty worthless overnight. What NQ could do is convert that quanta to loyalty points for example, with that you could buy certain things that are not directly in game, like skins for elements, characters, pets... Or even game time (sure that cost NQ money, but the f-upped). You could even limit every character to a max of 100M quanta, everything above that at date/time x is converted to loyalty points. Folks that exploited bugs (doubling items for example) in the past should be punished and the exploited product removed without refund. People that used unbalanced game mechanics can't be blamed for the faults NQ made, but you only get refunded what you paid for it (so cheap Schematics only gets you back very little). A system like this will take work, but imho I would prefer this to a space market (although I like the concept)... The way NQ is doing it now is going to generate a ton of bad blood (wipe or no wipe) and that is going to seep into the new player pool (toxic).

I am/was still playing and I'm not opposed to the Schematics removal, that's from someone that's been spending a lot of time/resources on acquiring Schematics since 0.23. I don't even mind that all my Schematics go POOF!(tm) without compensation. Why? Because I always found Schematics extremely unfluffy, we're far into the future, trying to build a new civilization and Aphelia suddenly reintroduces copyrights? Quanta makes sense as a token that facilitates trade between colonists. Schematics do not fit in here. Taxes also don't fit in that fluff imho. It breaks a bit of the game immersion for me. I can understand why people see Schematics as a method to put brakes on manufacturing and facilitate trade, but what I've come to realize is that it's only a temporary brake for motivated people. The moment you get far enough ahead of the rest of the pack, your Schematic growth is exponential. This is also the reason why people where doing SO much missioning, they needed the quanta to buy Schematics. Sure you need it as well for taxes, buying BPCs, elements and ore on the market, etc. But certainly not so much... As an example: Over the last months I've been doing a ton of missioning with my four characters and acquired 2B+ quanta. Some was spent on buying ore, BPCs, elements, etc. during that period, but the objective was getting enough quanta to start building a Warp Beacon factory on Sanctuary. Yesterday I had 1.7B quanta available and spent 800M on BPCs, that is an insane and unreasonable amount of BPCs to buy for any normal situation. The scarry thing is that with my current trade route that is about of two weeks of missioning... If I expanded my traderoute and/or did an additional traderoute with another PC, I would do this in less then a week. Now the missioning nerfs this would mean about 8 weeks with my current configuration, with an additional PC, maybe 5 weeks... BUT without Schematics, why would I bother ~100M/week is still way more then I need without Schematics. Why would folks have 20-100 alts for missioning if they have way more quanta then they can spend/use? Imho it's the same with (auto)mining, when I've mined 25M Natron for space fuel (year+), why would I continue to mine that? To sell it? Only if it's profitable and if I need the quanta.... Personally I think that the removal of the Schematics system and the Missioning nerfs with the connected max space speed nerf, will result in a better image for DU. It will not actually solve the things some players have been complaining about that is now resulting in a potential complete wipe, but it will make it way more hidden and more difficult to understand/comprehend. Which is good for NQ. Now, if you do the Missioning nerfs with the connected max space speed nerf and NOT the Schematics system removal. The amount of Schematics normal, casual players can acquire will be so extremely limited that it is never going to be a game play loop they can participate in. Something you can already see in the forums on a regular basis. People make stuff and can't sell it on the market for profit. Because they can't sell anything for profit, they can't buy anything they can't build, as no quanta. They can mine (more) and sell that, but they kinda need those ores to build stuff. Even so, it would mean all the players that can't compete in the manufacturing loop are mining until there is so much ore that the ore prices drop a LOT and then they can't make much quanta anymore either, so back to missioning they go (if they can/want) or just quit. When players, new or old, can just build anything they want, they just have to mine it. No quanta needed (only for taxes, but I would love to see that gone as well and replaced by something else)! Imho Schematics make the divide between rich and poor players ever larger.