Novean-61657

Multiple accounts are allowed in DU. Multiple clients in pvp were not allowed (unless NQ changed their mind on that front). The problem is then not that it p2w, but that it's cheating in pvp. Of course, there are arguments to be made for multiple accounts in DU to be p2w, but win what exactly? Of course a single account with 20 months training in piloting and gunnery will win from a single account with only 3 months of training in the same skills... That first account started earlier, has more talent points and paid more in subscriptions then the second account. Is that also p2w in your mind?

For any normal game, the game loop should be entertaining on it's own. But for a lot of us, this game is a building game where we expect persistence. The game loops in the game are actually quickly boring and don't let up. It's just not only the building that can be frustrating (lack of proper tools/options), but grinding the resources/quanta is such a bother! The satisfaction comes when you've finish that project and set the goals to the next. Part of that satisfaction is that what you did is now there and can be used. Be it a ship, a base, factory, landing-pad, space station, the materials for 100M in space fuel, infrastructure, etc. I of course can choose to break it down again, to do something else, abandon it, blow it up in pvp, etc. But that is my choice/risk to make/take... If NQ would have said that they would wipe at launch, I wouldn't be playing DU and paying NQ for the privilage. If NQ says, we'll do it in two years (again), I won't continue to play. Many wouldn't.

Imho you're wasting your time (yours to waste though). NQ has promised systems that after years of development are still not in place. There are enough ideas at NQ, just not enough manpower/skill/focus to get that done.

But a single character doing missions was never the issue. A single character today would make ~100M/week (doing it via my method). That currently sounds like a lot as ore is cheap, making elements cheap. But if ore is not cheap, as there is virtually none on the market, what will you spend your quanta on. Mining would be profitable, but you can make everything yourself, so why buy from the market? If I would be playing again after the wipe with my four accounts (subscription runs till November) I would do the following: 1 Pilot would fly the four best missions from the 4 characters every day (except weekends). => quanta in All four would setup maximized automining operations, 200+ autominers, just do the mini game with a character during the week => ore in During the weekend do asteroid mining, one character doing the piloting of the scanship, another character doing the mining, another doing the hauling back and forth. => ore in I would do this until I have my infrastructure/ships in place again, then start selling ore as well, as it would still be pretty valuable. => ore out, quanta in

With the slanted message of NQ regarding wipe or no wipe, I expect a wipe, just unsure/unclear on how bad it's going to be. Thus I'm making a list for how likely certain thing are going to be wiped. I'm not talking about what I would like to see, but what I expect from NQ. Maybe someone else has some interesting views on that: From most likely to least likely: Schematics Quanta Scans Items in market storage Items in container storage on constructs outside of Sanctuary Constructs outside of Sanctuary Items in container storage on constructs everywhere Constructs everywhere Blueprint Copies Blueprint Originals Talent Points There could be some convoluted system in place where you could only take X amount of whatever into the full release, but I imagine that unlikely as that would need very specific systems in place and I do not think that NQ currently has the manpower to do that (well)... Unless NQ drops some more specific information, I won't be grinding anymore quanta. With the quanta I have, I won't be spending it on Schematics (had just grinded enough to setup my first Warp Beacon factory). I will be buying a bunch of BPCs, move all the stuff in market storage to Sanctuary and move some of the other stuff in system to Sanctuary. Maybe build some additional ships, park them at sanctuary and distribute them evenly across my accounts. With the left over quanta, share across my accounts. I think I'll have been as risk averse as humanly possible doing all this. When done, I'll be playing other games until it becomes clear what will happen, and even then I might not return as NQ has been extremely undependable regarding decisions that heavily impact the player base (scans is just one example of many). ==================================== Imho, if you're a player that doesn't care one way or another, I'm happy for you that you will enjoy playing a game no matter what. I would love to be as an accepting person as you are! If you want a wipe, I'm pretty sure you'll get your wish, I hope you're happy with yourself. If you actually get what you really wanted is a whole other matter entirely... If you don't want a wipe, you're pretty fncked! 😉 It might not be as bad as a complete wipe, they might not take everything... If that's acceptable or not to you, is a personal matter. Personally I do not want a wipe at all. And I can only comment here and on Discord to make my stance clear, as I only buy my year subscription from Markee Dragon these days and did that in November (12 months on all four accounts). So I cannot make a statement by cancelling my recurring subscription to make it clear to NQ that the current situation isn't acceptable. Not to mention that cancelling your subscription required you to jump through some hoops in some circumstances... @NQ Shame on you on just making the situation worse (even more unclear), hours before the easter weekend! We've been asking for a clear decision for many months now, not making a clear statement (one way or the other) is just shameful!

Maybe... You still get a bunch of Special missions per day, it looks like you'll get a couple of missions worth a couple of million. I'm currently doing one traderoute 3-4 times a day, with 4 characters, ~4 days a week (the weekend is less save through pvp space). With the new system I can probably only do one special mission at a time, at different locations. I would still be able to do 4 of them (less space/weight, still at full speed) per day, but I can choose the 4 best special missions from a pool of four characters. Add to that a couple of less paying, lightweight constant flights, with 4 missions a day, I can get around 25M/day or 100M/week. That's about 1/4th of what I get from the current setup. But that change isn't done in a vacuum. They also want to abolish the Schematics model, that is my biggest quanta sink at the moment, after that it's buying BPs from players (of whole ships if I'm feeling lazy). I currently do buy certain components from the market due to not (yet) being able to build them myself, that would change and I would have very little reason to buy stuff from the market (I manufacture often as much as I can myself). Then we have basic materials, but with the probable wipe, everyone needs to start afresh, most people will need their ore themselves, so very little winds up on the market. And what does wind up there will be relatively expensive, way more expensive then it is now. Due to that, auto mining, picking up stuff, asteroid mining does become interesting again. For me, I can generate enough charges on four max chars to run 200 autominers, so I'm good on ore... Might have to buy some of the more rare stuff, but I don't expect much. What I do need quanta for is taxes, at current rates I need maybe 10% of that 100M/week, that leaves me with 90M/week to spend on other stuff, without Schematics that is a huge amount of quanta! If you have more chars, you could decide to run more then one PC doing missions, the more chars you have, the bigger chance you'll have overlap in missions, making more and more quanta... I expect that in a world where you needed billions for schematics, you could earn tens of billions with missioning. In a world without schematics, you can still make billions doing missions...

But how long will you stay when you realize that nothing has really changed, that the dedicated geniuses still outperform you by a mile. And that others, will also see opportunities your group won't or will just outspend you in RL with accounts and computers... Anyone complaining about 'an unfair advantage' doesn't get how an MMO sandbox works... There's always a bunch of people that have advantages you do not have, making them by definition unfair. Get over it! I prefer a ton of extra players, but I hate basing bad decisions on people that will quit after a month...

I would tell you: horrible design! And no future for the game as it can't scale if every change is 'lots of work'...

So if it happens in your bubble, it happens everywhere... The people I know speak either Dutch or English, the rest of the world must speak either Dutch or English... Think about this: If I need 40-50 Metalwork M machines, I can just start a production line and I'll have them tomorrow, at ore prices and perfect production. No need to travel to location X and back again. Especially useful when you're not next to Alioth Market 6 with you're factory. I'm currently placing my factories either on top of AM6 or on Sanctuary, this isn't an issue anymore. But previously I was building all over the system and hopping back and forth between Alioth and the outer planets got expensive with warpcells and time consuming. Especially when most of the ore was already at that outer planet.

So they are already gifted with talent and you want to further give them advantages? If they are gifted instead of lucky, they can reproduce or improve on their creative works again, by spending time again. They will be rewarded again, just like the rest of us... Now a fun mindbender... What about the folks selling LUA code like the space elevators, autopilots, etc. That is code that can be exported and imported again... They loose a lot less (besides having to recode some stuff for the new release). How is that fair... Conclusion: There is no fair!

I have 4 accounts, have no hair and am from Gen X, do I count? Let's say I spent 1500 hrs playing with four accounts vs. your 1500 hrs playing with your single account. How does that make my or your stuff anymore or less valuable to each of us? I don't give a flying X about someone with many, many billions (like many that are still playing). I don't care that I have more stuff then you, neither should you! My take is, never base your decisions on what others say. Listen to others and see if their point of view changes your point of view, we don't know everything, we can still learn from others. But certainly not from everyone, truly learning from others is often rare... /fortune cookie Exploiting a bug is bad, exploiting a game mechanic is good. If the game mechanic was badly designed, that is not our problem, that is NQs fault. I'm also flabbergasted how some exploits of bugs haven't been manually fixed by NQ. Someone else gave a good example how CCP fixed some exploits with EVE Online, but they are certainly not unique in that.

Sure you can, you can sell it to all those new player NQ is talking about that will be attracted to DU when they wipe... Hmm... Yeah... Maybe you are screwed! 😉

What sources do you have that we don't have? If you're quoting the pletora of MMO player population sites, those are far, far from accurate! I would go so far as to say that your comment and number of players is meaningless.

I don't care about advantage over others, I'm doing my own thing in DU and I want to keep what I've been doing the past year and a half. So I don't want ANY wipe. I have no interest in mining another 25 million Natron for fuel, etc. I want stability in tools and rules, I want to start designing space ships without another bunch of extreme makeover balancing patches that would make my craft unflyable without a major redesign. I do not want to setup another bunch of space bases by hand, because we can't accurately place stuff and some scripts require voxel precission. I do not want to flatten an entire tile again at 1600 meters (not just flatten, but place a lot of new ground), etc.

I paid for a persistent MMO experience, so everything I did in this game would be preserved, as in not wiped. I spend way, way more time building stuff, accumulating stuff an quanta then the value of multiple subscriptions for a year and a half. Something by a factor a 100+... Time=money. Now that wouldn't be so bad if the game loop was truly enjoyable all the time I spent on it. Let me tell you a secret about DU, it isn't fun most of the time. Imho it's about satisfaction when you make certain stuff happen, like building X, buying Y, or manufacturing Z, etc. All those things require you to do a lot of boring things. Mining was interesting when you started, but doing it for many, many hours per day, week in week out is quickly no longer fun. Setting up 100s of machines is also quickly no fun anymore. Placing voxels small square by small square, because NQ has very limited tools, is quickly no fun anymore. Flying 12-16 hrs/day doing missions... You get the idea... Now if you hit that magic number that allows you to do XYZ, that is the point of satisfaction. The satisfaction partially comes from not having to do that again for that particular project, unless you yourself do something really stupid (pvp). I agree that keeping the Talent points will actually keep most veterans playing, making the TP unassigned would be a HUGE bonus. But then the question becomes, why just the TP, that gives the veteran players a HUGE advantage over starting players? Why not just keep everything? I'm absolutely not saying that I want a complete wipe, no way! But I am a huge proponent of consistency, and this wipe business sounds like a LOT of inconsistencies and still leaving certain people with HUGE advantages...

I've been doing some thinking... If NQ does a full wipe, except talent points. Existing players would have a HUGE advantage! My main can perfectly produce most T1 (Basic) Elements and is getting close to perfectly building T2 (Uncommon) Elements, the same is true for Atmo and Space Fuel. Do some math and see how much of a difference that makes compared to a fresh player. That's not only an issue with quanta, but with resource consumption rate, and advancement rate. I can make stuff faster, be earlier done with a ship, get earlier to missioning, trading, mining, etc. Grab land earlier, start scanning tiles earlier, etc. My main has almost perfect passive mining talents, my other three characters also have almost perfect passive mining talents (except the handling talents, need only one char for those). Not only do I get more per autominer, I also get a TON more mining charges per week. My secondary has perfect placement talents for vehicles, combine that with the perfect flying skills of my third and (almost) fourth char. That would mean I could lift a lot more, a lot faster, combine that with the limitations of the max speed in space, that is also a huge advantage over newbies. That's why keeping the talent points is a bad idea if the objective is to equalize the difference between new and existing players... But there's something you can't realistically block, the knowledge on how to do stuff effectively in DU, what you should look at, how, why, when, etc. The only way to counter this is to massively change the game on launch or just start blocking existing players. Keep in mind that the players and corps that where playing in Alpha had a HUGE advantage over us Beta starters, they became massive fast. For some reason people keep forgetting this... The problem with this is, there is no solution, not even an imperfect solution. The cat is out of the bag.

How would limiting Aphelia packages work with docked ships? Couldn't they dock or something? Reducing the mission rewards just makes quanta more valuable. Limiting how many quanta each character can earn per week from missioning sounds like a good idea, until you realize that this just means that people will buy more characters. At least those that can, many can't, and the RL rich get richer ingame... Then if you have money, if you can only have x amount of packages per ship, per character and you already have multiple characters, but you can run only one DU client per PC... Just buy another PC... So many characters on multiple PCs... The problem you're trying to solve, you can't, at least not with these simplistic solutions. You can make it more difficult, but you can't fix it at all. Oh, I already hear, limit it to one account per player! How are you going to enforce that? How about only one active client per IP? Ever heard of VPNs? Block VPNs? What about the people who can route traffic through private servers in datacenters/Azure/AWS/GCP/etc? For every block you try to throw up, there's a counter for the people motivated to counter, but it just makes life more difficult for the rest of us and NQ is spending an inordinate amount of time on insignificant issues...

Dammit! With the wipe coming, I might have to try this 'Minecrafting' thingamabob! 😉

Because some people find manufacturing stuff yourself fun and satisfying... But I understand what you did there Daphne "Trolllord" Jones. 😉

If NQ is destroying all the work except core blueprints, wouldn't the people that spent their time making those core blueprint have a huge advantage over the rest? I'm not in favor of a wipe at all. But if you want to be consistent and wipe the wealth from players, that includes core blueprints. Time is quanta, and ready built objects that normally take time to build are worth a significant amount of quanta. So the person that spend a 100 hours mining gets shafted by loosing everything, the person that spend 100 hours building and making BPOs isn't? How is that fair?

I found the Pros vs. Cons extremely slated towards one side. I can see which way the wind is blowing (wipe). Instead of focusing on the positives of the current player base, there's only a focus on the negative side. If people need to spend weeks picking up ore to build even a basic functioning ship, how many would be able (or willing) to help newbies in a significant way? Not to mention how many veterans to offer such help would have left with the full wipe... I feel incredibly used by NQ, I would say false advertising during beta launch is a problem. Sure there was a caveat that said "We'll avoid it, unless we have no choice.", but I'm missing the 'no choice' part in this conversation. You've been asking us for subscriptions these past year and a half with the promise of a persistent universe, over the last year many, many pieces of that persistence promise have already been destroyed. With the release of 0.23 I've spent most of my time in DU adjusting to all the changes NQ has been making: Schematics, mining changes, scanning, terrain reset, core limits, Aphelia parking, etc, etc, etc. Instead of more options, we got limits upon limits upon limits. This has made achieving self set long term goals almost impossible, as NQ kept giving us more busywork instead of just facilitating the sandbox. Changes that should have been made in Alpha, were constantly been made in paid Beta. NQ, no matter how you go, you will piss people off. The question will be how the pissed people will respond and how that will look to the rest of the world and potential new customers... A trustworthy company that keeps it's promises or an exploitative company that goes back on it's promises whenever it suits them... If NQ was more clear at the start of beta and making wipe a very real possibility, instead of a remote one, and misusing their (streaming)partners to push that message (and sell subscriptions). I, and many with me, would never have started paying for a DU subscription, especially not multiple subscriptions. Without that you would never had the population bump DU got from both subscribers and streamers. I don't know about NQ financials and how much the subscription fees kept NQ afloat, but it certainly helped investors keep pumping money into the company...

I like the idea of the space market, I think I like the space market as presented in the Dev blog, I do not know if I'll like the actual implementation of the space market... I already considered making a BIG space station at the middle of the safe zone, this might really push me to actually do it... It got put on the back-burner due to the constant major changes that required my attention way more over the last year... I understand the issues, but depending on which people and what kind of resources are involved, it might become an actual hub. But if and how that happens depends on so many factors, it's a complete crap shoot on when or IF that happens! Imho it will also depend on how easy it will be to dock/land on those landingpads...

I can understand why someone might think that, but do you have any evidence that this is the case? Some examples from other MMOs?

Why are they empty threats? If 1.5-2 years of progress and subscriptions goes POOF!(tm), why would folks that find that problematic start over from scratch? Especially if that is just the last straw for many of us. How many of those that already left over the last year and a half do you think will come back if there's a wipe? I suspect very few. Look, I understand the whole mining wipe that happened (something is being removed and added), the scans wipe was a bit iffy though. But a complete wipe-wipe... That is just... Unacceptable and, at least for me, totally destroys ANY credibility NQ had left. NQ without any credibility (for me and others) sets the whole future of persistence for DU on loose screws and that makes it unplayable for me. A wipe-wipe is DU in a failed state (for me), maybe even worse then closing down the servers due to NQ insolvency... It's not as if there aren't other sci-fi games that will scratch a similar itch (nothing is like DU), but if it's playing DU with so much frustration and disappointment (not to mention spending money on subscriptions) vs. playing another, similar game, the question quickly becomes mood for me...

I was looking for the right word, you nailed it with 'envy'! Envy is not an emotion that will go away with are whining now for a wipe, there is never pleasing these kinds of people unless they are the ones on top of the food chain. So I have a tens of millions of talent points, and a decent amount of ore/quanta/etc. Compared to a new player that's a LOT! But I've been playing this game and paying for that privilege for a year and a half now, if it all goes POOF!(tm) at launch I'll feel a different emotion... Namely Wrath... 😉