Novean-61657

I don't know enough about voxels, but... I can easily describe a flat surface (x,y,z), but a flat surface with a ton of holes in it is a lot more difficult to describe. Either you describe each hole separately, which costs a lot of storage, or you make a formula for it that needs resources each time it's displayed or interacted with. Maybe they moved from one method to another in the last year?

Been a loud annoyance... There's a ton of stuff that isn't crime in RL, but will certainly give you a bloody nose and/or a knee in the nuts. As I said, you can scream all you want in the forums, most of us can ignore you there. But you're calling folks to start bothering other players ingame, with methods that aren't allowed anymore (if you have to ask, I have to wonder if you're even playing the game). I don't care if only three other daft people showed up for your proposed shenanigans, you're actively trying to ruin other people's playing experiences (by methods that aren't allowed in the first place). DU is buggy enough without a couple of kids throwing around stuff at markets that will make other people crash. If you don't like NQ, hate what DU is, then you won't mind not playing DU for a while (or forever). If you want we could even start a poll to see if others agree or not... ?

You're just not feeling the ZEN! ? Imho it was different from almost all the other MMO games where you needed to acquire resources. With going with the automining option, DU is shedding it's more unique sellingpoints. And imho the 'brainless boring task' is just replaced by a 'brainless boring task' you'll need to do each and every day! Those aren't 'free' minerals at all, that's a daily grind that you have to keep playing whether you want to or not. But the OP brings up an excellent point, where does this leave the NEW solo player? I suspect not in a good place. They might be forced into certain gameplay loops with very specific paths, because this might now be the optimal way to gather resources. The new talents are just another talent sink. In addition to the previous mining talent sink. Another 4+ months to spend subscription on... And it's advantageous for training your alts into it as well, more alts means more ore (and more grinding a mini game)... More incentive to buy those additional accounts (if it wasn't already the case with other talents/activities)... Less well known consequences to the Demeter patch also mean that players need to concentrate their mining on a single planet. Otherwise your ore income will be severely impacted or the quanta costs of additional tiles will be significant (I suspect that it will be unsustainable). That means people will need to specialize and trade. Giving more opportunities to traders and space truckers. But the NEW solo player just won't easily be able to build much beyond the basics in any real quantity. On the other hand, I think many people think to much into the MMO classic of guilds and (EVE) corps, I think DU has much more potential for more loosely organized collectives that cooperate with different solo players, the tools for organizing this in game just SUCK! You want me to boost your Cargo capacity with my Lvl5 talents? Can you boost my engines with your Lvl5 skills? I have a ton of Coal, you have ton of Baux, wanna trade? And especially not just locals/neighbors, this is an advanced society, we just need tools to get this off the ground. I would love to see autotrade units (I have x and want y) with a decent interface (you want to trade 407 times... Just hammer those buttons ?

I would like to ask for a pre-emptive ban for the ringleader @Warlander I have no interest in these shenanigans affecting my and other people's gameplay in any way. You want to attack NQ in these forums, go ahead, leave the other players out of it! @NQ if the OP wants to play out a RL scenario ingame, please provide the tools in game we also recourse to in RL. Shove people out of the way (launch into orbit) or if they don't get the hint, knee them in the nuts (send to respawn)...

You live in a richer country... Fork that monies over! ?

I play games like DU (and EVE) because they don't have separate servers, it is all one universe. Another part of the attraction is that there is risk of PVP and you have certain choices whether or not to participate actively in PVP. There are risks and rewards for those choices.

is DU worth 10 USD a month? Currently: No, in the future possibly. I'm also missing a poll for doiny the price increase on Demeter release or one/two months after the Demeter release... Side-note: Currently a year subscription is $70, with the new $7 for a year subscription that will increase to $84. Thus a price increase anyway you look at it.

This is also a huge concern for me. All the assurances of the past are up for grabs. That combined with the announcement of price increases with the Demeter release (thus pushing to buy now for a year), that means alarm bells are going off, loudly! I can understand price increases to a certain extend, but if you want to inspire confidence, do that a month or two after the Demeter release. I was already hesitant to extend my four accounts for another year at the end of the year since the first Demeter video, that concern waned a bit as I saw options and the probable release before the holidays. I can no longer wait and see without a significant price hike. So I either take a risk now and spend money for another year for four accounts or just wait and see and either spend significantly more on subscriptions or just reduce the amount of subscriptions I have (or just quit all together).... If a full wipe is done at launch, without compensation for subscription fees and time spend in game, I'm done. Hell, I might be pissed off enough to see if we could take legal action, based on statements made by the CEO in public videos at beta launch...

Where's my hit head against the wall emoticon? ? And no other Devs have played EVE or there are really no other games with a territory loss mechanic. I absolutely hate the territory loss mechanic as proposed by NQ, but blaming anyone at NQ is just beyond the pale!

Or what I've heard at other companies: "What UI dev?" ?

It's not just the direct mining talents, it's also the related stuff, terraforming, the linked container skills, etc. Moving of product over fast distances, etc. Now we have to own the tile to automine, place static core units, etc. It's now just easier to build directly from what you mine, so a ton of skills are either no longer relevant or just suboptimal. Then we have the pvp crowd who's had change after change to pvp, that also impacts the useful combat skills. Honestly, just pile on a complete talent point chargeback, might make a lot of people more happy to completely respec with all the drastic changes. Side-note: It would be nice if someone could spend some time on improving the Talent Point interface. Things like exporting a list of your currently trained talents, importing a training list, etc. Multiselct skills, richtclick, move to top/bottom, etc.

So you want us to strip? ?

While you are right to certain degree. #1 Sometimes it's cheaper to loose x amount of customers, then to service their wishes. #2 What a customer says and actually does, can be two very different things. Let me take my own comments as an example. I've indicated that I would not renew my subscription if this goes live as is, but I might very well change my mind. Changing my mind might range from renewing all four accounts for another year, to just another three months, to just one account for three months... Or I might not change my mind at all and just let the subscriptions lapse. It all depends on the actual implementation on the live server, when, the bugs, when it goes live, how creative I am, how much time I have, my mood, etc. But I'm seriously considering spending that $280 (four accounts for a year) on buying other games instead, Like Satisfactory, Minecraft (Dungeons), Space Engineers, Factorio, Rimworld, Per Aspera, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Dyson Sphere Program, No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous (expansion), etc. Heck, if I do that during the Steam Christmas sale I'll even safe a ton of money... Many of these do what you can do in DU, but better implemented, they just don't combine them all into a single sandbox game...

You do ~7 autominers a day, every day, per character (we already have a job!). Why would you want to move all the ore to a central point/market every day. You could easily do that once a week or even once a month. 30-60 minutes a day is very realistic, not telling you how and why, figure that out yourself. Hint: Read what others have written about their actual experiences with the new mechanics. Too many sour comments in here by people that haven't touched the PTS server or even have a running subscription anymore (how can they even post in the forum?). Part of making quanta in DU is figuring out how to use the systems optimally, testing out concepts, etc.

In my experience, exclusively listening to users is also a road to disaster, especially IT and Devs, those are the worst backseat drivers! I'm not saying don't listen to them at all, but use their feedback. You can of course disregard their feedback, because your not pleasing them (specifically) but you are running a business, cutting customers might often be the more profitable thing to do. The customer is NOT always king, he just likes to think so! I totally understand that NQ has cost considerations that translate to tech and gameplay effects. I know all about keeping systems and users manageable, you sometimes make choices that are unpopular with certain users. The issue isn't so much that they are made, but how they are implemented and communicated. The only real issue I have is that NQ seems to be only looking at the short term and not the long. That could be a necessity when the short term is already in an untenable situation... EIther way, it's bad news for all of us, the players and NQ itself. I'm not critiquing their communication in that regard (I was critiquing their known error communications). Regarding the breaks, I was critiquing that this is being done NOW at all, when every indication is that this is not going into the Demeter patch AND it breaks a bunch of ships in a highly spectacular fashion. If it is going into the Demeter patch, my rant highly articulated call to sanity is even more on point. Stop breaking your players by piling on a bunch of changes that are hugely impactful!

You can only do one scoop mining, with the autominers you can have multiple miners active at the same time. With max skills you could have 36-48 autominers running. 4-6+ per tile, with adjacency bonus of an additional 60%. Gottchar calculated that you could get 150.000 liters of ore per day with max skills and 30-60min of 'work' per day. If the amount of ore per played hour is your only concern, this is better, unless you got thrown meganodes in your lap on a continuous basis (many meganoders keep forgetting that finding them is a significant amount of work).

I think not. I suspect that ~25 tiles is the optimal amount of tiles for a single account, that's 25M, you do 3-4 long range missions and you can cover that. Especially on the weekends you can do that semi afk for the most part. When you have a lot of corp mates and/or accounts, missioning scales up pretty darned good! Currently there is coming in way more then is getting out. As most folks doing that have already bought pretty much every blueprint they'll ever need. Also keep in mind that folks doing a lot of missioning don't really need to also do the automining thing, they just buy all the ore they need. No automining, no real need for owning more tiles, no meganodes to secure, no tiles needed there either. So only tiles needed for bases, manufacturing, sales, and logistics. I also suspect that most folks not on the automining craze will just have their starter tile and maybe one 'base' tile. Their daily login will cover that. And chances are that the new meta will be space bases with elevators to flattened unclaimed tiles below. Folks in a corp sharing a single tile, etc. I do think that it will slow down inflation (quite) a bit, but not cause a deflation, unless other game mechanics are changed as well.

People with taste... ?

If this change happens as it's currently implemented, expect similar limitations be set for Space stations down the road... Because it doesn't solve the issue of to many constructs, I would even go so far as to say it would increase the problem drastically. Tiles would still be claimed (for mining), but instead of a central factory on the tile, we just have necessary static cores (for mining units and storage), a flat area and a bunch of space elevators up to the 'permanent' factory space station. In the end that just means way more cores to create safety for players. That is more data to store pay for by NQ instead of less.

NQ is a company, a company is run by people, who also need a weekend to decompress and recover. Sure there is (limited) support in the weekend, but I suspect that any serious responses will have to wait until the working week. Even then they need time to go through the responses, make notes, compare notes, discuss and (maybe) respond here. Just don't hold your breath waiting... ?

I'm not comparing the current EVE to the DU of today. I'm comparing the possible future DU against the current EVE and the EVE of the past to the DU of today. Look at EVE from 2003, while I didn't play it then, I've seen gameplay from then and it was rough! I would even say that the current DU doesn't compare favorably to the EVE of December 2005 (when I started playing EVE)... DU has potential, sure, just not the potential of millions of monthly players (in our lifetimes). But currently I have large question marks whether or not DU will even be around in another year or so...

You of course wouldn't mind showing us where that was mentioned... ? The problem isn't so much that you have to pay upkeep, but that you can ever loose a tile due to unpaid taxes/rent. I have no issue paying x amount per week for mining rights, or even sales/production rights. I just never want to loose those tiles I've claimed outside the territory warfare mechanic that was 'promised' (but still a long ways off). Also the Alioth/Madis/Thades safe zone is imho sacrosanct as this was talked about by the CEO/developers when this game was launched into early access beta. I of course need to realize that maybe many other things have been told to the KS backers in the years previously. But from my perspective, I wasn't there for that, I was sold on the vision that was promoted on the beta launch. Besides to what was 'promised' in the past, it's also bad for customer retention/return in the MMO space. MMO's have been around now for a long, long time. And by now we know that people's interest and RL obligations change, people leave, for a time. Be that EVE, WoW, or any other long running MMO. If your items/character disappear when you are gone for a while and your subscription lapses, years later there is very little additional attraction to get into that old MMO you played a while ago, but all your stuff/characters are gone. If/when you take another break due to interest/RL, your stuff/characters will be gone again... Better go for a game next time that doesn't do that... Imho this is why certain older MMOs still have returning players, besides the nostalgia, the players have an investment in the game. If the starter moon is the only persistent tile in DU outside of taxes/rent or your continued subscription. That tile will be heavily build upon by those players that decide to stay. That also means you have to load all the stuff of your neighbors, etc. And anything beyond that on a Static Core Unit will be very functional and/or very small. While deploying stuff from Blueprint is luckily an enormous time safer, deconstructing cores is a TON of work! I'm was working on building a tower (multiple L Cores) on Madis that will have tens of thousands Glass panels. Those are a pain to place, but deconstructing those towers would be a Pain and if I had to do that before a dormant period, that would greatly sour the experience and getting back to DU would be very doubtful. Maybe a way to quickly disassemble static cores into their component parts would soften that blow a bit. But if you don't have the time or the motivation anymore to disassemble your static cores, you're still F-ed. Maybe compactify the static cores that are on it when the tile lapses... But that is asking for misuse (build a static core on planet x, fill it up, let the tile lapse, move the compacitified static core to another planet and place).

If this is where we're going, I'm out at the end of the year. Because that just means a downward spiral going forward. We all want to build more, build those epic things that were shown over the years. If I need to daily grind, aka 'do the DU job' just to keep what I've already got, there is no room for growth and no prospects of this getting any better down the road. What I do not understand is that why this wasn't recognized at the start of the project? Did they expect bigger leaps in processing power and storage capacity? Lower AWS prices? Bigger software improvements that their development team couldn't deliver or were just unrealistic to begin with? Am I the only nerd with hopes of building an underground fast travel network, but also needing tons of ore to sell and build stuff with?

According to Gottchar himself it's like 30-60min a day, pretty much every day (every 35 hours with max skills). Also you're just assuming 7 tiles, but that's not optimal and not how Gottchar was calculating it all. You also need the tiles around those 7 tiles for optimal results, and other factors. His exact words: That leaves you with ~700.000 worth of ore if you want to use it yourself. IF you can find the ideal patch. A LOT of players are solo players, only choosing (sometimes) when they do stuff with others. One of the more relaxing activities in DU is mining in a tile that doesn't have anyone near it, just you with the soil and ore! So Zen! ? The current implementation of the asteroid system is anything but relaxing nor Zen. When I want to go mining in pvp space for rich rewards, I can, but relaxed mining with a ton of others around, I cannot do anymore. If the reason for phasing out planet mining is saving money on server resources for the always persistent ant tunnels we've dug under there. There is a very simple, yet effective solution. Make an asteroid belt that goes through both the safe zone and pvp space. Just create tens of thousands of asteroids, the moment someone mines or terraforms the first voxel on an asteroid a 7 day timer starts to run, after which the asteroid despawns and a new rock spawns. In safe zone you'll have access to everything, but the higher tier ores are more abundant in pvp space. There are many variations of this concept possible, instead of automatically despawning and respawning you can have an attached missioning system where if an asteroid has more then x amount of tunnels (costs x amount of data on the server) it's marked as a missioning target by Aphellia, 90% of the asteroid ore needs to be mined out and then a charge set at the center of the asteroid, which despawns it. You get Y amount of quanta based on how bad the asteroid is on the server (higher load, more quanta). Or asteroids do not automagically respawn, respawn only happens every x months or once a year. There are a ton of options which don't require us to run like a bunch of lemmings on an asteroid and then quickly mine it out as fast as possible. That sounds to much like work, just like having to log in every day or every 1.5 days to set 7-10 autominers via an annoying mini game...