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Atmosph3rik

Alpha Team Vanguard
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Everything posted by Atmosph3rik

  1. I was just looking at the old Kickstarter page, wondering what physical rewards they haven't sent out yet. I already got the Arcship ID card a few months ago, but that was the only thing i was supposed to get. I hadn't realized that they sold the Kyrium Backers a lifetime sub and 160 DACs too. It literally advertises the DACs as a value of 2880 euros. But if you can't trade them in-game, they have zero value to someone with a lifetime sub. I never really understood why they didn't implement the DACs as an in-game item. Seems like selling them would generate revenue. But i wasn't considering how many DACs they sold during the kickstarter. That's pretty messed up NQ.
  2. I got my Arcship passenger ID card in the mail a few weeks ago. I didn't have any other physical rewards though, so I don't know about the T-shirts.
  3. There's no limit to how much weight(kg) you can carry. There's only a limit on how much volume(L) you can fit in your Nanopack. You can get around the limit by linking to a container and then setting it as your "default inventory". Then when you buy the ship all the parts will go directly into the container. You can buy a container on the market, and then enter build mode and temporarily attach it to your starter speeder. Then right click the container and "set as primary container". Then open your inventory, you should see two tabs at the top, one for your regular inventory, and one for the container, then click the "Chain-link" button in the top left to toggle the container as your default inventory. Now as long as you stay in range of the container you can buy the ship, and then deploy it directly from the container.
  4. When someone really wants something that they can't have, businesses are often tempted to just sell them whatever they do have, and tell them they are getting the thing that they wanted. To me that's what NQ would be doing if they sold the game as is. I would rather have a game company be honest and tell me that if i keep paying them, they will keep giving me access to their product. Rather than telling me i own the product, and as long as someone keeps giving them money maybe i'll still have access to the product. I don't like signing up for reoccurring charges either. Especially when it's with a shady 3rd party company that makes it hard to cancel. NQ was supposed to implement the DAC system, so it was possible to access the game without that level of commitment too. The first time i agreed to pay a subscription for an MMO i was giving my private info to SONY. I think a lot of people would be more inclined to sign up for a reoccurring charge if it was with the same company that was selling the game. Or at least a company that they trusted.
  5. The problem is that so much of the game's design depends on players committing to a subscription, and losing access to certain things if they stop. The big question is what would "owning the game" actually entitle someone to? Right now, you have to pay a sub to claim territory, and the longer you sub and train talents the more constructs you can deploy. And if you cancel then you lose HQ territories and constructs. If NQ sells the game for $30 or $50 how long can someone hold HQ territories? and how long does NQ leave their constructs in the game? I think MMOs are so popular because they're kind of like a country club. You pay extra to use their facilities, because they're well maintained, and there are other people there to enjoy them with or compete with. DU has a few really cool and unique features, but one of them is that you can use all the other features in a shared online space and compete or collaborate with other players for territory and resources. I don't think it's sustainable to sell permanent access to a shared space like that. But i also don't think it makes sense to sell memberships to a country club with almost no staff and no plans for the future. Bit of a catch 22 at this point. Whatever NQ decides to do, i think they would need to announce their intentions for the future of the game, or announce that they have intentions for the game to have a future, before they do anything else. Or it would be a waste of time.
  6. Considering the game isn't really finished, and there are no major updates planned, the numbers seem higher then i would expect. MMO's are like sharks. If they stop moving, they start to die. If this was a standard MMO with nothing really unique to offer, i don't think anyone would be playing at all right now. Saying the numbers don't justify further development doesn't make sense to me, when the current numbers are due to no further development being planned. It seems to me that there are still a lot of people who are interested in the game's potential. But they're all just watching now, maybe playing a bit here and there, and waiting to see what NQ does next. I don't expect anything at this point. But if NQ doesn't finish the game or sell it to someone who wants to finish it, then i'll just be waiting for someone else to make a game like this.
  7. The size of the reward was balanced to match the current amount of risk. That's just a fact. Asking NQ to remove the risk and give you the reward anyway is the same as asking NQ to just put the Quanta in your wallet. If you don't care about the Quanta, which you said at the beginning of this discussion, then you don't need to do the parts of the game that involve PvP. You can just leave them to the people who DO want to do PvP. That shouldn't affect you.
  8. My conclusion is that your confusing gameplay with problems. The pirates are supposed to be a problem. You don't have to try to solve that problem if you don't want to. But you can't have the reward associated with solving the problem, unless you solve the problem. There are other ways to earn Quanta in the game. But you're going to be expected to solve some problems there too. If they did allow you to turn PvP off. They would obviously need to rebalance the reward for those asteroids and missions, because they would be too easy. And they would undermine all the other activities in the game.
  9. That's great that you want to help. But you seem to be ignoring the fact that games usually have objectives and obstacles in them. PvP isn't just an activity you can do in DU, it's an obstacle to your progress. There are other paths to progress where PvP isn't an obstacle. But turning off PvP means turning off that obstacle. What you are asking for is the equivalent of playing Super Mario Bros and then complaining to Nintendo that you paid real money for the game, and you shouldn't have to make Mario jump over all of these obstacles. Some games allow you to cheat. But online multiplayer games usually do not. There are other paths that you can follow to progress in DU that don't involve PvP. But if you want to follow the PvP path you have to jump over the PvP obstacles. There's no rule requiring you to do PvP missions or mine PvP asteroids. That's an option.
  10. You don't know either. But i've got 5 more years of experience watching NQ struggle to make the game fun, and please everyone all at once. I've watched the PvP players demand more and more, and they got a lot of attention. And they are pretty much all gone now. I've watched people demand that NQ level the playing field with a post-launch wipe, and they got what they wanted, and they are all gone now too. And i've spent years arguing for PvP to be optional instead of being forced. But you're the first person i've seen demanding that you should be able to have all the PvP rewards, without risking any PvP. Being able to turn PvP off wouldn't change anything for you except it would allow you to farm PvP content more easily, and possibly troll people in the PvP zone with your invincible ship.
  11. If any player can turn off PvP at any time, the game doesn't have PvP anymore. It's just has duals. There would be no reason to do PvP, and no risk at all to farming the parts of the game that were designed to be made more challenging by including PvP. Removing a feature from the game, so you can do whatever you want for a week or two, and then get bored and go play something else, isn't going to revive the game.
  12. I don't do PvP at all personally. I've only been shot at once in all the years i've been playing this game. And i've never shot at anyone else. But i think PvP should be part of the game, because it adds something else interesting to do for people other than myself. And missions and asteroids would be very boring if there was no risk at all. I have spent years on these forums arguing with other PvP players using the same faulty arguments that you are using, to claim that the game shouldn't have a safezone at all, and they should be able to attack everyone, all the time. They made similar claims, that the safezone was ruining the game, and everyone would leave if they didn't remove it, and if there was no safezone all of their thousands of friends would come play the game immediately. So maybe they were right, and the safezone ruined the game. Or maybe you're right and PvP ruined the game. But i think you both sound selfish and shortsighted. And that more options for everyone makes a game more fun for everyone. The only thing that is going to bring 1000s of players back to this game is MORE content, not less content.
  13. PvP is optional. You just can't have the rewards from PvP, without risking the PvP. You can choose the option to warp between planets and avoid PvP, or you can choose to not spend the warp cells and risk PvP. You can choose to run missions for Aphelia, but if you choose the ones with the highest reward, then you have to risk PvP. You can choose to mine asteroids, but if you choose to mine asteroids in the PvP zone, you are choosing PvP. In all these situations PvP isn't just there to entertain the people who want to shoot at other people, it's also there to force you to choose between the easy way and the hard way. The lower reward versus the higher reward. If you want to avoid PvP completely you can still do safe zone missions, safe zone asteroids, territorial mining, industry, and the PvE missions now too. PvP is part of the game and part of making PvP fun is that there is a reward for being good at it, or being good at avoiding it.
  14. What is it about then? The only way PVP really affects the Aphelia missions is that it forces you to put a bit more time and thought into how you do them. If there was no PVP you could fly straight from point to point. Without PVP, the missions wouldn't be exciting or interesting and they wouldn't require any strategy at all. It would just be another task that you have to do if you want more Quanta. Hit the feeder bar, wait, and receive your reward. I do think that it's a big problem for the game right now, that for a new player just starting out they are a long way away from having enough Quanta and talents to do what they might want to do in the game. But i don't think removing PVP would fix that. When the game had momentum, when it felt like it was growing rather than coasting, it might have been reasonable to expect people to just enjoy that time. But the way things are going now, i don't think most new players will last that long. But it doesn't make sense to say the original plans for how the game would work aren't good or aren't working when we don't have all the features that were planned. DACs were the way that new players were supposed to be able to get a head start if they wanted one. And they were also supposed to be something that you could spend Quanta on, once you had more then you needed. I also think there should be a way to speed up talent gains too. If there was a higher tier of subscription that you could buy or activate by using multiple DACs that would give new players a way to catch up. Rather than forcing customers to manage multiple accounts if they want to pay for an advantage, just let us pay extra for that same advantage on one account.
  15. The problem here is that the only reason you want more Quanta is that you don't have as much as you need. The easier they make it for you to earn Quanta the faster you'll get to the point where you have so much Quanta that you have nothing to spend it on. If it's too easy to get Quanta, then it has no value at all. The original plan was for DACs to be for sale, and tradeable in game. If you wanted more Quanta faster, you could buy DACs and sell them in game. If we had that option at least there would be a way to offset the frustration of not having enough Quanta early in the game. Without completely destroying the in-game economy.
  16. The terrain smooth tool can be pretty frustrating to use. Rather than smoothing voxels it seems to tighten them up into knots that just get spikier and spikier until you eventually have to delete it all and start over. It would also be really nice if we had the ability to shrink the add/remove terrain voxel tool down to a smaller size. Trying to fix minor flaws would be much easier if we could add or remove a single voxel of terrain at a time. It can be really frustrating when all you want to do is remove a little spike coming off a wall, and your only option is to leave it there or delete a massive sphere-shaped hole in the wall trying to fix it. Allowing us to edit terrain voxels with the VPT would also be incredibly useful. Another tool that would be really helpful would be a Terrian Healing tool. Once you edit the surface terrain it never renders the same from a distance. It would be great if there was a way to revert changes, so when you make a mistake there's a way to fix it. Also, it would be so awesome if we had access to all (or some) of the natural decorative elements already in the game, like trees and rocks.
  17. All that tells us is that you don't want to pay for the game. That has nothing to do with whether a game that features a constantly evolving persistent shared online world can exist indefinitely without a steady income. You're saying, "They didn't finish the game, so i don't want to pay for it." I'm saying, "For the game that was marketed to exist, it would require people to pay more than $70 total." I agree that NQ isn't showing the kind of interest in the game that i would like to see. And I wouldn't blame someone for not wanting to sub. But i would like them to continue to work on the game, and make it worth paying for.
  18. If they were all-in on the crypto thing, why didn't they do it with DU? It seems like DU would have been ripe for it. They could have sold constructs as NFTs or whatever, but they didn't for some reason. I guess i was holding out hope that was because there was someone up there who was aware that it might not be a great idea to taint the only thing the company had ever created with the stench of web3. I think to the average investor, the difference between what we might call a "great game", and what we might call a "scam" doesn't really matter, as long as it makes them money. I want NQ to make a game. Maybe the CEO thinks they should make something else. I'm just here to be a cheerleader for the original game idea. Maybe it's just me but it seems like the whole web3 thing is kind of over anyway and people have already moved on to other things. I followed a "project" on twitter out of morbid curiosity about a year ago. They were selling pixel art NFTs of spaceships, with the promise that someday they would make a "AAA" game, and you would be able to redeem the NFT for a spaceship in the game. A year ago, they were claiming to be a "large AAA game studio" working on a serious game. And now the account is basically silent.
  19. I don't understand your point. How does that disprove what i said? NQ decided to make an "MMO" with a subscription. They chose to make a subscription service. Every successful MMO i've played has had constant continued development and attention from the devs. New expansions every year, holiday events, etc. That's how these games work. As far as i'm concerned that was supposed to be part of the deal all along. NQ was supposed to be an entire company dedicated to the continued development and upkeep of this game. NQ's new "CEO" may have decided that he doesn't really feel like doing that anymore. But i don't think it's going to solve anything if we all decide that we aren't willing to pay for it either. That just means the game is done. As for server costs, most games don't have a persistent shared online world. As far as i know most games that do have a subscription. The games that have switched to a Free to Play model, only did so after they were massively successful, or headed for failure. I'm really not interested in what the CEO has to say about anything. As far as i'm concerned he gave up on the game as soon as he took over. He clearly has his own ideas and would like to use the companies' resources to work on those instead of DU. All we can really do is wait for his crypto crap to fail miserably, and then hope that NQ decides to put someone in charge of the company that actually wants to do their job.
  20. There may be other options besides the subscription. But what you're asking for is just unrealistic. This isn't a game in the sense that they can just give you a copy of the code, and you get to play it forever. It's an unfinished project that requires them to maintain servers so you can play in a shared persistent world. Even if they decided to sell you the game for a one-time fee of $70. There is absolutely no guarantee that you will be able to continue playing it indefinitely. They would be doing you a disservice by selling it to you under the pretense that it is a product that you can own. It's a service, not a product. Whether it's a service that is worth paying for may be up for debate. But asking them to lie to you and sell it to you like it's a finished product isn't going to fix anything.
  21. I think it would be cool if we could have a discussion on here about what NQ should do. Without it being steamrolled with comments about what NQ might do, or what they've done wrong in the past. It's one thing to say that NQ should do one thing instead of another, due to the current state of the game. But if all someone has to add is that suggesting anything is pointless, i think the mature thing to do would be to take their own advice and just move on.
  22. Many XS and S sized elements including some engines are craftable in the Nano. Even some Medium sized elements, i think.
  23. Some of it is decades out-of-date for sure. But some of it is pretty cutting-edge too. I guess i always thought that's what the formula was supposed to be. That kind of trade-off has worked for other games in the past. When i first saw someone playing Everquest i thought the combat looked like a joke. Your character just stands there, and swings their arm every few seconds, and a chicken monster stands there and wobbles a bit, and some damage numbers float by at the bottom of the screen. It looked terrible. And the graphics were terrible too, in comparison to most other games at that time. But Everquest offered other things that no other game had. An absolutely massive game world, the unpredictability of other players, thousands of hours of playability. It was interesting enough that i was willing to pay $10 a month and tie up a phoneline to play it. I played a new game called Everspace 2 recently. It's a fun little space shooter with really great combat. But playing it really reminded me where we are technologically at the moment. They really killed it with the space-shooter combat in this game. But to get there they had to make some sacrifices too. It's a single player game, no multiplayer at all. You play in a tiny little bubble with a skybox. Some areas look like space, others look like a small area on the surface of a planet. Warp travel is basically just a fancy map that you look at while you travel between areas, similar to Elite:Dangerous. And the game only entertained me for maybe a week tops. It was fun, and worth the money. But when i'm done i've still got money left in the bank, and i'm still looking for something more. I realize that i probably represent a pretty small niche. But MMORPGs have always been a small niche. Even at the peak of their popularity, half the people playing them kind of hated them. That's why the industry has spent so much time throwing every aspect of them under the bus, with their "skill-based action combat" and "Sandboxes" and all those other silly buzzwords that turned out to mean nothing. I just think NQ spent too much time overselling the negative trade-offs and underselling the positive aspects of the game. And it's never had a chance to find its niche. Or its niche hasn't had a chance to find it.
  24. I feel like the whole industry just lost the plot at some point when it comes to the idea of what "PVP" is. It means player vs player, but only in the context of a game where you don't usually fight other players. It's really an MMORPG specific term. It's not called PVP in a fighting game or a First Person Shooter, it's just gameplay. The first MMO i played was Everquest. It had PVP if you played on a PVP server, but the PVP never really worked. Some classes were totally overpowered, and others were almost completely helpless. But it made the game a lot more fun, because you never knew when someone was going to show up and try to kill you. PVP wasn't the point of the game though, it just added a little spice. The PVP was never really fun for me. It was just fun to be able to do PVP in a game that you already enjoyed playing. Early on I was skeptical about whether this game was going to be fun for a large portion of the PVP players who were here on the forums making demands about how the game should work. But they didn't want to hear it. We spent weeks on these forums at one point arguing about whether the game should have a 3rd person view, because some PVP players were concerned that it would give people an unfair advantage in cover-based ground combat. I know NQ set some unreasonable expectations in a lot of ways, but i don't understand how anyone could reach the conclusion that this game was ever going to have cover-based FPS combat in it. I think NQ has the framework of a game here that a lot of people could enjoy. And i do think PVP has the potential to make it more interesting. But frankly they need to stop listening to people who are only here for the PVP. Because those people will never be happy.
  25. Even in PVP a ship doesn't just vanish, someone has the option to recover it. The idea that someone might recover their destroyed ship after a PVE mission doesn't seem all that crazy to me. And completely repairing a destroyed ship is a cost. Honestly it seems like your being intentionally unhelpful here, so i'm going to go ahead and ignore you.
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