Atmosph3rik

Phrases like "tend to be" and "not all" are the kind of things that players of video games love to cause trouble with too.
 
If there's something that we "probably" won't do, you can be sure we're going to DU it, and a lot.  😁

When are we getting a 3rd person view though?
 
C'mon NQ this is a role-playing game.  Lemme see how cool i look.

When are we getting a 3rd person view though?
 
C'mon NQ this is a role-playing game.  Lemme see how cool i look.

When are we getting a 3rd person view though?
 
C'mon NQ this is a role-playing game.  Lemme see how cool i look.

When are we getting a 3rd person view though?
 
C'mon NQ this is a role-playing game.  Lemme see how cool i look.

This post right here is a perfect example of why this is a bad idea.  You basically just said that anyone who disagrees with YOU doesn't have the game's best interest in mind.  That's just dishonest and manipulative.
 
If you couldn't even pretend to be impartial for 5mins why would anyone want to trust you with insider info, or a more direct line to NQ?
 
This is an awful idea for a million reasons.
 

It's the T1 Products though.  I finally had to set up some Smelters, but i feel like i spend half my time queuing up T1 product schematics now.  For Steel, Silumin, AlFe, Polycarb, Glass.  It's rough.
 
The thing that has really been frustrating me lately is the odd number of schematics that it requires to produce some things.  Why do i need 15 schematics to run a batch of Scrap?  Or 18 to run a batch of Honeycomb?  Why not just make the schematics more expensive, or take longer to produce, or both?
 
Why does one batch produce 25 T2 scrap schematics and then it requires 15 of them to run one batch of scrap?  
 
Why does scrap require schematics in the first place?
 
I think the idea of needing schematics to produce actual elements is great, if you want to make one element, you need one schematic first.  That makes sense.  I can plan for that in my head without my brain melting.  But i don't think we should need schematics to process things like ore, product materials, honeycomb, scrap, or fuel.  

It's the T1 Products though.  I finally had to set up some Smelters, but i feel like i spend half my time queuing up T1 product schematics now.  For Steel, Silumin, AlFe, Polycarb, Glass.  It's rough.
 
The thing that has really been frustrating me lately is the odd number of schematics that it requires to produce some things.  Why do i need 15 schematics to run a batch of Scrap?  Or 18 to run a batch of Honeycomb?  Why not just make the schematics more expensive, or take longer to produce, or both?
 
Why does one batch produce 25 T2 scrap schematics and then it requires 15 of them to run one batch of scrap?  
 
Why does scrap require schematics in the first place?
 
I think the idea of needing schematics to produce actual elements is great, if you want to make one element, you need one schematic first.  That makes sense.  I can plan for that in my head without my brain melting.  But i don't think we should need schematics to process things like ore, product materials, honeycomb, scrap, or fuel.  

It's the T1 Products though.  I finally had to set up some Smelters, but i feel like i spend half my time queuing up T1 product schematics now.  For Steel, Silumin, AlFe, Polycarb, Glass.  It's rough.
 
The thing that has really been frustrating me lately is the odd number of schematics that it requires to produce some things.  Why do i need 15 schematics to run a batch of Scrap?  Or 18 to run a batch of Honeycomb?  Why not just make the schematics more expensive, or take longer to produce, or both?
 
Why does one batch produce 25 T2 scrap schematics and then it requires 15 of them to run one batch of scrap?  
 
Why does scrap require schematics in the first place?
 
I think the idea of needing schematics to produce actual elements is great, if you want to make one element, you need one schematic first.  That makes sense.  I can plan for that in my head without my brain melting.  But i don't think we should need schematics to process things like ore, product materials, honeycomb, scrap, or fuel.  

Added a new augmented reality HUD for tracking the output and states of your factory's industry machines. This display is free forever, and simple to set up (you just need a programming board element).
 
The display can filter the view by status type, and you can filter with search keywords.. industry unit types or output product names (partial searches work). For more info, demo video here:
 
 

Simply put, allow multiple selection of points. 
As a example.. A shape 35 voxels long and one high, allow all the upper vertex's to be selected and moved. 
 
Doing this one vertex at a time is very time consuming and tedious.
 

At this point there's really not anything NQ can do to make up for the lost progress that having a sanctuary tile would have provided during the bottleneck of the first few days.
 
It wouldn't have made a huge difference.  But it would have been nice to have it.

I know I'm far from the only person to suggest this in the last few months or few years. I know NQ has heard it many times. We need larger flight elements. We have XL space engines, and we have tiered atmo/space engines and hovers/vboosters, which is great. We don't have XL atmo engines. We don't have XL atmo brakes or retros or adjustors, nor do we have tiered brakes/adjustors.
 
We need:
XL atmospheric engines XL atmospheric brakes XL retro-rocket brakes XL adjustors XL hover engines XL vertical boosters Military/safe variants of atmo/space brakes and adjustors L and XL wings L and XL ailerons  
It is beyond ridiculous how many L brakes and adjusters have to be loaded down on a ship to make it flyable. Even simple and lightweight designs can require a ridiculous number of each, making designers have to find ways to hide them under voxels so that the designs don't look like something a Warhammer orc would throw together. But looks aren't the only problem. It's also the element count. When you need hundreds of flight elements to fly a ship, the lag generated by those elements can get pretty intense, and that's not even looking at scripts that get info from/about them for display or use. When you need hundreds of flight elements to make a ship capable of flight that the achievements call for (100k m^3 of material, fly 1kt in atmo, haul 10kt in space at max speed), or even for normal high-capacity hauling, you stop caring about making a ship that looks good (they're already constrained to the volume of a square, rather than having the option to have a longer/wider/shorter build volume) and focus only on making sure you've got enough brakes, adjustors and engines.
 
These demands for bigger flight elements have been made over and over by many people for the past several years. It would be great if @NQ would actually listen and take action on an issue that is this old. Ships requiring >100 L atmo brakes and >100 L space brakes and >10 XL space engines and >10 L atmo engines and >50-100 adjustors are butt-ugly lagmonsters, but people make them because they need/want what they can do.

The problem is as the elements get larger, higher tier scrap becomes more of a necessity then a shortcut.  It would take hours to repair some L or XL elements with T1 scrap.
 
The idea that paying more for higher tier scrap makes it faster is good.  But even when i've paid to speed the process up, there's still an incredible amount of manual clicking involved.
 
With a smaller ship, being a mechanic might be fun, going around and repairing a few adjusters before takeoff.  But on a massive ship were talking about repairing stacks of 100 wings.  If Large ships are going to have 1000+ elements on them.  There needs to be a way to repair them without clicking every single element one at a time.  
 
Unless NQ can find a way to make repair a fun/popular gameplay loop, and there's going to be player run garages everywhere, where i can pay a team of 20 players repair my ship in under an hour.
 
 
 
 

I really think more balance needs to be done before the repair process is made any more punishing.  
 
People are going to buy a L core ship, crash it once, and just quit playing rather than spend 12 hours repairing it.  And that's just after the 1st time they crash.
 
I'm not at all against there being a steep cost when you crash an expensive ship.  But the cost in time and manual labor is way too high right now as it is.
 
It should be a cost in Quanta, not in clicks.

The problem is as the elements get larger, higher tier scrap becomes more of a necessity then a shortcut.  It would take hours to repair some L or XL elements with T1 scrap.
 
The idea that paying more for higher tier scrap makes it faster is good.  But even when i've paid to speed the process up, there's still an incredible amount of manual clicking involved.
 
With a smaller ship, being a mechanic might be fun, going around and repairing a few adjusters before takeoff.  But on a massive ship were talking about repairing stacks of 100 wings.  If Large ships are going to have 1000+ elements on them.  There needs to be a way to repair them without clicking every single element one at a time.  
 
Unless NQ can find a way to make repair a fun/popular gameplay loop, and there's going to be player run garages everywhere, where i can pay a team of 20 players repair my ship in under an hour.
 
 
 
 

I really think more balance needs to be done before the repair process is made any more punishing.  
 
People are going to buy a L core ship, crash it once, and just quit playing rather than spend 12 hours repairing it.  And that's just after the 1st time they crash.
 
I'm not at all against there being a steep cost when you crash an expensive ship.  But the cost in time and manual labor is way too high right now as it is.
 
It should be a cost in Quanta, not in clicks.

These "Lern to fly!" comments are funny.  It's totally irrelevant to the discussion.  Just low hanging fruit.
 
Whether someone crashes into the building or not doesn't really change the fact that it was in the direct flight path of an incredibly popular mission.  People are running this mission repeatedly and it's in the way every time.
 
I ran the mission a few times with the building there.  And again, last night without it.  And it sure was nice not having it in the way.
 
There's no reason they can't build an awesome building there, that doesn't block the flight path.
 
If their intent wasn't to piss people off, then it sounds like they made the right decision, and now we can all move on.
 
 
 

Some minor points or additions to the above:
 
STU’s are becoming less useful with each passing day. They were an advantage in the beginning to help get started but as players/orgs get onto asteroids etc their value plummets. Ores are now readily available on the markets. Not having an STU when promised one (or more) during the second week after launch is very sad. NQ dropped the ball on this one so hard I wouldn’t be surprised if the ball entered orbit on the rebound.
 
The max build height is a number they can should be able to easily change. But I agree with the points that many of the changes NQ makes do not seem to be made by anyone that actually plays the game. A difference of 128m here shows that clearly. Beta saw the proliferation of space elevators which NQ decided to stop by putting in a height limit. Crashing into towers is never fun and a space elevator works just as well without the shaft. Or is it that Aphelia doesn’t want anything taller than the arkship? 
 
The problem with scanning on Alioth is that Alioth is big. Mind numbingly big. And there is not much variety in the ores to be found and the distribution is quite uniform. There are patches of T2 spanning 10km or more from end to end. Making 3km hops while looking for T2 is counter productive. For T3 however, it is about right. What this boils down to is bad luck.
 
The HTML was always going to be disabled... but there is a setting to re-enable it. Click checkbox in settings and it’s back. The Lua refactoring is always a pain but they usually deprecate instead of outright deleting old functions. If something was outright removed (even a rename is a removal) then they broke scripts which should not have happened and seems like a hug to me.
 
In summary, NQ where my STU?

Let's set aside for a moment that wiping beta player constructs at launch was always unfair, given past commitments. NQ have now heaped insult on injury with a number of stealth nerfs at launch:
 
Alioth T2 Distribution: 
I did 80 territory scans on Alioth at a ~3 tile spacing and found zero T2. None at all. Zip. Nada. No T2 - after spending 3 days building the XL assembler and scanner. This is a broken gameplay loop. Combined with the removal of Malachite from Alioth, the stealth nerf of ore distribution on Alioth resulted in a week of wasted effort. Forcing effort with no payoff is not gameplay. 
 
If NQ had been transparent with us before launch, said they were going to nerf T2 on Alioth, I wouldn't have wasted that critical week. I would also have rebuilt my base before launch so the BP wasn't made of 500,000M3 of Copper. Now, to deploy my BP I have to swap copper for another honeycomb, and then go back and untangle where the new material has blended with the same material already in the BP. More rework, on top of the wasted time.
 
1000m Build Height: 
This was self-evidently dumb. By choosing a 1000m cap instead of 1128m, it's impossible to build a 1000m AGG pad without placing your foundation core at an exactly multiple of 128m (since you won't be able to place the top core if there is less than a 128m gap.) Even then, you can put nothing on your 1000m pad, no elements, no structure. And you have to either use smaller cores for your top layer (increasing server load) or build your base from the top core, down - which means tall temporary scaffold structures first to place top cores and work back down - while others complain about griefing the entire time. 
 
A large number of pre-launch bases had AGG pads at or slightly above 1000m. All these pre-launch base BPs are now bricked.
 
This misstep demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of their game's own mechanics by devs, and poor understandng of players. To make matters worse, the change wasn't even included in patch notes. The only place it was mentioned - just wks before launch - was in 'Ask Aphelia #12. Few players had any opportunity to fix their builds before launch. This mistake (1000m vs 1128m) would easily have been picked up if players had been warned.
 
In summary, not only did NQ reneg on prior commitments to honour our builds in their 'persistent' universe - the only compensation being retained blueprints - they went on to stealth nerf the BPs we kept. 
 
[EDIT: Because this rule is not yet being enforced, and it is still possible to place a core above 1000m, this will create even more pain for players uncertain or unaware of the rule - should NQ decide to delete structures after they are built. And for as long as the rule is unclear, it is impossible to safely place the foundations of a tall structure.]
 

 
Missing STUs for 'Contributors' (and Surface Natron):
By making Sanctuary the only place with surface natron near Alioth, Alpha contributors already had a significant advantage at launch - since natron is needed to make many popular elements: screens, lights etc.. NQ then messed up further, by jacking up the distribution of STUs meaning only some Contributors received them. ~10 days later, this still has not been fixed. This means a small number of players, purely by chance, have the only access to surface natron near Alioth.
 
HTML/SVG nerf and Indiscriminate LUA Changes: 
The disabling of HTML screens was long rumoured, but took so long to be done it appeared to have been abandoned. Waiting till launch to tell players all SVGs and HTML are also now bricked is also poor form and counter-productive. Because a large number of ship BPs from pre-launch contain screens using HTML, and virtually every factory monitoring set-up, any player flying these ships or running these factories, will now simply go to settings and re-enable HTML, to be able to play the game - undermining the point of the exercise to phase out HTML, and prolonging the inevitable pain and frustration when it is finally done. This pain is now unavoidable given the original misstep of building a new API with zero compatibility with HTML/SVG. (The new API should always have been implemented in a way to minimise the effort of reworking existing content for players - rather than forcing ground up rebuilds of all screens. Better still, existing content should ideally have been ported on behalf of players.)
 
Combine this with the frivolous renaming of a number of LUA cmds, additional rework has also been created for players to reimplement scripts written before launch - for no apparent reason. 
 
STILL No Static BP Placement Snapping!: 
We asked for this in the Alpha Trello 3 yrs ago. It was poorly implemented on day one - snapping new cores only. Hundreds of players have asked for it to be fixed for static BPs over the years. It never made sense that new cores snap into place, but static BPs work of a bizarre raycast that doesn't even align with the player camera and - annoyingly - nudges by 2 voxels instead of 1. This feature was already long overdue, but now made more critical since it is essential to redeploying any mult-core construct after the wipe. Finally... finally, it was coming! In the launch livestream it was promised for launch here, at timecode 35:38:
 
Instead, we now learn this was skipped, rendering all multi-core static construct blueprints useless. 
 
Summary:
 
- Forcing players to constantly rework their builds is not gameplay.
- Reworking existing content is a poor proxy for new gameplay loops.
- Player input is invaluable. 
- Last minute, uncommunicated changes rarely if ever have a positive outcome.  
 
The culture at NQ of disregarding the time and effort of players, and lack of consideration of impacts on our gameplay, is worrisome. More worrisome, is the tendency to continuously rework existing content - mechanics, terrain, boolean noise - rather than develop significant new features, many of these features requested years ago. NQ are still missing the winning strategy of successful 'player generated content' franchises like Minecraft, where the focus of the first several years was on adding new gameplay loops - as opposed to continuously reworking existing ones. Reworking existing content decays player satisfaction by forcing the constant rework of our own builds. And making changes by stealth only magnifies the problem.
 
Until this is understood, the future of this franchise is fraught. 

I always assumed that the 2km limit was referring to parking AGG ships.  But the wording is pretty vague.
 
I think however NQ wants to handle this kind of thing; it needs to be built into the game.  Tiles shouldn't be claimable if you aren't supposed to build on them.
 
And it can't be on NQ to make individual calls as to what is considered a legitimate building verses someone intentionally blocking a flight path.
 
It's true that the markets in the purple zone on Alioth will always have a clear flight path on one side.  But there are a lot of other markets that could eventually have an entire city built around them.  And it would probably be a good idea to decide how to handle this now, rather than later.

I always assumed that the 2km limit was referring to parking AGG ships.  But the wording is pretty vague.
 
I think however NQ wants to handle this kind of thing; it needs to be built into the game.  Tiles shouldn't be claimable if you aren't supposed to build on them.
 
And it can't be on NQ to make individual calls as to what is considered a legitimate building verses someone intentionally blocking a flight path.
 
It's true that the markets in the purple zone on Alioth will always have a clear flight path on one side.  But there are a lot of other markets that could eventually have an entire city built around them.  And it would probably be a good idea to decide how to handle this now, rather than later.

Greetings Noveans,

We are aware that some players are experiencing an issue with missing Sanctuary Territory Units (STUs) and other backer rewards.

We wanted to let everyone know that the team is working as quickly as we can to address these issues and we are working to resolve them as soon as possible.  We will update everyone when a resolution is in place.

Thanks to everyone for creating a support ticket about their missing STUs and alerting us of this issue. Unfortunately at this time, we cannot distribute STUs on an individual account basis. 

We apologize for any inconvenience that this might be causing and we want to thank you for your continued support as we work to resolve this issue. 

I always assumed that the 2km limit was referring to parking AGG ships.  But the wording is pretty vague.
 
I think however NQ wants to handle this kind of thing; it needs to be built into the game.  Tiles shouldn't be claimable if you aren't supposed to build on them.
 
And it can't be on NQ to make individual calls as to what is considered a legitimate building verses someone intentionally blocking a flight path.
 
It's true that the markets in the purple zone on Alioth will always have a clear flight path on one side.  But there are a lot of other markets that could eventually have an entire city built around them.  And it would probably be a good idea to decide how to handle this now, rather than later.

The best way I have found is to use the flattening tool with the smallest circle, and then use the smooth tool over that.