Teufelaffe

Not suggesting that it's against the TOS, just making people aware so that STE loses potential legit business in addition to some income from those containers. Since, as you point out, there's not much that can be done in-game, I'm doing what I can out of game.

*shrug* Not everyone is going to know what is and isn't a "too good to be true" price; especially newer players.

The org Space Trade Empire has dispensers purporting to sell gold scrap, but dispense 0.10L of hydrogen. I'd recommend never buying anything from them, ever.

I feel like you're not quite meshing with what NQ appears to be creating here. They're creating a virtual galaxy for players to do what they want in. That's why there's no NPCs, no arbitrary limits on PvP outside of safe zones (plus plans to eliminate the safe zone around every planet outside the starting three), and eventually no market bots. There's no "winning" or "losing" and thus no point to declaring something as "too easy." The niche roles will happen "naturally," as not every player is going to want to interact with every possible gameplay loop. If your Org does a lot of PvP, someone is going to have to make sure that ammo, fuel, and scrap are in plentiful supply. BAM, there's your support role. Not everyone is going to want to spend time designing ships that are effective in combat, so someone is going to have to do that work. BAM, there's your "ship guy." Will there be some Orgs that won't do that? Of course, but Org A where everyone is doing a little bit of everything all at once is not going to have any inherent advantage over Org B who has specialists filling specific roles. In fact, it's quite possible that Org B will have the advantage because their specialists can focus on their roles and not dilute their time, energy, and resources across multiple tasks. DU is, above all, centered around "emergent gameplay". Which means it's up to us, not NQ, to create these niches or roles. As a side note, I definitely agree that territory scanners need to be nerfed in some way. At the current rate, players are going to strip entire systems of T3+ ores before NQ can roll out the next system. I have a couple of relatively easy fixes for that: • Every active scanner within a certain range of an active scanner increases the total scan time of all scanners in range by an exponential amount. So, sure, you can plop down your 3 scanners at a hex intersection, but instead of it taking 15 minutes to complete the scan, it's going to take more than 2 days. The lore behind this affect can simply be that each scanner is interfering with the other and thus it takes each one much longer to sift through the "noise" generated by the other scanners. • Just like cores, the number of active scanners you can have at once is limited, and can be expanded via talents, but there will still be a set maximum per player and org. This will help prevent the "drop a scanner, start it, hop over a hex, drop a scanner, start it, hop over a hex..." process that people are using currently to scan hundreds of hexes a day. Those two changes, which should be relatively easy to implement, would pretty much bring the current process of strip mining moons and planets to a screeching halt while still making scanners useful.

Not sure you got the idea that I wanted them to push this to the top of the list or that I think they're not doing work. I know how software development works, and I know that "I really don't feel like dealing with that right now and it's not on the roadmap, so I'm going to say it's too difficult or impossible to implement" is something that every professional programmer on Earth has done at some point. For example, Blizzard insisted for years that it would never be possible for them to increase the size of a player's starting backpack in WoW above the initial 16 slots due to how they originally coded it. Yet, a couple years ago they started offering an automatic upgrade to the size of your starting backpack above 16 slots if you enabled two-factor auth on your Blizz account. It wasn't impossible, they just didn't want to deal with it at the time, and saying it wasn't possible got players to (mostly) shut up about it. NQ may eventually give us glass voxels or fix the N-1 issue, or they may not, but that doesn't change the fact that their "it's too difficult/impossible" response to those things is almost assuredly BS and is just them trying to get people to stop bringing those things up. Any time a coder tells you that something is impossible "because of the way we initially coded it", they're blowing smoke up your ass. That's dev speak for "that's more work than I want to deal with right now on top of everything else, the issue isn't a show stopper or even that big of a deal, and if I tell you it can't be done maybe you'll shut up about it." The dev teams I've worked on have used "it's not possible" for requests that they felt were a waste of time or were for issues/features insignificant enough that they could be relegated to the "maybe we'll look at that after we've finished everything else" bin. I'd say glass voxels and the N-1 issue qualify; the glass is a relatively small feature that confers no additional gameplay, and the N-1 issue is something only a small number of players is going to care about. My issue with NQ's response on these things is that they don't need to bullshit us like we're some clueless executive from upper-management who needs to be placated so they'll go away and leave the team alone. They can literally just say, "that's not something we want to spend development time on right now. We're focusing on more important things and may revisit those later" and much of their player base would be fine with that.

Which, much like the "glass voxels are too hard to implement", I don't buy for a second. If they can make a 255³ build area, and a 511³ build area, then can make one that's 256³ or 512³. And before the JC groupies show up, this has nothing to do with them using dual contouring on their voxels. Dual contouring refers to how the system calculates the surfaces of the voxels. It's a difficult method to implement, and still hasn't been perfected, which is why we see so many odd behaviours with voxels. Dual contouring has zero to do with the application of textures (voxel glass) or how much build space can be allocated (cores). From what I've seen of NQ's work thus far, I suspect the real reason is, "we don't have a quick and easy way to do that, and we don't feel like putting in the effort, so we're just going to say it's too difficult/impossible."

Wut. The safe zone may be where most of the players are, but it's a pretty small portion of the game "world". And it will become even smaller if they start adding more star systems. As for the whole "we should get rid of the safe zone" argument that folks are making, they're looking at this extremely short-sightedly. NQ should absolutely keep the existing safe zone. This not only ensures that new players can get a good foundation for the game, it ensures that there's actually an economy in place, because I'm pretty sure that all of the, "OMG, I just wanna blow people up!!!" crowd is not going to be contributing to anything other than the ammunition trade. On top of that, as time goes on and NQ adds more systems, the fact that three planets and a few moons are a safe zone will become less and less relevant in regard to PvP. As long as NQ puts something worth going to other systems for, the "I'm only happy if what I do makes someone else sad" crew can get all the PvP shenanigans they want and we get a functional economy. If NQ gets rid of the safe zone, DU *WILL* lose far more players than would ever join specifically for that feature. Despite what the PvP-obsessives tell themselves, there is almost no demand for MMOs with unrestricted PvP. Or did y'all think it was a strange coincidence that MMOs with unrestricted PvP* rarely last more than a year? If you still want to be playing DU a year or more from now, you'll want them to keep the safe zone in place indefinitely. *No, EVE does not count as an unrestricted PvP MMO. If a game has an NPC faction dedicated to blowing your ass up if you start stuff in the wrong system(s), it's not unrestricted.

Flash the offending elements(s), display a wireframe of its bounding box, highlight it...just something that shows me exactly what is colliding with the element I'm trying to place so I don't have to play a guessing game and start moving bunches of other elements around until I stumble upon the one that's in the way.

Repair drones would be a player-crafted consumable that require a few parts plus a few hundred of any scrap of the same tier as your drone in order to craft. Once you're in repair mode, hit the drone hotkey, which gives a targeting circle like with mining, click and BAM, the drone attaches to the construct and starts repairing every element within its range until it runs out of scrap or all elements within range are repaired, at which point the drone is consumed. Benefits: • Repair more than one element at once. • Repair elements without requiring a player standing there holding the mouse button (or while the player repairs other elements elsewhere on the construct). • Provides an additional product for players/orgs to manufacture and sell on the market, and since it's a consumable, there's theoretically always potential for demand. Limitations so that repairs and associated talents are still meaningful: • Drones cannot take advantage of players' talents, making it slower and less efficient than a player who's put the points and time into improving their repair abilities. • Higher tier drones requires higher tier, and thus more expensive, scrap and parts. I.e., an iron scrap drone might require some basic hydraulics and a robot arm plus the scrap, while a nickel scrap drone might require uncommon hydraulics, uncommon electronics, & robotic arm plus the scrap. This results in drone repairs not only being slower than a player with the appropriate talents, but also potentially quite a bit more expensive. • Amount of scrap per drone is fixed, so you can't make a single "super drone" with thousands of scrap. • Drone is consumed if all elements within range are fully repaired, even if there's still some scrap left. • Repair AOE will be relatively small and fixed, so you can't repair half of a ship with one drone and damaged elements that are far enough apart on the construct require multiple drones or "manual" repair. • You can't "pause" an already placed drone. Once you've placed it, it's there until it's done or you remove it, and in either case it is consumed. • Cannot be made using the nanocrafter, so if you didn't bring any with you and need some emergency repairs in the field, you're doing it by hand.

Step 1: Start the repair process by holding the mouse button down. Step 2: While still holding the mouse button, alt-tab out of the game. You can then let go of the mouse button. Step 3: Surf the web, watch netflix, browse the forums, etc while the repairs continue in game until you alt-tab back in.

Currently mining is pretty monotonous because aside from gravity, mining on any given planet or moon is the same as mining on any other planet or moon. Mining should have some variation, and danger. Here are some ideas I had that would make mining more interesting and risky. • Vast underground caverns with nodes in them somewhere, but also deposits of a worthless mineral that interferes with scanner results. Players would have to either find the valuable deposits visually, or find and destroy the deposits that are interfering with the scanners. • Large deposits of an indestructible material that players will have to find their way around (or through, depending on the shape) in order to get to valuable nodes. • Volatile gas pockets that do not show on the scanner, but do show on the directional detector. Mining/digging into these pockets carries the potential for triggering an explosion that can kill the player or destroy nearby valuable minerals. Give players a bit of time after digging into a pocket before it explodes to allow time to escape or seal it off (which would prevent explosion). Like the indestructible deposits, players would have to find a way around the the gas pocket to get to the valuable node(s). • Geothermal vents that interfere with the directional detector. Finding and releasing some of the pressure from these vents can be hazardous, but will reduce or eliminate the detector interference. Different planets/moons would be more likely to have some of these than others, giving some much needed variety and a feeling that mining on planet/moon A is actually different than mining on planet/moon B.

If they wipe talent progress, I would be unhappy but probably not leave. If they wipe blueprints, I would cancel my sub, uninstall the game, and use an "eraser" program to ensure that not a single bit of DU remained on my computer. I would then hit myself in the head with a hammer until I forgot DU ever existed.

Sorry that you've not had a good experience with DU. I didn't even know about DU until the beta opened up this year, so I don't know what else you've had to deal with in the alpha stage, but I totally understand reaching a point in a game where it's just not worth it anymore. If you're not having fun in a game, it's healthy to stop playing it and move on to things that will give you enjoyment. Do good, and avoid evil. o7

There's no need to have two separate tools for deploying BPs and ground elements. Just one "deploy" tool that activates the appropriate functionality depending on whether you select a BP or an element.

You have to shift-drag it into your inventory; you cannot split the stack into the Market Container.