Emptiness

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

This is definitely my preference.
 
Not sure how finite ores factor into that, though. Planetary ore regen is needed.

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

This.

This.

But you do know it before everyone else, and someone (possibly multiple someones) have been taking advantage of that info before it hits the live servers.

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

This.

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

And yet again, NQ has proven they're out of touch with how the players have been playing the game.
 
Setting up a factory to produce everything one desires is just the first step, for many of us, through ensuring we have a reliable supply of elements and material with which to build our ships. The market is unreliable or too time consuming. Why would we spend hours traveling to different markets to pick up various ship building parts when we can just mine ore from our tiles and make what we need?

I don't think the durability changes go far enough to be honest - though it's a major step in the right direction. You are still discouraging player interaction as any element with less than 3 lives is worthless as an element to the victor of pvp. While at the very least they get some sort of compensation - like schematics back - it's still a matter of diminishing returns and a discentive to take your ship out.
 
Needless to say, you still - under the proposed changes -
 - Have the issue of decorative elements being completely discouraged, opting the pvp meta to be empty box shells of ships
 - Player interaction for pvp is still discouraged
 - Moving further into the future, expanding gameplay options for salvaging and exploration are limited and discouraged

I sincerely urge NQ to scrap the "limited lives" durability model and re-evaluate better alternatives to how element destruction and the need for new elements from the market is handled. There are a multitude of better alternatives suggested across forums - I won't do a self promotion plug again since I don't care what it is to be honest, as long as it's not the restrictive and gameplay penalising system that exists at present. Once again, to re-iterate - the present choice of limited lives of elements has been universally the least popular mechanic for durability in every multiplayer game that has tried it since the 90s. And for very good reasons.

EDIT: The DRM introduction also makes capturing ships not feel like... captured ships. Half of the appeal of pirates to capture ships was for underground lua script market. If you want player interaction, you need to want player interaction - not attempt to socially engineer what kind of interaction you want the players to have. Can't have it both ways.

I completely disagree. Since most crashes are caused by bugs - at least for me... maybe the rest of you are sloppy pilots - we shouldn't be penalized for that.
 
Overall, the proposed changes look good.
 
I'm also not convinced that feedback from ATV hasn't hurt the game more than helped it.

Have your devs play the game , from the start with no god mode 
 
They will learn more from that than any hand picked forum

Just forget about ATV. Their influence was clearly bad on this game.
Learn about the history of MMOs to avoid repeating the same mistakes other already made in past.
And play your own game (without the cheat codes).

Yesterday I made a ‘top of my head’ style post of how schematics could have been made good, achieved the goals of creating industry specialization, expanding the gameplay loop while not crippling the existing players.
 
I’m going to expand on this now as much as I can.
 
 
Goals:
 
Maintain the ability of solo players and small groups to stay self sufficient for the basic ship building.
 
Create a gameplay loop around schematic development that does not involve bots.
 
Create a use for ‘damaged’ elements.
 
Create a progression system for developing schematics.
 
Inject a finite number of end game schematics that will allow the owners to maintain a market nice.
 
 
Games we are basing the mechanics on:
 
SWTOR Research system.
 
Path of Exile Divination Card system.
 
 
Tier 1 – Basic Technology
 
This is current stage of human technology that is publicly known.  For a contemporary example – think the “Internal Combustion Engine”. You and I may not know how to build one off the top of our head – but we can easily find full blown instructions and even schematics on google at no cost.
 
In the game, the vast majority of elements we have currently fall in this category. We do not need to buy a schematic or research one – we know how to build space engines, we know how to build atmospheric engines and so on.
 
 
Tier 2 – Advanced and Proprietary technology
 
This is the pinnacle of human technology that goes beyond common and public knowledge. There are two categories in Tier 2 that require schematics:
 
Propriety Technology and Advanced Technology.
 
Propriety technology is NPC created unique items that players do not know how to build and cannot research due to licensing restricitons such as patents etc. For a contemporary example – an Internal Combustion Engine with variable compression rate – we know some companies have developed the technology, but we don’t know how to make it ourselves. We would need to license such technology to build from it.
 
Things that fall into this category and require purchasing a schematic from the bots:
 
AGG, Warp Drives, L cores and so on
 
 
Advanced Technology is player created by ‘analyzing’ Tier 1 items. When an element is ‘analyzed’ it is pushed to it’s limits until destroyed and knowledge is gained about how it can be improved. A brand new item can be analyzed, or a partially damaged item.
 
The difficulty of developing an item will vary on the complexity of the item being analyzed and the results are unpredictable (but can be steered, more on that later)
 
Example of how it could work.
 
I have a Basic Space Engine S and would like to develop and Advanced Space Engine S.
 
The Space Engine has a complexity rating of 20.
 
I toss a brand new Basic Space Engine S in an analyzer and the following formula is applied to identify the progress made towards a BP:
 
 
((100-<Complexity>)/50)* RNG(1 to <Analysis Skill>)*<Item Repairs Left>
 
The Basic Space Engine S has a complexity rating of 20.
My analysis skill is at 3.
 
So the formula results in:
 
((100-20)/50)*RNG(1 to 3)*3
 
Let’s say the RNG gods bless me and I roll a 3 – the result is: 14.4 points progress.
 
I’m sure NQ could come up with a better formula for this – but you get the idea.
 
Once you have accumulated 100 points in the analyzer you get a schematic for a variant of Advanced Space Engine S which is 10% improved in a random trait. For example, we may get a Responsive Advanced Space Engine S which has faster warmup time.
 
Which schematic is generated the first time is entirely random.
 
We can further steer the direction of research to ensure that we do not get duplicates. To ensure we do not get a duplicate schematic with faster warmup time, we have to feed an engine with that trait into the analyzer – we can do this with multiple engines. For example if we are seeking more power and already have engine variants with all the other traits boosted to 10%, we can load them all in and be guaranteed to get a 10% more power engine as the end result.
 
Finally, we can research an “Pinnacle Space Engine S” which has 5% improvement to all stats by feeding every single variant into the analyzer.
 
 
The above system is not limited to just ship elements, it can be applied to all elements with stats, anything from containers that hold more, to assemblers that work faster and so on.
 
 
Tier 3 – Future Tech
 
This should be introduced with the new solar system. We are the first humans in that system, but someone was here before us. There are technology fragments that can be found when mining in asteroids, deep underground or in wrecks. Completing a full artifact and analyzing it will produce a tier 3 schematic. These cannot be further improved.
 
Some artifacts can be extremely rare and the number of them seeded should be finite with more added as the game progresses. The number fragments that you need to complete will vary depending on the element – an XL engine could have 100 and an XS just 5 and so on. The fragments can be sold and are rare enough that it is impractical for an individual to find all the fragments to complete a set without trading for some.
 
There is a finite number of fragments and not everyone or even every org will be able to get one. The players that can get one will have limited competition on the pricing of the final items. If any one org is able to gain a monopoly on a schematic or they exit the game via inactive players, more are injected into the system.
 
Not all Tier 2 items have a Tier 3 counterpart.
 
 
Tier 4 - Alien Tech
 
This is ultra-rare technology that can only be acquired through in game events etc. This is the actual alien technology that we are trying to replicate in Tier 3 – except this is the real deal. These can only be acquired through events etc and are a cosmetic upgrade from Tier 3. Ultra exclusive, ultra rare, and largely a cosmetic bragging rights item. 
 
 
 

First off, I still kinda like the game. Now let’s dive into the negative things.
 
Unfun things and tedium is being added. Fun things are being removed. Grayseeker worded it very nicely in the JC Q&A:
 
"Creative people aren’t driven by economics, power etc. The driving force is to create, to build. And DU is awesome for this. A primary reason the market hasn’t been used as you would like could be because people love to make the stuff themselves. Are you concerned  that people will sink all their money into schematics to carry on building as they have been"

King JC misinterpreted the question and answered "We expect a minority (10%?) to go into the industry gameplay, and compete on the market to provide low cost "products" to all the other players."

JC, please tell us, how do you play the game?  Plenty of users would love to see you livestream normal gameplay, not just looking at nice buildings, but actual normal gameplay, like endless digging, fiddeling around with the market interface, checking all your machines if any are stuck. Have your ship bug out and crash for no reason, you know, real DU gameplay.



When is mining going to be more than hours of clicking while watching a movie?

And when will there be any positive changes to the mess that is the interface? Which number is bigger on first glance, 105532952 or 53223924? How about 105 532 952 or 53 223 924?

Search the market and tell me how much adjustors L are on Lacobus, or if there are any at all, while you yourself are on Alioth.

Try this, put 150 silumin in a container, nothing in another, and connect a transfer unit to move it. Click "doable". Now type the word in manually.

Ever made an "executive chair"? I never did, I just see them pop up on my notification log when I sell them. Because when you changed the name for navigator chair nobody bothered to change the text in the market files.
 
Or the sizes, ever wanted to know what size container or engine or whatever you just sold? Sorry, can’t do.
 
Further, we now don’t even know which market we sold something at anymore.
 
Got stuff at multiple markets and want to look through them? There are 100 ways to sort the inventory of a specific market container, but not one to sort the containers to show only non-empty.

Right at the start new players actually think there is a core limit. I mean there kind of is a core limit, until you find out there is not.

And the same is the case for territory units.
 
VTA or whatever you call it, why do some players get insider knowledge?

Is there a reason why I can inspect a stack of ore in my inventory to see the total mass, but not in the market inventory?
 
Too many elements and your craft flies at a small fraction of the displayed speed. Wh
 
y do I have the feeling I can add to this list for another hour or two?



And what did we get in the last patches? Was any fun stuff added? We got more bugs, more falling AGG as you removed the tools to keep them afloat.

Random people got insider info and could keep their riches.

Some others got rich because they saw the change in time about bots now buying ore for double price, or they had some other insider info.
 
Everybody else lost, my whole factory can not be rebuilt as it was using dynamic lines. All we can do now is dedicated lines to spam certain items, as not having a machine run 24/7 after you buy the schematic is a waste.  My social aspect in this game was people giving me a list of items they want to pick up the next day, All I can say now is "I don’t have 90% of those items, but the others I have 4000 times." And then bring it to the market. The dead market with all the trash of people who quit, corps that no longer exist and hubs full of items nobody wants. You were afraid the world you created could look empty, now it looks deserted instead.

The sad thing is none of these suggestions are revolutionary - all of these are rehashes from existing mechanics in other games.

Countless games had item fragments you had to collect and trade to get a complete item - path of exile cards are a prefect example of that mechanic. You will almost never complete a set of the rarer cards yourself but you would  trade for them with other players to get a complete set.
 
The scarcity can be tuned easily on the server side to inject blueprints early on or slow down the progression to create scarcity as needed. It's pretty easy for the game to have mechanics in place to keep seeding BPs until there is a set number of completed BPs and they are controlled by at least several different orgs to prevent monopolization of any one BP to maintain a healthy economy.
 
If the goal is to force industry specialization - the only way to do this is via limited BPs.
 
JC's argument of "You won't make your own iphone!" is silly because the reason there aren't 500,000 random factories making iPhones is patents. If they could get away with it,  they'd be selling $400 Huawei 'iphones' at every corner.  Limiting BPs creates the same situation where only certain entities will be able to make certain things.
 
 
Mining ships are nothing new. Empyrion has them Space Engineers has them.. The fact that DU does not have mining ships continues to blow my mind. 
 
 
Like - how is this NOT a thing in DU?!
 
In Empyrion you could only mount drills on a hovercraft which meant that a mining op involved flying your capital ship with some hovercraft to a planet, landing, unloading the HVs and mining with the HVs. While your capital ship was landed on the planet it was vulnerable due to capital ship weapons being less effective in atmosphere. So often you'd actually end up having to have a friend drop off some HVs, hide the capital ship in deep space, come back in a small ship and help mine in a hovercraft before going back to bring the capship to scoop everyone up and return to safety. Or you would leave the capital ship on the planet but also unload some defensive hovercraft which had strong atmospheric weapons to defend the capital ship. Handmining in Empyrion was what newbies did for the first day - and then never again.
 
In Empyrion our 'mining' hovercraft were basically tanks that could also mine to ensure that if we did get caught by some hostile players we wouldn't get slaughtered. My luckiest mining op resulted in finding a landed capital ship while piloting my hovercraft and blowing it up. Less lucky one ended with me running into another hovercraft and taking an artillery shell to the face....but that's what made it fun.
 
 

You're really grasping at straws here.  None of that is true.
 
People build hangers to show off the stuff they build.  I can promise you that will still happen.
 
Everyone will still need, want, and make voxel libraries.  In fact if these creative instances were shared, then people could build even bigger, better voxel libraries, because they won't have to farm all the resources to build them.
 
And elements and honeycomb that people have to buy, just to see what they look like, but then don't have any use for afterword, are a ridiculously small part of the overall economy.
 
Would you throw a fit if NQ considered adding a way to preview what elements look like?  Or adding the actual dimensions of the elements to the description?  Because that would have the exact same detrimental effect on the economy.

So every day for the last 5, I crash to desktop on login. Every day the form to submit a bug report comes up and I fill it in.
 
Today, I log in, I crash. I log in, I crash. I log in and my connection is blocked by admin. I crash.
 
I fire it up again - dual is already running.
 
Task manager, close, again - dual is already running.
 
When I can actually get on I need to move some some bits around. So I fly. In the next few hexes, I see towers, so I adjust course. There is nothing in my current hex apart from a tower on my right side, but there a significant amount of space. It's slow to draw as usual, but that's fine. I've got room and I know that there's at least something to avoid on my right.  Only there isn't, because at around 150 or so metres in front of me, another tower has been drawn in.

Now, I have to be objective here for a second. Is it a pain that there's allsorts of whackadoodle builds everywhere? Yes. Is it their right to build those? Also, yes.
 
Would it be nice to see them? YES.
 
So in few words @NQ - draw calls. Either you ran PERF on the draw calls and decided that this level of performance was acceptable for a charged Beta, or you didn't run PERF (which frankly you know as well as I do, you should have done in Alpha)
 
I'd like to invite you to comment on the connection issues, the rampant lag and your approach to PERF - I don't need fine details but the spread of Frames per second  and m/s to render (because lets not compare apples and oranges) would be good to know, especially if you feel the amount of PERF testing was justifiable prior to release.

I say this because there are now several adverts online that are in no way reflective of the product that do not disclose this. The most notable being what is evidently a scripted flight through  mountains, at speed, with jink and with smooth frame progression.

The reason I say this is that as  developer, I am a little pissed off that I'm legally obligated to ensure any advertising of my product is technically accurate and reflective of a product at the point of sale. If it isn't, I need to make that abundantly clear in my advertising.

Meanwhile NQ is sitting on 11 milion in funds raised and a live subscription model raising more income.

That is not only wrong, but it's offensive to others in the industry who are taking great pains to ensure they are compliant.

I'd like the community to be able to see the response, but more importantly, I'd like the response to a very straightforward question to be something that's easily visible, were it to be used as the crux of a regulatory complaint.