Zamiel7

Nice! It definitely makes it feel a whole lot better to step out of the safe zone knowing if they are people waiting to nab you.

Fair enough, I suppose. That being said, if you're going to flex on people for "doing it wrong" and not share with the class how you're "doing it right," people are bound to be a little skeptical ?

Radar absolutely works in the safe zone; we use it all the time to see who's around us before moving out of the safe zone.

100% accurate. Moons are almost totally worthless in terms of mining. As far as the planets are concerned, my organization has yet to experience any indication that ore is running out.

For weapons at least, this does not appear to be the case; they need to be completely exposed and not at all encased in voxels in order to fire. We encountered an issue where even having the base of a railgun (not even the "gun" part) baked into voxels completely prevented it from firing.

I mean, when we're mining Malachite/Limestone on Alioth and transporting it back to our base on Madis, you better believe we're going to want to haul more than 200 tons of the stuff ?

With modest piloting skills, our Medium Hauler can get 1700 tons (total weight of ship with cargo) off of Alioth comfortably. That's with 10 Large Atmospheric Engines and 4 Large Stabilizers.

Attempting to extrapolate any kind of concrete truths about a person's morality from how they play a videogame is so incredibly sophomoric. It's the rough equivalent of someone trying to diagnose mental illness after taking one psychology class. No reasonable person would take an argument like that seriously.

So much this. As potentially entertaining as it would be to watch the current established bases suddenly become warzones and get caught up in that rush, I think it would burn far too many people.

It's for this reason that I honestly think it's a good idea to just keep Alioth free of PvP, and this is coming from someone for who PvP is the top interest/priority. Honestly, I'd even be okay with the current safe zone that includes Madis and Thades remaining free of PvP. The planets outside of the safe zone are currently better for finding resources (especially higher tier ore) and when things like asteroid mining and such are introduced, there will be even more reasons to travel outside of the safe zone. But, this isn't (yet another) topic about PvP or the safe zone, so I'll leave it at that.

I think it's important when discussing mechanics to avoid falling into the trap of arguing semantics. Whether or not this behavior is techincally a bug or not doesn't mean much; all that matters is whether NQ specifically deems it an exploit of game mechanics. Personally, I don't think it's actually that clear-cut of an abuse, and it could go either way. What we have here is a fairly straightforward application of established game mechanics. As has been stated, you need to be able to maneuver dynamic constructs on your territory to prevent people from just dropping a big box ship over your stuff and preventing you from leaving or accessing it. That much is clear and sensible, and it likely won't change. Claiming territory that has a ship parked on it with the intent of maneuvering that ship onto a larger dynamic core and then ferrying it off to the PvP Zone for breaking it down and stealing it is a complex application of the mechanic in question, and it does require a lot of variables to be true for it to work: The dynamic construct has to located on an unclaimed tile. The owner of the construct has to be offline or otherwise away from the ship for long enough for the "aggressor" to claim the territory (15 minutes), maneuver the ship onto a larger construct (~30 seconds), and then fly that construct into a PvP zone and destroy it (hard to estimate how long this would take, but I reckon it could be done in about 20-30 minutes if it took place on Alioth, for example). The "aggressor" needs to have a larger core sized construct than the "victim" that can lift the stolen craft into space and haul it to the PvP zone (easy enough for XS/S cores, but more difficult for M cores like the OP's example). Besides all of these variables, the "aggressor" also has to deem that it's even worth it to steal the ship. Claiming the territory is probably going to at least cost over 100,000 quantas because it's unlikely anyone doing this doesn't already have territory claimed (though it's entirely possible they have a friend who hasn't claimed territory and can do it for free, I suppose), so it's not going to be worth it to steal new players' ships that are going to be worth less than that. Sure, some people might "do it for lols" but I can't imagine that will happen a whole lot. The real victims here are going to be people that have stuff actually worth stealing who, presumably, have a better working understanding of the game. However, even with all this said, I can see this becoming a problem if a lot of people start doing it. It would be pretty simple to design a Medium or Large ship that's sole purpose is to troll around looking for people parked on unclaimed territory, then quickly and efficiently steal their ships. It would still require the victim to not be paying attention for a decent period of time though, so NQ's ruling on this could go either way.

This point about Sanctuary is spot on. It doesn't make a lot of sense that the game starts players on Alioth, asks them to move to Sanctuary to finish the tutorial, and then the mechanics of the game essentially force them to either move back to Alioth or another planet if they want to progress at a reasonable pace. It would make a lot more sense to start players on Sanctuary, have them complete the basic tutorial of the game there, and then have that basic intro conclude on one of the Districts of Alioth where they can either complete the rest of the available tutorials or forge out on their own. Sanctuary is a deadend. There is currently no reason to be there other than the game telling you to go there, but it could have some value as the literal starting place for new players who are just trying to learn the basic mechanics. It just doesn't make sense to move players there if they aren't starting there.

Yeah, I mean, I'm all for improving the new player experience since it's so important for a game like this, but if players are getting turned off explicitly because of 20-30km travel times, then they simply aren't going to enjoy this game regardless. This is not a game for people who want instant gratification, and no amount of improvements to the new player experience are going to change that.

If such a device existed that allowed players to teleport directly to a market hub to buy and sell things, it would totally break the logistics aspects of the game. There's no way this will ever happen. It seems like your issue is more that you keep crashing, which is certainly a big problem, but this is not the way to go about fixing it.

This is a really thoughtful post with lots of interesting ideas! I'm not sure how feasible some of them are from a game design standpoint, but most of them make sense to me. Ultimately, I think the overhauling of PvP is going to go hand-in-hand with the implementation of energy management for elements on ships, but that's probably really far off.

As someone who is very much interested in PvP, I agree with the spirit of this post: PvP should not be gimmicky, broken, or function in the current way that it does. That being said, I also don't agree with all of the solutions outlined in the OP. I think there should be a PvP free zone, and I think the current one is mostly fine; it contains everything a new player would need to get started and it can act like a centralized location for people to go about their business without worrying about losing everything. I also think players should be incentivized to travel outside of the PvP free zone for better resources and rewards, and then be prepared to fight and contend for those benefits. That's a really important mechanic! I also don't think there's anything fun or interesting about an overly centralized PvP meta that saps creativity and renders elements of the game moot, but that is an issue of balance, not exclusion, one that I'm sure will be addressed over time. Ship design and combat tactics should always feel like an arms race of building a better mousetrap, and it's pretty lame to hold up a battle cube as the pinnacle of PvP. I very much disagree about removing space radars from the game. That strikes me as a terrible and excessive response to imbalance. If you're going to be slow-boating between planets in the PvP zone, people should absolutely be able to hunt you down, especially since once you get a Warp Drive, you can avoid PvP almost entirely. On a related note, the idea of banning PvP on planets entirely is bonkers: there's so much potential for terrestrial and atmospheric combat if it's done properly. There's no doubt that balancing PvP in Dual Universe is going to take some doing, but reducing its role to nothing of substance or labeling those that are interested in it as universally unreasonable is probably not the way to go.