Hiturn

someone shat in his cornflakes this morning.

TLDR at the bottom.

YOU may think that pvp is the GOLDEN ticket but there are far more things that they could do (and IMO, should do)  first before introducing PVP considering this engine is really not up to the task.

removal of ALL BOTS:  ore purchasers and schematics.
Replace schematics with org research. research the schematics and horde or sell them.
PROPER Tech tree with proper tiers that need to be studied AND USED to unlock. (Cyberpunk's xp system is great).
Automated defensive structures, domes, forcefields, fortifications ala every single shooting since the 80.
Energy generation and consumption and recycling, reclaiming.
WATER as a resource needed for industry
importing water to arid planets like Madis/moons.
OIL wells for energy and plastics production.
realistic resource distribution and extraction rates,
Proper resources and farming
Farming wood and other biological materials from trees and animals, not coal.
Or grow them in reactors/vats.
Tier Zero materials for land buildings like concrete, masonry etc.
Proper terrain forming tools with undo like in core building.
Requiring energy/time cool downs for local res nodes to function forcing players who repeatedly die back to earlier res nodes, further away.
 
 
NOW we have valuable resources that need to be gathered and pooled, we have real reason for conflict and PVP.
Once this is in place, remove the safe zones and allow air / air-ground PVP.

Before any of this is in place, PVP is just grandstanding/ganking/willie waving and roleplaying. It has zero strategic value as currently implemented.


TL;DR: PVP isn't the golden ticket, it is the icing on the cake, IMO

There is something very, very wrong with the dev pace at NQ.

yeah but it was absurd for investors to throw $20+million behind a first-time dev with no experience to begin with...
 
NQ had plenty of time and money to deliver a basic premise. the fact that investors let them stay in closed alpha for so long (to me) says they were fairly patient and reasonable with timelines. Yeah they pushed them to become revenue generating after ~6 years of "closed alpha" because they would have stayed in closed alpha forever otherwise. 
 
i don't think it is fair to say that DU's issue is "unreasonable timelines" or investors "not getting them" -- that investors jumped into a game dev with no track record for that sum is already enormously benevolent. DU isn't going to become stable no matter how long they spend on it -- it's a big house of sand built on sand piled atop more sand.
 
As for the OP...i don't think it was needlessly harsh or mocking. DU is a textbook "don't do this" case of game dev from top to bottom. They acknowledge that the mistakes made aren't easy things to avoid. Not like they are supposed to be warm fuzzy friends -- they are rival companies. Not like NQ is so innocent and needs to be defended. 

And then.. suddenly.. the lights go out and there is no more servers.. And some will look around wondering what happened and how the never saw it coming.
 
There is one major difference between a game's community and "sociologists, economists, professional writers" .. one of these pay the bills, the other are the bills..
 

Prints are a good idea, but the current iteration of implementing them in industry is a bit tedious.
Id think that if NQ were to move the print bank to the core for the construct, and then you can go to the core and put in as many of the prints as you want to have in that building
Then at the industrial unit itself you can select from a list of available recipes instead of the current iteration in which each machine has its own bank, that is unnecessarily tedious.
This makes for altering industry as a whole much more streamlined say if you wanted to alter the production chain of a building, or decommission a series of industrial machines etc.
 

One of the main reasons I played this game was for PvP, with the intention of competing in the future over territory and limited resources. If the people who I am competing against have money printers (that go brrrr), I'm at a huge, essentially insurmountable, disadvantage. For other players who are industrialists, they now have to compete on the market against people who got their schematics for free, and now don't need to factor the cost of the schematic into the price of the items they are selling.
 
Not everyone plays this game like Minecraft in space, never leaving their little corner of the world.

My conspiracy theory is they will wipe, because here in a number of months, the player base will be so god damn low, that it will make sense for them to "gamble" and do a wipe to actually get more players.  The wipe could actually get more players back and new ones then any amount that actually quit. Make no mistake plenty will "threaten to quit" but only a fraction actually will.  And if NQ actually has a good update down the road a wipe could be welcoming to most people.

From time to time I read that NQ has 100 employees, but the added content we are seeing does not correspond to this number. More like 5-10 20? people so the rest are either working on very long term future updates that have been hired recently so we don't see their effort yet  and single shard engine tech or there is a really big problem at NQ that won't be solved.
 
 

Question of how NQ sturctured, operating and staffed is extreamly untransperent.
 
Here is like transperent indy studio info looks like:
https://anvilgamestudios.com/presskit/#credits
 
You find nothing like this with NQ beyond their initial KS skeleton team listing 5 years ago, that likely seriously changed. It may be 100 empoyes, maybe 50, who knows, may be 10 of them making game and others mining bitcoins on your PCs : ) Also NQ have sub-divisions (France and Canada) likely not only for access to people, but also some creative bookkeeping/legal magic (as some of more investegative noveans suspect).
 
https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.novaquark.e74c2b8664be9a2c7fc6e1ed616e276f.html
https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.novaquark_inc.981afa95a964419e3a26467bf4a292c7.html
 
So, in short, its impossible to figure anything out at this front without serious inside, only wild guesses.
 
 

The cynic in may says that if this is introduced, it's just going to be a nanomarket window with a dropdown selection from about half a dozen mission types, a free-text box (limited to 500 characters), a price field and a deadline date field. And *maybe* a simple text search function.

Everything else introduced into this game recently has been coded at a junior intern level of sophistication... I don't see why this will be any different.

The only thing that saves this burning dumpster fire besides removing all ill gotten schematics or a rollback is to flat come out now and say there will be a full wipe before release. Seriously NQ, you need to own this one way or the other. Either tell us all it doesn't matter cause it's all getting nuked downed the road anyway, or act like professionals and fix it.

I will explain why ppl are angry today , using myself as an example:
 
after 0.23 patch, i had to spend 200 mil quanta on schematics to get my warp cell/warp drive factory running again.
 
the decided to go for long grind for warp beacon production line:
 
Schematics/ rare industry units cost me around 450 mil quanta. then managed to accumulate 500 mil towards warp beacon schematic.
 
Long  painful grind , hours of mining/hauling / market trading sometimes even at a cost of sleep , as I am an adult with real life responsibilities.
 
1 Billion 150 million quanta ,I have accumulated at a cost of many many hours ,was yesterday  reduced to 11.5 million.  Instead of being one of the few making beacons , i have nothing , when some have it for free.
 
How can i be happy and understanding?
 
 
 

Its probably bugged like so many other talents.

This stuff is why the game needs an “all but BP’s and skills” wipe on release. Reset the worlds and ore, etc..
 
I get it. I have stuff I do not want to lose too. But you can’t have stuff like this just go untreated in a PvP game with a player based economy. The consequences of these kind of massive economic errors only grow over time.
 
There’s a reason games wipe after Betas (and let’s be honest this is really an open alpha, not feature complete). There are going to be fuck ups, wildly bad balance passes, etc.. you can either micromanage their effects, ignore them and leave the game permanently damaged, or beta wipe. It seems like a pretty obvious decision from a balance/dev resource position.

As someone who is usually vocally and entirely anti-rollback and anti-wipe. I think this is a situation that would justify a roll-back. Yea it sucks hard but right now you lose around 24 hours. The longer they wait the worse it will be as well.
 
Sure the fact jonny whosit over there got 50 warp beacon blueprints wont hurt you now. But it wasnt just a few schems here and there. There are now people who spent as much as a billion on schems and have literally thousands of them on almost everything you can think of and can now dictate market prices to a point where they and others like them will be the ONLY ones who are able to compete in the market. That is unless you dont mind selling at what is esentially a loss on most products for a very long time.
 
This glitch has literally killed huge swaths of the market for most normal and all new players in terms of ability to compeat and literally invalidates .23. This means the only solutions are a rollback or to reduce schem prices down to glitch levels for an indeteminate amount of time unless you want a handful of super monopolies who price most players out of the market.

A warp beacon costs 20-30M to make, it is sold for much more because it takes so long to make and because people want to make back the money they paid for the schematics. The same can be said for any t3+ item, the price is not dictated so much by the raw materials but the build time and schematic price. 

Now that plenty of people practically got the schematics for free, there is no way anybody who paid the normal price for it will ever make his money back. The issue may not hurt you, because you don’t do industry, but it does hurt a lot of other players.

I agree, however economically speaking, there is no such thing as "pvp for profit".  PvP is a less-than-zero sum game overall.  There is always less value in the economy after a PvP fight than before one.

The only practical way to have PvP activities inject money into the economy is to have AI enemy bots as targets.  In addition to the loot of the kill, the amount of economic injection can be tweaked by using game-provided bounty rewards like the login/universal income/helicopter monies but you actually have to work for it.
 
 

A lot of people talk about how DU is "dead" or "dying".
 
Unfortunately, I think that the few objective numbers we have tend to back up that claim.
 
I don't think there's been a singular "mass exodus" but a slow and steady churn:   
8 months ago (official trailer)
1.6 Million Views 7 months ago (pvp trailer)
742k views 4 months ago (beta trailer)
659k views 2 months ago (official building trailer)
167k views 3 weeks ago (DU: a look ahead)
10k views 1 week ago (DU Lost in transit event)
<5k views Reddit
~50 people online on average, 8k total members, low engagement  Twitter
15k followers, low tweet engagement all around  
  I get that many people don't use social networking at all...but a growing game has a growing social presence...certainly not a shrinking one.  
 
Also, NQ no longer has any job postings -- maybe they filled them all (in which case dev should be going faster lol) or maybe they realize their runway isn't going to last for as long as they first expected. 

Only NQ can answer if the daily login alone is enough "fresh currency" to avoid deflation...keeping in mind that the player base is churning (hard), not growing -- and each player that quits takes how many days of login cash with them into oblivion...? 
 
It is really absurdly baffling that NQ hasn't thought about the economy...like at all. 
 
I've never even heard of an MMO that lacks a way to print currency, but here we are. 
 
Considering how easy this test would be, I agree that they should rip out ore bots and see how it impacts the economy. If it really isn't working after a week or two, just put them back...
 
Frankly, I've given up trying to figure out what NQ's devs actually do all day.
 
It's been almost 5 months and there's been no major updates...yet somehow the game will be release ready by end of year...when they don't even know the basics of how freakin' currency works?!
 
But sure, keep spending time on those wonderful events -- gotta earn those 4,000 youtube views somewhere, right? 

Without enough Quanta circulating you can wait forever for your products to be sold. Even with bots as source of cash there is currently no chance to get 4x the ore sales value. With a lot of products you can't even make profit at all because they have market prices far below their ore sales value.
 
That is wrong in theory (with money sinks (e.g. schematics) there must be corresponding sources for cash) and in practice (deflation is still ongoing).

The core is on top but the building area can go inside the market. 

It's not the PvP players fault that the meta is like that. The whole voxel aspect of ship design needs a serious overhaul.
The situation with PvE ships is actually even worse. The mechanical performance of any PvE ship can be improved by deleting all the voxels. In fact, if certain posts on reddit are to be believed, even having symmetric wing elements on your ship reduces its performance. Anyone who is flying a nice-looking ship is playing sub-optimally in terms of resource efficiency.
The only reason PvP ships look worse than PvE ships is because they are under more pressure to play optimally. An inefficient hauler wastes a bit of fuel, but an inefficient PvP ship gets totally destroyed.
 
If you want cool looking PvP ships then there are only two solutions:
1. Make voxels have no impact on performance (easy to implement, but a waste of a cool feature).
2. Make "pretty" configurations perform better than "ugly" ones (hard to implement efficiently, and will probably need tweaking every time a new ugly meta emerges).

But that would speed things up, and JC has expressly said people are playing this game too much... er.. I mean... people are progressing too fast.
In all fairness, CDPR were surprised when some players managed to "complete" Cyberpunk in less than 20 hours on their first playthough considering they had touted it as a 120hr+ play through game.

The problem is is that JC has now recalibrated the game around the 100+ player org with 10+ hour per day players that "caused" this perceived problem, meaning that single players and single digit orgs with single digit member play  times will be at a distinct disadvantage.

To some extent, there needs to be unlimited (in comparison to the population)  "staple" materials for a society to grow rapidly. Every developed society in the world came from a past where subsistence materials were common enough to allow the spontaneous creation of proto-civilizations without undue competition. However in DU, 

Refining limestone for calcium but losing the carbon and oxygen (CaC03), solid fluorine, gold and marble being the toughest materials (until recently) and of course my personal favourite, mining coal and combining it with Oxygen (IIRC) to create wood. These kinds of decisions immediately alienate players with even a modicum of scientific knowledge beyond primary school level. Stuff like this means that humans cannot harness Stone / Bronze Age materials such as wood from trees or glass from sand or even more egregiously bricks from clay. Heaven forbid, harvesting solid stone from those massive boulders and subsurface deposits.

This causes every single wall and floor of basic ground constructs to compete with the materials used in space age constructs creating enormous pressure on resources.

Are you allowed to build new ships, but not use them?

Effective immediately, all mining and transport in and out of Talemai and its moons will cease.  Company Waste Management has taken over after reports of multiple OSHA violations and violations of the UMU (United Miners Union).  Independent organization named RockHoppas has been dispatched to Talemai to replace all current miners.  Only people with proper Mining permits are allowed to and from Talemai and their cargo will be checked for any contraband. 
For inquires about Mining Permits please contact JohnnyTazer with your reason and your fee ready.  Its 5mil per person, per week.  And 20mil for a whole organization.  Thank you for your continued cooperation as we take this time to sort out the mess on Talemai.  

- JohnnyTazer
  Waste Management Consultant