Warlander

Personally I would rather have resource and element sinks via wear and tear and destrucible elements as at least it keeps the market moving on raw ore and parts replacement rather than straight up quanta when nobody is buying raw mats or parts they already dont need and killing atmo parts lines since you really only need a tax free space station and ships that use AGG and space parts post Demeter. Should there be taxes? Perhaps in very low amounts but with the mission system pumping in endless quanta and not tied to anything like the mission system per planet to use the taxes to pay for fluctuating mission prices based on supply and demand it should be 50-75% lower unless you are on farther out planets with rarer resources that the tax should be 1mil per week and even still its insane.

My whole take on the Upkeep is: Taxes need to be by planet and the resources available there along with what is actually in each tile as no planet or tile is created equal and now they are made to be even rarer than before as well as sparse. SO those who have good tiles need to pay more for that luxury. Upkeep also needs to add a small amount for chained or connected tiles by the individual org for the bonuses of needing to land grab clusters as well as other players tiles connected to or bordering your personal or org tiles. Taxes need to be connected to both your personal and org accounts depending on what tiles are placed and not have to have people micromanage their TU management interface and just have a check box to autodeduct the tax. I think NQ needs to build some kind of zoning system for specific tiles such as corperate (HQ), industry, commercial,residential, and mining to specialize the regions on planets to form some kind of rudimentary society structure to put certain types of builds in certain areas. Either way being stuck with T-2 tiles should not cost 1mil per week and IRS reposession in a month. This kills progression and retention for those already on the fence. Once word hits the internet when this patch goes live good luck brining people into the game or back to the game when there is nothing left to come back to.

Interestingly terrifying development I would say. If they sacked JC for being an overly ambitious person who couldnt deliver the new CEO is 1000 times more ambitious than JC ever was and I really hope the new CEO knows what those types of statements mean and what it truely takes to pull it off. It's true that the metaverse of gamifying life through VR/AR/IR/FR is the future and building an all in one out of the box toolkit is the way to go and I do support it. However, It is going to take likely 1-2 billion in investment capital to even scratch the surface and they are about a decade behind the 8 ball on that front in respect to companies like Voxel Farm, SpatialOS, and Euclideon or possibly even Daybreak Games/SoE in terms of their market they created as an asset library players could buy or sell voxel assets and both the studio and the player got paid and also the possibility of going blockchain with NFT type asset store. Or some heavy monitization in game and some deep investments. Thats not including all the dynamic content generation tools unless they are just going to sell a blank versions of DU which those other companies do better barring the space engineers elements the rest pales in comparison to better studios on all fronts. Just seems like a bridge too far when their house is on fire.

Well even in the context of a civ builders like empire earth, age of empire, civilization, or stellaris they kinda missed the boat since they thought about personal talents but didnt add an org talent tree or civ talent tree combined with first person RTS elements such as the org leader or officers being able to direct waypoint(s) to do things and sticking with specialized roles for the talent tree leading to unlocking content or the framework of a civilization in general.

Honestly im surprised with the markets that they just didnt flatten all the terrain to make a 1km flat landing strip and paint the ground with building voxels where they wanted instead of building platforms everywhere with all the voxels and everything that adds stress vs a flat market type space bazaar. Now that they have a tax system they really need to start charging people per week for just leaving ships at the market like all the box stacks and everything there or it defaults and gets abandoned.

It just makes me wish that NQ would just release some kind of offline version of the game or single player/co-op version of the game and just open it up to the modding community and see what happens. Or to let players buy the ability to host their own emulation of DU and collect money and again see where it goes.

I wouldnt mind if NQ let everyone keep an XS static core and let people fill it up with whatever they want to metagame it since you can fit like 10L containers and a bunch of other smaller boxes so its not really that much stuff you can transfer through the wipe in addition to live and since people would have to pay subs on all their beta keys it would benefit NQ if they gave out a single golden XS core that turns into the gold blueprint you can place. Hell I wouldnt be against them selling them for like $5-10+ so if people dont want to lose what they earned they have to pay for it. Or offering bigger cores with L golden cores being $100 a piece. So you get one for free and if you need more there are options to soften the blow. Sounds pretty win/win

They just dont know how to impliment TW-PvP in a way that wont kill off half to most of their playerbase. Instead they seem to be positioning themselves in PvD with the tax system doing the same thing.

It would be nice if there was an option via checkbox or some kind of shortcut keybind to delete voxel obstructions or at least when trying to place it make the obstructions flash like unconnected engines/hovers in a different color perhaps. im not gonna lie its a great solution. Unless your going for stacking in close proximity like wings it would be nice to have the option either way.

I enourage everyone to post your idea of the changes you think need to be made to DU to actually turn this thing around while remaining constructive and positive. This is a list of things I have been compiling and without all the commentary. This is a list of changes that must happen to make this patch work going forward. Orgs: Orgs should be given Population Caps / to limit the damage they can do to the game. Org Exp Caps for specific talent trees to create a well balanced organization similar to a salary cap for hockey/sports teams in order for Orgs to be forced to choose who they want to keep, axe, or bring in. Orgs should have Tile limits to how much land they can grab via talents like Cores in how many TU's they can put down and the influence of the game they are allowed to control. Taxes: Taxes need to be based on individual planets/moons and not across the board since different tiles on different planetary bodies are not all created equal. Taxes need to be based on what is actually in each individual tile and not across the board. Being stuck with a T1 ore tile is not the same as someone bogarting T5 ore tiles and reflect the ores available into the tax. Taxes in general should not be just some kind of floating number that is injected into the economy and deleted when paid. Taxes need to go into a NQ master quanta org account and then used to pay for missions to not just creating endless quanta and inflation. Using availability of taxes per planet/moon to fun missions and paying more/less average taxes coming in with a fluctuating average of what they pay out by how many missions are being run with realisitc supply/demand availibility. If nobody runs missions they are worth more or if too many are running them they go down to an average base pay to put taxed quanta back intot he game. TUs: The actual seeding of ore does not actually matter anymore either and making things rarer and sparsely populated makes things worse. This patch should have introduced TUs with Grades (XS-L) and Rarity (Basic-Unique) in which you could buy up larger clusters of tiles (1/7/13/19 ect) with Rarity playing into higher tier ores it adds, Rate of ore gained by rarity, and the actual bonus given per cluster with an imposed total cluster limit like cores via talents you can drop by the Grade each planet will let you drop to limit land grabs. Mining Units: Requiring hundreds of mining units and Tiles is the wrong direction by going with Less=More when it should be about doing more with less tiles and limiting landgrab monopolies vs prospecting. Mining units should allow players to instead of progressing their talent tree to hit pause on talents and use that Experience to prospect mining units individually to inceeae yields baked into individual elements. Or doubling or trippling the output of mining units in general to allow for progression to happen and allow people to actually have more fun playing the game rather than playing an IRS Repo Tax sim. Or there needs to be actual org based Industrial mining rigs that allow orgs to actually generate a realistic amount of resources per hour to play the game rather than requiring hundreds if not thousands of Tiles being purchased. The charge system needs to be swapped out with an active mining function where players use the mining unit to actively mine a 2D surface and find and mine sprite based nodes and make it an active activity or if nobody is there it auto mines. Ore/Seeding: The ore should not be made rarer or sparsely populated with infinitely finite L/h rates we have now. Everyone needs a chance to actually experience progression. Every Planet should have at least the ability to create space fuel with the necessary ore to do so. Every planet should have a spread of T1-T5 ore that makes some aspect of parts and have the ore they need to make those planets important. All planets and moons should have all ore types seeded in regions around the planet so that a planet can wage war against another planet so that certain planets arent better then others. The quantitiy of the tiles with ore or the amount gained on each planet should be the main factor but each planet should be relatively self sufficient. Ore Rates P/h need to be increased x5-10 what they are not to allow for progression, production, expansion. Scanners: Scanners should have a depth range attached to each ore type and ore tier that allows people to scan on the ground to detect ore. If using AGG scanning you can only see what is there below you to a certain extent limiting land grabs if they are just passing through rather than landing and scanning especially if they are using ships that cant fly unless they use AGG. Scanners should also require the Mining Charges since it deals with mining to opperate the scanners so that it limits land grabs by only scanning 10 tiles every 35 hours since it is part of mining. Asteroid scanners should also rely on auto mining charges to cut down on the number of asteroids you can mine every 35 hours since it is part of mining. Sinks: Property Tax works to an extent but it should be dialed back by at least 50% Destructive Elements should be re-introduced to keep the economy flowing now that resources are unlimited. Usage of Elements should cause damage as a slow dot for engines, AGG, hoverpads, Warp Drives, hoverpads, industry elements, and even miners where they constantly run or while they are being used in either a form of overheating causing damage or a wear and tear baseed sink. Single use damage sink where if you use a door, seat, screen, etc it causes a small amount of damage each time that should require repairs every once in a while. Missions: Using the Tax apparatus as a NQ master Org quanta bank account per planet as the driver for missions and use supply/demand surplus to pay base price or paying more beased on taxes collected. Making missions driven on actual work orders on collected taxes like getting paid to mine ore, then work orders for industrialists to make specific items, then creating transport missions of actual items to mission locations (markets that are understocked), and also paying PvPers to fly escorts, and also PvP missions to intercept those resources. Typing the Market Bids/Deliveries to the missions to the work order system/Mission System. Talents: Clone the Talent system and add a new talent tab for an Organization Talent System with its own experience pool called "Research Points". Every player would have an independent personal Tab but in whatever Org you are in the individual Org Research Contribution would be added together in what individual Org Perks they want to research that makes it so if you change orgs it deduct the research from the old org and applies it to the new one. Org Research should be for things like prospecting (improving ore outputs on tiles for each type of ore), Core/TU limits, Caps (pop/exp caps by exp tree), Industry (Element caps, processing boosts, output boosts), and whatever else is needed. Loyalty Program / Login Bonus: Every Consecutive Day you log in the L/H output on all ores increases by 1 with no upward limit. If you dont log in the bonus is reset. Every Day you log in you get additional Rewards like Elements, Skins, Voxel boxes, Rations, Gas Cards, Etc that rotate each month or some kind of Loyalty credit version of quanta that can be used to choose what sorts of supplies or rations you want. Consecutive Logins reduce Tax rates by 0.01% with some kind of upward limit. I do intend to keep adding via edits.

@NQ-Deckard @NQ-Pann @NQ-Sesch @NQ-Entropyand any other devs along with the new CEO. Please feel free to come in and have a convo. I want to start by saying that I don't hate DU/NQ even if that is your impression you might have of me. I never feel like it is too late for any game and spend my time constantly adapting and adjusting my thought process to try and save games or to point out the pitfalls. Lets pump the brakes for a second and hit pause long enough to be real for a moment and have a constructive conversation between the devs and the community to come to some kind of consensus on where this game needs to go to start moving forward. Its never too late until the lights go out. Everyone here along the devs needs to take a moment and ask ourselves: What is NQ trying to accomplish making at this point? What is the end goal here? Is this game worth playing? Is this game worth paying money for? If you cant come up with a reasonable response in your mind for all 4 of these basic questions something is going terribly wrong. Knowing what needs some love in this game is a start and must be said that no matter how hard things get or how much people might lash out at the developers we are all still behind you and believe in you that you can do what must be done to turn this around (/hugs). But it takes realizing things arent going so hot to start to know what needs to change and admit when things go wrong to start building trust and self respect in yourselves, your game, and your company. Respect is earned and not given. Not listening to the community is making matters worse and we can spend all day pointing fingers at each other and figuring out how to punish people via system mechanics or we can come together to build a game worth playing. All is not lost as this game has all the tools, systems, and everything it needs to be successful if NQ can adopt agile game development as a mindset and salvage what works and what needs to be nixed, tweaked, or added to turn this game around. Its all there its just what needs to be applied and adapted to cut through all the red tape, limits, and removal of systems to see what needs to be done to save NQ/DU. But before all that NQ has to have a meeting and really sit down and rethink what they want to accomplish here. What is being developed is not working and doing more of the same and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Lets have a galactic round table discussion on this and actually talk about how to move forward rather than what was origionally promised, what it has become, and look forward to the future. Everyone should now ask themselves what type of game do we actually have here: Is this a PvP game? Is this a Building game? Is this a mining sim? IS this a flight sim? Is this a Civ builder? Is this an IRS sim? Peformance VS Gameplay VS Graphics = Playable VS Fun VS Eye Candy This is the gold standard of MMOs and you dont get all three at once without sacrificing from all three in a balancing act. DU went full eye candy and does not have the gameplay and performance aspects fine tuned to be playable or fun vs having voxelization. The main thing here is it takes x1000 longer to build than it takes to destroy things in this game. This sets up a situation in which there will be a huge buildup to Territory Wars and 10 seconds of fury and then what? In all PvP games you are allowed to gain about x10 what you need to throw away on participating in battles to justify the losses suffered day in and day out to want to actually enguage constantly in fighting in a full loot game. Origionally this game was set up to do that until it was strangled with red tape and punishments while not filling the true exploits and the resulting sinks unequally applied across the board. Demeter pretty mch all but prevents PvP from ever happening on mass scale with minimal gains per month for T1 ore even though we now have infinately finite or that is rarer and more sparse than before. The problem is the sinks are not directed properly by how much weath or useage you have on the server and just defaulting on tax is going to wipe out anyone who was waiting for launch from ever coming back to the game. Or that Ore being removed and the geometry reset was supposed to add performance but when you add all the complexity back in and then some it turns gains into temporary boosts as eventually it will go back to how it was before if not worse. But even before that as a civilization building game with planets and wars not allowing each planet to be its own progression system to even wage war on other planets and not having all ores available at base to progress through the whole tree of elements and having certain planets having more of specific ores than others was a bad design choice since the ore spread appears to be strategic but its not as much as it gives those on the furthest planets supremacy over progression that will collapse down without balance or means for planets to fight each other and be able to wage war if that is the point. But at the same time the civ aspect is disjointed as the planets themselves have no goverments attached to them to pick sides or any kind of RTS elements in terms of required infrastructure as much as everyone just doing their own thing as disorganized groups vs planets with orgs working together. Or some kind of system that takes thee taxes and creates a chain of missions paid for by the taxes that serve a purpose rather than a sink to accomplish some kind of goal like paying people to fight, mining ore to create work orders for industrialists, pilots to transport goods logistically to markets or government dry docks to build ships, trade runs to markets or other planets, and flying escorts or intercepts on the missions created to drive combat to happen as a civilization tied solely to the tax system to function as a society in the first place. The only reason we need protection bubbles in the first place is because players arent born into a faction as much as just thrown to the wolves. If you could choose what planet you wanted to be part of and had a part to play in that society and invest in it and share faction protection with your peer to work towards something or randomly born into a planet that had everything you needed to progress to an extent that allowed you to progress to T5 and act in both an org and faction based capacity it would be a better game where players could take over multiple planets until huge planet factions form this game would be better off. The thing is the way ore has been changed and the time it takes to build vs how quick it is to destroy throws a wrench into PvP as mining is now pretty much destroyed as a driver for Pvp to ocvcure, mine asteroids each weekend, or the abysmal rates, rares being rare and sparse, and making PvP or war equally as sparse and compounded by taxes that do nothing for anyone compounding PvP from happening. Where this thing goes from here is up to NQ, but a conversation needs to happen between the community and the Devs to decide the future of DU worth investing into and trusting the community. All is not lost by a longshot. But until a Galactic Roundtable happens and the standoff on both sides is quashed or NQ swallows their pride and comes to the table to re-envision and rebrand themselves to restore trust and faith with agile development nothing changes if they are no longer passionate about building a game worth playing. NQ also needs to start selling full items like skinds, alternate parts, and anything they can that does not create unfair advantage to the game via power creep or P2W shop items to bring in more revinue and for example I would pay for different color forcefields, larger than standard different colored forcefields, etc and im sure other people would as well bringing in more money than NQ was never counting on VS putting it behind some kind of recruitment pyramid scheme that does not really work when DU has such a bad rep in the community. As well as NQ really needs to start using Crowd Sourcing since many people here would devote time to help DU if NQ would accept it. Scripting and all that works but since it is not fully compatible or vetted / limited it destroys more performance and causes more lag than if NQ was like hey help us build and Auto Pilot system and come together and we will add it to the game and then optimize it and give it to everyone as a standard feature of the game without having to go through 3rd party sites and potentially getting viruses or other nefarious scripts that break the game more than they add if scripts were vetted before being added for actual practical purposes. There are/were many talented people with valueable modeling, graphic art, sound engineering, UI, or Coding experience that could be harnessed like an army of unpaid devs if they simply realised the potential of modding communities or people willing to donate their time to adding value to the game. All NQ needs to do is give them a purpose that and what they acutally need made that they dont have the budget to build or things they wanted to add they dont have on the roadmap or on the back burner. Either way DU needs to decide what it wants to be and how to fix the issues made under JC to carve out a new path and a new identity and a pipeline for success which only happens if NQ comes to their senses and starts talking to the community. Together we can affect positive change and save this game.

Honestly I kind hope NQ makes setting up rings around markets come with some kind of property value to the rings around the market hexes so that it inceases the tax rate slightly to all connected tiles regardless of org as long as they touch each other so that living next to the market costs a lot more or to purposely denies HQ tiles to some kind of region cluster like 25-50 tiles from the central market tile so you have to pay.

I think NQ should consider using the same mechanics as those AA guns around the giant teraforming units and actually make them do damage and embed them into asteroids as space stations that spawn that look like asteroids to mix things up. Honestly though they should really consider either turning asteroids into meshes with a patrol path of waypoints around planets or at the very least attach the voxels to cores and let them drif around or gets caught in the planetary orbits and pulled down. There needs to be a range of asteroid sizes other than just spawning giant mines in space when they could do the same thing as ground rocks just a lot bigger.

Lol its no rumor they put in so much mechanics they let get exploited for so long there is logically no way around it before launch. In their vids they are still spinning their wheels in meetings (last Vlog) discussing it and they know it must be done.

Prolly not but im not going to shut up about it. Its a good thing Demeter is coming out since it will make people care more about the game and the cash increase for subs. Instead of taking advantage of the "DU Curious" and more amout the "DU Furious" that play games and steer potential prospective players away. Whenever they decide to make a game people might even play it.

And you think 99% of the rest of the people that come in now or at launch will care? NQ can hate our speech and call it speech they hate but when their ears and minds are closed they cant hear it anyways.

Every demographic of player in this game is dying and im not debating that. I have seen and explored the builds of large orgs, watched their streams when this game was in alpha/beta before most lost interest, and regonize the monumental effort collectively it took to make massive industries, builds etc along with all the resources many were sitting on. Any of them could come back IF/WHEN NQ turns this around unless they do things like create a tax grief loop designed to loot and kick out dead tiles and consolidate power further. Oh wait.

I trust AAA studios and even cash grab P2W studios more than unproven Indie Studios until they can prove they know what they are doing. The thing is that if you as an Indie studio dont communicate with your players or enguage in agile development as a mindset than some sort of attitude that their pride and arrogance somehow is a qualifier to do whatever they want when we are their lifeblood is a falicy and continueing to do so is a death sentance for indie studios. They constantly say they think long and hard about things but have no understanding of the pitfalls they are falling into like this isnt the 100th time this stuff was attempted in various ways over the years. Whatever they were trying to emulate isnt going to work antil they man up and accept that they dont know everything and ask for help they just keep wasting time, money, and effort constantly redeveloping broken systems they didnt understand when they developed and isntituted them, why they were broken in the first place, how people would exploit them to the max, and redeveloping even more limited or broken systems and never getting anywhere. The fact that they are public figures means they are subject to public scrutiny over their decisions. Games are the most brutal in that regard and it takes a thick skin to even attempt making a game and it is a cruel mistress in that regard especially since we as gamers dont care or give a shit we just want to play a game and have fun. We arent the devs friends and as I always say its not personal its just business. As a producer of entertainment you expect entertainment not whatever this has become.

And DU has 1 year left at this rate.

All ill gotten games when it was easy to amass mass weath with no limits compounded by the ability to scan mass amounts of tiles that will need to be wiped even though they said otherwise resulting in complete surpemacy of the server. If you dont think that needs to happen at this point buckle up.

The main point is you need people to build a library of of assets factions can use that are efficient and not just all over the place in size and scope. They could just as easily make pre-set factories that are focused on specific parts rather than just everything plugged into one machine. You could have builders make missle battery towers, and all that which are optimized to not bogged down combat with the new voxel complexity limiter bar to actually allow cities to form. You get the point but you need an army of builders focused on building those structures in a different environment and submitting the blueprints to be added to factions to use that actually are sytleized and not just random. What is the point of cities if nobody can live there due to the lag from all the voxels, teraforming, and scripts running? It wont work in its current capacity if things arent structurally oragnized and optimized with prefabs. Its either Eycandy graphics, performance, and gameplay. You dont get all three and you have to balance each to make a game playable. The gameplay is slow grindy, and strangled by red table and limits for the speed at which it can instantly be destroyed by even an XS calss ship stacked with whatever weapons with the sphere size of the blasts and the damage done. Something needs to give to free up gameplay and to get more peopleon board with it rather than setting up a situation that once the board gets cleared by a few groups that sieze everything the game is over and you put it back into the closet.

I came here after Beta started and was never sold on the hypetrain or stuck on some acid trip vision quest of JC was hucking. I dont remember any of the broken promises or sit here chasing my tail about what could have been. I see it for what it is and for what it has become. This game was never going to be what was sold to you all. What I do know is this game is suffering from an identity crisis driven by listening to what NQ thought people wanted via the PvP side of this game and jumped head long into that while trying to appease the building community. What they have developed in not fun for both groups with all the red tape, punishments, sinks, and taxes they thought would work to slow down all the exploits to mining via scanning, or the massive industries they allowed to be built without ever addressing any of the real issues plaging the game because they misunderstood their playerbase and thought we would build it all for them. Players arent devs and nobody really wants to experience the content we create other then the practical missing parts of the game players created. As content consumers of virtual content its all lacking in any form of fun gameplay with all the missing MMO elements that were needed to actually turn this into a game. Their roadmap is really short sighted and they seem more focused on redoing everything they origionally made and pushing stagnation in some kind of attempt to force PvP to happen when they again dont undersant PvP games they tried to emulate and what makes them tick or give reason to fight in the first place.

It's A's and O's Its not like the Nazi or Allies had L atmo radar railing structures with target lock from SU's away. Sure some buildings were left standing from the boming raids and battles and those that were not structurally sound were reclaimed and other countries who were not affected had a gold rush to sell their building materials. Sure we have that capability today to just blwo up whole cities with nukes and neutron boms but even still warfare is primarily virtual since you dont want or have to blow up the infrastructure vs silent weapons for quiet wars and pshch warfar along with hacking. A's & O's

Don't get me wrong I pay attention to architecture, love studying it, and enjoy studying fortificaions modern, medieval, or ancient. Whatever NQ set out to origionally do in terms of building a civ and telling us to play make believe with a sand castle building contest while telling another group they can kick them down one day. Without military, government, industrial, commercial, and residential mechanics in place to make it run or bring purpose to the flow of the game as a space combat PvP game that isnt disjointed or fragmented into hundreds of orgs all doing their own thing since NQ things guilds are factions or in this case orgs are factions. So the sand castle building/smashing contest that was supposed to happen has led to an empty beach with some people doing their own thing and PvPers mugging them in the parking lot when they try to travel back home. Building giant structures, factories, etc in addition to all the abandonded constructs in the markets or abandonded structures all over the place creates more lag than its worth keeping around or if they decide to drop territory wars lots of people will quit since it takes so long to gather the resources, make the factory to craft the elements, to just do what they built that takes weeks to months to rebuild and with all the red tape Demeter adds its just going to kick them out the game when a few mega orgs roll over everything and consolidate what everyone has built. I think bringing in the landmark crowd has held back the game up until now since NQ could have a full FFA game right now if it wasnt for the Builders not wanting their sand castles kicked down or NQ pandering to PvPers under JC constantly trying to stimulate PvP but not understanding the actual playerbase they attracted to the game. Builders need a sepperate server to build things NQ can then make a library of assets they can add to the game where it is appropriate or people can drop down on the fly to speed up and cut through all the red tape. NQ could easily make pets bound to the core that builds structures in a way that is organic enough voxel by voxel as it is in these BPs. The only reason we have all this red tape, taxes, limitations, and all that is because of the Minecrafters mass exploiting all the systems they build and compounded with scanning rising to what people have built on the server that is wasting resources and not being destroyed with a random ambush on ships or the occasional blockade. DU has an identity crisis of what it really is and what it wants to accomplish as a game. More voxel geometry complexity. More voxel vertex complexity. More voxel limitations via the complexity bar. More voxel asteroids added to the game. They preach performance but they have moved from PvP to a building game while they preach about performance and at the same time make it worse even if right now it will add temp gains in performance they just added back into the game while requiring hundred of thousands of elements to do the same thing you were doing without it all. You feeling me?

The builders need to be untethered from the rest of the game. Its not that building isnt important as much as each side of the coin is holding each other back in the grand scheme of things. Until that happens we are all building non functional playschool houses that wouldnt stant 10 mins of aerial bombardment from like 1 person let alone a whole group of people the way most people build. I wouldnt say creative mode as much as just give people a small spread of voxels when you log in to that other server. Really you dont need anything more than just a planet like Alioth since its the biggest but has plenty of room for people to build on. While creative mode works in that type of an environment just doing auto miners with a voxel industry works better than doing the same thing in the live environment. Creative mode without some form of grind would likely burn out people quick if there was nothing to work for. As well as NQ could also run community builds for specific assets they want to where they could clone all that is on the tiles themselves as a blueprint that oculd be build in the regular game. Since this game is missing a lot of giant structures needed for government type buildings, power planets, etc which should be needed. I think atm the civ aspect of DU that was sold is dead in the water and dead on arrival or it would have emerged by now since everyone is pretty much doing their own thing right now.