Warlander

I like what I see here and as a builder I love what I see suggested. However, from a game standpoint these changes add performance drops to the game at large. I feel like NQ needs to decide if this is going to be a building game or a PvP game since it cant be both and as long as builders dont have a spot to just build as they see fit to their hearts content it actually detracts from the game at large and would be better off with just an instance of Alioth as its own server where people can build in peace to free up the game for PvP since you cant have both since nothing we build is fit for combat or serves a real purpose in game other then eye candy vs war fotting designed buildings. DU needs people to build prefab buildings that serve actual specific purposes in terms of combat as forward opperating bases, to factories, defense instalations, barracks, drydocks, warehouses, military space stations, and everything else to actually wage a space war that isnt all over the place while still offering either modular type building via voxels or standard voxel prefabs that are tailored to a set faction people can vote for and adopt. They honestly cant have both unless its in different live enviornments as it creates too many strings for both camps when we just need to let builders build quality builds via free build.

The Tech is there its just they went total ham on a fully destructible environment without proper speed limits and damage mitigation while giving a lot more ore per node and not compounding it with how the scanners worked to destroy the game that much faster. They didnt need to make it as such to need to destroy a tile for such a low amount of ore (unless you got a 10 mil mine). The mining isnt really the important part as the voxelization itself presents without using static meshes would have done the same thing if they just had the same idea of auto miners with some 2D mining game on a static mesh world or a voxel to mesh tool for buildings. I know it was too tempting to bring in the minecraft crowd along with those who played space engineers and those EPs have a lot to live upto and it works in a low res or multiplay environment that required a careful touch to pull off on an MMO scale but harsh limits were needed while still providing the same experience doing more with less then less is more. It could have worked if they kept a lot of things simple as this type of game is not meant for long term buildings, market graveyards, and just the yard trash without world healing or just straight up zone filling once it was empty or a % of ore was left. This type of game is meant for seasons with FFA opposing sides and just fighting it out until one side wins and a new solar system is created for an Empire vs Rebels deathmatch starts new. They just let people too much too fast and build too much without checks and balances to remove as much as is created.

Lol and the peanut gallery said we couldnt affect change.

Yeah I wish they would pump the brakes and hit pause and take a common sense approach to things and ackknowledge things arent going so great and actually hold some kind of galactic roundtable and have a convo and be real for once.

They could easily create depth ranges per ore or ore tier and intentionally cut down on AGG scanner crews using huge ships laiden with tons of elements for landgrabbing that cant go below 1km to not only see higher tiers but to make everything you scan using that to force people to land and if your AGG scanner ship is stacked for containers way heavier than you can relyably fly with as is it makes a lot of sense and I support that. I also propse that scanners also use the Miner Charges to opperate them to slow it down further since itis mining equipment and should also be tied to that system so you cant scan a whole planet vs 10 tiles every 35 hours if you dont intend to use the miners vs just claiming tons of tiles. I also propose that the Asteroid Scanners also use the miner charges to find asteroids to allow for competitions so that you can only find so many and are forced to choose between auto miners, scanning, or asteroid scanning.

Go for it and waste the energy. If you think you need to be your own hypeman or call a vote knock yourself out. There are a lot more pressing issue around here than worrying about randos on the forums. If thats your main beef with the game do you actually play the game or are you worried about your alter ego joining the forums or something like in the movie split/glass? Should we be worried about the beast? Thats some buttery shit bro.

Honestly a Studio like NQ has all the power to make decisions and change course and its not as hopeless vs some AAA studio or foreign studio pushing patches through a hosting company with their hands tied. I do feel it is worth discussing. All it takes is a consensus and just bombarding every social media platform with it until they cant ignore it. It sounds impossible but it is totally possible to save this game.

I hear you. To me it all depends on how easy it is to turn our existing based into HQ tiles or the string and conditions it comes with. If we need to we will tear down our industry and migrate it to another station. If they tax those we will just sell the ore and just sit on HQ tiles. It just creates a grief loop of NQ trying to punish us and I dont care about taxes when there are less costly sinks that do the same thing. Im not against sinks but the way they go about it im going to doge taxes or just liquidate everything and wait till a better patch hits to buy things back or pivot to something else in game. I originally came here for the PvP and building aspects but ended up realizing this turn into a PvDev game where anything I like the devs seem to want to punish me for it with grief loops rather than adding game elements that promote fun. NQ got lost in the game.

They tried to emulate modern warfare in the sense that targeting computers will blow you up 10km away before you ever see your target or you can launch a missle from the other side of the world and blow something up. Only reason that works is because of satalites, AI, etc that target it for you and all you have to do is pull the trigger and even now we have AI drones that do all that without even needing orders and taking off, selecting targets, landing, and putting itself waya without anyone having any input. That is not fun as a gaming experience or movie tropes. How awesome would movies like star wars be if everything got blown up from 10 su away from their targets and there was not the dog fighting, dodging, and being able to blow things up like the death star if luke just got rando targeted 20 SU out and the credits rolled even though they had targeting computers and probes and all that it still relied on the skill of the pilots and not the long range auto lock even though you cant see them or we dont have statalites, orbital sensors, sensor arrays, probes, or anything supporting that.

Its the little things though they could have tweaked or done. Its like obviously the voxels werent working and there were days that you just couldnt dig, fly a ship, go to the market without the game crashing and the voxels were the root of the issue but they then go and develop more complex world geometry because they werent happy with the tile grid which was fine and nobody was really ever complaining about in the first place. They wanted to make voxelmancy easier by giving us a vertex editing tool when anyone at any time could take the time to learn it and master it. This was not totally needed but with how laggy it is already lets just pile ontop of that was a great idea. Or creating an org bank account that should have taken a month to impliment that took them years to bring out. Or missions which are childsplay for any other studio to make a waypoint, spawn an icon in your inventory, go to location, and complete the quest but it took NQ years to bring out and yet they never thought to tie it to the org bank system and the tax system to pay out the missions rather than just endlessly flood the economy with hundreds of millions or more constantly. Or that NQ at any time could have just added all TUs you own to the map and list in its own tab and tied saved all the time they spent on making a TU management system and just used the checkbox to flag taxes and a secondary checkbox for HQ tiles and spent that time, money, and effort anywhere else. Its like all the small simple things they could have done but they are still trapped in the car driving off the cliff even if they kicked JC out the car its still going off the cliff since nobody is behind the wheel.

Honestly I think they need to consider phasing in taxes slowly to allow NQ to find the sweet spot. I think NQ needs to apply the taxes to the planets/moons and then by what is available in each tile since those who have the best tiles should pay a premium for them and it would be easy to tie a tax value to 25 ores available across the board rather than a broad tax that does not serve any purpose it was designed to create. I think they need to make a persistent active mining 2D version of the old mining system players can use the Auto Miners as active mining units and making asteroids non voxelized static mesh asteroids that use the harvest system and applying mining talents to static mesh rocks instead since that was supposed to be the reason for the miners in the first place for performance.

NQ gets owned they dont own any responsibility for the slow bus decisions the make.

The main problem with games like DU regarding voxels were: They made basic tools that could dig 20m tall and 20-30m wide that on a good lag day you could run through the wall rather than keeping the sphere/height at the base and adding mining elements for ships that did the same thing costing gas and quanta to justify the damage. They seeded resources 500m apart further causing more damage than necessary for minimal gains for maximum damage rather than seeing huge mines but severly limited the speed you could dig and made the 4kl nodes give 10-100 times the ore but take just as long without having to strip mine a tile for like 5-10L containers of ore per tile. They never made a world healing mechanic or some kind of algorythm which each patch would fill in tiles that were completely empty or some random chance to fill them in by the % of ore left in the zones Or some kind of re-seeing loop to where whatever is going out of the game is put back into the game so that people 10 years from now could still actually play it. Not limiting the damage, not giving more ore for mining nodes longer, and seeing nodes 500m away with no world healing/filling tools should have been apparent it was going to be a performance disaster since for whatever reason NQ wanted both finite resources but they also have the pristine tile image layered on top of what is actually there since you would think sheering off a mountain flat would make for better performance but since the game still sees a mountain there it actually compounded the performance hits. My main problem is that I actually liked the mining and digging and I get it had to go but I dont get why they just didnt go with some form of a 2D version of that experience so you could keep doing active mining rather than nothing while you wait for charges. The thing is that miners should run on atmo gas and the efficiency drop would make sense if they had a wear and tear system which did damage to the machine the longer it runs by grade (XS-L) and Rarity (basic-unique) and Tags (Personal, Industrial, Military) playing into how much you could gain and how much you have to repair it via Scrap to keep it running and while it does it consumes gas to justify the numbers being more then infinitely limited since the damage to the machine is basically the same thing as the charges. They do really round about things to this game. They say they need sinks like taxes to get money out of the game but had they made mining require gas and repairs via scrap based on the HP of the machine and calculating the damage to it by how aggressive you want to mine it would have done the same thing as taxes without needing tons of tiles. Hell people probably would actually use the HP talent tree for miners if tht were the case. NQ just does not think about things or if they do they think in simple terms.

Yup its not going to happen which is why I have been saying its a building game not a PvP game this whole time. Well any performance gains they would have made they are going to waste with voxel vertex complexity, complex geometry, and voxel based asteroids rather than just resetting the land, removing teraforming completely, and actually freeing up performance which supposedly was the goal. They could have dropped another solar system with the gains to fight over. But instead that nor PvP will never happen. They dont seem to understand that even planetary PvP relies on players having all the same resources on each planet to even facilitate some kind of fight between them instead of a top down steamroll or people spread across all planets essentially doing the same thing but making ore exclusive and not really requiring PvP.

Yeah I hear that. For me Im not totally against taxes I just dont think they are applying it right when Taxes should be by planets/moons since not all of them are created equal and the tax you should be should reflect what is on the planet/moon and also by what ores are on the tiles themselves. Its not rocket science. The HQ tiles just seemed like an olive branch more than anything like yeah have 5 tax free tiles and, and then what?Can we tag existing tiles our bases already exist on without putting down some kind of special TU? Can we mine on it? Can we run an industry out of it? Im pretty everyone runs their industry out of their base(s) and would like to mine out of them or that if a voxel builder wants to chill and build 150k a day hardly will buy voxels to do that if you have to spend all that on a tile to mine to pay for the miners to mine to get the ore to build if you cant just do all that on your HQ tiles.

NQ is not ready either.

I dont think anyone expects an alpha to be shitty. We all get sold the blueprint by the hypeman before alpha and wait to see the materials to build a house arrive on the job site. Its when you see the materials arrive and they arent what you ordered and you know the house will slant because the foundation was a rush job and its not going according to the plan because either the GC or Foreman has no clue how to build a house and you keep telling them they are doing it wrong and they shrug it off and keep going thats when people expect an alpha to be shitty, the beta shitty, and the game to be shitty.

So your paranoid about what now? Its not like much if anything here changes in 6mo to a year so even if someone does not play now their feedback is still relevant to the day they quit and their feedback still needed since all the issues are the same. Your going about it all wrong anyhow when it should be about hours played in your credentials in posts to see how much actual invluence you have as a player.

The biggest problems with PvP are and have always been: Its not based in any skill since its basically tab target and not by actually requiring people to see the radar and get up close enough to actually target ships to lock onto them with homing missles, cannons, chainguns, etc. Its not based on skill as much as PvP scripting to target people further away then you should or using warp scripts to pick up ships you should not be able to track warping using scraping bots to then have wolf packs waiting on the other side. Its not about actually being able to dodge anything since missles travel faster than you can dodge since the game should be like atmo flight in a 4D space like all the Space EPs like Star Wars in which space battles are an emulation of dog fights and WW2 sea based combat. Its not based on defense since shields are actually more of a double edged sword with core stress blowing your ship up and creating a bigger target to hit than forcing people to blow up and disable elements. Its not about defense when there are no AI based turrets or real defenses like missle nano chaff, cloaking, emp's, or self destruct sequences as it is about just handing over your ship to some priveledge gimmie gimmie player who thinks they should just be handed everything you own. Its not about slow boating since you can warp out of anything. Its not a bad thing since PvP is lame but with speed limits at 30K Kmph cap you cant outrun players or missles even if you should have had the jump on them leaving before them since missles essentially travel practically forever faster than you could ever outrun. Its not about how much armaments you can add you can pretty much stack and fill a core with as much firepower as you want since the best defense in this game is pre offense with unlimited ammo, no power cells/reactors, overheating, jams, etc. Its not about ground based combat since there are no surface to air defenses with fixed weapons that dont rotate or pivot and nobody is going to sit in a turret 24/7 protecting their base so its just going to be ships railing your base from the sky with no way to protect yourself shooting weapons from hella far away anyhow. None of it works without AI. Until all of this changes this game aint a legit PvP game.

If NQ came out and actually admitted they messed up due to JCs running this project into the ground it would be just one of the steps towerds restoring faith in their project. If they then actually know what was going wrong and how to fix all the strangling red tape and really turn this game into a PvP game worth playing its just the second step in restoring faith in the project to justify returning to alpha. Everything this game has is pretty lack luster and mediocre as far as PvP goes beyond being a safe zone building game mixed with space engineers. Either way they need like 8+ months of solid work to even begin to turn this thing around with solid funding. It could take at least two years of solid funding to even begin to develop all the things they refused to add like AI/NPCs or essentially turn this into an MMO version of Emperion to mix up all the monotony with NPC fleets, transport, etc to fight along with actual lefit factions or turning Single Solar System into DUal Solar System with opposing factions to fight against each other to Make FFA PvP actually possible and not just putting it all on us to play pretend lo do it for them without actual tools/mechanics in the game to even bring in PvPers. Only with more complex world geometry, more complex vetex editing tools, taking out mining and adding voxel asteroids, adding voxel complexity limits, then adding a new seeing of flora props on some if not all planets/moons pretty much seals the fate as they could have used the gains to do other things.

Well Ill admit when I am wrong. My apologies Jake. Looks like NQ put their flip flops on.

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/Seegin: 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. 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. At best Demeter is a progressio/economy killer that adds a major grief loop tax treadmiill that is unequally distributed between planets and moons where the ore is worth more the further you go out. If taxes are adjusted to reflect what planet/moon its on and what is in the tile and the ore rates are adjusted to give more ore than 1 L container every 37 days with 210 L/H being the best I have seen yet and every higher tier being abysmally worse and getting a box of T5 ore per year will kill off any chance of war or progression past T1-2 if this stands. Without higher ore yields or adding some 2D active mining game for mining units instead of just auto mining and charges when it should be based on degradation through use that requires scrap to heal the unit since damage does essentially the same thing in efficiency of Elements anyhow making ore worth more than flooding the market with ore nobody needs since there is no elements leaving the game, being damaged through wear and tear or user error that will grind the economy to a halt. With infinite ore and at the same time imposing huge limits with no other sink than a money treadmill and a mission system that just adds quanta to the game making inflation worse rather than being tied directly to the Taxes collected, infinitely limited ore coming in, and no elements going out of the game or at the very least requiring repairs for constantly running elements or boards running scripts. It sets up a situation where few will actually be able to do anything in the game, afford anything in the game, force people to sell T1 ore for practically nothing to pay taxes, consumables skyrocketing, and nobody but megaorgs able to fight or do anything once they finish scanning until they are allowed to steamroll the server once territory wars are rushed into the game. @NQ-Deckard This is what I want to drive home to you even if you ignore everything I posted above this. Dual Universe is not two Universes Dueling its one solar system fighting itself and has gone off the rails so far from whatever Civ Building Distopia JC origionally set out to build. What you failed to understand in conceptualization of this game was that it needed two solar systems fighting as opposing factions and not one Solar system fighting itself or adding solar systems to fight over after they destroyed the origonal one or subsiquent solar systems after that. And lastly, You cite that Demeter was needed because of data costs of all the holes we made and then double down on world geometry complexity coupled with then adding vertex complexity backfilled with voxel limitations and at the same time drop taxes to further limit territories from building since the taxes create a grief loop leading to territory defaults that allow people to tear down and loot what people have built. Then compound all that with adding all the ore we were mining that needed to go back in as Voxel based asteroids. I suggest you keep the world geometry we have now, nix the vertex tool since people can learn to do voxelmancy any time they want, simplify effects, and drop another clone of this solar system that opposes this one and bind people to factions that allow for FFA combat in those opposing solar systems except for the Alioth trinity bubble. If you chose to free up all the red tape you are adding here to allow people to come together under a faction of orgs on each side with proper resource sinks based on destructible elements, wear and tear, and doubled/trippled the ore output, and minimized taxes you might still be able to turn this game around and actually attract PvP players back to the game rather than having everyone fighting each other for no purpose or trying to figure out how to make Territory Wars work unless you make planets factions and restrict residency to what planet your bound to but still with the way ore is seeded its setting up a disaster since ore is seeded wrong.

So what? Whats wrong with new players coming here, signing up for the forums, and asking questions? Whats wrong with old players coming back and asking questions? Or is it you dont like people's speech and your desperate to silence them?

You rolled out the jump to conclusions mat on this Jake If you watched both Vlogs you would know that they arent hinting at anything when they said in the first Vlog they intentionally made the PTS data different so that you could check out the scanning process and the infinite ore pool and it would be different then the actual seeded tiles when Demeter goes live. If you watched the rest of the video you posted they go on to say that they are screwed no matter what they do and they dont want people to loose their hard world and wont split the baby in half and will NOT remove scans. @23:48-26:54. If your trying to get people to delete their scans thats shady bro.

Lol like you cant just add more miners to just negate the need to charge the losses on most tiles. Its not also like you cant just VR to the miners and just blow charges even if you only have T1 talents. Its not also like you cant have 100 people link to the same box and go through 10k scans in a lot less time then you say since you only need one central container per planet/moon.