Warlander

Everyone has a bias. You are exerting yours right now, tuche! Ill never apologize or stop voicing my concerns. Ive played pretty much all the best and worst this industry had to offer over the last 20+ years. During that time I have seen the best successes and worst failures as well. Ive been in many alpha/beta tests as well during that time. Ive been in all types of elite guilds, raiding guilds, and any playstyle in between. I have a pretty firm grasp and a good track record of knowing what works and what doesn't overall to achieve success and the pitfalls most studios could avoid. I know a lemon when I see one. I know all the tricks in the book now that studios use to stall, lie, cash grab, or keep games rolling. And I can tell when a studio is about to run off a cliff. Why because ive seen it in action many times. The game might change, the genre might change, the style might change, but in the end its pretty much the same wether its a AAA studio or an Indie studio the only difference is team size and budget in terms of scale. Im part of a gaming community of hardcore PvPers in the 100s and none of them will touch this game with a 10ft pole because its not a PvP game. I dont care if they dont play its just the facts. My best friend is part of another top tier rading guild that destroys games and especially PvP games and they tried this game and wont come back because its not a PvP game. Many who try this game will never play it again. That is a huge problem. You might see it that way but it is. Why? BC there is no good or meaningful PvP to be had here. What I do know is the moment they opened the doors that was their real launch with whatever they had developed. This perpetual beta experience is doing no service for the image of this game starting day 1 of POBT. And if NQ thinks there will be some huge launch without drastic change the people who will play this game are most likely already here already and dropping like flies. Why? BAD GAME DESIGN. Its the same fallicy that Chronicles of Elyria went through where they thought that their huge hyped land sale was going to save them yet I warned them it wouldnt since the people who wanted to buy in already did and besides they sold $90 mayor packs and everyone who was going to buy did so already. So when their bad design killed the sale it killed the game because it wasnt the fundraiser they expected. Its kind of a similar story here since they rely on subs while chasing off new players and existing players with bad game design. Sure its hard to hear that the game you like so much is doomed for failure without a change in direction or management. I have no delusions or paranoia about gaming. This game has a lot of promise and its not an evil studio like EA or NCsoft. But at the same time they arent developing an approachable game to bring in the most amount of people they can to grow their studio or bring in new devs. If you havent noticed this game is dying not growing. The forums are dead and that is the often the first signs of a death knell for anyi studio is loss of interest. SO yeah im concerned about the viability and longevity of this unproven and untested indie studio and their peyote vision quest they are on. Its not personal it's just business. One where I give them money to develop a game I want to eventually play. NQ is not your friend or my friend. After all they are in the business of entertainment and there are well established norms and expectations going into creating a PvP MMO that does not require re-inventing the wheel when it has already been done 50+ times or more. Like it or hate it im not going anywhere. I want to help them make a game worth playing that isnt a short sighted single solar system with no point, function, or purpose when they cant even seem to get people to fight in a PvP game to me at least is a red flag since they dont seem to know how any of the systems work, the inherant design flaws for going with those game mechanics/systems, why their bandaids never seem to work and exacerbate the problems of their bad design, and what it takes to fix them. They just are a green team of ametures and that is ok. It still does not mean im not going to not speak up and try to help save this game from themselves or the same pitfalls the many developers before them made. To me its a waste of time to devote so much time and effort to keep re-iterating these systems before they reach the same conclusion I am pointing out to make it all work as NQ envisioned. As much as NQ wants this to be a PvP game its not, not will it be if they don't at least follow established PvP norms in the industry people expect. You might not believe me that creating a game in a niche genre you either love or hate. You might not believe that this game probably only interests -5% of the PvP gaming market share. You might not believe me that a mine craft clone and an over complicated shallow progression system only really draws in MOBA players who want to do 5-10 mins scrims and log off. Or that this only appeals as a building game with space travel and the devs arent willing to offer that. PvP in this game is dead. PvC is all there really is to do, and to many who would play if there were PvE or npcs to fight its still not fit for general consumption as an MMO set up to be approachable or designed for any real longevity to get to launch perhaps but like I said the launch happened when paid OBT began. Believe me or not. I dont know if you are white knighting and telling me to trust the plan, if you are new to gaming, you bury your head in the sand and dont want to see the truth, or you just disagree. There is nothing wrong with any of that. I just judge games for what they are and not by the salesmen / hypemen at each studio and their visons/roadmaps. None of that matters when the studio is already a year behind schedule and their player base is quitting or slipping into comas with new players bailing left and right. Facts are subjective to different people. You might think this is going great and nothing is going wrong. We shall see it plays out. My experience tells me otherwise. But dont worry I wont rub it in your face when this thing fails hard I just hope you take this little experiment of a game as a learning exercise and also learn that devs will say anything to get you to play their game and the actual results of the game will be much different than what comes out. So let me ask you then how do you see this thing playing out through the lens of your bias?

What is there to fight over? Strip mined out moons/planets for the right to put down TUs to use our mining bots? Liquidate comatose players massive reserves? Gank cargo haulers? Is that all we are really shooting for here? Because if PvP were a thing the mega orgs would be brawling non stop with the massive stockpiles they have destroying their enemies before TWs come out long before now. But seeing as they have some mutual non combat pacts going now their power is only directed at people below them to keep that power and exploit the 100su gap between a solo player and the power of their orgs with no limits of any kind. People wont typically fight unless they have a chance to win or it at least appears like they can even if they cant or that skill would somehow overcome the improbable / impossible odds. In DU you are pretty much facing orgs with free build mode potential and unlimited resources to destroy anything they come across. Those odds are so stacked against you that its likely that people will just live in safe zones and just bail on the rest of the content and just build since there is no means to do anything. Its a bad situation coming up and in no way does it help DU overall. The stakes are just way to high with no chance of success and everything to lose what will keep people playing? Most people are in comas already so do we pull the plug on their life support too while we are at it? There is no scenerio where this isnt a zero sum game that end any other way but badly for the studio the longer the PvP farce goes on. If this were a PvP game you would think NQ would have common sense enough to add all 5 tiers of ore to each planet and having certain ores more plentiful than others so that orgs could at least contend with each other or that specfic planets were designed in their world generation for specific parts manufacturing with grades in mind to allow a guild to build what they need to control the planet and fight other planets at the very least but that probably never crossed their minds either. You would think by now at the very least you could buy a tile territory or a region of territories and declare it a pvp zone by now so you could at least buy up a large enough pvp area to test what TWs would be like or have region scrims like some kind of battlefield size map but no I bet that shit didnt even cross their minds to allow for that. Giving orgs monopolies on specific resources that are used in high end parts and grades is one thing but giving them the power to hold the technology and the whole market hostage is another.

They still have to break fast travel so pvpers can get more free lunch which seems counter productive. They still have to add defense to the game and PvPers want more weapons. They still have to add traps and other tools to slow down or give a non PvP person a chance to retrieve their ship They still have to add territory wars and it serves the purpose of what is being asked here. You cant escape because you are rooted to the land. They still have to make reasons to fight and not just im a megaorg with almost 1 trillion vs your mom and pops outfit vs amazon with a military. The effort does not equate to the time frame of quantifyable results for progress it takes to make ships worth flying or losing. Just because the devs didnt design pvp to happen does not mean that people should be entitled to anything Just because nobody wants to fight you or wants to use fast travel does not mean im trying to flee you as much as the virtual road trip im on. Just because you see my ship does it mean you dont have to put 120mil h worth of effort to take my ship as I put into it. Just because a pvper camps out in a spot for 10hrs does it mean they should be guarenteed anything Just because PvP exists does not mean it should ever be a shortcut to all other grind infested playstyles or that my effort be served on a silver platter to you. Just becuase you dont want to chase or run down players does it mean that im against it as much as the 30k kmph limit and the only option being to warp. There is no real downside to going pvp vs the total losses on the other side with no recourse or balance. I know you want to PvP but warping costs me likely cost me more than the pvp ships coming after me alone not to mention the hardware and cargo. At what point does your need to take my stuff negate the need for me to keep it or to have any chance at progressing if the only option once disruptors are added or that the warp gate distance makes it so that efficiency will win out and players find another way to exploit this game to take out all their competition right before territory wars drop. If you already steal everything then what is there left to steal? Since you will be forcing people to use up all their reserves to keep trying to progress but cant. To those who have excess surplusses that is not an issue. To those who got kneecapped or still paying JC's hostage ransom to get their industry back or building a new one from the ground up will quit. As more people run it they quit. Less and less pvp happens and everyone gets bored and quis since this game essentially sucks ass on all cylenders and the games being mimiced here do it better anyways. Is that what PvPers really want? To get silver platter sack lunch handed to them until they kill the game before launch? BC that is what will happen.

They just need to build a script to generate and run events like anomolies, wormholes, hot zones, gold rushes, crash sites, and make that the mission system. Where there is always multiple things going on to keep enguaged in. If say the only way to spawn more ore is to select a group of tiles and create a gold rush for players in a safe zone they could just as easily open up a random hot zone for pvp that selects a region of tiles and flag pvp or drop some kind of base to assault using the auto firing turrets from the large planet TU restricted air space and make content that is too good to pass up. Like dropping an NPC armada Beyond that its just a mindless riot instead of militaries going at it with industries and gathering networks working together and enough incentive and push to make it work or the space to facilitate opposing empires.

The problem is space. In the current format they have set a standard and if they shave it down now it just makes things worse since it is anything but a level playingfield at this point or any kind of balance to make it fun. If a new solar system is the answer then whenever the wipe happens they might as well add a 3rd connected opposing solar system and make the center one a no mans land pvp anywhere anytime but more stable in the two others with factions. If they made the middle solar system so full of ore vs the standard homeworlds to the point that you could get rich overnight with 1 good haul or that there would be a sustained effort to get there to fight over the over abundant mats it would create the conditions to have a base for pvp if you could also march into the opposing solar system minus Ailioth or the opposing version and the three moons as a triangulated protection if there are anti pvp generators protecting the safe zone triangle and the opposing side had to siege the generators and other things like in the empire strikes back for each of the moons. It also presents the idea that all ore tiers need to be semi present in those protected areas so that if they are pinned down in a blockade they can still mount a retaliation being cut off from the larger deposits on other planets but it needs to be respawnable and likely rock harvest bassed so it does not break the game. At that point any expansion solar systems, just empty space or the belts of rock outside each solar system and dead planets could also be options or adding 1-2 enemy faction civs on wouldnt hurt either perhaps one being humans like us bound to the talent system and some kind of alien race on the other side. We just need random moments where a probe, scouting party, fleet, armada, mothership conflict shows up over time with invasion warnings like from skyforge. Until that happens this game is not set up for pvp to happen or in any kind of scale that would make conducive large scale pvp if it was faction based and other smaller orgs could help out vs being smashed into the ground in every aspect of the game and never having any competition emerge since they already have and control most of the game already with the evolution of this game without more space to fight over with set jump gates and random wormholes, hot zones, gold rushes, and other features that draw people to certain areas. Setting up a fish bowl and giving a kid a gun to blast gold fish trying to live their virtual lives to mine and prosper in a finite solar system is short sighted and will never achieve the type of PvP of EvE online they love so much. This game is just not set up for it to ever occur. I came here to smash faces and become a space pirate like everyone else and it turns out this is a forced labor camp sim with building elements and pvp ill never experience. Just feels like a bait and switch.

The mission system will only serve to bait people into pvp or to pay cut rate missions. You arent going to pay more than something is worth and the ones that seem worth it are liely going to be traps. If suddenly there are quests to transport anyone can do that. Missions to mine anyone can already do in a bot run market. PvP when you can already do that. Build when you can already do what it seek to achieve. The system changes nothing. The only reason for it is to pay people less then you would pay for it on the market or to exploit someone to their death for quick profit. JC even said so much on one of the live streams. Territory Wars? Same thing it will destroy more than it helps the game. This isnt a 2d plane game Shadowbane where tons of population capped guilds and their sub guilds fight it out non stop taking 3-4 hours of grind fighting npcs to flip back into your forge and re-roll until you get prime gear and fight over mines with 100 people a night or dropping banes to steal a city with a royal rumble of guilds that show up to sanke it from you. DU is different in that all your neighbors are enemies. Everyone is an enemy. You can join the communist party I mean mega orgs 1 size fits all just a number but still the mega orgs dont even fight and they have everything so why should I be forced to fight all my neighbors? I dont care about the geopolitics of the game im just here to build and have a good time and not throw away $100+ in ship or cargo every time some pvper gets the jump on me. There is nothing to the PvP or TWs when they go live. It just pushes out more people from the game. Why? Its not a PvP game they designed or want to force everyone to play as a communist miner giving everything away to other people who get rich off of your effort and dictate your playstyle or talents in game. I will never join a mega org no matter how much JC wants to punish me or design the game to kick me out the door if I dont. Its not JC's choice of how I play that is like the most fundamental basic gaming principals to giving players a choice and in this case your fole is dictated to you in the game design to mine and to fly then to build an industry to fight. As one or 3 people you are meant to have what seems like 10-25 people bare minimum to make all the basic ship parts alone with enough time to do just a few other things in the game with enough breathing room from machine demands or covering the cost of blueprints setting you to eat 100 parts before you break even which requires the little refined parts, which requires the pure and raw ore. Before you even do that it will take you 6 years of talent time locks to even do that, and even if you spec that between 10 people to do most of crafting it still cuts the grind down to just under a year. Seeing as the mining, piloting, industry, and crafting are all like about 8 years of grinding, sinks, time locks, up front investment beyond the insane numbers of containers needed for all steps its pretty beastly of a challenge that not having 25 people base makes even slightly profitable as an small org. There will just be too big of a gap between the alpha backers, megaorgs, and people hoarding massive stockpiles. Anyone remember the thread a while back talking about how someone got access to their guilds supplies and they sat in horror as some other guild came in and they had no access to their stuff and some other org walked away with a couple billion in assets? Yeah those types of people who have "billions" sitting around who are destroying the market, sitting on enough ammo to last any kind of sustained war and seeing as PvP is hyenas in space prowling for kills what do they think is going to happen when suddenly they take Territory Wars live? All the coma people's territories are gone, all planetary bases are gone, anything outside alioth is gone. Nobody will ever build outside Alioth if it is even allowed to be a safe zone and since all those people who were in a coma or had their entire gameplay wiped out are going to quit. SO is it worth it? Its what is going to happen. Kill off the game to make the neglected bastard children pvpers you brought in or keep the people who make and build and mine everything happy who make up the 75+% happy and continueing to play? This is a crafting game after all. If it werent then PvP would be more of a thing then the PvP community figuring out how best to kill off the rest of the game by stipping protections piece by piece and nobody wanting to enguage them and if they could there is no defenses to stop it. Nobody wanting to PvP in a supposed PvP game is not a good sign and an indicator of how badly designed this game is. There is no one thing you cant point at where the system is broken and going the wrong direction. Or that fixing any of it pretty much requires a complete direction shift to make it approachable to anyone. Designing a grind sink to defeat a player from lack of content is not a game at all. At best we have a home business sim with some muggers added to spice things up. There is no reason for the muggers to exist in the scenerio being there its just for show.

When you boil this game down its basically just fantasy MMO crafting stations and containers being made super overcomplicated which has its draws, a subpar flight sim, a below basic version of minecraft, and some basic weapons for people to fight with. Thats it. All the rest of this game is fluff and punishment that prevents you from playing so that they get 6-12 months of subscription time to do anything resembling a game. If they just spent their time to create modular functionality such as a tool that let us bake voxels into an element they could just add functions and the space you have to make that set item function such as an aileron/flap and choose the flap function which could be like 1x1x5vx for an XS flap that has a function to generate lift and then allowed you to just design the actual part ourselves, choose from a library of textures that have nothing to do with voxel honeycombs to make it look how you want with the intended materials that make up the stats, and then bake the new flap from a voxel asset into an element with the function of a flap/aileron/switch/etc. And since its being made into an element the scale of voxels could likely be shrunk down slightly to allow for a little more finer detail since it will be turned into an element. If I could make all the parts that comprise a wing I could then build my own custom wing out of various pieces that comprise the functionality of the element that has the parts in one solid piece and then construct the individual custom pieces I make into a wing (slats, flaps, ailerons, wingtips, winglets, spoilers) or engines (turbine, thruster banks, compressors, combustors, Air intake, etc) and make my own custom engine that isnt some devs idea of creating some wasteful "X" pattern L atmo engine that if it was stacked properly would be half the size or designed to stack or use engine cowls to direct the exaust thrust like an F-15/16. If I could build all my own custom parts that fit the style I want rather than working against and around the devs crap ugly designs. If I then had the ability to use some kind of engineering core to take all those custom pieces and put them together to make a single element like the voxels and merge them into a complete element instead of fragments and again bake an element into an updated one that is complete then now im in business if I can blueprint the part and have all the requirements and materials translated into a blueprint recipe down the line. If I could then that that blueprint to a drafting table or something and turn the blueprint into a custom production schematic I could then put into a machine I own and make the full custom wing which has all the parts, pieces, and neccessary requirements to make it update with the proper stats then now you have something to actually do as an industrialist. All NQ has to do is create the functions for us to turn into custom parts that sepperate orgs by what their parts are intended to do or that there is no upward limit to what can be created. NQ does not have to make XL, XXL, ZXG, etc. They just have to set the parameters to how many voxels you are allowed to add in the space designated for the part and function it represents. Or corrisponding talents for various X,Y,Z dimensions per size class dimensions and let us do the rest. The economy is broken for 100 reasons at least and customization is one of the major issues of why no org is distinguishable from any other org. Theres 500 orgs just like you making the same parts. Regardless of the grade its still the same story in smaller and smaller scales per grade. Im sure NQ could create a custom voxel size as a build space that is 1x1x5vx, 2x2x10vx, 3x3x15vx, 4x4x20vx, 5x5x25vx, 6x6x30vx, 7x7x35vs, 8x8x40vx, 9x9x45vx, or 10x10x50 vx for the different parts and I am sure others need more square or rectangular dimensions. If you had a scale of 1x1x5 to an XV instantly. Even if the XV class engine was 50x50x100 vx and you had to hand craft the voxels to make it look like an engine and still had the effects added its still an engine wether the dev artists make it or not if there is a modular system where they just need to add in the function for pieces of parts that conform to the existing crafting system for custom after market parts. Schematics dont have to be a bad thing if used in that way. Seeing as pretty much nothing they make that is modular to make it easier on them to roll out parts upgrades at the same time is never going to happen. While I think the answer to the economy is to make it cost more mats not less will not help without a wipe. It is apparent with all the suplus on the markets and what people are likely storing in their warehouses will only hurt new players just that much more since everything up on the market would have been produced pre update to account for the cheaper parts that will no doubt make it impossible for anyone else to break into the market after that since they cant compete with the pre-nerf production. So I have to agree that the real only viable solution they have is to steamline the industry to undercut the large orgs to level the playingfield by requiring less mats per craft which means less grinding overall and that is a good thing for everyone since new players win, vets win, and for once mega orgs feel the change the most. The bad part is that it makes everything on the market cost even less then the over saturated market is in now. even if you shave 10% off the req's it has a ripple in the market and no doubt the mega orgs can take the hit and still flood the market to no end since you still have to make money to sell to gold farming sites and all that since nobody fights in this building game. Personally I think that it should be more because parts just straight up need more stats even with the grade system that just went live. If I want to haul 14 boxes of gold it will take a minimum of 250L stabilizers to make it fly and even if I wanted to there is not enough space in an L class dynamic core. Since its my only option even if I dropped the number of boxes to 5 its still rediculous to expect an 8hr flight time to mine 5 boxes and fly back. The constraints are just too high. They need like ranks over the tiers for like 1L Rare Atmo Engine to give enough power to actually not need so much weight stats bloat creep so mega orgs can stripmine and kill the market. first I feel like the grades need to be bound to the same ore as basic versions just using 5x more of the base mats. Or if they want it to use better mats then they should have done ranks to represent the Ore Tiers so R1=T1 Ore and the grade is the purity of the ore required of that Rank. SO an 3XL rare Atmo Engine would be made out of Tier 3 ore, twice the size of a base model, made out of 4x the materials. That type of system requires a lot of recycling and there needs to be a machine that can take fresh/damaged/broken parts and extract what is left of the metal contained in the item and convert it back into useable ore to recraft into something else. So if it is broken you lose 75%, Damaged 50-25%, and pristine 5%. This makes it so that if the market is flooded with useless items and their cost dips below the cost of ore then crafters can buy up parts so tht the sellers still sell items but then they can craft a better overall part and advance the basic progression of the server and not just themselves since the parts still have value no matter what the condition is and can recoup some of the metals. Those are some huge issues to solve betore pvp is even viable since the cost of crafting worthy ships is expensive and too expensive for most people to lose their main ships to even want to attempt pvp. I think that the problem is items arent inexpensive enough regardless how much JC wants to create inflation for the gold seller community he didnt know it helps. If NQ adds any more grind you could pretty much work full time in du selling. Considering the tedium and the massive handouts with no limitations to megaorgs I wouldnt doubt that some of those 500 member communes arent just selling all their hard earned work to players on the side since 125mil is roughly $100. You can only imagine what the gold hoards alone are worth when you consider people are selling thorium for $250-500 per liter. But since PvP is so messed up yet the most basic combat system I have seen in a decade they lack the understanding of the dynamics of a 2d plane fantasy PvP MMO vs the 3d plane space PvP they have in DU. Since most of the resources to fight mega orgs has been pretty much strip mined and its neither practical or possible to efficiently make items yourself as the market undercuts you and the only way it goes is down it should in theory make it cheaper and more viable to pvp. If given the choice most will avoid or flee pvp. Even if territory wars go in the war is already pretty much has been won since alpha/beta started and those backers created all the megaguilds and beat the game before anyone knew how to play it. If PvP were fun or had purpose mega orgs would be blocading planets non stop or taking everything over. Perhaps that is the point. But at the same time the landlord should not matter who owns the territory or region its always out manned, out gunned, a day late, and an h short to do anything but join or pretty much have the last 6 months flushed down the toilet so a handfull of people can feel good about themselves as they haul off that hard earned work. I never stood a chance so whats left to keep playing if they just took out my payday large base? Without a full wipe reset and more solar systems to start in and travel to with space to build and fight opposing solar systems with enough mats for the tiers in each solar system to wage unified wars its just going to chase out a large portion of people who already are barely clinging on hoping for some update to suddenly not have a reason to ever log back in.

If solar charged the batteries for free or even if you had to put coal in a furnace to run a turbine its still the same thing as nitron in the end. Either you give a solar panel and negate nitron on a fuel cost that is already non existant practically to an alternate system that only charges during the day cycle. I think that drone rotorblades like the base look of the hovers that resembled drone wings seems to be an option if you had to position it to pull instead of push. Personally if I could I would have hoverpads that created thrust instead of large bulky hard to position the larger you scale atmo/space engines if there was a pull version that could serve that function for ground based vehicles without engines like a hovercraft. I also think batteries also serve a purpose for reagent based mining tools where they require both a battery/gas or different mining bits or modular scanners to be added to the tool to make it multi-functional. This game needs some kind of stamina like system and batteries could fit that role. If anything else to slow down mega orgs more than anyone else since they would now be confronted with needing a mountain of batteries to stripmine everything. Also seeing as it would appear power will be a thing to run ships or industry at some point so we will likely need various types of batteries, turbines, reactors, and power generation at some point so it also fits. It comes down to how many more ways we want to burn finite mats that much faster. We can create any number of energy storage devices or convert something into some other kind of energy at a loss but it still does not make this game more fun to play as it adds yet another layer of grind or time management to the game. I am not against this idea but hovers serve the function they were created for though it would be nice to be able to angle them and actually have thrust even if its pointed 90 degrees because it should be using gas. If that comes in the form of a gas powered rotor system vs batteries im cool with that too. I just dont see why all the sci-fi elements are being nerfed into unusable oblivion because its efficient and practical even if it immediatly skirts everything else developed in the game. Its not my fault AGG or Warp dont require talents or that the travel times are so high that I dont care how much it costs to fast travel im just not interested in slow travel with all the games ive played over the years that understood the principal that im not made of time nor should the studio expect that I play 5-10hrs a day minimum to get anything done and getting you to your destination in 45 mins-1hr was a reasonable time for slow travel and offering high speed efficient mounts or vehicles to get you there even faster not to mention movement buffs, bard songs, clickies, and skills to combine to make for max speed travel at will. Sure space is a big place. 30k kmph seems fast but it is incredibly slow. I would slow travel more if I could get eventually up to warp speed with just constantly getting faster. Seeing as the limits are capped its not possible to get there any faster without burning warp cells which pisses off PvPers that nobody wants to fight them and its cheap since they cant just rail everything out of the sky. NQ could have made a warp drive that just acted like a 2x more powerful space engine that will get you to 60k kmph or warp 2 engine drives that double that or warp 3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10+ that get you eventually up to a light speed drive. PvPers should be able to keep up with warping ships not disrupt them. They whould also have to deal with the high speed momentum and where the ship they are fighting will eventually end up at since it should keep traveling to where it will end up at and if that is lost in space then its lost unless they are flying auto pilot to a planet it will crash into unless they match the speed and board the ship traveling however fast when they took the ship out.

I think that about sums up what is holding this game back.

Sure this game might be promoted as a pvp game but would you rather play a PvE server if they had one? Q2 goes to those in a coma lurking the forums, Would you come back to play if they offered a PvE server? Q3 is if we dont need finite resources for PvP competition would you rather just play on a server that has respawning resources?

The moment they went pay 2 develop was that launch of their game. Being largely unfinished and just a grind sammich with some flying and basic minecraft and some overbloated complex crafting stations. Under the hood its like the most skeleton bare bones minimum they could produce. There is no substance or content or purpose to what you make or any reason to fight when it took so long to earn what you gained to just throw it away or have it stolen from you leaving PvPers scratching their heads like a school of piranha after a killing spree wondering where their next meal is coming from. The moment they chose a sub model they killed of more people since most people in my experience hate subs and prefer FTP, P2W, or B2P/DLC models over subs. Subs are like 10% of the market share if that. Not to mention their stance on solo/casual/small orgs and setting hard limits on megaorgs cuts out about 70-85% of the potential market from touching their game or staying with any longevity of new players or player retention. Since they dont want new players, players playing, or making money and handing out multiple beta keys for people who wont likely stay past the free time I dont see this game making it long if it makes it to launch a year past deadlines already without sustantial pay model hybrid servers, a E-Bay store for people to sell anything in-game with real $$$ and taking a cut because turns out this massive grind sink they created is pretty profitable to gold/ore farmers can actually make a decent living and NQ should take their cut for doing nothing since most gold farming sites take your cut already for you. The goal is to grow the studio, create a good game tons of people want to play, hire more devs, and produce the game faster. They have done the bare minimum to make the wireframe of the game and its now time to make the real game. Its not that NQ has basically made a PvC building game with granksquad pvp to make the building game harder. Honestly the pvp is so bad in this game I just want to play on a full resource respawn PvE server frankly at this point because that is the real game. There will be no big battles that arent megaorgs blocading your planet or soon blockading and ransacking everything through Territory Wars. Its not fun and it likely never will. At least a PvE server could make a less grindy experience meant to make pvp run but in the end the whole system is ill concieved. I was excited for PvP when I joined but now I dont care about it. In the end I really just want to build and make a handful of ships to mine or haul with and just make the building stuff I want to make but dont have the time because its always mine mine mine mine mine. There is no fixing DU without huge sweeping changes and even still the damage is likely already done to stop it. I suggest that if you like this game you should enjoy it while it lasts. Its pretty quiet in here these days.

I think that for warp drive it should have the time it takes to spool and wind up to warp should be calculated with the weight of the ship. The cell calculation is but the windup should be as well to instantly punch it out of there. I also think that the disruptor should only be able to disrupt and active warp drive and require as many warp cells to stop the opponent as they are attempting to use. So if you have enough warp cells to counter what they are attempting to use. If you want to disrupt me you should have to pony up cells too. If you bet wrong your burn the cells you tried to disrupt me with.

And this is the key here is that if you are going to make 99% of your game mining dont just frankenstein/shoehorn the shell systems of minecraft in without understanding the systems in play and how far they needed to go to add it as a viable feature to their game. I would have been happy if they made a legit mining sim using minecraft principals that its more than 1-1000m of ore per planet or that that planet is made out of only sand, tundra, and snow with some nodes sprinkled on the surface. Ore and Rocks are two different things. The planet is supposed to be made out of many layers of stone that gets harder and harder to mine through and requires drill bits equal to the tier of stone to not take a lot of damage to slow people down and have mining tool progression and bit progression to match the stone depths and ore tiers associated to those depths. Or that the rock nodes we have now are supposed to be the stone comprising the layers and is meant to be different voxels than ore based voxels since it should be a teravoxel stone, dirt, sand, snow, tundra type thing and not aluminum siding. Its a different thing but NQ cut all the corners. It is also the biggest problem caused in this game to slow miners down instead of stripmining everything in sight because there is nothing to stop them, hell NQ gave them all the tools with no talents needed to scan entire moons in under 24hrs or a planet potentially in a weekend. With the above mentioned system in play it would not have completely slowed them down, but just enough. If they had rocks underground like on the surface tied to those layers that you could find for T1-5 the deeper you go or gems or add some kind of danger to periodically stop or create rocks that are stone that block you with dense stone you have to switch tools to unblock the obstruction would further fix the issue of getting enough ore as a small org without stripmining 5 sq km for la couple parts rather than larger nodes that dont require blowing up 4-5 tiles and causing lag. But there is not territory vertical layers like the hex tiles since you pretty much own the core to space however far out you can build which is likely the PvP line. You would think that 1.25km hex but 1.25km +/- as well. Dont get me wrong I like the potential of building 50km but ill likely never even fill one tile even if I had put everything I mined into 1 tile with no build restrictions through cores. At least it shows no layers but there should be some so that NQ can target specific layers and add/change/remove layers or randomly select a grouping of tiles, the layer depth and add any number of things with ease like should be in the game. I would love a good mining sim but they took every shortcut they could.

Well I think the only real solution to space pirates is: You attack non Org ships and you can be pvped anywhere at any time. You are bound to the PvP restrictions Everyone else isnt If you kill rival org members then you are flagged anywhere anytime for members of that org for pvp. You are bound to PvP restrictions If you kill anyone under 1-5mil exp you have to pay a fine before you can use the market again. You kill a normal player you need to pay for their damages before you can buy/sell again. If you steal anything from a ship you cant sell it on the market unless you pay your debt to society for the perks. You can try to sell stolen goods on the market but if you try they are instantly siezed and given back to my account If you cant buy/sell then you have to trade person to person or sell out of a vending machine type ship or your base. Seeing as the people you killed can destroy your ship(s) thats pretty risky. I want your ability to place Territory Units since you are banned from all systems until you pay off all that damage you caused and stole. You can place TUs and cores its just you get your perms and protections to pvp turned off for everyone but you and your org members who are now accomplices. Even if you pay the debt to get the lights turned back on you should still be flagged for pvp for the duration of your parole. Who ever attacks you after that you can then attack them and their property. I think we have been going about this all wrong. PvP needs to be more punishing...for them. Seeing as PvEers are forced to use warp cells to avoid pvp or to fast travel that costs me something to make that choice, then PvP should also have to be forced to pay for the consiquences of their actions, damages, and debt to society. You have to come to us and anytime you want to drop a TU, buy/sell on the Market you will have to pay on the back end of your choices for the theft or damages caused before you can use those functions. You can still do whatever you want just know that since you are a criminal it opens everything you own up for destruction by everyone else not just the person or org they are part of. You are now a serverwide known criminal and must be hunted down and taught a lesson. You can have your disruptor I want criminal justice. If I have to pay you should have to pay too. Its only fair. Not to mention Territory wars could be handled this way. Its like a hatfields vs mcoys situation where you do something to me so I do something to you. You and someone else do something to me I grab a friend. Since it puts the aggressor's property up for grabs for stealing until they pay the damages to gain access to civ perks like the market or the TU that gives property protection. I didnt choose to be a criminal and steal things that was all you. You have the choice to attack others. Regardless you can also be pvped anywhere. Anyone who pvps you anywhere you can now attack. And it turns it into more of a GTA pirate experience of having to survive or to build a pirate org since you cant sell on the market so you will have to steal a lot of stuff. Eventually it will pull orgs into it since it will make them accomplices to your actions and they cant sell either. SO you basically have to choose to be good or bad. Sounds about fair

I just wish there were more biomes for Teravoxels to have a better color palette. The one thing I like about teravoxels vs voxels the most as an alternative to voxels is that most of the textures are mostly mat with minimal sheen vs metals or adding a light and it just glows. This game is missing a lot from a CIV/RTS standpoint. Or even a Sim City type standpoint in which orgs own regions or that there are vast sectors, regions, districts, and polis city states. And that in the city states there is the ability to zone out an area or that the area is already zoned out and has set designations for military, defense, government, spaceport, district headquarters, infrastructure, energy, residential, commercial, industrial, utilities built in for that that district should need based on all the tiles that comprise a district. If infrastructure were a planned thing like there was a tile line in each zoned area that connected to other districts or set aside nature areas between districts that had these tiles set aside specifically for things like roads, bridges, tunnels, tracks, spaceports, ports and there were more means of efficient travel outside of flight and building the infrastructure was built into the mission system for those things or getting an energy power plant built to power a region let alone a single core so that people could focus on doing that and provide a larger utility company type service everyone needs. Or if you want to build a spaceport there are only so many tiles reserved for people who want to build one or they should have to work with others to make a better one. Or if you want to be offensive military there are only so many tiles to build one and so if you want to do that you need to find an open military tile or hellp others. Likewise you need factory zoned areas with enough room to make everything the district needs. To where you join a team of people because there is only enough real-estate to go around instead of having everyone do everything it is a more tailored experience that requires a community to make happen. It would require Static Cores and Dynamic cores to have actual purpose that could only be placed in a zoned out area set aside for that purpose or Dynamic Cores being designated as Military, Defense, Freight, Transport, Speeder or the actual ship classification of fighter/speeder up to capital ship. Where you have to make a choice to sacrifice something to gain something else or that no matter what there are set defined roles for a district that are required and rather than having 100 solo players doing their own thing they only have so much space and makes it easier to work together even if you are doing it solo by putting a core down even if you dont own the tile to help increase production. Flying should not be the only way to get around and if there was some kind of high speed train that took you to districts or a type of freight train type thing, monorail, contained highway or other things it would be nice. Limestone is not ore. Granite is not ore, marble is not ore, stone is not ore. The moment NQ treated teravoxels like voxels they killed teraforming. It should be its own thing with the same tools and power as voxelmancy just teramancy. The world should be made completely out of various stone types like limestone, granite, etc which are harder to get through and make it harder to get ore and requires drill bits and things for reagents to get to other tiers of ore if they actually used the minecraft tier approach instead of the we just need mats and it'll work great. The top layer needs to be sand, tundra, snow and at some point it turns to T1 Stone, then T2 stone, T3 stone, and so on. Its supposed to be that way so you can then have different tiers of mats on every planet with particular ores/stones being more common on some planets/moons then others. Most of all I just need better precision or shapes in teraforming. Flatten tool does a job but its like carving a thanksgiving turkey with a chainsaw. I dont care if it requires talents to get the shapes or to use various sizes to either work on the precision I can produce to slow me down from skirting the voxels. I would wait a month or two of exp if I could just get a fucking square ffs. I dont care if im stuck with duplovoxels that are 3x3x3/5x5x5/10x10x10 squares I just need right angles without having to try and chisel everything with a giant beach ball. It just does not need to be that hard if there was an actual teraforming tool that acted like its own personal build mode for teraforming. But say if a planet were broken up into hemispherers, sectors, regions, districts, and polis and there were reserved tiles by say a faction that had missions built into it for new players or people to go there and build a road from your districts space port to s

The reverse ram is a thing it should only be fair that an L core should smash an XS core completely without question and yet a fly can take down a human in this case if you walk into it. Sound logic NQ.

The funny part about self destruct sequence is that it already exists if you save up all your last crash parts for a single use kamkazi hauler. As soon as I can duplicate my ship that is all im going to fly. Everything on the last break so just when you think you ganked a good haul jackpot There is nothing to gain its all destroyed even the containers and everything inside. Im suggesting it for the crews out there who want to head out with fresh new parts who should have the right to have a self destruct sequence if they dont want their ship to fall into enemy hands. If NQ ever gets the cores worked out to where ships can collide and do damage equal to the volume to see who smashes who more there could be some interesting dynamics of just ramming vessels with self destruct going and blowing up the survivors or rescuers. Self destruct is not simply a defense only weapon.

Honestly when the basic parts are phased out over time as basically white gear from other games and people get green, blue, yellow, red whatever gear there will just be an insane excess of useless parts people keep wasting tax money on but nobody will buy. Recycling should get back up to 95-97% of the raw reesources so that people with better skills might hit the point where ore is scarce enough with finite resources to buy up basic parts to extract the mats to make overall better green gade engines at a better price point since people are essentially trading them up for the next tier. Same goes for tiers above. There comes a point where useless items laying around should be able to be recycled and turned into something else more useful to everyone. This make salvaging possible as well if there are discarded and broken parts lying around that can have some of the metal that exists to be extracted. I think broken parts should fall off a ship to the ground. Or if your wing is on fire parts of scrap should also fall off your ship. If there was actual environmental dangers that made flying on planets harder with winds, visibility loss, magnetic anomlies that make different instruments or circuits have a delay or go dead if it is strong enough. If things like that existed and people had to have skill to get to a planet to mine or bring oxigen then there would be more crashes and discarded parts a new salvaging role could take advantage of as a real playstyle to pick up scrap that falls, parts, destroyed items, etc and create a new kind of mining experience of sorts. But this game also needs a sifting tool to take all the sand, tundra, and snow and turn that into like 1-25L of any resource in the game with higher tiers having lower probabilites. Everything is made out of sand and just being thrown away. You can sift for gold in RL why not DU?

I think the best option would be to buy up a bunch of tiles along a lake with maybe 2 outside tiles deep if you can afford it and build up the surrounding area enough to create a continuous height valley around the lake for a course and like 50-100m wide for turns. You could make some kind of inner F1 racing course and then another nascar type straighter loop. Since its being constructed of Teravoxels you can use the L cores for details like placement on top of the track, scenery like cages to prevent cars from flying off the track. OR to make angled turns. You want to make it fast enough to have some sense of danger but not blowing up ship cores left and right. But also long enough to make it a nice 1 lap race. You could also do drag strips. I think the only thing a mario cart type racing would need is some kind of duel mechanic where you all can choose to do damage to each other until killed and out of the race basically if XS weapons are to be on the table. You cant do that in a PvP free area unless there is eithe 1on1, 3v3, or 5v5+ races. I think it needs either a basic grouping system at the very least to have the group leader initiate friendly fire enabled.

Honestly I see it as being part of the flavor of building skyward. Honestly I dont see why you cant just jump in build mode and put down teravoxels or regular voxels at will unless you have a specific use that requires a static core for like industry and letting a player build skyward to build better looking massive structures rather than forcing me to use x515 L Static cores to reach my 5500m up platform. Regardless the AGG nerf has forced us to start construction of a just under 2km tall pedistal we can launch to space with that is all dirt leveled off. Eventually I will fill the whole tile with dirt and sculpt it to house cores in sockets up along the hex sides to form a base that I dont have to mine 999kt of ore to do the same thing. I basically see the teravoxels as the frame the static core sit in and if you are patient enough you can produce a relly decent sculpt. I have been able to reproduce 1vx thin smooth walls, straight shapes, and a whole host of cool things and it costs me nothing do make it in such a big scale if I collect sediments while I mine. I want to eventually build out the top as well beyond the initial 1.25km tile to the surrounding hexes of the 7 tile flower half way into the surrounding tiles for an airport/defense platforms. But Just under 2km to make the best use of the container range and shorten the round trip flight of hauling 30 L containers up to our high altitude platform which now take 30 mins to get up and 30 down for an hour round trip which to me is a good trade off. Most of all I want AGG to stay in its current format but act like hoverpads in the sense that it should have to fight the weight of the ship and the load and depending on the size of the AGG you own should take grav pads equal to that weight to first be able to move a realistic amount of weight but also that it should dictate speed with a sort of anti grav thrust. I do also think that the 50-100m should stay in the game and makes AGG interesting and challending to land when you are essentially bobbing on gravitation waves that have a near 100m spread which is kinda cool imo since you need to use your brain to land it properly. Or jump out of the pilot seat and have someone catch the ship with a maneuver tool to stop the bobbing. But these are the conditions NQ made that made this whole pedistal AGG arms race possible. IT cuts a lot of work out of the equation if you have an auto pilot script. Nothing more nothing less.

The ship and cargo factored in for a round tip to the farthest planets with the ship I made can cost potentially 32mil h or $25-40 in RL cash if I run into PvPers and have to warp. This accounts for the empty/practically empty ship heading to the planet and the full boat on the way back. When I mine im not going there with 2 L containers im heading there with 20-30L containers and staying a while. That potentially costs me 32+ Million h depending if I encounter 2 PvP encounters. Not to mention just cutting down the digital road trip NQ requires. It basically costs 2.5-5k cells round trip at the current market value of 9k per warp cell and what the warp cell calculator says along with what it can cost. Regardless going to closer planets will cost a lot less the the 32+mil h. Or if I dont encounter any PvP the cost goes down tremendously if I slow boat sure. But I factor the cost of the cells in and add containers to fill to cover the cost since I would lose money if I attempted to make them and with the rate the mats required to make them are being wholesale pillaged and burned I expect warp cell costs to sky rocket at some point if it takes a lot of higher tier mats to make them and the amount and rate people are using them. I dont want to fly a virtual road trip 8hr one way flight or 16hr round trip. No matter what im likely going to use warp anyhow since I have other things to do then fly for that long. SO really no matter what im likely going to use warp cells either way if I run into PvPers or not, they are just in the way of my travel and a momentary nuisance. Thing is it still costs me 32+mil h wether you believe me or not. And as I keep pointing out you dont have to pay anything to steal everything I worked for since I cant do anything to you even if I wanted to since im trapped in the Mining/Piloting/crafting meta for the forseeable future. Even if I wanted to I have like 6 years before I likely que up for weapons/ammo talent trees. I would love nothing more then to fight you but its just not in the cards for me in this game.

Mining needs more viable ways to mine beyond 20l surface rocks and 4kl-1m kl nodes. The biggest issue with mining is the inherent lag of needing to dig hundreds of thousands of tunnels a day and it seems like the point cloud data of keeping track of it all causes an intense amount of lag to mining that at times negates all avatar skills since you can only walk and the lag still is jamming the tool with "cannot complete opperation" or where the tool litterally jams up on the cannot perform operation itself for hours and sometimes days at a time. It is not bad to have caves and places to explore, problem is when you stripmine the area there is no reason to go back there or fight over the land once it has been mined out unless it is by a market or geo location of water, mountains, etc based on personal prefrence. First I suggest 3-4 potential ways to mine and add renewable resources that are sensable: Harvest-able rocks underground in tunnels Harvest-able crystals tht spawn underground in tunnels Sifting Mining nodes The biggest problem this game is the lack of re-spawnable resources. I dont expect the 4kl-1m kl nodes to respawn, but I do expect that there should be some random chance of getting T1-5 rocks that spawn when I mine or if I go to a dead mine that there is still something to do that suppliments all the ore in tiny non game breaking 20-250l harvest-able rocks that spawn on the walls, floor, ceiling, etc on the way to a node to give me something to do between the 1-500m gap batween nodes. When I say T1-5 I mean it, a planet should consist of most if not all of the ores on alioth or other planets which could have better spawn rates for rockst of that type but there should be a way to get other mats then you came for in little bite size chunks. On top of the rocks there should be rare gems that also pop up like they wanted to add a while back that could spawn or have a timer to grow to a higher node size or gem size (XS, S, M, L, XL+). This could also be used for the remaining existing nodes to make up for the dwindling finite resource pool if they grew in size with some kind of built in timer. But also that there could be other debris like random ship crafting parts, scrap, stalagtites that fall with physics, or put some kind of action on harvest like a terforming sphere that goes off and fills in a 16x16m-128x128m terrain fill in reaction trigger to simulate cave ins. There could also be different harmful materials like lava that is filled in on the triggers as well that cant be mined that have a cooling timer before it changes into some kind of random soil or ore. I also think that sifting could is required to also add even smaller amounts of trace ores at random every time you sift or grab dirt, sand, tundra, etc and spits out 1-5L of random ore on a 25% chance or 50% with T5. When there is no ore available sifting is still a good alternative since everything is made out of sediment it instantly makes it a profitable resource that nobody really ever collects. It also adds another layer on between surface rocks, underground rocks/gems/hazards between nodes so that you can sift dirt between nodes as well as collect rocks that spawn from breaking the sediment up as well as getting trace amounts from the sifter to slow people down between nodes is a good thing for longevity but still allows people to gather various supplimental ores while trying to go for a specific ore so that if you dont find anything for km you still dont go home empty handed. The spawn rates of T1-5 rocks/gems should be: T1 Rocks spawning 40% of the time, for 25L-500L harvestable rocks T2 Rocks spawning 20% of the time, for 20L-400L harvestable rocks T3 rocks spawning 15% of the time, for 15L-300L harvestable rocks T4 Rocks spawning 10% of the time, for 10L-200L harvestable rocks T5 Rocks spawning 5% of the time, for 5L-100L harvestable rocks Or Gem Spawn Rates: T1 Gems spawn 4% of the time, for 25L-100L harvestable gems T1 Gems spawn 3% of the time, for 20L-75L harvestable gems T3 Gems spawn 2% of the time, for 15L-50L harvestable gems T4 Gems spawn .75% of the time, for 10L-25L harvestable gems T5 Gems spawn .25% of the time, for 5L-10L harvestable gems Sifting Chances per scoop (Ore): 1 dig = 1 scoop. All mining talents for width should be duplicated for the sifter to get a little more chance for mats per sift. T1 Ore per dig should have a 25-50% chace per sift to generate 1-25 T1 ore of random assortment or potentially 5 mats per type T2 Ore per dig should have a 20-40% chance per sift to generate 1-20 T2 ore of random assortment or potentially 4 mats per type T3 Ore per dig should have a 15-30% chance per sift to generate 1-15 T3 ore of random assortment of potentially 3 per ore type T4 Ore per dig should have a 10-20% chance per sift to generate a 1-10 T4 ore of random assortment of portentially 2 per ore type T5 Ore per dig should have a 5-10% chance per sift to generate a 1-5 T5 ore of random assortment of potentially -1 per type. Siftin chancers per scoop (gems): T1 Ore per dig should have a 25% chace per sift to generate 1-25 T1 ore of random assortment or potentially 5 mats per type T2 Ore per dig should have a 20% chance per sift to generate 1-20 T2 ore of random assortment or potentially 4 mats per type T3 Ore per dig should have a 15% chance per sift to generate 1-15 T3 ore of random assortment of potentially 3 per ore type T4 Ore per dig should have a 10% chance per sift to generate a 1-10 T4 ore of random assortment of portentially 2 per ore type T5 Ore per dig should have a 5% chance per sift to generate a 1-5 T5 ore of random assortment of potentially -1 per type. Other RNG based drops: The purity of a node should give a random % chance to gain some pure ore or scrap with each grab. It could be equal to the % of the next tier up with T5 only having a possibility of 1L gains. Adding also other random ores that can be found in nodes. Many ores transition into other ore seams or most minerals are found with other minerals mixed into the seam or gems. There should be a random chance to get other things from an Iron node then just iron. The depth should weigh in with gravity and pressure and make a substance harder then higher depth nodes and negate some of your grab speed and not necessarily the amount. Depth should negate your talents like adding more wind-up time for gold but still produce the same results as it would be with a normal node. It is denser and should get much more overall then a surface based voxel node. Ore with grades: Ore should have grades attached which should be required to make the higher grade parts. Not by requiring higher tier ores but using the same ores with much more refining required. Like if you want to take say a Rare/Unique L Atmo engine you should need to refine pure ore 5 times to make a unique grade ore to make a unique grade part. Ore should have 5 grades per tier to cut down all the refining and have basic, advances, etc to suppliment and make that process more efficient if you can find better grade ores while mining at again random chances based on the purity of a node have the T1-5 grade factored in where you could get grades of T1 ore that are worth more then the standard 1 size fits all pure ore we have now. Talents Needed: Mining needs its own talent tree instead of 2 branches and 4-5 additional skills in the whole tree that even effect mining. Weapons/ammo needs to merge. Scanners need to be added to mining since we use scanners/detectors for everything its no surprise that mining would be the best spot to merge the Scanner Tree Into. HP tree is pointless since it makes repair costs higher instead of lower or bakes in more resistance via putdown so that should be scrapped. I would change weapons/ammo to a merged Fighter Pilot / Gunner Tree. Then come up with new game roles like Mechanic/Engineer, Builder/Architect, Base Management, or just creating a clone talent pool for PvP, PvE, Pvc, and Orgs so that the limited number of Talent Trees and skills can be opened up for other necessary things. Mining needs some kind of vehicle and that is either some kind of modular train/track system so that it opens up the underground game more or some kind of exoskeleton/mech progression with cores. Either way everyone has some kind of vehicle that makes life easier so why not mining. So if and when a vehicle is added it should have talents that go into it. Smelting/Refining should be moved to the Mining Tree and gated behind pre-reqs that only miners who go far enough can do. Until then people should have to use the nano crafter. Industry has way too much going for them requiring 10-15 people to properly spec into and some of that should be taken off their shoulders. Miners toil away all day and just hand over raw ore for other people to make real money turning it into items and not the miner who put in all the work vs a 1 button start machine that will run endlessly without having to touch anything ever again for max profit sounds pretty unfair. Miners should be the ones refining their own ore and making more money in the process. Mining needs an Ore Research/Metaleurgy trees for each tier of ore that makes everything more efficient, give more ore per grab, chances for sifting, chances for harvesting, chances for pure ore or gems and making mining more worth while the more you go into it rather than maxing out in 14-15 weeks and watching your boost slip away as ore gets harder. I should be able to do more with less nodes or mining in one spot longer rather than mining non-stop 4-8kl nodes that get washed out by all the refining and production that turns litterally an L core's worth of volume of iron into 2-4 potential parts in the end is rediculous. Tile scanner needs a nerf down to 1hr per tile and talents to potentially unlock scanner capability to find tiers of ore locked behind each ore tier above it being a pre-req to see the ore in a tile scan if you are looking for it specifically you should have to invest a lot of talents to see everything in a tile. Until you do so it would only detect T1 ore at a 4kl node size. Max talents should unlock the potential we have now with instead of 20mins its 30 max with a CD. Or making different scanners scan 1/3/7/19+ and base every tile scanned to be at least an hour base per tile added up with some kind of additional 1.5x time added on top of that so that even if you are using an L tile scanner its 19hrs x 1.9 or the number of tiles being scanned added on for attempting to scan a huge area should take longer than an hour but .1x per tile seems fair without talents making it slightly more efficient. Add a sifter Talent Branch for the chances listed above. Add a Talent Branch for Harvesting tool to make surface/underground mining more efficient. An alternate resource generation system that makes sense is: Create a world generation script for future expansions tht can target specific depth ranges and generate additional layers down the road under the 1-1000m resource depth range if the finite resource pool drops to dangerous levels that threaten the game. If they could specifically target and spwn an additional 1km worth of depth of reources under the current layer at will it would solve a whole host of issues and grant people full use of the 2.25km range from a container. Allowing the generation of periodic spawning of small 500L-1kl micro nodes and tie in a timer to tiles which grows the nodes organically over time so that a 4kl node can turn into a 1mil kl super node if it is not discovered so that you dont have to respawn all the resources at once but the existing pool of ore nodes grows over time perhaps per week adding x amount of Liters and adding purity, hardness, quanitity, and size as time goes on. That alone with solve 90% of production issues for smaller orgs and solo players. It shouldnt be a crime to play how you want and being forced into a mold you know you dont like or wont fit into and any playstyle should be viable wether you are 1 or 1000 people its just a matter of devision of labor. Ore can also be put into a nynamic core as an asteroid and launched from an asteroid belt to any tile in the game if the devs use the auto pilot script that exists where there is no ore for miles. Since asteroids travel up to 30,000kmph it will also be subject to atmo burn and roast some of the ore off before it lands in the intended tile and upon destruction of the core should use a magic blueprint to spawn a crater around where the ore falls and create new ways to get ore respawns. I also suggest if there is a new generation of resources that a core of magma be added 10km wide coming out from the core on Alioth. If you dig 20km down you will hit the magma core of Alioth and there should be a system that fills in the hollow space with 1 layer of voxels added coming up from the magma chamber until it gets up to the surface. Ideally its just a healing tool that heals from the ground up or that once you hit the magma core all the wall textures turn to magma and heal quickly but the bottom up healing would work best if the hollow space had a timer added to the tile in which it had to cool and you would not be allowed to dig unless you want to die. But once the magma timer is up it should have an instant 25% chance to turn into anything other than sediments like sand, tundra, or snow to create randomly generated ore seams. And even with the 25% chance it still has a random percent to spawn any kind of resource in the game including ore/stones/gems. I also think that there needs to be some kind of mad tank approach from C&C where you use a 1 time device that resets the tunnels in a tile so that you can build massive bases without hundreds of spider web tunnels below so that if you want there to be tunnels or a maze you can start clean rather than having to fill other tunnels. None of this breaks the game if you get 1-5 gold every once in a while sifting or you stumble on a gold nugget harvestable rock for 25L every so often or find a diamond randomly. It just bolsters and suppliments what you have. If the chances are much higher on planets/moons where that resource is abundant then it helps speed up mining while slowing it down so you dont have to go 20km to find out the ore in the entire region is picked clean and you will leave empty handed unless you spend a month or two on that planet coming up real soon here. Its all about longevity of the game and the timed release of more grind due to scarcity or the amount of effort required to do basic things being cut down with little random surprises of various ores playing a role in making PvE, PvC, and PvE more enjoyable overall or allowing for a little more ore to be used in building fleets to fight or just lowering the grind a little. This needs to happen one way or another to slow down mining whole km out for just perhaps 1 months worth of ore with how fast the machines process and make items. The craft times need to go up and the cost to make them go down. It takes a month to make a car from start to finish and it doesn't take a mountain of iron to make a car either. Parts or all of this is required for longevity of this game.

1 salvo of missles pretty much can destroy an M class with like 6 missles or one round of fire. Being largely defenseless because of the talent tree requires additional securty lines of defense. Since most people log off and sleep during the 8+ hr flight time and you have to leave to beat pvp traffic, change lanes, and get there while most pvpers are also sleeping means that I have to do 20x more work and so should pvpers. If 6 missles is all it takes after like 3 mins of trailing and missile lock and it pretty much kills everyone on board tell me at what point you get the chance to delete all the cargo when most of that is already destroyed and gone? There needs to be a legit security system with self destruct to give you pvpers some work to do. Just launching a hand full of missles hardly qualifies as having to make a boarding party to secure the ship if you only just have to drop a new core and not have to fight my security system piece by piece or set tup in sections. Like I said it costs me around 32mil h to avoid pvp the least PvPers can do is break the encryption to sieze a ship or blow up in the process since you shouldnt be able to take an L core with just one person in a star fighter if it takes like 12 missles to down it. Sack lunch handouts are not PvP.

I know im just saying that Sanctuary was the only slated PvP free zone and if that ever gets dropped its litterally game over. This is a war economy game that is supposed to burn off the excess market supply with tons of pvp. The problem is as I said earlier is a RTS game in which all your military units want to kill off all your villagers and you cant progress as a civ if you never are collecting anything because your whole side is constantly enguaged in friendly fire rather than pulling together to fight another enemy in a distant sector of space. The first problem is the time/effort/costs associated with industry and just keeping the lights on while being divided into 8 pieces and getting fractionalized into oblivion. The second problem is lack of factions or organized PvP in which everyone cant attack each other, they can however attack and gang up on anyone else who comes into a solar system. The third problem is space to fight in as there needs to be more than 1 solar system to house 2 factions bare minimum. Optimally its two homeworld solar systems and another solar system in the middle they can both fight over as a no mans land. And if it is set up right its like 4 solar systems, 3-4 factions or 2 empty solar systems away from the North/Middle/South that are occupied with two different types of aliens who constantly battle themselves and whoever is in the way in the middle or invading player run solar systems so that mass pvp and invasions can occur or that there is like a jackpot effect where there is so much stuff up for grabs the military pushing into other solar systems has enough to loot and pillage to bring back to keep things going. The Fourth problem is the markets. with finite weekly limits and pushing the excess to player run markets, vending machines, and trade to more markets since the limit is in each market until you can carve out a wholesaler/distributor role in each of them will balance the market if people can only reliably sell or buy so much and since it was supposed to be about P2P player run markets it works out for everyone in the end if we got player markets and people could come buy/sell at your market and you recieve a sub tax in addition to the normal taxes for hosting there to take some of the excess to put there. The fifth problem is lack of consistent resources or additional resources which make the progression faster to get to the point for any size org to at least be able to produce a set of parts to keep their fleet running with just basic parts. Its pretty much impossible and wasting if you even think about trying to make static/dynamic cores with the strip mining that has occured and will constinue to occur unless another 1km layer of mats is added below the surface to 1km depth. Considering you cant even use the 2.25km constainer range down below the surface needs to change as well as adding sifting and various size rocks and gems to suppliment some ore of all types that is random and % based spawns based by tier. The Sixth problem this game is facing is lack of some kind of Alternate Advancement to have some kind of augmented stats based on the 90 exp per min we have and cloning that amount but calling it augmented advancement in which you can spend that exp as it adds up to bolster stats on items. Since it its temporary buying say lift stats with the exp or links on a transfer unit, or resistances on other items like old leveling systems or character advancement in older games. Since most parts blow up in 1-3-5 crashes it is short lived or you could pour all your exp into some kind of part/machine/tool to turn the basic tools into its own progression tht just adds stats since mining tool is standard issue and needs some way to make it better over time which could be augmented advancement. The seventh problem with this game is the brutal reception new players get right off the bat that is a wanna be survival game type start but is just a massive mountain of mining grind and tedium the moment you get in. New players need at least a month of de-scaling buff that give them an awakening Talent buff that has T5 for a week, T4 the next week, T3 the week after that, T2 the week after that, T1 the last week before you are a normal person so a new player gets to experience what it like to be super strong for 1 month and 1 week along with getting some kind of tricked out magic blueprint for a sstarfighter, hauler, speed ship, some cores, and a magic blueprint for some kind of XS-S static core with some furnishings and a starter industry set up for scrap/gas rations. That should be way more than enough to bring in people to test the game make them feel good long enough before the buffs fade out (I figure the first 5 mil exp is sufficient). The seventh problem is no real need to play this game you can go into a coma and still be churning out 90 exp qued up for everything in the game and you dont have to spend agonizing amount of time waiting 2 weeks to a month for 1 T5 skill to bake. They just skip all that tedium and come back with full efficiency. I think if you are actually logged into the game there should be more given to you then someone who is perpetually in a coma. I think there needs to be some kind of catch up system in place since it should help to get people up to speed with the rest of the people and expected talents and get people through all the bs depending on if they are top 10 for the average of how much catch up people need but then by what 25% bracket you fall into. The eigth problem is lack of mini game type things such as if you attack my ship its missle lock which I can do anything and nothing else to slow down pvp or make these $25-100+ ships at least have some kind of security system that requires encryption/decryption that requires multiple people to crack since as soon as you start to decrypt and break encryption the auto security self destruct sequence should begin. If you break encryption fast enough then you keep what you kill and if you fail you lose the prize and also potentially damage your ship if you arent prepared with a proper boarding crew. Or the fact that most pvpers want to gank large hauls or whatever they can find. Problem is without fortified haulers or auto turrets the only option I really want is self destruct sequence to destry my cargo before it comes down to core encryption/decryptions since I would rather nobody got the $100+ ship or the other $50 in cargo aboard. It should be my choice and my choice alone if I want to light $150 on fire. But if itsnt any kind of dog fights, fighter vs bombers, fighters vs battleships and heavy guns, then the haulers should be flying fortresses with defensive weapon platforms to at least slow PvP down along with traps to at least cause PvPers some kind of chance of mutually assured destruction to occur rather than being mugged for $150 and nothing to make them pay for it if all they do is drop a core and take over everything without risk. It can cost me 32mil h to avoid pvp you should have some risk of spending as much as you gain to in order to fight me, get past my defenses, and potentially still lose everything and damage or blwo up your ship and lose potentially $100+ too. If they do all that this game instantly becomes more available to many more people. Not to mention more people to pvp.

It also boils down to adding more ways to get ore between nodes that generate a passibe pool of random mats and spawn rates of rocks below the surface like above but slightly larger when you dig causing blockages but also new ways to get ore. Such as you dig and you run across a 5l gold nugget. Its not going to break the game vs a 250L iron rock right next to it. Its still under a basic grab but requires the use of a harvesting tool. Or spawning gems in the same manner. You dig it spawns. Or they pop up over time in a dead tunnel making all this empty space potential mines in of themselves of random ore rocks and gems. But also Sifting so that you can also dig the dirt between normal large voxel ore nodes for 1-25 T1 mats or a rare random chance for 1-5L of T5 mats. The idea is that everything is made out of soil and there might not be any ore for km in any direction at least you can gain something while you mine in addition to the rocks/gems. But also that by using the harvest tool to mine a ore rock could do different hazard triggers from just triggering a 16/16m-128x128m teravoxel fill to occur and fill in a small to good size area automatically to fill in some of the holes but also to spawn the same size heal function with lava, radioactive material, explosions from a methane pocket or any number of other interesting twists. The general idea is that the grind is real and there needs to be a supplimental amount of renewable ore to fill the gap and lessen the costs and amount of progress being made. The only other option would be to have expansions where since the first initial pass of world generation seems to be from the surface to roughly 1000m deep the devs could simply just generate roughly another km deep layer of mats under the initial layer and when needed spawn layers under that if they can have the resource generation tool target specific depth ranges and and refill the game if needed as some kind of resource expansion later down the road. Either way the red tape is getting in the way of having to choose do I put minimal gains made into a base, industry, ships, playing the market, expand territory at 2mil a pop to put down in addition to the TU when it should just be factored into the price of the unit and dropped at whatever cost it currently sells at, and being pulled in too many directions just trying to make a legit set up the first time industry, and just being pulled in 15 directions at once for no real gain because you still need to do everything and maintain the base requirements of ore mining to keep it going. Its just too much and clerver use of systems in game already with a little tweaking and a sifting mining tool is really all thats needed to both slow miners down from getting to nodes with rocks that spawn in your way as you mine but also that the soils are a new potential source of ore as well that is largely thrown away as is. I think that the P2P transactions or selling burner ships is a potential unseen source of income if you get 1-3 uses out of it or it comes with a bunch of options like a car dealership for size, grade, putdowns, etc that could scale the value or put weapons loadouts and options on is also a good solution to cutting though red tape. People are already doing this and NQ should take their cut of free money people are willing to give. These two solutions would pretty much solve about 60-70% of the issues. The other 30% being the market. To fix that everyone needs scaling finite selling limits to how much volume you can buy or sell both per day but also a weekly finite pool you can burn though in a day or rolls over if you dont use it. It should be per market. This scaling system should have a quota for the week of what you can sell. If you make the quota your limit goes up in that market. If you dont hit the quota it goes down to the point of the base daily limit. There should be liscenses you can buy to cut through the red tape per market to raise the limit if you know you can sell that much volume per week. If you hit it you keep it if you cant then you wasted a permit for that week. The biggest issue with the market is that there is so much going up there that there is nothing to make people want to fight to get the wartime economy going due to no factions. This system will inherantly only allow the server to sell what can reliably be sold by consumers and create equilibrium between supply and demand in each and every market because it forces people to diversify and break into new markets unless you get a weekly volume limit raise permit. The idea is not to kill the market as much as it is to finally get real marketplace access in static cores and being able to get people to fly out to other peoples bases to make deals, barter, or buy in their market. Or that once those avenues are exausted and there is still excess items in circulation there should be nothing stopping people from pvping if there were like 4 solar system factions and a central solar system to fight over like hungry hungry hippos. If each faction has their own starting homeworld and allied unified faction they could pool resources or run as a bunch of guilds working together in combat, defense, mining, production, and bse building if missions were from the faction as well as the players but the faction payed out the best for worthwhile jobs or suddenly generating a gold rush event or a pvp hotzone to occur or anomolies that kill warp capabilities randomly, other times disable weapons do to magnetic anomolies, space weather, and other random things. If territory only mattered to the home team solar system everyone who comes in is pretty much an enemy who has no rights and can be destroyed. The opposing side would have to claim territory for their side as well since the perms only keep your players from doing bad things to you but since you are allied and cant kill each other its pointless anyways. And since you arent constantly killing your own side you can then focus fire on a greater enemy or the small rogue factions that break away from the main faction to become pirates or mercs for all the other factions as corsairs. If all those things are changed this game is back on track and can cut a ton of tedium and grind to open up the game for better things. Or they could keep sufficating their player base with a pillow while they keep telling me my play style is bad and one of these times im not going to revive. One of these times the cost of playing and losing $100s worth of assets makes it impossible to do anything unless you were part of the alpha test gold rush before anyone else knew what was happening. Its too much. 4 hours of grind to get done what you need to in a day should be the goal to be able to feed machines for a day. 8 hours of grind should get you pretty caught up on some kind of side project 12 hours of grind should be good enough to get ahead for the day even if tomorrow your odds arent so good. Law of averages and all. I should not be expected to play 10hrs a day to do basically nothing fun for months but mine mine mine, spend on a handful of things, mine mne mine for hundreds of hours a month and feel like I have not really accomplished anything in the 4-5 months I have played and still not have a fully functional industry yet that can make even a full set of ship parts to maintain even a basic fleet. Its just not my fault that to do what the devs expect to run a legit 1 button press and done insustry with future content considered we are forced to craft something like the tune of 500L containers for our industry alone not to mention about another 200 L containes for various other vehicles, hauler, walking cores, or just teravoxel/honeycomb storage. Its fun and all but the item bloat schematic creep is still a bit too much for a 3 man crew let alone a 10-20 man crew to keep the furnace firing on all cylenders.