Warlander

Yeah NQ cant keep losing people like this who are the people they wanted to build the game for NQ. We can do a lot but it would seem the exodus has started.
 
Hopefully NQ comes to the table before its too late.

Please, Thank You 

Also I feel like the more elements there are on a ship, the worse the framerate will get in flight... Im on a ryzen 2700x 64g ram 2080ti, and a a 1,5 kt ship will yield around 14 fps... the novark speeder has fluid framerate. Possibly the difficulties stem from 60+ instances of lift and drag being calculated.

Resource Revamp
Let’s give the resources stats. The same 4 type of stats for all the resources. You could grab a stack of resource and could "identify" them, and that would generate 4 random stats for resources. For example
 
Heat Resistance: 894
Cold Resistance: 390
Strength: 434
Decay Resistance : 900
Why would this be good?
 
1)      The stats of the resource would determine the end result of the crafting.
2)      Trading with resources will be exciting. Humans like collecting stuff ? which will keep them in the game.
Crafting Revamp
 
The issue with how crafting is designed is that pretty much everyone creates the same thing. If 10 players decide to manufacture Space Engine XL-s, then what we will be seeing over time is that they will start undercutting each other prices to a point where someone will sell the item for a loss.
 
The solution is that we need to introduce some variety.
 
What I am proposing is to introduce real crafting. It would be an extra step between when you buy the schematic and when you would put that schematic into the factories.
 
How would it work?
Let’s roll the dice. Let’s use the dice come up with an element’s stat just like in the old days.
You would have a crafting window where you could boost a specific stat on an element.
There would be 2 stages during crafting.
 
Build
 
where you assemble the item for the first time, 
You open the crafting window. You drag and drop the resources / sub-components you need for an item and you initiate crafting by hitting “Build”. This is the point where you would have a roll for the “Build”
 
This could have 5 outcomes.
 
Failure would look like this (see the below screenshot). You can only put two points on Thrust, 3 on hit points, etc) If you do a failure build, you cannot enhance the item by more than 30% (1 box / 10% ). Which basically means you only get 3 boxes.

Good would mean you have 5 boxes (max 50%)
Great would mean you have 8 boxes (max 80%)
Amazing would mean you have 9 boxes (max 90%)
Extraordinary would mean you have 10 boxes (max 100%)
 
The number of available white (empty) boxes and the default blue boxes would be determined by the quality of the resources/subcomponents that you use
Each item will have different resource requirement. For example what resource might be good for space engines may be bad for warp cells.
For example for space engines.
Thrust takes Heat Resistance 50%, Cold Resistance 25%, Decay Resistance 25%
Hitpoints takes 50% strength, 50% heat resistance
Warmup takes Heat Resistance 100%
 
 
This picture below would be for an extraordinary build with good resources. If you use bad resources, there would be fewer blue boxes and more white.

What are the blue boxes? The blue boxes represent how good/bad resources or subcomponents you used, then you will start placing your points from that point. In the above example Thrust starts from 40% so if you put one point, it may go up or down depending on the "enhance" roll (explained in the next paragraph)
 
 
The next phase is the
Enhancement phase.
 
This when you actually start putting points on the stat you want.
The process is simple. Depending on how many points you have, you start placing points. You can either do it point by point, or you can place all your points at once. Rolling the dice point after point could potentially give better endresults than using up all your points and roll the dice once. You can fill as many white boxes as you want, then you hit “Enhance” This would roll the dice once, and it would give you one of the following results
Fail, Good, Great, Amazing, Extraordinary
 
If you only put 1 point (fill only one white box), then this is how the bar would go up
Fail = The bar would actually go down. You initially started from 40%, but since you failed you would go down to 30%, at the same time the number of white boxes on all stats would go down as well.
Good = The bar would go up by an extra 10%
Great = the bar would go up by an extra 20%
Amazing = the bar would go up by an extra 25% points
Extraordinary = the bar would go up by an extra 30%..which means 3 white boxes would be filled to blue even though you just selected white box.
 
What determines how many points you could place of these white boxes?
Talents: we would come up with a new talent tree where if you could acquire maximum 10 points
Location: You could acquire +1 additional points depending which planet you are on. For example on Jago you could get 1-1 extra point on space engine assembly/enhancemenet.This would be good because crafters would actually need to fly to different planets to create schematics. This would boost the traffic and eventually would boost PvP
 
What would drive the rolls?
There are numerous ways you could do that. What I would do is the following
Talents: we would come up with a new talent tree where if you could increase the chances for both assembly/enhancements. It can be the same talen tree as above, but I would come up with a new one.
Location: You could get an additional chance on both depending on which planet you are on.
I would also introduce consumables to increase the chance some extra percentage points. But let’s not go that deep down yet. once you have all the talents and if you are on the right planet you have the following chances
 
5% fail rate
95% good
50% great,
20% amazing
5% extraordinary
 
 
Once you placed all the points, you have three options
·         Cancel
·         Create the item
·         Create the Schematic
 
Decorations and consumables could have a build/enhance on the quantity.

So many people have left because of the lack of content. NQ has decided that instead of creating more things to do, they will focus on making them not come back.
 
There's no incentive to come back because all your stuff will be gone and they can't even rebuild it because they won't have enough construct slots.
 
Great job!

NQ just needs to have a virtual build mode type system that has all the best things or essential things needed for voxelmancy and a creative mode to make things quickly and then just allow for blueprinting imports/exports for ships/buildings and call it one.
 
Part of the performance hits are from all the voxel reactors and kits all over the solar system that dont need to be there along with how lanscape voxels have two layers such as the base layer you see from space or that loads first before the teraforming changes are loaded, player voxels, lights, industry elements, scripts etc that all need to be toned down and not cores.
 
There is also ways to only load the voxel faces that need to be seen when looking at them to also increase performance but when you have a base layer of landscape voxels, changes, and regualr voxels with a 3x the performance being taken and millions of rocks that need to be loaded its impossible to get good performance.
 
The other thing is they need to create core size elements like hangars that are like an inventory that can compact ships and only has so much space like a container to hold ships you can take out and has some kind of cut scene with the actual ship like the sanctuary shuttle when pulled out and spawned.
 
There is no reason to have so much out unless you plan to actually use it or that most of this stuff has some kind of purpose since PvP is DoA the way it is to take it out.
 
Instead of reducing the amount of active non compacted constructs they want to force it in a way that does damage to the game with abandons or defaults since PvP is not a thing in the way they set out to make it.
 
The other thing is that Orgs need to have a level of sovernty outside of players to sink that the Org Leader should have an Org Talent Tree for things like TUs, Ships/Structures, tax breaks, and general bonuses that dont require 100 cores per player but that those who donate does help or that Orgs should be able to buy the cores from someone as a form of compensation and until the org is ready to relinquish they should be compensated each tax cycle to rent the core. 
 
As well as orgs renting the land to personal player cores outside of the org cores.
 
Or where an org can actually levy the taxes for themselves and anyone living on an orgs land pays taxes to that org and if you arent in an org then you pay your taxes to NQ. There is no reason not to have the taxes actually be levied to do something for the orgs rather than just bleed money out of the system.
 
I also think that 1600 cores is too low since you only really need 16 dedicated members you can actually trust vs randos who might just suddenly pull 100 cores from you after investing inthem.
 
The thing is eventually orgs will need to fight each other on multiple planets across from the solar system and they will need like 10-20k ships & 10-20 structures in order to wage sustained wars unless you want it to last a month and game over. You will need lots of land via TUs, lots of land for industries, lots of land for mining, and lots of structures for defenses, lots of ships for moving things, and lots of ships to fight with, lose, and still have more in reserve to keep wagign war as you make more parts to keep it going.
 
This system pretty much kills all chances of that from ever happening if every Org is 16 people and less with beta key holders.
 
Its very short sighted and since PvP is a thing this game has no long term appeal for players to want to wage massive wars rather than just hoard stuff and scrim for roids.
 
Thing bigger NQ. Its a bandaid now its amputation by not addressing the root causes of these problems rather than just griefing your playerbase every chance you get that puts you further into the hole monitarily the more gaming player types you chase out the door.
 
 

Why do you have to make everything more complicated?
I play a game with an avatar who uses an account. I create various buildings and reach the core limit. Why should I want to get another account and thus a second avatar? It would be easier if I could just book more cores in the shop. I don't need another avatar, just more coreslots.

Nope, still dont like it, I dont like to be restricted in a former free world.
 
You gave me the chance to save my current 175core spacestation(org 1) and the ship-shop (org 2), but afterwards I cannot expand it.
I also wonder how it is going to affect my current slots. If you save my station and shop, will I stil have 100/100 slots?
 
And yes, under 40 orgs have maybe over 200 cores, but most players have multiple orgs that work as one. I have 1 org that handles the spacestation cores, and another org that handels my ships and the shipshop. So its a bit, you know, not fair to say that there are ONLY 40 orgs that are over the 200 cores. The setup for this game made it so that we had to make 'divisions' for our builds.
 
And the game looks empty already, with just landscapes and few buildings. How are you at NQ going to implement content with these building restrictions?
 
Also Id like to invite a few devs to come to my base and you can takedown my "MEX 5 series Flight" M-core ship. Maybe then you will realise how much time that takes, and you wont just throw a statement out that reads: "just tear down your builds".
 

After calming down for a while and reading the quick turn of the boat I think I cold give my 2 cents:
 
1) First of all it really doesn't matter what the artificial limit is, there are going to be power user groups that will (need to) work around them. 
 
I really feel for the people and groups who took the NQ dream of DU being player built cities and infrastructure into their hearts and are going to be paying for that. Which brings next couple of pointers.
 
2) We need tooling to determine which constructs which owner entity has and it's core limits, preferably yesterday so we can start preparing to the change what ever it's last form will be.
 
3) NQ pretty please consider Monument program for significant constructs that makes DU great. I mean projects such as "Hedronic Library" some of the facilities displaying all different honeycombs in shapes and forms etc. Point is we need a way to nominate great things that do make the game and the communities better to be preserved. On successful selection these "Monuments" should have their core slots sponsored by Aphelia and in case of the owner dismantling (org) or ending their subscription (player) these monuments should be inspected to be in the shape expected and frozen for everyone to still access. These Monument cores should also be protected from that "random" abandonment if their owning org runs low on core slots.
 
4) Lets be honest. Landscaping is crazy wasteful in the core usage and same time one of the biggest projects any base takes over. Think about paved runways, roadworks etc. Please give us tools to do accurate terraforming (I mean one does not make anything pretty with current terraforming tools that are accuracy of bucket wheel excavator) to get our parking lots and environment groomed and not spamming 100s of cores doing so. Like in real life once yo lay pavement down or pour concrete, you can't go month later to pick it up and use it somewhere else. Let us place honeycombs as part of terraforming directly on the ground, without core involved, but with the cost that the honeycomb becomes part of the environment and will be lost if replaced or modified.
 
I really think that the points 3 & 4 would be immense favor for the game, community and lessen the cores we all need to deal with.

I don't post often on forums (almost never) but this time I'd like to give my PoV on this whole core debate.

Personnal context :
- I'm the super legate of a micro-org, "Blue Star". We are basically 2 in it (+ few not active members). We are successful because of my builds and libraries that most of you have, at least, heard about.
- My only goal in this game is building. I'd like to PvP but for me it is too boring currently.
- I'm quite casual for now, I want to see if the game effectively release and survive before investing more time in it.
- We currently have an HQ + 3 mining outpost made. For a total of around 110 cores. Many of them are used to show the constructs/libraries we are selling. Aside from this, we have almost NOTHING. No big outpost, only few ships.

About this new patch :
I fully understand that a limit MUST be put in place. But be carefull. In a blog post you said that you based your number on the CURRENT medium amount of core owned by player. BUT keep in mind that this medium will rise over time.
In your latest blog post, you said :
So basically you are saying :
"On average people have a home of 65m². So we decided that from now on, no one would have the right to exceed 80m²."
That is plain stupid. I hope that this is not the main reason behind your decision.

If in this beta stage (erhm, alpha), if you are already limiting too much the amount of construct, that means we will not be able to build more in the NEAR future. So basically it's a "game over".
Yes, we can ask for help from everyone to get some of those sweet "org core". But be honest, most people will keep them for themselves or their own org.

Everyone doesn't want to be member of a very large org. People who have many core are usually those who drives the game's community forward with big projects, social media presence, etc.
By limiting them, you will limit the capacity of your game to go viral and also reduce the fun of it. A "civilisation building" game ? Without big cities or space station ? How boring is that ? 

For my personnal case :
- 50 personnal cores + 50 org core (with the 2 players we are) > we stop the game NOW. We are already above this limit. So we can't do anything new in the future. No reason to play.
- 100 personnal cores + 100 org core > it's better, but we are still close to the limit. We will reach it quite soon. It is not motivating and we will probably also stop playing. With this limit Cities and big station projects are still in danger.
- 300 cores is starting to be okay for the long run.

To be honest, this limitation would be probably better received if there was many other gameplay loop aside from building. But currently, building is the only well-made enough gameplay loop available in this game. Limiting it now will be a disaster.

You are out of money and have no choice ? 
As a game developper myself, I will say : Ok, stops the studio NOW or find new investors.
It is useless to push update that will kill your player base more. You can only lose more money over time.

Sorry for the long post in my broken english. I hope it is useful for someone.

LOL! Ohh man.. I can't stop laughing.. my stomage hurts.. gasp.. stop it.. your killing me.. stop... gasp!!.

I can agree to most of that. But their latest actions and patches long after JC left, hasn't exactly been well planned and executed either to put it mildly..

I completely agree with that but it did start going down hill right after schematics 

That's nonsense!
The problem is not players who build too much, but all the beta key players who generate costs but no revenue because there is no paid subscription.
Take all the free players and convert them to subscriptions. Those who no longer pay lose their property after 4 weeks and it is released "for looting". 
I also can't imagine that these few players who have built very large projects are the problem, when at the same time we are talking about the fact that on average only 25 constructs were used by the players. Some players have only 1-5 constructs, others only 5-50...that should compensate for the few who build an enormous number of constructs.
There were also several suggestions on how to compensate for these additional costs. Either through a premium subscription or through an in-game shop where you can unlock more places by paying extra for them.
At the moment, it doesn't matter to me whether one player builds 1000 cores to create a city or 10 players create a city. In the end, most cities are unplayable in terms of performance anyway and have no "use" other than looking nice. 
For myself, well, I've made friends with fewer cores now - let's see when the next restriction comes, it wasn't the first downgrading of the limitations. But what is much more annoying is that there is hardly any game content that keeps you busy and makes it fun. By that I don't mean "obligations" like paying taxes or mindless calibrations - that's no fun! The game could offer so much more by now to give players variety and interesting content, instead it is still tinkering with basic problems as if it were more of an alpha.

 

That is the thing, it would seem NQ actually did.
JC used to talk about communities building mega cities sprawling the planets and space stations the size of moons. And that was the game they sold players.
And when we the community questioned the validity of this, it was NQ that either just remained silent of said it was fine.
 
So I have absolutely no pity left in me for NQ and the problems they are facing.

ofc not, asteroids outside of PVP sone are not worth the risk for anyone not looking to be or get engaged in PVP. The rewards are just not there and the are pretty much a big fat arrow with "pewpew here" written on them, easily and conveniently publically bradcast, first showing someone is there and then just fly straight there..
 
Mining the valuables on a a T5 asteroids takes more time than what it takes for a pirate to trace the route using a DSAT..
 
So they are mostly left alone.

True to a point, which is in the details as the number they will probably shoot for as far as "what will allow the game to exit based on number of paying monthly subs" is more halfway your min and max there. 50K consistently paying subs will probably sustain the game enough to let it stand on its own and leave enough after running cost to continue development.
 
But to even be able to get there, NQ will need to bring the "per player" cost down to where a $10 sub will do that when you account for 50K paying subs and add some overhead on top of that to account for any number of situations including future sustained development. And I think we are getting close to that point. It is where NQ has a MVP from where they can start building out the game to retain and grow player pop.

I also think that they will not be able to get around items in the cash shop which will support that.
 
I really believe that the "magic number" which will make the game work is a spend of $15 per player per month. And that can be people buying DAC in game too as that DAC has to be bought for RL$ in the first place. The same can be true for player using DAC to buy additional core slots sometime in the future. Again, the DAC has to be paid for before it gets into the game.

The racing tracks we now have in game could use contributions and entry fees for races to buy DAC and with that maintain their track (cores).. Same goes for large scale stations, serving larger groups of players. If the owner can add taxes to using the stations facilities, those again can go towards a solution like that.
 
 
And in the end the DAC used means $$ spent and in NQ's pocket which can then accommodate all of that in game goodness. I agree completely with what @Atmosph3rik says above, some seem to miss the point of this and may not see the logic in it, but it is really sensible and the whole reason why I made the post here is because for the first time in quite a while, if ever, someone from within NQ pretty much spelled this out and I greatly appreciate this and hope they continue to do so as it's needed to drive this home.. repeatedly.

NQ is not a philanthropic institution, they are a business and should behave like it. For me what Deckard did was just showing they are not quite there yet, but may now have a better grasp of where they need to go while they lack the will or ability to show it and be open about it for some reason until "pressured" to do so.
 

Dont know if you noticed but your in the middle of a slow rolling wipe. They can do all the countermeasures they want like abandoning cores, taxes, sinks, limits, etc but with all the changes its unavoidable the direction they are going. They might not be doing it all at once with a clean wipe and a fresh start but all the taxes, abandons, sinks, limits, etc are doing just that and if you dont see the pattern or that players are leaving anyways its going to wipe itself clean eventually of both assets and players alike.
 
#takealookaround

Thing is that you don't need to know every detail about the underlying technology to know when something has fundamental issues. So while voxel structures are efficient, you still have to store any changes made to them using moderate amounts of data for each change. And regardless of any compression (they did not even have or use that that until late 2020! But that is another story..) this means you will have exponential data storage and client transfer requirements as the user base grows in a game that allows close to unlimited change in the form of digging tunnels, terraforming and constructs.
 
So by 2018 at the latest it was becoming obvious to some of us in the community that NQ had serious and fundamental scaling and sustainability issues regardless of technology used, and we where asking hard questions about it. But all we ever got was either trademark NQ silence, "don't worry guys" or "you don't understand".  And that was continued with NQ aggressively selling DU as the persistent build anything MMO to subscription players, all the way up until recently.
 
And with JC coming from a scientific background, these are all issues that should be blindingly obvious to him even more so then they would be for any experienced software developer working with databases.

This right here ^. Our small org all feels like this.
 
Its like every update is yet another setback, roadblock, kneecap, setback, etc in the sense 
 
First it was schematics that ballooned our industry by 75% of what we actually needed to like 5000 machines for 3 people, destructive elements flip flop that actually helped the game, removing voxel mining, adding MUs that have been a chore/job and are part of what killing the economy, building a base with nothing else to do being techered to our tiles, and now they want to abandon our cores if we dont touch them, tax us, as well as abandon our cores so that we can reclaim them before someone else claims our work for us for no real reason.
 
Its like NQ has a sado masichist running their studio that just likes to cause unnecessary chaos working on systems nobody wants or asks for with no communication at all about them till is like surprise we killed your puppy again in a constant grief, abuse, and punishment cycle rather than actually spending their time, money, and effort into making an actual gameplay loop and constantly killing off segments of their playerbase they dont like because they dont understand gaming psychology and the different types of gamers they should be building rather than forcing everyone to thread the narrow minded window view of the game NQ has.
 
Or that they dont even know what kind of game they have built, the types of gamers it actually appeals to or why people play the way they do or for what purpose. Whatever JC set out to do was always DOA and it seems like NQ without him at the helm is finishing DU off.
 
Its like sure this time its core jurisdicational transfer and chaos breaking up an org and only needing 16 dedicated members per org that actually kills most orgs or projects like the D6-12 train project when the real issue is the need and the ability of being part of an org, creating a pocket org per person, and the loose nature of orgs when if NQ just had no real upward limit or like 10k/10k ships/buildings with this new system and only let you join 1 org it would do the same thing. and now you cant tokenize personal cores.
 
But on top of that whats the point if you cant trust anyone now to not unsub, pull cores since you only get 1600 and only so many are part of the org or those with multiple beta keys dont need other people messing things up more.
 
Its like what is the next shoe to drop if I continue playing or my friends continue playing. There is already not much to do in game since there is no PvE content, PvP is de post facto at this point, and the only meta is mine, produce, sell to just perpetually scale your ops to just keep endlessly producing more and watering down the economy that much faster with nothing to spend it on or do with it.
 
There is no real reason to throw away billions on PvP or that NQ has adopted a DvP meta in which you can really only take a 2 week break before things start going abandoned and with taxes constantly rolling any break you take kills your MUs, industry, and pushes you straight off the treadmill anyways at which points is like do you really want to rip down billions of voxels by hand along with hundreds of thousands of elements or do you just call it one.
 
Because there are just too many better games on the market that do all this better with a lot of content and dev teams who just care more about their communities to throw it all away every like this without actually having the intelligence to see what it does to their communities without treating their players like children by saying "you all seem to be confused to let me explain it to you really slowly and sugar coat it so that you keep paying us".
 
Everyone should stop logging in till NQ either comes to their senses or they scrap the new core system entiresly. If its not broke than why fix it or just give higher core limits in general in orgs so large orgs dont need like 30 sister orgs because of core caps and pocket orgs etc.
 
 
@NQ I really hope that you guys can actually come to your senses and build a game as its not just DU on the line as much as all your careers at stake now. I know if I see any of you clowns on a project im gunning for you being fired and any studio can see this slow motion trainwreck and should steer clear if your inability to develop anything.

Its like if the government was like hey we will give you 40 tiles and a ship and you end up building it all and the government turns around and taxes you to try to default you, cuts your breaks, trys to sabotage your industry, abandon your vehicles, kill your mining rights, turn the industry green with MUs that do less environmental damage, kill the economy to bankrupt you, and then tells you that you can only use x% of your company vehicles or structures.
 
They asked for this, they dont like what game they made, and not they want to kick people off the land who are paying or freeloading alike since we dont do what they wanted which was to make us fight each other.

It is even worse then that, since for there to be conflict you need to have something worth fighting over. And without the ability to build, your need to amass resources mostly goes away. And then what is there left to fight over other then bragging rights?

Its like if the government was like hey we will give you 40 tiles and a ship and you end up building it all and the government turns around and taxes you to try to default you, cuts your breaks, trys to sabotage your industry, abandon your vehicles, kill your mining rights, turn the industry green with MUs that do less environmental damage, kill the economy to bankrupt you, and then tells you that you can only use x% of your company vehicles or structures.
 
They asked for this, they dont like what game they made, and not they want to kick people off the land who are paying or freeloading alike since we dont do what they wanted which was to make us fight each other.

Lol its not like a Wallet Hostage Negociation where they can hold our money hostage. The truth is we can walk away any time we want. This situation is more like NQ is threatening Suicide and we are talking them down from the ledge they are threatening to jump off of.
 
Deckards like "We dont barter with our lives" while hes moving closer to falling off the edge and its like im just trying to save you from yourself bro. Back away from the ledge and NQs like "the time for talkings over its going to happen you better get ready to clean it up".

NQ will obviously have the last say in how they make DU, but there will also ALWAYS be some form of negotiation going on between NQ and players (costumers).
 
The simple truth is that NQ is making a product in the form of a game, and the goal of any product is to attract customers. So whenever NQ makes changes that makes enough players react and potentially leave, they are forcing NQ to backtrack and mitigate the damage as demonstrated very recently. Aka a form of negotiation albeit slow and very inefficient which leads to NQ bleeding more players then necessary.
 
And it should not be necessary to point out that negotiation is a good thing (for both parties), and it is basically what we have been asking for all this time in the form of NQ listening (and reacting) more to feedback.
 
And when negotiations break apart the end result is usually not positive, as reflected by the DU player count..