Warlander

Over the time I've had 3 people play with me/ live beside me in the game. 3 times I got them on their feet and taught them everything I know. Lately I've been super forthcoming offering to get their stuff to sanctuary where it's safe forever even if I die tomorrow... It's incredibly difficult to make them give a shit, only the requisition function motivated one out of three to login 30min so we can fly his stuff to sanctuary.
 
Ironically I'd have no issue to make them all agree the game would be better served with a wipe; eventhough I know pertinently how they'd throw the towel after looking the rates of their MU for half a week.

You will understand why it is a bad idea when NQ runs out of money as no one is playing the game to make it sustainable.

Its like the endless PvP threads that would pop up constantly asking for the devs essentially asking for your ship to be pretty much given to them with no work. You didnt earn what I gathered and you should not be entitled to it without fighting me and taking it via Territory War. You get Full FFA loot in deep space but not in atmo unless you fight me for what I have earned.
 
Adding Player vs Economy and Player VS Taxes and a bloated ore market after letting people hoard since the startof beta with infinite ore coming in with minimal effort and time based actuaion unit efficiency checks is hardly a reason to entitle you from tax default or forclosure or an arbitrary month I took off or being out for a couple months from a surgery or whatever reason I decide not to play means you are entitled to steal everything I own. 
 
I guess it adds the ability to liquidated your assets and come back later or park it all at a market to stay tax free until Demeter blows over or something worse happens in the next update.
 
And if you are actually going to stop playing the game its better to sell or just delete it all since you are coming back to nothing anyways so why let it fall into anyones hands?
 
If you want to fight all NQ needs to do is add Pvp cores and let people fight in the atmo if they wish to destroy cores and salvage things. PvP is always the answer and the more places you can fight the more you get to loot until Territory Wars finally if ever drops. But it shouldnt prevent NQ of making at least PvP Dynamic Cores or PvP Static cores to shoot the cores from the sky or vice versa. That makes more sense then the IRS Forclosure gravay train for scavengers getting jackpot payouts without any combat is the wrong way to go.

This is a beta after all and even if you pay for a 6 month sub you should be able to front load 6 months or 1 year of tax and even if you dont pay the tax there is no reason to immediatly tear everything down and loot hard work or vast sums of money without ever firing a shot. in territory wars.
 
Many people come back to check out the updates like every 6 months when the decent sized patches hit to test and see if its worth coming back to play DU. What is the point in coming back if everything is gone you worked for or some new feature gets added that makes DU fun to play again.
 
How are we supposed to build a society if everything is erased and looted that fast.
 
Even typical forecosures take a year to kick you out of your house if you can pay taxes. It should be the same here if we have to deal with this IRS sim.

Yes, no one punishes anyone, the game promised to be not only a construction casual game, and it is slowly becoming such. More complex and not only construction. The only problem is that they did not correctly give the players the beginning of the beta, and later took a course to make the gameplay more complicated - I only welcome this. But the problem is that at that moment a casual opinion about the game was formed in the game and 2 camps of players gathered. And when they began to complicate the game, the second part of more casual players or just builders who were no longer interested in anything began to rebel.

But alas, they will have to choose. And as only one part of the players remains, then only those players who are interested in such gameplay will continue to come. The same as in EVE online. Everyone else will just be quickly weeded out. The question is whether these players will be enough for them for the life and development of their company. Well, it's not up to us to decide anyway.

I just think the you miss two payments and your out at the end of the month if things are going on in RL or you get busy is a bad model for new player and existing player retention if everything you built is swept away and gone with nothing to come back to.
 
Tax rates are too steep as is only just to get rid of quanta and push people into owning territory they dont need so you can launcer money from ore into quanta to pay taxes and giving abysmal ore rates is the only reason we have taxes when Territory Wars was always the answe to wiping people or large properties off the map and not taxes.
 
The satic nature of the ore system makes it so that it never changes and never gets better so if the ore market tanks below 20h a lot of people will end up not being able to pay for tiles. That is also no real reason to erase peoples hard work over either.
 
And besides the taxes should be two weeks or at the very least having the machines timed with the tax cycle to last a week per charge is in order so you can actually get ore over the week and limited to being able to keep about 30 machines charged per week for a week for a cluster of tiles at the very least.
 
There are a lot better sinks for quanta they could have done like constructs or if you miss taxes it does 10% damage to everything in the tile requiring repairs. Or if you miss 10 tax cycles then you could come back in 3.5 to 6 months later before your property is actually salvageable when the cores rust away doe to not paying, paying taxes, or at the very least fixing your place or allowing players to just take the damage hits to pay in scrap as a substitue to the tax system to take ore out of the game instead of flooding markets.
 
This is not the right way to make salvaging a thing.
 
They can just as easily spawn salvageable parts instead of ground rocks to find any element in the game if you are observant even if an XL space engine falling out of the sky spawning in the place of ground rocks and harvestable with a harvest too to pick it up would be a lot better than looting peoples tiles not playing for a month.
 
They could just randomly spawn any ship BP in the game as a ground rock spawn and use a self destruct sequence if necessary as a script to blow up the ship once the blueprint is spawned on the ground.
 
Long before people lose their entire work in this game the first thing that should be lootable or salvageable is the Markets vs Territories period. If anything should be liquidated it should be the cores at markets.
 
And besides Cores in addition to TUs should all be taxed as it is how much you are able to bring into the game that also makes it unplayable and taxes are better directed as a quanta sink to those who actually have the most territory and cores being used in the game and is the way to make taxes do what they are intended to do.

I think that Dynamic mining costructs vs requiring static constructs should be viable.
 
For the most part its less messy perm wise if someone claims the tile and the tile has structures on it vs a ship that could be moved from a newly claimed tile. It makes more sense to have a ship that could mine somewhat like the old system of being able to mine anywhere but at the same time fitting into the new mining system where different ores have different rates and you still need to start the machines with charges.
 
SO allowing for mining ships with the mining units makes more sense and if you do it right you could used them like the scanners and mine 3 tiles at once with different units, tier ores, etc that require multiple mining units to be on board in case you come across higher tiers.

Well it makes it that more sad we are still using fossil fuels with no real clean energy, plasma, fusion, or anything sci-fi other than AGG, lazers, and some rudimentary teleportation.

Why should we buy ore?

It's been 1 years now that we have been waiting for PvP. Just to start having fun and using our tens of millions of liters of ore stored for over a year.
 
And PvP is still not there.
Now we are going to add tens of millions of liters of ore to our stocks every month.
 
And we still don't have PvP.
Who will want ore in the market? to do what ?

Gotta love that they dont even know their own mechanics.

Thank you, its sort of bingo in context of all this discussion.
 
Because there is no much difference if stuff is actually hard wiped or... "soft wiped", made irrelevant -- just sitting somewhere forever in totaly empty space, with no one to use, show, enjoy it, etc. 

Honestly its not like weight matters after you get AGG as long as you set up a pedistal 1k+ off the ground. You could litterally have like 50-100 boxes and it dosent effect anything. I just whish they treaded Pulsars like Hover Engines at that point to where each pulsar can handle a specific amount of mass required to defy gravity but its not like this game really has any real futuristic sci-fi elements they dont discriminate completely against vs fossil fuels 600+ years in the future or whatever.

You can offset the efficiency drops with an extra S miner so it never goes below 100%. Or on the flip sise acing the mini game can make the S miners or higher pull doubleor tripple and if you keep playing the mini game on them it seems like there is no upward efficiency limit. We have some baby miners pushing almost 200% efficiency, L miners pushing nearly 300%.

Yeah it was hella easy to amass large amounts of ore after Alpha and learning how to speed it up for the ore reset into Beta. Missions were just the icing on the cake since you could VR and double dip with a dedicated pilot only. Or triple dip with scanners and doing all three at once and then profiting even more before schematics arrived with unlimited versitile industry and then even after schematics when everyone else got kneecapped and had to random out their industry and eat parts while larger orgs were unaffected and selling parts during destructable elements.
 
I call that spoon feeding to the max when they should have chopped from the top.
 
I never said EvE wasnt unbalanced I am just simply saying they were able to turn it around unlike NQ who is dead set on making a failed game.
 
Am I jaded by sutoids who made countless bad games over the years? Sure.
Am I self absorbed? Who isnt?
Can NQ do better than the absolute bare minimum of what we call a game? Yeah.
 
I have seen pretty much all this industry has or had to offer. Its pretty much mostly cash grabs, clones, and has been stagnat for two decades beyond EvE, EQ/WoW, SWG, SB, GW, or UO, and few others that arent an amalgamation of those titles made easier, dumbed down, Americanized, or bastardized. Clueless? Cool! Can I get the DU clueless badge @NQ-DeckardI think I earned my merit badge!

Well NQ did say they were not happy with the geometry and would wipe at some point once they got the hexes better aligned.
 
There was no way of knowing that however and im sure its going to ba a job and a half having flattened 7 tiles worth of mountains and valeys to a flat sheet. I feel for you and anyone else having to go through that again or the people who sent in requirests to NQ to dig out cores and they just come in and dig out a core and ignore the rest of your requests they they did us bogus with.
 
A add/remove landscape voxel tool would have saved a ton of time for everyone if you could use it in a core.
 
Though it does nothing for alll the work you have to do teraforming.

Yeah it was hella easy to amass large amounts of ore after Alpha and learning how to speed it up for the ore reset into Beta. Missions were just the icing on the cake since you could VR and double dip with a dedicated pilot only. Or triple dip with scanners and doing all three at once and then profiting even more before schematics arrived with unlimited versitile industry and then even after schematics when everyone else got kneecapped and had to random out their industry and eat parts while larger orgs were unaffected and selling parts during destructable elements.
 
I call that spoon feeding to the max when they should have chopped from the top.
 
I never said EvE wasnt unbalanced I am just simply saying they were able to turn it around unlike NQ who is dead set on making a failed game.
 
Am I jaded by sutoids who made countless bad games over the years? Sure.
Am I self absorbed? Who isnt?
Can NQ do better than the absolute bare minimum of what we call a game? Yeah.
 
I have seen pretty much all this industry has or had to offer. Its pretty much mostly cash grabs, clones, and has been stagnat for two decades beyond EvE, EQ/WoW, SWG, SB, GW, or UO, and few others that arent an amalgamation of those titles made easier, dumbed down, Americanized, or bastardized. Clueless? Cool! Can I get the DU clueless badge @NQ-DeckardI think I earned my merit badge!

Sorry I should have been clearer in my points - I was mining for myself to allow production so and then sale, which allows me to buy ship parts and higher tier ores to make Honeycomb - So the cost of ore for me is not as big an issue as being able to get the ore to make things and thus sell these for quanta, that then allows me to make my ships - I hope to do one for each class (Currently constructing a medium ship).
 
I realise that deflation will eventually catch up with me too but the new mechanics really free me up to do more towards ship building. If their are problems for other player methods / perspectives, I think they need addressing in other ways, that do not involve bogging my play style down with forever mining.
 
To be clear I think this update is a step in the correct direction and other problems that are identified should be addressed with more correct steps instead of complaining about this one. Though I am still concerned about the flat 1,000,000 tax for every tile and every ore and its the same for a corp or a person. I think this last part is especially unfair considering from what I understand every member of a corp can put down their own MU on the same tile and basically split the tax among them - produce more ore for less tax (This is based on what I have gleaned from in game chat and posts here so it is not first hand and could be incorrect). Basically I think individuals should pay less and lower tier ores should also pay less since they are worth less (its also how it would work in the real world - people who earn more pay more).

Edit: People who pay more tax pay only slightly more tax - not equivalent to keep everyone down.
 
Edit continued: Also I think these taxes and ores that bots are buying should not disappear from the game but rather be used somewhere to make an economy that works. That way a balance can be struck, which seems to be the majority of complaints about the update.

I don't have a problem with people that work hard and play the game. I would say a true whale is someone that is north of 100 billion, probably like what 100 players or less? I also am not saying they are the reason for there to be a wipe. I am saying NQ is intentionally trashing the economy to pit the community against itself... or have you not been paying attention to all the bickering on the forums lately?

My reasoning is, when the developers can't see the problem with needing T3 ore to get the items to find/get T3 ore, they lack the ability/tools to catch/fully track money that is washed through their game ecosystem and the various ways it can change hands, and the deceptive strategies used to accomplished this. Some of these players have been exploiting mmo economies for 20+ years now, they aren't exactly as dumb as NQ believes the community to be.

The problems are so complex for NQ, that it is beyond their control, so the easiest way for them to erase the imbalance is to wipe, and they are setting it up to where they say the community requested it, so they can once again take the easy way out, as per the norm of their behavior without taking the blame.

Once again, not trying to push for a wipe, I am telling people one is coming cause NQ has designed the conditions for one to be needed. The problem here is you continue to accidentally/unintentionally keep assuming things about me that aren't true, This is where we are running into our friction.

It is mutual that I have no beef with you either, or anyone in this community... I participate here cause I care.
 

Yeah it does have potential to gain more ore for sure with the only cost being tax, gas, and travel time. If structured properly you can do a lot since you can hit like 27 tile joints with max container range and just a pocket bike to hit the container stops. 
 
Personally even though the old mining system was grindy the best part about it I though was you pretty much got out of it in time what you put into it with effort. Sure you had days of 4kl node after 4kl node but when you hit 200kl nodes or mil+ nodes it certainly made up for the shortfalls.
 
Personally I wish the mining unit system was more interactive as in if you pop a charge or just in general should be able to mine consistently since you could get 4kl about every 5 mins vs 10 times ever 1.5-2 days. I think in that regard if it were made more active or there was more to it than just a box, transfer unit, and the MU to increase production, speed things up, or have more efficiency it would be a good trade off for traditional mining. But getting much less than before to get steady ore I guess is the tradeoff and push for us to play other content that for me I find more tedious than traditional mining since asteroids are the same thing with a 1-2 hour road trip.
 
But hopefully they iron some things out like taxing the ore so if you are getting more you pay more since not all tiles are equal, not all ores are equal, and it hurts new players more than those who have more in their bank accounts getting the most from tiles who are the ones who need to be taxed the most.
 
I think over all demeter is just ok. It certainly needs some streamlining but we shall see.

Background / Summary
I backed DU early on and have three accounts - honestly, I tried to give my beta keys away to friends, but no one wanted them.  So, I have a character dedicated to mining / refining, one to piloting, and one to industry.  All three have some combination of radar, gunnery, and ammo skills.  Each of them is around 50M skill points.
 
My play time prior to Demeter could be classified into three categories, active, passive, and mindless.  The active playtime involved building, pvp, asteroid mining, or using the markets.  I’m sure most of you reading this know the autopilot time as you scanned an asteroid or traveled to a planet.  This is the passive; dare I say AFK time.   What I call mindless time includes digging around in an unclaimed tile, you could simply zone out, watch a video, or listen to music.  I liked this time, it was relaxing, easy, and still offered progression without any risk.
 
Prior to Demeter, On average, I spent about 3 hours each day playing DU.  About half of this time was active or mindless mining and the other half was some mix of ship building, industry, or solo pvp.  Occasionally, I would spend an entire session repairing my ship because...well you dicks with the giant towers know why.
 
On an average day, I would generate $46M.  About half was ground mining and the other half Asteroid mining.  This worked out to about $30M / hour of money making activity.

With the advent of Demeter, the mindless playtime has disappeared.  My playtime has shifted to only two categories and the overwhelming majority of my playtime is now active and focused on three tasks - calibrating, hauling ore, and picking up ore from the bonus ground spawn.  The passive time is almost non-existent and involves flying 60km on the same planet.
 
After playing the minigame 15 times, trudging out to some random spot to collect between 2 and 4k ore, and then doing my best impression of a garbage man picking up all the auto-ore from 14 containers, I generate on average $10M over 90 minutes or about $6.7M / hour.  I could probably generate $30M / hour asteroid mining again but that would be at an opportunity cost of the passive ore mining or I would have to fully dedicate my entire 3 hour play time to money making activities.
 
The real takeaway here is that my money making active playtime has shifted from scanning and mining to babysitting autominers and picking up ground ore - both steps down in the level of fun and engagement. Sure, I could go back to asteroid mining exclusively and will likely get to that point but for the purposes of this dsicussion, I focused on really exercising the auto mining system.  
Additionally, to keep the automiers at a reasonable level (not even optimal) I have had to set timers, reminders, and build a spreadsheet to track the decay so I’m hitting the right autominers at the right times and carefully balancing my calibration charges.  While I’m perfectly capable of managing all this, it is quite annoying and doesn’t lead to long term engaging gameplay.
At the current market rates, I’m able to generate about $5M per tile per week.   My tiles are probably slightly above average but are all T1 and similar to most of everything else I have seen around Alioth - so nothing special here.  
 
I have seen several posts of people complaining the taxes are too high and hopefully the next section will help show how to make automining profitable.
 

Setup
I put some of the refunded mining skills into the “on deploy” auto mining skills on my main mining character and had all three characters train to 4 4 3 3 (Calibration Charge Optimization / Efficiency at 4 and Improved versions at 3).  So, as far as investment into auto mining goes, I’m pretty deep but not outside of what most folks can do with a week of skill training.  This gives the three characters the ability to comfortably manage 60+ autominers across 14 territories.   A single character with 10 days of training can easily handle 7 territories - perhaps not at a perfectly optimal level but enough for a good profit margin.
 
While I was fortunate enough to have some scanners already available, I haven't found many territories that couldn't turn a profit with proper management.  The tiles that had 500 of one ore are best as you can get 4 miners working that tile with no leftover.  But most tiles offered at least 3 full miners and some partial miners.  The proximity bonus is key so simply picking a spot that has 7 open tiles will almost always yield a profit.
 
I currently have 14 T1 Territories with 7 being very bauxite heavy and the other 7 evenly distributed across all 4 T1 ore types.  There are 63 autominers currently running with the lowest base rate being 70 and the highest being 125.  With the territory bonus, the optimal rate ranges from 126 to 226 per hour with most clustered at 183 per hour.
 
For production bonus purposes, the tiles are clustered around a center which means one tile gets a 60% bump and all others get a 30% bump.
 
In order to maintain this, I do need to log in every day so I don’t overcap my calibration charges.  My characters generate 5.7 calibration charges per day and if I don’t use them every day, I lose 1.4 charges.  With current skills I can refill between 60% and 72% if I get lucky with the minigame.  If I don't get lucky, it's around 57% which means I need to calibrate when a mining unit decays to between 30% and 50%.  While I may over cap the 100%, I found calibrating when the unit is between 40% and 45% is the safest time.  The tracking sheet below highlight the units that need adjusting.
 
Given the base rate of 125 for most of the miners, I can usually get 4 full miners on a tile and one partial. On the 60% bonus tile I see around 1.1KL / hr of total ore and my lowest tile currently generating around 500 L / hr.  Optimal generation is around 700 L / hr on average.  I have also found that unless the unit is on a 60% tile, a rate below 90 would be better deployed elsewhere as it relates to spending calibration charges - there is something to be said about convenience so I have a few mining below that rate, but they are lower priority to calibrate.
 
Bonus Ore
Each day I spend about 15 calibration points and get an average of 3k bonus ore which works out to 45,000 L in bonus ore or about $2M income.  Getting the bonus ore is relatively quick but tedious and feels like a chore.  The bonus ore makes up 20% of the weekly income so it is unfortunately required to maximize the tile.  Without the bonus ore, I would still see a profit but it would reduce down to $44M / week (still not bad).
 
Sample Tracking

 
 
Financial Analysis
Initial Investment
Territory Unit: $175k -> $2.45M
Territory Claim Fee: $500k -> $7M
Small Static Core: 12K -> $168K
Basic Mining Unit L: $175K -> $11M
Container L: $300K -> $4.2M
-------------------------------------
Total Investment: $24,800,000
Time to setup: 8 Hours
 
I should note I have a ship with two L containers that handles the logistics.  This ship costs about $15M.
 
 
Maintenance Costs
Nitron Fuel: $70,000 / week
Scrap for those unexpected times:  $250,000 / week
Territory Tax: $1,000,000 / week -> $14,000,000 / week
-------------------------------------
Total Maintenance per week: $14,320,000
Maintenance Time: 90 minutes / day or 10 hours each week
 
 
Income
Raw Sales: $72,000,000
 
 
Balance Sheet (Week to Week expectation)
Expenses: $14,320,000
Income: $72,000,000
-------------------------------------
Net: $57,680,000
 
Given the initial investment of $24,800,000, I fully covered this investment in 4 days and had a first week pure profit of about $16,600,000.  
This works out to a little over $1.7M / Hour of play time in the first week. I expect around $6M / hour of playtime next week
 
Territory Summary

 
Daily Log

 
 
 
Bugs
Can’t access the Calibration menu that tells me things like when it was last calibrated and the location of the surface ore pop if I have no calibration charges Tooltip on Adjacency doesn’t have a % indicator -  should be  “a 30% bonus” not "a 30 bonus" The small 50L of ore are physically much smaller than the normal surface rocks that only deliver 20L of ore The harvest time on the bonus ore is not scaled with the regular surface ore - it takes less time to harvest the 50L and 150L rocks than it does the normal 20L ore The bonus rocks are labeled incorrectly, they show up as their pure counterparts instead of the raw ore label; Aluminum Rock vs Bauxite Rock
Improvement Suggestions
As mentioned in the Q&A, the transition screens on the minigame are painfully slow.  Can we eliminate or speed them up? The current reasonable cap of calibration charges is 9.  You can get more by investing more skill points but 9 feels like where most folks will end up given there are far more interesting skills to train.  I’d like to see this cap at least doubled if not tripled (or removed all together, why cap it?)  If I decide not to play for a few days, I over cap and there is an opportunity loss. Where can I see my current calibration charges?  Or is the Autominer UI the only spot?  I’d like to be able to see the current calibration charges on some character screen. The minigame is prone to RNG which causes a reduction in income for things that are outside of my control.  Could we have some of the mining unit skills affect the size off the tools in the minigame so that if I choose to invest points in those skills, I see my efforts less affected by RNG? The bonus ore is nice for the minigame but it's a chore to go out and collect it.  Can we have it simply deposited into the container The surface rocks offer a performant way to create a small faucet and give new players a way to earn money.  However, the way they are designed is both tedious to gather and painful to look at. Could we instead have larger nodes that leverage the mining talents spawn on the surface and offer the same amount of ore just more concentrated?  We could even add a piece of equipment that allows me to scan my territory to identify these pockets or leverage the territory scanner.
 

You'd run out of surface rocks before you would even get enough for a ship to take the rocks to a market to sell.
 
SM rarely has good buy prices, so they will get even less. Fun game!

If NQ gonna play, ping me plz. Gonna resub and intercept them on their first flight to any outer planet. This should be hilarious.
 

with 0.23, they at least gave us in return: more daily quanta, and bots were buying for double the price. The said focus of 0.23 was to bring more stuff to the markets
 
Well, they should have shown ingame PVP. This pvp video makes it look like the intro of Star Wars clone wars and its even within the 2SU safe zone around a planet.
And yes, you are right. They do lure destroyers into this game, what is the NQ marketing strategy anyway?

I think NQ needs to spend a week where the whole team starts the game as new players and stream it so we can see their reactions to how bad their own game is since they obviously dont really play it or if they do they started when it was a lot easier than it is now and need a reality check.
 
#outoftouchdevs 

They would never do such a thing. I'm pretty sure the devs don't actually enjoy the game anymore. They just implement what the business managers want and do their best. I hope, at least.