Warlander

I don't understand why they put these taxes in. Of course they said that it would get rid of many areas and constructs that are no longer used by active players. Accordingly, it is also an austerity measure. (Is NQ really doing so badly financially?)
The problem could also have been solved by moving this process to an active subscription. Same result, except that you wouldn't harm very many players by doing this, because you are now imposing a game compulsion and style of play on the players. Where is the motto "Play how you want - be who you want and develop yourself"?
I have now tested the MiningUnits for a few days and the mini-game is already annoying! Just running back and forth to the ground ores, just the fact that you first have to level up for many weeks to enable progress.
It feels wrong to demand taxes from players just to force them into the game in terms of time. They wanted players to have more freedom and more time to "play" - so why weren't these MiningUnits completely automated? An area restriction on how many areas a player can have in each solar system would have done justice.
By the way, their system does not prevent that many players now create many alts to generate more ores. Let's see how long they will enjoy doing this.
In principle, it doesn't matter, since they apparently plan to do a wipe at the end of the beta anyway. So why invest time and money now and not just wait for the release? When it's released in 3-5 years, at least you'll see what you're buying.

I find it cheeky that inactive players from the beta will now lose everything and have to log in to save it. Some players have reasons why they don't currently play DualUniverse, but would have come back later if there was meaningful content. Telling these players to log in or pay a subscription to log in so you don't lose your areas and buildings shames me. It smacks of NQ currently begging for every subscription and not understanding that this way more subscription players will leave.
 

I wasn't even mining, just trying to get from point A to point B. But PvP space is PvP space all the same. Guess you have to own a warp drive if you don't want to get attacked when approaching a planet.

Yeah for sure a warp drive is the way to go. Slow boating is dangerous you might get lucky a couple of times but more times than not your not outrunning a PvPer and youll lose a ship or two before you duget cells for anything importanit you dont want to lose.

The other amusing thing is you dont seem to have any idea the REAL reason why the ore price has shit the bed is.  Several MAJOR ore whales that have been hoarding ore for many months and artificially holding the price high, mainly to ensure products like warp cells retain high value, have all started dumping ore before they lost a TON of quanta (as they have been buying at high prices for some time).  I know this, because I have dealt with them since early alpha.

To quote one "it was fun whilst it lasted"

Couple that with the MASSES of additional ore mined by players clearing out mega nodes before the patch, which was also dumped.  THESE are the reasons why it has plummeted.  The people worrying about paying taxes lol, they have ZERO effect on the market.  The players who effect the market, could stop playing for six months and still not worry about taxes.

You people......lol, some of us know more than you think.

(Alpha 1 baker)
 
A few days ago I went back to DU to see the new update, Demeter, after several months of not logging in.
I warned all the friends I played with to go back to setting their territories before losing everything.
Nobody cared.
 
I have loved too much DU to lose it all.
So I logged in, set my three territories HQ (never gave a damn about owning land, I just wanted to make ships), looked around ... and logged out.
 
I don't feel any urge to play DU. No encouragement, nothing that entices me.
And with Demeter I also began to think.
 
To think why.

To think how it is possible that a development team, no matter how short-sighted NQ is, has introduced such a tedious, annoying and impacting mechanic on every game mechanic such as automining and taxes.
 
And my conclusion, which is as valid as anyone else's, so it's just an opinion, an impression, is the following:
Demeter adds a routine typical of free to play games.

You can do it all but if you want to play for real either you take the time or you put the money into it.
 
He's a suspect for now. Which could be confirmed in the coming months, with new declarations, or more in time. In the meantime, they have doubled the cost of the monthly subscription, making a calculation on their server costs, of course, but certainly also taking into account a forecast of lost users after Demeter.
 
Here many users are talking about the fact that they are in Beta, which is a masked alpha. Working in anticipation of the launch.
Warframe has been in beta for 10 years.
Star Citizen we don't talk about it.
 
They are not working in anticipation of the launch.
They are working to not lose their jobs.
 
And on free to play: it would also suit me. I would accept it.

If there was something to pay for.
If there was any fun to pay for.
If I have to pay just not to lose things, this is not free to play but moral blackmail.
 
My opinion.
Avoid salty answers

Q1: How do you plan to make salvaging more of an activity than just tearing down what people built?
 
You could just as easily add elements to the rock spawns on the ground and randomly  spawn elements like toilets, doors, ship parts, and whole ships so that you can find random things around the planets instead of looting peoples ships or buildings or only spawning ships. It would be nice to find space engines, containers full of ore, or any number of things randomly seeded in the world.

Maybe asteroid mining will be more feasible after the patch, since ore prices are coming down pretty fast. That will affect warp cells as well.

Assumption:
All mining unit talents = lvl5; calibration = 100%; adjacency bonus = 60%;
 
Question:
Does the value of the tile's base-rate effects the production rate of a single miner (assuming the tile contains at least 100ltr/hr?
 
E.g.
a) Tile base rate = 130; what is the product rate of a single miner ?
b) Tile base rate = 160; what is the product rate of a single miner ?
 
My guess is that the production rate of a single miner is always the same when looking at the base value of the tile. This beacause all the talent perks apply on the miner unit production rate, is this correct?
 
Woudl it be possible to give some calculation examples?

Q1: Can you consider tweaking taxes by the total ore pool and by ore present?
 
Taxes should be on the value of the property and not across the board with T1 = 100k-h per 100l/h, T2 = 150k-h per 100l/h
T3 = 200k-h, T4 = 200k-h per 100l/h, and T5 = 250k-h per 100l/h. Not all tiles are created equal and the prime tiles should cost more.

I love the pic where it says the game is built by the players and NQ does not have to do anything themselves. Its like if your parents were like we are going to play mopoly and everything is blank but they developed just enough for the sapces for property, pieces, blank cards, and said go play the game but every time you pass go you pay us $.$$. When you ask what the rules are they said you make the game and every time you try to do something they take away cards, properties, and add rules, taxes, dice roll limits, and slap someone in the face when they land on free parking. They keep adding stupid rules, conditions, and sinks but never bothered to make anything more then a completely blank game they make up as they go along.

Honestly a lot of the "Planets" were ugly, unfinished, boring, and other then to mine for quanta, simply not worth really going to.

I think the fact that I spend so much time now since update on forums vs. building like I was... says a lot about the impact. Forums are now more fun than Chore Universe.

It why I always say NQ tries to impliment schematics, sinks, or taxes at the large orgs and it basically is nothing but a speed bump and since they dont impliment sinks based on how much you have vs arbitrary sinks across the board it only ends up hurting most players and even more so new players.
 
Take scematics for example we were able to make whatever we wanted and had a good sized industry and had all the talents to make what we wanted from that and pivot to making parts we needed at the time. suddenly to even think about using our industry we built we had to turn around and pony up 200mil in ransom to get it out of m0th balls. For a new player upfront that probably does not know you can right click any element in a core and apply talents they likely will replace schematics over and over again as they go through their talents.
 
and if NQ isnt always trying to cut your brakes or knee cap you all the time they add sinks like Destructible Elements at a time when their system was buggy and would break parts even if you had a soft landing. Honestly with new players not having PDs at their disposal let alone skills and less braking power with the finacky placement system they no longer have the time to sit around and teach themselves how to fly or build a proper ship with the PD bonuses, fuel saving, or stats to properly fly. Combine that with a limited amount of ore coming in and insufficient talents to make scrap you could easily wipe out a daily supply of ore turning it into scrap.
 
Personally I think new players should get a system that gives them T5 talents the first week they player T4 talents the second week they play, T3 Talents the third week they play, T2 the fourth week they player, and T1 Talents the fifth week they play since you basically get 1mil exp per week you want to give new players a fighting chance that goes away to give them a sense of what max skills can be like but to get things done in a way that helps them learn while they get their talents going as well as 1mil h per day starting out for the first week and lowering with the exp bonus. It would also be helpful if there were missions that gave out ship parts, industry parts, elements, or voxels as their payout along with cash to also help get them going.
 
With this current system it also needs to be based on what is in your tile per 100l/h in the cost of the taxes. If you can only produce 500;/h of T1 ore as a new player with all other ores being rare and sparse you would think it should only cost a new player or anyone stuck with non prime tiles 500k-h per week and not a mil per tile per week. Anything higher per T1 and it should add 25-50k in tax by 100l/h. It makes sense to charge people with prime tiles more since they are getting better returns. The fact that NQ said you get more then you pay in taxes just means you can buy up every tile on a planet and cover takes and make money which makes no sense if you dont try to stem it in any way if you own an obscene amount of tiles.

the sad part is the catch 22/44/88 of being a new player:
You have to pay taxes and cannot mine ore in any substantial amount to overcome the taxes You need to choose between taking the ore you had an buying mining units, mining units and flying blind getting your mining operation going to start getting ore and using like 8+ charges to start getting ore and not having the talents to do it efficiency. Or using ore you have in the nano crafter and not having the talents and burning a ton of mats making things. Choosing between taxes or a territory scanner to not pick up tiles blindly. Not having access to missions, asteroids, or any profitable content to keep it going while waiting for miners to produce 12kl per day until you can start building a meaningful ore operation and cover the taxes when you have 3 days before they kick in and hope you can sell what you make or the ore straight up.  
Its doable but its certainly a lot tougher to get off the ground now.

Someone already mentioned new player experience but I'm giving it a try to give detailed feedback. I am not new, but am currently going through the game on an alt as a new player with 0 quanta on sanc. I have 4 autominers now on Sanctuary but my tile only has 13 bauxite (others are just over 100). I automine a total of 116 ore per hour. I received 10k T1 from calibration. I can sell that to bots for 250k or less. Schematics to build M industry, parts, and refine pures is 5m or so. I can do all tutorials and get 1.5m?  That means I have access to 2m maybe.
 
I can get to space barely but will take much more time to get a ship that's able to do missions for example.
I can't buy a DSAT (18m) or schematic let alone equipment to build one in order to asteroid mine.
 
What that leaves is a waiting weeks for autominers to produce enough ore to make quanta or surface mining for 10s of hours. Even if I work my way up to mining on Alioth, still lots of afk waiting. Besides joining an org and getting free things, that's the options here. Is that intended? is there a solution in the works?   
 
Others have said get rid of early game schematics. That would help
 
To clarify, my issue with this is there's nothing to do early game because factory and asteroids have a huge quanta barrier. 
 

the sad part is the catch 22/44/88 of being a new player:
You have to pay taxes and cannot mine ore in any substantial amount to overcome the taxes You need to choose between taking the ore you had an buying mining units, mining units and flying blind getting your mining operation going to start getting ore and using like 8+ charges to start getting ore and not having the talents to do it efficiency. Or using ore you have in the nano crafter and not having the talents and burning a ton of mats making things. Choosing between taxes or a territory scanner to not pick up tiles blindly. Not having access to missions, asteroids, or any profitable content to keep it going while waiting for miners to produce 12kl per day until you can start building a meaningful ore operation and cover the taxes when you have 3 days before they kick in and hope you can sell what you make or the ore straight up.  
Its doable but its certainly a lot tougher to get off the ground now.

This is just so very funny and sad at the same time.
 
NQ basically hacked in a right to use a mining unit and called it "Mining Unit"
It's pretty much an unneeded right as the esixting rights should cover the use of a mining unit since:
Access to a mining unit allows it's use/activation as is the case for any other element in the game. The "Mine territory" right allows access to the territories resources and so determines whether activating a mining unit actually results in mining resources.  
Not to complicate things for themselves and since actually designing in a consistent way seems too hard, yesterday's "hotfix" shows
Updated Mining Unit right description and name.  
And with it the right "Mining Unit" is renamed to "Use Mining Unit". It's still a superfluous right for which there actually is no need. It also break the core design purpose of how the RDMS system is set up and should work (yes NQ, I understand how RDMS works, seemingly better than whoever thought this up). There is no need for this right as handmining and use of mining units is mutually exclusive, so one right "Mine Territory" is sufficient for either.
 
The fix should have been:
Removal of the "Mining Unit" right The "mine Territory" right will determine if a mining unit will be able to mine when activated  
This is textbook NQ "fixing bugs", the issue is still there and nothing really changes, we just change the rule in order to not have to actually address and fix anything. It also shows that different devs do not actually care to (re)use existing code or options and seemingly can't be bothered to learn the mechanics of a feature someone else made but feel they must cook their own at every corner..  The game is filled with examples of this.
 
Some will say this is a minor issue and why the fusss, I'd say, this is a structural flaw in the way NQ designs their game and uses their own in game functionality in inconsistent ways. It is a waste of developer resources/time and thus money.

You gotta love when this shit is used in other games to basically temp ban whole guilds right before Territory Wars like in New World. Are there players who need to be reported? Yes, but this type of system gets abused more then it is designed to stop.

You gotta love when this shit is used in other games to basically temp ban whole guilds right before Territory Wars like in New World. Are there players who need to be reported? Yes, but this type of system gets abused more then it is designed to stop.

Agreed, I realize you were using best case numbers to start which are really not achievable so reality would sadly tell the true story as you did above. I assumed there was a good chance on many tiles that your production would go to taxes with nothing or very little left over. Knowing NQ since "beta" I can say there is very little chance we will see a meaningful rollback, at best they will "listen" to us and increase some mining outputs but nothing meaningful.

They could charge 10-100k per SU you want to travel via VR. 
You could also make it so that VR uses 1 mining charge every time you use VR.
You could do both.
 
Alt game over.
 
You get free ore per month with auto miners Double dipping with the mining mini game Triple dip with VR mission Runs Quadruple dip with asteroid runs every weekend via VR Quintule dip with VR to run scans and use maneuver tool to move the ship to the next 3 tile cluster to scan.  
one or all of those could be plugged if each of them used mining charges to VR since you get 208.6ish per month and charging a Quanta tax for VR. Beta keys are free play till launch and destroying the game from the inside out and something needs to be done about it.

And how is a newb supposed to get into space in any meaningful way with 200L/day, and the daily 150K that may or may not go away at release?
 
Never mind space, what about just being able to experiment with building and elements to figure out how the game works? It is easy to forget that a new player does no have a clue how to build effectively and make a functional space ship. And buying different elements for testing and making mistakes, takes on a whole other meaning when one mistake can be days or even weeks worth of quanta.
 
For some reason NQ seem to have this idea that they can pretend they have a full game loop, if they just slow down progress on the few working game features they already have.
 
And if I hear one more person say "just join a org" I am going to lose it.
That should never be the solution to work around bad game design. Especially when the game was supposed be an open world with few restrictions on your play style.

Dear Developers.
 
What I don't understand is why NQ isn't able to include a soft terrain wipe feature that allows mining underground without any permanent impact on the database.
 
Another voxel game, Empyrion, that has implemented this.
 
The difference with the current terrain reset in Dementer is that the terrain around the base, and even in the base itself, is not changed. So if you have an underground base, the terrain in and around that base is not reset.
 
But no, they remove a well-functioning game mechanic to switch to the autominer, which I have to constantly calibrate to pay my taxes with the meager yield.
 
If NQ doesn't have such a feature they should program it and bring back underground mining, that would be a positive addition to the autominer.
 
So personally I don't enjoy the game at the moment, so please make something that covers a wide range of play styles, only then can the game be a success.

Dear NQ,
 
After reading the patchnotes completely yesterday evening, my head exploded... One small line, has a huge impact: No more VR missions. I'm no objecting to the change itself, I'm objecting to piling it onto Demeter, with the other mountain of high impact changed. And with high impact changes, I mean changes that require a lot of work and/or a complete rethink on how to use something effectively. IF you had any customer related experience as a change manager that's working with customers, you should know that you don't roll out a bunch of high impact changes if you can avoid it at all. Looks like you either don't have a change manager or anyone experienced with customers looking over the changes and evaluating the customer impact...
 
You could have made this change two week earlier or two weeks later, fine! It would have been nice for a heads up ahead of time, but we've already established that what NQ says ahead of time is worth sh!te! So unless that changes, don't bother informing anyone of anything ahead of time.
 
So my DU work day after Demeter launch:
Is this thing on? Hello? Everything working? Looks like it... Great job NQ! (prays to the IT gods that this isn't going to change) Ground all trade ships until it's clear Demeter LUA changes didn't break everything. Get Autominer BPs, start factory. OK! (setup beforehand) F! Check factory if everything is actually running, F-ing factory patch bugs! But everything looks fine. Saddle up and go scanning/claiming (setup a TU factory before hand and had a bunch ready). Setup static core factory because I forgot something! (always happens) It's clear LUA changes didn't break (badly), so getting the trading ships (aka. mission runners) ready for launch the next day, because it's time for bed! Then someone mentions that single line in the patch notes. Wait what!?!?! *head explodes* If I had bought my subscription directly from NQ, I would have cancelled right there. If I had already been charged for a year, a ticket to get my money back and if they did not comply, initiated a charge back (service was drastically changed after charging a yearly fee without proper notification). But lucky for NQ, I bought my 4x year time codes via Markee Dragon and I'm not bothering him with this sh!te. So NQ, think twice before even thinking about cutting out the middleman, we actually like the middleman! ? At the moment I REALLY don't like NQ...
 
I run a main with three alts (miner, ship builder, and two pilots), two of them actually fly the missions, the rest just VR in. With this change and no actual change to the trade routes (missions). My profit would drop to less then 15% (over a 85% loss), as costs would stay the same but, the amount of missions I can pickup/return would drop drastically. If I move charcaters around I reduce the loss to around 50%, but that would mean chugging everyone into a ship and with Demeter launching that just can't happen (need to handle the other Demeter things). The end result will be three alts on a ship (sounds like the start of some joke) and a 65% reduction in income. I do see a solution to this issue, but that takes a lot of work to setup with a little additional running costs and maybe a little additional time required to get back to previous earnings. I think of that work as a challenge, the reasons why I play games like DU and EVE. The issue isn't the change itself, it's the change at the same time as a bunch of other changes that take up all my DU playing time (which is already significantly more then most) for the foreseeable future. I can understand that more casual DU players are getting overwhelmed, angry and may even quit.
 
In the end the VR mission change does not do anything to change the mission income stream for the long term for most people. We just have to rethink how we operate those trade routes. What it does bring is a bunch of frustration, which leads to annoyance, which leads to anger, which leads to the dark side....
 
I understand that some of the changes need to happen at the same time, no problem. But NQ needs to really reevaluate it's change policies, schema and user impact/response. It also needs to review it's communications and dependability of what was said. Both items have been raised before, and from the outside it looks like NQ has done Fnck-all with those issues.
 
In all, Demeter didn't bring any fun new stuff for people to explore, just changes upon changes. Movement in the margins. I'm choosing to see it as a hurdle to overcome, I might not see it so forever, and I know others have not...