[So, when is the game getting rolled back?]

2 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

 

This is completely unacceptable. I don't think you understand what "100x" is. If a player spent the money they got from 2 months of playing, anyone else now needs to spend almost 17 years to accomplish what they did in 5 minutes. There is absolutely no integrity in the game now, there are people with billions who should not have it at all; and even worse since it is in the form of expensive schematics you've given them the license to print money for as long as the play the game.

[So, when is the game getting rolled back?]

After this mornings huge screwup and bot prices were reduced 100x, I've seen screenshots of 10s of billions in schematics, and have heard of people who bought items at the bugged prices and resold to players who made hundreds of millions in a few minutes. When is this getting rolled back?

 

At this point it is probably too late to just reverse the market transactions. People are trying to hide the money in ore or moving it around, so the only way to catch it all is to rollback. If you just remove the schematics and return the money, you screw over all the people who had their buy orders filled and the people who sold them bugged items get to keep all that money. The longer it takes to rollback, the more annoyed people will be, so probably best done sooner rather than later.

 

I won't speak for everyone, but if people are allowed to keep these items, or the money they got from selling them, then I'm personally moving on to different games. There is no reason to play if someone who logs in for 5 minutes at the right time makes more progress than others who have been playing for months.

[(Discussion) What do you feel is holding DU back?]

Just now, JohnnyTazer said:

The lack of pvp, risk vs reward, and meaningful ways for people to and orgs to interact.  

I agree with this. PvP for PvPs sake is fun for a time, but it quickly becomes hollow because there is nothing to fight over. People are getting bored and leaving because there is no impetus to build warships just to take out into an area with quite literally nothing in it; well except for similar people who haven't quite realized how...pointless the whole experience is.

[NQ YOU NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT SHIPS REALLY!]

While I think the voxel tools need to be a lot better, the ship elements are already too strong. There is pretty much no challenge in making a well functioning ship, you just make it look nice and slap elements on it randomly. Hell, you can just skip the voxels and place elements floating in the build zone and you will make a perfectly functional PvE ship with essentially no effort.

[Incentives for using center of lift/thrust]

On discord yesterday I asked where I can see center of lift/thrust, and learned something disappointing: it doesn't exist. Apparently all thrust and lift is generated, by default, at the center of mass and you can opt in to these elements producing torque. Essentially, by default you are opted out of basic physics in order to make ship building easier. This makes as much sense as allowing people to opt out of air resistance or gravity, but I do understand why it was done: making a workable ship should be somewhat simple, and these concepts can trip people up.

 

There are two issues with this however:

1. Why is torque disabled by default, but the inertial matrix is exposed and used for rotation commands? These mechanics are of a similar difficulty, so it does not make sense to me to have one and not the other. Especially with how strong adjustors are, forcing people to opt into torque should not be too arduous, considering the default lua can just balance the torque with adjustors, and if you have a massively unbalanced craft you can just paste adjustors everywhere.

2. There is no incentive for opting into physics, for people who want the added challenge. Deciding to opt into torque is all downsides with no benefit.

 

It's the second issue I want to focus on with this post. Assuming that torque will not be forced on by default in order to make naive ship building viable, there needs be a real incentive for ship designers to opt into torque. This can take the form of bonuses to thrust/lift, drag, and/or fuel efficiency when all engines/airfoils have torque enabled. This lets ship designers who want to sell ship designs to opt into the extra difficulty of designing a ship with these elements, and they are rewarded with a more effective design. I think this would be a reasonable compromise between allowing easy ship building, and allowing people who want to take on the extra difficulty a way to differentiate their designs.