Karyfars

my water hex on sanctuary also does not contain any resources ?

i'm currently one of two who still play, from former 5 Guys. so that is a view from a small org/group with some freetime for playing while working and having families. the issue why those 3 quit was due to lack of possibility to help our small org with limited time to spare. first it startet well and it was fun exploring how to build and fly, we even managed to pack our stuff and haul it to the moon above sanctuary. where we build our first org base on our org territory. then we started to scale up our factory to produce our basic needs. thats when the first guys started struggeling. when i, the main factory guy, wasn't online they struggled/were hampered with even starting to expand the production, because it would take to much time to figure out the correct linking and they feared they could make changes which would kill other processes. they did know how the factory was designed, but still wouldn't touch it, because they had no real grasp of how it was connected and just wanted to play and build instead of following purple lines to be up to date on recent changes. the problem is that it is very time consuming if you just have 1 to 3 hours play time before RL kicks back in to invest half of that time telling purple lines apart. i played factorio with the same guys and with the same time constrains and they hadn't those issues there figuring out how the factory was setup and what needed to be modfied for a better output. So in the end, from their point of view, they had one less task in which they could be useful to our small org. then there was mining resources and scanning for them. which had its charm building ships for it to mine resources and scan for big nodes of ore. but logging in when you just have 1h play time that day and the only thing to do is mining wasn't that joy sparking. usually the searching was fun, the mining was not. specializing in mining was kind of underwhelming, instead of being able to cut the mining time by harvesting larger chunks and have more time with the other members building and expanding, the mining time did not change by putting skill progress into it. and since they where specialized in mining now, their main task in game was to login, search next mineral node, dig there and never see the sky again till they log out, because it takes so long. here a type of boost would help, like the xp boost in other mmos, just tailored to mining. maybe 5 times the chunk size mined for the first hour of playtime a time, here i'm not talking about an equivalent of the mining efficiency skill, rather something like dig tool optimization but for mining. after that, the only motivation was, that they could provide the T1/2 ores for us to from time to time build on something together (in the mean time the non miners would more or less wait, since we wanted some building time together and not stamp them as only useful for ore mining). so that worked for a while until we needed higher tier ores. we created a ship which should have been capable reaching thades (it was! yay!). the flight took one and a half hour, where we just did nothing, just starred at the quiet annoying stardust racing lines. and that was one day of playtime gone. just flying from a to b. since 2 needed to go off, we all went off after parking the ship somewhere safe, since we didn't want to do new areas without our mates and there was nothing else we could do and surrogating somewhere was not an option. next time we hopped over to the moons of thades, since we where not comfortable to land in atmosphere with the ship already loaded. so we did the hopping and mining for the next 2-3 game sessions when most of us where online at the same time. flying back was ... one guy (me) was doing it alone, since there is no point for all being online at the same time doing nothing. so it took me watching one soccer game (2x45min + 15min break) to fly it back to our base. next goal was warp drive and cells for skipping doing nothing. after upgrading our ship with our new tech, we were ready to start our warp jump to talemai, so we can explore a new place and build a small outpost there. we were lucky we bought enough warp cells for the jump back, but ended being a bit disappointed by how little we were able to bring back. so visiting other planets just for seeing them was off the list at that point. flying there with space engines would be too time consuming and hard edge boring and it wouldn't be a time spend well and fun, when you have little time to spare and chill with your friends and enjoy doing stuff. warping was also not an option, because it was somehow costly, which is ok, but not very rewarding, since the added value you can bring back is not worth the costs. here again its the time consuming which kills the fun. especially our miners would have been happy to jump to other planets and being, in their eyes, helpful again in progressing our org by providing valuable resources. there should be a better way of getting around the system. i understand, as was mentioned in an interview, that the 29999 km/h limitation is a technology one, but there should be a way between space engine and warp. warp is fine for avoiding pvp and should be seen as that, a costly way of avoiding pvp. maybe introduce a new engine which can only be activated at 29 Mm/h and would take 5-15min to jump to a new system out of the server limits (like warp) and introduce a kind of field which can disable the engine when it enters it and throws you back into normal space (so pvp would still happen). maybe another system to mark targets which enter the engines mode when you are in radar range and show the fly path as a line and you could share it with a friend in the pvp zone so he could move his jump disruptor field on that line to catch the target. in my opinion some sort of that would reduce the useless time sink which kills the fun for our kind of player type. being a merchant was also not an option, since it suffers from the exact same useless time sinks. we don't mind getting into pvp fights when we transport cargo through the pvp zone, sometimes it would be quite appreciated and fun, but the time sink flying from planet system to planet system makes it zero enjoyable to compare prices and transport goods from market to market. i mean there is a need for merchants transporting goods between planet systems, since some planets lack some goods which are available on, for example, alioth on the market. but warping is to expensive (at least for a small org like ours) and it avoids pvp which strips off the excitement and danger of doing it, which also reduces the felt accomplishment after doing such a delivery successfully to a planet in a pvp area. so in conclusion, the getting from a to b is a huge problem for us and its hard to motivate our friends who quited, because they don't see how they can help us and even when, it takes to long for them to have enough time after that to spend with us. mining takes to long for getting enough with small amount of time and the specialisation into that isn't worth it at all (like i mentioned bigger sphere size would be more fun than more ore per chunk. maybe a skill after mining efficiency 5 (30+ days skilltime till here), so a real specialisation). and the commute between planets is just another time sink with little reward (space engine takes waaaaaay to long and warp cells takes way to long for a small group to gather the money for a mining trip and strips of pvp). P.S.: Reporting Abuse ingame (through the menu buttons) is not possible. would have done it a few times where player constructs where build inside markets (even after m15) but it leads to a page where there is no option/possibility of reporting abuse. P.P.S.: for the lack of communication part mentioned in some posts here. maybe stop doing a discord only/first approach. the best keeping the community up to date work i personally experienced by a video game producer was factorio with their indepth friday features throughout their beta phase. you can still look them all up on their website for some inspiration on how to keep the community passively involved into the games development. P.P.P.S.: if someone urges to know why i had so much spare time to write that much ... was flying from sanctuary to thades ... and am still flying ... ?