Hi DU citizens,
TLDR : Demeter changes induces compulsive playing. Market flooded with ore. Taking a break from DU. Please bring back JC as chief architect/designer.
The mining changes with Demeter has reduced the freedom to mine whenever we wanted to on our whims and fancies. Territory rent and need to calibrate the mining units has made it harder for casual players. Either be a serious miner or don't mine at all! It has introduced compulsive gaming behaviour in a sandbox game. When there are 8+ tiles with mining units, it becomes compulsive behaviour to keep calibrating the MUs, so that it mines enough ore to pay tile rent and make some profit on the top of it.
With mining tiles becoming a compulsive game play, everyone is flooding the market with ores, leading crash in ore price. And there is no proper ore sink yet, in the way of PvP and ships getting destroyed. This is creating imbalance in the DU economics.
In Demeter, if only the mining units were introduced and no other changes like tile rent, infinite ore distribution, flat tile claiming cost, it would have been better off. Due to exponential tile claiming cost, it would not have been economical to claim beyond certain number of tiles at the same time for mining purpose. Tile claiming cost would have been like one time tax payment. As a money sink for mining units, fuel or electricity requirement could have been introduced. When we mine, we pay. Not a continuous tax, irrespective of we mine or not. We could mine whatever was there in our tiles, whenever we wanted without having the need to keep logging in every two days to tend them. With the ores getting depleted, tile scanning game play would have still been relevant. Now tile scanning is irrelevant once good tiles have been acquired.
To the DU thinktank and leadership: It appears there is no clear purpose and vision for DU. It is easy to get lost by doing too many trial and error changes. I think it's time to bring back JC at the helm. From what I see, if it were not for JC, DU would not have even reached this awesome level, which was before Demeter. History shows it very well, all great companies had great visioneries at the helm to see it through tough time, Tesla, SpaceX - Elon Musk, Apple - Steve Jobs. It appears current managment / investors are mostly interested in making money by licensing the multiverse game engine with unique voxel engine and have lost interest in the core DU vision.
I have decided to take a break from this compulsive gaming. I am Kickstarter backer and I say this lot of dissappointment. May be it's for the best, I will be focusing more on real life!
Please bring back JC as chief architect / designer of the DU and DU will have a future.
Those who are enjoying the Demeter update, have fun! Adios!