SubotRobot

I realized that I would go bust at the rate things were going. Ore prices were crashing and elements produced were not selling well. So I abondoned all my tiles, protect my capital and decided to take a break. There's nothing worthwhile doing in DU for me. Forced mining continuously to be able to keep the tiles has made the game mechanics meaningless. I doubt if the NQ management will reverse this Demeter change of taxing tiles and non depleting ores, because that means they have will take big battering on their ego and accept they did it wrong and throw away months of work. If they don't DU will most likey go towards slow death, except for few core players who have lots of time on hand.

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!

Hi DU citizens and NQ developers What really made me appreciate DU was its realistic features, like what you mine goes away and does not keep replenishing magically, realistic physics, ship building, destruction, etc. Now DU is less interesting for me, as resource part is not realistic enough for me. I see two reasons for introducing automated miners. 1. People hated mining, which was absolute full time grind. Not semi AFK mining like in Eve online, where you could watch movie and mine at the same time. 2. Digging and mining game mechanics was overloading the DU servers and increasing their server cost. Automated mining units are fine. It answers the above two points. But NQ could have done the following. Keep the ore distribution structure intact. Not make it infinite, which goes against the reality. The passive miners would be mining a tile until it is depleted, and then move the territory unit and entire mining rig (minus the static core) to another tile. The ore extraction rate would be proportional to the ore remaining. That would make mega nodes more rewarding with high extraction rate initially and discourage people from mining in tiles with very low remaining ore. Optionally they can introduce mining units for the ships, which has higher mining rate compared to automated mining unit. This will solve few issues DU citizens have been griping about. Current scans will be still valid No need to tax the tiles as no one will be occupying the tiles infinitely unless they have important buildings on it. It will give additional tasks for the miners to manage and move the mining rigs. It will not be scan once and settle down at the best tiles and end of the mining game play. If NQ designers are concerned about entire planets getting strip mined, wasn't this concern there with original mining mechanics? I think there's enough ore to last for few years. After which, people will move on to other star systems, which I assume will be introduced in course of time. I am pretty sure this idea would have come up during brainstorming of changes at NQ. NQ designers and developers, it will be very helpful if you can enlighten us about the reasons about selecting mining features in Demeter, and reasons for not selecting the features discussed above. Fellow DU citizens and NQ developers, what do you feel about this? If this is viable and interesting game mechanics, I hope there's still time for NQ to incorporate this into Demeter release. I hope and believe it is not overly complicated to make these changes. Cheers SubotRobot

That's a good plan and overview. I like that you are sticking to PvP interaction and not introducing any imaginary PvE play, like shooting NPC ships, etc. I am excited and curious to see how the DU will develop with only human players and no NPC. Once you implement all planned features, I hope NPCs will not be missed by the players who are demanding for it now. Schematics: I feel current schematics are fine. I am speaking as core producer, with 100+ assemblers churning out elements. May be some the very expensive schematic price can be pared down. Other than that schematics has to stay. If not, there won't be any role for those who want to manufacture and sell. Mining units : I am slightly concerned about the ore glut that may happen because of automated mining. I agree, current mining mechanism is tedious. Unless there is large enough sink for ores there should be some sort effort involved mining. You, DU, also need to consider the economics of tokens. Mining will probably one of the main revenue generator for those who make Quanta to buy tokens. What can help mining easier is to make it semi AFK game play like other persistent game like Eve Online or Perpetuum. This will let people mine, while multi tasking like watching movie, etc. Graphics : I am fine with the graphics as it is now. I would prefer any further development on graphics, to be of lower priority, unless it is for performance reasons. I would like to economics develop faster i.e. more ways to make and spend money. Looking forward to Mission systems. So far you have been doing good as far as game development goes. You have been quite steady sticking to the original vision. It is understandable that one of the kind game mechanics is keeping your engaged in fine tuning it. Next thing is well planned faucet and sink for Quanta. Get a strong economics person into the team, if you don't have one already. Economics will play very important role in balancing this kind of game in the long run. Eve online is the best example here. They keep the data analytics excited with monthly report on various metrics. I hope you will also do that eventually once full game is out. Thanks and all the best to the DU team. You are making history making first fully editable persistent single shard world!

If this is the issue, all the have to do is reset the talent points, when they introduce new talent system, with more longer training curve. There is no need to wipe all the other hard work of mining and building huge bases. Of course some people might have had unfair advantages from the unbalanced initial game. But then, that will sort of normalize over period of time. Most likely they will launch new solar system at the time of transition from beta to full release. And all the new players most likely will start in the new solar system.

Hi Noveans, What is the maximum number of link from container to industry units? I am remodeling the industry. I am not able to out link from container L to industry units beyond 10. Thanks Subot

+1 Exponentially increase the parking fee, with time. But then, we also need a way to pack off the ship which has been left beyond certain duration, to cater to the people who stopped playing for whatever reasons.