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.
 
 

As usual, NQ stopped short of being transparent on the important bits. They do not dare discuss what happens if you do not pay the territory tax and literally push back the conversation from the subject when it came up..
 
I'm starting to think that, while his vision and communication was not great, JC was not just let go, he was pushed out because all this destroys the very foundation on which the game was built, it may be a shaky foundation and a limiting/limited one but this just rips the heart out of the game. And all because NQ is out of money and must do what it can to try and stay alive long enough for the hundreds of thousands of players they think they will get once they release. and they will need those number to stay alive to begin with..
 
More and more the game is hollowed out, all the active components are getting pulled out and replaced by a numbers game of pushing single numbers to save cost. Frankly, the concept of the game failed and now NQ is trying to save what they can.. 
 
They will start taxing people for territory, it would have been great if they had implemented power management to maintain your TU and in turn your constructs.. proper power management could have driven everything in game and it would have been an actual gameplay mechanic. Now they just slap taxes on everything and create sinks.

Problem is that the new mining spreadsheet will not be able to sustain the flow of Quanta needed to drive the economy, let alone give players enough money to pay their taxes. And when the question is raised what happens to your stuff if you do not pay.. NQ shuts down and does not have the guts to provide clear and precise answers.

What will happen is, big orgs, the less than a handful left, will start mining all mega nodes they can and mostly dump them to bots on the market to stack up on cash, those who benefitted financially from the many exploits NQ where plugged te hole but  allowed the spoils to be left  in play will start organizing camps on abandoned tiles. it's virtually impossible to leave stuff on a tile which remains inactive so these will get scooped by the rich few..  
 

A planet reset is not enough, at least a partial wipe with reset of quanta will be needed to repair this and make the game have a chance. There is no reason for anyone to return to the game as it stands. Not only will the industry abandoned by the disaster of 0.23 fall prey to the vultures, so will anything else people who left had. And the game will become a playground for the rich few where the rest fight over scraps.
 

But I get NQ does no longer have the ability to actually build the/a game, all they can do is continue to cut cost to try and survive long enough to see the hundreds of thousands of players come and save them by paying for subscriptions. Well.. dream on..
 

Why are some territories in the safe zone better than others? If they're completely uncontestable, why would anyone new join the game if all the good tiles will be taken by players when the feature launches, and there is nothing they can do about it? This seems like a massive oversight.
 
At least with megas, once they were mined out your advantage was gone. Now you have megas that don't deplete and give you a permanent advantage? Seems like a pretty bad design to me, if you are trying to get new players into the game.

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

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

It'd be great to post a short transcript of relevant Q&As. 
 
An hour long video is okay...but you can't really blame anyone for not wanting to sit through this.
 
If this is the only medium of communication, make it more to the point...do some editing. I'm sorry but it's not super entertaining or funny, it's meandering. Or keep doing it in this format, but give us a summary in text. 
 
Here's a not-so-quick summary, I'm sure others can do it better:
They don't want to reset all talents because "that would mean we have to reset talents all the time!" and they feel people should be "locked in"...Which isn't what the player base is saying at all, but okay.  New vertex complexity meter -- so more build limits coming down the line, but not here yet.  Brake change reverted (already mentioned), but changes will come. Seems like they have some branch management issues.  Scans will show old information (will show resources that don't exist anymore). So....all old scans are defunct?  No real feedback about mining -- not going to make it more intuitive (idk about minigame) and yeah resources are infinite which we knew. Chicken and egg with T3 ore and DSAT..."we'll get back to you" --> guess they never thought about this somehow lol Some whining about "we can't win with this" regarding scans is annoying to me they can find a solution -- it's called planning ahead instead of this "let's just push it out and see" approach. Take some responsibility for your poor planning -- that's the root cause, not that "players are divided about what to do" in regards to keeping scans or making them all worthless. It's their problem created from their radically changing design and poor plans.  They are increasing asteroid spawns in safe zones, but not the spawn time frame.  Surface mining on unclaimed tiles is fine (other than sanctuary)  Higher tier ore is not "deliberately excluded" from pools, "should be present on outer planets". More rare.  Any LUA APIs on mining units? 4 new functions (maybe) to query state/rate/ore/territory pool.  Taxes... They need the resource sinks they say, because "resources are now unlimited". I don't think they've actually though about what "unlimited" means, because they are rate-limited. They are unlimited like gold in WoW is "unlimited" --> it's still finite because time is finite, the well just won't tap out. The prices of ores will change of course.  They are considering some free "HQ" hexes that won't be taxed and can be used on any planet. That would solve a lot of issues. "We might add it to Demeter, maybe not". Clearly they need this for Demeter.  They seem confident that the revenue of mining will be plenty to pay for taxes -- seems they don't expect ore prices to change. We'll see if that's true. Static/Dynamic constructs will become salvageable if parked on tile that changes ownership after "2 weeks", could be changed -- so there's a bit of a waiting period before you can requisition constructs Future plans -- new roadmap in early 2022 Increasing the price of the sub. If you want to pay $6.99/month, you must sub for a year. But they are introducing a 1 month plan at $9.99/month   
I want to remind NQ that this is a paid game, so players don't treat it the same as they would a typical beta. Nor should they.
 
A lot of reminding us "this is just a first iteration" etc. -- well...throwing it up and waiting to see how it goes isn't a great idea for any paid game. Especially when you're increasing prices. It isn't like this "push and see how it goes" approach is how games are normally designed, especially an MMO! 
 
It would maybe be fine for closed alpha, but that's not where we are. 

The simple solution is to have a parking fee on the market pad, with something like 1h for free every 24h and increasing overtime cost to prevent long time parking.
 
And to give people a place to show off/advertise make an large expo pad that is close'ish to each district market with free or cheep parking.