Xennial

You totally missed the point. If they choose to keep bots or not is not the real problem. The real problem is they won't say one way or the other. The bots were not refreshing before. They say NOTHING about if or not they will be refreshing in the future. There is no way I'm going around buying ore at 26+ when for all I know they won't refresh them and ore will be back to <=20 in two weeks. This is not a discussion about if or not ore bots are the right choice. This is a discussion about NQ needing to pick a freaking direction and communicate it with the players so we can actually make some plans in game. This hap hazard bots disappear and without warning reappear is causing constant damage to market stability. So they either need to act like professionals and tell the community if bots are going to refresh , or if they are not. If they can't manage that then they should just get the heck out of the way and let the players sort it out. All your arguments about whats fair to new players or not is completely irrelevant in a game where some people get to buy schematics at 1/100th the price if they were online at the right time yesterday. Notice the total lack of communication from NQ on that front too.

If quibbling over terminology is your thing then by all means plant that flag pole. The reality is no one cares if they call it alpha or beta. It's not going to win you any arguments, nor does it validate any opinion.

*Waits for the weeks of silence from NQ before they start hyping their next big patch while pretending this never happened*

I seriously don't understand why NQ insists on destroying the ability for the market to stabilize. So we had bots buying ore , then the bots slowly got eaten away and people started trading ore with each other again. Prices were beginning to stabilize in the upper teens , then bam without warning suddenly the bots refill their orders today. Everyone buys out the lower orders and sells to the bots and we are right back to everyone dumping ore to the magical bot orders. How in the world do you ever expect any player market stability to form when you insist on a whim destroying whatever pricing has stabilized. Not to mention the fact that you make it even harder for producers to acquire ore in bulk because everyone is selling it to bots. No one knows your bot plan , so I'm certainly not going to post buy orders above the bots , because for all I know if I wait a week or two you won't refresh them and then I will have bought a bunch of ore at twice the going rate. I mean seriously where is the common sense that your haphazard bot orders are unhealthy to the game world. At least if you said "we are permanently having bots buy these ores at this price" we could actually plan around that. Same would hold true if you said "after this batch of bot orders there will never be bots buying ore again". You don't however communicate any of this with the player base. This paralyzes the markets because producers cannot properly plan pricing , traders risk at buying and selling products is forever at risk at the carpet being pulled out from under them. I mean truly , you have central bank like power with these bot orders and apparently none of the common sense that would generally be required of people in those positions. No one knows what your doing, no one can anticipate when you'll wave your hand and completely unhinge the market again. Seriously , please treat the player base with some respect and either tell us your plans with the bots or just remove them and let the players actually control the market without your random sledge hammer bots.

It is entirely likely pre patch a lot of the buying of products was bots. We will never know since the market does not give us any information.

You can't hard cap orgs, sorry just no practical way to do so. Power / Influence consolidates and none of your suggestions to try and limit orgs would have any effect at all. Hard cap on how many items an org can list? You realize orgs don't list items in the first place, and if there are hundreds of org members they can all just list the items individually. Most orgs exist outside the game anyway as org tools in game are garbage. These groups on discord are not going to be 'chopped' up by any limits you dream up in game in any practical sense. The more you try that stunt the more you will consolidate power even moreso into outside the game guilds that no one can compete with because 20 different orgs in game are really just the same group out of game. There are not systemic flaws in the game vision. There are systemic flaws in your assumption that there needs to be some sort of balance to limit the power of the many against the few. Sorry , thats not the way the world works. If you had any idea the amount of 'work' involved in coordinating a good sized org in this game in the first place you might have more respect for how much effort those players have to put in just to steer that many players in the same general direction , manage permissions, manage this , manage that. The bigger your org the more 'work' the game becomes as is. You do not need some artificial attempt to neuter large orgs in game they carry plenty of weight the bigger they get on their own. You will never 'catch up' to long standing groups that have been playing longer so long as those groups continue to operate and grow over time. Some will , some will collapse into smaller pieces because of their own bloat, and some will just wither and disappear due to bad management or personality conflicts that can't be resolved. This mentality that "me and my 3 buddies should have the same level playing field with a 500 person org" is frankly grades school nonsense about not understanding life isn't always fair.

I always find it interesting that PvP haters use the "PvP is unsustainable for the business" argument. This is not only false, but wildly not born out by the simple fact that the most popular multiplayer games are competitive. They have enough planed without wasting dev resources on creating a game world where you can go blow up some NPC pirate for loot. If all you want is a sandbox creative mode they have already said they will add that. Then you can remove yourself from the gameworld entirely and just spend your days building 'pretty' non functional ships.

Or, we could just leave it as one ruleset for the whole game world rather then trying to turn territories into individual servers.

If the vision is a full player economy then you don't use bots to control that economy. Players are not responsible for pricing stability, that is purely a natural consequence of supply and demand. They should never have removed non-pvp element destruction, that seems obvious to everyone I talk to except NQ and the whiners that their ship was destroyed by a bug. While I sympathize with losing element life to a crash, bug , etc we are playing Beta so people should be told to just suck it up. Most likely most of these instances of rage were people flying ships that far surpassed their ability to maintain. This is no different in many respects to the crutch of bots holding up market prices. Ore , products etc should absolutely be allowed to freefall. Yeah for a few weeks it would suck if your not an industrialist as ore prices fell through the floor , but eventually things would stabilize as the miners compete with each other for the ore. All these band-aid solutions to just telling people to grow the @#$% up is what is causing half the problems we experience with the economy.

I have seen this happen from time to time as well. It used to be that if you changed the output links to a running recipy you got the unkown server error and it would hang at the end of the current completing run. I have however since the patch noticed every once in awhile an untouched machine that was working fine before will hang without a reported error and just sit there.

Yes the daily login is just a placeholder for 'earned' injection systems. That does not make bots necessary. You are still hung up on injection systems being necessary for players to 'earn' money. I will try and make my point a little clearer. When we earn money in the real world , it's not a reward from the central bank that just printed the stuff. Our real world has the central banks as the injectors , and they also function as the sinks. Everything else is just passing around what they print. Even in this system a low level of inflation is required to keep fiat currency based economies stable. Low level inflation is just fine. The same would be true in the game world if ore bots did not exist at all. The daily log in bonus (or whatever systems replace it) would be the central bank printing , and the schematic/tax bots would be the sinks. Everything else would be determined by players valuation of good and services. Ore Bots have always and remain the primary problem with the market not being stable. The market prices etc do not need to be 'regulated' by NQ, the simple laws of supply and demand would take care of that.

I didn't forget anything. I specifically said schematics , taxes, even bp creation are quanta sinks. The quanta injection can be covered by the daily log in bonus and whatever system they choose (ex: missions) to inject quanta into the game to keep the money supply from deflating. The fact that bots exist in this injection capacity right now was always a huge design mistake, and they should have just left it to daily log in bonuses. Bots created the gross over inflation that caused them to price schematics so high in the first place. Everything else is a discussion about the "value" of quanta in the game as it relates to pricing.

You cannot have a money supply problem in a game that gives players quanta every day for logging in. What you are confusing is the 'value' of money with the 'supply' of money. Money faucets in the game only relate to money sinks (taxes , schematics, BP generation). If you got rid of bots , prices would naturally arrive at whatever value is appropriate for the circulating money. The answer to artificially high product prices because bots pervert the value of quanta is not to add more money supply or make it easier to 'generate' money. The answer is simply to remove the stupid bots so they stop artificially inflating the price of goods.

I feel like a lot of this could be solved with play markets. Then maybe people would not be so obsessed with the Alioth markets in the first place and players could build proper searchable space markets.

No, what your talking about is money generation within the game. That is different from a player 'making money' to fund whatever activity they are trying to do. Two different concepts.

In your limited view maybe. Many in my org fill their time so much so that they simply don't have enough time to do everything they want to do (and no they don't spend it just mining or building). I will agree if your a player that needs your hand held with 'quests' , instant action buttons, or if you need to be able to craft without having to interact with a 'game world' at all then DU doesn't have a lot to offer. Thats ok, DU doesn't have to be for every single game loop minded gamer out there. DU shines when you take personalities that prefer to define their own game experience rather then a scripted ones. There are MANY different way to 'make money' in DU other then mining. The creative mode to design your blueprints is already in the works so that should largely solve many of the creative types complaints, right up until they find out to use it in game they need to actually play the game to use the ship. So the complaints of "omg , it will take me months to earn the stuff to bring my super carrier dreadnaught into the game change the game!!". I still like the idea of it just for convenience.

Go into your market screen. Search the item and pull up it's market tab. Use the down arrow in the upper right and click the 'details' button for the item which pops up the item window. At the bottom of that popup is a section that tells you all the skills that can affect that item.

I want the risky open ended player driven game world DU promises. If I wanted to whack bunnies for loot there are a myriad of games out there for me to play to scratch that itch. Same if I just want to build a giant ship and show it off for no point. I think a lot of people set themselves up for disappointment coming into the game thinking it's either a sandbox, or an action game. DU is both , and neither at the same time. PvE 'content' is just another way of saying "please turn DU into --insert fantasy mmo game loop--". Even if they tried it would just be some pitiful knockoff that everyone would hate. I disagree with this. In part, because the combat meta issue could be solved with some intelligent balancing which could if done right balance the rather lop sided "A pure combat ship will always beat anything else. The energy system could go a long way to solving this ... if they do it right. The other reason I would disagree is simply that even if pure combat vessels remain meta, nothing is stopping people from using them as escorts for their more frilly / hauler type ships.

So the solution is to turn DU into an effortless SP sandbox in space? I disagree, there are games out there to scratch that itch. DU doesn't not need to be just a build tool thx.

No other data then anyone else. Our org has continued to see expansion and actually a rather dramatic increase in player activity since 0.23. I also can use the 'data' that people still buy the products we place on the market so someone is out there playing. Obviously some people quit playing over 0.23, but from what I can see in activity levels it's not some super high %. Twitch numbers, A.I. player base estimators etc should be taken with a grain of salt imo. As it relates to twitch the game only has so much to show right now thats interesting to watch as entertainment. I actually watched a prominent streamer for DU before I decided to join last year, I'm pretty sure he was done with the game just dealing with the length of the tutorial. DU as it sits is not a game that lends itself well to streaming as there is soooo much tedium in anything you do in DU I feel like it would fall heavily on the streamer to retain viewers as the game is not going to provide a lot of 'wow' moments. DU I think is more akin to games like Satisfactory in that way that they lend themselves to youtuber videos' moreso then actual streaming. Thats just my feeling though and I can see a point in the future where that would be different with TW etc.

Of course they 'want' it to be a success with however many players. There is a big difference from designing a game for the 'masses of ADHD gamers out there' and a game that becomes popular because it provides a unique game experience people didn't even know they would enjoy. You design for 'mass appeal' you get cookie cutter garbage. You create a game vision and implement it and it becomes popular would be the objective. If it doesn't then it doesn't. DU doesn't play like a first timers indie project at all. I can fault NQ for a lot of 'rookie' mistakes but the product itself is far outside the scope of what the vast majority of indie developers could pull off.

Players never really left , the claims of game dead were exaggerated. Why would they revert back? 0.23 was a great patch.

I think what is holding back DU is the vocal minority perception of what a game experience 'should' be. You can never look at a thread in this forum without at least one response or post containing: 1: DU is dying because XYZ the devs need to save this sinking ship! 2: NQ has no idea what game they are making , here is wall of text describing how DU's game vision was failed form the start and this is mine to replace it. 3: DU was meant to be a non progression , open sandbox with zero purpose OR DU was meant to be PvP warzone and those 'carebears' are destroying it 4: NQ needs to turn DU into the same formula as "insert my favorite MMO example / game loop" to appeal to a wider audience. None of these are true naturally. If all someone does is view gameplay in DU as a 'job' then maybe DU just is not for them. Maybe at some point in the future the game loops will have filled out enough for players that feel that way today to not feel that way in a year or two. Not every game is for everyone. The answer is never to destroy the direction of the game to appease to vocal minority who want the game to cater to their personal play style. The only question for a game designer should be are there enough players interested in what we are making to keep the game alive over the long haul. Hyperbolic arguments about appeal to the 'masses' are useless. DU will never appeal to the masses , it only needs to appeal to enough people to keep it alive and hopefully growing at a slow and steady pace.

Incorrect. The economy would run just fine without them buying ore.

Who knows, NQ has some misguided love afar with their bots so I wouldn't count on them being gone long if they actually are.