Xennial

How about we just limit the height at which static cores can be placed? "But what about my flying city waaah" yeah, I get it. Your floating eyesore is special to you. I frankly don't even understand the purpose of AGG other then to totally be a balancing nightmare for the rest of DU's existence. They should just remove it entirely and that will solve the issue of a reason to build hair.

Endgame... I always find that an amusing notion. In any other MMO what are you really striving for? Oh I get to go on a raid and kill XYZ bigger baddy then the ones I normally slay. I might get a chance at some loot that will simply allow me an easier time killing the baddies I fight or the stats I need to fight the next baddy. They are all just 'encounters' put on a power curve. Give your average bunny the same stats under the hood as Lord Demon Raid Boss and wala the bunny is no different. Every other MMO out there spoon feeds the player with a simple liner curve of progressively 'harder' monsters which is nothing more then gating the same game loop with some different graphics and perhaps some combat mechanics tied to that liner progression curve. DU lacks this simple never ending repeating game loop players are used to from MMO's. Here you can actually change the universe by banding together with other players and actually change the game experience for other players then yourselves. What they see, what they buy, what they fly, where they live, what missions they do , even what game loops they spend their time on. All these things are meant to eventually be player controlled. Every time I see someone talking about end game it's always form the perspective of "what will the devs spoon feed me to make me think I'm making 'progress'". Maybe your asking the wrong question. What is the end game? -> What is YOUR endgame?

We have a player whom recently got run down by a pirate losing his ship and cargo worth he estimated at like 37 million. It was entirely his fault , didn't even have a space radar and to top it off his ship was extremely slow to accelerate. Once he started getting shot he had zero recourse but to watch his ship get slowly blown apart. Again , this death was entirely his poor planning. That being said his experience highlighted some of the current massive flaws with PvP in DU as it stands. You will never be able to balance a combat vessel vs a hauler. If we think about this in the real world naval warfare tells us this is what escorts are for. The issue in game is this becomes a RL time issue. It's all well and good to say a naval ship in the real world is 6 years of boredom followed by 6 minutes of hell, but people won't pay for that experience in a game. So asking 1+ people to escort a hauler on a multi RL hour long trip to protect said ship from any 1 attacking player along the rout out of however many trips with no attack is asking people to play for zero game activity for hours. The natural solution to this would be to remove warp entirely and simply allow ships to accelerate as fast as they want. I'm sure there is some server tech issue that makes this impractical. Travel times between planets outside of warp are currently a walk away from your computer event. Understandable since there is literally nothing to do during that time. If they implement warp interdiction in the game it will simply be used to grief gank people period. Warp is used to avoid combat , by non combat vessels so ganking is the only eventuality. You need to remove the warp mechanic in it's entirety and dramatically reduce travel times between planets at the same time. If it only took me 15 minutes to go from one side of the system to another via high acceleration then I'm not asking an escort to devote the entirety of their game day to flying near me doing nothing. Then, maybe you could have hunting and chasing happen properly. Warp is the problem to be sure, but only half the problem. Travel times to slowboat are the other half. No one is going to spend hours escorting some hauler around on the off chance a time or two a week some pirate might choose to engage.

All I can envision when people talk about warp interdiction is gank squads sitting around cackling about nuking any ship that warps in. Whats that players alternative? Oh yeah slow boat hours of RL time to get to a planet to still be intercepted by the gank squad, or add hours to try and maneuver around to come at the planet from non traditional travel lanes. There is no simple solution here thats going to be palatable to the general player base. I would much rather see warp removed entirely and max speed cap be removed. My guess is the server tech simply cannot handle ships moving that fast which is largely why warp works the way it does. If you want warp to require risk by dropping outside of safe zones etc , then weapon ranges should be dramatically reduced to allow some chance for a ship to out maneuver another and escape a fight. ECM or other defensive measure need to be added to under such a scenario. You don't solve the lack of PvP by simply turning unsafe space into gank town.

Did you think of joining an org that might help you get over the curve? I'm going to guess that the 'few parts' you deemed to expensive on the pre 0.23 market were the late game items like Warp Drives, AGG's? Pre 0.23 when I joined the game it took me a matter of days to achieve self reliance with a factory of my own making all basic ship parts. Granted those were 10-12 hour player sessions so your 'day's' may vary. That being said at that point it only became a matter of ore access to make high end items. I even know someone who after 0.23 managed to setup a factory producing all basic ship parts machines etc on his own just mining for himself and buying all his own schematics This really sounds like an issue of "I don't want to put in any effort or socialize with anyone else" more so then a game flaw.

Venture Capitalist: I know a player whom started making money simply moving products from market to market on Alioth. He turned that profit into strategically buying up underpriced items and repricing them at appropriate levels. He became in a month one of the wealthiest players I know as an individual. He has expanded to being a venture capitalist since the patch, and has used his capital to invest in industrialists product lines for future return value and generally being a financier employing groups doing various tasks to then sell the proceeds to other groups. Skilled Tech: It's no so much a playstyle but I have seen players successfully market their talents out to other players for rather remarkable returns for the simple act of showing up and picking up things and then putting them down or turning off and on industry machines. Personnel Transport: Cheap access to movement between planets for players whom may lack the means to warp around. Interior Designer: I know players whom pay other players to redesign the interior of a ship. This happens when someone buys a ship for it's performance but the ship designer while creating a great looking exterior or performant ship did not spend the same time on the inside.

So basically your out unless DU turns back into a SP sandbox. Don't worry they already plan for a 'virtual building mode' for you with access to everything. Then you can completely remove yourself from any concept of playing a game with goals, structure or purpose by just living in there and showing off screen shots of your creations to people. You won't have to worry about producing anything, mining anything, or having to put in any effort at all to build whatever you want. You'll get a blank canvas with access to all the voxel ship painting tools you could wish for. Hopefully NQ will spend the rest of their time making an engaging game where you have challenges to overcome, player controlled markets, territory wars, community(org) focused, risk vs reward etc for the rest of us whom don't mind putting in the effort to achieve.

Expecting episodic TV thats meant to hold your attention for less then an hour to be mirrored in a game like this is not going to leave you with a satisfactory game experience ever. I also disagree that new players have to be handed all aspects of the game on a silver platter on day one.

I think it's funny when people attempt to put a real world price tag on virtual items. You realize by the ToS you own NOTHING in game, have ZERO rights to it in any capacity whatsoever. It will at some point in the hopefully distant future be erased from the planet when DU servers shut down. Them wiping is not 'robbing' you of anything because you 'own' NOTHING.

They may not as stated have any plans "at this time" for a wipe, that does not mean one won't happen. You can't find a definitive statement without a qualifier because even NQ recognizes with the number of core systems being changed in the game the possibility of a wipe does exist. You insistence that they "promised" you is not going to help you when that day comes. While I think a wipe would have been much healthier then not with this patch, I understand them waiting to put in some more things before wiping. They should never have gone so hard on the verbiage of "no wipe unless no other way" because they are really only shooting themselves in the foot. I also find it amusing that the most avid anti-wipe folk are the ones accusing anyone asking for one of just be jealous of all their "success". Dress it up all you like, but at the end of the day your just ego tripping. You would not care if a dupe was running for months undiscovered, or whatever reasons you think are the only qualifications , you would argue against it because you don't want to lose all your stuff. You have no objectivity to a wipe discussion because for you it seems to start and stop at "wait , you wanna take my virtual stuff? @#$ off!!".

I applaud the absurdity of wrapping the world wide pandemic into some attempted guilt trip to cover up the standard pissing and moaning about the patch. DU is not a social platform, it is a multplayer game. If you need therapy due to isolated feeling I suggest finding a professional or calling a help line. You might also try actual social platforms like Facebook and its kin or pick up the phone and call a friend or family.

The way JC described making 'inner' TU's unattackable by forcing attackers to work from the outside in will encourage this behavior of forming towns/cities/nations on planets. Perhaps individuals will be able to declare their tile allied to a 'nation' of tiles thus letting smaller players / orgs band together with larger presences on planets for safety and mutual benefit. We will see how it gets implemented.

This is really no different then a PvP flag unless I'm misunderstanding the OP. I would be very sad to see NQ go full carebear like this so that only PvP is consensual "wars" between orgs. Even non consensual PvP being limited to orgs would be a mistake imo, it would be gamed hard by people simply using non org territories for anything of value. If you are worried about some org going zerg and taking over the solar system , then people should come together to attack said overpowered org / alliance. If there are not enough players able to then we live under the thumb of the successful said org/alliance till they collapse under their own weight or another alliance breaks them. Warfare in games, victory generally boils down to he who has the mostest wins , it's an unfortunate reality. Put in all the limits you want but in the end if territory can be acquired and held, the bigger the org the more influence they will have no matter what 'mechanics' you try and put in their way like war timers etc. They will just use alts and alt orgs etc to get around them and zerg anyway. The only effect trying to limit big orgs from being big orgs or able to operate as freely as they want with such ambitions is prevent smaller orgs from having a fighting chance. Seems like a paradox I know, but remember big orgs have more people to work with. You cannot overcome this with some game mechanic and in the end such limits will only hurt the smaller groups with less numbers to overcome the same limitations.

There will be no hope of balance between core sizes until energy and pvp revamp. Till then there will be 0 point to pvp at all. So really your looking at 9+ months before pvp "might" get changed. So long as L cores rain supreme in every context PvP will be nonexistent. I would add ship balance in general wont come until they restrict at least engines to core sizes and change the stats that the bigger the slower to warmp up on a fairly exponential scale. Also I support making the core REALLY heavy the bigger they get to force people to engineer the ships large.

I totally understand the hypocrisy inherent in my post, of giving advice from a player in the form of don't listen to players. Which is part of the point. None of us have the full insight into what happens in the dev meetings , or their financials etc so we are all just trying to twine together the vision of what DU at release and beyond will be based on past interviews, what has been said at various stages etc. In my talking with various members of the community the singular thread I find is that no one seems to have a firm handle on exactly what DU is trying to be. I don't have 'disdain' for players whom want a non hardcore space game. I can see how it comes off that way. What rubs me wrong is when development resources are wasted undoing work that is done because people cry foul. I recognize while I personally found no real fault with what 0.23 brought , others found it offensive to their enjoyment of the game. What bothers me about what happened is not even a week went by where they have basically reversed course on the whole thing. Perhaps I'm wrong, and element damage will be activated for non PvP again in the future, perhaps schematic prices were only lowered to allow for the other parts of that puzzle to come in first. I don't claim to know all. While I appreciate your attempt to list all the answers based on what has been said, how much can be trusted about that as so many things are constantly in flux. Nevermind, that even the answers you were able to provide were largely vague broad stroke skeletons like I said without the meat to help people understand how they will fit into the overall puzzle. I can have feelings that lead me to in my view valid concerns, that if they reversed course that hard, that fast, that either $$ is a real problem for them , or they are just to willing to bail on an idea if players scream loud enough. Neither of those two scenarios bode well, and I have seen a number of promising games destroyed by both. If they had waited a month for the dust to settle and then came out and said the patch did not have the intended effect so they were making these adjustments while attempting to achieve the goals of the patch in different means I could have been more ok with it. The larger point to my posting this I think you grasped overall in that the devs should stick to their guns with their vision whatever it is and not knee jerk react if some change is not palatable in the moment. Your wrong about me not informing myself, my questions listed were not just my own but subjects I see bantered about constantly because people do not have a clear picture of their intentions so it's all theorycraft. If they had far more involved discussions about how to envision the various systems to work we could have far more constructive conversations about their impacts and possible problems / advantages to their implementations that might have a shot at preventing 'surprises' like the industry schematics. Not wanting to do that is fine, but if they keep a pattern going of surprising the community with major changes the reactions will always be bad, especially if they turn around a few days later and reverse course. It makes it seem like they don't have a real plan and are just kind of floundering around in the dark. Thats not good no matter what side of the 'vision' you sit on. Merry Christmas to all.

I know , click bait title right? No not really. Obviously constructive criticism can be healthy for any dev to take note of and make adjustments for. Bugs , exploits etc are always helpful for players to report. The problem in any game is that players taken as a whole do not impart constructive criticism. Most things you read on forums etc are born not from the desire to make a game 'better'. They are born from the selfish desires of players to make things better for themselves. I am just as guilty of this as anyone , as my personal desire is for DU to be extremely hard and unforgiving which isn't the same as many. Your (NQ) recent immediate and severe backpaddle on 0.23 schem prices and element damage are prime examples. You didn't even allow time to see how the economy etc settle down a few weeks after. Now I don't know your financial situation , but if it's so dire that you can't tolerate some rage quits we may as well pack up shop now and call it a day. If that is not the situation then you could really do yourselves a service by making the game you envisioned , not the game players complain they want. DU will forever be niche , and if it cannot financially sustain itself with a niche audience then *shrugs*. Example : "I'm a solo/casual player and you have cut me out of XYZ game feature!!! I quit". This player will never truly be your core audience imo for a game like this. If you pander to this person you will forever subvert the vision of large groups trying to form 'civilizations' and fighting for control and exploitation of territory within the game. Example 2 : "There is not enough to do!! Give me bunnies to shoot with my pew pew gun for magical loot!!". This player only cares out their personal ADHD entertainment and you will never be able to shovel enough of their version of "content" to satisfy them. Player made / player controlled world is not in this persons lexicon because they need a simple shoot X to get loot Y formula of game to be happy. There are of course other examples, those are just the two I see the most. Gamers by and large will come to DU with other games meta and game formula loops as their prior experience. If all you want to do is replicate the myriad of other games out there and make DU cookie cutter with some voxel building then just go full tilt that direction. If you want DU to be an immersive world with trials and tribulations and hard fault wins / losses on the player base go that way. Either direction you go will have some segment of the population crying foul and quit. For example I don't want yet another boring ass MMO with 'quests' where we spend all our time doing errand boy quest 1 , moving to kill X bunnies 2 , to receive loot Y. PvP confined to arenas , or god forbid PvP flags. I don't want minecraft in space , or a regurgitation of Space Engineers. Does that mean my idea of what I would like to see DU be is the best? Certainly not. However if NQ spends all it's time trying to provide players requests to make DU more like what they are used to , then DU will become some cheap knock off of one with some voxel crafting element. If you want DU to be something different , you need to take players requests with a giant grain of salt. They will always by and large lean towards selfish desire, and to call for features they are already accustom too. Yes some game systems planed for DU might be abnormal , but frankly thats where unique game experiences come from. They do not come for caving into making the playerbase's cries for adhearing to cookie cutter game loop formulas. To that end maybe it would be best if you actually came out and gave us the current vision you have for the game 2 years from now. Throw some meat on that skeleton you keep talking about with generalizations no one knows how fit into the overall picture. How do you envision TW to function in the context of the game as a whole? Do you expect PvP to be a daily part of our lives in game or just something people go do when their bored? Do you want DU to be a hard fought hill for players to climb with 'nations' of players in conflict with each other over finite resources? How is automated mining going to work? Do you see it as infinite resource systems that are fought over?, or will it just be a different way then digging to get ore deposits out of the ground? Are asteroids planned to be spawned in events or a permeant ring of respawning resources to be fought over? Why do we need another solar system when we don't have the player population to utilize the one we have now? Just because it sounds cool? Or will it effectively be a different game shard? These are all questions that would help define NQ's vision for the DU future. Staying vague on the details of these plans doesn't give people the context to form their opinion on if it will meet their gameplay style of fun. It's like the industry schem thing, you say it's one part of the puzzel but you don't elaborate on what the other pieces are that you think will lead us to a diverse industry with costs and consequences to your choices. PvP changes, energy etc. All these things have no context other then a few off handed comments here and there that leaves the playerbase with just wild speculation. Define your current vision for the game and then promptly ignore the multitude of requests to make that vision into something different. I may personally hope for the more hardcore vision of DU , but it would serve me well to know if you will end up producing some carebear friendly mindcraft in space. The same would be true if I wanted the more carebear crafting world and you want something more hardcore. Most people I talk to about various game features in the end can only shurg and go "dunno how they plan for that work".

Here is the error in that thinking in my view. If T1-T3 are renewable in the safe zone no needs to bother with T4/T5. They have nearly no uses aside from fluff parts. Plus if they keep these stupid bots buying low tier ore no one ever has to leave the safe zone to make $$. You can make the case for renewable T1/T2 ore maybe if you remove bots buying ore ever again. All of which would function far better after a hard wipe letting people only keep their skill points. This would likely need to be after TW and the PvP revamp , Energy , etc.

This is exactly the imbalance that exists with PvP. I'm not going to volunteer to put my ship at risk to fight some gunboat just sitting in space waiting for a hapless victim. There is no way I can defend such a ship because the gun boat doesn't have to bother allocating resources to entering the atmo , cargo hauling and just packs it with weapons and armor. Now I will grant you that the warp past PvP mechanic is stupidly carebear and prevents any sort of emergent PvP like me needing to bring combat escorts to prevent my armored hauler from being destroyed before it reaches safe harbor. Right now I hear the "make them come out of warp in unsafe space". Maybe this helps, but what reason do I have to put in that risk? Just to go get some higher tier ore? I dont' 'need' those high tier weapons / engines , they are just a convenience. PvP needs to have a purpose and right now really there is not much is the realm of purpose other then to gank someones ship parts whoopidy do. The flip side is also true that higher tier ores are woefully underutilized in crafting.

I live on Thades there is plenty of ore around. Not in the same density as some planets but it's there. Running low on high tier ore amuses me since up until this patch there was not anything that really required high tier ore at all except a few 'end game' products. What else did they expect to happen when they have bots everywhere deleting ore from the game and the most efficient way to repair for some dumb reason being to burn up high tier ore. Asteroids / auto mining is coming which are for sure going to be infinite resource systems. You do not "need" another solar system to provide ore in the game, all that will be is every planet being a barren waste land with like 5 people living on them. Hell we basically have now anywhere but Alioth. All you have to do to prevent ore being gone is: Auto mining: outside safe zone (never in safe zone). Each hex has a "deep ore" value that an auto miner can extract X amount of per day. These territories and buildings must be defended with no safe zone around or in the planet at all. Asteroids : Put an asteroid ring in unsafe space only. Make it big so PvP types actually have to hunt down people trying to mine and can't just camp a couple rocks spawned in by the devs. This alone would provide endless resources for people to mine. Thats it , and poof you don't even need another star system. We don't need one now. We don't need Madis / Thades to be in a safe zone, just provide a bigger sphere around Alioth and it's moons as the safe starter zone. If they allow renewable ore in the safe zone ever you can kiss any idea of PvP being a big feature of this game goodbye.

They can't even realize that the market can't work with bots. You want them to grok the idea that PvP and forcing everyone into PvP situations to advance is a pillar to a healthy economy? Nevermind that PvP would have to work completely differently then their server/client tech seems to allow for PvP to even be engaging.

I find all this talk about stargates and new systems funny. We don't have the population to spread to the planets we have now and everyone gets their nickers in a twist at the idea of doubling that empty space in some new system. Just what the game needs, is even more empty planets for everyone to scan and mine and move on *eyeroll*

This statement right here is a big part of the disconnect in the community. So many think it's supposed to be SP space minecraft on easy mode. The idea they can't do everything all by themselves is the problem. This is naturally the fault of NQ by putting the game into the wild with solo players being able to do it all themselves in the first place. Now, because of that, and the bots, everyone thinks the easy mode we have is the way it's supposed to be. Naturally they feel affronted when updates seem like they "take away" gameplay, rather then viewing them as fixing a broken dynamic of everyone can do everything all on their own.

That player can still mine and sell to bots. It takes very little upgrade to the starting speeder to get into space. This argument of the poor lone newbie is the weakest of all. That poor lone newbie is likely to reach out for help or join an org. Even if they don't there are plenty of resources between discord , youtube etc on what few pieces you need to get your little ship into orbit. If you have the quanta bug which I assume you mean your not getting daily welfare that sucks, but that doesn't mean you can't do anything while you wait for NQ to fix it.

You guys seem so hopeful. Lets be real here given recent events. Asteroids will end up either some stupid GM event spawn in nonsense , or they will exist in the safe zone because we can't ever have a game that is 'hard'. I expect the same level of cringe when automated mining and TW comes. It will be infinite resources for everyone! Even in the safe zone! It honestly wouldn't surprise me if TW included a voluntary "pvp flag" at this point. I especially like that they have had bots deleting all this ore all this time. Wait they can skip all that dev time on asteroids and automated mining !!! They can just have their favorite pets the BOTS sell ore to us on the market forever right now! Thats sure to get the player driven market going!

if you can't get a ship together and off a planet it's entirely your refusal to put in any effort at all.