Xennial

I am pretty sure I'm the kind of player NQ wants "back". I poured stupid amounts of time into the game, was in an org, built a massive factory, etc etc. I was even happy with schematics. I also supported a full wipe of the game. I stopped playing when most of my org stopped a few months after 0.23 out of frustration with the grind and soul sapping tedium of making any good sized build. I also couldn't believe how brain dead the implementation of missions was that I couldn't put something in a box, have it delivered and someone get payed without me online. I stopped in to check out the auto mining update only to discover they botched that all the hell and back with taxes.
 
So many core systems in this game need to have a real game designer overhaul the entire game design doc, full-wipe or no, DU is a failed project that will never reach critical mass of players. DU tried to do to many different game types at once, Sand-box, MMO, PvP, Strategy, Simulation, FPS, Industry, Building. The only one it pulled off at all was the creative building and as my org mates discovered, creatively building stuff "just for the sake of it" can only hold your attention so long. The other genre's it tried to do were all shambled together without a cohesive plan and design on how the system interact with each other and feed off or lead players into each other. Leading to a bunch of a half implemented "ideas" that play more like a tour some kid gamers wish list then a cohesive singular game experience. 
 
Add to all this the game universe of DU is WAY to big for the pittance of players it has. It's a niche game, and the game world size should reflect that. Now they are trying to throw in a few of the 'good' ideas the community has been clamoring for in a hopes that 'release' will somehow bring back the initial rush. Good Luck. Like seriously? It took you this long to understand bots in the markets were a bad idea?
 
The sad reality is DU would need to be overhauled at such a core level it would probably take 3 more years to even approach a state that would be full wipe->release ready. Could I sit here and write out a game design doc that would work better and a path for DU to get there? Sure, but why would I bother? NQ has proven time and time again they are so stuck in a quagmire the best they can manage is to think or hear an idea and then just throw it at the wall at hopes it improves rather then hurts gameplay.
 
This ship has no Captain. After it fails, perhaps some entity with money and real game design chops can buy the IP, put it behind the curtain for 3 years. Then, overhaul the core systems and release it under a different name, with an actual idea of how all these system are supposed to work together, and make the real game we have all waited for. I mean for heaven sakes people, we still have ship construction/operation mechanics I could design better on the back of a napkin, and ships are the core of the game!
 
 

I am pretty sure I'm the kind of player NQ wants "back". I poured stupid amounts of time into the game, was in an org, built a massive factory, etc etc. I was even happy with schematics. I also supported a full wipe of the game. I stopped playing when most of my org stopped a few months after 0.23 out of frustration with the grind and soul sapping tedium of making any good sized build. I also couldn't believe how brain dead the implementation of missions was that I couldn't put something in a box, have it delivered and someone get payed without me online. I stopped in to check out the auto mining update only to discover they botched that all the hell and back with taxes.
 
So many core systems in this game need to have a real game designer overhaul the entire game design doc, full-wipe or no, DU is a failed project that will never reach critical mass of players. DU tried to do to many different game types at once, Sand-box, MMO, PvP, Strategy, Simulation, FPS, Industry, Building. The only one it pulled off at all was the creative building and as my org mates discovered, creatively building stuff "just for the sake of it" can only hold your attention so long. The other genre's it tried to do were all shambled together without a cohesive plan and design on how the system interact with each other and feed off or lead players into each other. Leading to a bunch of a half implemented "ideas" that play more like a tour some kid gamers wish list then a cohesive singular game experience. 
 
Add to all this the game universe of DU is WAY to big for the pittance of players it has. It's a niche game, and the game world size should reflect that. Now they are trying to throw in a few of the 'good' ideas the community has been clamoring for in a hopes that 'release' will somehow bring back the initial rush. Good Luck. Like seriously? It took you this long to understand bots in the markets were a bad idea?
 
The sad reality is DU would need to be overhauled at such a core level it would probably take 3 more years to even approach a state that would be full wipe->release ready. Could I sit here and write out a game design doc that would work better and a path for DU to get there? Sure, but why would I bother? NQ has proven time and time again they are so stuck in a quagmire the best they can manage is to think or hear an idea and then just throw it at the wall at hopes it improves rather then hurts gameplay.
 
This ship has no Captain. After it fails, perhaps some entity with money and real game design chops can buy the IP, put it behind the curtain for 3 years. Then, overhaul the core systems and release it under a different name, with an actual idea of how all these system are supposed to work together, and make the real game we have all waited for. I mean for heaven sakes people, we still have ship construction/operation mechanics I could design better on the back of a napkin, and ships are the core of the game!
 
 

The highlighted bit right here is why DU fails to attract new players. This mentality that lone new players deserve to be chained to their sanctuary tile till they 'grind' enough low hanging fruit to deserve to get off it is ass backwards. Ya know what that new player in your scenario that should just sit on their Sanctuary tile for 1-3 months to come back in a 'proper hauler' will actually do? THEY QUIT. Join an org you say? So the new player tries that only to discover that majority of orgs out there are empty with almost no one playing. They go into chat only to discover people talking about aspects of the game they have no idea about while mostly bashing the game. Maaaybe some old guard takes pity on them and puts them under their wing to try and get them settled into the game. I have done this a few times, and it's extremely time consuming, and thats only if the new player is comfortable with voice coms. Most players just can't be bothered to throw these new players more then a sentence or two of what they should try next. 
 
You don't win new players by gating them behind such a huge progression curve they never get to see what the game has to offer before they are bored with the lot they are stuck with. Old players that are used to the game, surrounded by other experienced players, have totally forgotten what a new player experience is like, and likely have no idea what it is like now. You have friends in game? good for you! The majority of people trying DU won't have anyone! Those players are stuck with , pick up some rocks, doing some boring missions, and don't even think about industry, the ore they would use is more valuable then the T1-T2 crap they can produce. I am sure many of us can say with certainty that if we had not happened to stumble into a good group back in the beginning of Beta, we wouldn't have stuck with the game even then. Now the situation is 10x worse for new players because it's not a thriving community of players all trying to get their footing in the game, it's just a small self contained group that still enjoy it in their own orgs doing their own thing, a small group of disgruntled vets, and a barren wasteland of nothingness. 
 
Everyone that is comfortably in a group in DU and has played for some time is more then happy to layout the 'progression' some scrub newbie should go through. Why wouldn't they be? They don't have to do it. We all got EASY MODE start in the game. We were able to play with every aspect of the game at whatever pace we decided to. We could mine ore anywhere if we got the itch to do XYZ, we could dabble in or do industry to our hearts content (I had a fairly robust factory going in 2 days of heavy playing brand new), we could experiment with ship mechanics casually because chances are we all made the parts ourselves for only the cost of time to grab the ore. None of these are true now for new players. Everything is gated, time locked, or limited in some way.
 
The hubris of vets in the game is amazing. Games are a business, and so help me if people can't understand the simple mechanic that if a new player is cut off from the game for more then a certain period of time without something to occupy them or progress in they will quit.

I am going to try and articulated these thoughts as succinctly as possible but it's a broad concept.
 
Working with DU general vision of a gaggle of players all living in DU, building org's, fighting over resources and buzzing with activity.
 
The problem with this vision as it stand now is the game systems and dev direction work against it's success. Basic game theory premise: People play games for fun, the closer a game gets to a job or the higher the pain of loss, the fewer players will continue. Unlike the real world you can't 'force' players to accept excessive hardship. MMO's require a large player base to survive. 
 
Currently the dev direction continues to try and add 'value' to things in game. I assume this is under the idea that if people care about there stuff then they are more likely to covet it , care about their efforts in game giving them reason to stick around and value their acquisitions. There is also a general push to 'force' players into groups in order to not be locked out of game content. The primary issue with this current game approach is it violates the basic game theory. Every time they make the game 'harder', or more 'group or don't play', or grindy, they lose players.
 
Open PvP cannot exist for the vast majority of players in the game where Pain of Loss is as high as it is. Player are simply not going to spend a week or two building a ship and gathering the materials for it, only to have blown up in a couple minutes and accept that as a good game experience. No matter what the few orgs that dominate in this space think, every player they gank that leaves because the pain threshold is to high is one DU step closer to server shut down.
 
The general effort by NQ to 'force' people to play in groups is highly counter-productive. Working together should carry advantages that encourage people to want to group as their desire to scale their game experience grows. You cannot tell players 'join an org or quit', they will choose the latter. We are 'forced' into organizations we don't want to be part of IRL all the time and players don't want or need this replicated in the games they play.
 
Solution:
 
The core problem for DU is that pain of loss is far to high to sustain most players in the activities that would make the DU concept work. Ore acquisition is the primary culprit here, with industry gating being a secondary but more complex. MU's could have solved this issue by making ore readily accessible to everyone, but then they hard locked what a player can produce with this charges/calibration system. You WANT players to acquire lots of territory and produce a ton of cheap ore. If this is one dedicated player or an organization is not the problem.
 
The issue with this is the obvious lock down of vast amounts of territories by players that can never lose them so long as the bots make sure tiles are profitable. This would not be an issue if territories could actually be attacked. That would force players to defend said territories thus limiting their expansion in a more normalized way. The way to naturally curb such over acquisition as the game stands now is to remove ore bots and allow the natural ore market to make tiles unprofitable/profitable based on supply/demand. Normalize sanctuary ore distribution and remove tax for mining there to create a baseline ore production of T1 for all players. This helps to insulate newbies from being cut off from the T1 game experiences and allows players to always have some amount of ore availible for building for 'free'. You could also prevent omni factories on sanctuary by limiting industry machines to T1 level from being built on sanctuary. This would also require some level of fuel ores to be availible to sanctuary tiles since the core 3 planets T2 is so blindly rare now and would be monopolized in current form. 
 
The net-net effect has to be to make ore acquisition prolific and cheap at least for T1-T2, ore bots artificially prevent this and prevent any 'free' or ore baseline on sanctuary form being viable. This unlocks the ability for most players to participate in the game be it via building things, building basic ships and parts, and low-tier industry. If players can make and produce basic ships for dirt cheap, then their pain of loss in PvP would be significantly reduced. It is important to consider PvP will NEVER work if the loss of a ship causes the player to much pain of loss. We don't need most ships to be valuable to encourage warfare, the future TW's over outer planets higher tier resources will give people plenty of reason to fight or risk going out there. Simply adding a metric that the org owning the most tiles on an outer planet get a cut of the tile taxes would be enough reason for major wars. People won't risk going out there if a single combat wipes out weeks of in game effort. 
 
 The common argument that ore bots are a needed faucet are in-valid in a game world where you get daily cash and have missions to gain more. You need a baseline player experience where most player can access a lot of content, with the effort and value coming from grouping, logistics, fighting for control and generally interacting with other players.
 
Current dev game theory path is never going to reach critical mass. Pain of Loss HAS to be drastically reduced for most of DU's general concept to function. Solo players HAVE to have access to more of the game not less, and I don't mean the solo players that log in for many hours every day. If the game only ever caters to a hardcore organized group of a players thats all the game will ever have. NQ probably knows how many players they need to keep the game open, and I'm pretty sure what we have is not it, especially when NQ continues to take steps AWAY from the model that would make DU work we bleed more players.
 
This is about as much constructive criticism as I can muster for DU. These changes could be implemented very quickly (minus the TW part), and would help to get players to return to the game or stick around. But it hinges on NQ being open minded enough to realize their current vision has to be adjusted. The more content is locked from most players without excessive effort, the more pain of loss exists, the less and less players DU will maintain.   

The highlighted bit right here is why DU fails to attract new players. This mentality that lone new players deserve to be chained to their sanctuary tile till they 'grind' enough low hanging fruit to deserve to get off it is ass backwards. Ya know what that new player in your scenario that should just sit on their Sanctuary tile for 1-3 months to come back in a 'proper hauler' will actually do? THEY QUIT. Join an org you say? So the new player tries that only to discover that majority of orgs out there are empty with almost no one playing. They go into chat only to discover people talking about aspects of the game they have no idea about while mostly bashing the game. Maaaybe some old guard takes pity on them and puts them under their wing to try and get them settled into the game. I have done this a few times, and it's extremely time consuming, and thats only if the new player is comfortable with voice coms. Most players just can't be bothered to throw these new players more then a sentence or two of what they should try next. 
 
You don't win new players by gating them behind such a huge progression curve they never get to see what the game has to offer before they are bored with the lot they are stuck with. Old players that are used to the game, surrounded by other experienced players, have totally forgotten what a new player experience is like, and likely have no idea what it is like now. You have friends in game? good for you! The majority of people trying DU won't have anyone! Those players are stuck with , pick up some rocks, doing some boring missions, and don't even think about industry, the ore they would use is more valuable then the T1-T2 crap they can produce. I am sure many of us can say with certainty that if we had not happened to stumble into a good group back in the beginning of Beta, we wouldn't have stuck with the game even then. Now the situation is 10x worse for new players because it's not a thriving community of players all trying to get their footing in the game, it's just a small self contained group that still enjoy it in their own orgs doing their own thing, a small group of disgruntled vets, and a barren wasteland of nothingness. 
 
Everyone that is comfortably in a group in DU and has played for some time is more then happy to layout the 'progression' some scrub newbie should go through. Why wouldn't they be? They don't have to do it. We all got EASY MODE start in the game. We were able to play with every aspect of the game at whatever pace we decided to. We could mine ore anywhere if we got the itch to do XYZ, we could dabble in or do industry to our hearts content (I had a fairly robust factory going in 2 days of heavy playing brand new), we could experiment with ship mechanics casually because chances are we all made the parts ourselves for only the cost of time to grab the ore. None of these are true now for new players. Everything is gated, time locked, or limited in some way.
 
The hubris of vets in the game is amazing. Games are a business, and so help me if people can't understand the simple mechanic that if a new player is cut off from the game for more then a certain period of time without something to occupy them or progress in they will quit.

The highlighted bit right here is why DU fails to attract new players. This mentality that lone new players deserve to be chained to their sanctuary tile till they 'grind' enough low hanging fruit to deserve to get off it is ass backwards. Ya know what that new player in your scenario that should just sit on their Sanctuary tile for 1-3 months to come back in a 'proper hauler' will actually do? THEY QUIT. Join an org you say? So the new player tries that only to discover that majority of orgs out there are empty with almost no one playing. They go into chat only to discover people talking about aspects of the game they have no idea about while mostly bashing the game. Maaaybe some old guard takes pity on them and puts them under their wing to try and get them settled into the game. I have done this a few times, and it's extremely time consuming, and thats only if the new player is comfortable with voice coms. Most players just can't be bothered to throw these new players more then a sentence or two of what they should try next. 
 
You don't win new players by gating them behind such a huge progression curve they never get to see what the game has to offer before they are bored with the lot they are stuck with. Old players that are used to the game, surrounded by other experienced players, have totally forgotten what a new player experience is like, and likely have no idea what it is like now. You have friends in game? good for you! The majority of people trying DU won't have anyone! Those players are stuck with , pick up some rocks, doing some boring missions, and don't even think about industry, the ore they would use is more valuable then the T1-T2 crap they can produce. I am sure many of us can say with certainty that if we had not happened to stumble into a good group back in the beginning of Beta, we wouldn't have stuck with the game even then. Now the situation is 10x worse for new players because it's not a thriving community of players all trying to get their footing in the game, it's just a small self contained group that still enjoy it in their own orgs doing their own thing, a small group of disgruntled vets, and a barren wasteland of nothingness. 
 
Everyone that is comfortably in a group in DU and has played for some time is more then happy to layout the 'progression' some scrub newbie should go through. Why wouldn't they be? They don't have to do it. We all got EASY MODE start in the game. We were able to play with every aspect of the game at whatever pace we decided to. We could mine ore anywhere if we got the itch to do XYZ, we could dabble in or do industry to our hearts content (I had a fairly robust factory going in 2 days of heavy playing brand new), we could experiment with ship mechanics casually because chances are we all made the parts ourselves for only the cost of time to grab the ore. None of these are true now for new players. Everything is gated, time locked, or limited in some way.
 
The hubris of vets in the game is amazing. Games are a business, and so help me if people can't understand the simple mechanic that if a new player is cut off from the game for more then a certain period of time without something to occupy them or progress in they will quit.

The highlighted bit right here is why DU fails to attract new players. This mentality that lone new players deserve to be chained to their sanctuary tile till they 'grind' enough low hanging fruit to deserve to get off it is ass backwards. Ya know what that new player in your scenario that should just sit on their Sanctuary tile for 1-3 months to come back in a 'proper hauler' will actually do? THEY QUIT. Join an org you say? So the new player tries that only to discover that majority of orgs out there are empty with almost no one playing. They go into chat only to discover people talking about aspects of the game they have no idea about while mostly bashing the game. Maaaybe some old guard takes pity on them and puts them under their wing to try and get them settled into the game. I have done this a few times, and it's extremely time consuming, and thats only if the new player is comfortable with voice coms. Most players just can't be bothered to throw these new players more then a sentence or two of what they should try next. 
 
You don't win new players by gating them behind such a huge progression curve they never get to see what the game has to offer before they are bored with the lot they are stuck with. Old players that are used to the game, surrounded by other experienced players, have totally forgotten what a new player experience is like, and likely have no idea what it is like now. You have friends in game? good for you! The majority of people trying DU won't have anyone! Those players are stuck with , pick up some rocks, doing some boring missions, and don't even think about industry, the ore they would use is more valuable then the T1-T2 crap they can produce. I am sure many of us can say with certainty that if we had not happened to stumble into a good group back in the beginning of Beta, we wouldn't have stuck with the game even then. Now the situation is 10x worse for new players because it's not a thriving community of players all trying to get their footing in the game, it's just a small self contained group that still enjoy it in their own orgs doing their own thing, a small group of disgruntled vets, and a barren wasteland of nothingness. 
 
Everyone that is comfortably in a group in DU and has played for some time is more then happy to layout the 'progression' some scrub newbie should go through. Why wouldn't they be? They don't have to do it. We all got EASY MODE start in the game. We were able to play with every aspect of the game at whatever pace we decided to. We could mine ore anywhere if we got the itch to do XYZ, we could dabble in or do industry to our hearts content (I had a fairly robust factory going in 2 days of heavy playing brand new), we could experiment with ship mechanics casually because chances are we all made the parts ourselves for only the cost of time to grab the ore. None of these are true now for new players. Everything is gated, time locked, or limited in some way.
 
The hubris of vets in the game is amazing. Games are a business, and so help me if people can't understand the simple mechanic that if a new player is cut off from the game for more then a certain period of time without something to occupy them or progress in they will quit.

The highlighted bit right here is why DU fails to attract new players. This mentality that lone new players deserve to be chained to their sanctuary tile till they 'grind' enough low hanging fruit to deserve to get off it is ass backwards. Ya know what that new player in your scenario that should just sit on their Sanctuary tile for 1-3 months to come back in a 'proper hauler' will actually do? THEY QUIT. Join an org you say? So the new player tries that only to discover that majority of orgs out there are empty with almost no one playing. They go into chat only to discover people talking about aspects of the game they have no idea about while mostly bashing the game. Maaaybe some old guard takes pity on them and puts them under their wing to try and get them settled into the game. I have done this a few times, and it's extremely time consuming, and thats only if the new player is comfortable with voice coms. Most players just can't be bothered to throw these new players more then a sentence or two of what they should try next. 
 
You don't win new players by gating them behind such a huge progression curve they never get to see what the game has to offer before they are bored with the lot they are stuck with. Old players that are used to the game, surrounded by other experienced players, have totally forgotten what a new player experience is like, and likely have no idea what it is like now. You have friends in game? good for you! The majority of people trying DU won't have anyone! Those players are stuck with , pick up some rocks, doing some boring missions, and don't even think about industry, the ore they would use is more valuable then the T1-T2 crap they can produce. I am sure many of us can say with certainty that if we had not happened to stumble into a good group back in the beginning of Beta, we wouldn't have stuck with the game even then. Now the situation is 10x worse for new players because it's not a thriving community of players all trying to get their footing in the game, it's just a small self contained group that still enjoy it in their own orgs doing their own thing, a small group of disgruntled vets, and a barren wasteland of nothingness. 
 
Everyone that is comfortably in a group in DU and has played for some time is more then happy to layout the 'progression' some scrub newbie should go through. Why wouldn't they be? They don't have to do it. We all got EASY MODE start in the game. We were able to play with every aspect of the game at whatever pace we decided to. We could mine ore anywhere if we got the itch to do XYZ, we could dabble in or do industry to our hearts content (I had a fairly robust factory going in 2 days of heavy playing brand new), we could experiment with ship mechanics casually because chances are we all made the parts ourselves for only the cost of time to grab the ore. None of these are true now for new players. Everything is gated, time locked, or limited in some way.
 
The hubris of vets in the game is amazing. Games are a business, and so help me if people can't understand the simple mechanic that if a new player is cut off from the game for more then a certain period of time without something to occupy them or progress in they will quit.

That still won't do it, as core size cost is relative to player progression curve. You might not think a S or M core is a big deal to lose, but to newer/smaller players that may have been a major time investment or monetary investment to build and operate. I agree that L core is always better is a fault, but even balancing in this regard is not going to change how valuable a ship loss is to a player. The base cost in time/effort for a player to build/operate a basic ship is just to high. The pain-of-loss extends even to travel times for example. If someone spends 2 hours slow boating just to get destroyed in a couple of minutes they have 'lost' 2 hours of their life. This particular issue goes to what le_souriceau was saying.

I am going to try and articulated these thoughts as succinctly as possible but it's a broad concept.
 
Working with DU general vision of a gaggle of players all living in DU, building org's, fighting over resources and buzzing with activity.
 
The problem with this vision as it stand now is the game systems and dev direction work against it's success. Basic game theory premise: People play games for fun, the closer a game gets to a job or the higher the pain of loss, the fewer players will continue. Unlike the real world you can't 'force' players to accept excessive hardship. MMO's require a large player base to survive. 
 
Currently the dev direction continues to try and add 'value' to things in game. I assume this is under the idea that if people care about there stuff then they are more likely to covet it , care about their efforts in game giving them reason to stick around and value their acquisitions. There is also a general push to 'force' players into groups in order to not be locked out of game content. The primary issue with this current game approach is it violates the basic game theory. Every time they make the game 'harder', or more 'group or don't play', or grindy, they lose players.
 
Open PvP cannot exist for the vast majority of players in the game where Pain of Loss is as high as it is. Player are simply not going to spend a week or two building a ship and gathering the materials for it, only to have blown up in a couple minutes and accept that as a good game experience. No matter what the few orgs that dominate in this space think, every player they gank that leaves because the pain threshold is to high is one DU step closer to server shut down.
 
The general effort by NQ to 'force' people to play in groups is highly counter-productive. Working together should carry advantages that encourage people to want to group as their desire to scale their game experience grows. You cannot tell players 'join an org or quit', they will choose the latter. We are 'forced' into organizations we don't want to be part of IRL all the time and players don't want or need this replicated in the games they play.
 
Solution:
 
The core problem for DU is that pain of loss is far to high to sustain most players in the activities that would make the DU concept work. Ore acquisition is the primary culprit here, with industry gating being a secondary but more complex. MU's could have solved this issue by making ore readily accessible to everyone, but then they hard locked what a player can produce with this charges/calibration system. You WANT players to acquire lots of territory and produce a ton of cheap ore. If this is one dedicated player or an organization is not the problem.
 
The issue with this is the obvious lock down of vast amounts of territories by players that can never lose them so long as the bots make sure tiles are profitable. This would not be an issue if territories could actually be attacked. That would force players to defend said territories thus limiting their expansion in a more normalized way. The way to naturally curb such over acquisition as the game stands now is to remove ore bots and allow the natural ore market to make tiles unprofitable/profitable based on supply/demand. Normalize sanctuary ore distribution and remove tax for mining there to create a baseline ore production of T1 for all players. This helps to insulate newbies from being cut off from the T1 game experiences and allows players to always have some amount of ore availible for building for 'free'. You could also prevent omni factories on sanctuary by limiting industry machines to T1 level from being built on sanctuary. This would also require some level of fuel ores to be availible to sanctuary tiles since the core 3 planets T2 is so blindly rare now and would be monopolized in current form. 
 
The net-net effect has to be to make ore acquisition prolific and cheap at least for T1-T2, ore bots artificially prevent this and prevent any 'free' or ore baseline on sanctuary form being viable. This unlocks the ability for most players to participate in the game be it via building things, building basic ships and parts, and low-tier industry. If players can make and produce basic ships for dirt cheap, then their pain of loss in PvP would be significantly reduced. It is important to consider PvP will NEVER work if the loss of a ship causes the player to much pain of loss. We don't need most ships to be valuable to encourage warfare, the future TW's over outer planets higher tier resources will give people plenty of reason to fight or risk going out there. Simply adding a metric that the org owning the most tiles on an outer planet get a cut of the tile taxes would be enough reason for major wars. People won't risk going out there if a single combat wipes out weeks of in game effort. 
 
 The common argument that ore bots are a needed faucet are in-valid in a game world where you get daily cash and have missions to gain more. You need a baseline player experience where most player can access a lot of content, with the effort and value coming from grouping, logistics, fighting for control and generally interacting with other players.
 
Current dev game theory path is never going to reach critical mass. Pain of Loss HAS to be drastically reduced for most of DU's general concept to function. Solo players HAVE to have access to more of the game not less, and I don't mean the solo players that log in for many hours every day. If the game only ever caters to a hardcore organized group of a players thats all the game will ever have. NQ probably knows how many players they need to keep the game open, and I'm pretty sure what we have is not it, especially when NQ continues to take steps AWAY from the model that would make DU work we bleed more players.
 
This is about as much constructive criticism as I can muster for DU. These changes could be implemented very quickly (minus the TW part), and would help to get players to return to the game or stick around. But it hinges on NQ being open minded enough to realize their current vision has to be adjusted. The more content is locked from most players without excessive effort, the more pain of loss exists, the less and less players DU will maintain.   

I am going to try and articulated these thoughts as succinctly as possible but it's a broad concept.
 
Working with DU general vision of a gaggle of players all living in DU, building org's, fighting over resources and buzzing with activity.
 
The problem with this vision as it stand now is the game systems and dev direction work against it's success. Basic game theory premise: People play games for fun, the closer a game gets to a job or the higher the pain of loss, the fewer players will continue. Unlike the real world you can't 'force' players to accept excessive hardship. MMO's require a large player base to survive. 
 
Currently the dev direction continues to try and add 'value' to things in game. I assume this is under the idea that if people care about there stuff then they are more likely to covet it , care about their efforts in game giving them reason to stick around and value their acquisitions. There is also a general push to 'force' players into groups in order to not be locked out of game content. The primary issue with this current game approach is it violates the basic game theory. Every time they make the game 'harder', or more 'group or don't play', or grindy, they lose players.
 
Open PvP cannot exist for the vast majority of players in the game where Pain of Loss is as high as it is. Player are simply not going to spend a week or two building a ship and gathering the materials for it, only to have blown up in a couple minutes and accept that as a good game experience. No matter what the few orgs that dominate in this space think, every player they gank that leaves because the pain threshold is to high is one DU step closer to server shut down.
 
The general effort by NQ to 'force' people to play in groups is highly counter-productive. Working together should carry advantages that encourage people to want to group as their desire to scale their game experience grows. You cannot tell players 'join an org or quit', they will choose the latter. We are 'forced' into organizations we don't want to be part of IRL all the time and players don't want or need this replicated in the games they play.
 
Solution:
 
The core problem for DU is that pain of loss is far to high to sustain most players in the activities that would make the DU concept work. Ore acquisition is the primary culprit here, with industry gating being a secondary but more complex. MU's could have solved this issue by making ore readily accessible to everyone, but then they hard locked what a player can produce with this charges/calibration system. You WANT players to acquire lots of territory and produce a ton of cheap ore. If this is one dedicated player or an organization is not the problem.
 
The issue with this is the obvious lock down of vast amounts of territories by players that can never lose them so long as the bots make sure tiles are profitable. This would not be an issue if territories could actually be attacked. That would force players to defend said territories thus limiting their expansion in a more normalized way. The way to naturally curb such over acquisition as the game stands now is to remove ore bots and allow the natural ore market to make tiles unprofitable/profitable based on supply/demand. Normalize sanctuary ore distribution and remove tax for mining there to create a baseline ore production of T1 for all players. This helps to insulate newbies from being cut off from the T1 game experiences and allows players to always have some amount of ore availible for building for 'free'. You could also prevent omni factories on sanctuary by limiting industry machines to T1 level from being built on sanctuary. This would also require some level of fuel ores to be availible to sanctuary tiles since the core 3 planets T2 is so blindly rare now and would be monopolized in current form. 
 
The net-net effect has to be to make ore acquisition prolific and cheap at least for T1-T2, ore bots artificially prevent this and prevent any 'free' or ore baseline on sanctuary form being viable. This unlocks the ability for most players to participate in the game be it via building things, building basic ships and parts, and low-tier industry. If players can make and produce basic ships for dirt cheap, then their pain of loss in PvP would be significantly reduced. It is important to consider PvP will NEVER work if the loss of a ship causes the player to much pain of loss. We don't need most ships to be valuable to encourage warfare, the future TW's over outer planets higher tier resources will give people plenty of reason to fight or risk going out there. Simply adding a metric that the org owning the most tiles on an outer planet get a cut of the tile taxes would be enough reason for major wars. People won't risk going out there if a single combat wipes out weeks of in game effort. 
 
 The common argument that ore bots are a needed faucet are in-valid in a game world where you get daily cash and have missions to gain more. You need a baseline player experience where most player can access a lot of content, with the effort and value coming from grouping, logistics, fighting for control and generally interacting with other players.
 
Current dev game theory path is never going to reach critical mass. Pain of Loss HAS to be drastically reduced for most of DU's general concept to function. Solo players HAVE to have access to more of the game not less, and I don't mean the solo players that log in for many hours every day. If the game only ever caters to a hardcore organized group of a players thats all the game will ever have. NQ probably knows how many players they need to keep the game open, and I'm pretty sure what we have is not it, especially when NQ continues to take steps AWAY from the model that would make DU work we bleed more players.
 
This is about as much constructive criticism as I can muster for DU. These changes could be implemented very quickly (minus the TW part), and would help to get players to return to the game or stick around. But it hinges on NQ being open minded enough to realize their current vision has to be adjusted. The more content is locked from most players without excessive effort, the more pain of loss exists, the less and less players DU will maintain.   

I don't remember ever seeing a business newsletter that was ever worth reading, so thats not unusual. One of the reasons I don't bother to generally read things like this, it's always sunshine and roses as newsletters are just some vein attempt by executives to put a 'positive' spin on how business is doing. If the dev's actually cared at all about player opinions they would be in the forum discussing things with players. They hide for a reason, they have no desire to 'discuss' changes, or take our advice, simply to shovel it out the door and decide how to react based on results. It's the old throw it at the wall and see if it sticks approach.

And you help to validate my point about a pain-of-loss here. In DU unlike in EVE we design our ships from scratch and choose all system etc in said ship. Also in DU the ship has to be functional in relation to flying on a planet. If making a ship in DU was nothing more then picking what was on a few hardpoints / upgrade slots then it would be a different animal. Balancing a freeform ship design system in any sort of PvP environment is a massive undertaking in and of itself that I don't see NQ ever really pulling off. At least if the cost to build/replace said ship was much lower people could focus less and picking up rocks, and more on using said ships, again here DU fails because gathering resources is basically the only activity besides building artwork.

It is certainly true that the game loops in DU are excessively time consuming. Ranges between planets non-warp are an example of excessive time sinks, weighting advantage more and more to the 'power gamer' that you describe. Building is another example where things are needless time sinks. Anyone who ever built a L core knows what I mean, tiny chunks at a time just to lay or pick up a floor. I generally assume this is a packet size issue. This system would have been WILDLY better if we had the client side design that you can just pop into the world in a single update. They even talked about such a system once apon a time.
 
But honestly thats more surface issues compared to the underlying fault of DU continuing to make pain of loss higher and trying to 'force' group play.
 
 

I went with a 2. Good idea, screwed up by being overcomplicated and unnecessarily gated by charges. Tax rates poorly thought out that only punish new/smaller players and generally nuke community/ambitious creatives.

I went with a 2. Good idea, screwed up by being overcomplicated and unnecessarily gated by charges. Tax rates poorly thought out that only punish new/smaller players and generally nuke community/ambitious creatives.

I am going to try and articulated these thoughts as succinctly as possible but it's a broad concept.
 
Working with DU general vision of a gaggle of players all living in DU, building org's, fighting over resources and buzzing with activity.
 
The problem with this vision as it stand now is the game systems and dev direction work against it's success. Basic game theory premise: People play games for fun, the closer a game gets to a job or the higher the pain of loss, the fewer players will continue. Unlike the real world you can't 'force' players to accept excessive hardship. MMO's require a large player base to survive. 
 
Currently the dev direction continues to try and add 'value' to things in game. I assume this is under the idea that if people care about there stuff then they are more likely to covet it , care about their efforts in game giving them reason to stick around and value their acquisitions. There is also a general push to 'force' players into groups in order to not be locked out of game content. The primary issue with this current game approach is it violates the basic game theory. Every time they make the game 'harder', or more 'group or don't play', or grindy, they lose players.
 
Open PvP cannot exist for the vast majority of players in the game where Pain of Loss is as high as it is. Player are simply not going to spend a week or two building a ship and gathering the materials for it, only to have blown up in a couple minutes and accept that as a good game experience. No matter what the few orgs that dominate in this space think, every player they gank that leaves because the pain threshold is to high is one DU step closer to server shut down.
 
The general effort by NQ to 'force' people to play in groups is highly counter-productive. Working together should carry advantages that encourage people to want to group as their desire to scale their game experience grows. You cannot tell players 'join an org or quit', they will choose the latter. We are 'forced' into organizations we don't want to be part of IRL all the time and players don't want or need this replicated in the games they play.
 
Solution:
 
The core problem for DU is that pain of loss is far to high to sustain most players in the activities that would make the DU concept work. Ore acquisition is the primary culprit here, with industry gating being a secondary but more complex. MU's could have solved this issue by making ore readily accessible to everyone, but then they hard locked what a player can produce with this charges/calibration system. You WANT players to acquire lots of territory and produce a ton of cheap ore. If this is one dedicated player or an organization is not the problem.
 
The issue with this is the obvious lock down of vast amounts of territories by players that can never lose them so long as the bots make sure tiles are profitable. This would not be an issue if territories could actually be attacked. That would force players to defend said territories thus limiting their expansion in a more normalized way. The way to naturally curb such over acquisition as the game stands now is to remove ore bots and allow the natural ore market to make tiles unprofitable/profitable based on supply/demand. Normalize sanctuary ore distribution and remove tax for mining there to create a baseline ore production of T1 for all players. This helps to insulate newbies from being cut off from the T1 game experiences and allows players to always have some amount of ore availible for building for 'free'. You could also prevent omni factories on sanctuary by limiting industry machines to T1 level from being built on sanctuary. This would also require some level of fuel ores to be availible to sanctuary tiles since the core 3 planets T2 is so blindly rare now and would be monopolized in current form. 
 
The net-net effect has to be to make ore acquisition prolific and cheap at least for T1-T2, ore bots artificially prevent this and prevent any 'free' or ore baseline on sanctuary form being viable. This unlocks the ability for most players to participate in the game be it via building things, building basic ships and parts, and low-tier industry. If players can make and produce basic ships for dirt cheap, then their pain of loss in PvP would be significantly reduced. It is important to consider PvP will NEVER work if the loss of a ship causes the player to much pain of loss. We don't need most ships to be valuable to encourage warfare, the future TW's over outer planets higher tier resources will give people plenty of reason to fight or risk going out there. Simply adding a metric that the org owning the most tiles on an outer planet get a cut of the tile taxes would be enough reason for major wars. People won't risk going out there if a single combat wipes out weeks of in game effort. 
 
 The common argument that ore bots are a needed faucet are in-valid in a game world where you get daily cash and have missions to gain more. You need a baseline player experience where most player can access a lot of content, with the effort and value coming from grouping, logistics, fighting for control and generally interacting with other players.
 
Current dev game theory path is never going to reach critical mass. Pain of Loss HAS to be drastically reduced for most of DU's general concept to function. Solo players HAVE to have access to more of the game not less, and I don't mean the solo players that log in for many hours every day. If the game only ever caters to a hardcore organized group of a players thats all the game will ever have. NQ probably knows how many players they need to keep the game open, and I'm pretty sure what we have is not it, especially when NQ continues to take steps AWAY from the model that would make DU work we bleed more players.
 
This is about as much constructive criticism as I can muster for DU. These changes could be implemented very quickly (minus the TW part), and would help to get players to return to the game or stick around. But it hinges on NQ being open minded enough to realize their current vision has to be adjusted. The more content is locked from most players without excessive effort, the more pain of loss exists, the less and less players DU will maintain.   

Any reasonable person not emotionally attached at the hip to their 'digital stuff' recognized there is a glaring need for a wipe of some sort at least at release. The idea that they would convince new players to start at the bottom when the world is already full of people with gaggles of junk on all the good ore spots from easy mode beta days is laughable. Ideally they would wipe everything, give the Beta players back their talent points as a thank you, and then reshuffle ore distribution so people can't just go right back and camp the best spots with Beta knowledge.
 
Regardless, the one thing we can all be assured of is that NQ will still not understand that ore bots are the root of economic evil in this game. Nor will they recognize the need for properly searchable player markets.

I am going to try and articulated these thoughts as succinctly as possible but it's a broad concept.
 
Working with DU general vision of a gaggle of players all living in DU, building org's, fighting over resources and buzzing with activity.
 
The problem with this vision as it stand now is the game systems and dev direction work against it's success. Basic game theory premise: People play games for fun, the closer a game gets to a job or the higher the pain of loss, the fewer players will continue. Unlike the real world you can't 'force' players to accept excessive hardship. MMO's require a large player base to survive. 
 
Currently the dev direction continues to try and add 'value' to things in game. I assume this is under the idea that if people care about there stuff then they are more likely to covet it , care about their efforts in game giving them reason to stick around and value their acquisitions. There is also a general push to 'force' players into groups in order to not be locked out of game content. The primary issue with this current game approach is it violates the basic game theory. Every time they make the game 'harder', or more 'group or don't play', or grindy, they lose players.
 
Open PvP cannot exist for the vast majority of players in the game where Pain of Loss is as high as it is. Player are simply not going to spend a week or two building a ship and gathering the materials for it, only to have blown up in a couple minutes and accept that as a good game experience. No matter what the few orgs that dominate in this space think, every player they gank that leaves because the pain threshold is to high is one DU step closer to server shut down.
 
The general effort by NQ to 'force' people to play in groups is highly counter-productive. Working together should carry advantages that encourage people to want to group as their desire to scale their game experience grows. You cannot tell players 'join an org or quit', they will choose the latter. We are 'forced' into organizations we don't want to be part of IRL all the time and players don't want or need this replicated in the games they play.
 
Solution:
 
The core problem for DU is that pain of loss is far to high to sustain most players in the activities that would make the DU concept work. Ore acquisition is the primary culprit here, with industry gating being a secondary but more complex. MU's could have solved this issue by making ore readily accessible to everyone, but then they hard locked what a player can produce with this charges/calibration system. You WANT players to acquire lots of territory and produce a ton of cheap ore. If this is one dedicated player or an organization is not the problem.
 
The issue with this is the obvious lock down of vast amounts of territories by players that can never lose them so long as the bots make sure tiles are profitable. This would not be an issue if territories could actually be attacked. That would force players to defend said territories thus limiting their expansion in a more normalized way. The way to naturally curb such over acquisition as the game stands now is to remove ore bots and allow the natural ore market to make tiles unprofitable/profitable based on supply/demand. Normalize sanctuary ore distribution and remove tax for mining there to create a baseline ore production of T1 for all players. This helps to insulate newbies from being cut off from the T1 game experiences and allows players to always have some amount of ore availible for building for 'free'. You could also prevent omni factories on sanctuary by limiting industry machines to T1 level from being built on sanctuary. This would also require some level of fuel ores to be availible to sanctuary tiles since the core 3 planets T2 is so blindly rare now and would be monopolized in current form. 
 
The net-net effect has to be to make ore acquisition prolific and cheap at least for T1-T2, ore bots artificially prevent this and prevent any 'free' or ore baseline on sanctuary form being viable. This unlocks the ability for most players to participate in the game be it via building things, building basic ships and parts, and low-tier industry. If players can make and produce basic ships for dirt cheap, then their pain of loss in PvP would be significantly reduced. It is important to consider PvP will NEVER work if the loss of a ship causes the player to much pain of loss. We don't need most ships to be valuable to encourage warfare, the future TW's over outer planets higher tier resources will give people plenty of reason to fight or risk going out there. Simply adding a metric that the org owning the most tiles on an outer planet get a cut of the tile taxes would be enough reason for major wars. People won't risk going out there if a single combat wipes out weeks of in game effort. 
 
 The common argument that ore bots are a needed faucet are in-valid in a game world where you get daily cash and have missions to gain more. You need a baseline player experience where most player can access a lot of content, with the effort and value coming from grouping, logistics, fighting for control and generally interacting with other players.
 
Current dev game theory path is never going to reach critical mass. Pain of Loss HAS to be drastically reduced for most of DU's general concept to function. Solo players HAVE to have access to more of the game not less, and I don't mean the solo players that log in for many hours every day. If the game only ever caters to a hardcore organized group of a players thats all the game will ever have. NQ probably knows how many players they need to keep the game open, and I'm pretty sure what we have is not it, especially when NQ continues to take steps AWAY from the model that would make DU work we bleed more players.
 
This is about as much constructive criticism as I can muster for DU. These changes could be implemented very quickly (minus the TW part), and would help to get players to return to the game or stick around. But it hinges on NQ being open minded enough to realize their current vision has to be adjusted. The more content is locked from most players without excessive effort, the more pain of loss exists, the less and less players DU will maintain.   

Any reasonable person not emotionally attached at the hip to their 'digital stuff' recognized there is a glaring need for a wipe of some sort at least at release. The idea that they would convince new players to start at the bottom when the world is already full of people with gaggles of junk on all the good ore spots from easy mode beta days is laughable. Ideally they would wipe everything, give the Beta players back their talent points as a thank you, and then reshuffle ore distribution so people can't just go right back and camp the best spots with Beta knowledge.
 
Regardless, the one thing we can all be assured of is that NQ will still not understand that ore bots are the root of economic evil in this game. Nor will they recognize the need for properly searchable player markets.

Basic economics of the tiles at bot ore prices means tile owners only effectively keep 30-60% of the ore mined assuming the rest is used to pay the tax (depending on talents optimal setup etc). At least at T1. This will dramatically reduce the general ore used most likely here is why:
 
NQ either needs to reduce the tax or make it progressive based on ore level found in tile. The latter makes more sense, and provides some value in owning 'cheaper' land. Otherwise most won't find the hassle of mining their tiles worthwhile. Some would say this is fine they can buy their ore from the market. Sure, except the only other money generation is now missions especially for newer players, a gameplay loop that few enjoy.
 
Net-net I think this updates apparent goal to cause deflation will work, just not in the intended way. It will exacerbate the wealth gap as the flat tax favors the already established player whom has the means to find and setup on profitable clusters using alt's or whatnot to maximize production on them. These established players also have the means to more effectively get asteroid resources and setup on far flung planets. This will run off newer/casual players who feel chained down in their game experience thus reducing demand. That will cause oversupply on the market thus pushing prices down, which will eventually disincentives established player from producing or playing.  
 
Some would say this is a normal eventuality and to some degree they would be correct even if for example we wiped. However, before this update any newb could go mine up whatever T1 ore they wanted even on Alioth and get on with exploring the building / industry side of the game. Those players are effectively hard locked into a power curve where they have to either #1 run missions for the AI, or #2 sacrifice a lot of the yield to paying taxes. Add to this they will likely be setting up on sub optimal hexes with the first movers having snatched most high production tiles puts them even further behind. 
 
I think a lot of the negative aspects of this update could be mitigated by adjusting the way taxes are handled. Have some baseline tax like 150k/week to clear out people who don't play thats fine.
 
Choose an option.
A: Scale tile tax rate with ore amount contained in the tile. Aim to normalize yield via value. Have a crap tile? Thats fine, it will cost a lot less to mine / run industry on. Have a great tile, thats fine too you pay a premium for the resources.
 
B: Have a system where beyond the basic tile tax of like 150k, each machine that is running on the tile takes quanta per hour running cost. This would apply to industry and miners. These would draw hourly from the tile 'wallet'. This option would actually be better a deflating excess currency and apply a higher tax to more expansive players. Apply this to system to space cores as well.
 
Either option.
Remove the charges / calibration mini-game, it was a better idea on paper, in practice it's a forced log-in annoyance to most. Your limiting the number of miners a player can run solo sure (without alts), but goal should not be strangle ore production. Ore is the only thing that enables people to play the game, if you strangle it's production rather then letting people who choose to invest the time and effort to setup a mining empire all you do is make people do less in game and eventually leave. 
 

Ok , and what is the purpose of spiffy looking mining rig 'builds'? The answer is nothing, a flat platform with holes is all thats needed. They are just going to be scattered around so the surface of planets look like they have freckles. It's not like your really going to be motivated to spend $ on some 'nice' looking mining platform just to have it off in the wilderness where no one goes.
 
If you fixate the game from your "my 5 HQ squatter solo tiles" is all the territory anyone should ever want or need then your playing a different game then I am.
 
Territory hard limits? roflmao , there are not enough players to make use of 1 planet in this game never mind the ocean of useless territory out there.
 
Yes, there will always be some creative builders out there that get all excited about making some shinny new 'art' in DU, thats part of the games appeal. 95% of what they make has zero practical purpose in game.
 
This update is going to destroy a lot of the bigger org construction projects that existed in the game and disillusion the people that spent those countless hours you mention to fill large cores with builds. I myself was one of them. I am glad that you are happy building whatever you build in DU, good on ya. Most builders I have known in game barely participate in the game outside of using it as some game form of Blender. That group will not sustain the game. 

Feedback is simple, your update is poorly thought out. I'm not sure what the dev meetings must be like over there at NQ but let me make this KISS for you folks:
 
Currently:
 
Zero reason to build anything period outside of a ship. Especially now with your well thought out brutal tax on any grand building ideas creatives might have ever had for POI's. 
PvP that most hate and even the PvP'ers have to admit sucks in it's implementation, never mind completely broken risk vs reward balance
Player based economy is a joke with your constant meddling with bots & refusal to let players setup markets
Industrial gameplay that was put out of reach of all but groups or highly dedicated no lifers with endless time on their hands
Gigantic game world that is so sparsely populated deserts in the real world seem to team with life by comparison
Asteroid mechanics that defy game design logic in their implementation (I mean really is it THAT hard for you to spawn roids randomly and continually like literally every space game with mining ... ever?)
Completely broken organization tools that make managing any group harder not easier. 
Mission system that could have be automatic and really helped the game world when it comes to posting / payouts , instead is a hot mess of must be present hand shaking nonsense. 
 
I could go on honestly, but EVERY single time you people do an update you overcomplicate everything and make it a nightmarish chore, rather then simply go "here are auto miners, enjoy". Asteroids same darn thing, couldn't just create a asteroid belt in the game and have rocks spawn randomly for period of time, part in the safe zone part out? OH NO , you had to make even something simple like digging a rock the most arse backwards design of all time. 
 
*sighs* I am not sure what your grand vision for DU is anymore , but it certainly does not contain the word 'fun' for most people. Every update makes the game more grindy, more work, less reward. The only joy people seem to have anymore is sitting in Discord / Forums talking about game theory of what DU might have been if it wasn't what it is.
 

Full wipe or no wipe at release? It's the only question that matters and you need to stop dogging it.

Ok , and what is the purpose of spiffy looking mining rig 'builds'? The answer is nothing, a flat platform with holes is all thats needed. They are just going to be scattered around so the surface of planets look like they have freckles. It's not like your really going to be motivated to spend $ on some 'nice' looking mining platform just to have it off in the wilderness where no one goes.
 
If you fixate the game from your "my 5 HQ squatter solo tiles" is all the territory anyone should ever want or need then your playing a different game then I am.
 
Territory hard limits? roflmao , there are not enough players to make use of 1 planet in this game never mind the ocean of useless territory out there.
 
Yes, there will always be some creative builders out there that get all excited about making some shinny new 'art' in DU, thats part of the games appeal. 95% of what they make has zero practical purpose in game.
 
This update is going to destroy a lot of the bigger org construction projects that existed in the game and disillusion the people that spent those countless hours you mention to fill large cores with builds. I myself was one of them. I am glad that you are happy building whatever you build in DU, good on ya. Most builders I have known in game barely participate in the game outside of using it as some game form of Blender. That group will not sustain the game.