Xennial

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 what happens when game dev insta cave when adding elements that provide challenge. They couldn't even get element destruction in for a full week before insta cave to whining.
 
If they allow themselves to get caught in the age old trap of shoveling out "content" to the solo/casual ADHD crowd you can just kiss the game vision goodbye. Next we will be shooting bunnies that have magical $$ or drop super spiffy engine +5. 
 
Keep on caving to those whom came to a unique game only to cry for mainstream 'features'. We will end up with generic sci-fi MMO with an indi short on funds end product.
 
Make the game hard. Take the training wheels off and let those that can't hack it go back to whatever SP game that will spoon feed them do X to get loot Y quests and other nonsense.
 
Frankly same goes for a wipe. If its needed to reset the progression curve after a few major feature let the "omg! I paid money so you can't wipe" crowd go away. Bring it back from such a wipe with hard mode on, no bots , pull the safe zone buffer outside of atmosphere from the outter planets, drop the link range , the whole 9 yards. 
 
People act like $70/year is some sort of blood contract to have the game cater to their every impulse.

You don't need to "jump start" an economy. Thats where all these problems originate is thinking this way. You have cash injection for every player every day. Cash is only an exchange mechanism, it has no value in and of itself in a free market. The actors in that market set the value of goods/services based on the overall cash supply and perceived value of goods. If you wiped out all bots, all in game cash, removed all taxes and then in turn gave everyone a one time 100,000 credit infusion what would happen? The only thing that can. People would exchange that based on the overal wealth level of the populus. Entire big ships would be sold for like 1,000 quanta , ore would be priced in the single digits or lower. 
 
Point is it all scales based on the average amount of money the average players have. On top of this the game already gives you a nanocrafter where you can make out of thin air and some ore the ability to make basic ships and systems to fly them. People didn't start real economies by having magical tooth fairies offer $ for rocks, or selling things before a single person ever made the thing. This is a broken way of thinking and it will forever destroy an actual player economy. Free markets work for a reason , only when governments or in this case NQ think they know how to control such markets better do problems arise.

As I have said elsewhere DU has an identity crisis going on. It's either a minecraft sandbox with no risk and the sole objective of getting youtubers to show off their "creations" to a fanbase, or it's meant to be an MMORPG where you actually have to strive to achieve something , with risks and challenges. Right now it appears to be leaning heavily one way , and if voxelcraft in space is not your cup of tea you will likely be dissapointed in the end.
 
The whole single shard idea can be thrown out the window once creatives spend all time time in some solo sandbox where they can access everything in the game without effort. Why would they bring BP's into the game world to sell? What on earth do they need money to spend on they have a whole solo world to build their ships and fly them around a little and never have to lift a finger to get resources, participate in the market etc.
 
The unintended consequences of deviating from the more hardcore MMO vision presented before is likely to turn the game into something many here won't like to play. Doesn't mean it will die, solo sandbox games have been popular for a long time. It just means those wishing for a universe full of life, drama, consequences and challenges will find themselves looking elsewhere eventually. Just wait till TW is announced as 'opt in' to make sure no one is 'forced to stay in the safe zone'.  I have no inside info on that, just my feeling given how fast they capitulated full stop on 0.23.

Run the mental scenario where all you get is the 100k/day cash , no bots, and schematic prices where they are at. Initially people would use mining to use their nanocrafter to get off the ground. It would take a player who wants to engage in industry time to work up enough daily log in $ to start buying schematics. Once they do they start producing items not availible to nanocraft. They are forced to price these based on the ore cost they have buying if not mining it. There would be a glut of ore availible for sale due to no bots so the price of ore would plumet. Then the industry guys start making items with the cheap ore for cheap prices so players will actually buy them.
 
Then over time as the supply of industry increases the demand for ore raises prices , which in turn slowly raises finished good prices etc. Eventually the prices are relative to the supply of cash which is ever increasing because aside from the schematic prices and sales tax there is no hole for the money to fall out of the economy. They would also have the option to set the daily welfare to whatever they feel matches their schematic price player progression curve goal.
 
Naturally this would all require a wipe to start off correctly and let natural market forces take root. The bots completely pervert this. Injecting money into a game where you hand cash to every player every day just for logging in is NOT a deflationary concern.

This all goes back to the fundamentally flawed idea of having bots in the market at all. If ore prices were allowed to nose dive, producers would find more value in producing etc etc etc. They insist bots are needed when all their presence does is cripple the ability for an actual market to develop. Their constant tampering with bots in the market is what has lead to the 'problems' they are trying to correct while still insisting on keeping the problem alive on their end.

This all goes back to the fundamentally flawed idea of having bots in the market at all. If ore prices were allowed to nose dive, producers would find more value in producing etc etc etc. They insist bots are needed when all their presence does is cripple the ability for an actual market to develop. Their constant tampering with bots in the market is what has lead to the 'problems' they are trying to correct while still insisting on keeping the problem alive on their end.