bleakcon

Largely agree with what you said here, force projection is a difficult thing to balance, we need look no further than eve to see the issues it raises but the issue I see with DU is the time investments currently required to escort being a real burdern, One point to mention is that if we allowed for higher max speeds this would mean a lot more fuel being required, anyhow any changes need to come with radar being made much better, 2su is pathetic.

PvP is an important pillar of this game, a pillar that is more of a stone at the moment. Current situation is this: we have haulers simply staying away from the pipe and easily being able to avoid the 2SU bubble that hunters have, it sucks for the hunter because there is no skill, it is pure luck that is heavily reliant on lazy players and honestly the haulers have it easy ( I made billions as a hauler for missions and if I activated all my accounts I could make billions a week). The current situation is also that we have missions that require players to play screensaver online, any escorts that come along will simply be doing it for the quanta in the current state and they will be required to sit there for 5-6hours straight waiting for that 1 percent chance of a contact, we can both agree this is boring for every single player involved. Even so let's say a freighter brings an escort along, doesn't matter, any decent pvp org is going to be flying in teams, the chances the freighter makesd it out of most engagements are slim, at least without being virtually destroyed because there are no mechanics for escorts to provide shield support, to intercept fire or to provide interference to enemy weapons - there is an argument for bringing more escorts I suppose but the population of this game as it is........escorts want action and as you have admitted the chances of action are about 1 percent if you aren't lazy and any freighter that pays for an escort is not going to fly down a pipe unless it is bait. A BIG problem with this game is PvP doesn't exist outside of prearranged fights or astronomical encounters, 9/10 it boils down to ganking which isn't engaging, now, you could tell me to suck it up and avoid you better (which I already do, in the 100s of mission runs i did i got caught twice and both times were due to players on ship prior to the mechanic of being able to eject players from constructs) but that isn't good for you fun per minute, you don't want people to put a hard emphasis on avoiding you because that is totally boring. In other words what this game needs is an incentive for escorts to escort (make the trips 1 hour long as an example rather than 6 hours by either increasing max speeds or lowering distance from planets and scaling payout accordingly), escorting is more likely to be a thing if you can escort for an hour then log off, at present you will be lucky to find someone willing to escort as a service without making the haul itself worthless to do. This game also needs to do away with the insane 2SU radar limit, times that by 10 but make the radar a mechanic (only able to ping for a certain core size in a certain direction as an example). Stasis guns seem good but let's forget freighters for a moment, this kind of weapon needs a counterplay, PvP needs depth, you make frequent remarks about eve, well outside of large fleet battles you have options in the forms of various modules and classes of ships which DU doesn't have. I'm not sure why you are so against non pvp ships having some pvp buttons to push, sure, they should not be ableto hold their own in a fight at all, maybe they can dissuade a poorly constructed pvp ship if their ship sacrifices cargo space for tank or whatever but not a well-thought out pvp ship with a prepared pilot. What they could be able to do is use mechanics to call in the cavalry providing they fit a proper tank, this is something that happens in eve, an example that is probably outdated is the rorqual and it fitting a cyno. Cyno mechanics would be great, might even act as a way to solve the previously described 'escort' issue, freighters could pay a organisation to be 'on call' freighter light cyno and the cavalry can warp to, of course this isn't perfect as force projection but there could be balance (those on call needing to have outposts throughout the system with active pilots in order to cover the solar system). What I am trying to convey here is that not every non-pvp player wants an 'i win' button or 'i escaped' button, what they want is a game that is fun and engaging rather than 'engage auto pilot, fly off pipe and then engage autopilot, watch netflix....profit' likewise pirates don't want 'fly from a to b and hope for radar contact because a player was lazy or unlucky'. To get that engaging gameplay we need more PvP mechanics and some of the mechanics will be applicable to a freighter, personally I kind of like the idea of ships being warp beacons for a cost and escorts flying in, people get their pvp, we get another profession in the form of mercenary and with proposed radar changes and even speed increases/space shrink we should get more encounters.

Definitions: Block = links from components, acts as a way to apply thrust, lift, brake force to a given direction Component = a stat block, place in a grid and link to a block in order to provide that block with a set of stats (more thrust, braking force, life etc) Honestly NQ could consider having an engine 'block' that is placed in the direction of thrust, then have engine 'components' that you can place anywhere on the ship and can then be linked to the 'block'. If this mantra was used for all functional elements then people would be free to design a ship that fit their required aesthetic without skimping on performance. The only reason stacking was ever a thing I thought about doing was because without it my ship would either look nice or be able to do its job but not both. Components would simply be limited to how many you could fit in a grid, components size can then be balanced around how many will fit in a core. should a component be destroyed the thrust it provides is lost (or braking if it is a braking component). Of course commentary on this idea will revolve around this meaning ships will be designed around protecting vital components within the center of the ship, to which I say: great, you won't be able to have all components in the center of the ship so if you design a ship with engines at its core they will be the last ones to be destroyed but that won't help you if your brake components are all gone. On the face of it, seems like this means aesthetics are something you can achieve without having to overly worry about placement of elements whilst ensuring you have to consider where you place 'components'

I found one on lacobus, it wasn't very exclusive, it had pulsars for agg but no agg and i was the first one to happen upon it as i had to dig it out of the ground

Almost withyou exception this has been the journey every player of this game has had. I came in to this game pre .23 and I can tell you I had a blast, it was great fun and there seemed to be a fair few people playing, sure, it wasn't perfect but I at least had fun creating a factory, figuring out what I needed, visiting other planets and searching for resources etc. Then came .23, ok, wasn't the best, schematics sucked but I built up a collection, I continued building ships and planning infrastructure for a guild. Then came the missions, I was a whale, I played that shit and made billions, it was weirdly fun optimising ships for bringing a lot of packages out of orbit, for optimising the space-based ship to have exactly enough fuel to get out of pipe and then get to the destination, drop those packages onto a atmos ship and land, then of course refill and go again. It kept me interested for a bit until I saw the playerbase dwindle, I saw NQ floundering about achieving very little and simply promising to communicate more and to 'deliver' more. Fast forward more than half a year and the vast majority of changes have not been to improve gameplay but to turn this into a game that you pay for monthly but log in once a day for a few hours to do 'your dailies' and it stinks of them trying to save on costs. At about the same time they did the 'mining overhaul' they raised the sub price for a beta game which to me was just salt in the wound. Now they are limiting number of cores. Things they have done which are actually good: An additional tool for building (great but so much more is needed: multi-core support? the ability to take down a core and stash it in a container?), Cleaning up markets (let's not pretend this isn't also for making a saving on the server side). As you will likely accuse me of (with just cause) being bitter, let me remind you that I and many others have watched a game with promise and potential slowly degrade in playerbase and even features, with the new features primarily for reasons of them realising just how unscaleable their tech is and all the while charging us more for their mistake. So nope, I don't hold out the most hope for this game, I can't imagine they can keep this game in beta for too long and if they can't complete the following list in its entirety before launch I don't see it taking (that is sad because i really do love this game and it is because of that I am unwilling to hope because I can see it going the way of the dinosaur)....anyhow that list: 1. massive pvp overhaul, it is the worst pvp in any game I have ever seen, I see they were trying to do some kind of eve-esque gameplay but it isn't even close, eve pvp can actually be really fun. 2. make planets more diverse. 3. give purpose to building other than just storage for factories/containers. 4. rethink the automining calibration mechanic, it is hot garbage. 5. add a tool to: a. take down a core and move the components of that core into containers. b. allow players to see what a core looks like before putting it down, currently moving multi-core structures is like pulling teeth. c. some way of figuring out what angle something is (even if it is just 45/90/135/180 and so on. 6. 'fix' construction of ships - with changes to brakes coming and stacking it is going to be super hard to make something look nice and be functional, we shouldn't have to choose. 7. add a mechanic to track ships further than just 2SU, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack and it isn't fun, bonus: add this mechanic and then add ways to construct ships which are 'stealthy'. 8. Add addtional ship parts, examples: XL wing variants, XL atmos engines, brakes with vastly superior stopping power (at the cost of fuel), oh and fuel - combustiable fuel - when I have a suit which lets me fly into space and enter a planets atmosphere with no issues? Yeah parts that use other sources of power which are higher tier and much more expensive to lose. 9. Add a cost to AGG and make the thing less mind numbingly boring to use (make it go up faster) 10. review sub warp speed cap, 30k is bs, no one wants to do missions taking them 5 hours of afk for a few mill, players should be able to exceed this cap and pay for it in fuel and ship design. 11. add power. I went a little ott but I do think 90percent of this stuff needs looking at and addressing before they can look forward to a player base that makes this game a sustainable business. I hope they succeed but the track record isn't there and their motivations as of late have been solely focussed on sorting out their lack of planning and foresight from the past.

Coming from someone who (when they played at least) did missions on a large scale this! Mission issues basically include: 1. Missions on their own are not worth the time investment but they are super scaleable so if you have multiple accounts then they become worth it, I whaled and had over 20 accounts. 2. Even with the scaling they are objectively boring, there is absolutely nothing to do once you load your ship with 20 odd packages and set in the auto pilot. 3. All this being said it's quite the tedious grind: logging in 20+ accounts *2 and clicking all the buttons is at best boring and at worst a good way of getting RSI. 4. If there were to be any gameplay involved it would literally be making sure you are way off of pipe and setting up your ship so that it contains the optimal amount of fuel (what I found I had to do was to have enough fuel on board to burn to get off of pipe and then burn to my destination, offload and then just enough to burn back. I needed this to be refined so I could slow down 'quickly' when approaching drop off (minimising risk of getting popped) and to be as light as possible entering atmos further allowing me to carry less atmos fuel) and of course ensuring I always had a steady stream of space fuel. I almost got as far as to creating two space stations and dedicated space hauling craft but quit before I went that mad. The sad reality of missions is they are an exercise in being afk for x amount of time for y amount of quanta at the cost of z amount of fuel. There is no skill aside from ensuring you are off pipe, I suppose you could bring a bunch of gunners with you and some escorts and really scale the operation up, which might generate some pvp but in reality it is a very boring game of cat and mouse which is only worth it if you play the system by creating multiple accounts. Looking at the bigger picture I simply see DU going in the direction of a mobile game e.g. log on, calibrate, wait, log off with most of the actual gameplay in space, my personal take is that this is to keep those server costs down. Now that I have started my ramble, it feels to me like that last couple of updates have been solely about reigning in the costs to NQ and not remotely about gameplay, in fact, gaemplay has objectively gotten waaay worse with many of these updates, the salt in the wound is the increase in sub fees. It is a shame, I want to like this game, I actually like the ship building systems, I like piloting ships out of atmosphere, I do find that fun and feel like that is a solid foundation (minus the stacking etc which I see is on the roadmap to fix) but that is not the foundation they are building on, instead it stinks of a company that is trying desperately to scale a game they are realising is not all that scaleable in its previous, or even current state. /rant

When I was looking to come back I felt the same, not only is the current mining boring as hell from what I can see (I don't need to play to know how awful this is). On top of that asteroid mining is limited to the weekends from what I can tell and land mining is completely gone so now you have a game where you log in, calibrate, and on the weekends you mine asteroids. As for the building, I saw the patch note for the airbrakes and just thought "why bother". What is worse, whilst making the game much more boring they raised the price..... I really hope NQ gets it together before it is too late.

I spat my tea out at the title of this thread. DU doesn't even have a single enjoyable game loop, even creating things is frustrating because of the lack of tooling.

Didn't even get that far this time.

The trouble is, everything in this game is a kind of 'fire and forget' daily, even missions; get into orbit, move off the pipe, let autopilot handle it. Mining is: babysit via a minigame, wait for the next day Asteroids: only during the weekend...... Suddenly players who were taking server costs mining, just log in, calibrate and then log off, occasionally take their ore somewhere. Currently no benefit to playing the game at all...

If I were to come back to this game I have billions in quanta and billions in assets, I do not need to do a single thing, the game would be boring. I would actually be interested if there was a wipe......

I would be hesitant to blame developers as such, I expect they are being told what to do by the business, I am a developer (not games but still a developer) and I can tell you through my decade + of experience (i am not that old I swear!) that you need to hold a passion to get through the day unless you are happy with perpetual self-hatred.

I agree with you that FF14 probably has a lower server cost but I guess I still think it is cheeky for us to be in Beta (some would argue not even this) and pay a price which is akin to a AAA title that is fully released with multiple award-winning expansions. I wasn't trying to draw a comparison to costs or anything like that; my view is it is up to NQ to manage that whilst keeping their pricing model competitive to other MMOS, something I don't believe they are doing, I believe they are raising the price out of desperation whilst spending the dev time lowering the costs at the same time by replacing tedium with a different kind of tedium; this doesn't feel right.

Yeah, tbh I wonder if the price hike plus these insane barriers to entry are what NQ want in the short term, I wouldn't be surprised if they have additional cost-saving ideas in mind and want those implemented before attempting to scale the playerbase, a bit tinfoil I know but it is so annoying, I really liked playing this game but I can't justify paying this price hike when they have done nothing to warrant such a payment. It's like they decided to create a sandbox......watched players do some 'creative' things that they didn't like and went "oh wait, no, not like that.....like this....you see isn't that better, now you get to log in, do a chore and then log out for 3 weeks minimum and then the vastness of space.....no wait, well the solar system with a varied (different colour pallettes) number of planets will be yours". I am a little salty because I was holding out hope that auto miners and the like would be a boon to this game, instead it is just another way to force 'daily `play` '

Whilst I agree with your pragmatism (that if this game is to continue then player numbers either need to be high or the sub needs to be high) I would say the reason they are not attracting many new players is because their game lacks anything remotely rewarding for the new player, it only becomes rewarding if you like to horde wealth or make things, both of which aren't going to bring in the numbers needed to make this game sell.

Yeah, sorry, I did it get it but this is a somber moment, truly I did think DU had some of the best feeling of flight and space (would have loved the old skybox though) of any space game and it sucks to see it not really getting better.......Hell part of me wonder if at least pre .23 was still more fun haha

I don't know, when a company has to up prices in a beta it seems to me that there is a reasonable chance that we will all be leaving sooner or later.

So some of you may (MAY LOL) know me as someone who played pretty religiously pre 0.23 and up to just before the asteroid update. Well I left for reasons and recently I thought "hmmm I really liked flying ships and DU really scratched an itch in that department". So I gave some thought to coming back, I looked at the updates and imagine my surprise. What the actual [filtered] has happened to this game ? The asteroids seem fine I guess from what I have read so I will leave that. But it seems like you have upped the price of a subscription to $9.99 or about £7.55, you are now 14 pence cheaper than Final fantasy 14 which is currently the most popular MMO out there. I can see how people would say "doesn't matter I hate fantasy games" but this brings it into perspective, a BETA (even this title is arguably optimistic) is charging pretty much the same for a game which is fully released, stable and has more features in terms of mini-games than DU has in its entirety. I would not care about the price update if I had not looked at the latest update....... "oh.....my....[filtered]ing......god, I'll have whatever NQ is smoking" I thought. 1. removed land mining (actually like this personally because it gave me the worst headache and was simply boring) 2. replaced with mining units, with some kind of calibration mechanism that diminshes if you don't do it daily, by all accounts this is not a fun mini game either. 3. added taxes (seems sensible on the face of it) but what the hell, the mining units will barely cover the cost of taxes in some cases unless you have skills and calibrate daily, this sounds awfully like a job to me NQ! Then it hit me, I remember when the devs were talking about their data costs and how terraforming was a real costly thing for them and then it hit me: none of this was done for gameplay purposes, it was done as a massive cost-saving mechanism. Now, all of this in isolation isn't necessarily a problem but when you raise the price of a game whilst at the same time removing a part of the game that was costing you money AND replacing it with a piss-poor implementation of a 'game' (READ: job) loop then you really are starting to take the piss. If that wasn't enough I just read that your intention for surface mining (the little rocks you can get 20l at a time for) was that they don't respawn?????????? Are you REALLY expecting new players to jump into the game, take a hex in sanc, mine for maybe 10-12 hours until they have eaten all the rocks and then simply log in each day for daily allowance until they can get a few structures only to.....login once a day to calibrate. Is this another low-key cost saving exercise? [filtered] me, it is beyond belief. New players are going to join and quickly leave after realising they probably have to wait a number of days just to be able to do the most basic thing, which is put down a autominer, then they will somehow (with crap skills) have to turn a small profit, after a few weeks they might be able to get up into space and do some asteroid mining and then they MIGHT have a shot at actually being creative. I don't even want to think what it would take for a new player to get into even basic industry! I am not being selfless here, I have billions in assets and liquid quanta, it is all meaningless if new players come into the game and just go '[filtered] this, this is boring' or 'no one has time for this' which I think 90% of people are going to do given they won't be able to start building for weeks on end unless they get lucky and join a good organisation. Let's be clear here, a good organisation is no excuse for lazy, bland 'game' loops being introduced at a snails pace for what I can only see as being done for business reasons. If that wasn't enough all I read is "They are laying the groundwork for a wipe", tbh I believe these posts, it is crazy to think I can benefit from pre 0.23 free for all industry and have all of that carry over to release, I will be running a sweat shop consisting of newbies if this game goes live without one...... So what you have is a game that is more expensive, where a whole release has been about business cost management rather than player enjoyment, where a good proportion of the game is now about scraping money together before you can get to anything fun. Let's talk about the fun, I haven't seen anything, not a single thing in the last two updates related to making voxel building better, no snap feature for cores, no additional tools to help make voxel building less tedious.......nothing, even the best bit of this game is still a tedious slugfest. Can I afford to play this game: Yes, Can I justify paying for this game: If I play a lot of mental gymnastics maybe Can I justify sinking time into this game: No, the developers don't value their players time, simple as that. So I will continue to check in on the game and hope to god that somehow NQ turn it around but for now it's beyond a joke.

Wait, let me get this straight. You took a game loop out and replaced it with automining as well as preventing bases being made underground from what I understand and now you want to also increase the monthly subscription? Seems mad to me considering you do not have a finished game. I was thinking about coming back but not at that price, not because I can't afford it but because there are other games out there with more features so I can't justify spending 9.99 on a game that isn't even 'guarenteed' to be around for the forseeable future nor is there any guarentee the time investment will be honoured because something could still go wrong necessitating a wipe.

I had a scare once, but it is probably not even 10 percent unless the pilot is running it down the pipe......... Missions are ok, they are a one up on the RSI-inducing activity that was mining.

Same issue, I have a 49 inch widescreen and it’s still a problem. dev 101: will this fashion feature affect function?

Agree but they didn’t and I’m just saying that the ideas by op will cause other issues, the solution is elusive

Then crash into a pile of nothing because the brakes won’t scale haha

I think I addressed this as being the core issue to missions is that they need to be fun and engaging but as to how that is achieved - No idea

Depends as to the context of how I became owner. If my financial survival is on the line I’m going to be cautious, otherwise..... - be totally transparent about the state of the game and the issues - be more communicative with the community - take no wipe policy off the table and make clear it is to be determined over the coming months of me checking the health of economy by employing an economist. - cry