bleakcon

This feels like a good solution, eve has been plagued by this for years, at one point there was a player with like a 100 odd miners, chewing up asteroid belts on the hourly, they eventually banned broadcasting which cause that chap and a bunch of solo incursion runners from being so impactful but yeah, as soon as you allow a player to scale accounts using in game money where scaling accounts means a an equal or greater scaling of income you start to get real problematic game balance problems. In a perfect world you allow the first use of a DAC by a person to be 100percent then diminish returns but the implementation of that would be problematic to say the least.....for obvious reasons.

It was a mix of power and credits, this was indeed an issue with SWG, it extended to housing too, to the point where you had Correlia being a planet wide city for the most part. At some point they did have a big cleanup and I think at one point they implemented something that would cause building to just be destroyed should the upkeep not be met. The problem was the upkeep of a large house was small compared to their vast wealth most players had, I would stick a few million credits in each thing I placed so that I could be assured I would not have that happen. Only thing they were missing was having upkeep scale with economy.

Reading is hard, I get you now; yeah why not, I mean why they don't allow you to do this I don't know only thing I can think of is the placement of things after the fact can be a real pain but then maybe you should be able to just be able to redeploy the blueprint with the inclusion of the new part without having to free place it or something.

I replied to someone else with an answer of sorts to this and really for me it boils down to a 20 year old game managed to achieve a similar market structure with 1000s of players on a server...the technology to make the market work in a user friendly way is there for sure, this is a deeper concern of the UI itself not exactly being very user-friendly.

can you expand on this, my brain is tiny and I would like to understand your idea.

This isn't a huge problem, if there is only 150k coming in a day it's not great granted and as someone already mentioned having a player run bank is a non-starter for too many reasons to bother with but it might arguably be better than bots, really doesn't matter if player a has 150k or 150 bill, the total amount of money in the game given healthy supply and demand is going to naturally set prices. I am by no means suggesting that this would be a sound practice past beta, what I am saying is I don't think it would have hurt as bad as we think, it might have even saved them some headaches, with the current mission system players are rightly pointing out that a showboating mission from Alioth to Feli or wherever is not something are going to do for 5mill, had they not introduced bot orders as they have this might have been completely fine, at that point the mission system would have been implemented and the daily quanta thing could go too, replaced by a one time payment to new players. All they have really done by introducing these bot orders is : 1. set a minimum buy price for ores artificially 2. injected large sums of quanta into the game and ejected large numbers of finite ore from the game (as the current state of the game stands). 3. forced every player who wants to compete at release to become a mining drone Tbh it might not have been so bad had they just set the quanta price to like 1 quanta a unit for t1 2 for t2 etc etc. That would have been enough to kickstart the currency whilst they sorted out missions without introducing unnecessary inflation......important to remember it takes more space in a db to hold 100000 than it does 10000 so there is even a teeny tiny technical reason for trying to keep the amount of quanta in circulation low.

Honestly as a starting point they could begin by just packing all ships owned by someone with a non-active sub into a schematic, this is a one time free thing, do it again though and a charge is levied for you to access that schematic and place, to prevent exploitation you weigh whatever the ship weighs and you must retrieve the schematic from a market attendant from the very same market or district in which you parked.

Agreed it's not a trivial change and there are a large number of technical considerations that might not be easily implemented, no doubt about that. Market wise - SWG is about 20+ years old and they had a better set of filters than this game does, I can see it being quite simple to implement a filter for certain stats ( > 800 thrust ). As for the hassle in inventory, yeah that would get extremely annoying - important to note we have this very same issue already when it comes to items with different dynamic data so this is a problem they should solve anyway, I'd suggest a way to auto switch to using an item of similar type with a message popping up letting you know (with the option to disable this message, message should probably be more of a passing message on the screen rather than something you need to click ok on every time). As for memory, yes it is going to take more space up in a database for sure and the extra joining on the tables may end up being problematic in some cases, really depends on how they have gone about structuring their DB and how often they access data in certain scenarios. Currently we have similar issues, especially on L cores where we have had to resort to layering multiple wing M's (stupid amounts of at that) and engines are just incredibly ridiculous in terms of the amount required for large haulers. There are multiple issues with this: 1. lag, not scaleable if the server has to recalculate a ships lift every time a wing is destroyed or its thrust every time a engine is destroyed when talking amount a large number of ships containing a large number of components. 2. design of ships becomes a real pain as functionality dominates form (big walls of engines that no one wants to see) What if this change also changed the way in which people deal with ship design? What if players would need fewer components for ships? What if a 900 thrust Basic Atmos engine L was equivalent to say 9 engines in its current iteration, what if the 300 Unit toughness meant that each time it was shot it would lose unit toughness, let's say that if you lose 100 points in a battle you just lost 33% of your engines effectiveness until repaired as the durability of the final product was 300/300, if it had been crafted with durability in mind then losing 100 points given it had 1000 durability would equate to a 10 percent loss in effectiveness. Perhaps this has a nice side effect of improving ship design and due to the idea that you can't just stockpile 10k engines 20k wings and whatever else is needed to build that ship what instead happens is ship builders look for the next supply of newer parts from specialised crafters that they can use to replace stock they are running low on or to create different variants on their initial design. Sure this idea to reduce component numbers doesn't outright solve the problem of increased memory usage, it just mitigates it but also has the benefit of providing some more depth of gameplay - hell what do I know about what they have under the hood? Nothing, this could be a non-starter but I honestly believe SWG had the most engaging resource gathering / crafting system every seen in an MMORPG or in any game I know of tbh and it seems like for all the potential problems and challenges it will cause it might very well be an answer to a plethora of issues too.

Its not very scaleable given they already seem to be having issues with their database with the one system. They should add some kind of upkeep mechanic that requires some effort not just take from your wallet but before they do it put a grace period in of 3 months and send a few emails to any subbed account who has hexes not being upkept, sorry, but if you are going to drop in every 6 months its probably time to move over if you aren't willing to play the game. I say that as someone who would be pretty negatively effected by such a change.

Sure but this desire to avoid the ONLY gameplay loop in the game that makes you quanta should tell you something about that gameplay loop, like, mining can net you a nice amount of quanta, about 50mill a day if you no life it but you better have a few series on the go on netflix because it is really that bad.

This right here; we all know mining is about as fun as watching paint dry....hell at least watching paint dry requires no interaction which given the kind of interaction required mining would be preferable at this point. I might redo my post from general to here to see what people think of my mining change idea which is heavily based on the SWG system.

Maybe that needs to change, perhaps we should have a mechanic that allows for deconstruction of items to their base ores with some loss. That way people can sell below market price all they like (probably the crowd that mines their own ore....so you know, the ore is free right ) can do that but those who notice this trend can take advantage of it

Agree, how they didn't see this as a very easy fix i won't know, instead of getting players to dig pointless, and horrific looking holes all over the place to mine why didn't they do away with that and make mining work in a very different way, perhaps have some kind of tool that you would put down on a hex, scan, get a concentration reading then play some kind of fun little mini game, instead of what we have which at times makes me a bit queasy not going to lie.

My hopes were probably way above the mark when i mentioned stats on materials and random seeding of resources over time. I just think that this change, whilst being a change that is absolutely a change for industry and miners will have a net positivie effect on seemingly dispirate things like PvP, after all if Ion has a great spawn of hematite for engines or weapons or whatever, it will need to be transported, opening up the type of emergent, player-driven gameplay we all want.

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away was a game called Star Wars galaxies and it was epic, the crafting was just amazing. What I am reminded of by a comment in another thread is this fact and how it could be the answer to the want by devs for players to specialise. Here is how it worked : 1. at the beginning of your journey if you want resources you had to scan for them, but that wasn't all, let's take iron as an example. Let's say you wanted to make an engine, well if you wanted that engine to handle a high amount of thrust you could put crafting points into thrust, now the gain on that statistic was linked to the quality of the components, those components qualities were linked to where the crafting points were put into and the qualities of the materials they were made out of. You ended up with something like this : base type: inorganic type: mineral name: Hematite sub-type: Ion Axidite Hematite Cold resistance: 100 Conductivity: 200 Durability: 566 Heat resistance: 1000 Malleability: 23 Overall quality: 599 Unit toughness: 300 There were a bunch of other stats that I don't remember depending on the type of resource. Some resources had a tendency towards having higher stats, such as copper having generally a high conductivity rating. rating was from 1 - 1000 How was this iron obtained? Well a bunch of intrepid miners scoured the galaxy and happened upon a hex that once scanned gave a scanner result with 30k iron with the above stats, great they thought some crafters will be interested in this, in fact one of them knew someone who wanted to build some engines and they figured this iron was pretty good for that. As the miners were able to triangulate the location of this vein they decided to hand mine it, mining units would take far too much time to set up and cost a ton of power. These miners sold the iron to an intrepid crafter who happened to have stockpiled other similar resources with the intention of making some very specialised engines..... Looking at our iron here we notice it has a high heat resistance, looks good for using for engines, maybe that gives us a good chance of producing engines with superior thrust! Only trouble is the unit toughness looks pretty bad, might mean if they get shot at the might pop pretty quickly eek. Ok so you decide to use this hematite to make some engines, first you make the parts, perhaps engines consist of pipes, screws, combustion chamber or something. You build each of these components and put points into maximising their resistance to heat, suddenly you find yourself with components which very high levels of heat resistance, great! Next you move on to building the actual engine, you click start crafting and you decide this engine is going to be a monster of thrust, to hell with durability, if you get caught then you weren't thrusting hard enough...yikes. So you put your first point into it and hit assign or whatever, the point is assigned and you get a message 'your attempt was ok', ok not bad thrust is at 400/1000, you put another point in, you get a message saying 'your attempt was a massive failure' oh dear your thrust just went went down to 390 because you got a little unlucky maybe or perhaps your crafting skills and implants weren't so great :(. To hell with it you try to assign all your points at once on thrust and you rolled big, 'your attempt was perfection itself' and you find your thrust is at 600/1000. Nice its slightly above average, wait though shouldn't that have turned out better? You look around and you notice one of the components you worked with actually has a really low level of heat resistance and unit toughness, perhaps that unit toughness is required as it is the pipe and needs to deal with all the combustion (I don't know just roll with me here I am no rl engineer). So you try again and this time your engine pops out at a whooping 800/1000 thrust but the other stats suck so this is a highly specialised engine. You still think you can do better, you look at your exosuit and notice there are these nodes you can place skill implants in, some off the include +10 to crafting of engines, wow these give you more points and increase your chances of bette results, they are hugely expensive though (turns out they are found in ship wrecks across DU) and taking them out destroys them. well now you have managed to pull a masterpiece out of your hat, a 900/1000 thrust engine, now the question is do you create it or do you use a blank schematic (currently sold by the bots but hopefully not for long) and write your prototype to this schematic, you decide to write it to the schematic, you then put the schematic into your machine. Of course the limitation is that you need the exact materials and components to continue using this schematic, if they are different by even a point or the resource has a different origin you are out of luck and you are back to the drawing boards, fortunately though the crafter had made enough quanta to afford to buy a new manual that was again looted from a ship wreck somewhere in the galaxy.......they bought the Advanced Military Engine, with this they could collect resources in the same manner through purchase or exploration and build an even thruster engine because it turns out the multiplier on thrust is 1.5 on this type of engine. In this kind of system your resources are not just 'Hematite' but specialised forms of it, some items would need specifically named forms of hematite to craft, yes, this means that crafting isn't an easy thing to get into as you go up the higher tiers, but it stops it from being a case of stick x amount of stuff in to get y item out of it. Instead players can play about with different attributes, perhaps one person specialises in fast, low yield lasers whilst another specialises in slow, powerful lasers, which one is better? Depends on what kind of radar you have on your ship, does it have a long range but a very slow refresh speed? better go for the repeating laser then, sure its going to cost you more power but at least you are likely to hit your target. Finally mining becomes a little more fun, suddenly it becomes a bit of a hunt not just for megas but maybe even for that 10k hematite that has the 1000 unit toughness, it's not going to make an awful lot of voxels but damn the voxels it does make are going to be impressive armour-wise. Also why not have hexes refresh their ores periodically, suddenly claiming a tile isn't so valuable just because it has a mega because it might be gone the next time the ores are updated, realistic? no but then this is a game so let's let it slide, obviously players will resort to claiming as many tiles as they can in order to be able to prevent others' from getting to decent resources but then that is where territory upkeep and warfare come in and need to be punishing to prevent this kind of choke hold.

Hands down was one of the most fun things ever in that game, I loved this game so much for the crafting it provided, if only NQ would replicate, the idea of being able to craft using stats to make an engine that could produce more thrust with the right quality of iron that had the right thermal resistances etc. It was such an organic way of focussing people on something specific, people would make a living in that game simply tracking down epic ores for weapon smiths to make crazy weapons with the that legendary acklay bone that was looted........or an armour smith with those high quality Krayt dragon scales. So good.

They are literally awful, all they do is act as a way for players to turn ore into quanta. This might seem like a great idea but it is literal garbage, let's look at it this way: Scenario: - 10 people play the game - each player receives 150k per day for logging in - 5 of these players mine - 5 of these players build and sell on the market - there are no market bots - the game has been going on for 10 days (to make it simple) 1. Player A mines some hematite 2. Player B mines some bauxite 3. A and B want to trade, things like the weight of hematite vs bauxite enter into the equation and they settle on a ratio to trade on 4. Player C comes in and also wants hematite, they want to buy it with quanta (there is only 15mill quanta available in the entire game) 5. Player C wants to build something that needs a lot of hematite, they offer to buy the hematite at 5h/u , Player A counters with 7 and they finally agree on 6 6. Player C sells a bunch of Wing S on the market 7. hematite suddenly goes up in demand as player e and f also want it, the price of wings also goes up too 8. a number of other players find a megapode of hematite on Ion, hematite is worth twice as much as any other ore at the moment, they figure if they mine it all and buy enough wings and thrusters they can probably get it to allioth and make a nice bit of quanta, they get super greedy and decide to showboat it (remember 10 days of the game being about is to keep it simple) 9. a few players get wind of this and try to figure out where and when they are taking off in the hope of shooting it down I could go on but you get the point, the price of the ore is determined by the players and their actions, there is no lower limit, in this scenario miners will want to focus on finding hematite as opposed to bauxite as it is more valuable, even if it is heavier, also the traffic and hauling is also being pushed by the actions of the market, because hematite is twice the price of any other t1 there is a willingness to haul it to the central hub of alioth. Additionally because hematite is heavier demand for wings goes up as ship designers must cater for ships that have more lift to handle heavier hematite cargo loads. What you have here is a market which is being driven by the actions of the player. What is actually happening is that because of the inclusion of bots which act as a endless ( well not endless but close given the player count) supply of quanta, what tends to happen is a player finds a node, doesn't matter what, any t1 node and then sells it to the nearest market for close to 24-25 quanta per unit, no haggling with players, no supply and demand in action here and no limit on the earning potential of any ore that any player finds, they know it is 23-25 quanta or whatever wherever they are. So what are the ramifications: 1. Players now have a lower limit of at least 25 quanta for the ore per unit, that doesn't take into account the extra hassle of delivering it or waiting around for a player so the lower limit for selling it to a player is higher because the opportunity cost of waiting for another player rather than a bot is much higher, this results in any new player being 100 percent forced to start doing this or.......well they have to, at least with having no bots a new player might have been able to use their 150k to say buy a small hauler to haul or a small pep ship to escort or pirate, not in this universe no sir, you will be forever condemned to mine your ass off until you can afford the 5mill s core or the 20 mill m core or the 100+ mill L core because you sure as hell aren't earning that kind of money any other way. 2. Players don't need to haul through space at all, just get to the nearest market and bam you are rich, no need to worry about whether you can escape atmosphere just need to be able to get enough lift to take off and enough brake power to set down safely, hell you could even not fly and just use hovers if you really didn't want to bother with a ship. 3. No PvP allowed, with no hauling required there Is really no opportunity to catch people, those same people never consider an escort service because they are totally safe, emergent gameplay such as escort and hauling services never arrive because there is no need for it. 4. Ore has been removed from the game (we aren't talking small amounts either here), not through destruction via PvP (at least that would generate fun) but simply through the conversion of a piece of ore to some quanta, now what this means is that quanta is now more plentiful and ore is less so, that 1 billion you have of quanta means nothing, all you have done is spent your time changing one number in a database to another number in a database, you got no fun out of it, there was no interaction with other players you just transformed one resource into another because you were told the bots would only be at 25 quanta for a limited time and you wanted to cash in hard before you had to get off the gravy train, only problem is everyone did it because there is nothing much else to do. The kicker is that once you got all that quanta what you probably ended up doing is increasing the schematic collection you have acquired, only problem is now there is far less ore in the game and everyone has quanta, better get mining some more. So you mine some more and get your factories running and then you go and dump your wares on the market and to your surprise it isn't selling as quick as you might like because everyone got burned out of solo mining for months on end and now you have realised that you just spend months grinding away at something to get to an end......trouble is the journey wasn't what you were promised at all. 5. Either way you have no got a bunch of quanta, you built your solo space station or city and a load of ships and then you look around, what do I do next.....mine for your bot overlords to pay you more quanta because the very same bots have removed any other piece of emergent gameplay that might have.....emerged. 5. outside of the game NQ have dug themselves an impressive hole too, they have just encouraged players to mine the crap out of the game for months in the hope they get a leg over other players........makes it so much harder to pivot towards any kind of reset whatever form that might take when you subjected your player base to thankless grind.

Agreed, they need to remove it, my current pc struggles hard in those areas, to the point where I don't want to go near those areas (that's when I bother to log in). Thing is, this isn't going to fix the issue of scaring new players away, sure for the first few weeks it is a novelty but once you hit the brick wall which are schematics and the realisation that you are literally paying to click on ore 99 percent of your time as a newbie it is enough to turn most people away. The unfortunate and inescapable fact is that this game isn't as fun as it needs to be (read: it is a grind that belongs in the 90s) and even if players do get passed that the economy isn't exactly booming and mining as it currently is isn't fun, sure at the beginning you couldn't go too far without finding a nice mega but that is becoming increasingly harder making the barrier to entry for the main play loop (building stuff) hard to achieve for someone that doesn't want to spend actual days mining.

It would be pretty good to have something like that, perhaps some kind of new resource you need to activate some extreme braking for asteroids only or some such thing, however it is implemented it would be another mechanic that could be used for various purposes.

A lot of your points are just systemic issues from other areas of the game that need fixing regardless. How fun would it be if they had ships players built get attacked by npc and then later on down the line you get attacked by an npc......in your design....turns out the npc's copied your design and are using it to attack other players. that would be sooo fun lol.

God no to the puzzles, it's not scaleable, it's boring just no. Spawn them randomly, add some kind of scanning feature into the game for triangulating and providing a warp point to asteroid, the asteroid should cause warp functionality to be a non starter, there needs to be some risk in the pvp zone otherwise I could just have one person in the ship and another mining on linked container with a warp away at the first sign of trouble. It'd be really nice to have some kind of mining component for a ship that allows you to scan a asteroid and extract the resource to the ship, perhaps the usage of such a module effects radar usage encouraging a more group focussed play in non safe zones. Asteroid fields would be great, make them dense so people can't zoom through them in L cores, might even incentivise the design of s core ships to go into such fields with l core mother ships that take on the ore? in reality the best we can hope for is a hex in space I expect with current mining 'mechanics' ;( I suspect they don't want to do this kind of thing because they don't want players getting salty when they see a asteroid belt coming up on view when they are heading at 30km, perhaps some sort of module to provide some emergency braking upon detection of a asteroid belt (could provide a good mechanic for pirates to hang out at such areas knowing they act as a way to stop slow-boaters in addition to the obvious score of catching some miners who warp in upon scanning it)

So I will be the first to admit when I am wrong; I really did think the change in CEO was ragnarok for the game, I thought this game was going to be scrapped and forgotten about, with its tech sold off for parts - seems I was wrong. Then to my surprise we get some communication from NQ and on the face of it a lot of it seems positive and well, it is positive buuuuuut. NQ it's time to face reality before the game really does get trashed into nothing. The reality for me is that the way the game is at present just isn't fun when all is said and done, sure I love building new ships and working on my space station (or should I say I like the end result and I will expand on this later on) but overall it's not worth (currently) the time you need to invest to get the output you want. Let's separate this babble into subsections. Mining Mining has rarely been fun in any game let's be fair but mining in DU would be a good form of enhanced interrogation, you could get your prisoner on a megapode or two until the answer the questions or until their wrists implode from RSI or their mind melts because you've denied them their human right of Netflix in the background. Let's forget about how boring the mining is for a little bit though and focus on the clear lack of progression, all I can do is add some talents to make myself mine a little faster which doesn't make it any more fun. I recently got into space engineers, now setting aside the motion sickness this game seems to give me if I go into space one thing I thought it did well was providing the player with tools to create different machines to mine, I found it fun spending hours building a contraption that would mine efficiently, I got to choose whether it would be a static construct or something on wheels or something that could fly, quite often it would blow up in my face and I'd make adjustments. It wasn't fun because I could get loads more ore than manual mining it was fun because I really had to put some thought into how I built my mining contraption and in doing so I would have to sacrifice simplicity for efficiency or mobility for simplicity etc etc. Now let's look at DU; turns out this is probably a non starter as it would cause too much lag having large constructs digging into planets, instead we get things like the auto mining unit.........I don't want to just slap a unit down on a territory and pop in every few days or whatever to collect some ore, that is boring and repetitive and requires no thought or challenge at all. For me there are 2 fundamental things missing from this that would make it fun, which is meaningful progression and challenge. On the subject of mining units.....new subheading. Mining Units One of two things happens with these things: 1. they give a lot of ore so everyone builds one and ore that is grabbed from these becomes pretty worthless - no amount of rebalancing is going to solve this. 2. or of course they don't give enough and they end up being a waste of time of both the player and the developer So what's missing? Firstly the linkage with other areas of the game, it's not like ore is in short supply, sure there might be some things like thoramine and the ore that makes titanium being pretty rare but things like t1 and t2 are plentiful, making it more so is going to tank the prices therefore removing the allure to mining units therefore invalidating any driver these might have had in the game as a whole (it's not going to act as a conflict driver if no one wants to build them). Secondly are these going to be a fire and forget kind fo deal? Probably you will have some sort of maint requirement for them but other than that what is the CHALLENGE, grinding is boring, how about having these things be something other than just a construct like a TU that you place? What about these things being a bunch of items like : capacitors, drill, laser, piston, scanner, drill arm etc etc and players must construct a mining unit, the design of the unit is a factor in how they function, perhaps different design choices effect the yield, types of ores found, power efficiency or whatever else. The point here is to add some kind of challenge rather than it just being another 'place this here and wait x seconds for y reward' Finally how are you going to balance these? One per player per planet? No problem players will have 9 alts ready to go. Not going to limit them? good luck any new player owning a tile and if you think this isn't realistic then you probably underestimate how nuts some of the player base are. Asteroids I am finding it hard to believe the introduction of asteroids and mining units is going to be a good thing considering the current state of the game, NQ seem to think asteroids might end up being conflict drivers but that really is going to depend on a whole lot of things, all you need to do is take a look at EVE, players have always been able to find ways of maximising the amount of ore they gain, a lot of the time they managed it with multiple accounts, when rorquals came out the impact was so high that ore prices dropped considerably on a single shard with 100k plus active subs.........NQ doesn't have close to that so what do you think is going to happen to ore prices and product prices. Once again NQ seems to be missing that there is a dependency of these systems, you can't just release asteroids and ore miners in isolation and expect there to be anything meaningful in terms of emergent gameplay.....the other parts of the game aren't there yet which brings me to another subheading. The state of the game currently and the impact on the future A big reason a lot of those I played with left the game had to do with the massive changes being made in beta that not only affected their fun (.23 as an example) but also really put them at a disadvantage to other players who had time to take advantage of that iteration of the game, let's name some things: 1. T5 bot buy orders were reportedly rather high though I didn't see this personally. 2. honeycomb production for quanta, this coupled with pre 0.23 allowed players to buy ores and quickly turn a profit by selling to bots, rinse and repeat to ever higher degrees of scale. 3. 0.23 changes, schematics as an idea not a bad one, timing of implementation and the fact they are just sold by bots for quanta.......big yikes. additionally many players found themselves at a loss of what to do next, the rug was taken from under them and now they found themselves with a whole bunch of items that they could not use, they also found game loops most could take part in consisted of mining....... 4. LUA changes; yes this might help performance but this just removed another game loop for a number of very talented people in a game which prides itself on creativity. I'm not advocating for reverting any of these changes nor am I saying push on with them, what I am saying is by the time you are at a stable point in development you have players with billions in assets and liquid quanta, much of it gained through now removed game loops (because they were deemed out of balance), you have hundreds if not thousands of tiles claimed but not used and some planets (looking at you lac) mined to the bone of any decent ores due to some very questionable actions from certain players from what I understand. Perhaps promising no wipe was a little bit silly but here we are. Building Supposedly the most developed part of the game, don't get me wrong it is great finally seeing your imagination on the screen but that doesn't mean the journey was very good and that should be concerning because by most players reckoning this is the part of the game that is most developed, I'll lay out some very annoying things: when I need to remove a construct I need to do it manually voxel by voxel, large construct are painful, it takes hours or longer and if you are cursed to miss one voxel (especially in space) expect to spend hours trying to find it in a large construct, what about a way to allow for a grid to be deconstructed automatically over time into a linked container provided the container has enough space as a first iteration? when I try to line up two or more static constructs its not easy, it really should be! I get that if you allowed players to select large areas of a grid it might or will cause lag, why not allow us to select as large a area as we want and then have it remove or add voxels slowly as a starter, I would prefer waiting 10 mins for a full side of a large grid to fill automatically rather than you forcing me to do it manually due to performance reasons. the texture changes were........well yeah let's not go into that, some of my stuff though went from looking ok to looking like it had been spat out the devils backside. Piloting Actually quite good fun, I haven't got much to say about this because largely I found it rewarding taking off and landing, reaching atmosphere etc with a larger load than I should have etc etc. PvP I am sure PvP in this game appeals to some ( maybe ) but lol, did someone look at mining and say 'hold my beer'? Besides that the balance......there just isn't any, there doesn't seem to be much diversity, out of every area of the game this isn't going to have any points made against it because frankly it feels like an afterthought and/or designed for a very niche audience, I'll take any other system over this one, at least eve PvP is fun if you can find yourself a small scrap or a 1v1. Ship Building I actually find this to be great fun but there are some glaring issues: 1. Never understood why there are XL space engines and not XL atmospheric engines......same goes for any other areas like wings on this, having a grid of engines on the back of the ship to get enough thrust just makes making things look nice harder - looking nice is what this game imo does well, if you compare some of the designs in DU to say space engineers, starbase, avorion etc etc I think it's fair to say that DU looks great and the less 'blocky'. 2. PvP ships are forced to look a certain way (previously the cube as an example) or just be terrible. 3. voxel materials double up as armour so they all have weight, if you want a ship to look like a mothership from star gate interior wise that's fine but use gold at your own peril if you want it to take off efficiently. The vision So I joined to play a space game that was a civ builder, with something akin to an EVE vibe. In eve I wanted to get into a group, there were clear benefits, I also chose my group carefully, because being in a group had consequences, eve was challenging, yes there was some grind but there was always some risk; if I went exploring in a wormhole solo and found a juicy relic site I could find myself an easy 100mill or a cloaked ship waiting to engage me, I could counter this by bringing a friend along or I could arm my ship to the teeth at the expense of efficiency in scanning down things or I could bring a cheap ship and head back to 'safe' space often to drop my loot off to mitigate my losses. My choices had consequences and my choices had an impact on the game, sometimes peoples choices made gaming history other times their choice might affect only 1 person but they did affect the sandbox. I don't get any of that from this game, I feel perfectly safe, pirate on scan? hit that warp button. Someone following me? Doesn't matter I am in safe space, where's the challenge? Why am I here? Why am I building a ship that can do x y or z? Errr for the most part I really don't know Let's get to the point Did you agree with all my points? Doubtful, that's ok, I didn't expect you to but everyone reading this will agree that there is a LOT of work needed for this game to be a game, between then and now mistakes are going to happen, if I were betting man I'd say odds are ore is going to be worth nothing in the near future, that's ok, it can be rebalanced but let's be honest and face reality, that is going to have an effect on the game when it becomes a game. Best thing NQ can do at this point is to hold their hands up, admit that this isn't beta, admit that they need to rethink what needs to happen on release and revoke the promise of no wipe and most importantly stop talking, enough visions, enough blog posts actions speak louder than words and that is what NQ should measure themselves on going forward.

What an arrogant post, new players may very well have foolish requests, no more or less than more established players with a clear agenda, equally they may have valuable insights into the new player experience which we have long since forgotten; they've invested time in it let them post what they want, it is up to NQ to decide what is useful and what is lunacy, if they can't even do that then this isn't THE problem.

I like this, I really do, it gives some hope for the game, in all honesty a few weeks ago i had written the game off as done and dead. A few thoughts though: 1. Lot's of screeens in one place, a few players have rightly pointed out that this is probably due to the refreshing of the html every time one change has been made, perhaps take a look at some of the great comments there that deserve a response as to why that was not considered. I believe the comments were centered around having a new method that allowed for the refreshing of small areas of html rather than entirety of it every time a single variable changed, couple that with setting a hard limit on how often or how many times the html can be re served in its entirety might be something to try before ruining hundreds of hours of gameplay by other players. 2. the screens at markets are a problem but there is a bigger problem here, the amount of ships just stuck there, the amount of cargo containers lying around. a. implement some kind of quanta sink where players can store items at markets then implement a way to contract players to move items from this paid for storage to other markets paid for storage view the new mission system. Limit the time players can leave ships at market or/and checks should be made on dynamic cores, if they can't at least hover away with the load they have then they should be despawned and retrieval comes at a cost. Looking at screens is all well and good but the problem seems more systemic. Overall though a promising update.

Find the meganodes for me and then take a cut of my mining, just want a chill mining simulator for a bit. give me a shout i think i saw one saying 90/10 split