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bleakcon

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Everything posted by bleakcon

  1. What do you think i am referring to? I am referring to the fact they refused to take away schematics that were bought at prices caused by a bug which is clearly something they have said won't be tolerated, yet here we are. if you are talking about .23, i dont have an issue with it, i have an issue with inaction which is turning into a bit of a pattern regarding those who take advantage of errors, bugs, exploits.
  2. Apologies but the point is nothing of the sort. Many players love to use the excuse of 'it is a beta expect this', I loathe this because generally it has been used regarding things that would only be acceptable if there was a wipe pre release; in the case of your hour being lost, well that would be unfortunate but they absolutely should have done it (I would have felt this way even if i was online at the time i assure you) because these sort of mistakes are the butterflies that kill a sandbox later on down the line. Regardless of any of that I have already explained to you that they simply should have rolled back any transactions relating to the illegitimate schematics; this would have solved the issue and had zero effect on you; to be clear, THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THIS.
  3. The reduction of schematic costs and refund was actually easier, all they would have needed was all players who bought a certain item at any time; no need to worry about what happened to that item, all they had to do was refund x amount of quanta to that player. If they don't have additional meta data such as sell timestamp and then logging on trades they won't be able to sort the discussed issue so there is still a question of how extensive their auditing is.
  4. I have paid monthly for 3 accounts put a couple hundred into the game, would probably be more up for playing it if a wipe did happen despite losing close to a few billion in assets and quanta. I think i might be slightly bitter at losing the ships i have made in terms of the look but maybe they can allow blueprints to carry through, either way it's not like a wipe was always off the cards there was a caveat. At this point there will probably be some players quitting due to this and some carrying on, NQ just needs to roll the dice and pray it goes their way.
  5. Going to be blunt with you here, what you mean to say is not worth it for you personally. At the moment you are tunnelling on your ship; unfortunately your ship is going to mean nothing if things like this cause the economy to go down in flames. Secondly, letting it slide is essentially saying to everyone : 'if this happens again take full advantage', it will embolden people to take advantage of similar situations, not to mention the effect this one situation is going to have on those industry players who put months into say specialising in warp beacon production. It would be like you finishing your ship with the intention of selling it but then someone gives a bunch of player a drm free master blueprint; it doesn't matter that only a few got it, it still devalues your work and makes your goal feel less unique. Finally a rollback isn't necessarily a case of rolling back every action on the server for x amount of time. Many posts, including my original post have stated that really, they should have been able to work through the market transactions and reverse every transaction, e.g. player a buys a warp beacon xl schematic for x player b buys the warp beacon xl schematic from a for y. rollback : credit player b with y, delete schematic wherever it may be, refund player a with x quanta, flag player a (identify any failed rollbacks (the player traded to another player for something other that quanta) and flag those for the CM team)) simple really, unfortunately NQ waited days instead of an hour so now they are likely to get some scenarios like this: player a buys a warp beacon xl schematic for x player b buys the warp beacon xl schematic from a for y. player c trades 5 million hematite for the schematic. player b makes pure iron with that hamatite player b makes honeycomb with that hematite player d buys the honeycomb from player b player d builds a super cool thing from that pure iron trying to reverse this is problematic because player d could not have possibly known that the honeycomb was made as a result of materials gained by selling contraband :D. NQ could try to reverse this but at this point it's a really awful idea and if they make exceptions in these cases i can guarantee there will be players out there that out of caution would have done things like this as soon as they were able. This is exactly why they should have: 1. identified their mistake 2. shut down the servers 3. made the decision to reverse transactions and communicated that to the community. 4. performed the rollback, identified edge cases where they weren't able to and raise with CM team to take manual action using GM tools. 5. servers up. 6. make a decision on whether to take action against players who abused the event and then communicate all of this. meanwhile you would have noticed what would have been about an hour of server down time, annoying yes but not as annoying as figuring out a few months down the line that the game just took a a nose dive because this action had dire consequences to the economy and/or community.
  6. Earning quanta is easy, terribly boring though; i actually think removing those bots would open up more options. As it stands you go to a planet, mine (hopefully a mega node) and then transport it to the nearest market and sell to bots. I do this on outer planets because frankly allioth is too laggy for my liking and tbh i hate the idea of scanning the other two in the hope of finding a mega node; if they removed bots at least people could start offering to haul and we'd finally have an actual market. My fear is the damage is done, so much quanta entering the game because there really is nothing else to do than mine and sell to bots, any change now is going to put new players or newer players at a disadvantage........i find the concept of bot orders maddening tbh, if they ever wipe remove every bot order aside from schematics.
  7. A little bit envious, it was Du and starbase i was looking at, looking forward to trying that one out when i get an invite. or rather if
  8. So much truth in this, the community creations are insane, hell they could have put competitions forward for market design etc
  9. Not for a second to I believe the CM team are at fault, they are a great bunch of peeps and if anything i say appears to be critical of the CM team (unless of course i do it explicitly) then I can assure you I don't believe they are at fault, actually I believe the CM team are a saving grace for NQ. If anything goes wrong within my team that I am responsible for then simply put the fault is my own, it doesn't matter if a junior member made the mistake or I made it, if I am responsible then I am responsible, that is why I hold the upper management of NQ responsible for these blunders; the mistake should not have happened in the first place. I think that argument being used means something, it means that NQ are trying to take cues from a company with a hell of a lot more experience with an MMO in production, this means they need to temper their expectations of what they can achieve. More to the point my understanding is some of the upper management including JC aren't seasoned game designers, my understanding is they are scientists who decided to build a civ sim, that makes sense and it shows; a grand vision, promises of features and building of hype are all well and good but it is the execution of it all that matters, all this is to say that they really should look at how they are making decisions and be honest with themselves; from my point of view some of these decisions are really harming the reputation of the company never-mind the game. Absolutely it should, if they aren't able to do this then it highlights either a gross inexperience in design or that they are so up against it that they have had to put off implementing such systems, neither of which bode well for a release. This was due to them giving out BPOS's instead of BPC's for some kind of competition? If that is the case then i'd point out that this was a different scenario from what NQ did, giving items to players for a competition is probably a case of inputting a item id, account ids and then executing but what happened to DU was a change in the pricing for every single item sold by bots, where are the tests? even something mundane such as: // Given item_id = someItemWorthFiveThousand // When const result = getBotSellPriceForItem(item_id); // Then assert(result).is(5000) Would at least act as a really simple guard against these mistakes; their code is probably heaps more complicated and in no way can i expect them to have such a method but I would expect them to have something LIKE this to be run when they make a change to config. I can only assume they don't - being that this happened - or that the tests were never run in which case big yikes.
  10. Well, I haven't said a word regarding that incident but if it were up to me I wouldn't have done a thing with those players either, for the simple fact that it was beta and to be honest these sort of players probably make good testers even if they do cause a headache here and there. In my mind I would have put that on me and fixed it because at the end of the day it was my fuck up as a dev and i would have fixed it in my own time; might have politely asked players in question to in future simply make us aware. The better option might have been to just delete market 15 and re design it as a nod to the event. I think the reason I am not advocating for these players to be punished is because it really is unrealistic to expect players not to take advantage of such a mistake, additionally you really don't want to get new players caught up in this who may not even be aware it is happening.
  11. If they have the necessary metadata, part of my little essay questioned whether they have. This is why this is so disturbing, it transcends the event itself and gives us an unsettling insight into what is and is not possible, obviously the decision making speaks for itself but that is damned disturbing too. This isn't a game issue, this is a company issue and that is worse in my opinion.
  12. Agreed this isn't the sort of reaction you might expect. I feel the need to point out that it isn't really an exploit as much as it was a straight up mistake made by NQ, to punish anyone who bought schematics would be bad, people aren't going to be honest in a game if they don't have complete faith that others will too, anyone who didn't take advantage of this when they could are saints but also just put themselves back months Most of them probably did so expecting it to be reversed, either way it is pretty bad, unless something is done i don't see myself resubscribing when my accounts come up for renewel. I guess I like what the game could be, i dont even mind what the game is; i am starting to mind who is developing it based on the decisions they are making.
  13. What follows is perhaps the most critical thing I have said regarding NQ, I don't think it is unfair though. Ok so my understanding is this: In an effort to fix a issue with pricing on a particular schematic someone managed to somehow set every bot order to about 1/100 of the price it should be selling at. Please let me know if I have missed something. Now, full disclosure, I wasn't able to gain from this, I wasn't online, I am telling you now I would have taken full advantage of it and anyone who is honest knows they would too. It might be fair for you to ask me something like "Why are you putting a post up of something you aren't even sure of?". That question would be fair only up until you realise that nothing is being done about it, with NQ stating they were "to err on the side of caution" whatever that means. Caution? It's a bit late for that now isn't it? Where was this caution when someone decided to make changes to live servers. I bet there are a ton of engineers and developers playing this game and almost all of them know the cardinal rule: You never, ever, ever mess with production code or data before fully testing it on a representative environment or as close to one as you can get! By now I suspect many reading this have seen the screenshot of someone holding 112 warp beacon xl schematics, not 1 or 2 but 112, if they also bought the necessary sub components then you are looking at production of an end game item at a scale that just should not be. NQ, where is the philosophy you so passionately and vocally used to defend the changes made in 0.23? Your insistance that having players being able to run up mega factories is a bad idea? Everything you as a company put out at that time is contradictory to the inaction on this issue. NQ, how are you meeting the statement you made after 0.23, you remember don't you? The one that stated you would be more communicative, you would test things out more before you rolled them out, what about internally? Did you not learn from the knee jerk reaction that was the talent reset? NQ, it boggles my mind that you don't see this as a serious problem, it isn't just about those 30 minutes and the minority of players getting a leg up it is about what comes after. Looking at this selfishly as an example, i mine like a madman for weeks and I finally buy schematics and a warp beacon, i mine more to build the beginnings of a space station, i keep on mining to buy more schematics and before Thursday I at least figured I had made an honest dent into building a foundation in this game; those 30 minutes demolished all that work. These points don't just apply to me, they apply to any player who wasn't lucky enough to get in on the schematic grab. Ok ramble over, NQ it is time to point out why this is all quite disturbing to me as a player (i would hope others too): 1. This has demonstrated a severe lack in your processes, you've lost customer confidence 2. Your decision making in the aftermath is abyssmal; your going to do nothing? 3. The reasoning for your inaction is.....well it isn't reasoning; 'err on the side of caution'. 4. Your inaction points to (from more likely to tinfoil hat): a. You truly don't see this as a problem and are content to carry on (your wrong, it's more than just the schematics, it is the message you are sending) b. You now see it as a problem but you can't rollback c. You always saw it as a problem but you are unable to perform a rollback and you don't want to admit that d. You intend to wipe e. This was intentional for the benefit of a group of players (tinfoil yes but it's not the first time a mmo has done this). 5. You either can't trace player transactions or don't have the time to rectify your mistake meaning this is an intensive process. 6. Your communication on this matter has been more pointed to 'stay silent and it will blow over' rather than addressing concerns. 7. Your indiffference to this matter I like DU, I see the potential, but potential isn't enough, at this point features won't be enough, your team appears to be lacking process, experience or maybe just passion, that or someone is calling the shots and overriding the devs decisions, this isn't the first simple mistake as a result of quick decision making or poor thought, something needs to change and it needed to change 4 days ago
  14. Not to be unkind to NQ but if they didn't know this before 0.23 then there is something seriously wrong with NQ, hopefully this is a lesson learnt. I have thought at lentgth to why this patch came out, I believe it is out of panic, trying to retain a playerbase they believe are getting bored now that they hit 'end game' but like many have said, this game is not about an 'end game', a sandbox will always be at an end when the player has run out of creative ideas. SWG did something similar except they did it out of wanting to compete with the big guns (wow). They saw how much of a playerbase wow had and either got greeedy or panicked (probably both) and released the 'new-game experience' which to anyone that lived it will send shivers up their spine.
  15. Well yes but alts give those with more disposable income an advantage, eve tries to combat that via being able to sell game time tokens for in game currency, I think this is a bigger discussion but some sort of concensus needs to be around how viable having alts should be. In SWG I had 13 accounts at one point.... Eve I had over 20 but that was down to being able to buy time with in game currency.
  16. This is what happened with eve regarding invention iirc, people just threw a load of money at alts for research, hell eve is a game where alts are almost a requirement for anyone wanting to get deep into it. I already have 3 in this game , not sure many want this to happen
  17. I understand your reasoning and even agree with it, I don't think too many players would be hard against this, the execution of the patch was in my view.......much to be desired. I think i will just bulletpoint: 1. Please never cram in this much to a patch again, it was the perfect storm of changes that caused players a lot of problems outside of simply just buying schematics. 2. No way in hell should a subset of players have had advanced warning of this change (even if that warning was via testing the change) in future i would reccomend that at the point of you going 'yes we are going to put this change to live' every single member of the community should know about that change the moment a single player does. In a game like wow or ff14 where players test content etc it is fine not to let the playerbase at large in on the change, it might even be preferable for the playerbase that this happen. In a sandbox this advanced notice is an incredible benefit to anyone who knows for obvious reasons. 3. Communication needs to improve, this lines up with 2 but from another angle, if you were to have given players notice of 0.23 ahead of time you would have been able to get feedback before it hurt players, the reputation of the game and your company. 4. Policy changes in support lined up with this patch......well i don't lose my head too often but last night 2 bugs totalled a ship and severely ruined another which could have been a no biggy if either we had the tools prior to patch 0.23 to stop the ship or GM's were allowed to repair a ship and tp without a ticket. 5. mining is not a fun thing to do, really should have added missions and then added this change maybe. Here’s our plan for now. We will modify the formula of the schematic prices to make it considerably more affordable for Tier 1 and still challenging and worth a commitment but less intense for anything Tier 2 or above. I am not sure I agree that you give anyone a challenge here, mining ore, selling to bots, buy schematics or some such loop is not challenging or engaging, don't get me wrong i understand this is a beta but can you not see how it might make folks nervous that you seem to be equating challenge with tedious grinding? If you look at the people who probably spend days building ships, the challenge for them is getting that ship looking good and ensuring it handles well, that involves thought, skill and testing often involving multiple iterations, i would say that is a challenge and a fun one too, at least i think it is, I can't imagine a single player would class collecting t2 schematics and setting up the factory as challenging, I would again, describe this as a time sink process. Agreed, might also be nice to send players emails, use discord, reddit and whatever else to advertise how players can participate, i for one was not aware of this until recently, to a point that is on me but getting community participating in this as much as possible benefits everyone. This is great, transparency in the development for the game was a key thing highlighted for me in this patch, love this. Having a subset of players have input into where the game is going is dangerous, look at eve for a lesson on why; players of the game are going to have their own agendas and it will be hard for all involved to discern agenda from changes directed at sincerely making the game better, also close collab between devs and a subset of players is treated with suspicion.....again look at eve as to why. If these are the same peeps who were clued in to 0.23 and played the market accordingly that should be enough to give you pause for thought on whether continued collaboration with players in this fashion is healthy for the game, then again this may have been a pledge or something in one of your kickstarters or what not so i don't know how viable it is to ramp player involvement down in closed door discussions or testing. Fantastic, it will be great when game is more stable to see this also removed and crashes causing element destruction, though element 'lives' have been questioned a lot, are you looking into the many forum posts and reddit posts that put forth reasoning for why this might not be the best idea? Another question would be, will elements currently at less than 3/3 be restored as a lot of people, me included ended up with blown components thanks to various bugs including one i submitted that i think was added into this patch (warp spool down, crashed when it was < 30k, when logged back in ship was at 26kmh heading straight for alioth at less than <2su, 3 guesses to how my ship faired on that one). This is cool, would be really interested to know if this is going to be expanded, something like this might be a partial answer to the reward of pvp. This got me thinking, I thought mining units were tied to territory warfare? I am sure NQ mentioned this or JC mentioned this. If this is the case does this mean territory warfare is going to come into the game within 2 months as well? Seems like an awful lot to achieve in just 2 months if so and I imagine territory warfare to be the thing that will dwarf the drama from 0.23 if it doesn't hit a fine balance. On one hand it is great that lot's of stuff is on its way but on the other this didn't add up to me from previous AMA's etc so would be good to get clarification. Also from a communication perspective territory warfare is going to be something that needs a ton of comms pumped out or players on vacation are going to come back to plundered territories if you go down the route of making a territory trivial to conquor. Now that I think about it this seems like a ton to come in within 2 months when you consider the horrendous balancing issues that territory warfare is going to bring. Anyhow overall the change shows promise that in the face of a community that is unhappy NQ is willing to reflect and adjust but on the other i felt the talent reset and quanta increase was sheer panic which ended up annoying players further, so I do hope changes in future go a little smoother. All my criticism being said and done I do like the game, it has a lot of promise and I hope it becomes a sandbox that I can enjoy like I once did SWG
  18. This, i can put down the voxel libs but i cant copy paste anything which means my creative options are.....limited.
  19. How is this a sick idea? At the moment the cube meta has had the effect of every other ship that is not a cube being unable to defend itself causing the answer to be : warp drive. If you add a stealth mechanic you get to add some more depth to the game: 1. design of stealth ships 2. caring about the cross section of the ship provides an immediate disadvantage to the cube as well as requiring some thought to ship design in general. 3. Currently it seems to be there is a limited. amount of materials you can make a ship out of if you hope to survive an encounter, this provides an additional option 4. arguments against warp disruption mechanics diminish as haulers can now feasibly design a ship that can haul and have some chance to survive, currently a cube on radar is equal to death if you are not a cube or a warp capable ship. My only thought would be that stealth should not be a mechanic that provides complete immunity from detection , it should simply lower the radius of detection and perhaps there should even be specialised radar to help detect such ships. OP isn't asking for a way to completely nullify detection, just a way to make it harder to detect at the cost of sturdiness, cargo capacity and in my opinion speed should be limited or when power comes out the output of your ships power before you become just another ship with an incredibly weak hull. These kind of tradeoffs that force you to pilot your ship by controlling speed or power output (if and when it becomes a thing) means the drawbacks arent just numerical but also have an affect on how you pilot a ship. I think we should be mindful that not every idea is going to meet with universal approval as not every idea is going to match our idea of fun and may even counter our idea of fun; doesn't mean it is a bad idea just means you don't want to contend with that playstyle which isn't a good enough reason to say a idea is 'sick'.
  20. Some kind of mechanic to provide an answer to those (people like me) who use warp to bypass the sorry state of pvp is required. The problem with implementing this now is the sorry state of pvp, if you want to kill the game then implementing this sort of mechanic now would be a good idea, if you want to build it up then fix the myriad issues with ship building first then look to provide the sandbox with further tools to answer problems such as a players use of warp drive. The argument of 'well you need to join an org or hire an escort' reminds me of the very early days of eve which were....interesting......at first. Back before jump freighters (this is going back quite some time so i apologise if i don't get this down 100 percent) corps/alliances would use freighters to handle the moving of materials from high sec to null sec and null sec to high sec. Freighters for those who don't know were completely at the mercy of....anything, they could take somewhat of a pounding (meh not really) but ultimately they really needed protection or an escort, the answer to this were operations consisting of escorting a freighter or multiple freighters to and from. Maybe the first few of these ops might have been novel for some but the truth is they were tedious, most of the time they were also a mandate if you wanted to remain in the good graces of your corp you would be taking part in that escort mission whether you like it or not. I always thought the attackers had it good, they didn't spend hours planning a route, they weren't rounding up the troops to do something that was just not fun after doing it for the umpteenth time, all they needed was a spy/good bit of intel and then a rally at the potential of a freighter kill. Now there were/are things that could be done to protect the freighter (electronic warfare, logistics support etc) but it is a lot of effort and was just really not fun, i didn't know too many people who loved the idea of an escort run. My overall point being is it wasn't seen as fun back then and I can't imagine it will be so much fun now, especially with all the issues in pvp, all it did was foster a mantra where players were forced to take part in an activity that they didn't find fun and i for one would rather the meme of a 'second job' remained part of eve :)
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