bleakcon
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Posts posted by bleakcon
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11 hours ago, Daphne Jones said:
The point is that I and presumably many others were doing things that would have been destroyed by a roll back and had nothing to do with this particular snafu. A windfall for a few industrialists just doesn't have a big effect on the economy in the long run. They make some money quicker... or if they have the sense to wait for the fix and sell schematics at normal prices, they might make a fair amount of money - so a few get rich. Anyone who want to focus on getting rich in this game can do it - but it's not a game goal, so it doesn't really matter.
If people got the cheap schematics for their own use, it might make prices of finished goods drop for a bit... but that won't last.
This is a minor blip that will clear up.
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.
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36 minutes ago, Darrkwolf said:
I don't know why this is still up for discussion.
They can do it and have done it in the past. When schematics were first released they were priced too high. NQ then lowered the price and then refunded every player the difference between the new price and the old price.
They have done it, they can do it in the future, they just don't see how this is a big issue.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.
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17 hours ago, SirJohn85 said:
To answer op's question:
Not at all. Consider the response time of triple A studios and their decisions on rollbacks in mmorpgs. They didn't wait several days. They acted immediately.
I'm curious how many people think it's great that they pay money monthly for everything to be wiped after the beta.
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.
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2 hours ago, Daphne Jones said:
Pretty sure I was rebuilding my ship that day, so still would have messed me up. Not worth it.
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 xplayer 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 mistake2. 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.
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7 hours ago, GraXXoR said:
I kinda understand the OP in terms of the meh.... Seriously, what has changed in this game since last summer? Have any of the core mechanics been improved? Any much needed QoL features implemented? Any new game loops introduced? Not really.
This game has stagnated with ancient bugs unfixed and new bugs only being patched after they are used by people to gain massive advantages over others... JC and his crew are seemingly content to apply band-aid after band-aid to the broken basics and allow rampant disparity between those who noticed certain bugs and... ahem.. unintended price points... remain un "punished" , fostering bad will and FOMO among the player base.
However, between 150,000 ℏ per day and JC's ridonculous bots sucking ores out of the game for market-crippling, stupid-level money, there is no excuse for being poor, really.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.
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3 hours ago, Derpzila said:
Gone to play StarBase.
Chow.
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
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17 minutes ago, CptLoRes said:
If NQ are making the programmers do 3D modelling, it explains a lot. Not only why even simple design changes seem to take so much time (people having to switch tasks), but also the gigantic and clunky looking furniture and overall boring/simplistic design of elements.
It is very telling when players can make better looking furniture using voxelmancy and all it's inherent limitations, then NQ can do with total freedom and proper 3D mesh modelling tools. And the sad thing is, if NQ truly was the progressive community driven company they tried to portrait in the beginning. They would have turned element/furniture design into a community competition. I bet lots of players would have put their heart and soul (and countless hours) into making elements for free, just for the bragging rights for having them become an official part of the game.
So much truth in this, the community creations are insane, hell they could have put competitions forward for market design etc
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13 hours ago, blazemonger said:
And I would not blame the CM team here
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.
QuoteThe argument some have that "CCP has had 15 years of experience" means nothing here as NQ clearly is taking many cues from EVE
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.QuoteBesides that, undoing these transactions should be a trivial matter.
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.
QuoteNot to long ago CCP had a somewhat similar issue in EVE and dealt with it swiftly and decisively by rolling back the error and it's fallout without needing to touch anything else. They first communicated that the mistake happend, that it was corrected and that player were not to sell the incorrect blueprints
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
// Whenconst 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.
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17 minutes ago, Astrodisiac said:
You mean like punishing Scoopy and the players that dismantled a base because of a mistake NQ made? What is it that NQ keeps drilling into us about RMDS rights? And they leave their own rights open then ban players. Tell me again why taking action against players is bad?
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.
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3 minutes ago, DystopianSnowman said:
What baffles me is the apparent lack of ability/willingness to just undo those transactions. Remove the schematics purchased at an incorrect price, refund the money spent on said schematics to the purchaser.
It would have taken less than 10 minutes to write a query to identify the transactions that occurred in that time frame.
it isn't that hard.
spend a little more time, and it's even possible to write a query to follow all subsequent transactions, and do a removal/refund for those too.
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.- Heidenherz, Maxim Kammerer, Dhara and 2 others
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On 1/22/2021 at 3:16 PM, qwertyboom said:
COMPLETE BULLSHIT lemme start there. So people that exploited this and made billions will get away with it, and the honest people get punished. I thought the COVID patch (AKA .23 patch) was a slap in the face of the players. This is a hold my beer moment and watch this slap in the face. What you just relayed to players was not good. I hope many people feel the same way and post on here, Not that you will listen or care NQ but your quickly destroying your players trust.
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.
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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
- Mordgier, HangerHangar, Deintus and 5 others
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19 minutes ago, Nodles said:
Hallo, I think you nailed it by recognising that there are just not enough different ways to make quanta in the game right now.
So thanks for adjusting the roadmap and pulling forward the mission system and , I hope (although this may be me reading being lines) that it will be more than fedex player induced missions. I understand this will take some time to do though.
Hope you find a solution to the unintented lockups from the RDMS change as well though.
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. -
8 hours ago, Ligator said:
I only have two alts. But i am considering getting a third for pvp. It is much more fun using the alts in this game than in Eve.
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.
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3 hours ago, Serula said:
I think you should be carefull with reseaching schematics. It can cause players with multiple accounts into a more pay to win model by having each account research schematics offline and sell them when they are back in game.
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
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Quote
Before we talk about the changes we’ll make in our processes going forward, let’s get back to the fundamental reason behind the update itself. What we did in 0.23 is at the heart of the vision for a game where a society of players is interacting directly or indirectly with each other through an elaborate network of exchanges, cooperation, competition and markets.
As it was, the current state of the game consisted mostly of isolated islands of players playing in almost full autonomy. A single-player game where players happened to share the same game world but with little interactions.
It’s hard to imagine how the appeal could last for more than several months for most players once they feel they have “finished” the game. It is also a missed opportunity to try something of larger proportion, a society of players growing in a fully persistent virtual world. For this to work, you need more than isolated gameplay. Players need to have viable reasons to interact and need each other.
In many single-player space games, you have ways to make money, and the game then offers you ways to convert this money into whatever you need in the game to progress, mostly via markets. This is the state in which we should end up for Dual Universe once all the necessary ingredients are in place, You get into the game, you farm a bit of money in fun ways, and you buy more and more powerful ships, equipment, weapons, etc., to help your character grow. The difference is that here, the ships or equipment you buy have been made by other players, instead of the game company. On the surface and during the first hours of gameplay, to a new player it would look similar to any of those other space games, but it would in fact reveal itself to be much deeper once you spend a bit of time in the game. Everything you would do would be part of another player’s or organization’s plan, everything would have a meaning. And soon you would realize that you too could be part of the content creation and, somehow, drive the game in the direction you want.
In its current beta stage, DU doesn’t have enough ways for people to make money because we haven’t yet had the opportunity to implement all of the necessary features. There’s mining, of course. Trading is not as good as it will eventually be because markets are not really used to their full potential. As a consequence, players rightfully turned to a solo or small org autonomous game mode.
We tried to nudge people out of this with the changes introduced in 0.23. While necessary, many players expressed that the changes of 0.23 came too soon because it lacked a variety of lucrative ways for people to make money outside of mining.
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.
QuoteThis will allow most factories focused on T1 to resume their activities rapidly while keeping an interesting challenge for higher tiers, spawning dedicated industrial facilities aiming at producing to sell on the markets. We will also reimburse players who have bought high-priced schematics since the launch of 0.23 (please give us some time since it may take a few days as we go through the logs).
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.
QuoteThe release of 0.23 also taught us that we need improved ways to test new features, both internally and with community participation. The Upvote feature on the website was a good start, but it’s not enough.
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.
QuoteTo address this, we have two courses of action that will be taken. The first will be to set up an open public test server, hopefully with shorter release cycles, for players to try out new features.
This is great, transparency in the development for the game was a key thing highlighted for me in this patch, love this.
QuoteThe second important initiative is to revise the role of the Alpha Team Vanguard (ATV), getting them more involved in early discussions about new features and the evolution of the game. We are still defining the framework, so more information will be released as available.
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.
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Element destruction will impact the restoration count only when it occurs through PvP, at least for now (not when the ship is colliding/falling as we want to avoid having players penalized simply for crashing their ships because they’re learning how to maneuver them, for example).
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).
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Recycling of un-restorable elements through a recycler that will take an element as input and grant a small amount of the schematics required components as output.
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.
QuoteWe also want to reassure you that the mission system is not the only answer to offering more varied ways to earn revenue in Dual Universe. Things like asteroid mining and mining units will be introduced in the next few months.
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 -
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7 minutes ago, dogface said:
We've also run into this when attempting to copy voxel from one construct to another. Voxel libraries are pretty hamstrung at the moment.
This, i can put down the voxel libs but i cant copy paste anything which means my creative options are.....limited.
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16 minutes ago, Tictaq said:
Right on. Too many posts referring to all this 'work' theyre doing in game. How about get a job, discover what work really is and realise that this is actually entertainment....
Awesome game NQ, I wont be going anywhere.
I am glad you think this game is awesome, in fact, i happen to share that viewpoint but this seems like a misconception of a core game dynamic.
There is a very clear line between a game that challenges you and a game that creates tedious activities in order for you to achieve your goals.
A challenge would be something like designing a ground based vehicle that can go through a mining tunnel and be used to remove minerals from the hole or creating a vehicle that can dig down and help you locate ore
A tedious activity would be lowering the link range such that you have to set up a chain of containers in order to move your ore out, hell i didn't mind the mining as it was but there is certainly an argument for it being tedious as it stands.
Players are willing to put up with tedious tasks in order to achieve a goal that they deem to be fun, for me my goal is to make a large dynamic construct able to act as a forward operating base for mining purposes complete with defensive weapons.
I can still do that with the current system but there is just a lot in this patch that makes the game tedious over making it challenging.
I have played many a sandbox game, SWG was my forever love and the original holo grind was an absolute pain to get through, followed by the grind to saber 4 and other key trees but once you got there you were somewhat a god if you didn't over do it; this is a great example of locking something rewarding behind a tedious grind, i and others like me were only willing to do it because we wanted that shiny glow stick and we wanted it to be a deadly shiny glow stick, not once did i enjoy that tedious grind, it was a clear indication that the devs had no other idea than 'lock this behind a massive grind' which just isn't fun even though the end goal was.As for getting a job, that seems a pretty tone deaf thing to say to people, I am sure, like with any other game there are those that have never worked a day in their life playing this game but I suspect a good proportion will have lost their job to COVID-19 or be on furlough if they live in a country where they are lucky enough to have that option.
Others, like myself have jobs and I can tell you this, I love my job, i enjoy software architecture and engineering, i enjoy building what i build, it is work but it is a challenge and that is what i like; mining in this game is a job where there is no challenge only tedious tasks.
So how does this relate to industry changes? Clearly they aren't adding challenges to the game, they are adding bots that sell a item needed to produce things, there is no challenge here, they could have opted to work on a power management system or made creating factories more challenging, they could have allowed players to obtain these schematics through a challenge such as a talent-led mini game, instead they added a quanta sink.
I don't actually disagree with the direction they are trying to take the game via this change just the execution, i actually see myself playing this game for quite some time but I really would like to see changes to accompany this patch in the near future to add challenge not tedium.
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NQ I love this game, I write this not to complain but to impress upon you the dangers of this move.
First off though mega factories are probably not beneficial to the game, the largest orgs will always manage this though but it almost certainly shouldnt be the case that one player can invest 3 weeks of time and be able to build anything at a whim so long as they have the ores etc.I don't believe this was a good focus of your time at this very point in the game for a few reasons:
1. this is such a foundational mechanic being changed that it has an impact on the playerbase both current and future.a. Currently, the game loop is something like; mine for ore, place down a base, mine for ore, build a ship, mine for ore, build a bigger ship. This proposal changes that to mine for ore, place down a base (TU), mine for ore, sell your ore, buy some parts, build a ship. This works for those that simply want to build something but a good portion of the community seem to like building factories and without that it's just taking away a game loop and replacing it with 'buy from market'.
Solution: unfortunately its a change the playerbase needs to suck up but the lack of additional game loops probably puts a timer on this games staying power with most players, perhaps getting the missions in or additional mining options and increased pvp options would be good so that these sorts of changes can be phased in along with such content, i appreciate this is a weak solution in as much as it is vague.
b. Long time players now have an exponential advantage over newer players, obviously a longer time player should have an advantage but it should be linear; I did a fair bit of reading on this game and it appears the game has had a few exploits and game mechanics that have been pushed to the max to make many players extremely wealthy. if schematics cost money then this change is unlikely to limit such players and if it does it will always effect newer players more.
Solution: difficult to tell how to make this fair, a wipe would be easiest but people have obviously put countless hours into this game and to take that away would be damaging to the game and pretty damned unfair to them considering you promised no wipe (whoops, better hope these foundational changes don't cause significant exploits). I feel like this puts the community into two camps, the haves and the have nots, this is probably a discussion in its own right.
c. I can't see how a new player is going to progress without being forced to mine and sell, this repetition is going to get old fast.
Solution: as above phase content in with these changes to give players who lost their factory content a chance at other kinds of gameplay, currently this patch is a bunch of compounding gameplay changes that could mix together to really cause some negative blowback which can't be good for anyone involved.
2. This change makes me question what the current state of the game is, is it a beta or is it a soft release; no wipe sort of indicated to me that this was more of a soft release but i don't believe changing a game mechanic in such a fundamental way can be healthy for the game (see point 1b).
Solution: Really would be good to get an answer here, if it is a beta then a wipe probably should come back on the table, otherwise continuance of these kind of changes is going to be a gamble with whether or not you can keep such promises to the community.
3. Communication is something I feel is lacking from you as a developer, you could make the argument that you didn't want the playerbase to stock up on items given enough warning but that is irrelevant based on this information getting out weeks in advance (if other posts and sources are to be believed) to some players.
This could have been avoided by levelling the playing field by making the playerbase aware of your intentions a month in advance, this would have caused stockpiling but eventually this would be less of an issue, i can't help coming back to point 2, perhaps the reason you didnt want it getting out was so you could track the effect the change had immediately, in which case this is more a dev sandbox and a wipe of some description may end up being inevitable, im not wanting one nor am i not wanting one but telling the playerbase there will be no wipe and then doing something like this is risky for you and for all players who want to see this game flourish.
4. Is it true element destruction is in this patch too? If so then this combined with the changes to industry and the change to how ships behave when a player alt+f4 could be a perfect storm whereby players find themselves at the mercy of bugs, destroyed elements and a very volatile market which could end up in sub losses, none that wants to see this game prevail wants this and so it occurs to me a more phased approach to such changes may be in order.
Solution: each patch should avoid multiple drastic changes and be much more phased.
5. Markets are not the most performant of areas, now we will see more traffic going to these markets its worth considering:
a. a cleanup of the markets, i cannot imagine the containers on dynamic cores or the ships that have been there since i started playing are good for the lag.b. A retrospective on whether the markets can handle high volumes of players.
Solution: would it be possible to work on a solution to gameplay that gets all the junk out of markets, i feel like this is a prerequise as well as things like player markets but i digress.
I like to give solutions where i can but i am still quite new to the game, so I appreciate many of them may not have hit the mark, I hope this view from a fairly new player was helpful.
I don't intend this to be a moan, I really have no other desire for this game to succeed and for that I believe a healthy dose of honest criticism is necessary, here is hoping when the dust settles this patch turns out to be less disruptive than i imagined but then if the communication was there no one would need to imagine anything
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On 12/3/2020 at 12:30 PM, Vazqez said:
Go elsewhere with such sick ideas.
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'. -
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 :)
NQ Your lack of action regarding the schematic fiasco is disturbing
in General Discussions
Posted
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.