Just read all 5 pages of concerns and gravitated to GaXXor's comments. Here are mine:
1) REMOVE ALL BOTS, ALL OF THEM! EVERY LAST ONE.
2) Add research for schematics and talents to improve research speed.
3) Once you have researched a schematic you should be able to sell that research, or use the schematic to further your cause.
4) Makes little since that once I own a schematic I can't use it repeatedly. None. What? photocopiers don't exist 10,000 years from now, or cloning devices?
5) Forcing players to this degree of specialization is just silly for a sandbox game. End point: "Guess what Mom! I'm now a master of making Advanced LED''s... I'm SOOO happy and fulfilled. I don't know how to make a screw or pipe but man are my LEDs cool!".
6) The degree of specialization is currently excessive. Example: Having specializations for Carbon Refining that is separate from Iron Refining. As laid out, someone smart enough might be able to specialize in making Warp Cells, and ONLY Warp Cells, efficiently after a real year or training time goes by (presuming the rules don't change during that year). Then what are they suppose to do? Start over with another specialty or just mine rock to feed their Warp Cell factory and presumably earn money? Reality is they will reach their goal and likely quit the game, cursing themselves for wasting so much time. People need to be able to experience different aspects of the game AND get good at them in order to have a sustainable game experience (and desire to continue to pay to play).
7) The markets currently sell products at or below production cost, so many just mine their own material and build up from there. Making intermediate parts more expensive just forces us to do more of that (yeah, I'm a miner/industrialist).
8) Balancing a game is hard... really REALLY hard. Please take on the task of admitting things are being tried for a period of time, and potentially backed out if they become exploits, with the end goal of having a wipe before the production release to level set everyone.
9) Be honest with the player base. Start engaging us in feature conversations instead of dictating and facing rebellion's. 10,000 heads really can be better than 1.
10) Be fair. When features change, reset skills and allow us to redeploy our earned points.
11) I have NO problem with it taking a month of gameplay after a wipe to build up skills and equipment sufficiently to leave Ailoth. I do have a problem with somebody else stumbling across a derelict and gaining that technology on their 2nd day in the game. e.g. Remove any feature that gives people that type of advantage post wipe.
12) Post a realistic new timeframe and focus on that, not on special events and other distractions. The march needs to be getting to Release.
13) For GODS SAKE, please fix Zendesk. That disaster alone might be justification for a wipe - allowing you to just delete the 10 week backlog of tickets you have. Please stop all the "Due to unusually high ticket volume" bullshit statements. They are insulting. Its not unusual when its been happening since day 1 of pre-Beta week.
14) Make life simple for yourself. When you wipe, make it a complete one with nothing transferring forward, and therefore no potential issues with such transfers that immediately overwhelm your newly refreshed ZenDesk crew.
15) Fix your debugging protocol. Make people file tickets real-time, immediately upon finding a bug. Make it F12 or something similar. The game should freeze, screen captures be taken, log files pruned, a DxDiag run, and everything pre-loaded into a ticket where the player just needs to describe what happened. Asking players 10 weeks after the fact to find, and prune (without any supplied tools), the log files might have been fine pre-alpha, but is just poor form now.
16) This isn't your mothers house... have the game clean up after itself. I noticed log files are finally being auto-purged (I only see about 10 days worth now). Make sure all aspects of the game do that. For example, allow players to specify how much disk space should be used for cache. Clean up crash reports immediately after sending them. Same for crashdumps. Its just polite.
17) If something like Markets are not being used as designed, ask yourself why and fix it. Don't force people to use undesirable aspects of the game, instead make them better so people are drawn to them. (But again, never by adding BOTs!)
18) Be transparent. No more ATVs or any other special group with inside knowledge. Create an open Test server and make everything public. Or, and here is a thought, declare the current servers Test and subject to radical changes as game balance evolves, with a promised full wipe for Release.
