Vidagild

Will the kickstarter DACs be credited to accounts at the launch to be spent on subscriptions?

how/when are you going to answer any of the questions and concerns that have been raised here? There is a heap of commentary and questions that haven't been responded to and the answers to those questions already asked really are needed to inform further questions. Summary of questions so far: What happens when running industry use up their stored schematics? How many schematics will be able to be stacked into each industry unit? With the examples shown in the video it would take approximately 700 schematic hours to produce enough warp cells to transport enough ore to build the required warp cells, similarly, assuming production time for schematics scales by tier, it would take approximately 100h of schematic hours to produce enough fuel for a 9600L fuel tank. How is hundreds of hours of AFK activity to support an hour of active gameplay considered reasonable by your development team? With the primary complaints for the game currently being time and resource gating access to the limited gameplay how do you see more time gating and gatekeeping as the solution? Do you want people to just find the game unplayable? If the schematics will cost money to copy and will be consumed on creation, and this is about making industry more accessible to players, why time gate copies instead of just letting people buy however many copies they want? Is this really just to try and further incentivise alt accounts for the few people still playing to try and increase your revenue? because this just seems to be further damaging to the game itself. I thought the idea of this was to "fix" the broken mechanics of the schematic system but instead you are doubling down on the worst most restrictive mechanics to further gate production, what is the point of this? So the band aid holding the entire game's economy together will be a highly limited resource that can be gained in an infinitely increasing scale depending on how many accounts you're willing to pay for?

How is it that you can get the message that the crafting system you implemented that had so many players stop playing because of how restrictive it was and how the barrier to entry was too high and decide the solution is to take the prohibitive system you have and then TIME GATE that construction process? Like lets look at FUEL. A ship needs 10kL of fuel to fill a tank, each 100L of fuel needs 1h to create the schematic and around 3h of pures schematics to produce the hydrogen and fuel metals needed to craft that 100L of fuel. So we are looking at ~100h of timers to be able to fill a fuel tank which will run out in less than an hour of active flying. How does this system make the game more accessible or more enjoyable? What purpose is this system supposed to serve? When is the game going to "find the fun" it spoke of rather than just continuing to make every system that is actually implemented more and more tedious and restrictive?

A full respec should be offered so that those of us that build can sacrifice our other talents to be able to support our primary gameplay loop rather than being stuck ripping apart in development builds to get under the core limits while we wait whatever period of time it will take to get our core counts up high enough again.

to put this in perspective, a minimum optimised mining site consists of 3 tiles and will usually only provide 1 ore at 100%, even if we assume 2 ores for some tiles that means a player needs ~12 cores to get all t1 ores, they need at least 2 cores for ships (one space capable and one pocket rocket) so a player getting t1 ore for themselves living on one of their mining tiles for HC and basic industry with only 2 ships for personal use needs 14 cores. With these changes assuming maximum core capacity for every player and all cores outside of this base requirement are signed over to an org you need 10 players to be able to just gather up to t5 ore for the group and literally nobody in that org can have more than 3 personal cores. There is no way something like UNet's Utopia, IC's citadel or any of the other super structure builds can exist with this being implemented as is. Given this will straight up kill the ability for people to participate in multiple things since any gameplay mechanic has a dedicated core requirement you should be doing a full skill refund so that people can at least be good at the one thing you are going to let them engage with through this.

With the Tax mechanic they have effectively said, hey whatever work you have done to get to the stage you are in the game isn't enough, pay me to keep what you have. It doesn't much matter if they call it tax or insurance, it pretty much comes down to street thuggery by the devs trying to solve the "problem" of player progression. No game that has a pay to maintain mechanic has a player base that enjoys it, look at the capital ship release by elite dangerous, and more to the point it doesn't solve the problem you are trying to address with it, you just push players into looking for exploits or bypasses of your punitive mechanics or they go and play a game they can still have fun in, leaving an ever smaller population that has an expanding proportion of cheaters and exploiters.

The taxes system means that I am having to do the calibrations on loop as well to just to keep myself from losing what I already have. The result is that I can't really engage in the element of the game I enjoy (building) because I have to monetise my playtime just to keep what I already have.

you know that not all rockets are on/off right, you do have liquid fuel rockets that actually have thrust control and even vectoring today

That is a light M core, a to scale firefly that could take-off and land in 1g came in at 4.7Kt unloaded made of aluminium and silicone

In my opinion to make the current rocket boosters cost appropriate they need to be supplying more thrust and using less fuel, a 100% increase in base thrust and 25% reduction in fuel consumption makes them 50% less efficient than a large advanced military atmospheric engine where the current values make a medium rocket engine more than 6000% less efficient while costing the same to produce(because of the rocket fuel tank costs). To put that in real terms the current boosters are literally balanced as the boosters used during the Apollo missions with the current basic atmospheric and space engines being closer to the expanse/halo levels of efficiency even with the extreme weight of the fuel itself being included. Add to this that the boosters are on/off giving extremely limited thrust control and even had the pulse lengths limited in a 0.23 nerf they definitely give the #feelsbadman's right now.

My suggestion for schematics is to significantly reduce the cost by removing exponential and replacing it for linear scaling i.e t1 element schematic is 75k so use that as the base cost, t2 element is 75k *2 = 150k, t3 becomes 75k*3 = 225k etc so their is still investment and the item still exists for the lua management but the barrier to entry is reduced. For expanding the schematic mechanic I would consider a machine that you can put a schematic into and for a nominal quanta fee you can generate another schematic from it with rng improvements above the starting schematic based on the users skills for example: A user with t5 industry talents for productivity for refining coal into carbon puts a base schematic into the machine and pays 10k quanta to improve the schematic, it generates another schematic that has a base yield and requirement between 5 and 25% better than the base schematic, say they roll a 15% improvement in yield and a 20% reduction ins cost, they could then take the base schematic out and put the newly created one in, this would have them produce, at a minimum, a copy of what they already have but if they rolled better on one of the skills they have that improved stat line would be on the new schematic. This would allow people who are specialised in industry to have the ability to stack production benefits while also making schematic improvement a marketable skill, in addition it would let those not investing heavily into production skills to still progress their production rates of items they may want to produce for themselves by purchasing improved schematics. At the same time by making sure they are capped to the maximum bonuses provided by the creators skills you keep it from being a potentially game breaking multiplier on multipliers (even though the skill would stack with the schematic stats they couldn't end up making a +500% productivity schematic for instance) and would give some incentive to invest in the t5 industry skills as the improved schematics would be something that would have their own market value too.

On the subject of industry, I am a player who has invested very heavily in industry and as a solo player that has been a mammoth effort, if schematics were to be removed I would expect that the retail value of those schematics would be returned. In my opinion the schematics could stay as a consideration but the scaling formulae for the schematics costs should be heavily reduced, a linier rather than exponential increase for instance as a minimum. On the subject of a wipe, if one were deemed necessary for whatever reason, as a minimum, beta players should be maintaining their talent points with a free re-spec. If the talent points were to be deleted you would be removing the only "reward" players get for giving you their money each month that can't be recovered through work and given that we paid you, and continue to pay you, based on that reward as till now you have always pledged no wipe or as a minimum no skill wipe to zero every account would be exceptionally bad form. If you will not commit to this as a minimum I would expect that to be explicit because I am sure for a large number of your subscribers, including myself, the game is not in a state right now that it is worth its price point if the time gated progress we are paying for will be removed.

This is the game post I was hoping for in the beginning, the steps laid out sound fantastic and I am very excited to see some of the grind and monotony removed in favour of active and engaging gameplay. I am also very hopeful that the rocket engines will see a rebalance to make them more balanced for their cost as part of the element development since right now they are about 2% as efficient as stacking large atmo engines for the same power values.

while I appreciate the need to reduce server running costs a major reason for the loss of subscriptions is the lack of content updates, and the uncertainty of the permanence of the game at this time. 0.23 was an update that tried to implement hard scaling to industry to slow down progression and try to force in game economics that the game simply does not have the features to support while 0.24 failed to bring anything to the game except some 4k dirt and a wallet system, and even that was bugged at launch while it was working fine on the PTS for whatever reason. Reducing running costs is only sustainable if you either have enough money to run the game without subscriptions till launch or you continue to introduce content to keep the subscribers in game and provide some surety to those of us paying the subs that there is still a commitment from those involved to build the game as it was proposed and that we will still be maintaining our progress when the client goes live.

As far as DRM goes I think the addition of a cracking mechanic, take hardware with a scrip, put it into the cracking machine and it takes time to break the encryption and supplies the element back at the end with DRM removed. in that way you could also have a machine to encrypt the elements in the first place, everything comes with t1 crypto and you have to increase the encryption using the same machine, character skills can then be used to increase the tier of the encryption/decryption taking longer and decreasing the time to crack respectively. This generates a skill contest between the maker and the breaker adding to the universe depth while not penalising makers that happen to have a ship sold to a bad pilot or straight competitor's smurf.