echa

It sits in their inventory looking pretty, duh. Wait, you think people would actually build the blueprint they bought?

And people like YOU are why this game is going to die. Don't tell other people how the game should be played or what to do in their free time. Removing gameplay options is almost never a good idea, especially when there's already so little to do in the first place. Have fun building your digital civilization with 12 people. The great thing about free markets and capitalism is nobody is required to pay for products they don't like. You and JC may not like the way people are playing the game but guess what, we're the ones paying NQ's bills. It doesn't matter why people left or if they were playing the "wrong" way. NQ is now missing that revenue stream and the game is missing the content those players could have produced.

While I'm sure he's an absolutely brilliant AI engineer, JC is utterly incompetent at game design. With pvp as broken as it is, there were really only 3 attractions to the game: mining, industry, and building. There's a reason everyone was building their own giga factory. There's simply nothing else to do. You could mine and sell ore then buy elements or mine and build your own industry. Most everyone opted for building their own industry because it's both easier and a more efficient use of time. They noticed that markets weren't being used so instead of adding more content to allow players to do something other than mining and industry they simply took away industry. You can't immediately remove 50% of a game's content overnight and expect everyone to be happy. I'm honestly shocked that NQ/JC either didn't anticipate the backlash or simply didn't care. What do we have now? Mine for ore, sell it, then build stuff. There's literally nothing else in the game. No way to make money besides mining. This patch should have been deployed after implementing additional mechanics for making money. As it stands now, you mine to sell ore (at continuously dropping prices thanks to supply & demand) or you do... nothing. I'm actually impressed. I haven't seen this kind of incompetence in game design since no man's sky and even that was arguably more fraud and deceit than incompetence.

The problem with this patch is it indicates that NQ fundamentally misunderstands their own game. They say they want a universe with a civilization created entirely by players. That requires.... players. When I first started playing the game and was still learning everything, I crashed my ship. I crashed many times. If I crashed close to my base, I'd respawn and run to the ship or take my little starter speeder and repair it. If I was far, I'd simply have to run far or get a ride from someone. It was annoying, sure, but my own fault for crashing and a result of the learning curve. The only difficulty I faced was getting scrap (trivial), getting back to my ship (trivial if potentially time-consuming), and repairing (again, trivial though time consuming). I could build all of the elements, voxels, and scrap myself and only needed to build them when I wanted to add to the ship. If I were starting the game now, what would I face? 1. Cannot build my own elements as industry is prohibitively expensive for new players so I'd have to buy both elements and honeycomb. 2. After 3 crashes my engines, adjustors, wings, etc are all broken. Since I can't craft them I have to go buy them again. After 5 the boxes break and again I have to go buy them. After every crash I'd need to buy a new core unit. 3. Since I'd have to buy all of my elements, experimenting with new ship designs becomes extremely difficult and expensive. NQ has effectively just told new players they're going to have to invest months upon months of tedious, endless grinding just to start playing the game as it was intended (and advertised). If I'd just started playing the game now, I'd quit after seeing my elements permanently broken and realizing I need to grind out even more ore to sell just to be able to rebuild my ship. If you're a current player or a member of a giant org you can easily get back to where you were before and continue playing. New players are going to be forced out of the game. A game like this requires a minimum critical mass of players to generate enough content to attract new players. This patch just virtually eliminated the stream of new players. I understand where NQ is coming from and why they made the changes they did. The problem is they did it in the worst possible way. They've mentioned adding multiple tiers/qualities of elements. Why not require schematics for T2+ and make them increasingly expensive as the tier increases? Keep T1 elements as they were; no up-front industry costs, no permanent destruction. New players can experiment with new ship designs and crash/repair endlessly while they learn the game. When they want bigger, better ships then they invest in the more expensive and life-limited higher-tier elements. With the game in its current post-patch state, I don't see it surviving until release. They've made it prohibitively difficult for new players and will likely never reach the critical mass of players necessary for the game to be successful.