Pathalogical Functor

People were worried that builders would all abandon the multiplayer world and retreat into creative mode. In that case, NQ could add an optional "creative only" flag to blueprints allowing builders to trade designs and have fun flying them without any risk of people taking them into PvP areas.

Safe zones solve the problem if the only conceivable PvP actions are limited to shooting. Consider a situation where someone buys a ship from a builder, flies it into the PvP zone, and gets their ship seized by pirates. Are the pirates forced to abide by the DRM imposed by the builder, or is the builder at risk of getting their Lua scripts etc. "pirated" by the pirates? Either option feels like a compromise to me. Pirates will feel they caught the ship fair and square and it's theirs to do with as they please, including reverse engineering. The builder hasn't left safe space and will feel it's completely unfair that his business is now subject to piracy. Similar ideas apply to other non-combat forms of PvP such as market manipulation, scams, and even just building structures which create a navigational hazard. Of course I'm not saying it's impossible to strike a balance between the two sides. It's just going to require a disappointing amount of compromise for one or both sides. EVE chose the "safe space isn't completely safe" option. I expect DU will compromise in the other direction, but creative mode could in theory be used as a way to keep both sides happy (or at least happier).

This might be a controversial opinion, but I don't think it's a problem if the community ends up split. It's never going to be possible to reconcile the wishes of players who want to play in a dangerous universe full of risk, violence, and competition over limited resources with those of players who just want a limitless sandbox where PvP, griefing, copying, etc. are all banned. I don't believe you can have "Second Life in space" coexisting along side EVE-style skullduggery and piracy without some pretty terrible compromises on both sides.

I don't think playing tedious mini-games in an NPC owned factory is a very appealing way of making money. It sounds even worse than working as a mining slave for a big organization. At least mining slaves get to work outdoors and maybe even pilot a ship from time to time. Also it runs totally counter to the goal of having a player-run economy.

What works for a NASA docking maneuver (cooperative, two-body problem in a controlled environment) won't work quite so well in a multi-ship PvP engagement where there are far more tactical decisions to be made. If you're just ganking an AFK freighter then sure, the autopilot will perform a nice intercept burn and drop you at your guns' optimal range then automatically bring you up along side the wreck so you can loot it. Now try designing a user interface which lets you tell your autopilot, "Get in weapons range of ships A and B, while avoiding the short-range weapons on C and maintaining at least 0.05 rad/s angular velocity around D to avoid getting hit by its heavy guns", then try using that interface in the middle of battle. Anyway, as long as engine control is possible people will still end up automating those kind of intercept maneuvers. It will just require clicking in a user interface to tell the AI what direction the target is in (and possibly its range, if that isn't available through the API). There's no Lua API for the ore scanner either, but people still managed to write scripts to make quadrilateration of ore nodes trivial.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with automating mining, but it should be limited to PvP zones. That way it becomes a source of player interaction and fun rather than just a way to get resources while AFK. The number of auto-miners a player or org can deploy will be limited by their ability to defend them. If auto-miners can be attached to ships then a solo player could let a Lua script manage the mining element while he/she operates the ship's guns to fend off pirates. It would fit very well with asteroid/comet mining.

It might somewhat work in safe zones as long as there's a way to hold collateral in escrow until the package is safely delivered. It definitely won't work in PvP zones (if/when PvP is fixed) no matter how it's implemented. Even in EVE, which has a fairly well developed contract system, courier contracts outside of safe space are usually just used as a way to scam newbies.

One possible solution to the immediate market problems would be to allow items to be recycled into their raw materials, with some percentage loss. This would make it profitable to buy severely under-priced items, recycle them, and sell them to bots. Of course it doesn't make sense to recycle pure aluminum into bauxite ore, so the bot buy orders would need to be changed to match the most basic outputs of recycling.

I suspect the bots are there to maintain some semblance of progression for new players. Aside from the daily login bonus, those bots are the only source of new money in the game. Schematics are a huge money sink, so without money faucets you get currency deflation. Deflation rewards people for hoarding their money instead of spending it, driving down prices even more. This means that a new player would need to mine for even longer before they could afford enough schematics to set up a proper industry.

I don't agree with this. NQ want players to specialize. I know I'll never be able to build a really beautiful large ship, but if I have the quanta I can buy one off the market from a player who took the time learning voxelmancy and spent hours getting every curve perfect. I might not be much good at PvP, but if I have the quanta I can always hire some mercenaries to fight on my behalf. Why not do the same for programmers writing Lua scripts? Dumbing the game down by nerfing or removing specializations which are "too hard for the average player" just seems insane. Also, I'd like to make the point that writing human-level AI is really, really hard. If the PvP mechanics are so simple that a 1000 line Lua script can perform better than an experienced human then those mechanics are awful and need to be reworked. DU isn't a first-person shooter which can be won by a simple aimbot. Just as in EVE, the outcome of an engagement should be largely decided before the first shot is even fired.

It's not the PvP players fault that the meta is like that. The whole voxel aspect of ship design needs a serious overhaul. The situation with PvE ships is actually even worse. The mechanical performance of any PvE ship can be improved by deleting all the voxels. In fact, if certain posts on reddit are to be believed, even having symmetric wing elements on your ship reduces its performance. Anyone who is flying a nice-looking ship is playing sub-optimally in terms of resource efficiency. The only reason PvP ships look worse than PvE ships is because they are under more pressure to play optimally. An inefficient hauler wastes a bit of fuel, but an inefficient PvP ship gets totally destroyed. If you want cool looking PvP ships then there are only two solutions: 1. Make voxels have no impact on performance (easy to implement, but a waste of a cool feature). 2. Make "pretty" configurations perform better than "ugly" ones (hard to implement efficiently, and will probably need tweaking every time a new ugly meta emerges).

This is a good idea, especially if the timer depends on the ship's mass. It makes sense and improves balance if a smaller ship can get away faster than a large ship. Any efforts to introduce balance by nerfing Lua automation are fundamentally misguided. It's just another way of adding un-fun grind to the game. Watching a sensor display for hours on end is even more painfully boring than mining. Forcing the player to choose between expense, boredom and death is not an interesting choice. Instead balance should come in the form of trade-offs in ship design. Conventional atmospheric/space flight already has some nice trade-offs between cargo capacity, agility, armor, and firepower (although certain aspects are very broken). The same sort of trade-offs should apply to warp flight. EVE has some nice mechanics involving align time, warp disruptors and warp core stabilizers. For example, it should be possible to build a large freighter which takes a long time to enter warp but has a well shielded warp drive and plenty of armor making it difficult to disable. To counter that PvP players would need to bring either a lot of firepower (for a quick kill) or several specialized electronic warfare ships. Equally viable should be the tactic of building small, nimble "blockade runner" ships which can't carry a lot of cargo but can out-maneuver all but the most specialized pirate vessels. Another tactic would be to invest in very powerful sensors. If you can see the pirates coming from further away, it gives you more time to enter warp before they can get in range. To counter that the pirates would need to build smaller ships (which are inherently less capable in a fight) or invest in expensive stealth systems. As you can see there are tons of opportunities for balance which don't involve intense boredom.

This is a highly amusing turn of events. Not only does real life DRM cause all sorts of problems for legitimate users, but now DU's in-game implementation is doing exactly the same.