0.23 was the feature that made the game excessively difficult for many but not all. My personal view is that NQ needs to be focusing on adding features to the game that make it fun and enjoyable for the community to even have the energy to get involved in.
"There's no where to go but up from here"
I'm going to make this claim: If NQ doesn't push to make this game fun, to offset the difficulties they've created it will not survive long after launch.
Many people don't like coming home from work to do more work. It's what won't make money for NQ's DU to survive as a game. The only thing left to do would be to sell the technology and close up shop and move on to the next project.
This hardball approach to the game is the reason why people get up and walk away. If there's any one lesson that players and NQ should've realized by now is that when you lean to hard to one side or the other it creates this initial implementation of the game that costs us both carebears and PVPers... basically community members, and friends. On a larger scale it costs NQ subscriptions which means they get less money during beta.
I can agree with this 100%. There will ALWAYS be groups of people who will "no-life" an mmo and get further ahead faster than many others simply because they're in a position to do so.
The point of smaller sized ships comes with boons that L core ships do not possess:
L core ships accelerate slower (typically) and legitimate PVP l-core ships will not be seen in atmospheric areas.
XS,S and Medium core ships are easier to make atmo capable and the smaller sized ships are able to act as faster haulers vs the mediums (if properly designed)
When Energy mechanics come into the light I'm almost certain we'll see the field shift to ship designs take on a more thoughtful approach vs. the brick shits you see today.
For those who build the luxury ships means they put in the hundreds to thousands of game hours scanning, mining and refining and crafting the T5 everything to have that ship. As you mentioned earlier there's ALWAYS going to be people who will push for the absolute best of everything. The matter of balancing is a common denominator across all MMOs.
I actually agree with certain aspects of this point. Having an L-core means you possess the ability to take care of it from start to finish. You're able to field a crew to manage the power, handle fuel costs when travelling and deal with the PVP costs when in combat. Loss of elements should come at a price, one that makes PVP both enjoyable and have you stop briefly to consider how much of a risk you're taking by going "all-in" on this engagement. This balancing act is important for NQ to consider because while you want to ensure there's a risk you don't want the risk to be so overwhelming that people just say "Fuck this shit I'm out" at every opportunity to PVP or even travel outside the safezone. (Again, going back to being too extreme on anything leads to people not playing the game or subscribing and telling their friends, don't bother until they... NQ... gets their shit together).
To this nugget, no, the schematic prices were insanely high... again they leaned TOO FAR to one extreme rather than starting low and then slowly turning up the heat over time. This has been a constant thing every time they've implemented something new in DU where they've gone too far to one side or the other and the game just sucked horribly. ATV would even tell them, "Don' t do this, and don't do that" but the Devs wouldn't listen and push out the bullshit anyway. As a result the community would go into an uproar. They did it several times during alpha 1,2 and 3 and here we are during beta experiencing the same thing again. Each time they've done it the activity in the community dropped dramatically shortly after seeing the changes they put in were done so leaning too far to one extreme or the other.
As far as the implementation of schematics? There have been mixed views on it. I do feel there could've been a much more fun an immersive way to implement it, that wouldn't have been this overwhelmingly complicated thing that caused an already hurting community to lose so many people.
As far as omni factories go, people will always go for aiming to produce everything the most efficient way possible in a move to swallow up everyone else. Similar to the PVP front where you'll always have someone going for T5 everything.
As forth the entirety of this piece goes, it leans WAAAAY TOO FAR to one side and makes the game more grindy than it already is. Overall I think DU has hit a pivotal point in grindiness to actual gameplay and I'm sorry but schools of thought like this, while well meaning, only serve to drive more of the community away.
Examples that drove away the community during Alpha (and yes I understand it's alpha):
Implementing Industry for the first time with high costs
Implementing PVP with excessive bugs
Fixing bugs after nearly half a year of the community dealing with the most game breaking ones for both Industry and PVP
Locking every single element behind talents, thus preventing players from being able to test the game out at all
Implementing Talent system with excessive bugs that ATV attempted to point out.
NQ taking well over 3 months to drop the price of AMMO when both ATV and the growing pvp community told NQ within the first 2 weeks of PVP industry that the cost was far too high.
There's some merit here I feel but again... adjusting the difficulty is leaning far to deep into the extreme side. People who think adjusting the difficulty are missing the mark on making the game fun vs. more tedious. There needs to be more fun ways for people to engage in a difficult mechanic to entice them to venture down the road to begin with. If something isn't fun people will grind themselves into not wanting to play the game and as a result will unsubscribe.
Again... people are calling for the game to be more difficult will only find themselves playing this game alone. Eventually their own friends will walk away and will begin to see NQ close up shop because they went the route of making a "NOT FUN" subscription based game thinking everyone wants to sign up for a grind that yields very little FUN.
Let's identify the ways you're able to make money in the game if there were NO OTHER PLAYERS AROUND:
Daily rewards
Selling ores to bots
Because these 2 faucets are the only sources of income in the game, then when there ARE players around what will the sources be then? Other players? No, because there will be many greedy individuals looking to gobble up every known piece of quanta in the game and everyone will be too poor to buy anything. This will force people to once again go back to mining and making their own stuff.
AGAIN, leaning TOO FAR to one extreme or another here.
Now THIS has some solid merit. If NQ implemented a suggested cost/value to the cargo onboard a ship that you aimed to sell on the markets that would help people identify a relative price they should sell their goods at on the markets. Not everyone is an economist and has degrees in the area. However, when people receive a suggestion from "On-high" they tend to go with what's suggested and place based on it. "Word of mouth" by way of NQ suggested prices based on calculated time spent flying/mining tends to go a long way potentially creating a legitimate economy.
Similar to EVE... (A game that's been going 15+ years) and virtually every MMO out there, everyone in various aspects of the game will "Follow the meta". Balancing is a constant thing that occurs in every game with every new feature. So telling NQ to do X,Y,Z to prevent balancing is just going to fall on deaf ears.
As mentioned before, XS,S,M ships will prove to be far more viable come atmo pvp. As the weight of Ammo currently takes a toll on ships and their storage capability ships designed for atmo combat have to be designed with some serious considerations. Even with full T5 cargo talents the weight and volume of ammo in it's current state takes up vast portions of storage room and with both core locked weapons and surface area chance to hit, forces pvpers to design ships that are actual ships and not blocks of bullshit with tons of weapons all over.
Once energy mechanics come in, you're going to see a difference in how ships are built and how long they take to be finished.
