Hazaatan

It won't be tomorrow. Gotta give the big orgs time to rebuild their MU and TU stocks...

Your dedication and belief in NQ is commendable, if misguided, but if NQ don't take this forum seriously, why should we? Heck, NQ barely even respond to tickets, let alone engage the wider customer base in constructive discourse.

Without NQ taking part, though, there is no reason to waste time formulating insightful comments full of detail about how the game is broken. It's not like other people reading those comments will help NQ sort their shiite out.

I have formulated careful posts in the past, collected and collated information into easily readable lists, helped other forum members and was once a very constructive member of the community. But that time is well and truly over. Other than taking our money, it's crystal clear that NQ have neither the will nor inclination to engage with us and haven't in any meaningful way since early alpha.

This throwaway addition of a single planet, identical to previous planets with all their obvious problems intact is absolute proof they haven't learnt a thing.
 
Periodically, heck even randomly rotating ores, making them far more common, removing the 15 minute timer and replacing it with a dowsing capability that simply points in the closest 45 or 90 degree segment of a compass towards the densest cluster if one exists within, say ten tiles (adjustable by skills and tier of the territory scanner). I don't know I'm not a game dev, but that seems like more fun than what we currently have and I just pulled that out of my arse.

At the end of the day, fun should be the number 1 goal of any game, above every other goal.

lore. that's a good one. This game's lore makes about as much sense as a knitted condom.

NQ: Build your new civilization... A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity... (hmm... maybe wrong franchise, but the gist is right 🤣)
 
Also NQ: But we're going to cripple the fcuk out of you with taxes on ABSOLUTELY EVERYFKKNTHING and there will be more bots than players.
And of course there are no player driven markets...  
 
But uh... civilization... so, yay?!?
 
Also, metaverse but no VR or wand support. 🤨
Heck, not even HOTAS support in a space game. ROFL.

Not very meta.

That explains it! The reason they are making the game unplayable is to keep the player count low enough for the "Free" tier on Cloudfront. It all makes sense now!!

So the cost of DU is not really CPU cycles but CloudFront - DU uses Cloudfront to push out all the voxel data. Any construct or terrain change you make is stored in cloudfront and pushed out to other clients as needed and then stored as cache by your client, at least till the cache is invalidated. Just how much data is pushed is easily tracked by checking your cache size folder. For the estimated costs it's pretty easy - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
 
You can confirm this easily by the way - 
 
 
Keep in mind that NQ likely has a contract with AWS that is for negotiated pricing, it's pretty rare for any significant users to just pay the list price.
 
That's why mining had to go and that's why constructs have to get destroyed if not tied to a paid account - else they are forever sent out to other clients and NQ pays for it.
 
Tracking millions of autominers is just a bunch of rows in a table - it's not a significant cost really. 
 
As to why NQ made the AM timer 24 hours instead for 20h like the "daily" timers in many games - it's because they have a consistent history of failure to learn from the mistakes made by other games.
 
"Daily" timers being either set to a specific reset time or less than 24h to avoid the constant 'shift right' for the players has been standard practice for some time in other games.
 
I had previously posted a breakdown of what I estimated NQ to be paying for hosting and how many players they needed to cover their staffing costs with the profit assuming France average DEV costs + taxes - and that post got deleted and I took a 3m ban for it sooo uhh not doing that again - you're welcome to draw your own conclusions though...admittedly I did also state that you shouldn't buy into DU because of that data because well...uhh...DOA.

And people wonder why at some point I stopped giving constructive feedback, and all that is left is to just straight up make fun of NQ.

The devs have been ignoring the forums for 7+ years...  Any good ideas you guys come up with have already been covered and ignored several times.   Have a nice day.

It's pretty clear that the design purpose of asteroid mining is to force us to be undefended targets for the griefers - or call them gankers if you like. Useless wastes of air, IAC.
 
Of course NQ wants to discourage sz mining.

Temporary. LOL.
Oh you sweet summer child. 
 
Five years has seen very little positive change and much revert to little more than it was in the Alpha. 
 
Why should the consumers who are paying to use a product be the ones responsible for designing the product?
 
Henry Ford once said ask a person what they want and all they would have said was a faster horse. 
 
in any case even though I’m not a game designer, I have already given my idea and opinions a hundred times. But just like everyone else who has, they have been ignored.  There is zero meaning giving ideas at this point in time. 
 
zero.  The game will get made in whatever way NQ choose, since they are building their own game, not our game. 
 
 

The whole premise of “entirely player driven and built” is a laughing stock.  This was actually a reply deep in a thread somewhere so I just thought I’d dig it out and post it here. Sorry if you’ve read this already. 
 
bots control our hex-rent. Bots control our schematics. Bots control our sales taxes. Bots hand out and receive missions. Bots sell pretty much everything anyone needs. Bots buy stupid almost unlimited amounts of ore and bots hand out a daily stipend. And bots control whether or not we can fire weapons. 
 
what is there actually left to play and strive for other than building?
 
why is there no energy required to run anything? Why is there no oxygen requirements for our habitats?
why is there no food or farming? 
 
why are there no threatening box life forms that raid our camps?
 
why are there no mysteries beyond a few lowest possible effort alien cores?
 


 
what an absolute joke. 

Trouble is, they're a symptom of NQ's approach to "developing" the game. And they're inexcusably poor. They're just busywork.

Schematics are just stupid. Remove them already and fire the person that came up with that idea, thanks. 

1. Way too expensive to be considered a "useful" game loop
2. Only being craftable in inventory is beyond frustrating for your smaller/casual audience.

It will kill your game in the long run. How is money distributed to players? By selling ores to bots? *Insert big brain .jpg here*
So the entire goal of this game is to grind T1 ore to sell it to bots, to be able to afford schematics for their production. Buying stuff/parts from other players in the markets isnt worth it since they will put the schematic price on top.

I quit during alpha/beta when schematics were introduced and came back to review this on release. This system is still beyond garbage, considering I have to manually look up all the schematics needed for a product. Should at least give people the option to "Que up all required schematics for this element" button.

Cheers

Oh, just the game play aspects - like the XL Scanner I've been working on.  Takes 625 Uncommon Power supplies, at 4 minutes each - so 40 hours just for those parts.  That's fine, except I can't tell you how many times I've found it halted in the morning because some sub-component (Al-Fe was the latest) ran out of schematics.  Seems like I spend one hell of a lot of time just feeding Tier 1 product schematics into my factory.  I'm doing 250 at a time now, and still running out.
 
This is suppose to be fun, right?

Indeed, and the newly refreshed schematic system is even worse than the old.
 
-Time sink added
-Quanta sink added
-minigame put new schematic in the machine added
-copy reproduce poof schematics from thin air minigame added
 
Did i miss anything?

The person who came up with all the schematics thing can be credited for almost, if not truly, killing this game.
 
The way it was implemented was the worst possible way and a big eff you to all. 
 
All big streamers left after .23 and the game lost all it's relevance on YouTube and twitch. 

You me both... twas the 0.23 exodus of players.  I was 2 days away from my warp beacon to start cooking and came back to discover a 800,000,000 (yeah, if memory serves, it was 800M, later reduced to 200M) schematic fee to start up the warp beacon factory.  Left the game until a few weeks ago after that point.
 
Only good news:  once you start racking in quanta, just start making 12 hours of schematics before you call it a night.  Those T1 Product smelters will run for awhile is you load them with 500 schematics each.  Still feels its a crappy solution that just adds distraction and worse, frustration, to the game.  e.g.  it makes the game less fun to play, not more.

I'm an addicted player, although very grumpy about it.  I have 6 tiles on Alioth's south pole, within linking distance of the marketplace there.  All 6 are completely mined, and heavily produce Quartz - my main cash ore since my factory uses it the least.  Cash for taxes is not a problem.  Ore for building is.  I'm completely dependent on calibration charges now since I've already raided all the adjoining public tiles and stripped them of ore.  Really throttling me now.
 
So the 500K/week/tile isn't a problem for me, but sure would be if I, god forbid, only wanted to play a few hours a day (or *shudder* a few hours a week).  In that case, Sanctuary (if I was a backer), and Haven otherwise would be my only option. 
 
Whats making me grumpy:  Constantly running out of schematics!  Not particularly fun to finally get my XL assembler up and running just to discover a single run schematic takes 8 hours to build.  Just sucks the fun out of what is suppose to be a creativity game for me.
 
Oh, I've reported it as a bug a week ago, and of course have not heard back, but adjacency bonuses apparently don't apply on Sanctuary.

I don't have a problem with there being some money sinks, but the whole tile tax thing does seem badly thought out (like so many aspects of the game design).
 
I grabbed a nice tile on Alioth near District 3. I started building out my factory there, completely forgetting about the tax. A week later, boom - nothing working until I pay my 500k.
 
For now I've done it, but I'm seriously contemplating decamping the whole thing to Sanctuary, even though it will be a massive hassle. I'm not aiming to be making 10s of millions a week, so that rent is subtantial.
 
The stupid thing about this from a game design point of view is that I like being based around a relatively high population area like D3, as it means that there are people around most of the time, which gives me a sense that I'm actually playing an MMO - even if a lot of the time I'm just doing my own thing.
 
If I move everything to Sanctuary, I'll spend most of my time on my own (even though my tile there is also near the equivalent District 3, it is deathly quiet compared with Alioth).
 
So the net effect of this bit of game design is to discourage me from basing myself near other people - which does not seem like a positive for an MMO... 😕

NQ has you covered, introducing DAC, for all your needs! Just swipe right with your credit card! 😉
 

Well, almost a week into this.  Was really excited, but now it feels like all I do is pay taxes.  Taxes to add territories, Taxes to build anything non-trivial, trivial taxes to sell.  I can't tell you how many times I've run out of Tier 1 Product schematics after leaving for a bit of sleep just to discover I'm out of them again in the morning and nothing happened overnight.
 
Taxes every WEEK to keep what I've built.
 
Not feeling very good about this right now.
 
Update:  By "a week into this", that's after playing for years, disappearing after 0.23, and coming back about a month before launch to refresh the mechanics in my mind.

Yes.
Incompetence of an NQ Game Designer.
He is very stubborn and like a child.
If you find a glaring balance problem but he didn't think of it before you, it will upset him. He will block the subject for a very long time (6 months to 2 years).
Then it come back a bit later when he thinks you've forgotten and offer balancing.
 
 

Yeah if it makes you feel better this has been a constant problem since even before the beta. 

There a quite a few minerals and their derivatives that defy physics in this way and its silly.  Refined product should never weigh more than the sum of all its components.  I pointed this out at the beginning of BETA and everybody seemed to think I was crazy, so, dont expect to get any support.  It annoys me because a science fiction game should be based in science.  If you cant understand basic science such as 2kg plus 1 KG does not equal 6KG  then what the hell else is wrong.

Yes, completely agree. There are many little immersion breaking details like this. They are not catastrophic, but are a constant low level irritation. 

Having wood come from carbon and oxygen isn't unreasonable, those are the basic elements in most organic matter anyway (and hydrogen, but they want to keep the low level products 2 materials). 
 
I guess what annoys me is that the game does so much right: silumin, duralumin, inconel are all real alloys, for example. Of course I'm not expecting modeling real world properties or anything, but the idea that "you refine ores to get rid of the mass you don't want and get the pure element inside" is so basic it breaks my immersion a little bit when it's so obviously violated.