Metsys

a bit confused here. If they update with the tactical map is to drop next week, how come NQ cannot show off their own working ingame version and instead they need to photoshop a screenshot of the UI of Elite:Dangerous. I'd rather see their take on this than a proof of concept they need to lift from another game's functioning ingame UI.

Strongly disagree. Building within the confines of the PvP environment, making designs that both push the limits and still look good, balancing compromises across the board, is far more interesting for me as a ship builder than making yet another hauler or warp shuttle. You work with cross sections, keeping an eye on mass the whole time so you can keep your max speed as high as possible, as a fast ship has many advantages over a slow one. You keep an eye on thrust, because the more Gs of thrust you can manage, the faster your ship will accelerate and reach the top speed. But more engines for most thrust means more weight and thus lower top speed. Using more military engines or higher-tier military engines means more fuel consumption. Your decision on which weapon-loadout you equip your ship with also impacts the ship's mass and thus its overall performance. If you pick cannons, you pick close-range weapons that require being able to catch up to targets and get in close to them quick, but cannon ammo is relatively heavy compared to other weapon types. So now you fight the compromises of best-as-can-be top speed, thrust and also your ship's dps. In contrast you can go big tanky battleship, where top speed falls out of the equation and it's all up to the rest of the stats, with focus less on quickness but how tanky you can make the ship. Also, for the most part, ignores cross sections. THIS requires you to find creative solutions. It provides challenge. You build a million LEGO things that all do the same, how dull would that be. What an uninformed statement of someone who does not know what they are talking about. Always so quick to judge when you lack the insight to know better. All I see here is someone who is willingly not involving themselves with PvP pinning all the blame and all their issues with the game onto this aspect of the game, because that's the easy thing to do. Addition of PvP and their future plans to add more mechanics to it is not something bad, just because you feel whatever you enjoy in this game feels neglected for it. NQ is incredibly slow developing this game, most of what they do nowadays is rosey talk of a dream-like future while at the same time shooting down community feedback to what the community wants to see, saying it's not planned, not happening, not possible, or whatever else excuses they can find. That is on NQ though, not on the fact that PvP exists in this game.

No XL cores because those would be bad for performance. Too many elements it would need to load. Okay then give us larger-tier elements so we don't need to spam them? Not priority, not happening. NQ shoots themselves in the foot and then point at their wound as an excuse why they cannot walk further. The reason we use L and XL engines instead of a million XS engines is convenience and so that don't HAVE to spam all the XS engines. They would also cause severe performance issues, understandably. But you gave us larger elements to avoid that issue. Only that you stopped halfway through, with some flight elements not going larger than M and requiring us to spam a multitude of them to get the required performance out of our flying constructs. And now NQ points the finger at that and the resulting performance issues to justify saying NO to XL cores while at the same time saying larger elements to tackle that issue are not on their scopes either...

Player numbers and specifically PvP player numbers are very low, we're in a sub-to-play early access beta stage game. The whole fight around Gamma Alien Core had around 150 constructs involved. You compare it to fully launched, decade-long running game that doesn't come with the uncertainty of the terrain DU is right now. Not sure how the lack of players and a lack of unified opposition of the players towards a big adversary like Legion is "bad game design". Lack of marketing engagement to create hype or whatnot to bring in players might be NQ's fault, but it's not a question of game design in that aspect. Where I do blame NQ here is that they didn't do anything with the Gamma fight. They could have made a video of sorts to promote it, show how PvP actually plays out in their game compared to the false advertising they do with their youtube videos on PvP. Get some info from the parties involved, backed by the data of the server and pull it off documentary style, generating some hype and maybe moving people to involve themselves with it, to at least check it out.

Still quoting JC despite him being out of the picture for quite a while now and also for good reason, probably. He made many promises, but NQ is not beholden to the promises of an ex-employee. Leadership changed, so did their decision making. I am not saying for the better, but a difference nonetheless.

Of course they are. We're years ahead on talents than anyone who'd come to play at launch, who'd expect a fresh game (since, hey, the game just launched). A wiped game will give the impression of a fresh world to inhabit. And let's be realistic, it'll drive anyone with any competitive sense away to hear that they already missed out big time because they didn't spend money on this game years ago. There is no way anyone would be willing to pick up a freshly launched game when they hear that quite some players are 2 years ahead of them in trained talents. If they don't wipe at all, then it's a different horse. They'd come into a game world they know is already inhabited and has been so for years. And with that comes the understanding that the players who comitted to inhabiting this world before them will also be vastly ahead in progress. That's kinda what we have now, any new player right now is well aware of all the players that came before them, that it enables them to buy all kinds of stuff on the market, because players trailblazed ahead to make buying everything possible. With a wipe, we all start from scratch. Everyone needs everything for themselves or their orgs mainly. Everyone will be in the gold rush, everyone will be building. But with 2 years worth of talents on some of all the people digging through the dirt again, they will have a clear advantage that wont feel fair. We'll all be back in the dirt but us backers will be vastly overpowering the newbies and leave them in the dirt, and that will make it feel unfair to them

These are digital goods that you didn't pay to own. You pay to access them. None of this you have any ownership rights to. They could decide to shut down the game tomorrow and all you have would be gone too. You have no legal grounds. You WILLINGLY pay money to play this game in early access and they never gave you any written contractual statement that they wont wipe. The hours you put into the game can be chalked up as your enjoyment out of this early access title that you paid for. Please don't clown yourself with wild statements about lawyers and legality like this

Hm so it took 2 weeks to answer 4 questions... To be fair: Entropy went deep on the future for PvP question. It's a broad topic and it's good to hear that they have some more ideas in mind, namely adding more mechanics to give it more depth (remote shield healing given as an example to consider), but that they also wanna look at the base again, that they have. Voxel HP, CCS and shield tanking require some more balance passes, but we're getting there eventually, I hope. Hopefully turn speed is among such balance checks, as larger, heavier ships have a hard time keeping up with the fast pace of current fleet battles (needing excessively long times to turn). As a PvPer, this week was satisfactory in getting some answers for what concerns me personally in my DU gameplay. Now you guys just finally need actions to follow your words. Because we all know, actions speak louder than words. And we're already 2 weeks into a completely disfunctional radar issue, which makes PvP near impossible to play out right now anyway, no matter what rosey future you paint.

Gotta jump in here. I brought a bigger battleship lately to an Alien Core defense. Apart from radars not working I had a hard time turning my ship into the direction of the enemy, as they nerfed adjustors and turning for bigger, heavier ships to a degree that makes larger ships being involved in combat almost unreasonable. It takes me about 40+ seconds to turn a ship around, over 20s just to turn by 90°. Nano is one thing, but that doesn't include all L cores. And the bigger battleship I brought, with it's 50mil CCS, is meant to voxel tank and survive multiple vents (rare active shield), so I think it very much fits into the overarching topic.

PvP is literally unplayable. This back-end radar change broke more than it could hope to do good. This needs fixing ASAP. No transponders was one thing but not even remotely half as bad as the current radar situation

Hmm we definitely didn't lose 35 ships within Legion. You guys sure you didn't accidentally shoot eachother too?

I wonder if NQ has any data on this fight. I am sure they had some eyes on it. Maybe they can pin-point how many ships and players were involved

That's exactly the point of the transponders though, basicly giving your real-time feedback on who is friend and who is foe. If we didn't use third-party programs (namely communication tools like teamspeak and discord) we wouldn't really have had a way to identify friend or foe at all as defenders. It was a major issue, specifically as the defending party, because enemy ships slipped through multiple times and shot the alien core again, resetting the combat timer back to 10mins and preventing the shields to regenerate. Might have been somewhat fun for this specific encounter, maybe. Or provide an interesting challenge. But this should NOT become the norm or even intended gameplay. Having your alien core be prone to attacks, having to be available for defense all the time, having to basicly have a multitude of enemies in DU simply by holding alien core(s), having to field the finances and production time of base shields and warp beacons, aswell as extractors and everything around that, is enough cost already. Burdening the defenders with bullshit such as (potential) intentional transponder scrambling goes a bit far imho

These dog fighting close range ship battles have never existed in this game, only inside NQs little falsely advertised trailers. And that is why I called them out for it back then already, as did other PvPers. This is false advertising and people like you fell for it. This kinda star wars dogfight in space stuff was never a thing and wouldn't even work well with the flight model we have ingame (a fairly realistic one).

well, despite what people outside of the PvP crowd think, this was actually hella fun! The bugged radars and transponders frustratingly made this incredibly difficult and challenging to see who the enemy is, and who might just one of your allies. We had ships from S to M to L sizes all represented, from the small cross section fast strike crafts to the larger L core battleships. We saw smaller ships trying to utilize their higher max speeds and we saw the bigger ships using their voxel to tank. It was a slug-fest the kind we haven't seen before and that brought excitement with it among us PvPers. Personally I chalked up 8 kills (2x S, 5x M, 1x L) that I either partook in or even decidedly have gotten myself, but among the stress and hectic of the battle I couldn't save the positions on several of the wrecks from those that tried to flee the engagement zone but did not make it. I am sure there are still lots of wrecks like this, spread round the Alien Core. We had up to 150 constructs, cored or not, directly around the Alien Core battle zone. With all the fighting slightly around it, it might be yet more that were directly engaged in the fight.

The slowing forums is people realizing their words fall onto deaf ears that say "we hear your concerns" all the same. We can complain and talk about all the issues here and suggest whatever we want, it just doesn't make a difference. This thread here alone is people voicing and talking about the wipe issue for a month now, making suggestions or stating opinions and observations on specific problems around the wipe. And NQ has not said a thing about it all this time, despite players begging for any word on the matter. So here we are, talking to eachother and at eachother without the power to make it change anything. And with that realization comes apathy and activity slows down.

And with that you add extra weight to your ship, making it perform worse. At least it wont turn any worse, since your ships turns like shiet if it is above 1.75kt mass, same as a ship with 40kt mass does. Because that makes sense. But that's a whole other story...

NQ is just in over their heads. They made some server tech that splits the main server frame into smaller sub-grids and splits those again and again, should increased activity or density in those grids require more performance that justifies its own shard. And with that tech-demo, they should have refined and sold it to a proper game studio that knows what it's doing and might actually properly apply it to a game. Instead, NQ vowed to take this tech and use it themselves to make their own game: Dual Universe. And here we are, years later, with a half-baked, issue-ridden game with bare-bones gameplay loops, a fancy tech demo at best. And funny enough, it already shows that their tech isn't as holy-grail as they'd want it to be, severe server issues have plagued us recently more than usual and desync has been an issue since the beginning. New features are always half-baked, not properly tested, more often than not break something, feedback apparently not taken. And the lack of communication takes the piss on all that. Just look at all the issues posted on diverse discord servers with just the obstruction and placement of the radars with this change. Free-floating radars, some meters away from their constructs, still show obstructions in some cases. This wasn't tested on a PTS or anything.

1 week for 4 questions answered. Wow! Totally worth the wait...

Well, Hello Games created insane amounts of hype through social media and interviews which fell flat drastically upon launch of No Man's Sky. Despite that, they still made lots of cash from pre-orders and all the shabang even if MANY, MANY people refunded. It gave the studio a cushion of funds upon which they could sit to rework their game and actually make it something resembling a functioning game to the decent game it is now, with people warming up again to it after it could only have gotten better with the state it was in at launch. DU does not have that kinda hype, not that kinda cushion. I predict the launch will see an increase in player numbers compared to now, but that wouldn't be hard to achieve. But generally it wont be that many new players that will also stick (especially since it's a sub-based MMO compared to buy once, play forever). A sub-fee alone deters players. Best case, just like EVE, it will have a dedicated, but in the grand scheme of MMOs, small playerbase that will be enough to keep it running, with occasional updates but nothing that will ever lift it into such numbers that it would fund any drastic overhauls or reworks.

So you complain you cannot make another beacon but then at the end come to the conclusion that a wipe would delete a beacon you'd have produced anyway. I don't quite understand what you complain about... And NQ seems to see beacons as a very late-game item that orgs will have to work towards so, just like all exotic elements, they locked it behind alien cores which require cooperation of orgs to extract plasma from. The reason no plasma is available at the markets yet is simply because the very little plasma the PvP orgs currently in control of the alien cores could extract they need for themselves first. Once control has been held over these alien cores for longer (now possible since first space base shields finished production today), we might see possible surplus plasma on the market in the future weeks. But don't count on it.

I am not too sure how to read this post, since it's been a no-brainer to run L shields and lots of voxels on the large ships to retain tankiness. By nerfing the shield and introducing max speed limitation to 20.000 km/h for the heavy ships all they did is cement this: You get voxel tanky with a big bulky ship and keep your L shield on it, the more voxel HP and thus core stress, the more venting processes you can survive once your shields are depleted. Smaller shields like M or S shields only come into consideration if you want to retain any sort of max speed or push your max speed as high as you can get it, since you will want to aim for as low ship mass as possible. But that includes a completely different playstyle of utilizing the advantage of being faster than the enemy and disengaging at a speed at which the enemy cannot keep up, which allows you to safely vent and basicly weave in and out of the fight, taking advantage of your superior speed. With that in mind, tankiness from voxels becomes kinda irrelevant on those smaller, faster ships though, unless you wanna survive a few shots after losing your shields on those kinda ships too

So if I understand this thread right you want the people to not have max speed if they cancel their warps but instead come to a full stop if they do. In practice this would only screw you over even more if you were the slowboater and the guy is warping past you and then cancels the warp. Now with Athena they will likely be faster than you anyway, reaching higher top speeds than your hauler above 1.5kt total weight could go, which is about 20.000 km/h. If you have the warper immediately stop and drop to 0km/h at canceling warp, they wont have to slowly decelerate and turn around and whatnot but your 20.000 km/h slowboating speed would basicly push you into their range and drop you back onto their radar pretty much immediately because they already warped ahead of you anyway. Even if they dropped the opposite direction, you practically going 20k km/h into the opposite direction, them now being at 0km/h means they can turn around and catch you a lot easier since, again, their ship will likely go something like 32.000 km/h max speed with high G forces of thrust compard to your 20.000 km/h slowboating hauler. So you're asking to get buttfk'd harder? I am not sure where you're going with this...

any of your green posts I have to read on topics of pvp have more than questionable content. The game's engine already struggles as is, dynamic real-time action combat is not an option. Small ships buzzing around big ships taking out subsystems or something like in star wars wont ever be a thing. Also as soon as you implement kamikaze as a viable strat it will become the only strat. You will have people strap their alts onto xs cores with just a rocket engine to ram into other ships. That is no tactic and it feels unfair at most. What purpose is there in building a thought-out ship if any moron can strap an engine to a core and ram it into you. We currently already have the issue of certain pvpers spamming XS cores (currently to mainly spam enemy radars), we certainly don't need these people to weaponize those cores into ramming them into us. Also, again, there is engine restrictions. We already have severe rubberbanding, chances you would actually manage to line up a ramming are slim because your target will rubberband 20km back and forth. All that aside, you missed the topic. This post was to kick loose a discussion about the importance of cross section with a look into current pvp meta reflecting it. Not about the delusional hopes and dreams of how you want pvp to reflect star wars

I spent some time thinking about this issue, especially since I am actually an advocate for the importance of cross section (even if, ironically, my ships as shown above only conform to small cross section along 1 axis). The idea I came up with would be to limit cross section effectiveness to a threshold, to create a sort-of "deminishing return". Say you have an L core. The lowest cross section "effectiveness" you'd reach with that idea would be if you get, say, 800m² of cross section. No matter how much smaller you manage to build than that, it wont lower the hit probs anyone gets against you any further than they'd have if you had 800m² flat. I would apply the same to the other cores, M for example I would say 400m² and smaller. So if you have 180m², 250m² or 390m², you'd have the same hit probs against you and would only INCREASE hit probs against that M core when you start going beyond 400m² cross section. Cross-core-size you already have penalties and bonuses to your hits probs and that should remain. NOW you would say: "BUT Metsys, that would just mean people build 800x800x800 voxel boxes!" to which I say that you'd add quite some weight at that point, even if you choose relatively light voxel, but that you are kinda correct. Also those stats aren't set in stone, I was just giving example numbers. But the build zone would still be a lot smaller than the full core and should, to a degree, still affect the chances of getting hit. But just large enough to allow some creative freedom to fashion something that is more than just a box. A similar idea that was given here before that I think might overall be a better way to prevent the "box" is a calculation on volume. I would still maintain a sort of deminishing return on effectiveness, but calculate the threshold with the VOLUME of the ship. In fact, this might be an even better idea. Let's do an example: Let's take the M core numbers I gave and go 400x400x400 vs a rough estimation of a "stick-like" ship like the one shown by OP, 180x600x560 (this would be small frontal, but a long ship so the other 2 would be bigger). The result: 400x400x400 = 64.000.000m³ vs 180x600x560 = 60.480.000m³ If you go by volume then, the sticky ship would look better, be within the "volume threshold" for deminishing return and even be a bit under it, so you could even add a bit onto the ship. We'd just need a method to see the volume of the ship too, to be able to build ships to remain inside the volume threshold on purpose. TL;DR: I suggest an effectiveness threshold into a deminishing return for hit probs on small cross section, but that alone might still result in boxes. So I also suggest doing this threshold calculation on volume instead of surface orientation, giving some made-up example numbers.