DrDerp

So you plan to add to the thing you hate..... which is probably how most of that crap got there in the first place.  Making it worse in an effort to make it better.... do you work for the Government?  

They trashed any actual gameplay loops to give a reach around to the end game content and PVP orgs instead of addressing the core of the game like higher tier ore regeneration and the new player experience. Who cares about brutes bashing their faces against each other  when market tools are trash you cant create missions as an org. No way to insure a package other than collateral making people pay 300mil for a 100k profit. This game is a joke when it comes to prioritizing the order of importance. Why is there no deep surface mining experience, caves generate below -6000m why cant we explore those and get resources.  NQ needs to stop listening to the PVP orgs and make the game FUN.

The roadmap is achievable because its practically empty. This was honestly more disappointing than not releasing a roadmap. At least then we would hope for more girthy teasers.

A Supernova wiping the solar system ?
jokes aside. I like your idea and even only new planets would be great, nebulas, asteroid fields and so on sth. In the universe to make it worth traveling. But I ll think of sth wilder still.

There is important context here.
 
In ideal word we can imagine asteroid mining happening in some sort of asteroid field, where thousands of them floating, waiting to be found, scanned, minded, contested etc organic way, probably with some sort of respawn.
 
Yet, NQ on course to minimize any voxel-changing mining (cost cutting), so they absolutly not want people doing a lot of such mining (that will totaly happen with actual huge asteroid belt, especialy, god forbid, with any ship-based mining tools). So they squezeed whole feature to this, where they can conrollably drop minimum ammount of entities, and activity with them produce minimum money leaking.
 
So, yeah, its even whithout any pun, as said above, poor man solution. But I guess this will be now standard mode of desicion making. 
 
 

I agree, I also found the community engaged and helpful. Without them getting into the game would have been much harder.

Yeah i don't think i'm a fan of this idea.
 
It seems like they are trying to force some kind of battle royale situation where all the people who want to shoot at each other get dumped into the same area and blast the crap out of each other.  Honestly that's fine, i just don't think it should be lumped in with asteroid mining.
 
Usually i'm the first person to say that good gameplay is more important then "realism", but i'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this one.  Who is broadcasting the location?  is your own ship ratting you out? is the asteroid trying to defend itself?  Is Aphelia just bored and trying to make us kill each other?
 
What if instead of every single asteroid that gets discovered, being broadcast to ever player in the game.  Maybe once a day or once every few hours Aphelia broadcasts the location of a high value asteroid, that's somewhere in PVP space.  And then everyone can go all crazy trying to get there first and fight over it.
 
 
 
 

broad casting asteroids sounds like a bad idea in general
scanning system with a mix of real live skills ( know how to) and ingame character skills would be great to get a hint on an asteroids position.
maybe even with deviation, so that finding them could lead to an actual challenge for both miners and hunters, where the hunters have no guarantee that there is something to shoot and loot.

??
Lemme brimg some more of this! I am rooting for... wait whos fighting again? Russians vs. The rest? EU  vs. Bureaucrats?  capitalists vs. Libetarian?communists vs. Socialists? Ah who cares if someone goes down spectacularly. also im setting up an ingame snowballsystem bring your qantas, i'll waste them and you may label it according to your (political) needs

In return for the 0.25.
 
Hauling mission :
1) The packages are difficult to identify (do not know where they should be dropped off and by whom ect) ...
2) In PvP we can do nothing with these packages, and as they are often not identified it is more than laborious to ask for a possible ransom.
 
The Job Forum:
3) announcement too short in time
 
Question for 0.26 and future update.
 
Major minning overhaul:
4) Can we have more detail? What relationship will there be between the future means of obtaining resources (surface harvesting, automatic mining unit and asteroid) compared to the traditional mining that we know today?
 
Asteroid:
5) Will the asteroid system use the current land mining system? 400m manual scanner and hand-operated vein? Or will it be blocks of pure ore?
6) Even if seen some leaks on how the asteroid system is likely to work, can you officially explain the principle? Or what you want to go towards.
 
Balance change pvp :
7) These changes will only bring changes to the current mechanics? (radar range according to cores, chance of hit, resistance of voxels, balancing of life points)
? Or will these changes begin to address more in-depth issues? Limiting the quantities of elements on a ship? End of item stacking / glitching? Speed limit in combat?
9) What is the objective of this balancing? Where does NQ want to go?
 
Introduction of shields:
10) Will this new addition come with an overhaul / balancing of voxels on ships? Will it work in symbiosis with the voxels in a hull + shield system?

I think you need to educate yourself on what socialism actually is before making oddball suggestions like this.

What?...wait, why would we listen to an air conditioner?

I don't know your reply seems contradictory. But I understand it the way, that you actually agree with the author: which is damage and collision system is broken, at least unreasonable

I guess the Titanic also wasn't build to re-enter atmosphere or travel space at 30000kph. And the iceberg doesn't really compare to a one voxel pillar. So damage? Yeah, utter annahilation of the whole ship not really. In your comparison, the Titanic sank it wasn't squashed.

Lol. I get the realism. I truly do. And i have played games like that in the past and enjoyed them. 
 
But why should this game further reduce the target audience? 
How much of a niche game should this be? 

Advantage in numbers is something that is impossible to avoid and still have a playable game.
Just replace multi-account with orgs and you have the same problem, with large orgs gaining the advantage by funneling the player resources into projects that others are not able to.
 
The trick as I see it is to not care so much about what others have or do. There will always be someone with more spare time then you, willing to grind the game out.

you say it's pay to win like this, but what do they win? Being rich at a game where  there is literally nothing worth spending it on other than building materials to build things that almost nobody will ever see or care about?

DU is an impressive and beautiful game in it's best moments. But there is absolutely nothing to win no matter what you pay.

If people exploiting loopholes and oversights to get rich is the issue here, fear not, people have been doing that since forever and those that wanted to get stupid level of rich have already done so and secured that wealth for eternity.

I get that the game is tedious. But I guess it is beta and changes every now and then. I also get that many want persistence and it is ok to utter criticism. Yet I feel some, the louder they are, also have an excessively strong sense of victimhood. They act like they didn't buy/sub the game, much more like they own the publisher, even more can dictate the people behind the scenes what they  (exactly) have to do. Even when NQ made and makes hard or questionable decisions, the way parts of the discussion go,  it just seems exaggerated and unfriendly.

There is no denying that the server tech NQ is using is not common at best and unique to them in the context of a persistent world for a MMO.
 
While it has been clear to many of us that the provisioning that the needs was always underestimated and undervalued by NQ from pretty much the start, that NQ tries to now spin this as if it was new to them from the start of Beta is really admitting they truly have no idea about the amount of work they bit of and it was way more than they could chew. NQ started of with the pitch that their tech could support millions of players, they wisely toned that down but still mentioned massive numbers, yet the peak concurrent logins in the week(s) after "beta" start was never more than little under 4K logins. We know this as we had access to an open API which told us this which NQ promptly closed as the number were already coming down.
 
This also ties into the financial struggles that led to NQ opening up "beta" and ending closed development. JC literally said several times that they needed the revenue to be able to progress and proceed. Problem is/was that this brought in more players than they accounted for and so the spiral started of needing to put in more budget into operating cost while doing that required more subs to start rolling in, which would cause more players and hence higher requirements for the server provisioning which would then lead to an increase in needed budget for operating cost and back to the top ..
 
If NQ did not correctly budget and foresee this happening then that says a lot about their ability to understand what the are/were doing beyond having a vision of grand things happening. And having your visionary also being the business lead in that regard generally will not end well even with the best of intentions.
 
So yes, I am really happy to see JC removed from that position and hopefully be able to be what he is, the one to provide the vision for the game. More proficient people can then both drive the business side, finances and manage the project itself to the extend the vision meets the technical and financial possibilities. And that is a lot of words for what I really think is a positive change for the company.
 

So what's next?
 
Well, we may find out in part 3 of this saga but I think it will be a bit premature to expect a new roadmap. Maybe a broad outline.
 
I still hope for a period of several months where NQ will restructure their core tech, rework the server and backend as well as find the balance between what they want to achieve and what's possible. I also think it is now inevitable that the planned release for end of the year is off the table which actually will be good. And yes, I see all this lead to the one thing many do not want to go but wil be impossible to go around.. a full wipe.
 

To go full speculation mode, here's my prediction:
3-6 months for NQ to regroup, restructure and get the core (server) tech reworked 2-3 months to get the existing game code fixed and balanced as far as it can be 6-12 months to bring in the remaining core game play features, being the mission system, player market, revamp on PVP, TW (with AVA, ACV and CVA), planet tech update (with partial wipe), pets, character optimization and all the remaining KS promises from the (stretch) goals  
By this time we're deep in the second half of 2022 at least and an actual beta can start with all core game loops implemented. This is where we wil see a full wipe and the arrival of the cash shop. A release would then be possible 2nd half 2023
 
And yes, if the above were to happen I'd be perfectly fine with it

Gloves off, knives out....
 
The 'vision' you speak of... can we get something explaining precisely what the vision is? I don't want to be an activist on the issue. But a player driven economy and a few vague points is not a vision... it is a blur. I would like to see, myself, what the endgame goal is as far as this vision is concerned. 

I am happy to see something to the effect of NQ stating some behind the scenes information. Information that is relevant as to why things are the way the way they are. I would assume that the optimization will take place before the upgrade in hardware would hit the table as an option. But it is pleasant that information is being put forth. Something that should be the norm... clear concise communication without vagueness or generalizations to make it sound any better than it is. This is as close to that as I have seen in a long time.

On this 'vision'... I should have drowned numerous times now. Starved to death a few thousand times over. Been pancaked, burnt to a crisp, asphyxiated, decapitated, rag-dolled, poisoned, crushed, electrocuted... Are any of these part of the 'vision'? I mean, I am aware that they can make a meat substitute out of sewage... but the realism is... we don't have any of that survival element so far. I want to see some skill based killing based on something other than computational or statistical RNG. 

On the issue with performance... derelicts which are not abandoned and littering the landscape, the airspace, the lakes and oceans, and space itself... it needs addressed. Not talked about, not a balance of aesthetics and performance, but addressed. I do not find it aesthetically pleasing to walk around a District Hub or a Marketplace in game seeing ships smoking from damage, seeing ships belly-up, nose-up, arse-up, or in any other sense than what they should be. This includes sitting on top of one another. We, as players, cannot fix this. 

There should be some attention shown to these AGG towers stretching into the sky as well. Indestructible... razor thin frames capable of withstanding an impact from the Deathstar at lightspeed it seems. 

I digress... I am happy that the truth is being put forth on the technical end. I want to know what this 'vision' is precisely. I would like to see some realism added to the game itself. And, I want to see an information flow that is honest, reliable, and responsive. On player suggestions, there have been a a large number of suggestions. They may be more tailored to the 'vision' if we knew precisely what that was....

Looks Like voxel lice, bring in some ladybugs they ll Munch the lice away And you should be fine. If it is voxelfungus though... You better Start a new Base, it ll eat the rest away in No Time.

my hope is that they implement rotation of elements in more than one axis and more precise slow rotations. As of now you can only rotate in one axis which forces to use weird work arounds.(that do not always work)