Kveen00

NQ-Nyota, As a player that started just after Beta started and had logged on and played every single day up until this thread started (I have not logged on since-possibly permanently done depending on this decision) I am happy to provide my feedback. Note that I have paid for my subscription(s), and did not have any free beta keys. Find what I believe are the main issues and recommendations below. Just a thought to keep in mind however....anything you do confers advantage to someone. That includes a full wipe. You can't wipe organization discord channels you don't control, so a full wipe absolutely provides MASSIVE advantage to existing large orgs simply because they are already organized and can pool resources to rebuild faster than anyone else possibly could. Nothing you can do will prevent that in any way from happening. For the 'full wipe' crowd, I think some honestly believe that is best, I can respect that, but some are advocating that strictly so they can dominate some aspect (e.g. PvP) of the game where having a large cooperative player base will vastly outperform anyone else that tries to compete regardless of wipe status, but even more so after a full wipe. You need to balance some degree of leveling with the need to keep some part of your existing player base by not making it to hard for single players or smaller orgs to restart or they will give up and go away. Issues: 1 Talent Points: Given a paid subscription, wipe of talent point is a non-starter for me. Since I have paid for the subscription, you would be removing value that can only be obtain through payment of real-world money over time. I could MAYBE see the argument for removing talent points for free beta keys, but any removal of talent points would feel, to me at least, like theft. Other people obviously feel differently about that, but that issue is a non-negotiable from my perspective, at least for anyone that has been paying for a subscription. 2. Territory/Quanta reset: I can understand quanta wipe, I can understand territory reset where players need to reclaim territory. Both of those are reasonable, and probably necessary at this point given some extremely poor decisions (e.g. WTF on auto-assigning 5 HQ tiles....most of the junk that needed cleaning up belonged to players that had less than 5 tiles anyway, so you destroyed any positive effect of the rent and cleanup mechanics with that one....sorry that was a terrible decision, made at the last minute). 3. Schematics: The only reason I can think of that you now want to remove schematics is that someone did the math like I did and went 'whoa' when they saw the number for how long it would take to restart any reasonable economy or even create the capability to build most elements if everything was wiped and you had to restart the economy from scratch. With the mission nerfs you are putting in, there simply won't be enough quanta in game to finance schematic purchases to rebuild factories fast enough, at least before any new players get frustrated and bail. With the new resource distribution and lack of a 'grindable' mining mechanic elements that are now common and inexpensive would be nearly impossible to build for weeks or months, at least in any quantity. The small number of players and large orgs that might do so would effectively have a near monopoly on advanced through exotic elements (including you know warp drives and warp cells) and would get WAY richer than most are now. Sooooo, you remove schematics so more people can build by taking the brakes off, but run into the same situation pre-schematics where no one really needs to participate in an active market. 4. Economy restart: You have backed yourself into the corner on this one with the resource distribution and auto-miners with Demeter. A number of people pointed this out in the pre-Demeter comments, but apparently you all missed that. The only change that was made was to allow the DSAT to be build with lower tier ore which makes it theoretically possible to restart the economy, just very very slow. Had you made the recipe for autominers to only rely on ore from 1 tier down from what the miner mines (that was recommended pre-Demeter) a economy bootstrap would be MUCH faster. Restarting the economy from a complete wipe will be VERY time consuming, even without schematics and any benefit you hope to gain from new players at launch is likely to evaporate quickly since there simply won't be easily available stuff. This is a hard game to master and is only viable for new players in many cases with help from existing players/orgs OR the availability of relatively cheap parts/elements on the market. Have you looked at a factory progression/restart from a complete wipe to building warp beacons? I have, I know I could do it, but I am seriously questioning why I would want to as it would be in no way fun or enjoyable, just a painful slog to get back to the bare minimums. It requires layers of bootstrapping. See item 3 on schematics....removing schematics probably puts this in the realm of weeks and that is just because of build times delaying progression and assumes ore is actually available in quantity, which i am not sure of. However, regularly availability in the markets for anything higher than 'uncommon' elements could easily be months due to scarcity and price gouging for what is available. I would be shocked if the first warp drives that hit the market were priced under 10M each, and it stayed that way for some time. Keeping schematics puts this likely at months, if not the better part of a year unless you dropped schematic prices to almost nothing. A small number of players will be able to ramp up SOME production in either case, but there will be no common or reasonably priced availability for most elements for a LONG time. Orgs that band together will go quicker, but it will still be weeks or months before their internal needs are met. Just building the industry units to build more industry units to build higher tier industry units will take a long time any way you cut it. The ONLY way you have left to get higher tier ore is asteroid mining, at least until there is enough availability to start putting out autominers, but even then there won't be nearly enough in operation to meet demand for weeks or months, which means huge inflation and price gouging and the same people that are currently rich getting rich again with no effective change. Bottom line here, your tone in the devblog clearly indicated that a full wipe was the preferred decision of whomever wrote it. (Yes we have all used the 'present non-viable/flawed options first' then the preferred choice last approach to shape a decision process. Whoever wrote the post did exactly that, whether they realized it or not) but I don't think you understand how non-viable a complete wipe is given the current factory and resource mechanics. 5. Player advantage: I am going to be blunt here, in the immortal words of one of my org mates: "Did you win DU yet?". If you don't get it you don't get it, but this was supposed to be an open world sandbox game with persistent creations but it is also an MMO. People that want to acquire stuff will do so, no matter what, but most of your creative player base just wants to build stuff and have Friday night races and such. Be careful when you 'remove advantage' since the starting point with the current game is NOT anything like the starting point when Beta started. If you remove all the 'stuff' from the economy, well, see item 4 above. Bit of a potential nightmare there, probably the quickest way to kill the game for good. A lot of veteran players will feel betrayed and not come back, and the economy restart....well it might not restart, at least not the way you think it will, which will bleed off any new players quicker than you think is possible. What you should really be focusing on is enabling new players, not looking for ways to nerf existing players, or at least some balance of the two. You have a hard call here, but you seriously need to think about balancing the benefits new players get from the large number of existing players willing to help them out, because those existing players HAVE resources and the time to help and are not scrambling to build the next tier autominer against the 'level playing field' you seem to want to create where everyone is scrambling for limited resources for potentially months. Any leveling you do accomplish will be short lived at best, and I honestly don't know if it will provide some marginal benefit or kill the game within 6 months. Also, 'removing advantage' really does not work. It will only benefit a small number of large orgs that will be able to immediately pool resources and will simply dominate everything, and single players will be left worse off than before. By 'removing advantage' you run the risk of actually giving ALL the advantage to a small number of large orgs, which is probably why a good quantity of the people that advocate for a full wipe are doing so, they know that your approach to 'leveling the playing field' will give them (or their org...you know who they are) a HUGE advantage over everyone NOT part of a large org. Well, everyone else could also band together you say....but what about the new players that don't know they need to do that. There is no simple answer here, but actually zeroing out what you apparently perceive as advantages, simply gives certain player groups their own MASSIVE advantages. Bottom line, whatever you do, some people or groups will start with massive advantages, but if you get to extreme with trying to level things, you will alienate a significant portion of the dwindling hardcore player base and they will leave, while the playing field will be even less 'even' than it was before. 6. Trust: You don't have it with your existing player base. New players get: time mark 10:34. Unfortunately, this the only 'up and coming space sim' video where I have even seen DU even mentioned, and the mention is not good in this case. I also have a hard time disagreeing with TheYamiks on this one, as much as I would like to do so. This contributes to frustration and fatigue on your existing player base and will drive off any hope of new players. There is a strong perception that when you do listen to players it is to a very small minority of very vocal players in the official discord echo chamber. When is the last time you actually put out a player base wide survey with meaningful questions to your entire player base? (That is clearly a rhetorical question, the answer being 'never') There are the occasional pop up surveys in-game that don't really cover anything substantive, but that is really it. Example, from all prior communications, the party line has always been along the lines of, we will avoid a wipe at all costs, but if we do, veteran/beta players will keep something and I am pretty sure talent points were explicitly part of that something or at least heavily implied. Yet that was CLEARLY not my takeaway from this dev note, which dropped talent points squarely in the 'advantages we need to nerf' category. It was also pretty clearly preferring a full wipe the way the pros/cons were shaped to make that appear the only viable solution. That is why since last week I no longer log in every single day like I did for more than a year and a half, and depending on what your decisions are here, I may not ever log in again. All my subscription(s) have now had auto-renew turned off for this simple reason, I don't trust NQ to do what they say. I am not unrecoverable as a customer, but you need to convince me it is worth my time to come back. Recommendations: 1. Talent points: leave them alone or reset them into a pool that can be re-assigned, at least for paid subscriptions. Harder call on free beta keys, but at least an option to convert to a paid account is probably in order there. Will they provide an 'advantage', sure, but not that huge of one in most areas. If you are doing an economy reset, your industrial players will absolutely need every single talent point they can get if you want the economy restarted within months vice a year. The ONLY place there might be an 'advantage' issue is the PvP specific talents. Training single weapon or function talent trees for PvP functions would likely be possible before the parts become readily available to take advantage of them anyway. The large PvP orgs would likely WANT you to wipe talent points since they have a large enough player base to quickly rebuild specialized talents and will simply dominate everyone anyway within 2-4 weeks no matter what you do here. 2. Territory/Quanta reset: Unfortunately, I think you have to do this and wipe territories and quanta. Had you NOT auto-assigned HQ tiles to effectively inactive players, or used a better approach to cleaning up dynamic constructs it might have been possible to keep territories, but NQ messed that up hard and I don't think there is any other option there. Quanta is a harder question. Due to the previous mechanics, you likely need to get most of it out of the game, BUT with the mission nerfs, if schematics are left in, there is a problem for ramping up the economy again if you don't include new quanta injection. Unless you are adding purchase bots back in to the markets for things other than tier 1 ore, capital injection into a restarting economy is going to be an issue. I don't know that there is a good answer there, so nuking territories and quanta from orbit is probably as viable as any other approach and I don't think there really is a 'good' solution here, only different levels of 'bad'. 3. Schematics. I think you screwed yourself and all of us on this one. With the current resource distribution and more limited quanta injection due to mission nerfing, leaving them in at anything like the current costs significantly delays any sort of economy restart. However, there is a need for a mechanic that requires capital investment in industry, otherwise there won't be an economy, and people will just build their own stuff. If you leave them in, reduce costs significantly and for gods sake just allow them to be purchased on any market, making people run around to different planets for schematics does nothing useful other than waste time and annoy people. If you remove them, the way resources are distributed now will probably provide the short term 'brakes' that limit everyone from building their own factory. That MIGHT be enough in the long term, I don't claim to know the answer there, but nuking them MIGHT be OK but I am wary of that as to simple an answer to a complex question. 4. Economy restart/peoples stuff: This one is problematic. However, there could be a partial solution. If you allow each player to bring over a limited volume of items that they select, this could mitigate somewhat the economy jumpstart issue. Allowing everyone to bring unlimited items would be terrible, but if each player can select some volume that can be retained, this possibly addresses economy restart. If each player got a 'magic container' of fixed volume or even say a Sm or XS static core they could pack to their preference this would allow a economic restart much quicker, and how 'successful' each player would be is dependent on the choices they make on what to bring. I am not sure what the correct volume would be, but probably no more than you be able to pack into a Med core WITHOUT allowing containers, or a SM or XS allowing containers. Would some players get ahead doing this, of course, that that is going to happen no matter what, and part of that would depend on how good their decision were on what to bring. Could someone pack 20 warp drives (or even 100) and get rich....maybe unless everyone else did the same thing, and lets be honest, 100 warp drives would be a drop in the bucket on what the demand would be after a reset and how rich would they get when no one had any money to start? Miners would bring autominers over, industrialists would bring industry machines over, ship parts would be available in some quantity. As long as the total volume for each account is limited, whatever comes over is it until a new industrial base is created, so some people would have an 'advantage' but a limited one at best. If you pack your volume with industry machines, you can have a factory up quicker, assuming someone else brought miners and is mining resources for you. If you pack your volume with warp drives, you get an immediate influx of cash, to the extent that people have cash to spend, but no long-term benefit after that. If someone wants to use their volume to bring over a bunch of space engine XL, great, but those take up a lot of volume, so there would simply not be a lot anyone could bring if the volume is limited so it is self-limiting based on the number of paid accounts. It will disproportionally advantage large orgs, but that is going to happen anyway with a full wipe, so this would at least allow single players or smaller orgs to avoid a from-nothing bootstrap and possibly encourage people to stay that would otherwise leave. This would introduce more diversity of products and get different sectors of the economy working faster than a one-size-fits-none standard starter pack for veteran players and would be an almost interesting mini-game in itself....kind of: :"you have to pack one bag to live on a desert isle for a year, what do you bring? Choose wisely" where any advantage that is accrued is based almost solely on peoples game play type and decisions. If you feel it is necessary to balance that for new players, give them a standard starter kit which the new FTUE is essentially doing anyway but don't give that to veteran players or make it an option for them to do one or the other. That probably levels things about as well as possible while adding enough diversity to engage different player types, restart some of the economy faster, and retain at least some of the people that will simply not come back with a full wipe.

Sure, should have put the 'directly' in front of the API reference, and while the approach you suggest works for single item containers, it is unworkably tedious for multiple item containers, which constrains factory design to ONLY using single item containers. I agree that single item containers are typically the best approach for many things, but the fact that it creates a artificial design constraint to address a single code error seems a tad bit silly. Between todays update and the previous one my jam detection script was getting CPU overloads every time I tried to run it, but it worked fine before 2 updates ago, and again works fine after todays update, same script same factory, so who the heck knows if your detection script is even going to work after the next update which brings us back to the thing we all agree on....can we please fix this NQ?

I am guessing there is an event that is sent from a container to linked machines when the container inventory is updated telling the machine the container inventory has changed, but this event or trigger is lost when the server is in maintenance, so the machine code assumes one thing about container inventory but the actual inventory may be something else. That generates out 'unknown server error' condition since the machine thinks the container inventory is one thing but it is actually not what the machine thinks it is. That is also consistent with transfer units simply not triggering and refilling containers that are emptied out while the server is in maintenance. If we assume the transfer unit would normally trigger based on an event from a container inventory changing, but that event is lost during server maintenance, it would explain the observed transfer unit failures where they are just not working but also not in an error state. The machines on the other side of the container would eventually enter a 'jammed missing input ingredient' state but since that does not modify the container contents, it would not trigger the upstream transfer unit.

The problem appears to be how the machines update container contents (or not) during updates. There is definitely a randomness factor so I can understand how it is difficult to troubleshoot, but it appears to be directly associated with a function or trigger associated with container inventory checking (or lack thereof) under certain conditions when the server is in maintenance. We really do want this fixed, it is a HUGE issue, and there are plenty of people in the community willing to help, Please engage with the factory operators and we can work with you on troubleshooting this. It is probably a tough one to find, but you have a lot of people running thousands of machines so the player base sample set is fairly large. Kind of the point of beta right? At the end of the day we still get the 'unknown server error' stoppage and the transfer unit is not working with no error stoppage every single server maintenance. Last one was over 50 machines stopped for me, this one was over 25 'unknown server errors' plus both Inconel and screws (the entire production sets for both) being shut down by transfer unit failure. That is what I know about right now, tomorrow I will have found one or two more broken transfer units after some assembler shuts down for missing ingredients and I trace it back through the supply chain. I know some people have more, but I only have about 500 transfer units running, and it is simply not practical (and REALLY not fun) to check them all manually and the transfer unit issue is not detectable by script given the current LUA API since there is technically no error, it just does not work. SUPER frustrating.

I like this one, it gets you the next day and shuts everything down for another day or so while the lines re-prime.

NQ, As noted, you have created a new issue by changing a clearly articulated direction in mid-stream. By definitely announcing scans would be retained, you essentially forced players that were already disadvantaged by not having massive quantities of scans to shift their gameplay for weeks in order to reasonably prepare for Demeter which they could have better used preparing in other ways. Now by switching directions, you have essentially wasted peoples time for no reason. I was largely on the fence on scans/no scans and would have not particularly cared whether you kept them or not. I am now ROYALLY PISSED by the direction change that WASTED a huge amount of time for NO REASON. I don't see anyway for you to fix this at this point since no one is going to be happy with anything you do on this matter now. But in the future FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR DIETY OF CHOICE DO WHAT YOU SAY OR AT LEAST INDICATE YOUR ARE UNDECIDED. WTF. Would you like some syrup with your waffles?

NQ, you appear to announce two significant changes to auto miners from the PTS. Can you clarify if these are actually changes from PTS or just examples used in the blog post? 1. the blog post identifies miner output as 50L/h. In PTS it was 50L/h for smalls and 100L/h for large. Were you using smalls as an example in the blog and larges will still be 100L/h or is this a change from PTS? 2. The blog announces a 24 hour cooldown between calibrations. Is this a change from the 48 hours on PTS? If so, does this change the point in time that calibration decay kicks in? If so, this is a HUGE change to mining economics. As additional clarification, I assume the extraction efficiency talent we saw on PTS is what you are referring to with "amount of ore extracted when calibrating". Can you clarify what this talent actually does? Does it increase the amount of ore pulled by the autominer after calibrated by a player with this talent, or does it simply increase the amount of rocks spawned during the calibration process? Concern: You indicate in your blog that tier 5 ores would be available ONLY at a 'few small points' on the outer planets. I assume this likely applies to some degree to tier 4 and tier 3 as well. This seems to be a recipe for a small number of players or orgs to effectively lock individual players or smaller orgs out of higher tier ores and force PVP upon players disinterested in that aspect of gameplay. If this was your intention, it will likely do exactly that as well as cause the resultant attrition of non-PVP interested players. If this was not your intention, would it not be better to have higher concentration of higher tier ores at small points (which would still lock the market to a limited set of suppliers for large quantities or ore and provide that competitive element), but a more even distribution of very low output tiles of higher tier ore. This would make other gameplay options available that do not include force PVP but also limit market impact since low output tiles would not produce enough ore to significantly impact the markets in comparison to PVP play with asteroids.