CMDRTaco

Basically DU is a grinding game. You invest your time to achieve progression. NQ promised that under all circumstances that investment would be persistent. That's why most of us invested so much time in it.
By breaking that promise, i lost my trust and probably won't do that investment of my time again. I don't even know how many thousand hours i spent to progress.
The reasons they state for this being a must, are weak. Honestly, i don't care if any "exploited" stuff that people gained stays in the game or not. there will always be a lot of players with more Quanta or other possessions in the game. In the end that is NQ's problem. If they did not act with a small rollback after accidentally giving away Warp Beacon Schematics for a way too low price.
And if people used lots of alt accounts to make money with the missions, i would say. clever.. they invested their time into that game mechanic when it was possible and made a fortune.
I personally did not benefit from any of those Exploits and have never been a mission runner. So why should all players be punished for that? Just because there is too much quanta or elements in the game? Come on NQ there are enough possibilities to resolve that.
The way they are doing the reset, is in my opion just a desperate attempt to make money with new player subscriptions,by giving the max "bonus" to anyone who now invests fresh money into  the game. And by doing that they accept the risk that a majority of senior players will just quit.(financially not a huge loss for NQ with available  DACs for a lot of those senior players.)

If they want to give new players a fairer chance for fast progression without having to compare themselves to senior players.. Just create a 2nd system, make it extremely expensive (energy or time consuming)  to transport mass there and have a new different currency there. problem solved without breaking promises. New players could spawn there if they want and build up that system.
Senior Players could travel there accepting the price and knowing that their Quanta would be more or less worthless there.


 

I can't help but laugh at peoples saying "Now this is the release, there wont be another wipe !" or "You really thought there will be no wipe after a beta ?"
 

Beta release :
NQ - "No more full wipe now, we PROMISE !"
Players - "Yeay ! Let's play for real now, invest our time in it !"
 

Re-release :
NQ - "Here is the final full wipe !"
Players who played years - "F"
Players who have not played - "Yeay ! Get rid of all those beta cheaters ! Now I will play !"
 

Also NQ in this annoucement :
"We hope to have only one release"
 

It's HILARIOUS.
Good bye everyone. 

THIS! So much. 
 

Yeah, sadly NQ don't have a great track-record keeping promises.
 
(31:58) "Whatever you do after beta starts is going to stay in one way or another... You will get what we call for the moment 'magic blueprints'... blueprints with everything included in it so you will be able to respawn the things as soon as we restart the server. So we don't like to call it 'wipe'... The key thing is the beta is really the start... You can start to invest yourself in the game. We guarantee that you're not going to be losing everything at some point... the universe is blank again, and you have to start from scratch."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syku-NmSg4s&t=1918s
 
"With future wipes, as much of your assets as possible will be kept between before and after the wipe, in particular constructs will always be preserved, if necessary with special one-time-use blueprints ("Packaged Blueprints") that do not require ingredients..." ⬇

As a funny youtuber always says every time something politically stupid happens irl, 'imagine my shock'.
 
I've always been pro wipe, but the inclusion of talent points to be wiped has me really miffed. As it is, I have almost 100M points currently. The pioneer packs to get me back up to 60M over 6 months is nice, but I really feel like that should be an addition to what we've already accumulated.
 
Short of blueprints, avatar and organization names, NQ program rewards, and the knowledge and experience we've gained, not including talent points. I'm grimacing and coping really hard. I'd always imagined the talent points as the only tangible in-game item that took time to build that would be really useful after launch, well I guess that's dashed. Real disappointed.
 
 
As an aside, I feel like the disbursement of the pioneer pack rewards is somewhat unfair:
If you've been a subscribing member for at least 1 to 3 months of beta up till NOW, not release: Advanced If you've been a subscribing member for at least 4 to 12 months of beta, or are a KS iron, bronze, silver founder, or are a post-KS contributor backer up till NOW, not release: Rare If you've been a subscribing member for at least 13+ months of beta, or are a KS gold or above founder, or are a post-KS sponsor or patron backer up till NOW, not release: Exotic Not having a cutoff of the announcement date cheapens these packs since anyone can get them, or at least until the release date. I envision a ton of 'rare' packs going out.
 
Like the difference between testing and playing, or founders and backers, the verbiage is so important.
 
 
How many times do I have to say it? NQ should have never gone with a 'soft launch' and kept the spirit of the beta test, strictly a test. Hopefully, after this wipe, they'll have figured out that it is not a good idea to let the effects of a bug (1% schematic fire sale for the best example) ripple out. Stop the game, fix the bug, roll back the server, and press play.
 
That's what "beta testing" is for, the effects of this would be negligible, and newer beta players could get a taste of the scheduled pre-/alpha experience. I don't know how this will translate once the game is released, nor the reaction that these small reversions will do to the whole idea of a 'persistent universe', but the seeds could have been planted back in beta, hell, back in alpha once we started going full time.
 
 
I'm hesitant and reserved about the future going forward based on my general beta experience. Alpha 3 had me hopeful, but that hope dissolved as beta progressed. It doesn't appear that DU will make its 1.0 feeling feature complete and truly playable. There's still lots more I think that should be added, old stuff needing further refinement and adjustments, and the whole game a more polished and launch-ready feel. 
 
You only get one chance to make a good first impression... If we're releasing in the sixteen months, I'm anxious. No one will laugh at you for going to a charlie 'test phase', but I doubt that will happen. At this point, I'm just hoping for the best.

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.

SO many of the pre-alpha marketing images are just wrong now... 


 
(These are just the ones I didn't include in other posts.)

I try to avoid being a doom-sayer, and haven't made that claim of any of the changes made before now, but this one... I'm not sure. I think it will force the closure of many of the things that actually draw people to the game.

SWG folks, remember when NGE killed that game?  This core decision would be the same.  Please don't do it NQ....

After the dev Discord Q&A a few days ago, it's clear the devs don't even play this game. They are completely out of touch of how much this update has turned this "GAME" into a 2nd job. The taxes are too high for the effort required. NQ admitted they set the tax to be 50% of what you could mine at 100% efficiency. No society flourishes when everything is taxed at a 50% rate. On top of this, many of the miners we put down are bugged and will not pull at the rate they are suppose to. It's like other miners are already pulling the vast majority of the available pool, but there are no other miners on the territory.

After the dev Discord Q&A a few days ago, it's clear the devs don't even play this game. They are completely out of touch of how much this update has turned this "GAME" into a 2nd job. The taxes are too high for the effort required. NQ admitted they set the tax to be 50% of what you could mine at 100% efficiency. No society flourishes when everything is taxed at a 50% rate. On top of this, many of the miners we put down are bugged and will not pull at the rate they are suppose to. It's like other miners are already pulling the vast majority of the available pool, but there are no other miners on the territory.

After the dev Discord Q&A a few days ago, it's clear the devs don't even play this game. They are completely out of touch of how much this update has turned this "GAME" into a 2nd job. The taxes are too high for the effort required. NQ admitted they set the tax to be 50% of what you could mine at 100% efficiency. No society flourishes when everything is taxed at a 50% rate. On top of this, many of the miners we put down are bugged and will not pull at the rate they are suppose to. It's like other miners are already pulling the vast majority of the available pool, but there are no other miners on the territory.

After the dev Discord Q&A a few days ago, it's clear the devs don't even play this game. They are completely out of touch of how much this update has turned this "GAME" into a 2nd job. The taxes are too high for the effort required. NQ admitted they set the tax to be 50% of what you could mine at 100% efficiency. No society flourishes when everything is taxed at a 50% rate. On top of this, many of the miners we put down are bugged and will not pull at the rate they are suppose to. It's like other miners are already pulling the vast majority of the available pool, but there are no other miners on the territory.

Why SHOULD brakes be obstructed?
Just tell me WHY it SHOULD. Because there is no reason that it SHOULD. 
The are not obstructed now are they, so why is it so important that they must be obstructed?
Tell me why you so deeply want this feature. I cant think of anyone who wanted to quit this game because the brakes were not visible.
 
And some people going for that 'more realistic' dont know what they are saying... Going into space after 3400m up in the air? Being 10000 yrs into the future? Having a nanocrafter in your pocket? Ditch that realistic thing please!
 
There is no should, the devs can decide for themselves if its obstructed, how powerful they are, or how big etc. This is their world where they decide the rules. There is absolutely no reason that it SHOULD be this or that. Its just something that they decided to implement now of a sudden and Im wondering what they hope to achieve with this change?
Its not like, more people will come to this game because the brakes are outside of your ship like it SHOULD be...

1. If your goal is to reduce element lag by reducing the number of brakes on a construct I can understand that. Just increase the braking power of brakes and we will remove them.
2. If your goal is to reduce the amount of ore and packages hauled by ships to extend end game progression, all this will do is cause square ships to be made reducing the aesthetic of the game. This will also impact the payout of PVP. Big haulers with lots of ore or packages make worthwhile PVP targets. Making the targets less worth while will just reduce PVP payout and hurt a much needed dynamic and resource cycle in the game.  Also some NQ sold ships have stacked brakes.

I would love to know which of these cases you are moving towards.

Historically, ALL of Helios was safe - no PvP at all. Then a small region of space was defined as PvP Zone. Then PvP zone was extended to what we have now. Thats what happened, but the dream envisioned was PvP everywhere (including on planets) except Sanctuary and an extended region around the Ark ship (which incuded markets before the Ark was moved).

To paraphrase: No dream survives first contact with reality.

DU differs from EVE in one very important aspect. DU is/was supposed to be a persistent universe with unlimited terraforming and building.
 
And as such, there need to be some mechanism for solo players and small orgs to be able to step away from the game for some time, and NOT lose all the work they have put into building permanent bases etc.
 
As I see it, this is just another chapter in the build vs destroy balance problem, where a PvP'er can destroy in minutes something it took months for a builder to make. I.e the PvP'er wins by default, and the builders leave the game.

While I don't disagree with the changes to Airbrakes, can you explain why Demeter is the time to implement this? A time where we are all already experiencing a game changing shift in the way we will play Dual Universe, with entire systems being implemented and changed, why would adding an previously un-announced change that will go and cause the majority of constructs to not function properly, be something you thought should be included with Demeter? 

The L/hr seem too low even with talent and adjacency bonus for the 1 mil/week tax. Either the rate needs to go up or the tax drastically reduced. The brake change is horrible. I know the current implementation was temporary, but requiring the entire brake to be exposed is going to usher in the golden age of freaking ugly ships. Please change the requirement to be only the front surface to be exposed.

The L/hr seem too low even with talent and adjacency bonus for the 1 mil/week tax. Either the rate needs to go up or the tax drastically reduced. The brake change is horrible. I know the current implementation was temporary, but requiring the entire brake to be exposed is going to usher in the golden age of freaking ugly ships. Please change the requirement to be only the front surface to be exposed.

The L/hr seem too low even with talent and adjacency bonus for the 1 mil/week tax. Either the rate needs to go up or the tax drastically reduced. The brake change is horrible. I know the current implementation was temporary, but requiring the entire brake to be exposed is going to usher in the golden age of freaking ugly ships. Please change the requirement to be only the front surface to be exposed.

The L/hr seem too low even with talent and adjacency bonus for the 1 mil/week tax. Either the rate needs to go up or the tax drastically reduced. The brake change is horrible. I know the current implementation was temporary, but requiring the entire brake to be exposed is going to usher in the golden age of freaking ugly ships. Please change the requirement to be only the front surface to be exposed.

The L/hr seem too low even with talent and adjacency bonus for the 1 mil/week tax. Either the rate needs to go up or the tax drastically reduced. The brake change is horrible. I know the current implementation was temporary, but requiring the entire brake to be exposed is going to usher in the golden age of freaking ugly ships. Please change the requirement to be only the front surface to be exposed.

The L/hr seem too low even with talent and adjacency bonus for the 1 mil/week tax. Either the rate needs to go up or the tax drastically reduced. The brake change is horrible. I know the current implementation was temporary, but requiring the entire brake to be exposed is going to usher in the golden age of freaking ugly ships. Please change the requirement to be only the front surface to be exposed.

The L/hr seem too low even with talent and adjacency bonus for the 1 mil/week tax. Either the rate needs to go up or the tax drastically reduced. The brake change is horrible. I know the current implementation was temporary, but requiring the entire brake to be exposed is going to usher in the golden age of freaking ugly ships. Please change the requirement to be only the front surface to be exposed.