Carnegie

That's the thing. It doesn't.

I don't play the game anymore, except to fly down to Haven and check it out (just another rock with grass and trees). However, I do recall suggestions I made a long time ago about mining. I was one of the early people to suggest an auto-mining feature , however it was nothing like the current implementation. I still wanted the digging but the only difference to mining was that you set up a machine on the node itself, not on the surface. Certainly did not want taxes. To deal with the problem of too many tunnels, there should have been a tunnel collapse mechanism that erases tunnels after no presence of a human after 60 days. Easy enough to implement, just keep a least recently used timestamp on each tunnel object that gets refreshed any time a player walks by. In a nightly maintenance sweep, all tunnel data structures with old time stamps simply get deleted. The other idea was that nodes respawn after a while of being dormant (like a month or two). That would give incentive for people to fight for meganode tiles. well since there probably be a wipe anyways, there is another opportunity to fix this mechanic. Or not. I probably won't play again unless there is enough critical mass of players to make things interesting again. Here is the thing about voting on wipes that I have seen over and over again over 20 years of playing MMOs. 1. The people with nothing to lose and everything to gain always vote for a wipe as they have no skin in the game. 2. The people that were "betrayed" by a wipe stop playing. These are the true diehard, committed people that actually generate the content that NQ keeps talking about in their visions. 3. The "betrayed" people leave with their amazing creativity to some other environment. 4. The people who wanted the wipe are left with the daunting task of creating a new content base. 5. However, the people who voted for the wipe are generally tourists, and are not the building personality type ... so not much gets built. 6. The level-the-playing-field tourists get bored and leave with a mild shrug. (They don't care - they had nothing to lose anyways) 7. Trust is broken for builder personality types. 10x harder to convince new ones - advertising not much help here - they go by word of mouth 8. Ghost town

Besides, you won't need a wipe soon. I stopped playing due to tile taxes (I can't commit to a fixed schedule), and I visit here occasionally to see what is new and if it is worth my time to come back. My guess is that there won't be many veterans left by launch (unless changes are made). Only people that play are the ones who have seen the misleading ads and play for two weeks while they are confused as to where the action is. Why are the ads misleading? They show a large vibrant population and imply PvP activity. Also the real people in the ads haven't been active for more than a year. What happened to land territory warfare outside the safe zone? Game is boring because there is no risk. You don' t need risk everywhere, but it should be available somewhere with meaningful rewards equivalent to the risk. It needs survival-type challenges in addition to legit PvP. Why should I fight for plasma? Lack of plasma doesn't affect me.

Nope. I have never heard of a new player that joined because there was a wipe. New players join MMO sandbox games for a new experience and potential for being part of something larger than themselves. Agree that the game needs more players to survive. The game simply needs to be more fun to attract new players. Most of the arguments about mechanics are just noise. NQ needs to stand back and revisit the concept of fun.

I am already in the process of mothballing my stuff. I can't justify any more hours investing in this if it all goes up in smoke. There was minor progress on the PTS , with at least weapons fire being visible. The situational awareness is still poor, hard to see who locked radar on you when all the ships have the same name. (which I am sure is a deliberate tactic by orgs) There needs to be a yellow glow or highlight on ship icons that have targeted you. The warning that "You are being attacked!" isn't very useful unless its just the two of you out in deep space. My experience with the PvP was mediocre at best. The ship I was targeting kept jumping around, as if it couldn't decide where it was. After I changed direction to follow it, it suddenly teleported back to its original position defying all laws of physics both real and imaginary. Sounds like a cache or buffer problem. The new mechanics have promise, but it is a bit of lipstick on a pig. The experience has to be snappy (not sluggish), smooth and consistent. Still no HUD for solo players, its nuts to have to keep hitting INS multiple times to toggle between flying/situational awareness and managing weapons. I have thousands of warp cells from my factories in storage, but I am having a hard time being motivated to feed them with raw ore. I could go anywhere I want, but not feeling the desire right now with the combination of releasing the game without planetary land warfare and possible wipe announcement.

Yeah, I am seeing a lot of those too. A bit puzzling as a new player is expecting to see what was in the ad. Once they look behind the curtain and say to themselves "wtf?" they will probably leave and lose trust in NQ. A shame to burn new players before good content is available. NQ should have waited until at least Athena was out for a few weeks.

I did think of that, but then I thought of the warp speed reduction. If the new lower speed of warp was sufficient to keep you from flying through a planet, wouldn't it be the real top limit? I am not railing against warp here, as I can make plenty of cells for myself with even a surplus, but just saying the devs need to be really careful about applying new rules without a full analysis of its effects and their effects. Fundamentally, each new rule should create two potential gameplay decisions for every decision it takes away. Too many restrictive rules lead to the creation of one or two "metas". We see that now with voxel-less ships. Voxel armor is mostly obsolete due to ratio of damage absorptions. The reduction of hit points per material was strange, it should have been the opposite. If there was a problem with massive ships being invulnerable, then improve the largest weapon damage yields instead of nerfing armor. That seemed odd to me.

It seems to me that many of the issues with gameplay arise from a root cause: A split in philosophy in how players are supposed to act. (Open vs. Guardrails) Movement: Open world claim: Go anywhere, fly anywhere Guardrail philosophy: Limit speed to 30k to promote a feeling of "vastness" Natural philosophy: If you go too fast, you can't slow down and miss your destination or make a crater By using a guardrail, a whole new set of side effects come into play for PvP, which then requires a whole new round of guardrails (top speed per core size) Also the original reason for having the 30K limit pretty much went out the window with introduction of warp drives. Mining: Open World claim: Mine on any planet or asteroid Guardrail: You have to maintain your mining units every few days with calibration to force people to participate regularly Natural: Land based territory warfare. If you can't defend it you lose it. Side effect of guardrail: Requires an all-in effort, which is a commitment of personal time. It is an ultimatum of sorts, and ultimatums more often fail than succeed or, at the least, lowers morale. Economics: Open world claim: There is a player economy Guardrails: bots and schematics Natural: prices move according to real supply and demand The reason that the natural approach didn't work is that there wasn't a natural supply or demand curve supporting it at the time. If PvP ever becomes a real thing with territory warfare, then the demand curve will take care of itself. The original concept of schematics was to force people to rely on other people to buy parts or elements. The problem with that approach in 0.23 was the idea of "force the players" to act a certain way. Territory Open world claim: land warfare to control tiles Guardrail: everything is in a safe zone and taxed Natural: fight for what is yours The problems with the current situation: a. There is not much difference between one tile and the next. The mineral extraction values are tightly controlled to be within a certain range. b. The tax on tiles make it so expensive to maintain, it really isn't worth fighting for compared to just moving to another tile (with the exception of T4/T5 but those are too rare for generalized war) c. Once you own a tile, the extraction rates for T4 are almost the same as T1. I have collected 800 kilotons of T4 ore in just a few weeks once I found a set of tiles and got rare mining units. And you wonder why prices for high tier ores are so low. This was not the original intent of having different tiers at all. My scrap needs are satisfied for a while. d. There is is only one weak strategic value to a tile and that is distance to a market. A strategic value is the control of or access to something larger than itself. ( A river, a deep water port, safe passage to somewhere else, railroad endpoint, recharge point, repair depot, bonus nexus, etc.) again, guardrails on top of guardrails. It is a patchwork of limits with officially sanctioned exceptions. Bottom Line: Open world games need to use incentives to encourage behaviors, not guardrails and hard rules. People who are attracted to the open world concept are inherently turned off by guardrails.

With all this uncertainty about the future of my efforts, I am mothballing my stuff and cutting back my time spent on DU to the bare minimum. If this goes on too long, my interest will start gravitating to other options for my daily attention: back to EVE check out No Man's Sky try out Elden Ring or one of the many other options out there I think the biggest shock to my expectations was the announcement of this being the last major update before actual game release. I kept playing from hope. This announcement tells me there will never be land-based territory warfare. That is not a thing you can add after a release. Without land-based territory warfare you will not get a true demand curve for things in the market. There is no skin in the game for space territories. Owning a spot in space is no more important than having a calendar on the wall of your favorite thing to stare at. With a release announcement in the current state, it puts a huge amount of pressure on Athena to make massive injections of fun. I'm sure it will be fun for a short time while people explore the new mechanics, but long term? The solutioning approach to gameplay issues seems to be on the myopic side. Using the approach of "what is the minimal change we can make to address the problem" results in some strange side effects that often make the original problem worse or create a new problem. For example, having an unlimited amount of missions between two points makes no sense and is ripe for abuse. This feels like a "yes boss, we fixed that problem, now lets fix the next one". That is the problem with checklist mentality vs. a craftsman mentality where you take pride in your work and dive deep into truly understanding the situation. Going back to first principles and and really looking at ongoing motivations from each participant's point of view in a scenario is really the only way to go.

Wow, that brings back some memories. Nothing like Pink Floyd for some deep philosophy. 🙂 Problem is that even if everyone "restarts" at the same place, within a month the front runners will be so far ahead that they are actually behind you (possibly shooting at you)

so what is wrong with having a few rich people? They add character to the game. This obsession with fairness is not natural. I am not rich by any means, but I don't mind if others are, as they are either wonderful allies or a goal worthy of bringing down. This isn't the kind of game where you have a score. What is the actual need for a "level set" that is driving the wipe requests?

Indeed, human nature for most people is that they like an occasional fight with other real people, but not a protracted one. Too many negative feelings to go on for long time. War for most people is for negotiation, not hate. The natural trend is then for short wars and longer peace. In other games with PvP, peace broke out and the players got bored and the game died. (Life is Fuedal) So that is why you need 50% PvE, .... because NPC bots wont get tired of being the bad guy.

I don't see why I have to go to a 3rd party solution for what should be in the game. I don't trust outside software as it hasn't always been tested and may have strange side effects. One of which may be to trigger the EQU8 anti-cheat system and then I get banned. No thanks. Also it isn't just me. If we want to have decently sized PvP population in space wars, then it should be fun out of the box.

Industrial Suggestions: 1. On one of the interviews with NQ, the NQ person was surprised that the host had 1200 transfer units in his factory. I suspect that number (which seems big to me too) is due to the limits on how many input/output ports exists on containers and industrial equipment. If the current limit went from 10 to 15 (or 16 if you are a hex kind of guy), then there would be much less need for transfer units. I suppose early on it was part of the design to encourage players to find clever ways around these limitations, but the side effect is extra server load and more complicated factories. 2. Add a feature in transfer units to move by a ratio or percentage of the source containers qty. It would simplify things greatly if one could split the contents between two containers about evenly (or some other ratio) rather than just being limited to an absolute amount maintain limit. Why do I want to do this? I need more than 10 links to the materials inside the container without starving one side or the other. I don't know if this is possible in Lua, but many people don't have the time or inclination (willingness to deal with debug headaches) to learn a new programming language.

To give more detail on a better PvP experience: Provide the option to have a visual HUD interface for the gunner seat to be able to target and see weapons fire and damage effects in 3rd person view. There is a lot of 3-D location context that you can't get from a list of numbers. Targeting ships that you are heading towards but not the closest in the list is one example. ....................... As far as the upcoming rebalancing, having voxel honeycomb armor should have a role, keep using Core Stress for extreme cases but not for a typical situation. Being able to specify general location of targets would be cool, so you can try to take out the engines only. Then voxel armor could protect vital areas as a design tradeoff. If that is too hard, then specify from a list of [general attack (as default), shield, core, engines, weapons, inventory, control seat, adjustors, brakes] as a priority damage goal for weapons fire. .......................... Also I know there is a filter for inventory but it would also be convenient to be able to sort by type (then within that, by name) without filtering. (I would have that as my default setting)