SlaySomething

The problem with our two views is that you are thinking about how a small amount of players will have to start over to rebuild the entire economy, and I'm thinking about 2 years from now, if the game is successful at adding the amount of players required to make this game profitable and retaining them. I've been playing since before and after mining units but started playing shortly after schematics were introduced. Having always played with schematics I'm fine with their existence. They make sense. Whether through market purchases or by adding research and development to the game (which would be cooler) the concept of no schematics at all was just dumb and lazy and the people who complained about adding them seem like people who weren't committed to actually have to work for their goals. Every aspect of this game should be hard. Should require a focus on training, and investment, and time, and effort. That is the ONLY way this game survives the long term unless they basically do away with everything, make the entire focus about PvP, and people just raid and sell stuff to buy bigger faster ships than everyone else. If you make everything about this game easy and make it all about fighting over sections of territory without non PvP players having a significant role, this game will most certainly die. There are better games out there already within that model. This was sold as something different. They need to keep it that way.

Mining units weren't about changing how mining worked as much as it was to solve a world problem of too many holes. Mining should take effort. It should take time. It should be cumbersome. They could have solved this whole mining situation by just creating instanced mining. For people who didn't like the old way of mining, that would have been perfect for the economy. Don't like it? Don't do it. Leave the market to the people who want to be miners. Don't like to build? Don't do it! Leave industry to those they do. Etc. Making everything easy isn't the answer to long term survival. Most people will get bored.

They should be able to best decide if they have long term, big picture expectations and goals for the game. You can't make changes just to keep your beta testers playing. The small group of people who play have almost no power to alter the future of this game's success or failure. NQ needs to ask themselves, how many players do we want actively playing this game? As far as the economy goes, if we want a million active players, which form of mining or industry can the market support that allows for competition through supply and demand and not simply material over saturation? I feel like some of the long term implications of changes aren't being fully discussed or thought through. This game will die without specialization and a bigger risk vs reward system in my opinion. The everyone can do everything as long as they are around long enough model is lazy. Not everyone deserves a trophy no matter what activity they do in the game.

Once the bots go, the market is going to be so saturated with lower tier ore that it won't be worth the cost of fuel to fly to the market and sell it. New players are going to have a terrible first time user experience trying to figure out how to make money.

I think Dual Universe has made two terrible decisions moving into launch. First is the mining units. By allowing anyone to simply purchase mining units to gain all tiers of ore passively, they are going to flood the market with raw ore. Mining should be an art, and something that people spend time doing. Mining should be a career! To allow anyone to mine any material (albeit some more skilled than others) you take away from people who want to be miners. Obtaining ore should be a time consuming process that people have to dedicate themselves to. By simply having enough money to set up mining operations anywhere by dropping a few constructs, you take the profitability of mining away from others who want to focus on that career. The mining unit was a terrible choice. I've suggested it before in another thread that if you want to do away with permanent holes in the ground, make mining happen in instances. There are so many ways you can do this, and make materials discoverable based on mining skill. Make mining a real profession! Secondly, getting rid of schematics is a terrible idea. For those of us that played after schematics came about, it really isn't a big deal. In fact, I love having schematics in the game. It makes zero sense that everyone can create anything without an investment in time. Without having some barriers to industry the market will be flooded with product which is a devastating effect on their value. Industry should be hard. It should take a lot of time, dedication, and investment to be effective at. If anyone can make anything, why even have a market? If you destroy mining and industry by not making them a focused profession, than what is left for players? Building ships so you can fight over space territories. Well, guess what, not everyone wants to do that! Some people enjoy being a support role. Producing things that an organization needs and providing value for their time. If you make everything stupid easy, the game will fail. I guarantee you.

If you want Industry to be a path, then it should be something to work towards, either monetarily or through discovery and research. For people who want to make Industry a primary function of gameplay, there needs to be something that requires work to produce. To simply allow and industry unit to make anything of it's level is just silly and will flood the market with unskilled items to sell. The only people I know that got mad with the introduction of schematics are people who built massive industry with little to know true effort. It should be something that requires a ton of work, and yes a ton of grinding to be successful. Industry will be the heart of the market. and if everyone can do it on a whim, the market will be useless.

I'm mostly a solo player, but I'll add my 2 cents where I can. 1) I don't know enough about game mechanics to have an opinion on this, so I'll trust your critique. But in the long run, I would hope the game would be stable enough that this wouldn't be an issue. 2) I don't see issue with this 3) Cooperative mining. Perhaps a simple "group" system could be the solve for this, like other MMO's, grouping up before heading into an instanced dungeon or raid. 4) I can see where having large groups of people scanning the same hex could produce better results, but if the hex is randomized, and perhaps doesn't have any T3 or at all in that particular instance, or just a small quantity that doesn't justify a large group effort, I would think it's a waste of time sending many people to one hex than it is to send a large number of people to several hexes at the same time to maximize the chance of finding the biggest node. There is a chance that one hex might be overlooked by many looking for gold, but the same hex might be mined by someone who is fine with it having a large hematite node for a quick sale to keep up with taxes. But I do agree, there is a chance that if too many hexes get constantly overlooked, over time, there might be a problem where a planet gets flush with hexes that don't contain a high amount of desired ore. There may be the need of "refreshing" hexes by going in, mining a bit, and leaving so it will reset again. There has to be some sacrifice to find the big score. 5) I don't know much about the implementation of atmospheric PVP, but it seems to me, it would be better to wait for someone to be flush with ore and leave an instance and have to travel back to safety rather than disrupting an instance and get nothing for your PVP efforts because they haven't even reached a node yet. 6) there should be no deployment of any construct inside the instance besides the construct you enter with. If you go in with a medium container, that is what you have. If you go in with 4 large containers, there you go. I agree that you should not be able to set up an operation inside of an instance. 7) Asteroids being something people can be able to PVP over is only somewhat true. It was a possible solution to making permanent holes in planets causing rendering problems. Asteroids still provide a larger guarantee to find ore that you are searching for and come with a bigger risk. With DU introducing control over space sectors for resources, there will be plenty to fight over in space.

Level the playing field whether you are a solo player or part of a large corporation. The current problem with mining, even with the small player base we have now, is that mining areas with higher tier nodes are quickly overrun leaving most others out of being able to set up mining units worth anything of consequence. Though I still enjoy setting up mining units, I miss the old days of digging holes and searching for the nodes. I do understand why they had to get rid of it however. Asteroids! Well, that's cool for the people who are here early after reset but diminishes quickly, especially in safe zones. I propose keeping territory scanners for general area ground content like they are doing right now for the purpose of placing mining units, but add a secondary scanner with a shorter scan duration that is designed to try and find concentrated pockets of minerals. The ability to find mining nodes of tier 1 would be common place, but the higher your scanner skills increases the chances of finding larger nodes. Then for every tier, the chances of finding nodes at all gets harder and harder but the ability to find them and the size of the node would once again be based on your scanning skills. When nodes are discovered, you can get the option to open an instance, you and your cargo ship enters the instance, and you can mine away. The instance would only be open for a set duration (24 hours?) and once the timer is up, or you leave the instance, it is gone forever. This way there are no permanent holes in the world, the players that invest heavy in scanning skills will have the highest chance of finding valuable ores (as it should be), and mining goes back to being an exploration again. A system would have to be put in place where the possibilities of finding something vary at each territory (just because one person doesn't find the good stuff, doesn't mean someone else with RNG something great at that location) and once and instance is entered and left, that territory will spawn another random chance of regular to valuable ores.