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Kurock

Alpha Team Vanguard
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Everything posted by Kurock

  1. Some minor points or additions to the above: STU’s are becoming less useful with each passing day. They were an advantage in the beginning to help get started but as players/orgs get onto asteroids etc their value plummets. Ores are now readily available on the markets. Not having an STU when promised one (or more) during the second week after launch is very sad. NQ dropped the ball on this one so hard I wouldn’t be surprised if the ball entered orbit on the rebound. The max build height is a number they can should be able to easily change. But I agree with the points that many of the changes NQ makes do not seem to be made by anyone that actually plays the game. A difference of 128m here shows that clearly. Beta saw the proliferation of space elevators which NQ decided to stop by putting in a height limit. Crashing into towers is never fun and a space elevator works just as well without the shaft. Or is it that Aphelia doesn’t want anything taller than the arkship? The problem with scanning on Alioth is that Alioth is big. Mind numbingly big. And there is not much variety in the ores to be found and the distribution is quite uniform. There are patches of T2 spanning 10km or more from end to end. Making 3km hops while looking for T2 is counter productive. For T3 however, it is about right. What this boils down to is bad luck. The HTML was always going to be disabled... but there is a setting to re-enable it. Click checkbox in settings and it’s back. The Lua refactoring is always a pain but they usually deprecate instead of outright deleting old functions. If something was outright removed (even a rename is a removal) then they broke scripts which should not have happened and seems like a hug to me. In summary, NQ where my STU?
  2. Disappointed but not surprised. Thoramine was a lovely dream and it really sucks that it was never realized. Missed opportunity imo. Question: Will NQ still honor the rewards from Kickstarter packs (DAC’s, lifetime subscriptions, pets etc)?
  3. Ah, good to see we have reached the Bargaining phase. Almost there. The main reasons for a wipe is to remove past "mistakes" and fix the "economy". So keeping quanta and the vast array of territories (and their mining units) is not going to be viable. An excellent outcome in the event of a wipe would be if each of the current players (not ones created after the announced date) gets to keep a single construct and all the contents in its containers. Quanta and talent points are still at NQ's discretion, though I would suspect that talent points remain while quanta gets removed. All blueprints stay because they are effectively useless without gathering materials again. All this is conjecture and at this point NQ can do as they please since many have stopped playing (and retracted subs) until further notice.
  4. This quite ill-considered and frankly one-sided towards wiping post by NQ has made it clear that NQ see a wipe as the “proper” way forward. This has caused many subs to be stopped immediately and players to simply stop playing because it’s all going to be wiped anyway. Two servers were never on the cards and even suggesting it is an insult on top of more insults. What of Thoramine? Is that considered another mistake by NQ to be removed just like the economy “mistakes” NQ let happen (like unchecked Aphelia missions) which has injected far more quanta into the system than a few minor exploits. Regardless, the damage has been done. NQ should announce the final decision so that people can prepare for release (if they can) and if there is nothing to prepare, then expect player counts to drop drastically until after release were a few will check in, see they still don’t like the game and quit again.
  5. I have never read a bigger pile of one-sided bullsh*t basically advocating for full wipe in order to easily do away with schematics. Just announce the decision and get it over with. At beginning of beta it was announced "no more wipes except as required for updates" (like the mining update that was done). So if NQ do decide to wipe, it would be yet another promise broken. This also completely ignores that people have been paying monthly to play... As for "removing unfair advantage" and "level playing field". These are fallacies to help people sleep better at night. The players with the know how will return to the positions of abundance they have now in short order. There will always be "haves" and "have nots". All a wipe does is a slap in the face of the people that put time into the game after being told a wipe would not happen. Make a system that creates schematics rather than remove them. The problem with schematics, like the markets, is that they do not give player agency. A player cannot make a schematic at all, they have to be bought. Make science research a thing. Cons for wipe have already been mentioned: As I said, the "NQ thoughts" are heavily aligned to a wipe disregarding promises and small details like leaving an empty world, avid supporters of the game just leave, and paying customers just get their stuff removed. What a wipe also does is remove the history of DU such as it is... like Thoramine. Deleting a piece of DU history like that is unforgivable.
  6. @NQ-Deckard Great update. 10/10. Talents are for those that want to invest and specialize in a certain direction and builders need lots of cores to be a builder. Or have massive space ports or showrooms or puzzles or have a huge junkyard of defeated enemy ships to show off. This system still allows those fresh off the arkship to ban together and put down a decent number of cores (I still disagree with the gated core size placement talents but that is a different discussion) Panacea update is looking more and more like its namesake rather than a Burst Pancreas. Edit: For those worried about players leaving orgs in the lurch on core counts: there will be other players that will sell their core slots temporarily to keep the org afloat without losing anything. If there is a market, there will be those that fill that market.
  7. The per player approach is likely the correct one, however abandoning the constructs so quickly when someone leaves is a bit... draconic. I feel like an org should have a longer period before abandoning happens. also unless the new talents are very very cheap, 10 more org constructs is worse than the number you can get for private cores using talents (2 base + 15 talents). Sure the org constructs start at 15 but I feel like the talents should give at least 15 again if not double that. It would basically be required for ship collectors and builders.
  8. Love these changes. These wrecks are how their low-browed terrestrial cousins should have been. And the salvaging is long overdue. My only suggestion is to extend the "salvagable" timer on aphelia owned tiles from two days to a week before full deletion. Players will clean those up quickly. For every well meaning DarkHorizon there are twenty market spammers with horrendous advertising and lag inducing sales pitching constructs. I am still against having Aphelia run markets at all (power to the players, players run markets, advertising run by players) but this is still a good step in the interim.
  9. Explicitly printing to the Lua channel for non-explicit execution would make copy-and-pasting from a channel very very useful. If spamming is a problem then a limit to kill the PB could be added? Or another way that allows placing a limited amount of text in the activating players clipboard... the only option now is to write it to a screen and edit the screen to get it out (since log files will not be available anymore). The screen method is tedious at best.
  10. Along with this, would it be possible to add a print to a chat channel (like the Lua channel) that also functions for PB’s activated in surrogate mode?
  11. NQ want a quanta sink and one of them currently is schematics. Now a schematic research system that requires quanta to use... I am sure they can get behind something like that. Players generating schematics makes a lot of sense, but it won't happen while its tied down as a quanta sink
  12. I like immersion. DU's asthetic is supposed to be scifi but more on the side of realism. The glowing rocks simply arn't realistic. Now there are certain rocks that do glow under certain lights but not nearly to the extent depicted in DU Idea: These rocks should look like normal rocks except when you have the harvest tool equipped then it they look like this. This makes them easy to find when you want to harvest but doesnt look terrible when you don't. What say you?
  13. The day the planets ran dry Memoir of a miner <Recording started, datalog 2021112315311321…> Ahem. This thing on? Good. I’ve been mining since… Bah. Delete the recording before this. Damn technology, anticipating needs I don’t have. Just do as I say and not... <Recording ended.> <Recording started, datalog 2021112315313512…> I've been mining since the day I stepped off the Arkship. It was boring but I never got bored. That’s an old mining joke. Along with the one where we are all old enough to drink at bars. With the bad jokes out of the way I can get down and dirty. Back on Earth we were lucky to have a jackhammer or a sonic destabilizer, but right off the Arkship we were giving nanoformers. Amazing bits of technology, able to detect nearby concentration of ores, vaporize the ground to get to the ore and pack the ores neatly into a container. The abuse of nano-fields and Calabi-Yau space at its finest. Then came the territory scanners. Able to scan a square kilometer and give a read out of the ores in the ground. They were prospecting made easy. The big business scanner-heads went out in their tri-scanner ships and deployed arrays of tri-scanners to be able to prospect on upwards of twenty-four square kilometers at the same time. But before all that it was just me and my trusty ship with a territory scanner bolted to its side. That's all a miner really needed. Then Aphelia, the Arkships AI, made the Arkship fire its big beam deep into the planet. That can’t be good for the planet. The Novark spat small ore rocks all over the planet's surface. Must have done it to all the planets and moons of the Helios system, because the rocks were everywhere. But no self respecting miner would waste time picking those up. The yields were simply too small, compared to the expansive nodes in the ground. And then there were the motherloads: the mega-nodes. Where one ore node held thousands of liters of ore, the mega-nodes held millions. I personally found and cleared out more mega-nodes than you can shake a stick of carbon at. Those were good times. But just because a territory scanner said there was ore in the ground, it didn’t say where it was. It was still an art to find those elusive ore nodes, even the megas. My preferred method was walking the compass. Find your level, walk north or south whichever makes the blip get closer. Then east west. Once the blip gets no closer, you know the ore is right above or below you. But never dig straight up or down. How are they gonna get back up? What if there is a giant desert scorpion or worse… ecologists. But some did dig straight down. The well-diggers or shafters as I called them, wanted to get down to where the ore was quickly. And they didn’t waste time digging back to the surface either. Instead they would just kill themselves, trusting their resurrection nodes on the surface wouldn’t malfunction. But sometimes they did. That’s why the shafters were either desperate or psychopaths. The proper way of mining was always just the miner and their trusty tool. No floating mining chairs, auto-mappers or follow-me container bots. Just you and the dark. And occasionally a miner would be treated to the midnight sun: the hallucinations of sunlight seemingly streaming through the surrounding rocks to illuminate the tunnels or caverns they were traversing. A beautiful sight but also a warning you might have been mining for too long. Maybe all miners were a little touched in the head. <Evacuation order received. Ignored.> If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed I kept saying “was”. Aphelia predicted it would take decades to empty the planets of a fraction of their precious ores, but it’s been a single year and they are all gone. We dug them all out. The purer ores anyway. But humanity always needs more resources. So Aphelia made mining units available, each capable of extracting the diffuse ores from the ground. She gave molecular quantum tunneling or some such nonsense as the reason. But I think it's something else: Nanites. A high energy beam is used to inject nanites deep into the ground. They suffuse the surrounding rock and gravel through Brownian motion. Each nanite is specially calibrated to search for a specific group of molecules and, once found, they construct nanotubes to pipe their payload towards where they are densest, eventually up the beam. The demonstrations that show diminishing yields within 48 hours seems to collaborate this theory. Either way, the side effect of preparing the ground is the liquification of the rocks that then fill in most of the caves and tunnels already dug. Some might think it’s like turning the rock to magma but there is no heat involved. Just a dark grey sludge that quickly settles back into natural rock again. The mining shafts will be the first to go. Followed by the engulfing of any underground structures. You would think that a solid box of iron would prevent the rock from flowing in. No. This ‘quantum’ rock that flows right through everything contained only by the gravity of the planets. And moons. The moons will be receiving the same treatment. <Evacuation order received. Ignored.> Us Noveans that have served for years as extraction experts have been relegated to asteroid harvesting duty. But Bert, they say to me, Bert, Mining is mining, right? No, I say. Besides micro-gravity leaching of muscle and bone, Asteroids are the turds of the Helios system, attracting pirates like the flies they are. Asteroids just don’t have the same, heh, gravitas of planets. What if this is how the dinosaur fossils were made: Subterranean creatures caught in a planetwide rock liquefaction event. Heh. That’s a thought. <Warning. Warning. Approaching anomaly.> Ah. Here comes the grey ooze... <Recording ended.> - Contents of databank found 6km below the surface of an icy planet. Want more? www.spaceshipdrama.com
  14. Q: Where is the “D” in RDMS (Rights and Duties Management System) to help with paying the exorbitant territory taxes? Until the D comes, the territory taxes should definitely be reduced. It can always be bumped up again later. But right now it’s not sustainable. Image land owners being able to charge rent for those living in their territory. Or renting out ships. Or services.
  15. Q: Will the taxation per hex be reduced to an acceptable amount? (Suggested: 1 mil per month not per week) It feels like the price is set with purely auto-mining in mind while the territories are used for other things: like racetracks, train-lines, bases and works of art (voxel or dirt works). Is the plan to force players to move back to sanctuary or space?
  16. I would love both but can keep neither. Rip community projects.
  17. Constant communication to answer players burning questions is a monumental task that is required at any time during the release cycle, even if that answer is reiterating “We [NQ] don’t know yet”. So keep up the great comms @NQ-Naerais ! On another note, if the dreaded schematics arn’t banished back to the pits of hell that spawned them, players should be able to create them... though science!
  18. Space Mom always said "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" So to NQ: Keep the communications coming. I am loving them. To the players, I have nothing to say.
  19. You could have just said: Schematics should be researchable. XD
  20. Requests for Rotors, Wheels, Pistons, Hinges, Sliders and further parts that make other parts of a construct move, always gets the same response: Not going to happen. The server is built with a single shard MMO in mind and that comes with a price. That said, stand alone elements that do not interact with surfaces directly (direct contact) are definitely possible. They are called engines and a request for a vertical lift type element sounds like a reskin of a downwards pointing engine. but engines that thrust downwards to upward lift are not fuel efficient. That’s because engines in this orientation have their power halved because everyone was vertical lifting stuff into space much too easily for NQ’s liking. So players, in turn, just put on more engines so they could do it anyway. TLDR: helicopters aren't fuel efficient so use vertical engines.
  21. I believe the opposite. It's simple to work out the statistical probabilities of complete failure. I would assume there is at least one statistical analysist in NQ just like I assume there is an economist. ? That said, randomly decreasing the maintenance meter has to be very slow. Why? Because a griefer can break all your public buttons my smashing them for 30 minutes. A months frequent use as a half life seems fair, but can easily be tweaked. Most of the maintenance will come from crashing and PvP anyway... Updated OP to reflect it's a complete fix.... so no dynamic properties to worry about and complete salvage. It's also far simpler to understand. It makes both a element sink AND a parts sink since elements WILL be used when they aren't maintained AND people will want to maintain their expensive stuff. For the cheap stuff... less so. It's about choices and trade offs. The current system has none. The market will decide which is "better" for a player at a specific time: if engines are dirt cheap then why bother maintaining them? Added. It's very similar to Tuning so if one can be done, why not the other? An element sink is very going to be fun, always tedious, and direct you back to mining. The "lives" method is definitely less immersive. Maintenance makes sense... some might even find it enjoyable. Not everyone. And that is a good thing imo.
  22. YARSOS aka Yet Another Repair System Overhaul Suggestion Preface: No one likes the elements breaking on X lives system. The factory owners want it to be 1 life (because that's quanta in the bank eh?) and other players don't want it at all. @Volkier has been fighting the good fight and while the "multiple lives system" was suggested by (the factory owner) players and implemented, the great ideas of Volkier go unacknowledged. So the hopes of this suggestion getting more than a passing glance is low indeed. The suggestion: How about instead of lives for elements, have a maintenance meter that degrades randomly with element use. If the maintenance meter reaches 0 then there is a chance elements will be destroyed *while in use*. HP loss from crashing and PvP makes the maintenance meter take a big dive. An element at 0 hp means it's broken and unusable (as usual). Scrap repairs hp as normal. (hp is so gamey... calling it "integrity" would be better especially since that is a trait sorely lacking in some). Just repairing an element with scrap will make it functional as normal however if it is *used* (just to reiterate) there is a random chance it would be destroyed permanently. Finally, maintenance takes enough time (or maybe the construct needs to be stationary, or maybe you have a better suggestion so comment below) that it can’t be done in combat and in if the maintenance meter has degraded enough, it may require *parts* to bring the meter up again. A fully maintained element is the same as a completely new element. But why? - It's far less grievous if the *permanent* destruction of elements is under the players control: aka a choice led to that outcome. Whether that is going into a PvP zone or deciding to not do maintenance. Hopping landing gear leading to entire ship exploding should not be part of this equation at all. - Why "on use"? - computation is off-loaded onto the client in DU... mostly... except for factories. That is why the batches of factories had to be increased as well as the schematic nerf. Can't have all players DOSing the server with millions of factories now can we? Anyway, what uses items but players themselves. Hence on use. What does this mean? The side effect of this kind of system would be: - Even elements on static/space constructs would not be exempt from needing maintenance. Those doors and buttons will need to be oiled and kept in working order... or just them break and buy replacements. More choice for players. And factory owners should be happy right? (no they will never be happy until your whole ship has to be replaced after moving 5 meters) - Mechanics! Imagine actual mechanic shops. Job creation right there. (throw in some maintenance specific talents and we are golden) - Accidents (especially those caused by glitches and pop-in towers) are far less infuriating. There will always be glitches, that is the nature of the beast. An entire ship should not need to be replaced because the (default) flight script decided to get stuck in a perpetual left turn. - More of a market for parts. Will that make factory owners happy? My guess is no ? - Elements that aren't used directly won't need maintenance... this covers those decorative items: Leave them looking good without being a pain. No need to remember to water those plants. - PvP and salvaging rewards... fully functional elements: with some parts and scrap they are good as new. - Industry needs maintenance. You want to keep your expensive factory working? Keep it maintained. The reality is the initial cost isn't the problem, its keeping them going that is the real trick. No fire and forget factories. Future improvement suggestions: - Talents - Make maintenance fun with a talent tree for your mechanic - Tuning - alter you engine to have less performance but a larger maintenance meter. Or the opposite. - Efficiency - Have engines become less efficient as they are less maintained... requiring a visit to your local mechanic for a tune up. - Recyclers - Take those destroyed elements and recycle them into parts which could be used to maintain the not-destroyed elements. Element lives don’t matter... I demand maintenance. TLDR: Random destruction chance with mitigation mechanics (maintenance meter) gives players a chance against mishaps.
  23. It is very difficult to make suggestions for mechanics/systems in a game like DU where not all the systems are implemented yet and future systems details are not available. Each system affects all others like cogs in a machine, some directly, some indirectly through a series of other cogs. Set one cog out of alignment, or have one cog spin a little too fast, it could turn the entire machine into glazing inferno of death. So making suggestions through the little pinhole of understanding is the best we can do. That said, permanent element destruction is coming, like it or not. Durability is already in the game in the form of hit points for each element. The real change is once the last “life” has run out, the element becomes irreparable. It means that while it has more than 1 “life” the system is still as forgiving as it was before: repair it and all is well. Eventually the part will be so worn out most wont want to risk flying around with 1 life remaining and risk being stranded after a mishap. I suggest a capstone talent for the repair line of talents. This will make mechanics a wanted commodity. A talent to add a single life to an element that has only 1 life remaining. That is all. 1 life becomes 2. The tiers of the talent could correspond to the tiers of elements to be given the last leg. Make it useable only once per day per element (and potentially increasing cost each time) and players have the option to decide when it’s time to get a new one or continually take it to the mechanic to be repaired. This is forgiving for the casual player while those that want the best and shiniest 5 life elements will replace their elements far earlier. The little old old lady that flies her spaceship to the market once a week was never going to be the a massive source of income for element sellers. Don’t punish the little old ladies afternoon they crash their ship a little. Think of the little old ladies.
  24. To expand on the idea: The general idea is to allow players, through whatever mechanic, to claim planets and eventually systems that allows the setting of options otherwise not available to players (like setting PvP status), making the universe really the players own. Coupling this with territory control gives a very compelling reason to claim a percentage (or all) of the territories.
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