wizardoftrash

I kinda like "Wall". Not everything high tech needs a long name.

Our most recent Devblog laid out NQ's plans for how base protections will work in non-savezone areas, and I've got to say I'm relieved. In summary... -Can use a Force Field Unit (I'd like it to be more of a structural integrity unit myself, as a forcefield implies it prevents entry, which so far the proposed mechanic does not). -Force field absorbs damage. When it gets below a certain threshold, it effectively freezes pvp for 24-48 hours, making everything temporally indestructible. You'll be able to predict when your defenses drop, and there will be a cool-down before turning it back on. -You get an Email notification when your stuff is under attack Yes, I know the EVE tryhards are going to cry and moan about this, but as an ex-eve player who really wants to participate in pvp in DU, I'm extremely relieved that there are solid protective measures like these. That being said, I don't expect these defenses to come cheap, they might require quite a bit of upkeep to maintain, and they might eat a ton of power or resources to turn-back-on after a cooldown. This means that not every rando player will be able to keep their stuff shielded 100% of the time. Pirates will have plenty to do while they wait on my shields to collapse. This also means that abandoned structures left by inactive players can eventually be purged, at the *worst* after about 48 hours. So what should this force-field be called?

eeehhhhh I dunno. I do think that there might be one reason people will attempt to multibox, that being the 1-player 1-gun rule on ships. It'll really depend on what the "final" combat system ends up looking like.

Sure, and what marketing campaign has DU set to be a full-loot FFA-PVP game? Have we gotten any bit of advertising to suggest that it'll be a thriller full of combat? Maybe that was a big part of the kickstarter? Nope, nothing. Yes we've heard whispers of what pvp might be like in DU, but there hasn't been a single inkling that this is going to be a lawless hellscape like Rust or Conan. Emergent gameplay is something they are shooting for, however they are also wanting players to "rebuild civilization together", which would be impossible without a robust set of build protection and defense tools. They will likely put their thumb on the scale hard in-favor of those carebeares you mention (since as I've mentioned earlier in the thread, this game has attracted tons of bandit/murder hobo/greifer style players). Nobody really knows what the pvp/nonpvp cultures will look like or need until we actually have mechanics implemented for those. I suspect that you'll find it'll be much easier to set up a safe-ish place than it'll be to tear it down.

The devs will also get to tip the scales pretty heavily here, don't underestimate the power of mechanical reinforcement! The game itself will likely have a bias towards order and protection, to help counteract the player-bias towards destruction and PVP. In games without that bias, it only takes a few destructive players to ruin the experience for a large number of peaceful builders, I've got some faith that NQ will provide plenty of tools to create safe-ish areas. We will still have some equivalent to null-sec (from eve) though, since "laws" will really only be enforceable in automated areas (like within the influence of a TU), or in areas where there are actually players to carry-out law enforcement (in loosely held zones or space without TU's). Outside of those areas it'll be the wild west, but space is huge, so a pirate finding you and killing you randomly will be a needle in a haystack situation unless there are solid ways to scan for ships long-distance, or unless you happen to be intersecting a high-activity area.

apparently survival mechanics is something they'd like to add in some future update, so in the short-term these will be purely decorative. Now when we'd get those mechanics, and what those mechanics will actually look like is totally up in the air. NQ has their hands full getting the base game up and running

oh no, we actually agree on something guess the world is ending again

you know what would require people to think? if they needed to actually craft their first weapon rather than starting with an indestructible unlootable weapon. Otherwise you can get a situation where someone keeps respawning behind a bubbled grid with no gear, just attacking you again and again with their nanoformer. thats the kind of silly behavior you get when you "start" with a weapon, and it requires no thought to rush someone again and again "naked".

Any starting "weapon" would hinder the process of people leaving the safezone to mine, since it would be such low hanging fruit (and exactly the kind of thing that would attract trolls). If you have to craft the thing, then that might be enough of a deterrent for trolls to not bother, or at least reduce the number or provide some time day 1 for people to mine before there are weapons floating around.

My concern is that people would be hanging out just outside the safe zone day 1 to zap people with their nanoformer. If its something that you had to spec-into, or an "upgrade" to the nano-former that you'd have to craft I'd be fine with that.

I see what you mean now, and I think this would certainly be possible. The thing is, miners will still be able to use regular ol' weapons too, so the way they would defend them-self is with... well... weapons. The way that I would see a weapon-ish tool be useful for PVP *and* mining would be mining-charges. It would be an explosive weapon that breaks up non-ore material (as you pointed out there) but would also potentially damage players and constructs to a lesser extent. It would probably use expensive ammo (as T&T in minecraft or similar items in other games are kinda pricey) but it would allow a player to mine lots of materials in a short time, so a good trade-off there. I'd also be down for a ship-mounted jackhammer or piledriver, but not really for mining exactly. As an Outlaw Star junkey, I'm jonesing for a ship-mounted class of melee weapons. Grappling hooks, claws, jackhammers, beam lances, you name it I'd dig it (not super likely to actually happen though).

Precisely. But more importantly here, NQ isn't a bunch of dummies, they know games like this are troll/griefer bait. To prevent this from being an anarchy murder-hobbo garbage fest, they are going to have mechanics in-place that make it kinda hard to ruin the game for others. I mean the motto is "rebuilding civilization together". I think the protection options for builds and tiles are going to be pretty solid. That doesn't mean the game will be safe that's for sure, but there will be plenty to dissuade people from griefing in the dictionary/traditional sense of the word.

I believe that the plan is for mining to be done using the nanoformer. You know that quick footage of NQ removing spheres of dirt and adding it to their inventory? That might be what mining looks like, in which case no real "mining tools" necessaraly. If that's the case then no, the nanoformer should not also be a weapon, it would again devolve to "rust in space" where your trusty rock is your first tool and also your first weapon, naturally people run around hitting each other with rocks. They did make it clear though that mining would be done by hand (no ship drills or mining lasers here), since they wanted to make scanning and mining an engaging activity, and doing it form inside a ship removes from that. I wouldn't be opposed to having hand-held mining lasers of various qualities that could double as something like a melee weapon (sorta like assaulting someone with a chainsaw). This would also allow them to develop mining tools that each have different strengths (a tool that can only gather common materials but gathers them quickly in a wide area, one that's slow but squeezes some extra ore or higher purity ore out of it, etc etc). It would make sense for such a tool to hurt players, however you'd have to be careful how effective it can be against constructs. If the mining laser tool works well on ships, then it would be just like the grinder in space engineers, where you can bust up basically anything for free as much as you'd like. To damage a construct i think you'd need an actual weapon, ideally explosives (something designed to hurt constructs). To take a page from something rust does well, it takes for friggin ever to break down a door with anything other than explosives (and that's honestly a good thing)

I'm going to try to rustle up a quick-crew so that we can specialize the early skills, and race to set up a TU somewhere on the surface. Probably work in-conjunction with the Terran Union for safety reasons, maybe try to help set up some early game law enforcement (help root out the murder hobo players). Ideally I'll plan it as a vacation (long weekend or something) and spend a good 4 days straight just sleeping and playing to get started. Fortunately my wife understands how i feel about these things (we currently lost all our free time to Stardew Valley lately)

I doubt that building a ship that holds several players will be much harder than building a ship that holds 1 player. This means that if an org worked together to get into space, the work of building 1 ship would be shared across several players, and it would then take that org a fraction of the time to get into space. Specialization here is also a factor. We don't know what kinds of skills we will need to build a space-worthy ship, it might be that between scanning, refining, crafting, and piloting we need 4 different skills at a higher rank (like rank 2 or 3). With an org, you could delegate those specialty skills across several players, meaning that while a solo player waited a week or weeks to get the skills needed to leave a planet, an org would have it in a couple of days, makig it an order of magnitude faster. Even if the org then built 1 ship per player it would be a full week faster than the solo player, and they would all be in space with their own ships while McSolo was still waiting to gain ranks in their skills. It'll all depend on the pipeline, but I suspect that an org will be able to cross that space threshhold much much faster than a solo player, but it could be as few as 4 or 5 people needed to gain that advantage. Then building a 4 or 5 seater ship would be enough to get the whole org up and out.

NQ did actually mention that it might be possible for players to create safe zones, so I wouldn't rule this one out entirely.

Yes, hence why there either needs to be a way to bypass it, or restrictions on where the TU can go.

This discussion is over. Take it up with the admins and move on

"Unofficial Discord Corruption" isn't civil, its an accusation. The civil thing to do would be to politely ask for an appeal instead of showing up with "evidence" of wrongdoing. You got kicked out of someone's clubhouse, its not like you got kicked out of the game lol.

then ask the devs to un-ban the two of you... oh wait, the devs don't run that channel. Sounds like you'll need convince the person that banned you that it was actually wrongful rather than dragging it out here, which really only makes you look bad. You've shown us what you want to show us, which doesn't seem to prove anything :/

Its an unofficial channel, run by another human being. If he doesn't want you or your brother on, that's up to him. You taking it into here to try to get him in trouble just proves that he made the right call.

I'm fairly certain Blaze didn't mention anything that wasn't already part of publicly posted footage and info by NQ's part here. This is just plain bullying EDIT: Guess there was a stealth edit, woop

@Vorengard a bit crass, but well put! Another point of concern then boils down to what you can do by burying things. So far one of the planned functions of a TU is to regulate who has the rights to mine or edit voxels on a territory unit. What then prevents an org from literally burying their TU along with the power components needed to keep it running? The attacking player would have no way to reach the TU to re-claim the tile, no way to destroy it, and no way to override permissions because they can't dig or edit voxels, and its indestructable dirt in-between them and their goal. One possibly glimmering part of my suggestiont that could still be useful, even if it has no impact on whether or not you can damage structures, would be some kind of module that can disable some of the protections of a TU even temporally. Doing so would allow the attacking player to dig up whatever is buried on the tile. If NQ decides to stick with the "the only way to take a tile is from an adjacent tile" idea which is a really neat one, then having a city surrounded by buried TU's would guarantee that it could never be conquered.

I'm not sure what you are referring to there. Is there already a detailed system in-place for damage bubble implementation? Are you talking about the rumored damage bubble feature? or are you trying to talk through my suggestion? My suggestion still only brings down the protection/damage bubble for a window of time before it raises itself again (a matter of 30 minutes to 3ish hours). So it would be... -set up the tcu beside the tile, turn on your cyber warfare module, wait 24 hours, then attack during your ~1 hour window while both their and your shields are down. If you miss the window or fail to capture, you'll have to turn the cyber warfare module on again, wait again, and try again during a similar window.