Lord_Void

Step 1) Create new account Step 2) Pay for account with DAC Step 3) join target organization with new account Untraceable (assuming you don't get discovered some other way) EDIT: I don't know if they have specifically stated whether multiple accounts are allowed or not, but I haven't found anywhere that said you can't use them, so long as you are only using it for legitimate gameplay reasons and not to harass/abuse anyone.

I'm interested in joining. What sort of "standards" do you have in mind?

It would be interesting if sensors not only had an area of influence but also had a strength attribute that affected it's ability to operate at certain ranges. So for instance at a very long range you would only be able to tell there was a ship, but not any specific attributes about. As the ship got closer into range or the sensors are in some way manipulated (perhaps the scan area is decreased in order to increase scan strength) more attributes would become scan-able. Various skills could affect different aspects of scanning: skill at pinpointing ship's location, owner, elements (what kind of equipment it has), crew size, cargo hold, etc. This could make being a dedicated scout/scanner a valuable career path. it could also make it a bit more fun and challenging rather than a simple point and scan.

I agree. What will set this game aside from other similar games is that it will start as a totally blank slate. A cool as it would be to have some monuments to the alpha/beta stages, it makes more sense with the lore and the nature of the game. I did see somewhere that someone suggested preserving some player made structures immediately around the ark ship. If anything should be preserved, it should be something small like that.

The best way to make money off running a market will probably be the percentage based approach. When I first thought about it, I thought price per volume would be a good way to go but now that I've thought it out a bit, I don't think that would work very well. For instance, I initially thought that since almost all goods will take up physical space in the market area, the main limiting factor for a market (at least in the beginning) will be pure volume of storage space. So for bulk items like basic raw materials, it would probably make sense to charge per cubic units of storage space. However this does lead to several changes in market behavior: Not every item will have the same ratio of price to volume, so the percentage cost for lower ratio items would be much higher than for higher ratio items. For example: Say you charge $5 (is there a term for the in game currency yet? idk) per cubic unit of space. Item A sells for $20 per cubic unit and item B sells for $100 per cubic unit. That would mean 25% of item A's income would go towards the cost of selling while only 5% of item B's income would go towards the selling cost. Therefore, as it's 5 times less profitable to sell item A as it is to sell item B, merchants will likely start to favor items with higher value to volume ratios. These higher value items may have a lower velocity (the rate at which they pass through the market), so you may end up with a lot of stagnant orders waiting to be sold. TL;DR: I guess long story short is go for a percentage based approach. It's just less headache for everyone and shouldn't affect market behavior too drastically in any particular direction.

This is a good point. I suppose this still leaves the possibility of having territory that isn't controlled but is so saturated with other players that travel becomes very dangerous for new players, but that is part of the sandbox I guess!

I agree with most of your assumptions, and you are probably right in that well organized groups will immediately start expanding and constructing . This will also, as you said, lead to near instant conflict. One thing I'm not sure about, though, is whether this is a bad or good thing. One possibility is that the conflict will lead to lots of entertaining content and also increase the demand for materials, raising prices and helping to kick start the economy. It could also help check the rate of expansion for larger groups, giving the smaller groups a chance to not get left behind quite so fast. The main thing I am worried about is since everyone starts in the same safe zone, what if the first groups that go out end up forming a sort of ring around the edge of the safe zone, preventing others from being able to go out and acquire resources? That would sort of strangle everyone else trying to start out

I'll be really interested to see what happens in regard to player driven law and criminality. Personally, I hope they allow nefarious activities so long as they don't involve a) exploiting glitches or flaw in the game, hacking the game or using bots or c) tricking people into spending real life money. I also hope they allow for a variety of emergent responses to it. For instance, I really liked the idea of being able to lock players out of things. It could make maintaining a reputation a very important part of the game.