[Reputation system/Curriculum Vitae]

If this is not implemented in game than someone could easily do this outside of game on a web site.

 

I see both sides to this, and really don't know which i prefer. What if you are really good at those hands dirty jobs, you might not want just anyone to see your job history.

 

Very true. But at least if it's done third party it's emergent and player driven and people can choose to use it or not.

[Reputation system/Curriculum Vitae]

Personally, I don't like the idea of a public/persistent reputation system, for several reasons:

• I spend enough time worrying about my resume and work history in real life. I don't want to have to stress out about it in the game too. 
• It favors people who already have a good reputation, making it harder for other players to get their foot in the door. (Bad for community growth)
• It traps players who have a bad reputation. e.g. Can't get work because of a bad reputation, can't improve reputation because you can't get work.
• It create a dichotomy of "good" and "bad", with little room for interpretation. 
• It mechanically favors "good" playstyles. DU is supposed to be a sandbox game, and if the game is designed to favor a specific type of game play it discourages diversification, making the game (in my opinion) boring. Sure, everyone wants to root out the pirates and con-men, but with out them the game would be pretty bland.

This is all just my opinion.  I think there should be a personal reputation system, where entities can assign a reputation to other entities but ti is only viewable by them. Thoughts? 

[How Should Markets Make Money?]

TL;DR - Markets themselves should not be owned or run by people. Control of a market should come from owning the goods for sale and the property used to store and transport those goods

.

 

I don't think giving players the ability to regulate things like sales tax is a good game play decision. All realism aside here, allowing the "market" owners to decide what people pay in taxes, especially for individual goods, is a recipe for a broken economy. Just think for a second about all the possible exploits, manipulations, and just plain griefing that could be done with such power. What happens when someone buys all the stores in a system (or, heaven forbid, multiple systems) and starts charging everyone 50% sales tax? Another example: you're at war with Group A, who primarily flies ships that use a ton of component X, so just increase the sales tax on that component to 1000% and voila, their entire doctrine is worthless because they can't afford to buy the parts/materials they need for those ships.

 

Things like that might be fun for the 2-3 people who own markets, but it's absolute garbage for the rest of us. That's why I think it's a huge mistake, game-play-wise, to allow players to control things like sales tax and transaction tax.

 

That being said, players should absolutely have the power to regulate other important things, like docking fees, storage fees, etc. I think the most money in DU will be made by people who own property and access to specific valuable spaces. In a world where goods need to be moved, and resources at locations are finite, the most money will be made by shipping agencies and the mercenaries who protect them. If you guys want to control the market, I'd suggest building tons of huge warehouses that people can rent in close proximity to major trade hubs. Then start hiring people to move things, and as mercenaries to protect people moving things. Eventually, you'll have a major market share because you'll own all the implements for getting things to market.

If people set the sales tax super high or do other things to try and gouge the market, someone else will just set up a new market with better conditions to attract merchants to theirs. Since there is no limit on the number of markets or who can create them, competition will prevent long term market failures. If I see some else set up a market with 20% sales tax I guarantee you the first thing I'm doing is setting one up next door with 15%, and then someone else will probably make one with 10% ... Anyways, in a game like this, economic pvp is a perfectly viable form of gameplay.

 

 

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. But the obvious solution is to have regional (perhaps in this case system) wide markets that are run as an extension of the game itself, like in EVE Online.

 

Then we can avoid all of the issues you and I just stated.

 

Even in EVE the markets aren't really stabilized in any way. The prices are all determined by players. Especially with the new citadels, people are creating 'offshore' tax havens where they control the tax rates. It hasn't broken the game as the markets are competing to attract customers. Not to mention there is Lenny Kravits2 paying off Mercenary Coalition to kill the markets because he doesn't like them. If you feel there is a corrupt market in DU, just get some friends and attack it! That's content for everyone

[BOO - Band of Outlaws]

Reminds me of mo0 back in the beginning days of EVE .... They were some intense pirates ...

[DevBlog: Monetization, player happiness and economic viability]

Personally, I like the pay to play model. It provides a steady income to the developer and keeps costs consist for the player, plus it helps avoid the pay to win that seems to always come with free to play models That being said, there seems to be a trend in the industry away from pay to play. A limited freemium system like EVE online is implementing might not be such a bad idea, but the f2p players would have to be significantly limited so as not to have a disproportionate affect on the game. 

 

If you can avoid that, though and just do P2P that'd be great! 

[Let Us Take Credit For Our Work]

I love this idea. Not only does it add the ability to brag but it opens up a whole new segment of gameplay revolving around marketing.

[Contractual Corporate Peace Accords {CCPA}]

I think this is reasonable. It's important to test everything, combat included, but the alpha should focus on everything and not unwarranted combat.

 

I and those I represent will still be looking to try out all aspects of the game and have some fun fighting, but will refrain from unprovoked/non-mutual combat.

[Joining More than One Organization?]

Perhaps requiring Organizations to pay a DAC fee (call it a Black Ops fee) for each operative that if not paid would make their operatives easier to discover -- hmm, a Black Ops budget! 

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.

[The BIPM]

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

[Sensors 2.0]

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.

[Use things built in the beta/alpha and turn it into "Ancient relics"]

Following the lore - there was no human on this starting planet.

Then this could give extra advantage to alpha team members. They can easily create hiden treasures.

 

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.

[How Should Markets Make Money?]

Here they are:

1. Market owner (MO) takes a percentage of the sales. (ex. Item sells for $10. MO takes 1%. Seller gets $9.90.) -- thanks ATMLVE
2. MO is paid per each listing by the seller. (ex. $10 to post one item for sale, $10 to post 1,200 items.)
3. MO is paid per each item listed by the seller. (ex. $10 to sell one item, $20 to sell two, $30 for three, etc.)
4. MO is paid based on cubic units of storage space taken by the items sold. (ex. at $10 per cubic unit, a listing occupying five cubic units of market storage would cost the seller $50 to post for sale.)
5. MO establishes listing "types" (raw resources, ship parts, blueprints, etc.). seller is charged using any of the above methods based on item "type". (ex. raw resource listings charged using method #1 cost 1% of sale, while blueprint listings cost 5%.) --This option allows the most freedom to the Market Owner as they could use different charge methods for each listing "type". (ex. MO uses method #2 for raw resource listings and method #1 for blueprints.)

       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.

[Conflict at the Beginning]

Claiming territories will require TU's (territory units) which as described so far, will be very challenging to construct. Ideally it would take a while before a TU could be built and placed, as some of the prerequisite material for them may be offword.

 

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!

[Conflict at the Beginning]

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

[Is scamming going to be a thing?]

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.