Daphne Jones

You join an org in game now.

The unexpected number of players thing doesn't really fly. Every one of those excess players is $20 that could be spinning up more capacity. Since we old players aren't paying any more, the more new - paying - players the better.

I was worried I was doing that too much and might break something lol. Do I need to get a new link each time or just keep banging on the same one?

Definitely a stretch to call this beta, but what do those terms even mean anymore?

Could someone at NQ please fix the password reset. I'm just getting an undefined error.

Hell Yeah!

Eventually.

It's hard to know at this point what will be necessary and what things will cost. If I'm carrying gunners and marines, it will be because they're necessary and whoever you hire will also need them... and you'll have to pay for them. If they aren't necessary for a mission, they won't be on the crew. If I'm carrying miners, it's because the profit is going to come from selling the product of mining - this will only happen if the price brings in enough to support the miners. As a solo player, you will be able to afford some of my services and you won't be able to afford others. In some cases, the benefit you get may be that materials from other planets will be available on the market because Hyacinth brough them.

Up and running in A3 and waiting for you to join

Hyacinth Partners Ltd. is the org for the flight and ground crew of the Hyacinth - a medium hauler tramp spacer. We aren't planning to take over the galaxy or build a city in space... but we may provide the logistic support for those activities... for a price. Full flight crew complement is Pilot Navigator/Radar operator Engineer 3 gunners 2 stewards or 2 mission specialists (Yes the ship has bunks for all those people) Business focus: Transport and Logistics Trading Deep Space Salvage ops Special Courier Services. Auxiliary activities Mining Security Combat Currently recruiting Navigator/Radar Op Still working on what this job will be exactly. I expect to have software to improve navigation, plus a radar system for tracking and flagging hostiles for the pilot's combat display. (System design is WIP). Will be trained to pilot as well. Flight Engineer. Monitors Engine performance, fuel, and damage during flight. Fixes damage as needed. Advises pilot on best engine performance. Gunners. (3 positions) Protect the ship from hostiles. We will begin combat training in A3. Stewards (2 position) Takes care of any passengers. This includes providing whatever they need in during the fight, but also controlling them. (Steward is a polite word for marine. After release, this job may include combat and we will train for it when AvA combat comes in game) Mission Specialist (several positions) Conducts non-flight mission activities. We will need miners and eventually EVA salvage. A courier might be a mission specialist for special courier services. Sales Rep (several position) Based on a planet and usually embedded with a nation-type org, reps will handle sales, provide fulfillment and collect payment especially when the Hyacinth is off planet. Miners (several positions). Gather resources for transport and sale for times when we don't have other contracts. Miners may double as mission specialists And most importantly.... Customers! While our customers will not generally be members of the org, they are highly valued and welcome at our in-game facilities and on our discord server... Speaking of which... find us on discord at https://discord.gg/Tgp4TZY If you think the tramp spacer life might be for you, you can apply at https://community.dualthegame.com/organization/hyacinth-partners-ltd/

Everyone will be mining, so of course PVP combatants - legit and bullies - will be mining.

I've had you blocked so long I don't even remember why. I'm pretty much giving everyone a pass on that for this thread. I stand by the idea that if people who enjoy hurting other people are mentally ill. I don't think that's a minority opinion and I don't think dislike of unrestricted PVP combat is a minority opinion. Most of us just tolerate it as a necessary evil to build a game if you can't afford good NPCs and mobs. As I said above, I play PVP both non-combat and combat. I just don't like unrestricted PVP combat in a game that has other things to do.

Been there done that and I didn't even do anything to deserve it and your right... you don't want that. (I was crew on a ship whose owner foolishly decided to let pirates use it when we weren't using it. I was never crewing when they were using it.)

I'm actually very gentle in my market play, lol. I do try to give value for the profit I receive. One thing I don't like about Entropia is that I was taking real money, but only providing in-game service. I think that' s what annoys me most about PVP combat players. They just take. I don't think I've ever met one (outside of serious RP settings) who thought about the value he was providing to his opponent except for the ones who smugly pretend that providing content is why they're doing - that's easily recognizable as the basic bully attitude, e.g., "I only hit her and broke her arm because she likes it rough."

I'm thinking the limited CVC in A3 is going to be boring for the PVP crowd.

Well this is much less ambitious than SC so will probably be easier to complete. The combat won't even be in the same class. IMO DU is a good space game and the ability to design and build your own ships answers my biggest complaint about SC and almost every other space game. Can't really say much more because of the NDA, but I do recommend trying it unless you really just want PVP combat, in which case, wait a year.

Exactly. You will specialize in beating up players who can't defend themselves from you. Don't know why that's fun for you (and don't care). Won't be fun for your victims.

There seems to still be some misunderstanding about my stance on PVP combat as well as continuing confusion on the purpose of this thread. You may read all about my stance on PVP combat and ask question here: TLDR? Then you don't really want to know so STFU. Further discussion of that topic in this thread will be reported as off topic and trolling.

Why is Daphne planning to train her org for combat? Doesn't that make it a combat org? No. It's your fault actually. You're planning to hunt down my very expensive ship and destroy it. In some cases it's not because you want to steal my cargo but just because you want to hurt me. I wish I were being paranoid, but the debacle with my recruiting thread proves that I am not. I wonder why all the PVP combatants exhort the non-combatants to hire protection and then when we do, they accuse us of hypocrisy? I think it may be that many would be PVP combatants are really just bullies. Yes, I do think most of you are just bullies. That's just an opinion. I think a lot of unkind things about people who have grown up under the current propaganda machines that pass for government these days. I even think humans in general are a blight on the world and should be eliminated. But none of that enters into this discussion. None of it is intended to insult you. It's just what I think. My org will hire combat specialists - both gunners for the ship and "marines" to control any passengers that get out of hand and/or project force outside the ship if/when needed. I don't plan to need the latter, but I can imagine scenarios in which it would happen. In A3 which will be have limited combat (That fact is public, right?), we will be training in a ship that flies like our actual ship but is cheaper to replace and limited to flying where combat will be allowed in A3. By Beta, I expect to have our actual ship armed and a crew ready to kick your butt if you want to mess with us. I may also hire escort fighters, but I don't plan to train them. They will be hired from an org that has trained them for the task. I hope that clarifies my position for any of you who actually care and weren't just trolling in my recruiting thread. If you have further confusion, you may ask here. I will try to read and respond to legitimate questions even if you're already on my mute list.

Why does Daphne think PVP combat won't be fun in DU? First, for people who are in the game for PVP combat, I think it will potentially be fun. You'll have your character combat skills at the highest level you can achieve at the cost of every other non-combat skill and you'll be looking for a fight. You'll find each other. You'll conduct wars between the larger orgs and really put JC's single shard tech to the test. I might have a combat alt in a fighter in those fights. It will be a cheap, easily replaced fighter. Or I may just do infantry and have essentially no cost to rearm. But for the rest of us - not so much fun. And if you're the kind of lose who goes for the easy kill rather then the good fight, I doubt it (or anything else in your life) will be much fun. Why? It's leveled. We expect that that there will be character skills (nothing to do with player skills) that will be acquired by some mechanism (which may be under NDA and the actual mechanism is unimportant) that will contribute heavily to combat success. This is just like leveling in a game like WOW. WOW tried leveled PVP - it's in a now completely empty area in the Burning Crusade. No one goes there because leveled PVP isn't fun. I wandered in there (not knowing it was PVP) with a level 60ish character once and ran into a level 100 alliance guy. He killed me with one hit - no weapon. I didn't try to hit him, but you know very well that I couldn't have hit him. Leveled PVP didn't really work in WOW. Aside from that area (and open world PVP servers) when you enter a PVP area in WOW your are either required to be a particular level or everyone's level is adjusted to match. It's lock and shoot. This means you will lock onto a target by some mechanism. When you pull the trigger the game will compare your attack level with the target's defense level to decide the criteria for a hit and damage and then use a RNG to determine whether there's a hit and how much damage is done. This requires little or no player skill. This is especially true in DU. JC has said in interviews that the single shard tech depends on a certain amount of desync to work. This means your client and even your server will not necessarily agree with the target's client and possibly server about where the two of you are. You can't do meaningful positional combat or determine a hit with a projectile or even determine a hit with ray tracing if you don't have consensus within the game about where the combatants are. The best you can do is to target the thing the shooter is looking at according to his client even though the targeted player may believe he's in a safe position. Many of us will not be able to have much (or any) character combat skill. DU is a game with other stuff to do. It's billed as a civ building game. Combat goes directly against building civ... especially in a game where the only way to end a fight is make the other side want to quit the game (cause otherwise they'll just keep rebuilding and coming back). But being a civ building game, some of us will be trying to build the civ - maybe most of us... and we need our skill points for other stuff. I'm a cargo pilot. I need whatever pilot characters skills are in game to be high. I hope high pilot skills will make my ship hard to hit, but there's no public info on that yet. A consequence of all this is that some of the combat in DU will be high level players shooting low level players who can't dodge and can't hit if they shoot back. It's just like shooting the unarmed miner above. You can say, hire combatants... and that leads me to the next sub-topic.

So does Daphne hate PVP? Or even just PVP combat? No. I have played a lot of PVP. I mentioned Entropia above. I never did PVP combat there because it's too expensive ($2 per 5 shots from my space plane's guns just for ammo. There was a cost for degradation of the guns too.), but i did get shot down now and then since I was carrying people across PVP space. The shooters thought they were pirates, but I don't know how they were making money. I never carried anything lootable (except sometimes a pile of dung - surface harvestable there) and I advised my passengers to do the same. What about PVP combat? I regularly play three kinds of PVP combat games. RP games where combat is possible at any time, but moderated by rules of engagement to support the RP. This is mostly in RP games set up in Second Life (SL). The actual combat can be pure RP, RP supported by programmed RNG - some of which are very sophisticated, or actual programmed FPS mechanics (SL has many such systems created by players, including three that I created) PVP combat areas within an otherwise PVE game. The one I played most was Ashran in WOW. It's a really good game when both sides are working in teamspeak or similar and have good leadership. (And it's really boring when it's PUG vs PUG, lol). I'm an orc protection warrior and I mostly played with Hyrdra. Hail Hydra! Team combat games where combat can (almost) always happen and the play in between combat is either hanging out waiting for invaders or forced RP (i.e., RP involving a captive which the captive is obligated to go along with - this gives the captives team incentive to invade and rescue. It can be fun if both are into it and competent RPer - really dull otherwise.) This was mostly GE Gor in SL where each team has their own fortress in their SL region and the teams travel to other regions to attack them. The hosting region sets the rules. This uses one of the best FPS systems in SL (or an imitation with some small changes to the feature set).

First: This is a non-NDA discussion, so please do not reference anything in-game. Anything we say about the game needs to come from publicly published sources. Now, people seem to want to attack my efforts to recruit for my org because they don't like my views on PVP. Let me say, You don't understand my view on PVP and IMO, you don't even know what PVP is. Most of the time when we're talking about PVP, we're talking about PVP combat. There is also PVP non-combat. I played Entropia for a few years (and still have investments there). In that game PVP combat is limited to space and a few geographical areas on the ground of some planets and small arenas (I think only two planets have PVP combat at all); however, everything in the game is PVP. The whole point of the game is to take RL money from other players. That's the only way to win the game. If you don't do that, the game costs about $5 an hour to play unless you're sitting around doing nothing. If you rode on my interplanetary taxi service, you paid me between 80 cents and a dollar per leg and that money came out of someone's RL pocket. With my investments there now, if you go mining or hunting on a certain moon, you are paying me RL money for use of the land (About enough to play for an hour once a year, but it's still RL money). That is also PVP. What is not PVP, IMO is beating up players who, for good game reasons, are not prepared to defend themselves. This is no more PVP than beating up an old man or a child on the street is boxing. It is this last point that leads me to the conclusion that open world PVP (combat and non-combat) doesn't work as game-play unless there is no other play in the game. If there is other play, people who are conducting that play will probably not be prepared for PVP. In some cases, the game-play itself will prevent them being prepared. The best example of this in DU is behind the NDA, but as a general example, a miner may be necessarily unarmed or too lightly armed to matter. I don't see that shooting him is PVP - just bullying. Even if we accept by definition that it is, why do you think it's fun? I do think that players who find this fun have a mental illness issue and should seek help. Such players need to actually hurt someone to have fun. OTOH, it's fun to shoot NPCs like that - that's only slightly different from shooting targets and the NPCs are in the game for that purpose... the guy who's mining is not in the game for that purpose and you are actually hurting him.

Is that a criminal syndicate or a more neutral use of the word. (In US English it tends to imply criminal although that's not part of the actual meaning of the word.) Do you have an org page on the DU site?

To clarify something that some people were confused about, no, we're not a combat org. Yes we are a PVP org, because the economy is player driven and we will focus on making money by providing service to players who will then pay us.Yes, that's PVP. As a necessity in an MMO full of players who think PVP requires combat, we will be prepared for combat. Yes, that means some portion of our in-game capital will be spent training in the Arena of A3. Those who are afraid to engage us should not engage. Since we are not a combat org, we will not be chasing anyone down. We expect there are plenty of players who will be happy to help us train until we are beating them consistently ?

Thank you @Mod-Meldrik