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Anomaly

Alpha Tester
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Everything posted by Anomaly

  1. For all this game's problems, the first time I broke out of the atmosphere in a ship of my design gave me the kind of thrill I hadn't experienced from a game in many years. It was the kind of feeling I got got when experiencing something truly new in gaming.
  2. I think there is a better chance of Mr Lin reproducing DU in his engine than NQ incorporating this tech. That said, it really would be amazing. More natural terrain deformation and mining, trees that aren't invincible etc...
  3. That isn't quite right. If you were to read the ideas forums most of them have more people for or against and that's to say nothing of actually reading and judging the arguments made. In some cases, such as the trouble market bots were going to cause, most were against market bots and almost all were against bots buying high end ores. Actually reading feedback and ideas would take effort but that effort would have saved NQ from some serious blunders.
  4. This is one of best discussions of game mechanics I've seen on the forums in some time. Ill do my best not to derail it. Speed limits: The first thing I've gathered is that combat speeds need to be slowed way down. DU cannot and most likely will never be able to support combat at such wide relative speeds. I like the idea of keeping combat under 1000kph. I will also suggest that the different size cores have different base max speeds and that ships be able to use afterburners (for lack of a better term) at the cost of greatly increased fuel consumption and potential hull damage. Combat speed limits will make cheaper warp or some kind of sub warp engines necessary. Sub warp could require either far less warp fuel or a lesser version. Perhaps it could still burn space fuels to keep the number of fuels required down? But everyone will be able to avoid PVP with warp! When coming out of warp into safe space, yes. I don't think ganking haulers as they come in to planets is good gameplay anyways. There should be reasons for people to choose to risk warping their ships into PVP space. To prevent prey from simply warping away, Eve style scramblers are needed. Unprofitable fighting: I've said from the start, the current wear and tear system isn't going to work. I've seen some good ideas that could fix it but the most simple solution would be to have, at best, a 50% chance that a module damaged in PVP can be repaired. Half of any cargo in a destroyed container is lost. Done.
  5. There is a foundation here for sure. Not enough for a great game yet but for one players would have been happy to play until more content was added. To give the game its due: I enjoyed building up my factory and the challenge of arranging pieces to get the most functionality out of it. I still like just flying around in the atmosphere and the transition from atmosphere to space is a great experience. Had the game gone into beta a little closer to being a real beta - with at least asteroid mining providing a reason to PVP, If there had been no market bots, If some of the worst bugs had been dealt with. DU might not be in the state it is now. The tech isn't the biggest problem. The game design has been a disaster from the start. Maybe someone will apply some good game design and make something amazing with this tech.
  6. A balance has to be struck between the risk of the PVP area and the reward for venturing there. Individuals and groups will suffer losses fighting each other so there must be something worth fighting over that cannot be had in safe space. It is the primarily the materials sink of PVP that will drive the economy of this game so giving players an incentive to fight each other will benefit even those who want nothing to do with PVP. This is coming from someone who was most interested in industry in his Eve days. Players in DU's safe space would not be any more cut off from high end materials than they were in Eve. Should DU survive to launch, there will be players who shuttle goods between PVP and non PVP areas.
  7. Connecting every market on a planet could alleviate the congestion somewhat but those on Ailioth would still be lag generators. A market without enough clutter to generate lag is a market unlikely to have everything on your shopping list. Central markets are going to form and for that reason, ways to control the lag are needed. I am in favor of Eve style interior parking garages. You fly your ship toward them. Your ship gets grabbed by a tractor beam or whatever and pulled inside (it vanishes). The player appears at a door and heads to the market on foot. No laggy market. No crashing your ship due to lag.
  8. Disappointing. Non answers and questions no one asked. I wanted to know more than anything else if NQ has learned anything from the game's failures up to this point. If they have figured out that paying attention to the problems their players keep warning them about might be a wise move. Regarding the wipe. It will have to happen but it should come right before launch. Until a whole bunch of fixing has happened, there is no point. That PVE is still thought of as a post launch option leads me to think they are still doggedly holding to their original flawed vision for the game. There is a time to realize, that while you do have a plan, its a plan that isn't going to work and it needs to be changed. I hope NQ is prepared to survive on an anemic player base until post launch. There is a glimmer of hope for the game now but its only that. Whoever has filled JC's spot needs to approach this with an open mind.
  9. Market bots are technically NPCs, yes but I don't think that is what most are referring to when they say "NPC". I wouldn't mind letting it stand as an example of the wrong kind of NPC for this game. Given a level of design that NQ is not capable of this game might make it with no NPCs. As is, the game will get NPCs or it will die. The question is if this new management will realize this before it is too late. I had no hope of this happening under JC but I will now watch and see.
  10. @ShippyLongstalking Space threats are needed but, I agree, it shouldn't end there. How much more attached would I be to my little factory if I could Hire a couple of grunts who provide a small boost that could improve a bit over time. Even if they just walked from station to station it would make the place feel alive. They would also be things enemies could attack and they couldn't be replaced instantly. Beyond that NPCs could reflect the activity in an area. If an alliance of players has a number of factories and structures full of NPCs, it would make sense to see a number of small personal craft that reflects the population. Again, these could be attacked by enemies, giving the home team a reason to respond to smaller threats. There is far too much that can be gained from NPCs to ignore them.
  11. Way back in my Eve days moon mining was the thing to do when you could afford it. Thing was, any of the moons worth having were also worth fighting over and located in the space where that was allowed. I had my own mining station on a lesser moon for a while but the net income was always lower than most other activities I engaged in to make isk. The take away? The mining units need to be a relatively slow way to generate ore unless they are located in the PVP zones. I think it could work out. We would always have a small amount of the basic ores coming in. In the PVP zones we could have some static points of interest for organizations to fight over. As long as they are distributed in such a way that one group cant dominate all of them, it should be good.
  12. I like to underscore this whenever I see it because it is true for any building game with claims that players can build cities. The ancient relic that is Terraria is more of a city builder than most because you have to house a few NPCs. Clever distribution of resources could bring groups of players together so they take different roles within the chain of production and distribution. This will get us closer to cities though the end result will be more like interconnected factories within shared fortifications. True cities will require some kind of NPC presence even if those are only background props that reflect the economy of the area they are connected to. More to the point of the thread. PVP is the best way to motivate players to band together and the best way to drive an economy that gives those bands something to work toward and fight for. Should the game survive and keep going some years I would love to see different kinds of settlements emerge - High population centers - good for research and general goods production and then more frontier type settlements that could be wiped out in wars.
  13. The most important aspect of this or any MMO's PVP is that it is (at least mostly) consensual. Players choose to fight over a thing or place or choose to risk having to fight to get to a thing or place. The asteroids are a step in the right direction but the OP brings up some things that will need to be addressed: There will need to be such an abundance of asteroid spawn locations that there is no use in bookmarking or trying to predict them - because you know people will try. They will need to be spread around the planets and safe areas evenly so there are no travel corridors from safe areas to asteroid spawns that can be camped. There will need to be enough asteroids spawned at one time that there is enough payoff in ore to be worth the time spend traveling to them, scanning for them and risking death for them. The biggest trouble with launching TW right now is that there are no territories worth fighting over. The planets were mined out when I quit playing months ago. I think PVP and TW are necessary for the creation of a real economy but I cant see the value that makes territory worth fighting over right now. A storage point on a moon might be good for asteroid hunting I suppose.
  14. I left the game upon the release of 0.23 and left the forum shortly after because I didn't see a point in arguing on a forum that didn't matter. NQ wasn't listening and as long as JC was in charge, that wouldn't change. So I pop back in for a look as I have been doing and things have changed, Someone new is supposedly in charge and we have some new dev blogs. The first two meant little to me but the third gave me some hope that maybe someone has listened and maybe someone at NQ understands game design. We are going to scan for asteroids and if we find one, we get it to ourselves for a while before everyone else sees our flag, the energy signature, the magic mining dust or whatever gives us away. This is great as long as we are talking about a sufficient number of asteroids spawned at any given time - Otherwise a few big corps will dominate. Those of us scanning will have choices (good!) to grab what we can, tell our buddies and try to hold the asteroids by force or send along the coordinates and zip away in our speedy ships in search of more roids. I would add that it would be very cool to see asteroids of different sizes. The biggest being the easiest to scan but the fastest revealed to the world, the smallest being hard to locate but yours for a good chunk of time. I did not see any indication that NQ understands just how badly the game has been handled to this point. I still think a server wipe (of resources at least) will be needed but I don't think that should happen until the game becomes a real beta and there are strong gameplay loops to retain players. Integrate the best builds into the new world and start the game right.
  15. If you are speaking of the general tone of my posts then I will agree with you. The NQ devs spoke in a very professional manner when they permabanned players for exploiting a RDMS mistake the devs tell players they are responsible for. I would have never considered punishing players for my mistake but I don't hold myself to the same account.
  16. You know that bright outline that makes ore easy to see when you have the mining tool equipped? That - only along the ground any and static structures when you are moving fast enough to be damaged by them. Perhaps it could be something you can toggle on and off. Anyone who has had close call with a mountain that popped in late or a single voxel tower two kilometers above the ground knows we need this.
  17. This cant be emphasized enough. A community will put up will all kinds of troubles and delays if they like the devs. The community managers here seem nice enough but what we have gotten from the devs themselves has ranged from indifferent to nasty. Should DU fail, I will keep a wary eye out for any further projects from these people.
  18. This is a much better solution. NQ's repair limit makes having extra repairs on your elements a liability when going into anything other than a hit and run battle. Your enemies will simply repair any captured ships and turn them on their previous owners. I can already see players deliberately crashing ships to remove the extra repairs. That it also eliminates much of the repair tedium is a big plus. If NQ feels they must keep a number of full repairs for each element, there should be onboard repair units that can restore a destroyed element for a significant chunk of resources and a strike through one of the full repairs. This way, ships in combat could burn through the repairs for some of their elements before going down for good.
  19. This is a start but its still far too much loot from a single ship kill. Even with 1 full repair it means the victors in a fleet battle will have the ships of both fleets to use afterward and things will only become more unbalanced. I think it was Moosegun who suggested that weapons do carry over damage that will reduce or eliminate possible repairs unless attackers are careful to shoot only as much as needed - something unlikely to happen in a fleet battle.
  20. The Worlds Adrift devs made the same big mistake the DU devs are making now. They focused on PVP without giving players a reason to PVP. On top of that, there were no safe zones and your ship carried everything you had when it went down. The PVPers defended the devs right up until the lights went out. PVP is needed in DU if for nothing else than to provide a materials sink but most of the player base will continue to ignore it until there is something to fight for.
  21. This would be one of the simplest ways to add some needed challenge and complexity to the game.
  22. I'm holding to a hope that NQ-Naunet is here because someone higher up has picked up on the theme of dev communication in so many of these quitting threads. Time will tell if this is real or a show to stem subscriber loss. He's done a good job of bringing people back to the forums for now. My impression of the dev team has been, that of a programmer led team - which means they do amazing things with code but completely fail to predict what players will do when set loose in their creation. I keep yelling about communication because, from what I've seen, I don't think this team is capable of balancing all the parts that need to be balanced. For the short term, if they want this game to stop bleeding subscribers, they need to implement their PVP overhaul and then give us something to fight over. It doesn't matter what. It could be resources, it could be unique base decorations. It just needs to be something players will want and that most players can get to. Alternately they could implement NPC enemies to fight - something to threaten bases or ships and provide a new dimension to building. I know they have said no NPCs but everything should be considered at this point. As for quitting - I don't want to rekindle the argument here but it was the handling of the Market 15 heist that was the last straw for me. Naunet's arrival provided a enough hope that I felt like playing a few hours last week but nothing like my activity before. I still think Dual Universe has the potential to be something great so I continue to linger on the forums and watch for some sign that NQ has learned something.
  23. I want those shapes. All of them. It baffles me how limited the building tools are. Do we not want better looking ships in this game?
  24. @NQ-Naunet Unless its a public event, I don't think Ill be there. It looks like Williams is saying much of what I would bring up though. Ill cheer from the sidelines. Edit: Looks like it is a public event though Ill be working through it. Ill certainly watch the replay.
  25. One of the biggest issues with Dual's PVP is the speed limit that is common to all ships regardless of size and configuration. Acceleration matters but if that pirate gets to 30,000 kph before you are out of range, your hauler is done. If that hauler is out of range by the time you reach max speed, you have no hope of catching up. Therefore I propose that ships be allowed to burn fuel at a greater than normal rate of consumption to increase their speed past the current 30K limit. When the fuel is cut, speed will begin to return to maximum. I know this suggestion and physics do not get along but a speed limit in space is a bit contrary as well. Smaller core ships would be able to push farther past maximum speed (because core structural integrity or something) creating a niche for interceptors and smaller core blockade runners. With upcoming changes to weapons and shields hopefully on the horizon, an encounter between pirates and a hauler might not be decided at the outset. The hauler might be able to outrun the big guns but it would still need to swat down interceptors.
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