DevisDevine

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Great point I hadnt thought of. Imagine having to be on to level. Makes a time based system impractical.

remember those shirts and IDs cost NQ. Maybe not the same as the value of DACs but remember what they are. Its a credit from NQs perspective, which only cost them ther server upkeep. Which, a few hundred more users on in one month wont be much in relation to the overall user base. But to NQ that money used in development is worth a lot more. What I would like to see is addons to the kickstarter. So for like $50 I can add 10 DACs to my rewards.

I get what you are asking. And thats what Beta can be to those who need it. But what you are suggesting will not demonstrate their new technology, just the build system. There are other games out there you can play to get a feel for what they are doing. Look at things like Landmark, Planet Explorers, Empyrion. Sure DU will be unique, but its not a groundbreaking build system. What is new is the way it will handle player interactions, which wont be demonstrated in a void build system.

Well there will be the beta release. But I dont think they intend to let you keep any designs you make. The virtual build system may not even be hashed out for Alpha, and furthermore bugs will be worked out during alpha for any features that are implementing. I think pushing them to create a standalond of the virtual build system early would take development away from the game and cost them funds. One possible route if they chose to do this would be to charge a few bucks for it, like $10, so it pays for the development and possibly gives some funds for the development of the rest of the game. But even still, I would think this would be done after Alpha as they need testers on anything they are putting out.

Oh I agree that they should be encouraged to take all the tutorials. I was just suggesting that if they felt the basics across the board was to much it could be a selective measure based on what the player intends to do.

I dont know about any pre-release system for this. But there will be a virtual reality system in game you can go into to build and test constructs before creating them in game. Essentially a god/admin mode for creations.

A few times in Eve I wished they had a system like this. But for those who play a lot it could become a lot more costly as well. I would think NQ would have to offer both options in some form for the intense players. The one thing I would have to say against what you said is in relation to waiting for the game to develop. You can always just cancel your sub for a few months or however long you intend to stay off. Just sub up when youre ready to play again. Also they mentioned some sort of F2P trial system as well. I am uncertain of its nature but it seems to be leaning towards what Eve will be doing on its limited F2P function. And as I have been telling everyone who complains about the sub. It is expected to be <$15 a month. If you have a computer that can handle the game and can pay for power you should be able to afford that. Seriously thats less than the cost of a cheap meal at most places now adays.

So listening to on of the interviews again today, there was a brief mention about how they will do a tutorial, or rather if they would even had one. I had an idea on how to encourage new players to actual go through the tutorial. I would think having them run through a virtual training tutorial as they wake up would be the way to go. But in doing so it could be a way to learn basic skills. Say they take the tutorial on mining, they are then rewarded with the basic level in mining (or mining related skills) rather than have to wait the time it would take to train it. I would only suggest to give them the first level in the skill. This could then be repeated for the tutorial on the market system, crafting system, etc. Say it took an hour to train the skill but only 15 to run the tutorial, obviously its beneficial to take them. And while its their fault if they do the tutorials with or without incentive, it reflects well if new players have an easy experience when starting. So I think it is in NQs interest to ensure they learn the systen. To take it further, if NQ feels that is too much to give a new player they can limit it. Take all the tutorials but you can only choose x numeber of skills to gain immediately. So if you intend to mine and build you take those 2 skills. If you intend to work the market, or lead a corporation you take skills in those. This would lean towards a system like Eve uses. By selecting specializations you start the game with the basics to begin your journey as you please. Anyone have thoughts on this?

I expect the character creation system may become a stretch goal.

Id expect it to be implimented at some point. and eventually by just changing your suit like clothing. Remember they intend to impliment a more detailed character ceration system later on.

So Eve has shown that this model works really well. And one of the biggest reasons for NQ to implement this is to hinder the gold farmers. No matter what all MMO games will have them, but giving players a legal route to do this that both hinders the gold farmers, which can severely hurt the in game market, and gives players a way to play with no RL money investment. So there is a slight increase in the DAC cost with will earn NQ the difference but thats it, unless you do intentionally hord them. Lets assume there are 2 subscribers to the game. You and the guy you are selling too. In order for you both to play it requires 2 subs. if each of you buy them yourself then thats it. But lets assume he buys his and you would rather make money in game and buy a DAC. Now that guy buys his sub and a DAC, selling you one for in game currency. NQ has benefited by the difference in this transaction, but thats all. Now lets look at you working in game for what you did vs him spending real world money. If you choose to sell your 25 hr creation for 2 DACs then thats you're choice. Furthermore you can resell those designs again as you did in the second instance. What is happening is he is trading real world currency for your work in game. The money or items he gets for DAC isnt created out of thin air. It has to be earned by someone else's work in game, in this case yours. It still has to be earned by someone. So what will happen is the market will normalize at a price for DAC's eventually, a given credit amount. You will buy them with your credits. And when you have something to sell you will sell them for credits (we havent been told how the credits will be injected into the game). You can decide how much you think your invested time is worth. It will either sell or not based on what others think. And maybe it will take you 25 hours to create something worth 2 DAC and maybe another guy can make something worth 2 DACs in just 15 hours. Whats interesting is with designs it will be highly subjective. With eve, there was a normal, somewhat restricted rate of making isk based on your skills and what you're doing. But with DU and making your own constructs, even mining could be done at varied speeds. The reason I like this system is it allows people who have busy real lives and limited time to play on the same level of the basement nerd. You may have 40+ hours a week to play, whereas the guy who has a busy job and a family may only have 10 at best. (and they tend to be broken up and interrupted) Why should he be penalized for this, after all he is spending the same amount on a sub as you each month. So he finds it wroth wild to buy his sub and a DAC a month to supplement his game play. Instead of mining 10 hours a week he buys the resources and builds his ship only. Now lets say NQ decided that for $15 they just gave you 1mil in game currency. Well this would be game breaking as it could cause massive inflation in the markets and ruin the economy. This is why the method of money injection into the economy will matter. Usually MMOs do this by quest and bounties on NPCs.

Sounds about right. I believe they suggested limited skills and currency in a video. I would expect them to do what Eve did and essentially give a extended trial peroid but in a way that anyone who wants to play seriously has to go P2P. As for it being prohibitivly expensive, they are expecting something like $10-13ish. So under $15, if you have a computer that can run the game and can afford the electricity this shouldnt be costly at all. Now a days its hard ti find a meal cheaper than that.

WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE!!!!!! Um, sorry wrong forum. Welcome to DU, try not to get to lost in the information and overload yourself on the first day.

well so far we are well above 15k a day. Today so far has been about 15K, I expected a slow down and in the next few days a slight increase. We just need to get word out on forumns and game outlets.

You definatly put a lot of thought into it. I personally would love even realistic gravity, and maybe in 10 years we can get that. But I can tell you for now that is a lot of added calculations to tax the servers. Sure its not many per player, but for thousands of players and millions of obkects it's a lot. And the devs seem to be taking large steps to reduce that for now. But once Carbon nanotube or Quantum computers hit the market its all good.

There is already a game that lets you do this, Entropa Universe, or something like that. Not sure if I would be for or against this.

I would also suggest looking at the community portal for that. community.dualthegame.com/organizations

I would assume resources, yes as they are a physical thing. Just like you could strip down the buildings or constructs. We dont know if blueprints will be a physical entity in game or solely digital. Then it would be a question of how advanced will hacking be.

I think we have at least a half dozen people saying the same thing in this thread alone, and probably a dozen more similar threads with more on this, but I will echo it as well. I dont understand why it is so hard for people to grasp. The servers to run this cost a lot, and it takes a lot of planning and maintence to keep it running smooth, that alone justifies a P2P. And before you go on about F2P with shops or guildwars, dont bother. Games like GW are fundamentally different on how they are run server side. An you cant expect a small company to rely on sporatic trinket sales to a small portion of the community to fund the game for all in a F2P system. Furthermore it puches incentives to design a new outfit over the next groundbreaking feature or a new component, as thats what makes the money. When you arent sure if you'll have eneough income to keep the lights on, how can you invest in further development. To get close to the infrastructure needed you have to look at Eve. No other game of this type matches its scale and longevity. And before you claim they went F2P I will stop you, they didn't. Essentially they extended their trial peroid in hopes to bring in new dedicated players. Any serious player will have to pay or flip timecards. And to truely answer your question, what do you get from the sub, aside from the servers, we can also look at eve. The answer is more content. Throughout the years Eve has invested in better hardware, better coding, new items, and new mechanics and features. From high performance servers for battles, to t3 ships and wormholes. They regurally add new features and game changing items. While NQ wont be making the ships, they do make the components and the voxel items we will use. They can also invest further into the mechanics, giving us new features or optomized performance based on they game play that emerges. Actual character creation, higher tech levels, new Arks, NPC enemies, wormholes, Life support, and the list can go on. These are all things, to my understanding, that will not be in the game at launch. Some it seems NQ intends to impliment later, others are things they could consider. When we see the final game the community will have countless request of features they would like added or removed from the game. Without a source of funding NQ cant achieve any of them. The initial influx of money from 1 time sales would run out. F2P wouldnt incentivise this type of development and wouldnt be a reliable revenue stream. I wouldnt want it to be anything but P2P, as I know thats the only model that gives reliable inventive to keep inproving the game.

There have been a few suggestions in varying degrees on this topic. There are a lot of points here I agree with but I will just rehash all my thoughts on this. First, I would hope that skills arent a limit to being able to harvest and use resources. Affect the speed at which you do it sure, but dont say I cant, just have a longer mining time, or maybe a higher chance at failing to craft something. As I level my mining, I can do it faster. As I train up surveying skills I can operate better equipment that can locate deeper ore pockets,or give better detail on ones I know about. As people have said, all iron isn't the same. We mine it in different concentrations and with varying impurities which have to be processed out if undesired. I think having varying ore density deposits would be great. Poor deposits may only be 10% where the richest spots upwards of 90%. An it could be that as you dig deeper they naturally get more dense. Also you would expect asteroids to be much richer in what we consider rare elements, most are thought to be nearly completely iron. One that was looked at is estimated to contain more iron than we have mined on earth in our entire history. So if you mine a poor spot it will take you longer to get a given volume of iron, while mining a lot more junk, stuff like clay or dirt. It would be nice to naturally find trace impurities in very low quantities like cobalt, nickel and other ores. Now, based on the purity, on earth different processing methods would have been used. But remember, we have the nanoformer that is pulling it apart already. I would assume this could naturally separate it. So mine a section and you get 70% of it iron, 25 dirt, 4 silicon, 1 nickel, or something like that, all in your kadpack separated. Now maybe they wont go this route, but if they didnt they would have to have some station on the ark to process the initial batches, as how else would you get iron to build the blast furnace or whatever device you used. But this doesn't have to be the end of processing. It was suggested having alloys you can make, and while I hope they introduce some, it is another component to code into the game. But qualities could be used. While its not completely realistic there could be a Fe1, 2, 3... system. And these could require certain processing facilities and even skills to make. Now it would make sense to have Fe1 able to make equal parts Fe20, but it could take 20Fe1 = 1F20 on a simplistic level. Or even 2Fe2 = 1Fe3, taking 2x of the previous level. This would mean it takes exponentially more material for the highest grade stuff (2^20 is just over 1mil, meaning 1mil Fe1 for 1 Fe20). These levels could give increases in various stats, which as some have discussed, could be used in various ways. Affecting the voxel blocks stats is an obvious one, and likely easy to implement. But it would be nice to be able to affect the components you make themselves. While more complex, it would give more variety to the one feature of the game that will inherently be limited. So better stats or durability on a turret, to possibly more dense fuel.

I understand that upkeep cam be difficult for some, but there must be some way for people to reclaim abandoned structures. I was under the impression that hacking TCUs and ships gave that mechanism. But maybe it wont in a safe zone. I wouldnt mind a decay mechanism, so long as it can be automated when the resources are provided. It would be tedious regardless of how well you are organized if you were to have to do it manually. Eves system for this isnt bad. POS require fuel, without it to power them and form the shield anyone can take it over. TCUs could require a power source, ajd the same goes for ships. Ships require a low amount of power for baseline systems and without it the computers shut down allowing anyone access to scrap it.

I can quickly sum up how I feel about this. NO. Absolutely not, it will ruin the game. They are trying to make a game with no limits no bounds, just a physics engine, and with 1 implementation you will hinder that. Dont tell me I can build a 3km ship but limits the number of elements on it, thats absurd and unrealistic in reality. If I have a space for it why cant I drop in another battery pack. Need more thrusters, yet I can only install 6. Absurd. Sure limit me by power or fuel. I can overcome those if I deem it worth it. Thats what will limit your ship sizes. More units means more power and more control, ontop of more mass and space required, in turn requiring more fuel from thrusters. It is the one feature I hated about Planet Explorers. It had a similar build system to what DU is going for, but it was limited. I could stack 4 rotors ontop eachother no problem, but couldnt put more than ~6 battery packs for energy. Arbitrary limits like that hinder what you can creativly do, not just functionally. Besides, with massive multi crewed ships you need the freedom. Why have a specialized carrier or a dreadnought if you're gunna limit things like turrets and docking spaces.

I'm alive! I've been silent for the past few month but not gone. Just lurking around. I'm glad they are finally getting us some in game footage. It starts letting us see what exactly the game will be like rather than speculation. It looks good. It is confirms the system I expected and from what was shown they are doing a good job pulling it off. I have 3 main questions, a few small ones, and some question/comments right now from the video though. 1st: He mentions the core unit he used is a small one with something like a 32 block area, but larger cores will have bigger areas. Does this imply a maximum size to constructs? Or will the largest one be able to have infinite range? Now since the space station was kilometers in length I'm sure they have a large enough range for almost any project, but I am curious if they do have an actual limit or not. Furthermore, what if I start a ship, say a battle-cruiser, with a medium sized core, expecting it to be enough. But as I build and construct it I decide to convert it to a Capital class and add to it and end up needing more area. Can I easily upgrade the core or will I have to build it on a new core? 2nd: The RCS thrusters he used, well with a different name. He added 4, all placed to fire in a horizontal plane roughly, plus the 2 engines. In reality this would allow him to rotate the ship left and right, plus forward thrust. But he takes off, and while limited, it is assumed the ship can maneuver in every direction. I was under the impression that the ships would be a physics body and require thursters properly placed around the center of mass to manuver and rotate. Am I incorrect in this thinking? And if so, what exactly is required for a fully manuverable ship? How many RCS, how many engines? Do engine directions even matter? 3. In the video the jetpack used seemed to be an anti gravity type where you hovered in place when on. I assume it takes fuel, is that correct? Is this anti grav mode the only mode or is there also a standard flight mode? Minor things: How many undo/redo commands can you do? What is the maximum size of the brush/placement tool? How many of each element type are there? Besides fuel type X and Y tanks, will there be fuel type X tier 1, 2, 3, 4....etc, all with different stats?

I have posted on this before, but I will discuss it here to bring up an unknown that is a bigger issue. I would like to see 2 types of BPs. Both should be doable with the tag system discussed. Taken from eve they are BPO and BPC. The Original has unlimited rights, make as many as you want. The Copy has a limited number of runs you can make from that copy. 1, 10, 100. Whatever you set. After that number is made it is gone. So maybe I would set a royalties system on the BPO, every use from it you pay me xxx credits. Or I could sell you it out right for a large sum (in eve this typically cost the value of the ship it made, where a copy was less than 1/10, but it could be anything). Where as the copy would likely be a set price to buy it. Even if we dont get 2 distinct blueprint types it should be doable in the tag system. A BPO wouldnt have a use limit where a copy would. The bigger problem I have is how can you create the blueprints in the first place. If I make a ship from scratch it is assumed I can make any blueprint I want. But what if I didnt start the ship from scratch. Can I make my own blueprint of a ship I made from someone elses blueprint? If so that destroyes the market. Some people suggested that blueprints can only be made from the VR creation, but what about ships I make in the real world. Or VR creations that are then modified, as the larger ships will constantly be upgraded. If we then say only the creator can make the blueprint, what if my corp has a standard hull they give out for others to design on. There has to be a way for them to hand over blueprint creation rights. While it shouldnt be hard to do this, just another right you can give or sell, but it has to be put into the game.