Traceur

What if the ark tokens were connected to the arkship? This way arkification was turned into player made security sec by limited to an area around the arkship, perhaps the solar system or an area within the solar system (Or grow as the game progresses and players start migrating into other solar systems. Perhaps that growth could in itself be a player driven gameplay mechanic). This way you get the benefit of player made safe zones but you can't arkify any strategic asset you want or bring it with you as you expand into the rest of the galaxy.

With player construction I doubt their would be any problem in combining refining facilities into drilling machines ourselves. I believe they even give that as an example of the sort of thing a multicrew ship might have in one of their devblogs. Regarding the actual element - the drill head - we know that elements will have a set size. A large drill option would be cool, and certainly more eastheticaly pleasing then a wall with a hundred small ones. What might be cooler is having a more basic element, like a protruding plate with a blade and a suction area on its' side, that would allow us to construct our own drill head covered by it. If you can build a mechanical structure that revolves and slides it against a surface you want to mine through, you can use it for mining.

If that was the case why would it need a token? How is that different from just placing defenses and an LUA script to target enemies? In a player driven economy rare doesn't mean a golden star only a few lucky ones get to enjoy. Rare just means expensive and more difficult to match the highest bidder. And organizations are made out of what? You can't really introduce this kind of weapon to the game and not expect it to be used to defend key strategic points, even if you completely restrict the transfer of tokens you just end up making the token owner character the asset. I get the idea behind arkification, there is a huge advantage in giving the advantage to the defensive side to encourage players to invest in their environment and creations, but there is a line to be walked between safe areas and safer areas.

I wouldn't mind the ark areas as long as it has a time limit. Think of something like a shield or a weapon disabling field of sort which can hold under fire for 48 hours. Enough to give an advantage for defense over offense (which is essential to encourage players to invest in developing areas), enough so that defending organizations have time to organize a response, and enough that you don't loose everything in your sleep... but in the same time nothing truly indestructible. Having arkareas and limiting their viability with power requirement and rare tokens just makes it more expensive and more difficult for smaller organizations to have any chance of competing with larger ones. Imagine eve online if the goonswarm was indestructible.

Ignore them. Biological spaceships are delicious, and there is nothing like a spacesuit made of leviathan hide.

Except we already have precedent for that worldwide, game modders do it all the time, and the person liable for it is always the modder. NQ only become liable if they in some way publish the 3D model or include it in their product, which would be true if they allowed you to import your creation from the independent editor into the online environment.... Which is why I pointed out how an independent editor can still have value even if they don't allow it.

Thinking about it, the best way to design a game for in-game religion isn't actual religious mechanics. ...Because games really do have religions, people form actual beliefs about the true nature of the in-game in-universe and what's behind it, they become passionate about those beliefs, they organize around them and get into fights over them. We call these religions fan theories. And the best way for any gaming world to incite them is to offer a lot of not enough: Loose ends.

No, it takes place in a future where Sam Harris won. ...But we do know there's communication, so you can talk about you and/or your character's beliefs, and the organization/faction system is general enough that it should be able to support an organized religion as easily as it could a corporation or a democratic city state (Devblog here), and also from the little we know of the lore, we know that multiverse theory has being proven and is the basis for their Resurrection technology, which could easily inspire some very interesting spiritual philosophies.

For the vast majority of people, the current planned model works really well: Most people either have a job with regular income or a lot of free time, and the ability to buy a month's subscription with either real money (to finance the game) or in-game money (requiring you'd contribute a lot to the game's economy) utilizes the best of both. That's being said, there is growing 3rd market of people who have irregular income. If you do freelance work, if you own a small business, or if your income is reliant on the growing share-economy, you are going to have better months or worst off months, and it's harder to commit to a luxury (Which an MMO essentially is). What I would like to see is some sort of limited capacity for people to play without paying. Perhaps the building tools aren't available, perhaps you can't increase your character skills. A smoother transitions between pay and non-pay mode would allow people to participate on different levels depending on how they are doing. Someone is undercutting your web design clientele? Nobody is renting your airbnb? Perhaps this month you aren't going to build your own ships, perhaps this month you'll be the crew in someone else's. I am not exactly sure what limitations this mode would entail, but the point is that even while handicapped, you can put the bill on hold and still log in and participate and contribute in the world and your in-game social circle, which in turn would mean you are more likely to keep playing and go back to paying when the next client comes along.

So don't allow uploading it to the actual game servers - think of it more as an early demo, possibly a kickstarter reward after contributing a certain amount. It could also e useful to lay the PR groundwork before the kickstarter, it would help make the game feel a lot more real for the space sandbox audience, and help disperse some of the vaporware claims. People will build things and dream of the moment they can fly it in-game, meanwhile word to mouth gets an early start and they can use some of the creations as showcase pieces to demonstrate some of what they can do.

The opportunity was too good to miss.... Totally in context too

Nobody is arguing for a target lock system because it's more fun. It's just a worthwhile sacrifice in exchange to the rich social, economical, geopolitical and emergent gameplay brought upon by a single shard. I used to joke that we all want to explore No Man's sky with Eve's social interactions piloting ships we've built in Space Engineers with the combat and immersion of Star citizen. If Dual is all it's promised to be - I will gladly take 3 out of 4.

I have to ask... Why? This isn't doing research, it's waiting for research to be done. Yes, there is an advantage in different players having the capacity to do different things, but the rpg elements take care of this anyway, and tech tree "research" is the most passive way to go about it. Experimenting with LUA code, trying out in-game mechanical parts, exploring for new materials to try out or ruins to salvage, that has a lot more in common with the activity of doing actual research. From the described demands of exploration, this alone can be an undertaking just as demanding and cooperative if not more. And the level of experimentation would alone provide us with completely different skillsets as builders and completely different technologies as factions. Look at the SE workshop: The death lotus, torpedo designs, robots, various ship automation, drones, in-game Tetris, a plethora of mining techniques and armor designs and plenty more, each of those demanding hundreds of hours and going through dozens of failed experiments (if you are lucky). So what's the benefit of adding a layer of waiting for research to be done over that? Why does it add to the game?

Wait so... The ships is an NPC?

Or it could be a continues system - each set of wormholes are activated in pairs, you'd be navigating between wormholes within a system, the space explored would be the system and everything the players built within it. Some factions might try to create a large nexus, in other cases you might need to travel between the wormhole orbiting one planet to the one orbiting another, possibly dealing with two different factions. You wouldn't be able to use it to run out of PvP but you can use it as PvP choke points. You can pursue - assuming you can survive what's on the other side - or you can evade - if there's something on the other side the pursuers can't survive. We have the other current-theoretical-physics-sanctioned FTL, the Alcubierre warp drive, whose advantages as a gameplay feature I talked about here.

Yes, I think we can all agree Babylon 5 was awesome, that's sort of besides the point.

I get what you are saying about the seamless transition offered by hyperspace when compared to jumpdrives as the main alternative. But wouldn't straight up wormholes be even more seamless?

I actually really like the idea of an exploration ship. Not an official class ofcourse (this is a ship building game), but much like modern day rocketry, the requirement for a ship capable of FTL without a stargate could be set so that the majority of the ship would need to support it. You could make the distance it can travel decline exponentially with the mass, you could require a space bubble generators to surround the ship and thus limit it's military potential and practical size. Think of something like this: This would mean that the majority of activity is still happening in known space and existing stargate networks, but you can still explore and scout other systems (At great risks and with limited supplies).

That's a very presumptuous accusation. Personally I got into space precisely to avoid traveling. First to get into a stellar-synchronous orbit around the sun, then I had to escape that to stop rotating around the center of the milky way, then I tried going in the opposite direction to the expansion of the universe, but the center of the universe kept running after me and I got screwed by physics. In fact I had to screw with the arkship trajectory navigation to make it happen, so this applies to everyone here. So welcome, space stationary.

Right, well.. Actually they might not, I've seen some indie development studios and I wouldn't be surprised if their closest thing to a marketing strategist is the one coder with experience in retail, but that's besides the point. I am saying their might be more of a value in not reacting directly to the naysayers, but rather in pushing through with their own presentations and demo's to let the naysayers drown in the crowd of yaysayers. Perhaps instead of trying to reach out to youtubers who take issue with the promise of game, look for youtubers who are into the game and give them the first look at the demo the xpgamer was playing. If there's anyone here who has a let's play channel, it might be worth letting the dev's know.

This might be slightly unrealistic, but using your [insert future biotech-babble], if they remove the cap on how much you can fill your food bar, then instead of obtaining food filling your inventory with food and then eating it each time you are hungry, you could just eat it when you obtain it and have the stomach serve as the food inventory. This way you get the immersion of having to actually eat without the annoyance of making it any more of a chore then putting it in your inventory in the first place.

As much as I love almost all things babylon5, the decision for the developers should depend less on the rule of cool and more on what kind of gameplay they want to facilitate. A system where FTL is a large heavyweight endeavor requiring large wormholes or expensive ships means that traveling to other star systems is more about colonization and expansion as a group then it is about exploration and discovery. It would also enable a more stable PvP environment by creating bottlenecks (stargates) and requiring the defense of large FTL capable carriers, making it easier to defend an area then it is to assault an area, which in turn encourages players to invest in an area and build it up rather then just going system to system. In a game where the majority of the content planned is player made content, that actually makes a lot of sense.

I've heard that in the next installment of Rachet and Clank she forgets her babybot prototype in a spaceship, develops a machine oil addiction and shows everyone her private robot factory. It's kind of sad.

Ok I am going to go ahead and say it: NovaQuark is going to need a better PR plan then reacting to naysayers. It's starting to look like the best way to get an interview with the developers is calling vaporware on the game.

One thing that could be really fantastic - though possibly too much to ask - is if they used something like XML or CSS to control the display of information, and then allowed us to edit it to our own whims. Another way to do this could be allowing us to use blueprints as holograms and control the display orientation location and movement using LUA (Like some Space Engineers mods allow), it's a bit more cumbersome but if they make sensor data available as variables and include letter blocks we could still use something like that to create some pretty diverse information displays.