Sethcran

I agree that there is a problem here, but I really dislike instancing it. The most wonder I currently get in the game is when I go walk around and see all of the different ship designs people have made. It's a great way to get ideas and such. What I would like to see though is 2 separate avenues to address the problem: 1. Auto removal of logged out users ships. To some extent they probably need to stick around for awhile in most places, but especially for those that don't log on for a week or so, or those ships that go a while without being used/interacted with, I think at that point ships should be moved to a hangar instance or tokenized. That way I can still see the cool ships people are building, but we start to clean out the crap that's just sitting around lagging everyone out. 2. Player markets are obviously a long term feature, but when they come, and as people spread out and more and more across the galaxy, so long as we handle the unused constructs, we'll find less traffic here in general and it should be more manageable.

Frankly, I think that this is a good outlook to have, and I'm glad that there are some in the community who feel this way. Too many people these days view alphas as their chance to play a game and see if it's the game they want to play, but this is bad both for the game and for the players. These players rarely leave feedback, and when they do, they rarely stick around long enough to comment on the results unless they happen to love the game in the state that it is in. Not only does the game not properly get the feedback it needs, but these players often have extremely high expectations for an alpha. MMOs are huge games that take lot of people a long time to develop. As such, the alphas are often *extremely* buggy and incomplete. Servers may go down for days. Rollbacks and wipes can be frequent. Totally game breaking bugs will exist, and on top of all of that, features are often nowhere near complete or in their final implementation. The alpha for this game may very well be little more than a building simulator at the start with little destruction of player interaction. If you aren't ok with explicitly testing the game for the sole purpose of making it better (most people really aren't), then the alpha isn't for you, and there is nothing wrong with that. This game's success will not be determined in alpha, but on it's launch and how the community grows around the game, and the more people that are around to play it on launch (instead of having quit an incomplete game in alpha), the better for all of us. * One note on the fact that wipes will happen. Personally, I don't think this is a big deal. Objects in most places in game will be destroyable. Best to not get too attached to the things you've built

Whether or not this is useful has a lot to do with the crafting system and how it works. I'm not sure if details on that have been announced yet (if so, I'd love to be informed). In many games, such as WoW, where the items that you build have individual stats that are based solely on the item being created, resource quality doesn't really have any impact other than to say "I have x amount of this required quality to build this item". In games like Star Wars Galaxies, the stats on the resource directly impacted the stats on the final item. Personally, I'd love to see a system like this. In DU, I think there are really 2 areas that quality could enter construction. First, the raw materials used when creating voxel structures and ships. This likely wouldn't impact much beyond durability and mass though, though could be used to make a better version of an object if higher end materials are present. The second, is items themselves. We know that we'll be able to get objects that add functionality to our ships (such as weapons). The stats on these weapons could well be based on quality of the materials. That said, if we do end up with a system where there's quality, I'd like it to be more interesting than just quality 5 > quality 1. Using SWG again an example, resources had multiple stats (randomly generated) and different items used these stats in different quantities. Thus, it would make the crafting game much more interesting and knowledge based when the best crafters can figure out which proportions of impurities yield better results in their weapons.

I definitely think that this will exist, but I also think that this is one of the things that really drives the emergent gameplay. In wow, if you hated someone on your server, you'd ignore them and that was about it. You couldn't take it out on them, or really do anything against them at all. In DU though, this can be the type of thing that starts wars. This is that content that gets created and keeps players absorbed, so while little incidents may rustle some jimmies and cause a player to quit in other games, in this one, it could be the impetus that creates content for thousands of more players. This is a huge part of how EvE has stayed relevant for as long as it has.

Personally, I'm in the boat of a 50/50 type player. Solo play needs to be supported, simply because friends are not always online, so in order to keep people in the game, solo play must be feasible. If it is feasible, then some players will choose to do it. That's their right, and it doesn't really negatively impact me, so they're welcome to it. That being said, if I've learned anything from playing EvE online (the only other big sandbox game with truly emergent gameplay), it's that playing with a group completely changes the game and makes it so much more fun. I think that everyone intending to play the game solo should seriously consider at least giving one of these organizations a shot, because there is such a difference in the stories, politics, and fights that are just simply not attainable while playing solo. That said, I'll play solo some both because I'll be on when friends aren't, and sometimes I just like the idea of solo roaming combat (did it for a long time in eve, both in low sec and null sec.)

The one thing to be concerned about with drone fleets is that code can be shared. It's not just a matter of someone taking a ton of time to write up LUA for a drone fleet and having 1 dude with a drone fleet rolling around because he spent days on it. The problem is that once this code is shared (or bought / traded) then it becomes something that any player with the resources to build the drones can incorporate. Frankly, I suspect the devs will put some sort of a limit on these scripts that make it harder to have a really good automated fleet like this (maybe as simple as a length limit, as an AI script like this could get fairly complicated), so I imagine some people's hopes and dreams will be crashed, but I think it's for the betterment of the game. That being said, maybe they'll allow it and just give us a counter. Perhaps a module that interrupts remote script instruction within a limited range?

So, a lot of people are talking about the risk / reward nature of the game and interactions with other players, but I want to draw more on the Eve comparison. I think there's one big difference, at least from what I've been able to read so far about this game, and that is how the safe zones work. In Eve, there are no true safe zones. There are areas where you are significantly less likely to be attacked (High sec), but anyone who has seen freighter ganks or been around for Burn Jita or Hulkaggedon knows that even high sec is not truly safe. To me, this is the big thing about even that leads to people hating the game and keeps the playerbase relatively smaller than it could be. Beginners especially, need a chance to get to know the game in a low risk area. Some people prefer to play in it indefinitely. DU will have areas like this where pvp is disabled entirely. We'll see how big they are and how frequent they are, but we do know at least that they will exist, and think that this is critical for allowing people to enjoy the game without being griefed. That said... Once you leave these safe areas, nothing is safe, and you are putting yourself at risk. There are things you can do to mitigate the risk at this point (join an organization, go to less populated areas, etc), but if you want the best stuff, you're going to be running the risk of pirates or other people coming after you. Note, that I don't consider this griefing or trolling anymore, because at this point, they are killing you for good reason. You are in a zone that allows it, they want combat, and they probably want the stuff you've been mining too. So frankly, I don't think 'griefing' in the traditional sense will be a big problem here, and I think that new players will have plenty of opportunity to get used to the game before they expose themselves to the risks of the wild.