willolake

Right. The root of the PvP issues in this game is the fact that safe zones were created instead of combat mechanics. If we had been iterating on warfare, for everything, since Alpha, we'd have something really nice. Instead NQ threw in temporary measures that forced there hand with every other mechanic. So we're in a world where there is a magic line that _everyone_ can hide behind. I'd love for the world to be dangerous and for players to need to make safe-spaces, but we need the tools to do that. Static construct mounted automated weaponry would be fun for PvP, but it would be cheap to deploy and hard to defeat (not impossible, just hard). That way the ships are _easier_ than the bases, but again, not impossible. Anything that is impossible versus improbable, sucks. When someone kills you, they should become red to you, you should be able to put a bounty on them, AND a bounty on reporting their location! That makes being an aggressor and surviving a thing of pride, but also give people a chance to hunt them, and their base, down. It's not a sandbox unless you give _everyone_ sand, which means anyone can throw it in anyone else's eyes at any time. Not just sometimes in certain parts of the sandbox.

I've waited and waited and waited for a _reason_ to return. Even when I was playing, the aspiration of territory warfare was always been my reason. I played expecting it to happen. I got to the end of my patience and stopped playing. The mining unit update was the absolute worst change ever; incredibly repetitive and boring. The only thing that will have me, an emerald backer, come back to even try DU again will be territory warfare. Yet, you're asking me to "play now so we can get data". No. I'm sick of the safe zones. The beta was completely botched with the dual launch of the sanctuary moon AND then Alioth being safe too; WHAT EVEN THE EFF! All the planets with their safe zones around them... just so incredibly frustrating. What motivates activity is the chance to build something or acquire things *in the face of adversity*. I'm all for the sanctuary moon and the tile per account (I'd say that's too much even, but different discussion) for creativity to flourish. But the real reason to do anything needs to be once I pop out of the sanctuary moon, I can freaking die, I can lose something, but I can also conquer territory, be a pirate, hunt pirates, protect convoys, hunt asteroids, do missions, but all of that has to be under threat AND present opportunities for ME to be the threat. I know I can try really hard and go find a fight, but that's not what I'm talking about; I want to be in a fight as a by product of a more broad goal, and right now you have to simply find value in acquiring "stuff". An incredible number of people in this community could design a start to territory warfare, and so can you. Just freaking do it. This post isn't about warfare being the goal; it is that the existence of it is what adds to feeling of accomplishment when doing literally anything else. That has been the key failure of this project so far, understanding motivation of the player. It has entirely rested on people's desire to be creative, and that only goes so far in a closed ecosystem where their creations die with the project.

I agree the daily maintenance is sucking the life from me. The basic math I did during PTS told me taxes were going to be tight, but actually having to "pet" these mining units constantly just to pay the IRS is such a boring chore. All of the time doing maintenance takes away from the activities I might actually enjoy! For example I have a 3 tile setup, each with 500l/h hema producing for 5 days, and that only covers 67% of the taxes with hema at 50q (I'm fully spec'd in the new mining talents BTW). Now I have this added time pressure to get ore to the market and sell to get the tax payment in. Of course I expect prices to depress greatly around tax time due to this rush. Honestly, I don't think taxes are the answer. I'm fine with the rapid decay of mining unit production, but it is the pressure of the taxes that make it suck. If you want territory decay, make us go add fuel to TCUs that powers their "ownership field" or some crap (and restore the exponential cost of territory ownership). I don't mind having to touch something to prevent territory decay, but it shouldn't be so often needed that my limited play sessions become all about chores. The mining mini-game itself is not bad. I wish it involved interacting with the actual world and not a goofy 2d space; like deploying probes on the territory and using the scanners or some such, but in its own right it is decent.

While we've yet to see just how painful the taxes are, I must second this sentiment. As a KS backer, I'm incredibly saddened that DU made it into "beta" with zero territory warfare mechanics. I really hope we hear something about this Soon®. I too would much rather be stressing about defending my land from players than the Interstellar Revenue Service.

A small mining unit can be crafted in your nano from surface harvest-able materials. You can run multiple of those to bootstrap your mining operation. You can run around an harvest surface ores from any unclaimed territory. I think basic large mining units will only end up costing no more than $500k quanta; so the daily monies alone will give people the opportunity to bootstrap a larger operation quickly. I think something we're all going to need to adjust to is that "being a land owner" is not a given outside of sanctuary anymore. I honestly hope this makes sanctuary useful. As an early player that saw sanctuary put in at the last minute, I was completely confused why a safe zone was _also_ added. The point was sanctuary was safe, everything else was not. Because of the safe zone, no one had a reason to stay in sanctuary. Now there will be pressures that make sanctuary useful.

Thought I had you there "It's a tarp!" - j/k Not wrong, but there will have to be a level of cooperation and misdeeds to make the universe interesting. Some in-game mechanics to help here are certainly needed; bounties, reputation, etc.

I'd love for you to build voxels on my territory, and I'll pay the taxes. We'd both win. You don't pay taxes, I see pretty buildings that I'd have zero motivation to build myself, because Dual Universe is a sandbox game that has multiple motivations; not just the one you find value in.

Keep in mind that not paying taxes on an HQ tile only disables industry/mining. You won't lose the tile. So if you don't want to log in and pay taxes for many weeks, that's fine, you also won't get the benefit of production; that is the trade-off, but you're not being forced to do the tax dance on HQ tiles.

If you unsubscribe, you should not expect to come back to the game and have anything except the quanta in your pocket. If you do not unsubscribe and just go afk for years, that is what HQ tiles are for. If you own 100 tiles and disappear for any reason, the game should have a forcing function to return most of those assets into the economy; that is what we are getting.

I would like to see some math here as well. I did not get to play PTS enough to feel any meaningful mining production output and determine how much base production effectively goes in the trash. @Gottchar Did have a thread with a lot of good numbers. I really hope they did not calculate based on well-maintained and maxed out mining units, nor should they use the current market price of ore but instead only the bot prices to determine possible income. An average of 400L/h T1 production on a tile, assuming a few poorly calibrated mining units, will produce 9,600L/day and 67.2kl/week. At 23 quanta/L that is 1,545,600 quanta/week. It is doable, but we'll have to see how tedious it feels for the average player to be forced into converting ore into quanta just to pay taxes. What we might see are a lot more player hauling missions to take ore to the market. That could actually be a welcome bump in general activity. I also agree with others that two weeks is not enough time for the world to settle after Demeter drops for taxes to kick in; I'd like to see a month before the first tax bill.

Please make it clear that this cap is for the entire universe, star system, or planet. I believe the intention was universe, and if so I think it is a reasonable number. If it is per planet, GTFO, and per star system, I'd prefer 3.

Yes.

Right. I expect the scan items themselves to be deleted, honestly.

I'm pretty sure you can craft the T1 ore, small mining unit in your nano. Not sure why they would need to be free; they should be craftable with surface ore.

I too wondered if "four" was the correct number here. If so, there seems to be a detail missing.

I put this comment on the video, but repeating it here since it is the official response thread. The question about what happens to dynamic constructs when a territory becomes vacant was not actually answered. The answer became about static constructs. Please clarify the result for dynamic constructs. I have an assumption about what the answer is, but it would be great to hear it specifically from NQ. Edit: What @DontPanic said!

I'm not a fan of the tile claiming wait period. I think someone is using a game mechanic to paper over technical laziness and is not willing to spend the cycles to find constructs to automatically abandon after the tax debt grace period. Speaking to @DutchEasyGamer's concerns a little about having to wait; I'd say that the wait is yet another barrier to having fun in-the-moment. If I'm out flying around and discover something, I want to interact with it and feel like I've seized an opportunity, not just started a timer. I've not heard this talked about, but if the owners don't have active subscriptions, the automatic abandonment should be a no-brainer at minimum. Maybe I've missed commentary on this topic specifically, so feel free to throw links at me.

I'm fine with calibration being required to start a mining unit, but I would request that I not actually be able to start the mining unit when 0% calibration means 0L/h production rate. I did this on PTS; I started the unit without calibration not understanding that "production rate" was a value that should be non-zero immediately after starting the unit. Conversely, if 0% calibration means no production, then the mining unit should stop when it reaches 0% calibration. I don't understand why the production rate value is only populated when the unit is running when it is just a calculation of base * efficiency * (1+adjacency) * calibration; all values you can clearly see before starting the unit. The "running" status and a progress bar are enough to tell me the unit is on. I don't understand why there is a calibration lockout time per mining unit when there is also a rate limit on charge generation. There are too many timers, and they are too long. Let me spend as many charges as I want on a mining unit until I'm happy with the calibration; just use limit of charges to moderate my ability to calibrate! Also, agree with the taxes being way too high. I agree taxes are useful as a forcing function to turn materials into quanta and thus create market activity, as well as a means to force decay (which is badly needed). They just can't turn the already tenuous "game" into even more of a grind fest. As far as the airbrake change, it should have been done a long time ago, just like fixing the ability to stack elements. So I get it, but I agree with others that there are way too many elements that need too much line of sight. Wings (via flaps) and retro-rockets are also capable of producing countering forces in atmosphere! More elements should have some ability to produce thrust in different directions depending on the need; maybe they aren't as efficient at it, but it should be an option.

I'm glad NQ is acknowledging the poor quality releases; meaning the obvious broken behaviors in new and changed features. I'm hearing a huge reliance on the PTS for farming out play testing, but I'm not hearing anything about what is supposed to motivate players to spend their time and energy in PTS. At the moment, I will never play in PTS when I could be "earning" with my time on the live server. I hope there are enough souls with time to spare to cycle on PTS changes for the thrill of bug hunting; may you be blessed.

@Aaron Cain That would fall under not being in a cryo-chamber or safe zone and thus means your avatar would stay in the chair/cockpit until you log back in or it is murdered. I'd say you also block the use of the chair/cockpit while doing so. I was attempting to imply you can logout anywhere. So under my statements, you have plenty of room to log out. If you're implying some "safety" aspect to the chair/cockpit, I'd say the cockpit would have HP like the cryo-chamber, but a chair should have been protected by the voxels/elements surrounding it. Thanks for mentioning those, as I'd not called them out specifically.

Just voicing my opinion in this thread for the sake of sharing with NQ on this topic. I agree with others concerning persistence of the world should also mean persistence of the people. I actually don't think live avatars should disappear at all. People taking space in the world is a physical motivation to build safe spaces and provide restricted access to areas. I'd want any toon not online to be asleep with their inventory accessible to everyone; doing so means you inherit risk when you don't log out in a secured location place. The exception to avatars existing in the world would be for "high security" areas like the ark ship; there the players could disappear immediately in complete safety (barring any combat timer). For those concerned with bodies littering the land, slaying the asleep person would relegate them to the heavens, troubling your frame rate no more. An alternate option to requiring death for entrance to the heavens would be, as some have stated, to have a "cryo-chamber" to logout in. I'd be fine with a chamber that shows the last player in the chamber and makes it inaccessible to entrance for 5 minutes, after which time the player toon vanishes allowing another to enter the chamber. Having multiple cryo-chambers is thus incentivized by the the speed of logout, but does not prevent a group using only one in their building. Any player capable of reaching the cryo-chamber should be able to see who is in the chamber and have access to all embodied toon's inventories (no magical permissions, if you're in range to activate the cryo-chamber, you can loot it). Taking this sentiment to death, if killed, instead of a toon being asleep, their inventory would drop in the form of a container. The items in these containers should begin randomly despawning after a grace period until the container is empty (this is to prevent using death containers as storage). Empty containers would despawn immediately, and you'd not be able to put anything in a death container, only remove. Regarding destruction of a cryo-chamber, it too would generate a container if any toon inside had items. It is important that these "death containers" be bound to any dynamic construct they are in such that the weight of them is not ignored. I'd gladly murder my teammates in order to get a ship into space with their inventories for free. This also means dying on a ship in space makes the container follow the ship. Outside of a constructs influence, I'd like the containers to maintain some velocity and react to gravity until the influence of a construct interceded, but I can understand if that is too much effort on the server; thus having space-born death containers hold position in the world should be OK. Respawning would be allowed at any spawn point that is not under cool-down, and the cool down time for any given spawn point should increase after each use. Additionally, as I think others mentioned, there should be a spawn delay based on distance to the spawn point. That is, something like 5 seconds per SU of distance traveled. The reality is that any spawning mechanic is going to provide "fast travel" capabilities. People will kill each-other and themselves for the sake of travel. The disincentive for that is that you never carry your inventory through death, and regardless of a spawn point's cool-down state, you have to wait to spawn when doing so over distance. There will still be a benefit to death-traveling long distances, but it simply won't be free and people can work with that. In order to make respawn waits not entirely boring, we could allow the player to perhaps "follow a friend" through their eyes while dead (first person perspective only). As far as default spawn points, the ark ship should always be available but still require the spawn distance time cost. I'd possibly include some player agnostic spawn points on sanctuary moons, but perhaps those would continue to have cool-down timers per player. I mention the sanctuary moons because I fear having the ark ship as the only always-available spawn point puts too much emphasis on Alioth as a home planet and would discourage more emergent activity in the outer planets.