NanoDot

NQ next time you announce a decision that affects current game play, please keep in mind that players will act on that decision, sometimes immediately. When the first decision was announced that scans would be kept, players were faced with a difficult decision: either go out scanning or use the remaining time before Demeter to mine as much as possible. It was a choice available to everyone. Many of us chose to forego the short-term benefit of mining and went out scanning instead (which would give a long-term benefit). The subsequent decision to reverse the original decision invalidated all the work we had done since the first decision, and we also lost the opportunity to do something productive with that time we'd spent. Effectively delivering a double blow... A decision to delete scans made before the first announcement would have been perfectly justifiable. However, including the scans made after the first announcement is not justifiable. Everybody had the same info at that point, there was no pre-existing advantage. Please consider excluding the post-announcement scans from the deletion that's coming...

After years of playing DU (started Day 1 of pre-alpha), crash-on-login is the "new normal" for me, lol After 4-6 crashes on login, it stabilises and runs fine for the rest of my session...

Sounds similar to the early description of Titans in EVE, lol Except as time passed, Titans became a dime a dozen, relatively speaking. NQ have said they're not planning "super-weapons" at all.

The way DU's safezones and Sanctuary moon system has been explained so far, it sounds like non-PVP'ers will have "safety" in less than 10% of the game world (if that much). So they can "play" in complete safety, but in a shoe-box... I'm not sure how appealing that will be.

We have no idea whether a newly created character will get "free quanta". It's obviously something that's wide open to possible exploits and abuse, which will be extremely hard to counter. The more difficult it is for players to get quanta in a game, the more likely it will be that players will try to "game the system".

People who "leave the game on Day 1" will have no effect on the economy, because they'll have no quanta. People that stop playing (or take a break) after playing for a few months will affect things though, because all their accumulated quanta goes out of circulation. NQ will probably monitor the money supply, and reactivate their buy-orders whenever the "active quanta" falls below a certain threshold.

The idea in DU is that new money will only be created by selling ore to NQ's buy orders on the market. Once NQ feels there's "enough" money in circulation, the buy orders will be temporarily withdrawn, until the point is reached where they are needed again. Having a single faucet that can be shut down at will, removes the need for "money sinks". The faucet is also independent of game play, no need to remove or suspend missions or loot tables, etc. Instead of things like paying rents or taxes to NPC's to drain excess money from the system, those payments in DU are made to actual players, which moves the money around in the game. As long as the dependency between players is high, money should keep circulating. You can only hoard money if you don't need to buy anything from anyone else, whilst they will have to need something from YOU. You can't take money from other players by force, because quanta is not lootable (it's in a digital wallet). So the only way to "forcefully liberate" the funds in someone's wallet is via asset destruction. However, that doesn't mean the person doing the destruction gets the funds, the money will go to those involved in replacing the assets. It's a complex web, but the money moves...

If they REALLY preferred playing grouped, they would CHOOSE grouped play, lol None of the "convenience" features you listed prevent group play...

I'm prepared to bet that the vast majority of MMO players actually spend more time playing "solo" than they spend in group activities ! If it was the other way around, MMO design would not have evolved in the way that it did from the days of EQ and UO. When the majority is "doing it wrong", it's only a matter of time before "wrong" becomes the new "right"...

How would "Toughness" help a new player survive ? The attribute is increased by taking damage in combat, so a "vet" will have many times the toughness rating of a newbro, which will make them that much harder to kill. It may well result in a worse outcome for the newbro overall... It works in Kenshi, because your units become more effective over time as their Toughness increases, but the NPC's don't get the same resistance boost. So your units get better, but the NPC's you're fighting don't evolve in parallel (as other players would in a PVP-based MMO).

There's no need for sophisticated rules to remove "abandoned structures" outside the safezone. DU already has the most effective structure-removing mechanic in gaming: FFA-PVP ! Inside the safezone, things get more complicated. NQ have raised the possibility of having "activity timers" to determine whether a structure in a safezone should be removed. If the owner of the structure does not login for a specified amount of time, the structure is removed. This is particularly important for hexes claimed on the sanctuary moons. The idea was that everything in that claimed hex would be "packed-up" and stored by the game until the player returned one day. Losing everything you have because you took a break from the game is a very strong incentive not to return...

There have been several discussions around this topic over the years, and the feedback from NQ was basically "no tree planting in the environment". Apparently, trees and plants have the potential to massively stress the servers if we're allowed to plant them anywhere at will. Someone will go out and plant a forest of 50K trees, because they can... In the short term, the best we can hope for would be "plant elements" that can be deployed in the build space of a static core. There already are a few of those ingame, hopefully more will be added later.

I haven't played EVE in a very long time, I didn't realise that high-sec ore belts had become so insignificant. I stand corrected !

No, it's not the same thing. In EVE, the asteroid belts start regrowing after the next maintenance cycle. The resources always respawn, and always in the same place. Whether you collect them or someone else doesn't matter, it's a steady and endless supply of resources with a relatively short respawn timer. EVE's high-sec space doesn't have any ores of great value, but it has thousands of asteroid belts. None of them ever get very fat... To keep things balanced, that high rate of ore supply must be countered with a high rate of asset destruction, otherwise the bottom will fall out of the ore market, and the economy will grind to a halt. In EVE, the average player doesn't build personal bases, cities or roads. There's no lavish mansions, no furniture and no "corporate boardrooms"... or bathrooms. The vast bulk of EVE's daily mined ores go into military production, i.e. ships, modules and ammo. In DU, infrastructure projects will soak up tons of ore. Entire space stations will have to be built from scratch, as will stargates and cities and personal bases. Additionally, we'll be selling ore to NQ's buy orders, which will be the only way of generating new money in the game. So DU will have many "ore sinks", which means the intensity of combat will probably be lower than in EVE, because military production won't be getting ALL the ore.