NanoDot
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Posts posted by NanoDot
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23 minutes ago, Fitorion said:
If they don't like the game they can leave.
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The result of a game without the structures to "force" people together... is a boring... and then a failed game.
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No, a game with structures that "forces people together" via a limited range of game play options is a game with a small population.
Interacting with a market terminal doesn't create a "civilisation". Most MMO's I've played have very active Auction Houses, none of them have anything I would call a "civilisation".
A civilisation is born when a group of like-minded individuals voluntarily decide to adhere to a set of common goals, laws and cultural norms.
If you try to force that co-operation, you're not creating a civilisation, you're creating a PUG, which will disband the moment it is no longer convenient or necessary.
Delaying access to space is not going to turn a solo player into an enthusiastic group player. It will at most force them to reluctantly group-up until they can get away.
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To me, "attaching" and "docking" mean different things.
Docking:
In the case of a carrier, any fighter docking on it becomes an inert piece of cargo. The only implications are the added mass of the fighter that would have a tiny impact on the flight performance of the carrier. Simple and straightforward: anything docked on your ship is just a piece of deadweight, until such time as it undocks.
Attaching:
Two constructs are "joined", and become a new construct temporarily. All elements of both constructs remain potentially active, but controlled by the "main" vessel. I see many problems with that idea.
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Attaching one ship to another would have implications for the flight physics. Which pilot seat will be the one that controls this new unit ? Which CU will govern the attributes of the construct ?
If you "attach" 10 fighters to each other, should the resulting mega-fighter still fly and maneuver like a fighter, or should it now perform like a battleship ?
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2 hours ago, Fitorion said:
Part of the design of this game is that it's about civilization building. In order for a civilization to be built there has to be some level of difficulty to travel and resource gathering and services people can perform that have some value to other people.
Why? Because if you can go anywhere and do everything without having to expend any effort or time or resources to do it then you will and not stick around other people... not rely on those other people... not interact... and no civilization occurs.
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You cannot "force" people to interact if they don't want to.
Those that are interested in the "civilization-building" aspects will engage in it voluntarily, those that are not interested will engage reluctantly (and minimally) until they can get away from it. If it takes too long to "get away from it", they will just quit the game.
I'd rather have a game with 1000 players, of which 500 are enthusiastically building civilizations, than a game with only 500 players.
More players means more diversity and more market activity. It makes politics and business more varied and complex. The more diverse the population, the greater the chance for interesting "emergent gameplay".
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1 hour ago, lambert514 said:
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Discord seams to be highly popular now days and, as I'm trying to build the group up, I am also seeking out other discord channels to participate in.
Why not request the creation of a new channel on the unofficial Discord ?
It could be something like "DU-Diplomacy" where related discussions and announcements can take place. Perhaps only accredited diplo representatives would be allowed to post, but everyone would have read access.
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The common feature of all the images you linked is not so much determined by the "rarity" of the materials used, but rather by the extensive amount of small intricate surface details.
The size of the voxels we can work with will limit that.
A wide selection of available surface textures can compensate to an extent, but I'd guess that something like the cathedral window will not be practically possible.
There are several pre-made meshes for decorative elements that NQ have developed (e.g. trashcan, indoor plant, etc.), but those require artists' time, so they will probably be added slowly.
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There may actually be a use for formal wardec's, but not by imposing some game-determined limits.
An org or alliance could integrate war declarations in their RDMS system. That way, anyone that declares war on an alliance is automatically flagged as being at war with all members, for instance. Being formally at war could trigger all kinds of rules and actions in the RDMS.
Making wardec's a formal concept in the game allows players to use the concept as they see fit. But if the concept doesn't exist in the game code, it can't be referenced in RDMS rules or Lua scripts.
Making wardec's a concept in the game does not imply that the game rules should attach meaning to the concept, other than recognizing it as a status attribute of an org or a player. The players can decide how they want to use that status indicator.
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2 minutes ago, Warden said:
Frankly, I consider this as part of emergent gameplay and putting more meaningful existence into some sort of "end-game" by dragging out things a bit. Making it easy won't feel like an accomplishment. Then it's a question of doing it alone compared to a collaborative effort.
I get that being stuck there for months could turn away players. But effort for a few weeks (as loner, again, without help from others or without a group effort) I consider to be acceptable so far. A struggle must exist on some level and people should perhaps then reconsider or ask themselves when they want or should go for a collaborative effort instead of trying to do it alone if they want something done faster.
In addition it won't become that bad anyway. You always have to consider that those who already went there can come back and take anyone with them, so you won't be stuck down there for months unless you want to be stuck there. Besides, if the planet will be large enough there will be plenty of opportunities down there initially and then even later. I'd rather worry about claiming one tile or two on the planet than racing into space initially.
Space should not be about "getting there" as much as "what to do when you DO get there". How quickly you get to space does not change the difficulty of surviving there.
Access to space opens up vast new possibilities for game play. Exploration, colonising new planets, building secret asteroid bases, enjoying the view, and so on.
Getting to space should just be a tiny speedbump in your character progression, and it probably will become just that very soon after launch.
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I don't think it should be "hard" to get into space.
Space is an integral part of the game play. If everyone is stuck on Alioth for months, players will get bored and frustrated and that just leads to bad behaviour and rage-quitting.
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5 hours ago, Eternal said:
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Question is; where does Quanta come from if we don't have NPCs or Monsters that will drop them?
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NQ will generate buy orders on the market which will buy resources from players. That will inject Quanta into the game and remove resources.
The plan is that when NQ feel there's "enough" money in the game, they will stop generating the buy orders, which will effectively cap the money supply, because there will be no other way to generate "new" money in the game. The theory is that capping the money supply will limit inflation.
However, the money in circulation will slowly start decreasing once the supply is capped. Players inevitably leave the game, which also removes their Quanta from circulation. So NQ will have to resume placement of their buy orders from time to time, to "top-up" the amount of active Quanta in the game world.
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The speed of mining will be a significant factor in resource prices. More supply means lower prices. The faster you can mine, the more you can bring to market, and the less your risk while mining.
But speed of mining also ultimately determines the intensity of PVP in DU.
If ship losses are easily replaced (fast mining, abundant resource supply, low prices), more people will engage in PVP. And it will also mean more "speculative" PVP, because ship loss will be relatively trivial. The balance of game play will swing in favour of combat and destruction, because it's always faster (and more fun) to blow something up than it is to build it.
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I cannot vote in this poll, the options either don't make sense to me or are too vague.
"Cheap or expensive" are a relative terms, and mean different things to different people.
"Cost of minerals" will vary wildly depending on how your org deals with the different aspects involved.
"Risk of piracy or stockpile theft" is a reality of the game, the only aspect that's up for discussion is how the risks should be managed.
Supply-and-demand will largely determine the prices for anything bought and sold in DU. It's a cornerstone of the player-driven economy. The only price regulation will be via the fake resource buy orders placed by NQ to create currency in the game. Those buy orders will set a floor price for specific resources, and only while they're active.
If a specific resource becomes "too expensive", that's an incentive to find new deposits of that resource. You may have to go to a different planet, asteroid or moon to find more, or even go to a new solar system, but there will always be more somewhere. Resources in DU are infinite. They have to be, otherwise the game grinds to a halt. Resources are only finite in a given area.
The distribution of resources is regulated by NQ to achieve balance, depending on how they are used in the game. The "rare" resources will always be "more expensive" than the common ones.
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Without some regulatory system like "re-inforced states" on shield-bubbles (a.k.a. timers), we can look forward to raids and surprise attacks whenever most of your org is logged off.
So, if you want to be a viable org in DU, make sure your org is large enough to include a significant number of members from all the world's RL timezones. If not, don't be salty if your base is attacked at 4:00am by an org on the other side of the world whose RL primetime happens to occur at that point. You may even face "alarm clock raids" from motivated groups in your own time zone.
Timers and "windows of vulnerability" came into being in online games for a reason. They weren't arbitrarily invented to make combat more tedious.
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14 hours ago, Davis said:
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What's important to remember is that they have in fact (From what I have researched) created a proper outflow of the Quanta through the DACs.
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DAC will NOT create an "outflow" of currency from the game. You will be buying DAC from other players, so DAC will only transfer currency from you to another player, the quanta will remain in the game world.
The only "money sink" I've heard of in DU is the possibility of "rents or taxes" that may be charged for claiming hexes in the safe zone. Presumably the tax will be payable to the arkship AI ?
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20 minutes ago, wizardoftrash said:
Yeah, except you don't actually drop all of your items on death, you lose a percentage of your inventory, determined somewhat at random, and it might not even be lootable.
DU =/= Rust
You can't introduce a "loot all" mechanic in a typical mmo like WOW, that kind of mechanic is built for murder-hobo style sanbox games. "re-build civilization together" wouldn't happen if you could take everything from anybody just by shooting them.
AFAIK, in DU you drop your entire inventory and all equipped items on death. Only your body is resurrected at the Rez node, your items don't "teleport" with you.
Read the last paragraph in this devblog: https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2014/07/06/quantum-immortality/
However, part of what you drop is randomly destroyed, and the rest is lootable. The % of items not destroyed at death remain in a virtual container wherever you died. DU works exactly like EVE in this regard.
But the "gamey" systems that would be needed to deal with "downed states" is the reason why I don't like them in the first place.
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I don't like "gamey" systems like special KO mechanics and "downed-states" that allow all kinds of game play to continue. Dead is Dead !
My version of KO would be a realistic version of being "knocked-out": if your health bar drops below a certain %, you lose consciousness and drop on the spot. So no vision, speech, movement or taking actions, and your inventory and equipped items is fully lootable.
After a certain time, you "regain consciousness" and can stand up and function as normal, but with the very low health that caused you to fall down in the first place.
And KO should not be some magical damage absorption mechanic. If you have 25 HP left and the KO threshold is 15, you die outright if you take 25 or more damage in 1 hit.
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8 minutes ago, Falstaf said:
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Sure, if your perfect group in that perfect scenario has everything they need whenever they need it, they wouldn't need money perse.
Fortunately the chances of that happening are very small.
On the contrary, I'd imagine that a group of 20 could very easily be self-sufficient in their basic needs.
It all depends on how important "rare" resources and "high-end" parts and elements will be in everyday game play. Large orgs may have a virtual monopoly on those kinds of items, which would mean other players would need cash to buy those things from the suppliers.
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10 minutes ago, Falstaf said:
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If small to medium groups can be self-sufficient it would work against the overall goal of the game, in my opinion.
How would you avoid that ?
If the ability to manufacture components is purely skill-based, a group of 20 players can possibly co-ordinate their skill training to cover all options. The only constraint would be the volume of items they can manufacture and/or assemble.
If your group can acquire sufficient resources in DU, and you have the required skills for building/manufacturing, what need would you have for money ?
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We don't know to what extent NQ's money-injection mechanics (i.e. fake resource buy orders) will interfere in the player-driven market.
Hopefully the fake buy orders will only be i.r.o. the most common basic ores, with the price of everything else being determined by pure supply-and-demand mechanics on the market. If the fake buy order prices are set very low, it will mean that quanta will enter the economy relatively slowly, and making "new" money will require much grinding. But it would also mean that players wouldn't have to struggle to "beat" the prices offered by NQ's buy orders.
We also don't know how important cash will be to the average player. What is cash needed for in DU, other than to buy resources from other players ? We don't know how R&D works, or what the effect of skills will be regarding the manufacture of alloys, parts, elements, etc..
It may be that a medium sized org can supply all the needs of its members without needing much actual cash...
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The biggest problem with component-based weapons is balancing and the inevitable "FOTM" issues, imho.
Even if you have 1000 possible combinations, the players will parse them down to "the 10 best options" in a matter of days. Fleet doctrines will further constrain the weapon fits allowed.
One way of getting around the problem of "1000's of meshes" would be to have multiple recipes for specific parts, so that the ingredients used can change the stats of the part, and ultimately change the performance of the weapon element that the part is used in. The weapon elements would still look the same when built, but they would perform differently.
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We are now a starfaring civilization that will soon be spreading to multiple systems.
The stars are not mythical objects anymore, so they won't be regarded with the same level of reverence and awe felt by our primitive ancestors.
Star/system names in DU will most likely be arbitrary, with an emphasis on brevity and useability.
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Scanners will be a vital part of DU, because of the size of the game world.
But longer scanner ranges will be tricky, given that the game world will be dynamically assigned to various server clusters based on load in specific areas. How a long-range scanner would technically function in DU is not clear to me. A mining scanner in DU has relatively short range, and will be a "local" query, so the area being scanned will all be hosted on a single server node. But a long-range scan in DU might require communication between several distinct server nodes or clusters.
In DU, a scan of a single busy solar system might involve querying dozens of server nodes.
In EVE it's relatively straightforward, because each server node hosts one or more solar systems, so scan results can be returned very quickly, given that all possible scan results are elements hosted on a single server node.
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Nothing in DU is simple, lol, even something as basic as logging in/out becomes a multi-page discussion !
Leaving ragdolls in the world (like in ARK) is simply not practical in DU. Having 100 ragdolls on ARK's island is fine, having 10K+ ragdolls in DU is not going to be fine...
The most practical solution for DU is probably "ghosting" the player image and slowly fading it away. The ghost image would obviously have no collision detection, otherwise it could cause issues.
As for what happens when you log back in, that's probably material for several multi-page discussions...
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13 hours ago, 0something0 said:
... to modify yourself to love better ...
I don't think we'll be getting THOSE kind of "enhancements", lol
Space is Hard?
in General Discussions
Posted
I think we have different interpretations of "solo" play.
To me, solo play is simply what happens when I'm not playing as part of an organised group (usually referred to as a guild in older MMO's). That means I'm not subject to the rules, duties, activity schedules, rank privileges, drama, politics, etc. that exist in a formally organised group. My time is my own and I can do what I please whenever I please.
A demand for self-sufficiency is not part of my solo play needs in an MMO, in fact, it would detract from my enjoyment of the game. The presence of other players around me makes the game world feel alive and dynamic. I still compete with other players, but the level of that competition is determined by my agenda, not the agenda of some formal group that I belong to.
I spent half my time in EVE (3 years) as a "solo" player. During that time, I "interacted" with the markets constantly, but spent comparatively little time interacting directly with other players. I have no idea who supplied the things I bought every day on the market, or how they were made. I had no idea who bought the things I produced. I simply looked at supply and demand, and at the bigger picture of what was happening in the game at any given time (by reading the forums). Sometimes I temporarily co-operated with random other "solo" players for a while to get certain things done.
Game play in MMO's is not a binary activity: you don't either play as member of a formally organised group (org) or else try to avoid all contact with other players. There are many shades of grey between those two extremes. Trying to force everyone into formally organised groups is just an attempt to impose a preferred play style on the game.