hdparm

The fundamental issue here is that DU is a MMO with voxel building as one of the main pillars of the game.
 
If NQ for some reason started deleting inventory items or removing quanta from players who did not log in often enough, would that be accepted by players?
 
Now consider a builder. Most of his time, effort and play value is stored in the constructs he or she has created. So losing constructs is for him much the same if not worse then losing inventory or quanta.

The day the planets ran dry
Memoir of a miner
 
 
<Recording started, datalog 2021112315311321…>
 
Ahem. This thing on? Good. I’ve been mining since… Bah. Delete the recording before this. Damn technology, anticipating needs I don’t have. Just do as I say and not...
 
<Recording ended.>
 
 
<Recording started, datalog 2021112315313512…>
 
I've been mining since the day I stepped off the Arkship. It was boring but I never got bored. That’s an old mining joke. Along with the one where we are all old enough to drink at bars. With the bad jokes out of the way I can get down and dirty.
 
Back on Earth we were lucky to have a jackhammer or a sonic destabilizer, but right off the Arkship we were giving nanoformers. Amazing bits of technology, able to detect nearby concentration of ores, vaporize the ground to get to the ore and pack the ores neatly into a container. The abuse of nano-fields and Calabi-Yau space at its finest.
 
Then came the territory scanners. Able to scan a square kilometer and give a read out of the ores in the ground. They were prospecting made easy. The big business scanner-heads went out in their tri-scanner ships and deployed arrays of tri-scanners to be able to prospect on upwards of twenty-four square kilometers at the same time. But before all that it was just me and my trusty ship with a territory scanner bolted to its side. That's all a miner really needed. 
 
Then Aphelia, the Arkships AI, made the Arkship fire its big beam deep into the planet. That can’t be good for the planet.  The Novark spat small ore rocks all over the planet's surface. Must have done it to all the planets and moons of the Helios system, because the rocks were everywhere. But no self respecting miner would waste time picking those up. The yields were simply too small, compared to the expansive nodes in the ground. And then there were the motherloads: the mega-nodes. Where one ore node held thousands of liters of ore, the mega-nodes held millions. I personally found and cleared out more mega-nodes than you can shake a stick of carbon at. Those were good times.
 
But just because a territory scanner said there was ore in the ground, it didn’t say where it was. It was still an art to find those elusive ore nodes, even the megas. My preferred method was walking the compass. Find your level, walk north or south whichever makes the blip get closer. Then east west. Once the blip gets no closer, you know the ore is right above or below you. But never dig straight up or down. How are they gonna get back up?  What if there is a giant desert scorpion or worse… ecologists.  But some did dig straight down. The well-diggers or shafters as I called them, wanted to get down to where the ore was quickly. And they didn’t waste time digging back to the surface either. Instead they would just kill themselves, trusting their resurrection nodes on the surface wouldn’t malfunction. But sometimes they did. That’s why the shafters were either desperate or psychopaths.
 
The proper way of mining was always just the miner and their trusty tool. No floating mining chairs, auto-mappers or follow-me container bots. Just you and the dark. And occasionally a miner would be treated to the midnight sun: the hallucinations of sunlight seemingly streaming through the surrounding rocks to illuminate the tunnels or caverns they were traversing. A beautiful sight but also a warning you might have been mining for too long. Maybe all miners were a little touched in the head.
 
<Evacuation order received. Ignored.>
 
If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed I kept saying “was”. Aphelia predicted it would take decades to empty the planets of a fraction of their precious ores, but it’s been a single year and they are all gone. We dug them all out. The purer ores anyway. But humanity always needs more resources. So Aphelia made mining units available, each capable of extracting the diffuse ores from the ground. She gave molecular quantum tunneling or some such nonsense as the reason. But I think it's something else: Nanites.

A high energy beam is used to inject nanites deep into the ground. They suffuse the surrounding rock and gravel through Brownian motion. Each nanite is specially calibrated to search for a specific group of molecules and, once found, they construct nanotubes to pipe their payload towards where they are densest, eventually up the beam. The demonstrations that show diminishing yields within 48 hours seems to collaborate this theory.
 
Either way, the side effect of preparing the ground is the liquification of the rocks that then fill in most of the caves and tunnels already dug. Some might think it’s like turning the rock to magma but there is no heat involved. Just a dark grey sludge that quickly settles back into natural rock again. The mining shafts will be the first to go. Followed by the engulfing of any underground structures. You would think that a solid box of iron would prevent the rock from flowing in. No. This ‘quantum’ rock that flows right through everything contained only by the gravity of the planets. And moons. The moons will be receiving the same treatment.
 
<Evacuation order received. Ignored.>
 
Us Noveans that have served for years as extraction experts have been relegated to asteroid harvesting duty. But Bert, they say to me, Bert, Mining is mining, right? No, I say. Besides micro-gravity leaching of muscle and bone, Asteroids are the turds of the Helios system, attracting pirates like the flies they are. Asteroids just don’t have the same, heh, gravitas of planets. 
What if this is how the dinosaur fossils were made: Subterranean creatures caught in a planetwide rock liquefaction event. Heh. That’s a thought.
 
<Warning. Warning. Approaching anomaly.>
 
Ah. Here comes the grey ooze...
 
<Recording ended.> 
            - Contents of databank found 6km below the surface of an icy planet.
 
 
Want more? www.spaceshipdrama.com

This is exactly the point "make your own game" , which is dead for me now. I have no desire to be a tax and mining calibration slave.

.

Sure, but no matter how you spin it people are now forced to conform to a certain way of playing this game.
 
It is no longer possible to be totally self sufficient, slowly grow your empire and have total control over how much time to spend on generating quanta vs directing 100% of your resources into your own projects. The game now mostly caters only to those that want to jump in at the deep end and "play the game", at the expense of the more casual players and solo builders. And when you add subscription on top of that and consider players today have plenty of games to choose between. That doesn't seem like a very smart move to me.
 
It is also inevitable that a forced need to generate quanta in a game where selling ore is the only for sure quanta source, is going to affect market prices.
And the only existing mechanic that can keep this in check is fixed price bots. So there goes that free marked people wanted down the drain.

so now we are telling people how to play,,,it is easy to meet the 1m weekly cost per tile and you just need to do the following to achieve this.....once a game introduces a need to play a certain way i move on.

Please set HQ automatically for territories with static constructs on it. At least some people would not lost everything and they will be able more easy and less less disappointed when they will return to game

I'm afraid I have no + left to value her contribution.
I agree with the tax opinion. Taxes are implausible and unnecessary, especially since they make no sense in DualUniverse so far.
While they try to justify it by "controlling the areas and doing so through a purge", to do so the mechanic could have been tied to an active subscription quite easily.
I think it's the wrong way to go about it, because the system of compulsory taxation doesn't fit in with the sandbox idea of the game. It would have made more sense to introduce an energy system to power your production lines. There are great elements that could be built into the game. Wind turbines, water turbines, solar panels and everything with different designs to choose from...that would have been ingenious content that also fits into the current climate protection situation in the world.
The taxes, on the other hand, are more compatible with typical f2p or p2w games, the main thing being to forcibly impose a play style on the player. And yes, there is coercion in the game, although freedom was advertised.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

I don't ever post on here, but I feel that silence is consent and I don't consent. 
 
500k per hex initially. 1mill per week per hex in taxes? 
 
Monthly... maybe? I still don't like that. 
 
Here is the issue. I love DU. I backed it in the Kickstarter. What I don't love is feeling forced to play a game just to keep my progress. 
 
It is why WOW is failing and FFXIV is winning right now. 
 
FFXIV encourages its players to take breaks. "Go play other games for a month or two. Come back fresh and enjoy your time in this game."-basically Yoshi-p 
 
WOW basically does the opposite, and people are fed up with it. Which is why it is dying.
 
Logging in every few days to play a mining mini-game is a lot like WOW asking me to daily quests every day just to have access to the same type of content I can get in FFXIV at any point in the patch cycle. Other players are realizing that you don't have to bust your ass all the time to enjoy an online game.
 
I have a full steam library of voxel games. I assure you, if I wanted to build a big spaceship or space station by myself. I could load up StarMade in a heartbeat and have a good time. 
In some ways, StarMade is a better voxel game than DU. I know many of you will agree with that. If not maybe you like Space Engineers, StarBase, Emyprion, Stationeers, Starship EVO, or something else more? As players, we have options for building ships and stations.
 
The service DU provides is that we are all on a single persistent world. That is the one good stand out thing this game does. I built a god-damn Gundam that waked in Starship Evo back when it was called "Skywanderers"... The voxel tech here is cool, but it's not that impressive. I am actually limiting my build potential by playing DU in some ways.
 
I put up with DU's jank and quirks because of the idea that I don't lose progress when I take breaks. I am good to play a voxel game for two months tops before I need to take a brake for like two to three months. I get burnt out. Same with any other game type. If I lose progress or have to bust my ass to pre-pay my taxes. I just won't. 
 
RECONSIDER THE DAMN TAX RATE. MAYBE MONTLY.
 
CONSIDER ALLOWING MORE THAN ONE FREE HQ TILE.
 
I refuse to be in a situation where I am a slave to this game. I still have the old build on Skywanders on a HDD somewhere where you could build mechs. It would be a lot cooler if I had a reason not to just go do that instead. 
 

forcing players to log in daily and then arguing "it's not bad! you get 150k!" is a circle jerk and not an argument.
 
Quanta/resource sink is needed for sure. Taxes are a cheap way out for NQ without having to create interesting new mechanics like POWER SYSTEMS as promised for example, which would do the same thing as taxes, but better.

Some of us are not slaves to this game!
 
We don't forget about the 150000 Quanta per day, we just don't log in every day, we have other things to do with our lives.

That is all well and fine, except for one minor detail.
DU is a voxel building MMO. And with the TAX there is absolutely no incentive any longer to spend time building, except for on 5 HQ tiles for the entire universe.

And when every player in the game suddenly want to sell ore to pay for taxes, then what do you think will happen with ore market prices?
 

1M a week?? Welp. Shouldnt have bothered renewing my sub. Completely killed the game for solo players. Thanks NQ.

Read my post carefully Alpha Tester. Pay attention.
 
 
In the DevBlog they said that a million a month was getting poor reviews from the player base, and now they take it one step in the wrong direction. Mine to pay taxes, pay taxes to mine. HQ tiles were to be TAX FREE, NON-TAXABLE, TAX SHELTERS to give players an offset from the tax issues. Why have the DevBlog and a Q&A video if they aren't gonna stick by what they said. This is infuriating.

1,000,000 quantas a tile?!! A Week?!! Right. Not all of us live in Mommy and Daddy's basement playing DU for ever, we have jobs and like coming back home to our families and then getting on DU for some building and shooting. Not logging in to pay taxes or moving ore to pay taxes. I do that a plenty in real life thanks. I am aware that its necessary for a tile tax but that is nuts. In the DevBlog they said that a million a month was getting poor reviews from the player base, and now they take it one step in the wrong direction. Mine to pay taxes, pay taxes to mine. HQ tiles were to be TAX FREE, NON-TAXABLE, TAX SHELTERS to give players an offset from the tax issues. Why have the DevBlog and a Q&A video if they aren't gonna stick by what they said. This is infuriating.

I'd love to see how you came up with 1,000,000 a week in taxes.  I honestly feel like this is way to high, it is to much for smaller and more casual players.  This makes me much less excited about Demeter.  I get why you need a decay system, makes perfect sense, and I agree with it, but 1 million a week is just to steep.

All the timescales sound way too short to me. Two weeks is nothing.
 
I'd like to see things a bit more stretched out. Give us a month or two with territory transfers enabled so that we can get our heads around which territories we want to keep and who needs to own what. Then a month or two more with rents enabled but no territory reclaiming / forfeiting. Let that bed in before you start throwing people off their tiles and destroying their stuff.

I thought, 1 million quanta a month, and I was feeling strain on me. But now reading that it is four times more (!!!) as the tax is paid weekly and not monthly, i do not know how to generate so much money ingame. My focus is to fly around and interact, mining is not so much something i do so aggressively. And especially new players will find it hard, too, to make so much money.

Unless the start-up territories on the Sanctuary Moon have a significantly better ore output than now. hen new players won't struggle. Remember, there is no "average player", so many of us who are not loud and are known to you, are playing on a lower level, nott mining aggressively or in big groups.

Also, if all of us palyers have to start mining aggressively, won' this cause that ttoo much ore is given to the markets and prices will fall, thus making it harder to earn the quanttas needed to pay the insane territory tax?

Finally, I remind you for one of my previous suggestions in which I described a tax that is oriented on the ore output value of a territory. hat is how it should be. I urge you to reconsider.

Honestly, I am mad that I am being punished for having a life outside of DU vs. scheduling everything around this game for "optimized" calibrations for tile taxes, when I just wanted to have my little island resort of 20 tiles with protected views that I spent 2 years on, and was really coming together until this shit cut loose.

So mad to lose hard work... yes, mad for being punished for working a lot rl and game trying to enslave my free time... yes. mad that I spent hundreds of hours doing things I didn't want to in order to just build and create... hell yes... and I am not the only one that feels any of these things.

 

I think NQ need to decide what wipe they will be doing at release and make that statement publicly available, before they charge more for subscriptions. 

DU is becoming the opposite of the game we were promised in Kickstarter.

Anyone who backed this game before Beta knows exactly what I'm talking about.

I am PISSED!! After you announced that old scans will carry over i wasted a week scanning hundreds of tiles to have a good spot after Demeter, and now you say all this time, that i only spent on scanning because NQ announced it would be valid, was a huge waste of my few hours of spare time after work? Thats absolutely BS! At least set a cut off date that the scans after you made that announcement are still valid, take some responsibility for your damn announcements!

I first played DU at the beginning of the UKs first lockdown, so around 18 months ago. I was drawn in by the promises of the marketing: that I could forge out any path I wanted - I could be a builder, trader, explorer, be part of an org, or go it alone. My experience was off to a shakey start with a buggy intro, but I knew it was a ‘beta’ so I persevered and was hooked. I became obsessed... I loved it.
After a disgusting amount of time playing non stop, I started to make progress, bought my first warp drive, built a space station and some little bases dotted about, life was sweeeet. Then #23 hit. Massive bummer. 
I took a break for a couple of months, and came back, none of my mates did. I assessed the damage, regrouped and started again.
It quickly got really boring - really not into PVP - and dont have the funds for it anyway, but kept going with the promise of the new asteroid gameplay (thought I might risk some super-fast prospecting). Turns out, this isnt for single, newish, resource-poor players either, but nothing in the promo material indicated this would be inaccessible outside an org with deep pockets  (or, of course, an early player whos taken advantage of the abundant ore, bugs and exploits). The new announcement of the features of Demeter frankly spells the end of the downward trajectory for newish players like me. Theres no way to really amass the resources to access interesting play outside joining an org - which wasnt the reason I signed up. No doubt the game will continue to have draconian brakes applied through money & time sinks to curtail the large orgs and mega factories, but it feels like the game has shifted to cater to these, whilst simultaneously trying to save server resources. There needs to be a realistic and honest disclosure of what the gameplay is for new players, ie. join an org if you want to play beyond a few weeks.
I tried to play today for the first time in months, the new warp drive speed seemed like the perfect, sad metaphor. Warp Cells are ridiculously expensive, DSATs are beyond ridiculous both in scale and cost - the game feels joyless now, where it used to feel alive, vibrant and full of possibility.
 
Its a huge, huge shame the direction the game has gone in, it could've been so good. But thanks DU for a great experience while it lasted,  it was a great escape for me, for few months at least...

And indeed, please info on HQ tiles and please introduce before we need taxes as most here probably invested all quanta into schematics or other stuff