hdparm

Hi NQ, 
For me the value of the Mining in L/h is sooo ridiculus ! in ONE HOUR 1/2 scoop of traditional mining ? how to build something or create something ? 
the atmo break stacking is the onlty way to have enought break without kill the ship design !! please leave it !
thanks for your feedback !

After seeing the video and getting hyped for DU again I almost resubbed my account to come back to the game. (only been gone since Apollo issues).  I was like now this, this is the right direction.  Now after reviewing with my org the details on the test server I am no longer hyped. No longer impressed and no longer even considering for a moment about returning to DU if these changes go live.  

Not only will this destroy literally every build I have in the game and remove them permanently (I don't make 27 million a week in profit on anything) but as someone who has health issues, there is no way I can sustain my building enjoyment vs the tax rate.  NQ asked players to BUILD THE WORLD so there was stuff here when the release happened so that new players would see a world full of builds. Now with taxes the world will be barren.  Did someone just take a 2 week vacation with their family for the holidays? Oh great all of their factories, builds, etc have been taxed and unpaid and now simply gone.  They return after a good family outing to find out that NQ has deleted everything they worked for due to taxes.  That ends their enjoyment of the game, and they move on to other games. 

Even mobile afk games have enough buttons to press to keep people playing games like AFK arena for years.  Come on.  You get so close to something good, something that hypes the community only to throw in some STUPID last minute thing that completely destroys your reputation as a game developer. Its too much for any White Knight of NQ to deal with.
 
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What Demeter COULD have been.

-Auto-mining and more asteroids resulting in more ore in the economy.
-Time saving feature allowing players who build to have a constant supply of ore (although low) to build the world with
-Beautiful builds arising that function better and have less lag due to the ground rework
-Rebalanced Ore economy due to surplus from players not using the ore (or orgs mass mining to supply markets)
-Voxel tools making building with voxel easier, saving more time for players.
-More time saved = more builds = more pvp content as people have time to have fun in DU. (since they have to mine less)
 
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What Demeter IS GOING to be;
 
-Auto-mining costs more than the ore that is mined. (tile with 500L/hr hematite generates 2.1m in value to bots in a week, 1m cost to own the tile, likely 1-2m to ship the ore if not on Alioth in warp cells, saved to 400k if slowboat)
-With the increase in ore stabilizing the ore market, the lack of ability to pay the taxes results in NO ore on the market
-Players who aren't "Hardcore" and are "Casual" or have real lives losing their builds
-Ships now cost so much that the ore will never be attainable for the ships to be built.
-ALL ships PRE-Demeter become INVALID
-All Ship designers pre-demeter leave DU when this releases rather than completely overhauling everything they ever did in DU since September. (see Apollo update results)
-PVP will die off completely as orgs/pirates will not be able to afford the taxes on the ore they need to repair their ships and players will not risk hauling anything valuable without warp due to the taxes consuming 90% of the value of the ore before you lift off the planet with it.

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What should NQ do then?!
 
-Remove taxes from this update.
-Remove brake changes from this update
-Research how to implement "decay systems" into your game properly.
-Remove weird ass mechanics from Auto-miners that not a single person has said was positive. Wtf even is this. 

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Suggestion on HOW to implement TAXATION for CLAIMATION.
 
-Players place the core, receive a pop up that asks the type of tile it will be and selects one of the following options;
Residential Tile (Housing and cool looking builds with no functionality) Minor tax (150k/week) or No Tax (already paid upfront) Industrial Tile (Designed for Industrial tiles with factories) Medium tax (300k/week) Mining Tile (Designed for Mining Units) High Taxes (450k/week) Commercial Tile (Designed for selling goods) Taxes paid off sales (10%-20%) directly from dispensers. This will allow players to choose what they want to do;
 
To further elaborate- Residential tiles cannot hold industry units.  Industry Tiles could have a maximum # of allowed assemblers, Mining Tiles could be the only tiles that allow autominers to be functional, and Commerical tiles are the only tiles that allow use of dispensers.  Residential tiles could be green, Industry tiles yellow, Mining tiles Red, and Commerical tiles blue on the map.  
 
This would allow players to identify the tile type in the map and see the various commercial tiles around the worlds and encourage them to go shopping. (boosting economy)  Which highest traffic ones could eventually end up with market areas (as previously mentioned at the end of Alpha)

WAR DECLARE SYSTEM- This suggestion would tie into future features like the War system as orgs could identify mining tiles or commercial tiles of their enemy orgs while at the same time leaving alone those massive Residential builds that everyone loves to visit that won't gain them any profit for attacking. 
 
This would also allow a decay system to be put in place for people who just leave the game for "too long" and would remove many of the towers that exist of people who haven't played since 0.23.
 
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TLDR:  If NQ implements taxes/brake changes to DU, the game will die fully. These changes don't increase the time for FUN, they remove the FUN entirely.  NQ I strongly urge you to PAY ATTENTION to this update more than you did the last 2 and LISTEN to these ONLY TWO REAL complaints from the community and X them out before this goes live. 

I have 3 accounts to cover a modest spread of skills, I love to tinker in the game, I am a builder by heart and abhor the destructive aspect of PvP. l logged into PTS and after looking around I canceled all three of my accounts not so much due to the changes (aside from taxes, while the idea is sound, those are just stupid expensive) but more so as to where the update indicated the game was going.
 
In short no content, just PvP and PvP is just lazy ... DU knows this, it's why all of their structures are invulnerable and messing with them is the quickest way to get booted from the game but anything a player created is fair game ... double standard much?
 
On another note, personally I will often spend hours in game looking at an immense treasure trove of player created art, there really are some amazing pieces laying around. Unfortunately nearly all of these examples will soon be wiped out. I understand why taxes are needed but damn this change will destroy so much of what makes this game great. <looking at you IC Spaceport and D4rk Castle>

How long it may take util we get sick of grinding the same minig unit re calibration minigame again, and again and again and...
 
- Call To Action – Say NO to territory taxes - 

Really?
How very 12th century.
What are we the purity police?

 

Territory taxes of 1,000,000 seem a bit high after paying for the territories the first time.  Like I don't like the entire mission running system, and don't want to constantly have to do missions and mine for 1,000,000 quanta per territory each week.  Seems a bit like you are trying to make us play the game constantly.  I personally have 6 territories on Alioth that I have worked hard to get, and I don't see why I need to pay such a high upkeep cost on them all the time.
 
I think a reasonable cost associated with the slow pace of Dual Universe would be something like 1,000,000 every month or so.
 
Considering most missions to make quanta pay below 100k quanta for safe zone travel, this means I would have to spend time doing at least 10 missions per territory per week in order to pay for a territory if the cost of 1,000,000 quanta is carried to the live server.  Even to pay for one territory you would have to login at least 7 times per week in order to pay for the cost associated with 1 single territory.  At least other games are monthly or bi-weekly taxes, instead of weekly.  
 
If the economy was in significantly better shape in terms of the ease of making quanta by selling goods, then I could go along with a 1,000,000 quanta tax every week, but you can't even kill NPCs for quanta in this game yet.  

After looking at the territory taxes,  I believe this is untenable.  Based upon the numbers I am seeing so far we are looking at 112M per week for 1 cluster per ore type T1-4.  We will be forced to produce less even with 1 less cluster which reduces the amount of money we can make.  Our warp beacon factory will be shut down since T5's are so scarce and our warp cell production cut to about 1/3 of the 23k per week we can produce now and a good portion of those would be used warping around every few days to maintain the mining bots.  This may very well be the straw that broke the camel's back as far as my future investment in this game.

My question: 
What is the purpose for taxes. Why are they implemented into game? 
Second question: 
What is the new and interesting gameplay loop which taxes generate?

1: The numbers are way too low. They need to be upped significantly to be viable even without taxes. To make up for this you would need to up Asteroid Ore Nodes a lot, and greatly increase the number of safe zone asteroids, and start including rare ore spawns into the safe zone. There is a problem if you can mine more ore in less than a minute by playing cookie clicker surface mining then what using a powerful technological mining marvel can pull out in an hour.

2: The ore Market is already inflated, and that's with the ability to mine more Ore in an Hour Currently than you could in a couple weeks with a mining unit.  As it stands with current values, you will continue to wreck the player economy and market.

3: What's the point of adding adjacent territory bonus of 10% per territory, if you have to pay a heavy territory tax for that small boost to ore extraction. As with point 1, the numbers are way to low to justify this.

4: While I am a fan of using some elements in ship design to give them that rugged Sci-Fi look, forcing people to have to show every single element on a ship is just a bad decision. Some elements it makes sense. Hovers, Boosters, Engines being obstructed, makes sense. But when you need 50 brakes, and 100 wings to make a large ship flyable with cargo, not being able to hide some of those elements is just dumb.

5: I am glad the Space Industry not working is a bug. Taxing PvE Space Industry/Activities is another way to drive off more players. 

There are ways to kick inactive players without taxing the current player base to death i.e. out of the game and yes and no on the mining will bring enough ore to pay the taxes if the prices of ore fall then what. Now we all know that is not likely to happen in the short term but it could then there would not be enough to pay the taxes and that is also a relative term and really driven by how many tiles each player owns. 

When implementing the ore extraction rates and territory taxes, please just start with higher numbers for ore, and lower numbers for taxes. You can always adjust toward stricter later.
A slope, versus a cliff.

I confess I'm quite disappointed by what I saw in PTS regarding the implementation of mining units. 
 
1- Ridiculously low ore yield. Half an hour of manual mining will yield more ore than I could get from an tile's MU extraction in a week. So why even bother investing the time, quanta and talent points if there's no significant return? It barely covers the cost of fuel to travel between planets just to recalibrate MU's every 4 or 5 days. Tiles should have a far higher yield in order to make it worth the effort.
2- Calibration mini game is based on luck and not the player's actual ability to infer the best place to start extraction - seems pointless.
3- Regenerating calibration charges? Why not just stipulate a total amount of MU's a player can own (affected by talents), just like Core Units?
What to expect when Demeter lands in the live server? 
1- Ore shortages, leading to product shortages in the market. I doubt that MU's will have the capacity to produce an overall equivalent amount of ore as is currently produced by planetary mining.
2- Players actually having to dedicate more time to mining. MU's wont provide enough ore, and with only asteroids to mine, which have smaller ore nodes, mining is less efficient than current planetary mining, so more time spent. I expected the implementation of MU's would actually reduce the amount of time we would need to spend in manual mining, but I guess it's going to be the opposite.

This has been done, here -> (props and credit to Gottchar for running the numbers for us)
 
and the numbers say that each player character will be able to get only ~150kL of ore total of all tiers per day - and that is after 145days of talent training to all L5, and assuming you 'win' the rng of the calibration mini-game.
This specific limit on ore extraction rate will kill the industrial game and cause such ore market price inflation, as to effectively shut out all small orgs, individuals and new starters.
 
And this completely ignores the effect of keeping scans valid, which allows large orgs to cherry pick the best tiles to TU in the first day of the patch, denying everyone else even a chance at getting a somewhat reasonable tile set to extract from.

Daily Login is 150k. Rent is 1mil a week. 

Nice. 50k weekly profit. You might be able to buy something with that. Maybe. Someday.  Eventually. 

No, I want the ability to pay for the things I have, without having to play annoying mini-games, and own 36 auto-miners to run a simple factory. 

I want a mission system that can't be exploited by having 20 alts AFKing and VRing into missions by limiting the number of mission packages a core can hold.

I want the players building the "civilization" to define the economy, not have it sucked away by an invisible entity with no gain. 

I want the developers to listen to the majority of people who have said at the current rate of tax and ore collection, this is a bad idea and is going to lead to less people enjoying and playing the game. Rather than the two or three people that align with their idea of "We do what we want and you'll get over it".

I want a new player to be able to log in and not feel like they are stuck on Sanctuary surface mining, mindlessly clicking ores like it's Cookie Clicker and not Dual Universe, to be able to pay for the over-priced components to build decent ships, that don't look like works of art covered in brake stickers.

That's what I want.

What do YOU want? Besides paying a useless tax.

Much like Helvetian, I have done the same thing, where I claimed tiles around where I was building for a buffer. I do also perform money making activities in the game, but I have claimed tiles just for their natural beauty and then build on them. It would be a shame to just give these tiles up because they are not profitable.
 
Taxes in real life are based on the assessed value of the land and the zoning of said land. There should be an option to own land without mining.
 
I also feel that the adjacency bonus, while a good mechanic for auto-mining, is contrary to the goal of creating cities and empires in the game. If players are encouraged to claim land in clumps of tiles, we won't connect together as the game world grows. In many areas this won't be an issue, but on Alioth, Freeport, some places on Madis, I could see this being a problem.

As someone focused on building, not making money, I definitely support the idea of creating an option for people to own a tile just to build on, or even just to preserve it. As an example, I have claimed a ring of territories around a central territory I am building a city on, just to create a buffer zone that prevents other players from building too close to the city. Simply getting together the money to maintain these seven tiles would force me to spend a lot of time playing money-making activities such as delivery missions and asteroid mining. Not a fan of that idea at all.
 
I like Ruges' idea with taxation based on tile use.
 
I'm also totally on board with deleting old scanner results, or at least not having them show the "new" ores. Besides the obvious issue of scan collectors having a huge advantage when it comes to ore hunting, there's no logical explanation for the old scanner results (that might have been taken a year ago) to suddenly become up-to-date when they didn't refresh before.

yeh but for instance I own 4 tiles because I want to create some sort of beach town. I do work a lot of quite detailed elements. if tiles goes up exponentially I'm still scrtewed even with 100k as a starter.

everything looks great. EXCEPT the taxes! 1m is way too much! should be only 100,000 a week with a max of 3 month prepay! 

i'm ok with territory taxes... but would opt for incremental tax depending on the number of owned territories.
but the whole mining unit system has the problem that the tiles with the valuable l/h will be claimed in no time. so the workflow will be useless for all players joining in the future
 

Ok, usually i am not negative but the balance of Demeter on the PTS server has some severe problems.
 
1. Territory costs of 1m per week:
this will lead to almost nobody claiming any tiles any more outside of the sanc moon unless the territory can produce some serious income. so all "player made content" will disappear after some time
 
2. Scanning results do not get deleted and show l/h for mining units
this will lead to ALL really valuable tiles being claimed within the first 24h after demeter goes live, as it is really easy to identify  the most powerful tiles for mining units if you have containers full with scanner results.
so after day 1, the fun is over and the "mega tiles" will be claimed by those players/orgs that have all the existing scans.
 
NQ, as demeter is balanced on the PTS, it would kill the game if it goes to the live server
 
- New players some days later would not have a chance to find income opportunities despite missions.
- earning quanta will be a lot harder, so people would stop spending.. this would kill industrialists workflow.
- the imbalance between experienced players/orgs and new players would get worse and even more players would demand a wipe or simply not enjoy the game

please reconsider your decisions.

Hagbard.


 

maybe we could have a new Mining Territory Unit.. if you use that, you will be able to use mining units and the high tax is due for that tile.
but if you use a standard TCU, it will remove all ore pool values from the tile permanently ( or for e.g. 3 months) but it will only cost a one time fee similar to as it is today,

this would allow content creators to get tiles for their projects and only if you ever plan to mine on a territory you would use the other new MTCU. with the fine adjusted taxes / placment charges this would stop people from massivley claiming minable tiles and still allow creative gameplay
 

I am loving the changes so far (especially the ability to play your most recent emote), but I would like to mention:
I don't think you should be taxed for the first tile you place on a planet, just like how the first tile was free pre-demeter, so that you can safely have your house on a tile without it being evicted if you leave too long. Not doing this will leave most planets empty as many people will migrate to space. IK you guys are taxing for mining but I think its a bit unfair if you don't want to - e.g. you sell ships and money can be few and far between, so could you guys maybe consider changing this? Perhaps you could add an option to your tiles where you don't get taxed, but can't mine either? I'm usually pretty stoic about changes you make, but the new brake system really struck a nerve. these things are too flat and large to fit on the outside of sleek / detailed ships. can we see some changes so that we don't have to scatter them around our constructs like plate armour? maybe xl brakes? thanks! -Shaman ?

Just one weekend of PTS and maybe a second if NQ thinks it's needed? Announced a day before the first session starts?
That feels like NQ will go with the current patch unless something _really_ major pops up and then still only has one more weekend to test.
 
I feel this may be the make or break patch for DU, and it feels like NQ is not really giving it time to perculate.
 
But it will be interesteing to see what happens. I was considering reinstalling PTS for this to give the update a fair shake but this very limited access makes that impossible.. which is too bad.

Adding an "apply points to current queue" button is hard.. It would make respec easy enough on a point reset to the pool if you can just drop talents in the queue and hit a button to apply points but.. that is very hard to program indeed.. /s