Phaethonas

I was just reading the wiki about the combat and at the "friendly fire" paragraph I wondered how DU will handle collisions. So will there be enemy collision? I think there is but that it will be limited in the sense that you won't be able to ram and destroy a ship with your own ship. Is this correct? But more importantly what about friendly collision. If there are 10 starfighters will it be possible for them to occupy the exact same X,Y,Z coordinates, meaning that there is no friendly collision?

Sure, if you limit things the way you did, it doesn't seem to be p2w, but you ignore altogether my example, which has an entirely different context. First of all I did not compare two individual players. Also there was an assumption (at one message I explicitly declared it, I can't recall if it was here or not), that the two guilds were more or less equal in size and skill. In this context, the outcome of the battle will not be determined by the small difference in the skill between the two guilds (as it should have), but will be determined depending the pocket of the guilds. Hence p2w.

I said Buying in-game sub time = DAC!

I completely disagree, on both! There are non p2w games. Basically if the game is just subscription, it doesn't have a DAC/PLEX system and there is no cash shop but for cosmetic items, you have a non p2w game. Such games exist. Also, I want my game p2w free thank you very much.

@ Kurock, first of all, I don't think our definitions of p2w are that different. After all, in order to communicate my definition I used an example which fits your description This is exactly what I described, and I fear!! And exactly because I included the time factor, I suggested (among others) the measure to regulate the DAC market via having the seller of a DAC receiving the money in a period of 1-2 days later, maybe more. In my example (that once more seems to fit your definition of p2w) the guild that trades DACs is gaining an advantage because it is generating constantly and immediately in-game currency, whenever it needs these funds and at the amount it needs them. The other guild can't cope with that. On the other hand if the guild that is making in-game currency via the DAC market will receive that funds in 10 days, then the field is leveled as the other guild (that is not trading DACs) will have ten days to generate an equal amount of in-game currency or the necessary amount of it. In my example the 1-2 and 10 days are just examples. Statistics and data processing can help us at determining an objective number. By processing the necessary and correct data it is possible to find the correct and objective amount of delayed-time. As such if there is a regulation that DAC in-game currency is received after 10 days, that number will not be arbitrary. And as I have said before (I think at the reddit), I wouldn't trust such things easily to many other development studios but I feel that NQ has the necessary know-how, because of JC's scientific background. The DAC system is not perfect, no-one can say otherwise, after all NQ has admitted that it is not perfect. That said, it can become better! Also, what I am suggesting does not affect at all the three point you are making. If anything it adds a fourth bullet; "The DAC system is not turned into a p2w mechanic" This is the only thing I am suggesting, making the DAC system better, by shifting it out of any p2w area.

Agreed, money doesn't mean everything but it does mean something. I will also say that DU in comparison to EVE (Which is p2w), has some overall gameplay mechanics that will make the DAC system less p2w than the PLEX. To name a few of them; a) the limited resources that DU has (and EVE doesn't), b ) the fact that DU ships are not predefined but player made and designed (while EVE uses predefined ships), c) the fact that DU will need crews to operate those ships (while EVE doesn't need crews) and d) the fact that DU does not have a skill injector mechanic (at least at the moment), while EVE has. All these (and potentially others as well) will make make the DAC less p2w, but the potential will still be there and it is worrisome enough. I am a practical man, I know that the DACs are here to stay. I don't want them., I don't like them, but they are at DU and it is unlikely they will go anywhere. As such what I am suggesting is the regulation of the DAC market. OK you may not like that, I get that. But the problem remains. DACs remain an element with strong p2w potential. And no matter how many times and how hard someone says; "they will combat the illegal gold-farming", my answering will be the same; "Combat the gold farmers there is no need for collateral damage". So you don't like regulating the DAC market? Propose something else, cause as it is DU has a system that will allow p2w.

I don't know your definition of p2w but this is an old school, classical, traditional p2w situation. The organization that has the monetary ability to always, constantly recouping losses will win. And if an organization is getting funded via the DAC market, then in the long run of an entire conflict they will have the monetary advantage always, and as such win all the time. Note here the key phrase; "Always having the monetary advantage". No matter what the other guild does, no matter how many hours they play, no matter how good they are, they will always have less money than the guild that is trading DAC. You can't get more literal and old school than that. First of all, and correct me if I am wrong, but in DU we will have one character per account. So your alt argument is not valid. Secondly, and regardless of how may alts we may have (if any), the idea behind what I said is simple. When you buy a DAC from NQ you buy it outside the game, in their site etc, with the use of your account. So even if you have 3 alts, you have one account and you buy the DACs with this one account. Now, for the person who buys the DAC in-game, the sub time is added to the account and not to the alt of course. So what I am suggesting basically is, for the player to be able to have 1-2 additions of sub-time, per month to his/her account. That said, it is possible for people to make additional accounts and to use them to bypass the system. To that I argue that; a) These people will be less than the number of people who would buy multiple DACs without this regulation. For example, without regulation we will have 50 people buying multiple DACs, whereas with the regulation we will have 20 people with multiple accounts that buy multiple DACs. b ) this is why I said that there may be a need for two (or more) measures to be implemented. You misunderstood. The person who buys the DAC will get the DAC immediately and the sub time will activate immediately. The person though who sold the DAC will get his/her money after a time period. So what? First of all let's make something clear. The IRL blackmarket purchases of in game money are like a fraction of the amount of in-game currency that is being bought when this transaction is being legalized. So from the p2w perspective, legalizing the in-game currency trade is worse than having a black market. Now, will it decrease the effectiveness of the DAC system on that front? Absolutely, no doubt about that. But essentially you will have (partly) the best of both worlds. The black market will be severely limited and the p2w will be also severely limited. if you don't regulate the DAC market you may have a non existent black market but you will have a p2w mechanic. And frankly, personally, I can ignore the black market, but I can't ignore, nor will I ignore a p2w element. Frankly, I don't care how much money players who are into the DAC market will make. All I care is that they will be making money and that in an organization's context these money can be used for literally p2w. As for CCP's regulation, that does not ease my worries. EVE is p2w. EVE's example is to be avoided and not to be followed, if you want to avoid p2w that is. Which is what I want. It doesn't really matter how fast production works actually. Assuming that the time factor is the same for both guilds, the time factor doesn't play a significant role. Let me be a little more detailed on that. My example was comparing two equal (for the most part) organizations/guilds. They had similar number of players and similar skill. Not the same/equal, but similar. As such, the guild that is trading DAC will always be able to produce ships, the other guild would not, as they would be lacking the materials. The first guild would just buy the materials from the market, the second guild would have to wait to farm the materials and/or farm in-game currency in order to buy the materials at the market. The first guild would produce at 100% of their ability because they always had the materials, the second guild would have production gaps because of lack of the materials. Do I really need to say it in yet another way? And if they aren't they will have literally paid2win. Which is also the most likely scenario. People who buy in-game their sub time will be able to do so. As for gold-farmers I couldn't care less about them. I am not a gold farmer, I don't buy from gold farmers. I understand though that NQ has every reason to worry about them. Although I will support NQ in their efforts to combat gold-farmers, I will protest if by doing so they hurt me as well. So, the DAC/PLEX system may be hurtful to gold-farmers but is also hurtful for people who don't want to play a p2w game. This is why I propose a compromise, by suggesting basically; "OK NQ combat the gold-farmers, but there is no need for collateral damage". Did I say anything else? I don't care how much it takes for a DAC to get sold, I don't care how much times someone needs to farm in order to buy that DAC, I don't care how much money will someone make from 1 DAC, all I care for is if the DAC system becomes p2w. That said, I am not saying that the DAC system is p2w, I am explaining that it has potential to become p2w. Exactly because it has the potential to become p2w, it can be combated and prevented from becoming p2w. Now if you think that such a system does not have the potential at becoming p2w, then you are simply wrong. Proof of that is that, actually people at EVE have said that they have lost wars because of the PLEX system, and perhaps more importantly they have proven it. As such EVE's PLEX is the definition of p2w, primarily cause it is accompanied by the skill injector system. And no alternative scenario you may think undoes that. If there is even one single valid p2w scenario then the system is p2w even if there are 10 non p2w scenarios. Lastly, if you were right you would be able to counter-argue my above scenario. Not by proposing that another scenario could unfold (that Guild A is full of noobs for instance), but prove that it is not a valid scenario, and as such that it cannot unfold at one time or the other.

I hope that this won't be possible! You want to engage in such an endeavor? Great, but you have to face a risk. If you are allowed to run such a business (basically) without any danger what-so-ever, then the game will have serious problems. Basically you will be an untouchable god! You will be filthy rich, you will provide ships for both sides of a conflict and you will be 100% safe. A safety that will be delivered to you by the game itself, while you do nothing in that (safety) department. As such, I totally oppose what you propose. That said, there are ways for you to avoid pvp. a) Make your shipyards one of those "safe zones" that will be difficult to destroy (but also difficult to create). Not as safe as the landing safe zone (aka 100%) but better than nothing, b ) hire mercenaries to patrol and protect your assets.

This isn't the correct way to ask this. First we need to answer another question. Will DU be GPU or CPU "heavy"? Or in other words, what will it use the most, the GPU or the CPU. Depending the answer two questions arise; 1) If it is GPU heavy, will it support SLI/Crossfire? (now it is the appropriate time to ask this) 2) If it is CPU heavy, will it be developed with the new Ryzen CPUs in mind?

From what I can tell it will be totally feasible, in theory. Asteroids per se are movable objects. On the other hand, as the moon was shown to be editable then there is no reason to think that asteroids won't. These two things in mind, I see two approaches. You build your base/station at the asteroid and let the asteroid's orbit be the force behind your movable base. I suppose though that you want to have some control over the direction, speed etc. In that case all you need to do is place engines at the asteroid. A controllable and movable asteroid base is something that science fiction has explored and pioneers at astro-engineering (real scientists) have approached in theory. In practice though you need strong enough engines, that will be able to function in the vacuum of space etc etc. Although these engines don't exist in real life, DU is a science fiction MMO (allowing even stargates in future expansions), as such these engines probably will exist. So the next thing that remains to be done, is experiment in order to find the correct way and place to put these engines. But from what I can tell, totally feasible.

As this topic interests me as well, I am reading these kind of posts at the forums. So, I'd like to add my 2 cents and say that, most of the times people are approaching this in a somewhat limited fashion. Sure, for the individual player DAC is not a p2w system, for a number of reasons that have already been explained/mentioned, but what about guilds? A guild for example can replace, fix and so on, a ship with in-game currency obtained by selling DACs. Then that guild can operate efficiently that ship, cause it is a guild and has the necessary number of players. Their adversary guild though, that does not participate in the trade of DACs, will have to get in-game currency "traditionally", which would be a process. This means that the first guild has an advantage over the second guild, (the first guild being able to replace their ships before their enemy), that was paid for! Now, here is the important question, whose answer in my opinion will define if the DAC system will/can be turned into a p2w system. How long and difficult is this process? If it is long and difficult, this will determine the outcome of the conflict between the two guilds! If on the other hand it is not that much of a process, the outcome of the conflict will not be influenced by this system that much, if at all. So, let's go back to the example. Guild [A] fixes and replaces their ships via in-game currency obtained in the DAC market. If at the (relatively) same time Guild fixes and replaces their ships as well, via in-game currency obtained via in-game methods, the DAC system is not p2w. If on the other hand, Guild [A] is able to fix and replace their ships x2 faster than Guild , because they can always have readily the necessary funds, obtained via the DAC market, then there is an in-balance and literally Guild [A] won cause they paid to won, hence p2w. But all that is theory, let's add some actual facts as well. Discussing this at DU's reddit, people have reported that EVE PLEX trading can result in more than a year's worth of traditional ISK farming! I haven't played EVE to know personally, but this kind of scenario is scary, and if this is indeed true, then EVE is outright p2w. So, and taking into account that ditching DACs at this point is highly unlikely, I think that this problem could be bypassed if DACs were not being traded freely. Instead a number of restrictions at various points could be introduced. To state some examples, as I think of them; a) players could buy a maximum of -X- DACs per month from NQ, b ) players could buy a maximum of -Y- DACs per month, in-game, c) some kind of tax could be implemented at DAC trading, and if a tax is implemented at all tradings then DAC's trading could have a higher "tax", d) there could be a restriction at the number of DACs in circulation at a time,. So if only 500 DACs at a time are allowed, no more DACs can be bough from NQ's cash shop, e) the in game currency made from DACs could be received after a longish "processing time". Again if that is a feature for all trades then this time would be more in DACs' case, f)......etc, g) a combination of some of the above. As I said, these are just examples as I was thinking them. There are of course pros and cons to all of them. That said, my favorites (and which I think are better) are a) and b ) in combination with each other. If that is not enough, then tax could be added. In any case. the point is that NQ should take measures in order to always reach the outcome where no guild has an advantage over the other, just cause one of them is involved in the DAC market. The other thing that I'd like to point , but is less important (taking into consideration the fact that DACs are here to stay) is that, although external trading of in-game currency is possible, "legalizing" trading in-game currency for real life money (or rather a product bought with real life money -the DAC-), will make these kind of transactions more prevalent. In other words, those who would buy in-game currency with real money, would be less if there was no DAC and they will be more now that there is the DAC system. Yes, yes, the DAC method will also come with its perks, but as far as the p2w element goes (buying in game currency with real money), the problem is getting worse. That said, what is important (and the solution) in my opinion, is for the DACs to be seriously regulated and not to be allowed to be traded freely. That, and of course, not to combine the DAC system with a system similar to the "skill injector" system that EVE has. Cause these two combined make a game absolutely p2w.