Magz

now REALLY nervous :S

now REALLY nervous :S

Why don't we forget tags and flags for now, and go BOOM together, heh ?
 
It puts hair on your chest.

So are specs really that much of a hard limit ? It would appear that...
 

ATV is the Alpha Team Vanguard set of members, chosen because of community involvement, and a few other sets of parameters. 
So naturally, the ATV test was when the ATV members were able to test the game. 

They are testing All Terrain Vehicles on the servers. If it goes well we'll be testing ships  soon. 

As Anasasi said, we already got to play DU last week.
 
And we're the ones (at least some of us) that are more involved in community things like discord, 3rd party stuff (maps, spreadsheets, programming), player organized mass tests and so on

The more topics you necro, the better?

DU is no single player offline game. And they shouldn't put effort in creating such a thing. My 2 cents

YES, you explicitly SAID that:
 
So please NO, don't split the players. EVERYONE should play and build on the SAME server, in nearly the SAME area with protective measures taken by NQ to protect monuments (which they already did take: the arkzone!)

This is a game, no program to work with.
 
And DU isn't, shouldn't and hopefully will NEVER EVER be instanced. They want to avoid that crap and make something new - not go back to that dark age of the old times

Some things have already been said and I just want to add some points:
 
- In a game with predefined ships/armor/equipment and weak balancing ("THIS IS THE UBER-EQUIPMENT FOR LVL 1325445 ROFLSTOMP-PALAS") it is P2W (just buy the best ship/whatever from the market)
- In a game which only relies on small groups of players (raids, small gangs, instances with some people) it is P2W, because people who pump money into the game to get better items will most certainly always stomp people who don't do that (assuming same skill level, same tactics, same behaviour, and assuming pvp ofc)
 
But
 
In a game with thousands and thousands of players and the possibility to create your own ships with your own layout/weapon placement/armor thickness/shield strenght/LUA scripts, things look much different.
Here this "P2W mechanic" dilutes to merely an advantage.
 
Will someone most certainly always kill you in DU because he buys huge amounts of DACs?
Most certainly not because of
- a crew required for operating "better" or larger ships
- a probability chance in PVP
 
So for a single guy this boils down to ONLY starfighters with one seat. He may have an advantage there because he can just buy the "best" fighter (so far) on the market and can come for you time after time. But maybe you're good with scripting or building, that is YOUR advantage. Build a more efficient ship than he can possibly buy - and kill him.
People always assume that the market in DU will be exactly like EVEs market. But I don't think so. The mechanic will be most likely the same (buying, selling, orders, blabla). People will sell elements (turrets, engines,...) because those are used by everyone. But whole ships? Who said that players will definitely sell ships? If they don't sell ships (or only junk ships), a DAC user could only buy more elements than you - but he would have to build the ship for himself or pay someone else to do so. And then again there will be nations and huge orgs - would they really sell their top notch ships to people?
Plus markets are under RDMS - if you piss off the owner because you're a pirate or a douchebag who just kills people for fun with his RL money, guess what will happen. They just lock you out and you can't use the market anymore.
 
I think the fear of people is that huge orgs with some very wealthy members just drop large amounts of DAC on the market to fund a campaign against some other players, like IWI did in EVE. People forget that there are old accounts and some years ago, PLEX were sold for under 250million. So rich (ingame) players could've easily bought large amounts of PLEX and sell them nowadays for 1,2billion. Take EVE's jita market, there are about 1200 (serious) plex buy orders and even IF there was a spike today there in sells, that doesn't neccessarily mean some rich (in RL) guy is using some P2W mechanic to get rich (ingame) fast. It could be Jimmy o'Tool from your org, a VERY old character, just selling his stacks of 500 PLEX. So in an old game there is old money, because naturally a item like PLEX or DAC will be valuable. And STABLE in it's price, most likely ever so slowly rising.
In contrary to EVE, you can only hoard DACs in a few places (ark zones) and not everywhere. As NQ said, these zones are rare so maybe there are only 2 which will be very very far from each other. So your only choice as an org to make money out of DAC will be those zones. Depending on the location of big markets and their owners, the sourrounding territories and other factors in a mmo - that org has to buy those ships (if even possible as said earlier) in the first place and then either use them instantly or try to get away with them.
And to come back to IWI (because that's a prime example people always use as argument why Plex are P2W): he ran a site where players could buy tokens with isk. You can argue all you want about shadyness, RMT, unfairness.....and many more things here but IWI earned the ISK (ingame money!)....somehow. It wasn't RL money. He bought huge amounts of plex when they were cheap and sold them for the MBC war - plex spiked hard (read here: https://crossingzebras.com/the-great-plex-crash-of-yc-118/).
So such a mechanic isn't clearly P2W at all, it's no easy task to answer it and my wall of death certainly didn't answered everything. Nor can people who think it's p2w find arguments for it.

I don't think they will keep the servers up 24/7 with alpha, possibly only the whole weekend so they have time for bugfixing during the week. I guess that we will see extended uptimes once beta hits

This is one project im really looking forward to.
Keep up the good work @Cybrex

oh you could implement a system with just an id or something if you don't have the (In-game!) means to detect his real affiliation/name yet. So you got a "name" nonetheless but no clue who he is. You can then block/report/whatever anyhow.
 
They'll go for an easy system for release imho, but such a detection system, if well balanced, would be a great addition

What you suggest here will not work because they have already enough people as it is to stress test their server architecture, and now that they have a concrete number of the maximum amount of people that could load their servers, throwing it up into the ether again would be a bad move.
 
However, what would be interesting to me personally, is a single-player version of the game for messing around with (a client+server bundle), however considering their server tech is (extremely likely) proprietary, they probably don't want to distribute it freely. Would be pretty cool, not happening, unfortunately..

Well, that's exactly why people bought alpha....Your idea would diminish the perks we got for pledging early and trusting nq. 

I'd say the best thing you can do right now is join a bunch of organization discords and start getting to know people. That social currency will be the best resource you have once the game starts.
 
That and read around on the forums. There are lots of hidden gems of threads out there that you may find interesting

DISCORD: https://discord.gg/CYNYpT9
PORTAL LINK: https://community.dualthegame.com/organization/tortuga
 
Tortuga City is a building project of immense proportions looking for builders and residents to join in this great undertaking. Tortuga aim’s to be a community created, neutral player hub for all players in Dual Universe. As Alpha/Beta are now underway, Tortuga’s evolution as a community and city will progress up through launch. We will be testing, making blueprints, and finding out what we really need to keep a city going strong.
 
At it’s heart, Tortuga is a city project for Dual Universe. Organization affiliations and agendas will play no part in the politics or development of this community hub.
Please read this statement about Project Tortuga from Cybrex, the Project Director for Tortuga: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-esur-s4sCeCwH3kDGlV90iz4JkHljSaTOLHaKz_FCk/edit?usp=sharing
 
WHY FOR YOU DU DIS??? 
 
Plenty of organizations have cities planned. Some of these are quite ambitious in scale and already quite advanced in planning. So why are we doing this?
 
Well, it turns out that a bunch of us from different organizations have a real world background; or work in; urban design, town planning, architecture, construction and geospatial (mapping) systems. 
 
And through the course of talking "shop", we realised that real towns and cities grow organically (while guided with zoning), and the idea of a single organization enforcing a certain architectural style or design thinking approach was a bit odd.
 
We wanted to make a place which, while based on some well thought out design rules and urban zoning, would have a feel of a free city, sprung up around trade, rather than a designed urban space (using a grid for instance) one sees with administrative cities such as Brasilia, Brasil, or Canberra, Australia. 
 
LOCATION?
 
In the best interest of developing a city long term, we want to place Tortuga in a safe zone. However, based on how little we know, we are not going to decide the location yet. We could build within the safe zone on the first starting planet, we could build on a floating asteroid in space, settle another planet in the starting solar system, or wait until build it in a completely different system.
 
This is what we plan to find during Alpha/Beta of Dual Universe. Finding out the best possible location that meets Tortuga’s needs.
 
HOW DO WE GET THERE?
 
For now, we have broken the development of Tortuga down into three basic phases. These stages of development will follow Dual Universe from the beginning of the Pre Alpha up until the final release.
 
Phase One: Theory discussion and brainstorming of possible starting points for building. Understanding how the build system works etc.
 
Phase Two: Deals with the actual planning and implementation of theories from Phase One. We will be piecing together Tortuga bit by bit as we finalize it’s layout. This will be a continuous process through Alpha/Beta until release.
 
Phase Three: Begins on the day Dual Universe officially launches. This is when we will be putting the city together in a live setting.
 
HOW TO GET INVOLVED?
 
Join our Discord! We have created a server for all interested in parties for Tortuga. This will also act as the main communication application for Tortuga even after release. Simply join the server, and state that you would like to get involved in the development of the project. If you just want to live in Tortuga, then that’s fine too, join anyway.
 
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/CYNYpT9
PORTAL LINK: https://community.dualthegame.com/organization/tortuga
 

I found a great place to start with lua is roblox studio and if you really wanted to go in depth there is a book on coding in lua 4th edition i think, guarunteed to keep you occupied
 
And as im sure your starting to notice already, DU is a very lively community and it is great to get involved in all the discord channels and forums.
There is some great youtube stuff on all the politics and game features by a few organisations and also some very good reading material in the forums by people like @Lethys, @yamamushi, @Cybrex, @Lord_Void etc. etc
 
I probably shouldnt have started listing people but meh. sorry to the hundreds of others i also should have listed

@TheBlender
Whilst it seems like a good idea and dont get me wrong it would be great for those exact sorts of scenarios that you mentioned up top. I have to agree with the majority here, it would be a lot more practical for people to just ask NQ for some sort of refund or a credit that carries on to the next month or when ever you wanted to use said 'credit'.
Servers still cost a monthly/annual subscription fee and someone has to pay for that.
Maybe one day when/if NQ make their own Server farm, then costs may decrease or they may be able to implement a similar system to what your suggesting.
Until then i just dont see it being practical

I found a great place to start with lua is roblox studio and if you really wanted to go in depth there is a book on coding in lua 4th edition i think, guarunteed to keep you occupied
 
And as im sure your starting to notice already, DU is a very lively community and it is great to get involved in all the discord channels and forums.
There is some great youtube stuff on all the politics and game features by a few organisations and also some very good reading material in the forums by people like @Lethys, @yamamushi, @Cybrex, @Lord_Void etc. etc
 
I probably shouldnt have started listing people but meh. sorry to the hundreds of others i also should have listed