CptLoRes

The "red arrow" is in typical NQ fashion a poor mans version of territory war. Quick and easy to implement, but riddled with balancing issues. Just the kind of solution NQ loves.. A: You are going to have to use resources finding and scanning the asteroids, mine the resources within a time limit and then transport ore while protecting yourself from attacks. B: Just sit back and wait for the notification on where you should attack.

Yeah.. New players are like fabled unicorns in this game. So everybody is treating them like royalty. And despite all the game problems, community is the one thing that seems to be good with quality over quantity winning the day.

And while at it, make it possible to link elevator teleports on different cores (with some distance limit).

What player missions? You mean those couple of hundred K quanta missions with 30mill in collateral? Right now as we speak there are 6 player missions in total, yesterday it was half that. I don't do alts. but at the moment I kinda wish I did. The current Aphelia missions are low on reward when you look at the risks, time and costs required to complete them. And most player missions are a joke. Not to mention hauling cargo without warp is possibly even more mind numbingly boring then mining is. To put it simply, this game feels more like doing work then playing a game.

Exactly. Being born and raised in one of the more socialistic countries in Europe with a higher Per capita income then most. Some of the stuff that happens in for example US, to us seems bat shit crazy and Orwellian. Or to put it frankly, their notion of freedom seem to be skin-deep compared to the legal rights and protections we take for granted here. And as joaocordeiro also pointed out, there is no such thing as pure socialism or capitalism. Only varying degrees of both, with some countries showing signs of unhealthy large percentage in one direction or the other. But data shows that countries with strong economics and a functional public health care system tend to lean towards the socialist side.

More and bigger with variation is a recurring theme for sure. Luckily when it comes to gates you have some possibilities to make bigger openings. DU gates are usually wider then they are tall, so you can stack two of them to make a bigger opening together with a logic relay to make them act as one gate. But the prices for gates are uhmm.. prohibitive.

There is an old joke that whenever two or more socialists meet, you get capitalism.

I think NQ/JC knew what they wanted to build, but they had no idea how to..

Remember that the DU universe and planets are supposed to be something like 1/10(?) scale, so speeds etc. must also be scaled in accordance.

That's the big question. The main pitch JC always used when presenting DU, was 'unlimited' open world possibilities with communities building large cities and asteroid sized space stations. And PvP was never meant to be more important then any other part of the game, something that together with the 'unlimited' building and scripting set this game apart for all the others. But the game engine has never been able to demonstrate that it can handle anything even close to this. And every move NQ has made lately, seem to move DU away from the initial premise. Granted, this can be seen as a good thing since NQ is now finally starting to make hard and realistic choices needed to progress the game. But at the same time the DU subscription model was already a hard sell even with the initial game promised, so the question is if people will buy (literally) into this new more limited direction.

And I suspect, a big part of why they needed 6 months to implement a bare-bone mission system. It is not easy to develop efficiently when the base is a house of cards.

That is something NQ should have had the solution for, before they even wrote a single line of game code..

To compare mining a mill takes less time, and zero risk except for potentially crashing your transporter. And more importantly. Neither sitting in a cockpit looking at stars for an hour, or being down in the dirt developing repetitive strain injury in your mouse hand is something that makes people want to play the game. And the PvP missions seem to be high risk, and not that big reward type of deals. And again, very time consuming so there is not only the quanta that is lost.

To my understanding the crash and damage model in DU is very simplistic. When you hit something, a number is calculated using the entire construct speed and mass. And then based on this number a certain size of 'damage sphere' is projected from the hit point, and everything that falls within this area is assigned damage. Meaning flying into a brick wall or just touching something with your wingtip or something like that, will be the considered the same since there aren't any kind of structural integrity (crumple zones) or mass distribution calculations done during a crash.

I would not, but if it was forced by circumstances then I would start putting out feelers for another job.. The problems at NQ are many, fundamental and deeply rooted. And would require a CEO that is pragmatic and extremely hands-on to solve. And there is no indication that there is someone like that in charge.

I get that. But a fundamental principle when developing software, is that you always try to minimize changes (outside fixing bugs) for features that are actively in use, unless you have strong indications that many users want changes/improvements. And hardly anyone asked for this, since one of the main usages for glass in DU is cockpit windows. So the obvious solution would be to introduce a second type of glass elements or even better make the transparency effect strength variable using the alpha channel in the #color parameter to avoid frustrating existing users and give them options.

But once you have completed that loop a couple of times, it becomes what is essentially just another boring and repetitive task like mining.

And a recurring theme in DU..

They already have one, but it's not working as any sane person would expect..

Another trick if you are in a pinch and away from larger containers, is to stack stuff onto the 'emergency ship' and compact it (Alt+B). And if you don't already have a compacted ship in your inventory ready for unforeseen events, look into that too.

Yeah.. I still don't understand how that frost/dirt effect got into the game in the first place. It is almost like they don't know how the game is played at all.

Am I missing something, or did the job forum just tank? Was pretty active some days ago, but now I am seeing 3 jobs in total with reward levels that looks more like slave labor to me.

I suspect this has little to do with community or balancing game loops, and more to do with managing server cost. Simply put there are strong indicators that this game does not scale, and the vision JC had of flying over planets watching sprawling civilizations and community driven cities is fading rapidly. And it pretty much all boils down to the persistence factor in this game. Something we have always said would be problematic for many reasons, but all the discussions never resulted in anything but total silence from NQ.

Variable thrust is kinda hard for rockets, so vectoring is the preferred method as far as I know. But the point was that in DU it would not be a unreasonable to have variable trust on rockets, so that people might consider using rockets at all.

Maybe it is Drunken Boxing style? I mean I at least, would have to turn to the bottle living like those avatars do..