Novidian

Some YouTube top ten upcoming mmo list. It was the only sci-fi one, and that’s the only genre I have an interest in. I’m sick of fantasy games. It’s a shame there aren’t any decent science fiction mmos that aren’t sandbox building type games. I think the last one released that I played and half enjoyed was Tabula Rasa, and we all know how that went… pity.

I’ve been trying for some time to avoid posting much on this topic, and my stance has always been that of no wipe at all. NQ has earned many a sub since they became available, operating off of the inference that there would be no wipes barring a catastrophic necessity. Many backers, myself included, will still run at least an alt sub or two come launch. Even with DACs, backers will be subscribers too. I think if they pin their hopes solely on new players, at the expense of backers/beta players, they’ll ultimately lose more than they stand to gain. However, part of me sympathizes with NQ’s plight of trying to release the best possible game at launch to make a positive impression on new players, somehow without causing a mass exodus of players already heavily invested in the game. At this point, I feel no wipes works against that goal, but so does a full wipe (which I am vehemently against and would cancel/unsub alts if it happened - my sons also play this game and share the sentiment). I feel that the players ARE the content and maintaining as much carry over from beta as possible only benefits new players, so long as it isn’t at the expense of the game’s quality at launch. Concepts like “fairness” are questionable to me, though. You ultimately can’t create it long term, because you cannot enforce it. You can only try and give every player the same opportunity, which everyone has. New players will find their time rewarded the same way beta players found theirs. I’m also unsure about what a “balanced economy” actually consists of and looks like in NQs eyes. Some with always have more than others - how does a wipe actually lead to that goal. That said, here is my devils advocate approach to a solution, which reflects the most compromise/sacrifice I am personally willing to make without leaving and not looking back: Talents: Wipe talents. Pitchforks down, please. Afterwards, pre-launch players will start with ALL QoL like talents at max. Container range, athletics, personal core units, tool efficiency. Anything that doesn’t represent an advantage in combat and industry or the like, that can cut down the time getting back on their feet and working towards their specialty. Then, add a pool of XP based on how many months they had an active account during beta. Like 200k/month. This should give vets something to work with, without enabling them the option of doing everything imaginable right out of the gate. Finally, add additional tiers to industry talents, 5-10 total, to further incentivize specialization. Increase talent costs for those tiers, and make those massive margins something to unlock with considerable dedication. Schematics: Delete them and just rip the band aid off. No compensation sadly, because many were acquired in ill gotten fashion. Replace them with MUCH lower cost “licenses” in game, that allow a finite amount of uses before expiring. You could even have different length variants at different costs. This would not be an item inserted into an industry unit, but rather a timed unlock for characters. It would essentially grant any industry unit owned by a player the ability to produce x product for y time. No plunking them into individual units, which saves time. Anything T1 can be nanocrafted for free. This should make the cost entry to industry more manageable for new players, while creating a more sustainable quanta sink long term. Dynamic constructs: Each player may keep their compactified constructs and one designated “flagship” dynamic construct. This is like flagging a tile as HQ. Just r-click it in menu in the same manner. This vessel will then be magic BPd sans any container content, and will be in your inventory at launch. All other dynamics you own would become core BPs, DRM intact. Ideally, there would be a mechanic in place where any elements deployed with the construct would have a special tag, making it where they couldn’t be removed - only deleted. That way you can edit it, without the “I’m gonna hoard 100 exotics” loophole. Any easier work around would be to simply make it unable to be edited, beyond lua. The flagship designation could remain in game, actually. It would enable one dynamic you own to become a magic BP, in the event it becomes abandoned anywhere in game. Everything else goes to the vultures. Territory and static construct wipes: Planet resets and the resulting visual improvements make this justified IMO. This may need to occur in a few offline “phases” to do properly. First of all, all land ownership is wiped before terrestrial constructs. Any HQ tiles wiped as a result of the reset will refund 500k quanta and one TU per HQ tile lost. TUs would probably need weight substantially reduced to accommodate this, or simply make a special no weight version for this purpose. (NQ could up the ante and throw in a container M and four L mining units, but whatevs) This offsets the surface cost of resettlement and gives you the basics required to do so. Then, all containers will have their contents deleted. Finally, Any regular static with either containers, flight elements, and/or industry becomes a core BP. Your factories can be rebuilt when you have the mats, ensuring you won’t have to relink and set up anything. Any regular static without industry, flight, or container elements becomes a magic BP. Space statics would follow the same rule set. Quantas… I’m all for some kind of starting cap, like 250m-1b. This is the more difficult one to pin down. It comes down to that whole fairness thing that I think is a silly notion. However, there’s no denying some people acquired wealthy unfairly, even if it doesn’t necessarily affect anyone else directly. Thats all I can think of at the moment. 🤷‍♂️

If NQ really has no idea what they have planned for a wipe, soft or otherwise, that’s a problem. Being this close to launch, they should at least have some notion of what they intend to do. Rather than wait for player feedback, they should give the community some inkling as to what they are thinking the right course of action is, and then get feedback on that. Without any real specifics, we can’t really provide them with much more than blind panic. Either way, more clarity is needed. The longer they wait, the more it feels like our feedback isn’t really important. The fact that every con they listed only amounted to “We’ll maybe piss a few people off.” is troubling and short sighted.

I think this would be a system better suited for introducing UNIQUE elements to the game. What you’re proposing is essentially NPC gameplay to lure in player interaction, which I’m not against. Schematics should be wiped out altogether, IMO. Personally, I would simply tie what we consider schematics into the talent tree. Specifically the one involving industry unit use. Whatever tier industry unit you have unlocked, that’s the tier of good you can produce. Boom. Simple. Bump up the XP costs to learn them a bit, then add another 5-10 tiers for efficiency to really move players towards specializing instead of making everything.

Unless the effectiveness of the elements they made heavier was increased, I find this to be monumentally stupid and unnecessary. Which, if the flight characteristics are altered as much as you suggest, they weren’t. If the goal is to have certain mass thresholds for their relative top speeds, why change element mass and not the figures for how much mass equals how much speed? Seems like given the large variety of builds using a different numbers of elements, that would be harder to figure into things than a more broad strokes approach. Now you have ships that would never even see PvP bogged down by changes to elements that never needed to happen. I’m no dev/math whiz, it just seems like the wrong way to tweak things…

This has what to do with industry units and schematics, exactly?

I don’t see how removing them requires a wipe at all. Remove them and make industry work as it did before - need a wipe for that? No. They had all this time to correct it, if they feel schematics were a mistake and wanted the players who quit over them back. That part just sounds like a weak excuse.

That’s actually not far from the $7 average that the current subs are. It’s about two months difference. Interesting how the current sub price lines up with the pledge dollar to DAC ratio, now.

How about no. If it was free, then it would have cost nothing, like countless betas before it. I’ve participated in tons of betas dating back to Anarchy Online, and they were actually free. Literally free. Hell, I dropped $250 on the secret world and that got me beta access + a lifetime sub (and theirs was much more expensive monthly). No one paid $150-250 solely for 3-9 months of sub. That’s 2+ years of sub time, based on the 12 month cost of $7/mo. If that’s true, then early backers got fleeced by your logic. If you add the time there have even BEEN subs, plus whatever game time they gave as a bonus, then the numbers make sense. They don’t have to pay a sub until release precisely because they paid more than anyone on a subscription plan has by a large margin (even factoring in DAC). It’s no different than paying a large sub plan to get a greater discount - the more you pay up front, the better the value. We apparently have very differing views on free.

I think an easy fix is just to drop mission packages for interplanetary missions, entirely. Have Aphelia request large quantities of mid tier elements and ore be delivered to distant markets, prioritizing materials that are lowest or out of stock at each destination. Payout/market listing will be based on cost to produce with no skills and a set amount per km travelled, with a higher per km payout the more you haul. Since risk is solely on the player, no collateral for these missions would be required. This eliminates warp restrictions, instead making it a cost consideration. A “no warp” option could exist for a pay rate bonus, since you’re being careful with the cargo and slow boating. It also creates and fulfills a REAL demand for both warp cores and elements, opposed to making packages out of thin air. This way, people running alts will have to either produce large amounts of different elements or buy them at the market, which creates industry demand either way. And since the missions are based on need, what is requested will always be changing - it will be harder to set up a single industry to haul and game the system.

Was about to say. Paying $150 got what… 3, maybe 6 months of game time post launch? I don’t even remember. That is at best a $50 value. Even including the post wipe beta period when subs were introduced, it’s more like people paid up front - not for free. Two years sub pre paid is like $168. Hell, originally, a year was like $65. So yeah, no one is playing for free. That’s ridiculous.

I honestly had no idea any such thing existed for DU. I look forward to learning more! I’ll be in touch soon. Thanks for reaching out to me.

Ah, but Aphelia has watched your kind fail over and over. Trial after trial, age after age; that persistent hubris has been your undoing each time. Far more times than you know, pitiable and tragic Icarus’, one and all… Despite knowing the pitfalls and short comings of your species’ tribal nature, even with the knowledge of your predecessor’s mistakes, you failed to manifest even the slightest semblance of the utopia you sought to create. This time will be different - the Silicon Mother is certain of that. Praise be this new and final age, oh empty vessel. Dundundun…

At least for Anarchy Online, Ragnar wrote a whole novel “Prophet Without Honor”. He had a long term plan with the story for that game, at least through Shadowlands. It’s a shame he never finished them beyond the first, they really had potential. This type of game really needs supplementary info, because there are no npcs or story missions in game. If they won’t bother, at least give us the tools lol

I had a similar premise in my head cannon. The difference was that humanity entrusted AI to see us through the cosmos until we arrived at a habitable planet. Afterwards, we were supposed to be reconstituted and slowly introduced to the new seat of human civilization they had set up for us. Unfortunately, humanity’s old grudges and prejudices reared their ugly heads again and our benefactors wiped the slate clean after it was determined that if we remembered our former lives, we would surely destroy ourselves vying for supremacy. After numerous small batch social experiments (like GLaDoS in portal lol) it was determined that our memories must be erased and all “unsafe” history deleted for our protection. What a mind fudge it would be to learn that we were actually the XXXth attempt at rebuilding humanity, but aphelia time and time again wipes us out because we became unworthy and self destructive. That would give a lore reason for us not having talents at the start of the game, along with any hand holding after being rezzed the first time. It would also explain any mysterious ruins we’ve found, without actually having to introduce aliens. Why things we encounter seem advanced beyond our present capabilities, yet strangely intuitive and familiar. Over time, we would uncover the truth about what aphelia had done to us and be forced to align with her or rebel/go off world to assert our autonomy.

If it’s going to be alien, then make it alien. Make it a bloody obelisk or one of those zohar things from xenogears/saga, or something otherwise foreign. Not something that already exists with a green skin on it or something.

All true, but if it’s going to be given to us as one-off content, it’s pretty pointless. Can you imagine a new player trying to put it all together and old players are trying to remember that one event some time ago that sort of eluded to something, but there’s no real record, so just take our word for it? lol We may as well make it up as we go along, I doubt we’ll ever be corrected.

Seriously, from a potential lore perspective, it makes no sense to call them that at this point in the game. I mean, realizing that other life (and a technologically advanced civilization at that!) is not just a game changer for humanity, but for a game. I think it would be better suited as a post-launch expansion/content reveal. There's no lore in this game really, and unlocking the mysteries of an alien civilization is something that deserves to be expanded upon and even supported with in game events. I just think it's too soon to toss in there for the sake of doing it. Also, are they just one core? Why not anomalies, instead? Or wormholes. Pick your your technobabble poison on that one. That way, you could give bonuses to any static core placed within proximity (various boosts to industry placed on cores there would be a start that could further tie industry/PvP). This could encourage more expansive building and inter-org cooperation in those zones, not one core to rule them all in a certain space. Aaaand you could hold off on the whole extraterrestrial thing to make it more meaningful. tl;dr ALIEN cores? lol wut? Slow yer roll.

I’m kind of skeptical of that if talents are wiped too. I mean, you can’t just go buy things on the open market, they have to be made. Talents have to be trained, BPs have to be bought, TUs and MUs made just to mine more than skittles - all of which require ore that you’ll get at a fraction of the pace you could now/pre-demeter. Having quanta helps, but getting the infrastructure up and running could take a lot more time than two days, even with limitless funds. Honestly, NQ should do a wipe on PTS and see for themselves what a cluster-f of a crawl it’ll be. The game is a lot different now than it was after the last wipe, and I think if they saw what a world starting from zero was like for the average player, they would axe the idea.

I’m still waiting on certain info to drop before I decide, but I’ll definitely be reviewing the game closer to launch.

Not to mention that the new player experience has been ass since forever. Frankly, the only real reason recent players have stuck around this long is because the existing community was there to pick up the slack - teaching newbies, giving them ships, missions, materials, and direction that the tutorial failed to sufficiently provide. I think if they wipe, they lose all of that and more. Probably worse, as disgruntled players and content creators will be warning new players away instead of welcoming them. And I say that as someone who loves a good launch day - it would be a huge mistake.

I’m already not playing because of the possibility of a wipe looming and my son is in the same boat. If a wipe happens, I don’t think either of us come back. If not, I’ll gladly pay our subs and keep on going - otherwise it’s a no for me. I see literally no benefit of doing a server reset. You wanna reset HQ status so people have to manually add it in the game a few weeks before launch, be my guest. Purge more inactives through the game systems you designed, not some ham fisted way that will cause many of the people actually playing to pack up and leave.

My main concern is how big of a wipe will it be. Are we talking talents and/or quanta, not just materials? I imagine NQ will do what they do and try and walk a middle ground, ultimately pleasing no one. I don’t see anything remotely gained by it, though. The construct abandonment system is in place for a reason and the clutter should sort itself out in time post-launch. Also, new players benefit from having player driven content/help. While I enjoy the mystique of launch day as much as anyone, I think that ship sailed when they started offering subs. I wouldn’t be opposed to HQ status being reset and making it to where players have to manually set it after launch, though.

This is how I view, more or less. Anyone who thinks a hard reset will result in large scale equity or fairness is ignoring the nature of mmos. There will always be people who put in more effort and organize to greater success than others, especially if they have more experience with the game. In a matter of weeks the same gaps that exist now will manifest themselves again. More opportunities don’t magically arise by knocking everyone back into the Stone Age.

Lots of valid concerns in the topic and I’ll add one more. We’re racing to launch with this as the last major update, and we still don’t have an eta on the energy management systems that could potentially change the shape of PvP entirely. Unless it’s been abandoned, which I hope isn’t the case - I think it may be the key to balancing it as a whole.