Supermega

I'd agree the nebula as it is now should be removed. The effect and "reality factor" of this can be seen very distinctly in Space Engineers where the default skybox has a similar function but replacing it with a realistic one makes the game world look so much better and less "comic book" styled.
 
We know that, while nebulae exist, the sky will look the same anywhere in the universe potentially only "coloured" by the atmosphere of planets. Now as far as I know the lighting system in DU is still very broken in many places and NQ is applying (a lot of) workarounds and fixed to make things at least look somewhat "workable", but yeah, the existing lighting is way over the top and should be dialled down. Problem is also that light objects really do not work very well. In general light in DU is not rendered at all, something that becomes very obvious when you are underground where light gets "textured in" a few moments after you remove chunks of ore or soil.

Yeah, I hate this NMS colorful looking space .... one of the reasons (as I mentioned in my review) I liked DU is for its realistic DARK space ...
I want my space to be dark!

What risks, pray tell? If you are shooting up an unarmed mining ship it is zero risk for you. Frankly this is the usual PvP bullsh1t. As always you want to force your playstyle on others. Surely the whole point of PvP is to fight other skilled players and win those battles is it not? In which case you are likely not randomly fighting unarmed ships.
 
What bollocks - it is a game -  I actually have a job and a real life so I don't play these things to work excessively. The game would need to support that with appropriate content and it currently doesn't. To be honest I have no interest in doing something like 'building a civilization' against a bunch of barbarians - really not interested in a 24 x 7 job thanks.

DU's design is pure chaos -- of course there's a wide divergence between die-hard builders and die-hard PvPers. 
 
It's NQ's fault that they decided to make it "only run by players" so that PvP is the only possible avenue for conflict. 
 
Like good stories, all games need conflict to be interesting. It could be conflict against the environment trying to survive, against NPCs, or against each other. Conflict is what drives engaging content, not combat. 
 
DU's combat model is crappy, frankly. It's a niche within a game that's already too niche for its own good. There's a reason the only social posts about DU are builder creations.
 
When I do see someone posting PvP videos...it reminds me why I don't do more combat. Slow, boring, and if you're an unlucky gunner? An extra side of slow and boring. 
 
It's possible to have combat without meaningful conflict -- asymmetrical battles can feel greatly unfair when there's no true conflict, e.g. being ganked or one-shot. The nature of this game means most battles will be asymmetrical -- that's just how it goes when players build their own ships and not everyone has a full crew. 
 
Is it realistic? No one cares; well designed games aren't driven by realism. 
 
NQ decided to build this game without having a real idea for how to drive conflict. That's like writing a story with no antagonist. There's no simple solution, here...simply adding more opportunity for PvP won't completely work, IMO. 

Yeah.. I found myself getting very annoyed by NQ's overall attitude and general avoidance of any real ownership or willingness to actually use the many resources they have here and on Discord to their benefit.. They seem to think they know best and I think the last 3.5 years have shown that to not be the case. This last spat in the continuing "we heard you" saga to me just means they do not get it and will probably never will until they find themselves with a dead game wondering where it all went wrong.  
 
So, it's better to not bother anymore and move on as why should I continue to care when they don't..

So I finally make the choice to leave the game behind me for now. I really do not see how the current company will be able to make this work and I feel their attitude and overall outlook on what they are doing will help any chance of a revival of the viability of the project. And no amount of pushing the buttons to try and see some movement will have any effect I believe. Maybe I'm wrong but I do not think so.. I see no reason to spend more time supporting a company when I do not see much of anything to make me believe they can and will support the game.
 
So there, all you haters can rejoice as I'm out.. been a good few years but unless things change drastically, this game will not make it.
 
And no, you can't have my stuff..
 

About a year ago I fell in love with DU's tech and the promise. Launched my organization (DIA) with the beta. I have grown it to a relevant proportion. I then left the game due to what's basically a lack of content. This devblog series does not rekindle my hopes for the game. Here is what I think about the game's current state and my open letter to NQ and response to the devblogs.
 
Is DU a Tech Demo, a Beta, or a Full Launch?
 
Dear NQ,
 
A fundamental thing about why this game is losing so much momentum is you calling a tech demo a beta, then expecting players to actually play it like a fully launched game.
 
From a game mechanics perspective, Dual Universe is a tech demo. The only sustainably enjoyable and interesting gameplay has been construct building. Most playstyles this game should have been featuring are out of balance, boring, or nonexistent. Player support is a nightmare. The game regularly experiences bugs and exploits most of which affect the universe and enjoyment of all players, not just the ones who interact with the bugs.
 
From the your official perspective, DU is a beta, because you wanted to be able to charge the players for the game, yet make drastic changes to the game without angering the playerbase.
 
But from the player perspective, DU is a fully launched game, because you are letting players accumulate wealth, experiences, organizational structures; and carry it over to the actual launch. Let me explain why this matters so much.
 
Why Would People Play DU?
 
Your failure to recognize the fact that this game isn't a beta for the player showcases a fundamental lack of appreciation on why people play single shard sandbox games. People do not and will not play DU for the immediate experiences of mining, building, industry, ship flying, or PvP.  Your main problem isn't the immediate "gameplay loops" that the players are put into. These are not the primarily outstanding features of DU gameplay. There are much better games out there for each. I could play Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous if I was super into spaceship flying. I could play Satisfactory for a way better version of DU's experience of industry. Literally any game has better PvP than DU. 
 
[I exclude construct building from the above list of activities as it is pretty high level compared to games of similar nature, such as Minecraft. And guess what; it's your most time-invested and early-developed feature.]
 
We are early adopters of this game, because we want to play a game which we don't just log in and do our favorite activities, but we also want a game in which doing these activities matter in the context of the greater sandbox universe. The ore I collect could fuel a war. The PvP I do could save or collapse an organization. The ship or LUA I designed can be adopted by thousands of players, ultimately be used to tremendous ends. The factories I build could be the backbone of my space empire. We are here waiting for this emergent content to emerge. We are want to get ahead, be relevant, be famous, be helpful in our different ways in this universe. We want to be a part of something greater. That's what a single shard sandbox is about. The fact that whatever you are doing matters in a greater scheme of things, is why we are playing this game. This is also why game changes, exploits, lack of support and lack of content matters so much.
 
The Frustrations
 
We cared about playing in the context of a greater, living universe. So we sucked up the broken mechanics and the lack of content, and started seriously investing our time in DU. This is because if we didn't, we'd have fallen behind. In other words, we had no choice but to treat this game as a full launch in our time investment decision, because otherwise we'd be punished with respect to why we are playing the game. You basically forced yourself into a position which you constantly frustrate players, because you gave them a tech demo but pushed them to play as if it was a full game. Let me elaborate on concrete examples.
 
The vast majority of specific frustration cases in DU can be categorized into three.
 
Firstly, there are game design changes that invalidate people's hours. The industry patch, screen updates, and every other perhaps much-needed change that would invalidate hundreds of hours of people's time. Now since the game is mechanically a tech demo, you want to be able to make drastic changes. But since people play it as a fully launched game, they commit their full selves and do become frustrated when major changes that are very much necessary invalidate hundreds of hours of their time.
 
Secondly, there are bugs, exploits, and lack of support. People derived truckloads of money and benefits off them (e.g. the blueprint market bug, the initial T4-T5 bot ore purchases, old broken industry, and lots more). People who didn't get support fell behind (even in DIA we lost a warp beacon, and we didn't have DRM ownership of our factories due to the lack of support). These exploits and broken gameplay elements aren't things that you can shrug off when you fix them, because their repercussions in the DU universe (aka the illegitimate wealth people acquired, etc.) carry over even into the actual launch. And you didn't (in most cases couldn't) address that in most cases. You didn't remove the profits earned by the exploiters of the blueprint bot order fiasco, for example. When players earn billions off bugs and exploits, that makes the rest of us who has to do legitimate work to earn that income invalidated. That's game-breaking, because again, most of our enjoyment of DU derives from our activities in the context of the greater DU universe than just the activities themselves. Again, you launched a tech demo in which you didn't have the manpower to do cleanups (e.g. deleting the income) after exploits, and players playing it as a full game pay the price.
 
Thirdly, there is the lack of content because the game is underdeveloped. The path from a tech demo to boredom is pretty self explanatory with this category of frustration.
 
The truth is many players wouldn't have invested that much time and effort in trying to do things that matter in this sandbox, if the game reset once it's properly launched at an acceptable quality. And no, it obviously isn't enough to argue that "players knew that they were going into a beta" because you committed to not wiping the game, including designs. Because, again, people mainly play DU to matter and to be relevant in a universe, and you left them a choice of either falling behind of that goal, or playing a semi-working tech demo.
 
Emergent Content
 
The second big picture issue I see with your decisions is about your views and predictions of how emergent content emerges. Emergent content does not emerge unless the game creates the right conditions for it to emerge. The lack of conflict and content driving mechanics mostly made it impossible for it emerge in DU.
 
[I am saying "mostly", because the one playstyle which is an exception to this is construct building. Great construct creations (although only in looks, not as much in functionality) are the only emergent content this game provides so far. And guess what, the content around this playstyle (ships, stations, expos) are the only thing NQ Twitter can mention daily.]
 
For even a beta, DU should have emerged as many stories in war, piracy, theft, great empires, great trade deals, and so on. These are the kinds of things Eve players should be familiar with. The fact of the matter is that for any other single player experience, there is a better game. But for the emergent sandbox-wide content, DU could have been the best game. Meanwhile, we got JC's "puzzles" which were badly envisioned attempts to generate that content. They were one-time events generating one-time content. They were pretty exclusive in terms of the ratio of DU players engaging with it. They were probably a waste of your devtime. An elaborate "puzzle" is an example of how not to introduce emergent content to your sandbox. True sandbox content is typically unintended, unplanned. 
 
Here are some immediate choke points on the game design which makes it non-conducive to emergent content.
 
Industry: All processes in DU leading up to construct building are fully vertically-integrateable solo (if not with a small organization). If you have 10 people, no reason to not to everything in-house. The game should have been designed from very early on in a way which deep specializations are needed to prevent self-sufficiency. Instead, your "gameplay loop" and "DU shouldn't feel like work" worries pushes you to introduce even more self-sufficiency (aka mining units). In a true sandbox people who don't want to mine would have other opportunities of value generation to buy the ore. Moreover, this is a bad case of "listening to players". Most players have no idea what makes an overall high quality sandbox. A builder will just want free materials to build. That doesn't mean that's a good implementation for a sandbox MMO.
 
Trade: JC's allergy to API, ESI and such removes huge depth from trading for the sake of trading.
 
Organization-Building: There is no value organizations can provide to members which they couldn't have gotten elsewhere. There is no service and value-generator members couldn't have gotten elsewhere unless they join. And inversely, there is no reason why members should pay "taxes" or invest in their organizations. Thus, there is no point in creating a deeply structured organization. Anything can be done better as 1 or 2 dedicated players, without all the hassle of people management.
 
Consensual PvP:  There is no structure in which players can find PvP. Solo PvP isn't even viable (at least to most who don't use remote controllers) when 2 players can man an L core that can one-shot your ship. It is a huge deal-breaker for a sandbox game if one can't hop on their ship and find daily PvP at their small time window. Frankly I don't see how you will be able to circumvent this problem in the next year or years. The devblog certainly does not provide an answer here.
 
Organizational PvP: Can be summed up as "nothing to fight over". Even if you introduce territory warfare, huge mining and resource distributions revamps will ne required to make territories worth fighting over.
 
Non-Consensual and Asymmetric PvP: Piracy is near-impossible because avoiding potential pirates is easy. There is no mechanical depth to generate a meaningful risk/reward space in which some players die to pirates, but not in a game-disabling fashion. Similarly, there are no asymmetric (big org vs. small org) opportunities for the same lack of depth. 
 
No PvE Content:  You don't seem to have money for any.
 
No Exploration Content: You don't seem to have interest for much. One can do construct and planet exploration, but it gets old pretty fast without any reward. Moreover, exploration gameplay was a very low hanging fruit to generate right at the beta launch. Just sprinkle some exclusive rewards in a manner which someone roaming regularly would find these rewards at least once half an hour (and this is how you botched shipwrecks).
 
The Trajectory of the Game and DU as an Ecosystem
 
Reading the devblog does not excite me about the future of the game and on whether you learned meaningful lessons. Emergent content will not emerge unless you begin thinking about Dual Universe as an ecosystem. In a single shard sandbox, playstyles and activities should be interconnected in an ecosystem of relations. Yes, you do seem to realize that there is a lack of content, conflict driving mechanics, and more "sand in the sandbox". You don't however, seem to appreciate the role this interconnectedness plays in generating content. 
 
For example, you want to implement space mining, but you don't think about the demand-side. Ore itself is only valuable if there is demand for it. The lack of PvP losses, the availability of ore in safe-zone players, in the market, and in people's long term stashes won't make ore worth fighting over. So you need new things with demand. And even when you meet this challenge, you have to solve the n+1 problem. For players, the optimized way of engaging with big-reward mechanics is creating consortiums and monopolies. Good conflict drivers involve inherent game designs against these. There is nothing for example, that yields advantages to smaller fleets of ships over larger fleets in DU PvP. This example illustrates how sandbox conflict drivers are supposed to be grounded on mindful and deep PvP mechanics, as well as meaningful balance of risk/reward to drive the conflict and the fun. It is unfortunately predictable that you will put some ore (or new items) to PvP space, and wait for people to sustainably fight over them, which won't happen. The nature of the reward and the nature of the PvP to obtain the reward are as much inherent to content emergence as the placement of the reward.
 
I have a pessimist prediction, because any earlier game design decisions involving ore distribution to planets and hexes, territory scanning, bot orders, industry flows, etc; indicate a similar lack in conceiving Dual Universe as a single interconnected ecosystem. Earlier decisions could have easily generated a more meaningful distribution of value to territories (the most valuable hex is cleared in a day, which is also connected to mining mechanics), things to fight over (if we would have construct PvP on asteroids, there is no reason why we didn't have construct PvP on some planets), exploration (for example, it's not costly to add 10 valuable NPC ships with sub-par AI at a given time to orbits of planets), and so on. Similarly, some future plans show the same lack of appreciation to DU as an ecosystem; such as mining units which will predictably devalue mining by underestimating how much effort players (and botters/RMT'ers) would spend to create big passive income setups.
 
Overall this all just feels like different teams at NQ are given different aspects of the game and they are all implementing their individual designs. There is no wider orchestration from upper level game designers and producers who truly can conceive DU as an ecosystem, and who can appreciate the interconnectedness different systems in the game should exhibit. JC looks like a person who has a great big picture vision, who wants his metaverse, but who does not have the necessary specific visions and approaches to sandbox/ecosystemic game design and development to get there.
 
DU's Project Management and Finances
 
As a final remark, it seems that most of this "lack of content" and the launch decisions could be due to high level decision-making for financial or technological reasons. Perhaps you heavily needed the subscription revenue. Or you needed players to truly commit to the game so you can test the tech. Even if so, the plan seems to have failed. The people who pitched the game to investors should have conducted better expectation management and better financial/business planning. 
 
I am speculating JC was put on the bench for related reasons. If so, then that's perhaps a good call depending on who replaces him. If this is the most you could deliver given the money you have, I don't see how using the same money better would have delivered a timely product. The game might have just needed more money and several years more of development to reach a workable design and launch track. If so, then the responsibility is with those who planned DU and NQ as a business and project model.
 
That said, I hope the investors keep up with it, because I think the initial promise of the game (provided good future game design) is pretty sound. It might need two years more development and a bigger team though.
 
I'll keep following how the game progresses and I hope it succeeds. I don't find the money I spent on it a waste as I already played hundreds of hours.
 
o7
 
EDIT: Corrected some grammar and sentencing.

Everyone here has paid to be in this game one way or another and they have the right to offer feedback, post suggestions and join in on ANY conversation they like.  It is simply not your place to tell them otherwise.

The rest of them will be go mine X and deliver it to me.  The mission system won't keep people from having to mine.  It will be a lot of big guys trying to convince the small guys that mining for them at a loss is in the way to go.

Bounties might be nice when ava comes, until the average player realizes that he will spend more in ship parts, ammo, fuel and time than the bounty is worth. 

Until they fix the grind of mining and the costs of basic industry, I think this game has about had it.

Ok.. as a new player i finally understand why o.23 killed the player base..
 
"Specialize and use the markets" *boot to the head with schematics*
 
I came in after schematics so I didnt get what all the fuss was about.
 
Ok.. I have been specializing and have some t4/t5 refining and smelting and basic parts lines up.. I mine ore, refine, produce low level parts from t3 and t4 ores and materials... good mid level products...time to start using the market
 
What? The lag is so bad its basically unusable? It would take riddiculous time just to go around and put my stuff for sale
 
What, all the high level stuff is built by god like tychoons with full production lines that dont buy anything but ore?
 
So I'm left thinking.. 

I FINALLY GET IT!!
 
I was defending this game and arguing that people must have been cry babies overreacting, cause I was making progress in specializing... I just hadn't got to the point where I was ready to sell yet....as soon as I tried to "take my wares to market" I realized instead of creating an economy of specialists.. all they did was creat an economy of elite industry tycoons and ore mining peasents
 
At least before 0.23 I could have said...oh well.. if the markets and economy are unusable I'll just make my own stuff and have fun

For a long while i was thinking that yes, NQ can bring this back.
 
For me, 0.24 was a turning point where that last bit of hope faded. It shows that no, they can't fix the game's fundamental problems.
 
The tech is an absolute mess -- even if the game's design was fleshed-out, the tech is a nightmare:
It's riddled with bugs that never get fixed (or get fixed then regress in a future version) Performance is shoddy at best and hasn't been proven to scale even with modest crowds. A million players? Please, they can't handle 10% of that without massive lag and pending ops.  Devs have proven over the last 7 months that they can't make changes -- since closed beta started, what's changed? Schematics to nerf industry, jetpack tweaks, purchased 3rd-party texture packs? Barely making a dent in the laundry list of long-standing bugs? Even if they did drop the mission system in 0.24, this simply isn't enough to justify all that dev time.  They've already been developing for 6 years...and are still far away from being feature-complete. 6-7 years is a long time to stay in alpha.  
This is hardly "early stage" of beta, it's longer than most games spend in development...to not even have a feature-complete beta. With how many bugs they've collected in the last 6 years? Even if they can get to "beta" state, it'll be another 6-7 months of bug fixes and polish before it is actually release-ready. 

It all adds up to one thing to me: they physically can't develop the game in a pace that makes any sort of commercial sense. 
 
Dev never gets faster as the project gets older and bigger...so it isn't like pace is going to magically improve. 
 
Then...you take a step back and look at factors other than raw technical development:
the fact that their leadership has zero experience in game dev  the fact that they make short-sighted design choices (probably because of the above point) the fact that they never had a complete design to begin with and are still "winging it" with core pillars of the game the high staff turnover and low player population the poor/no communication with players -- building zero goodwill with beta testers -- and even having this reputation among their own employees (that they don't listen) nothing about DU today adds up to "this game is going to turn around"
 
Yes, the premise still has potential, but not the game.
 
There's simply too much broken to me and no sign that NQ is capable of fixing it or humble enough to recognize their faults and make changes accordingly. 

The saddest part is what did the thief even gain? A few elements? a bit of voxel substance? Absolutely nothing of real value to the thief and the owner of the ship lost something of real value that cannot perhaps be replaced.

Would anyone who thinks this theft is fair play like to also clarify what the actual point of taking it could be other than pissing someone off?

No one wants to play a game where you don't know where it's safe to leave your stuff, and where it's not.
 
That's not risk.  It's just bad design.
 
A player left their ship somewhere that they were told it would be completely safe, and another player exploited a bug, in a new system designed to stop people from maneuvering their ships into space, and moved the ship, without the owner's permission, which is not supposed to be possible, at all.
 
The thief knew that there is not supposed to be any way to move another players ship outside the safe zone without their permission.  
 
Should be a simple decision for NQ
 

Besides it being really not great to force a survey on your player base through the game, please learn how NPS works..
 

 
 
Someone scoring 1-6 is a detractor, 7 or 8 are neutral and 9 or 10 are promotors .. 
 
So if you want to get your NPS score correctly, do not put NEUTRAL under the 5-6 as :
You will likely trigger a lot of those scores and thus trigger detractors You will imply a 7 or 8 is good which it really is not  
 
BTW. .if anyone wants to know.. NPS (Net Promotor Score) is what is measured here. the score will be:
 
((number of promotors-number of detractors)/total number of scores)*100
 
So neutrals are not good as they will actually lower your score 
 
If you want to do NPS.. At least do it correctly..
But then, NQ may not even be aware of this and just use the format without understanding how this works.. Would not really surprise me..
 

Communication is the Achilles heel of the developer Novaquark. They seem to really not have a grasp of the concept or at least have the wrong idea about what it entails.
 
Technically , as they are charging money for access to the game, they run a released game IMO.
 
As it stands the company, by their lead and owner JC, remain adamant they can and will bring the game to a full release quality state within the next 9 months. With the snail pace speed of development they are showing, that is frankly hard to believe but every time the question was asked that is what was said. In those 9 months they have said they will bring in several major additions to the game including, but not limited to:
 
Mission system Revamp of PVP Territory Warfare A completely new solar system A vertex editor for voxels Asteroid mining Player markets Pets Avatar customizing  
On top of that for a release quality game it should stand to reason performance should increase dramatically and there is massive mountain of bugs and technical debt to be resolved in that time as well . Oh and obviously optimization and polish.
 
And so all of that in the next 9 months, pretty much that means they claim to be able to do more in that time than they did in the last 3 years while they run a live service game.

If all PVP organizations want PvP, why not just kill each other?
 
traders and miners and industrialists will not go those routes, and since all gameplay and economy and industry is bjorged since 0.23 please do not expect anyone to accidentally end up in PvP space.
 
In short, All the people who want PvP and call for it, start with yourself and go into PvP zone to fight with eachother and dont expect any gains from PvP coming year. Unless the whole economy, mining and industry is changed including the schematics and player driven markets, asteroid mining.

If they make it so I have to mine less so I can build more and ALSO wipe the server so we all start on an even playing field, I "might" consider trying this game again.  
 
And that's no small thing for me, I have about 12 cores up across two planets full of buildings and landing pads, ships and runways.  But as it is now, no way I'm going to spend 90% of my game time mining anymore in an economy that is ridden with players who took advantage of so many exploits.  My org is a business and we got screwed because we weren't online for any of the shenanigans that screwed the economy up and gave out almost free schematics to competitors. We're at a severe disadvantage through no fault of our own I'm not mining for a year just to catch up to them (if its even possible now). 

Alpha backers have literally nothing to lose, as the money has already been spent. Either the game pulls out of this nose dive and they come back no worse for wear, or it doesn't and they don't. Your blind faith is meaningless.

But these arent even general texture or graphics upgrades. Madis still looks the same, so does Ion, so does lacobus, so does space. 
 
They shouldve done what the promised 6 months ago and totally revamped the planets. Instead we got some new tree and rock models. Woo. 

We do not know that's why it was pulled.. It could be that NQ found it might be better to have a more complete mission system implemented as first iteration.. either way.. the point is the same as far as the issue behind all this.. C o m m u n i c a t i o n 

First off, I like Naerais and I think she is a great CM. anything I may feel or say about NQ really does not reflect on her.  She is a pro and as a person a good communicator.
 
The problem I have is not with her but wit h the company that employs her and frankly, does not use her abilities to their full potential. Just in case no one noticed, when she "sat in" as lead CM during the absence of the actual lead CM things were different and that came to an abrupt end when the lead CM returned to work.  NQ has very artificial limitations as to what CM can/should do (it's more a choice of style than a needed one I believe) and while the people doing the work (like Naerais) have a lot of potential and capabilities, the next level up is pretty much a brick wall.
 
What we saw yesterday fits _exactly_ with the pattern NQ has shown sine pre-alpha started. a few weeks prior to releasing a major patch they ramp up their presence which as I see it is an attempt to hype up the audience for the release. They well stay visible and active for maybe 2-3 2weeks, popping in to Discord to "get feedback on the patch" after the patch arrives and then slide back into silence only to start posting devblogs about two months before the next patch and getting more visible themselves a few week prior again.
 
0.24 is expected to arrive in the next two weeks, and I can see 24 March as a potential date, and so I expect to see CM popping in more frequently for some chit chat and maybe answering a few "innocent" questions along the way. That would be entirely "in character" for the NQ CM team and outside of them showing up, there has really never been an actual engagement with the community here outside of what Naunet did (and tried to maintain) while she was with NQ. That was IMO unscripted and her own initiative which earned her the respect of the community. Not saying Naerais does not have that respect as she does (for different reasons) but I hope you get what I mean. Naunet IMO was more open and free in her interaction, Naerais does seem to be more inclined to follow the corporate mantra in when she appears (but is great and tries to take full advantage when she does that)
 
But clearly, it is well possible also that Naerais decided to "go rogue" and just spend a bit more time with the community.
 

For me most of magic died out, when I realised, that (at least -- currently) game not about cool space empires/interconnected society, politics and wars, but about small groups (or even solo) of boring nerds, sitting on their factories and containers, bragging how much useless shit they producing, owning or building. Amazing creations.

Starmade deserved better.

someone shat in his cornflakes this morning.

TLDR at the bottom.

YOU may think that pvp is the GOLDEN ticket but there are far more things that they could do (and IMO, should do)  first before introducing PVP considering this engine is really not up to the task.

removal of ALL BOTS:  ore purchasers and schematics.
Replace schematics with org research. research the schematics and horde or sell them.
PROPER Tech tree with proper tiers that need to be studied AND USED to unlock. (Cyberpunk's xp system is great).
Automated defensive structures, domes, forcefields, fortifications ala every single shooting since the 80.
Energy generation and consumption and recycling, reclaiming.
WATER as a resource needed for industry
importing water to arid planets like Madis/moons.
OIL wells for energy and plastics production.
realistic resource distribution and extraction rates,
Proper resources and farming
Farming wood and other biological materials from trees and animals, not coal.
Or grow them in reactors/vats.
Tier Zero materials for land buildings like concrete, masonry etc.
Proper terrain forming tools with undo like in core building.
Requiring energy/time cool downs for local res nodes to function forcing players who repeatedly die back to earlier res nodes, further away.
 
 
NOW we have valuable resources that need to be gathered and pooled, we have real reason for conflict and PVP.
Once this is in place, remove the safe zones and allow air / air-ground PVP.

Before any of this is in place, PVP is just grandstanding/ganking/willie waving and roleplaying. It has zero strategic value as currently implemented.


TL;DR: PVP isn't the golden ticket, it is the icing on the cake, IMO

Sorry but that is only your own opinion not from us all. just because you have never learned to act without harasment its not our fault.