Ferran

This was my thinking on a Quality system. As others have stated earlier, iron is not iron, raw iron ore is usually full of impurities and other useless minerals in varying concentrations. Surveying an iron ore vein in the ground might yield 60% iron and the other 40% a mixture of other things, this system can then be expanded as such for example: 1. Proportion of desired mineral versus proportion of other minerals. 2. Proficiency of Miner and quality of equipment used will determine the about of energy/fuel needed to extract said mineral. 3. Proficiency of Refiner and quality of equipment used in refining process determines what % of desired mineral is transformed into useful ingots/rolls. 3a. Refiner skill and equipment quality also determine quality of end product (high quality imparts +5% HP bonus or something). 3b. Refiner skill and equipment quality determine amount of energy/fuel needed to produce end product. 4. Refined material quality determines sub-component quality and stats. 4a. Assembler Skill and equipment quality determine sub-component stats. 4b. Assembler Skill and equipment quality determine energy/fuel needed to produce sub-component. 5. Sub-component quality will determine the element's quality and stats. 5a. Builder's skill and equipment used in construction will determine elements and voxel quality. 6. End ship/vehicle/building/base stats are determined by averages and sums of all items used in construction, with all items going through this process. High Player skills will improve chances that beneficial stats are imparted on the final products in each line, in addition to reducing costs of production by producing more/better things using less energy/fuel. This system would be entirely outside of a player rating system for Quality which I've seen mentioned before. What players rate the ship's or final product's usefulness is entirely different than quality of it's parts and stats.

This brings another idea I've been batting around for a bit, Locking blueprints to the original creators, her me out on this please: A builder creates a blueprint for a particular fighter or small craft, it is really well designed and is bought by a lot of various groups for whatever reasons and becomes the mainstay of most faction's fleets. Now sure any builder in any other group can buy one of these fighters on the market, and do a detailed tear down of the craft so they can rebuild it piece by piece identical to the original so they can generate a blueprint themselves, this happens all the time in RL today, so stopping this kind of behaviour isn't practical or realistic, but there is a way to give the original designer a market advantage even when someone reverse engineers his/her design and makes copies. The original designer would be able to make that craft with boosted stats consistently, nothing major, maybe like +2% HP or +5% more power from the reactors or something small, but a constant bonus on every ship he or she builds of that type. Sure anyone can recreate the same craft part for part, and make an identical copy in every way, but they will never be able to make it with the bonuses, it would still be 100% effective as the defaults for the parts should be, but it won't be 110% effective like what the original creator can manufacture. Basically saying that any design can be reconstructed and imitated, but never as good as the original from the original manufacturer. This removes the RNG aspect of making exceptional ship parts or ships, so people with a good design can keep a market edge over any copy-cats. It won't stop people from copying good designs, but it will prevent them from ever make an exact one for one copy better than the original designer. I would like to her your thoughts on this, cheers!

I'm not entirely sure this hasn't been covered yet, but I did a search and nothing came up so I wanted to put this in here, a Material Quality system. I really enjoyed using this system in past games like Earth & Beyond where all items that can be made by players or dropped from NPCs had a quality value. I believe this would be more appropriate for the Elements side of building but the voxel side could also apply this system. Essentially, a player making an item for the first time will not make it 100% mastercrafted but instead be a rough item with reduced stats or capabilities because of the poor manufacture from a low skilled craftsman/woman. Where a player with exceptional crafting skills manufacturing that particular component would make something with much better stats/abilities and/or have a chance to build something unique with above average stats for it's type. Here is an example of how I see this working in DU: Player develops his/her skills building components for something like a "smelter" for lack of a better word at the moment. This smelter will make metal ingots or rolls with a stat and structural quality slightly better than that of the smelter itself, providing the ability for player to one day use that smelter with the player now improved skills to make the parts for a better smelter that turns out better quality items. Thus encouraging players to better their skills to build better tools or machines to craft better components for better ship or building elements. Components built by a low skilled crafter but using high quality materials might have a slight edge over a component made by a high level crafter using poor quality materials Players would be limited by both the skills they posses at the time and the quality of the tools used at that time, making a market just for professional tool crafters or manufactories crafters. This eventually flows down the line of even the big capital ships; if you have two identically designed ships, but both of different quality levels in the elements or the materials used in the construction process, the superior quality ship wins out with better stats, like power, armor HP, guns not jamming as often, etc. This would also really solidify the builders place in the game world as the time and effort to build these skills to qualities that people would buy, would make those players very attractive assets in player organizations. Player corporations would build a reputation on the quality of their products and not just the designs. And corporations would invest handsomely into having the highest quality forges, smelters, assemblers, and whatnot. Adding to the value of whichever city, station, or planet they set up shop on and attracting more businesses and settlers. Maybe even setting up training programs to help new players who wish to be builders find employment and a way to build up their own skills before striking it out to build they're own reputation. Even if there was a PvP group who bought all of their ships and equipment on the market, having a few highly skilled builders or crafters to handle repairs or make only small replacement parts would be economically sound, instead of replacing whole ships with minor damage. Ultimately, very skilled high level crafters would be prized in any organization and the keystones to building any company or empire. And when builders reach the highest limit of crafting skills, along with using the finest materials in the highest quality equipment would grant a fairly high RNG roll rate for exceptionally rare mastercrafted items that become parts of Legendary ships or stations. Just my two cents.

I can understand your sentiments on this mish, but it has been my experience that paying regular instalments actually keeps the quality of the game high and content consistent. In the past, I would not play any MMO that was free or micro-transaction based because the quality was usually equivalent to what you pay for, free = terrible. Now I have seen it mentioned that NQ is intending on implementing a PLEX system similar to EVE online, where players with extra in-game currency can purchase subscription time, and players will extra RL money will sell them in order to make up for less available play time. This I appreciate as I rarely have any amount of time to dedicate to any game, usually about 4-6 hours per month. The trick with this system is finding the balancing point for the price, if buying the PLEX units is too expensive, or making in game money is overly time consuming were players have to devote considerable time in farming credits just to play another month, then this system could be bad from the beginning. I have confidence that the balance can be found early on though.

Greetings and hello all, I've recently discovered this game via a report from one of my normal youtubers, and I have to say, WOW! I thought Star Citizen was ambitious but this is almost too much to be believable. I want this game to succeed desperately, and will contribute what I can to see that it happens. This is incorporating many aspects of other games I currently play and getting a chance to have them all in one game is staggering. A small list of a few references: -Space Engineers -Kerbal Space Program -Stellaris -Minecraft -Eve-Online The last MMORPG I played was Archage and it simply killed the MMO experience for me, I haven't been able to bring myself to start another MMO since. I'm holding high hopes on this game to help me return to that part of the gaming world. Cheers