Wyndle

Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.
Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't comin back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
You can't take the sky from me.
There's no place, I can be,
Since I've found Serenity.
And you can't take the sky from me.
 

 
G'luck no matter what you choose.

Oh I didn't  think you were disagreeing with me (it's ok if you do by the way!) ...sorry I was talking generally about what I had been trying to get out of the debate...the discussion with you has been a very welcome change.
 
I hope the game survives..I had hoped to go into launch not feeling so bitter about the game but if they manage to make a success of it then it will have been worth it.

I am pleased about the reset. Frankly, I have never approved of games that kept everything from the Beta. Betas are for discovering faults and improving a game for end release. Not for people to think, "Oh I can get a headstart."
  A proper game launch should be for everyone. For new people to discover a new game, For people who played in the alphas and betas to think "Well, I did this but wouldn't it be fun to do this, this time around?" At the end of the day, it a game. Like all games it will eventually close and all you be left with are the memories and perhaps good friendships. These you can take with you, forever more..
  So many people are raging about it, saying it has spoilt their game play that it saddens me. If you haven't the imagination to start over again and think "I get there again." and enjoy that journey, then you shouldn't be playing Beta. end of.

as far as i know an alpha is where they add all the features and a beta is the testing, balancing and polishing phase?  They went into 'beta' not feature complete and are about to launch without the features tested and polished?  not sure what to say..
 
Anyway... i get blasted for sharing my views on this.. so going to end it here.. thank you for being civil... its more than i get from the DU discord.  
 
You know....its sounds trivial but all I really wanted from this 'debate' was an acceptance that yes its about the cash....instead I had people talking to me like this was always the plan... maybe im a bit OCD... like many others ive put a lot of time into DU and to be degraded into nothing (i get a lot of 'if you don't like it leave') is a hard pill to swallow.

I understand how it works... As i have an alpha account i dont have an active sub... so for me to continue as i have been for the last 2+ years I have to give them 2 x 13 months of sub.  I can't do that... so i'll sub my main, and that character will get the rare pack and i'll have to accept the downgrade.. as for my alt, he used the beta key from my alpha pack... so is locked behind a pay wall unless i want to pay 13 months in advance.  
 
My point is that im very happy to pay for 2 monthly subs.... but thats not good enough for NQ.. they want me to pre-pay for 13 months to get as much back as i already had as possible.

Oh i agree with you.  They have been cutting costs and trying to make the game financially viable for ages.. now they are forced to release despite the game not being ready.  The things i have a problem with is hidding that behind a 'reward' and the loads of people in this community defending it.
 
loads of people played and helped build this game for 2+ years... they will have all of their stuff deleted and then handed back based on how much they pay.... i know you get it....i understand it's a business.... but when people defend and pretend its not a thing i find it triggering.  NQ dont want long term (more than 13 months) subs.... they want short term money... that should worry people..

The game is not feature complete therefore its not ready.  PVP is a shadow of what it was meant to be.  Most game mechanics are implemented at a very basic level.  Its not even beta at this moment.  
 
As for putting your money where your mouth is, that's not what this is about for me. for me it is a total disagreement with the practise of taking away everyones TP's (which was NEVER talked about before or even hinted at and please don't use the 'its a beta' argument...DU had bypassed the traditional alpha and beta rules) and then giving it back based on cash spent.  NOWHERE in the game was that ever mentioned as a possibility.  
 
Im not talking about what people are comfortable with or happy to accept.... im talking about the principle.  You agree above that its a financially motivated move..  thats all i have been saying... If some are happy with it great!!!  but it means I lose one of my alts and NQ lose a sub, no big deal to them.... i can't spare the cash to sub for 26 months between 2 accounts, so im glad you can, but for the rest of us we get screwed.  simple as that.

Since we now have a confirmation of a wipe at launch, how about  a contest  for new UEF ships. Give us some parameters, and let us submit our creations.

Well, people said that.  Some of the parts of the event were visible in Alpha but the problem was not solvable and, I believe, more pieces were added after alpha.  As I understand it NQ expected the event to take years to solve while it actually took about 6 months and this caught them by surprise.
 
But it wasn't particularly well hidden.  I'm fairly certain that at least one of the objects was right next to one of the districts or a commonly used market on Alioth.  There were also public forum posts about it and it was discussed on the discord.  Accepted that some people don't engage with these things but this was meant to be a group puzzle solved by a group.  And if you aren't engaging with the wider DU community it's true that you would miss out on these things.
 
 
There really wasn't ever very much of it at all.  Just one node to mine.  I agree that making it have an actual, valuable use now would be bad because what there is of it is either in tiny quantities or held by people who didn't earn it.  But there's no real reason why it couldn't, for example, be a voxel with non-useful properties (make it very heavy with low HP, resists and CSS perhaps).  Then it can be used for decorative purposes only.  That doesn't really break anything and would, IMO, be a well-deserved finger-up to anyone who RMT'ed it (IDK whether or not anyone did).
 
As a game which is meant to be a persistent-world MMO where your actions are persistent and matter I think keeping things in the game to make trophies is actually a good thing.  A good use of a city, for example, would be a place where people could display the trophies they earned while playing the game.
 

You can add game time codes on top of whatever package. So if you really wanted that exotic pack, you could apply 12 month GTC and a 1 month GTC.

Look the wipe would be the perfect time to change things up and introduce new mechanics. 
 
First Id delete all but 1 of the outer planets and move the safe zones back to their original promised borders. 
 
Second I'd bring in player markets and remove all the markets outside of the alioth safe zone. 
 
Third I'd finally create and introduce energy systems to be the great balance that everything needs. 
 
Also anyone who thought there wouldnt be a wipe post beta was kidding themselves. If youd been here since the alphas and knew all the exploits and bugs, you'd know a wipe was the only option. 

Trust me, I feel your pain and disappointment.
 
I feel the lack of a player driven economy, of which player driven markets are a huge piece, is my 2nd biggest disappointment in the evolution of DU.  1st being the lack of delivery of "Galaxy" with the implications its was well beyond 2 or 3 solar systems - I wanted in pre-alpha to work towards a Stargate Universe class exploration and gate seeding ship.  That dream died a rather slow death, with feature after feature required to do it slowly being removed and replaced with more and more dependance on central markets.  That dream died its last death with the introduction of schematics.

Remove the markets completely and make good on the promise on player markets with a proper Lua API!

While NQ are resetting Alioth, they might consider spacing out the districts/markets a little bit, rather than having them in a nonsensical circle which just increases congestion and lag. I mean, why would you have 10 of them in close proximity? Time to resolve the situation!

Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.
Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't comin back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
You can't take the sky from me.
There's no place, I can be,
Since I've found Serenity.
And you can't take the sky from me.
 

 
G'luck no matter what you choose.

Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.
Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't comin back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
You can't take the sky from me.
There's no place, I can be,
Since I've found Serenity.
And you can't take the sky from me.
 

 
G'luck no matter what you choose.

Just because building something was fun, doesn't mean rebuilding all over again is also fun. 

Not only will I be around but I want to have boots on the ground as soon as possible after the wipe.  The instant that even a partial wipe became possible the odds of a full wipe for release started growing exponentially, then multiplied by multiple economy breaking exploits.
 
The fewer beaters (SAO reference FTW?) there are in release, the higher the proportion of greenhorns overshooting the safe space boundary and all of the other pitfalls that can give beaters a leg up.  NQ can take away points and materials but they can't take away my personal experience within the game. 
 
Were you having fun with the majority of those 3000+ hours?  If not, perhaps you shouldn't play after the wipe.  I may not agree with all of the design choices but DU still has far more potential fun available to me than most other games.  I'm not the best at anything per se, but I don't have to be a 1%'er to have a blast.

Not only will I be around but I want to have boots on the ground as soon as possible after the wipe.  The instant that even a partial wipe became possible the odds of a full wipe for release started growing exponentially, then multiplied by multiple economy breaking exploits.
 
The fewer beaters (SAO reference FTW?) there are in release, the higher the proportion of greenhorns overshooting the safe space boundary and all of the other pitfalls that can give beaters a leg up.  NQ can take away points and materials but they can't take away my personal experience within the game. 
 
Were you having fun with the majority of those 3000+ hours?  If not, perhaps you shouldn't play after the wipe.  I may not agree with all of the design choices but DU still has far more potential fun available to me than most other games.  I'm not the best at anything per se, but I don't have to be a 1%'er to have a blast.

I have heard Markee say on stream a few times that his relationship with NQ is as an overseas distributor, meaning that both parties agree that Markee's company is not meant to "work with customers in Europe" even if some EU citizens may elect to use his site over the official one.

Cross section should not be removed. It does it's job perfectly. It encourages you to engineer ships correctly, and to fly them correctly, with one mechanic. Removing it would remove a lot of depth from both building and piloting. It is possible to make good looking ships that are optimized for cross section, they just need to be original designs suitable for the game mechanics, and not an .obj file you grabbed off Sketchfab.
 
I think the voxel changes will help with giving some more leeway for design, but it needs to be accompanied by increases to exterior element HP, and perhaps a more gradual decrease to top speed from mass.

If it were strictly issues of game development I doubt there would be anywhere near this much turmoil.  The corporate leadership over the dev team has as much to do with the problems as undeliverable promises of any or all of dev team. 
 
When JC left I considered leaving right then and there.  I took a break instead, keeping an eye on updates and logging in every so often.  I have been less than impressed with the changes since (being nice), but the Demeter changes that I have interacted with so far are unbearable IMO.  If the stated reasons for the map wipe hold true then I expect a future patch to nerf (and eventually remove) terraforming on some or all planets.  It wouldn't be the end of the game per se, but it would pull the rug out from under more than a few creative players.
 
We already had the "player run economy" gutted and all but removed early on.  Now terrestrial mining has been gutted completely and heaped onto the already broken market bots.  What few features that have been added only add to the sense of performing chores rather than playing in a sandbox.  I have enough chores, I play games to get away from chores.  F*** busy work and shoehorned gating mechanics.  I don't have much to say about PvP, but I've seen others say plenty.  That just leaves constructs and space travel, for which there are better games.  
 
I don't think I'll bail just yet, but I suspect I won't be given any significant reasons to play DU anytime soon.
 
Mega:  I hear ya, and good luck out there.

There was enough of the vision in place to transition to beta.  In fact, I complimented JC and NQ at the time for correctly using alpha and beta status in-line with other software industries (outside of games) instead of a greedy "Beta" money grab like so many games.  It needs to be moved back to alpha, possibly pre-alpha state based on what has been removed and the stated reasons for it being removed.  From my perspective, the changes made since at least 0.23 indicate that the initial design is still out of technical reach and the whole project would be better off with a new ground up approach based on lessons learned rather than counterproductive reactionary "fixes" as we hobble along.  I'm not saying to scrap everything, but I don't think the current NQ team and leadership can deliver anything even remotely close to the original vision without it becoming a hyper-realistic mirror of the broken things in the real world (i.e. not fun for anyone).

and there my friend, I am sorry to tell you, you are wrong.
 
It is all about psychology.
 
There is a huge difference between
 
- if you define the base yield at 100% and punish the player when he is not calibrating
 
versus 
 
- if you calibrate nicely, you are rewarded and get more than 100%.
 
see the difference ? Its called motivation.
All game loops should be designed to be motivating.
If they are not, the game designer failed.
 
 

If it were strictly issues of game development I doubt there would be anywhere near this much turmoil.  The corporate leadership over the dev team has as much to do with the problems as undeliverable promises of any or all of dev team. 
 
When JC left I considered leaving right then and there.  I took a break instead, keeping an eye on updates and logging in every so often.  I have been less than impressed with the changes since (being nice), but the Demeter changes that I have interacted with so far are unbearable IMO.  If the stated reasons for the map wipe hold true then I expect a future patch to nerf (and eventually remove) terraforming on some or all planets.  It wouldn't be the end of the game per se, but it would pull the rug out from under more than a few creative players.
 
We already had the "player run economy" gutted and all but removed early on.  Now terrestrial mining has been gutted completely and heaped onto the already broken market bots.  What few features that have been added only add to the sense of performing chores rather than playing in a sandbox.  I have enough chores, I play games to get away from chores.  F*** busy work and shoehorned gating mechanics.  I don't have much to say about PvP, but I've seen others say plenty.  That just leaves constructs and space travel, for which there are better games.  
 
I don't think I'll bail just yet, but I suspect I won't be given any significant reasons to play DU anytime soon.
 
Mega:  I hear ya, and good luck out there.