MookMcMook

The announcement will be posted on our Facebook, Twitter and on the official website in the news category. We'll also send an email to the players that subscribed to our mailing list! The ETA is still Q1, we are working on improving our website so that people interested in supporting the project don't encounter any issue when they'll get a supporter pack.

Eventually, orgs will be able to 'control' planets and maybe even a system. All they need is enough presence/manpower/resources to push all contendors off the planet. They don't need to cover the whole planet in TUnits. And I don't see NQ stepping in at all because someone complaint that its unfair that an org owns x planet.

Eh, not entirely true in this case. Can’t kill someone and take their safe plot .  It’s actually pretty funny, just watched chronicles of riddick last night.
 
 Large organizations dominating safezones is an issue (one that I don’t think is necessarily bad).  
 
However, I do believe organizations owning large swaths of a safezone can be a GOOD thing.  Not every single player needs an entire plot of land, they simply need a place to lay their construct to sleep at night ^^.  Perhaps someone will offer a place to land for a small weekly/monthly fee.
 
A bunch of single ad hoc players owning land pretty much means there won’t be any system order or infrastructure for the area. They’ll simply implement what they need for themselves... and nothing more as they don’t have the manpower to open up a market, or anything of that nature.  And the fact of the matter is, many would remain barren 
 
I think it’s more important for large organizations to own chunks of the safezone than it is for someone like me to own such.

You don't solely have to look at "static" documents, on another note. 
 
I hear various players here have some professional background or relation to city planning and comparable areas of expertise. 

Sure boss, I do appreciate your "wider considerations here" at "this early stage" to "set the record straight".
 
I guess my example to replace the OP's theorycrafting with a game space with wide interactivity already set to be in the game, has not been an apt one. Hm disappointing I could not help with a constructive alternative suggestion.
 
But -
 
hehe, only joking !
 
@Jegleebow20 I know what you mean about sci-fi interest in "The Other". I do like the idea of some AI-sentient like things which seemed at least possible via our own creative work in-game. But the extra dev work would even for this as @Lethys says is too pregnant with high-level game altering implications.
 

Just going to interject here quickly and say that I think it's important that everything have some sort of value, obviously we're not really talking about hundreds of dollars worth of stuff necessarily, but everything having some sort of value means that there is some weight behind it. Flying a ship that I built or sunk a lot of resources into getting, with the risk of losing it, makes it that much more interesting. And that's sort of a dangerous tipping point to deal with in terms of market stability. If a resource or ship becomes effectively worthless it takes away a level of depth that was there before.

Just a small addition to all the good answers.
 
There should be no regeneration of ores, dirt should not be deleteble and plants should be able to regrow. And all this for e few reasons but mostly this: In reality nothing regenerates but most forms of plant life. The best reason to move from the start planet is to deplete it from every thing. Probably when the planet is depleted they will choose another starting planet for the new players. But to help people with a need to move into space, dont regenerate, create a need, and dont destroy waste. There are always people who are willing to recycle and regenerate....there is the word...old materials into new ones and make a whole economy of that alone. Waste management will be the most lucreative business in year two? three?. That should be the big picture. No easy gains, else they could also donate every player alot of materials every month in the ingame mail system.  Same should go for buildings, give them an owner, and a timeframe after which ownership is automatically ended. and after that you can take it or demolish it or recycle it.  That should be the idea, that will boost economy and choises people need to make.
 
Aaron

Well, for all the people that dont know where to leave their dirt. Look me up in DU and feel free to donate. I am planning to make alot of bricks so any material you need to dump is appreciated. For other stuff you need to get rid of, feel free to contact me.
 
Aaron 

Novaquark has mentioned before that they would like to encourage cities. Why not solve two problems with one system.
 
An example system
Safe zone territory markers take a large amount of resources (medium to large organization), and are not impervious to damage but very VERY hard to kill (weeks of sustained successful attacking) Once constructed, a safe zone territory marker would be surrounded by 6 frontier hex tiles. Frontier hex tiles have some protection (one day of sustained attacking) and are automatically reconstructed by the safe zone territory marker after a week of being destroyed. Frontier markers can be purchased by individual players as a large expense, or several per week by a medium organization. Once a frontier marker is surrounded by other frontier markers(or above) it becomes a suburban marker with more protection than a frontier marker. Once a suburban marker is surrounded by suburban (or above) it becomes an urban marker with nearly as much protection as the safe zone marker. Once an urban marker is surrounded by urban markers (or above) it becomes a metropolis marker with the same protection as a safe zone marker. Once a safe zone marker is fully surrounded by metropolis markers, it is truly invincible. In such a system you could add, remove, and adjust levels of zones to fit balance. It would also make incentives for city building, and giving organizations control over ordinances etc (pay your taxes) would add some depth to organizations. It also makes sense thematically (frontier more dangerous than interior). It's also (vaguely) similar to how cities actually get built.
 
 
The Imgur Link https://imgur.com/a/WfhX5 is an example of a city built using such principles.
 
Dark blue is city safe zone
Light blue is metropolis
Dark Green is urban
Light Green is suburban
Light Orange is frontier

 
Another possibility is that zones must get downgraded and the only outright destroyable zones are "Frontier" zones, so that attackers can either choose to pick at the fringes of a city (small pirates, thieves etc) or strike towards the heart of the city on longer campaigns (war, inter corporation fighting etc)
 

I want to add to the discussion of resource extraction by explaining what the effect of energy costs could be.


 
The premise is simple, mining takes energy. If players must make a comparison between the amount of energy spent on mining (in some kind of universal credit) tot he value in credits of the resources gained, and that balance doesn’t turn out well, the resource doesn’t get mined.


 
Thus, energy costs add room for several aspects of mining economics:


 
First of all, mining is no longer free. This will limit the problem of areas or planets being strip-mined; it has to be worthwile.


 
Second, it adds tot he economic balance of the game. As resources become scarce, prices will rise and mining becomes more profitable. This is easy enough for players to understand.


 
Moving along, mining itself can be made more complicated, or taking a bit more thinking than pointing some kind of harvesting beam anywhere. Different deposits could have different energy costs to recover. A deposit deeper underground could require more energy too. Add in the aforementioned option of diluting or contaminating your ores and mining becomes something more exiting altogether.


 
Dilution refers in this case to the concentration of valuable ore  per cubic  metre, contamination means the presence of undesirable or unexpected ores in otherwise valuabe deposits. Getting some nickel-contaminated iron could be workable for you if you know how to separate the ores.


 
It now becomes worthwile to specialize in mining and more apparent how to do so. You’d need the ability to mine at a lower energy cost than the competition, or be able to do so in areas where other players can’t, or be able to work with contaminated and/or diluted ores.


 
Finally, a consequence of this system is that there’d be an economic resource geography of sorts. By this I mean that virgin area’s get surface mined (costs little energy) first. Later on when players end up starved after the quick resource dump made by surface-mining players, more experienced miners can move in to make the investments necessary in profitably recovering deeper layers of ore.


 
Once this golden age of resource gathering has past, truly specialized players with exceptional abilities can gather the few valuable depositis remaining.


 

 
Adding in energy costs in general could have other consequences as well. Resources could get transported and sold where they can be converted into useful materials where the energy costs are lowest, necessitating transport.


 
Also, energy is necessary to recycle waste, be it broken up material or oxidized fuel.

Tks for information, is this what they confirm ? Because if ship not de-own many of people will dock/park their ship or maybe entire org fleet at safezone and take all space. I do hope the "de-own" system also apply for the dynamic like ship, Garage owner will have job to do :))

 
 
Umu if ship can despawn i think it will broke the game when you only need to hide enough of time and boom your ship is despawn.
 
Okay thanks for this even new information. But i hope it will not despawn. The feeling of rage when you are hunt down someone and they just despawn before you can even shot their ship.

We don't yet know the time-cost of producing things in DU, and that factor will have a significant effect on the kind of game play that DU will have.
 
At this stage, it sounds to me like things will be a lot slower in DU than in EVE. EVE's design facilitates a high level of combat. There's large-scale mining in EVE, there's automated mining (moons) and there's automated "planetary industry". The huge money faucet of PVE means that many players can afford to replace losses relatively easily, without being "forced" to mine for hours. A combat player in EVE can spend all their time fighting, whether it be PVP or PVE or a mix of the two.
 
There's also a lot more risk in DU. EVE has hundreds of NPC stations scattered throughout empire space, each of which can safely store all the possessions of an infinite number of players indefinitely. That's simply not possible in DU, because things like ships occupy physical space in the game world, whether you're using them or not.
 
Take a 3-month break from playing DU and you'll login to a character with an inventory full of blueprints, the physical assets (and the resources used to construct them) will all be gone. The only resources you'll have will be whatever was in your personal inventory when you logged-off last, and that space will be limited. In EVE you just resume play wherever you left off last, whether it was yesterday or a year ago. All your assets in all NPC stations will still be there and ready for immediate use.

I've thought these exact same things. And for all you know some people could already be planning divides like that ;^)

It won´t. WoW has always been extremely casual-friendly MMORPG which also came out at the time when everyone and their mom was into high fantasy and brought in the golden age of MMORPGs. That age is now long gone and even if DU could somehow cater to such a big audience as WoW did, it would never get so many players simply because the gaming population has moved on.
Of course, DU will be for much smaller audience, pretty much like EVE Online. That smaller audience can still number in hundreds of thousands of players, but it certainly won´t be millions.
 
Well, this could bring something else: Planets that are deliberately sparsely populated.
Factions will need major bases of operations. Places where ships are constructed, headquarters of government, army, navy, housing for citizens and so on. These places will require tons of players to take care of, so naturally more and more citizens of that organization will flock to that city.
Now let´s say there will be resource on another planet in the system that this faction needs. They will build mining outposts there and start mining the resource. Most of the planet will be unused, but the faction certainly won´t like if some small organization starts building on that planet and draining its resources. So they may destroy them simply to keep that planet for themselves to use in the future.
If we magnify this and put two or three organizations into that solar system, we can end up with all of solar system divided between them, while only three planets are actually inhabited, with others being claimed and used for various purposes...or just left unused as sort of buffer zone.
 
Of course, this can change and we may end up seeing organizations that are spread out throughout dozens of planets, with smaller settlements on each of them, with every organization controlling only a portion of each planet (although how could security even work in such organization is beyond me). But I really see DU being similar to The Expanse as the most plausible option, simply because it is far easier to have one planet as "Earth" and then have multiple colonies in the same system, while also preventing anyone with the exception of other major factions in the system to do anything (or maybe even union between those factions, where they can be in state of cold war, but when someone from the outside universe dares to do anything in their system, they band together and kick their butts).

I'm excited and I like:
- To be able to build my own spaceships and fly them around in a MMO-Universe.
- A sandbox-MMO with player-cities and player-driven-economy from an european developer.
- Subscription model, no item-shop p2w BS!

I'm excited for:
-markets crashing
-factions clashing
-construct-smashing
-and a whole lot of political head-bashing

Not sure about the last part. I read somewhere that Alioth has about 40k square kilometers of surface area. Let´s say water makes half of the surface. We then have 20k square kilometers of surface...that is area of Slovenia, pretty moderately populated country with 2 million inhabitants.
I simply don´t see a way for any organization to claim entire solar systems and then colonize (or even protect) them effectively. Maybe one planet, after years of development and conquest of other orgs out there. In the end, we may end up with situation similar to The Expanse: Few big factions per solar system, with bunch of small ones fighting for scraps in places those huge organizations don´t bother to control (or maybe working for those big orgs to be left at peace).

I spent some time as a UI developer and intend to in the near future, and one aspect of this video had me slightly wary: 

My concern is with the responsiveness of UI elements. It's been proven by studies (and anyone that has used any bad UI for an extensive amount of time will tell you) that added delays of over 100ms between interaction and response leads to user-input frustration. As displayed at 0:07 pressing b opens a menu, however it does so slowly, sacrificing usability for an entirely aesthetic animation. At the very first time you use something slow but pretty you'll think it looks good, but after the 10th time you'll notice it could be faster, and the 100th you'll be frustrated. Same goes for the options highlighting at 0:28. 
I'm not saying that everything in the game is like this, but simply giving a warning that UI development with little regard to responsiveness will give a bad user experience. So please head this and make sure you aren't intentionally adding delays of over 100ms just because it might look pretty. Making a user interface have a responsive design is critical to how users perceive it. Thanks for your time.

Not quite, very few space games (any ?) require all larger ships to be multi-crewed.
 
DU is an MMO, so players will quickly calculate the most efficient way to deliver dps. If 5 players in 1-man ships potentially deal more destruction than 5 players manning turrets on a battleship, battleships will probably be a rare sight.
 
And we've yet to see how attractive the game play will be as a turret gunner on a multi-crew ship. Flying your own fighter sounds like a much more entertaining option...

Great to point out but  I'm very curious to see if DU will have a decoy and countermeasure type system and if they do I'm sure these manned stations will be a great addition to the game play mechanics for spacecraft battles and more .

No PvE ? What about mining ? It still generates goods "for free" (no redistribution).
Saying that we will see less combat in DU because there is no pirate to kill for a bounty looks a bit anticipated: it greatly depends on ships price too (and I mean, time to extract raw materials, refine them and build the ship, not the currency price).
 
Regards,
Shadow

What are you most excited to do in DU?
What are you most excited to build?
What are you most excited to experience? 
 
Im very excited for the grand strategy aspect. I am excited for combat, and the hugely dynamic combat system thats gonna be in place. Im super excited to see thing like shipping and mining thrive, and to see others' creativity. You always get to see some really cool stuff when you get tons of people a good creative outlet. 
 

Another angle on this sub question topic: A superior product can demand a sub price OP, if DU achieves that, then it will be the commercially best pricing option for NQ irrespective of any person's personal preference. Not even coming back to server costs, player investment in virtual economy and social groups ROI of sub...

Another angle on this sub question topic: A superior product can demand a sub price OP, if DU achieves that, then it will be the commercially best pricing option for NQ irrespective of any person's personal preference. Not even coming back to server costs, player investment in virtual economy and social groups ROI of sub...

Subscription games are like buying a 60 USD game once every six months and DU's plan of free expansions once every six months or so, means you can take a six months break and - unlike WoW - you won't have to buy the Expansion you never got to play, since each Expansion is ADDING to the game, not the "end game".
 
And if you guys didn't notice, B2P is not even good enough to support EA's games which come out every year or two years. 

The recent debacle of Lootboxes, had analysts in EA's favor saying "Gamers need to spend 10 USD a month for these companies to sustain the game post-launch". That's 10 USD a month ON TOP of the 60 USD you payed for the game itself. DU has no B2P price due to that.

DU is not lying to you with "free to play" and then shoving a paywall and saying "pay or grind forever like a limeston quarry slave". and EVEN the DAC system (you buying subscrtiption for other people and selling it in-game for in-game cash) is built around the notion of subscription as a microtransaction.
 
See, in DU, you don't get in it cause it's F2P, then paying a metric fuckton to be on equal footing with others. You START at an equal footing with others and then end up - literally - playing for free, by buying you subscription for in-game cash - which is not hard at all, if you are business savvym or, you know, pay attention and talk to people.