Pleione

Concur completely. What annoys is the often transparent excuse of "Improving gaming experience". ex: Manufacturing "batches" - which was clearly an attempt to reduce server overhead (e.g. cost) on their part. It was actually a decent idea - no reason to wake up a server every few seconds to process a single screw - make batches of them every 10 minutes or so instead. That worked fine for things like screws, but borked a lot of higher level parts both by requiring factory changes (intermediate container sizes) and by making some batches take hours or days to complete. Had they simply hand turned each process to something like batch sizes that took nor more than 30 minutes, they would have gained the bulk of their objective without discord for what might have taken some intern a few hours to implement (presuming its table driven) and not a 1000 "if then else" statements.

Not sure an energy system is going to be a cure-all some feel it will be. It will just be another throttle in the game. Pre 0.23 I had a large core space factory that I fed ore into and out popped Warp Cells and other items of interest. People seem to feel that's somehow wrong, that an individual that player 12+ hours a days shouldn't be able to do that. Ok. Everyone is allowed an opinion. However if there was an energy system the impact would be one of two things: I'd use up more space building more generators, or things would just slow down as power was routed to refiners, then metalwork units, then medium assemblers, then large assemblers. So like schematics, it would slow me my progress down, but would not stop me. Note that it was REALLY rare for the entire plant to be active at once - typically something became a throttle point, be it ore, or advanced leds, or some other intermediate product. The fun for me was finding those bottlenecks and reducing them. For those PVPers out there: I was one of those folks that supplied parts to the marketplace, so slow me down, and to some degree, you will just be slowing down the availability of parts.

So... what about this option: Early backers get DACs they can use in place of subscriptions for game time... but that is ALL. DACs cannot be bought or sold in game. Doing so would fulfill their backer obligation, backers could run one character or ten using their DACs - their choice, but it wouldn't have any in game economic impact (beyond secondary ones like a player multi-boxing).

Or perhaps they will just burn one a month over the next 13 years... or burn 3 a month on a primary account and two alts for the next 4.5 years. Why is them helping to seriously fund the initial development of the game somehow evil? Just because you didn't do it???

Its been years, but if I recall those top levels were for people backing at over $2500 each.

Bottom line: NQ is not a charity, its goal is to make money. It does that via subscriptions and the creation of a game worthy of people paying that subscription. Being able to craft a DAC, although perhaps personally (for you) desirable, defeats the core income goal. In my opinion: DACs should be limited to their role of being a reward. e.g. An extension of the subscription model. So founders, that paid significant funds up front, get rewarded at release with the ability to play for a number of months directly associated with the quantity of funds they paid. That is what was published during initial fundraising and is not only fair, its probably legally required. I could see DACs (likely singular) being given out to players who uncover major bugs and whom go through the effort of writing up detailed enough bug reports that enable the developers to find and squash that bug. Of course, that would be controversial (why did Sam get a DAC and I didn't...) and would likely require some bug report scoring mechanism which was included in a reply. Something like: "You were the first person to report this bug so earned 0.5 point, your bug report was clearly written (0.1 points), you provided a scenario that was repeatable (0.3 points), and you included illustrating screen captures (0.2 points). This bug affects everyone in the general population (0.8 points). Congratulations, your score is above 1.0 and therefore we have placed a DAC in your inventory. Thanks for the great work." I'm vehemently against being able to trade DACs. Doing so is a gold bot's wet dream.

Pre 0.23 my small corp managed to build a large space station, JITA Trading Station, with the goal of making warp cores. We were 2 days away from having a warp beacon go into its 30 days of cooking time when 0.23 hit. All of a sudden, we needed schematics. Ok, how much? Just 840 MILLION quanta for a warp beacon schematic... We were crushed. Note that is the three main players saved up the 150,000 daily quota to buy that schematic it would have taken us over 5 years. Believe they tweaked that price down, but really? 840 MILLION quanta to enable us to build the warp beacon we had been striving for since pre-beta launch? I'm sure schematics to build all the required parts would have added up to something similar, if not much, much, more. Likewise for all schematics required to allow us to keep our 24 warp core factories busy. The group of us just gave up, and decided to wait for launch.

Completely agree - I suspect doing so would even be a violation of some Kickstarter (inc.) agreement - e.g. the terms and conditions between NQ and Kickstarter.

That seems perfectly reasonable. Basically grant everyone "temp DACs", that look and feel like real DACs except they carry some identification tag and can be purged at release. Give everyone enough to play until release, via the same mechanism buying regular DACs will be, except price them at a dime apiece. I'd throw a dollar at it to get enough to help test the system... since they need to make sure the credit card processing worked as well. Great idea! At least for Patron class people that are playing free right now. Not sure how to integrate that into those Beta players paying a subscription. Maybe continue the subscription as the primary method of payment, and have dime DACs grant an additional hour of play - or something similar - just for testing purposes.

Exactly what they talked about doing back when the price drop was announced.

I guess somebody should ask it: "Just a desperate attempt at generating cash, or a real attempt at building something they will need for release?" I can see it both ways, but if the later, it sounds like they are starting from Ground Zero in this part of the effort.

Your an Alpha Patron and this surprises you? <smile>

That was the promise.

Really unclear here: Are DACs going to be required to play the game going forward? e.g. Am I going to have to start burning my backer DACs before the game is released?

Now that is sickly funny... especially since it rings of truth.