Pleione

Well, just started a new alt to test some things out. I can tell you that none of the tiles on Haven appear to have reset - there was a steady, hole free, spread around every market. So based on that sample size of 1, I'd say yes: Haven and Sanctuary are permanent.

Can't argue that point, but NQ has shown no indication they plan on reducing taxes in any way, shape, or form.

Did that early on, but its not scaleable. Calibration charges eventually become a bottleneck as your try and obtain a bit of each ore.

Your English is just fine - never doubt it. I think you are 100% correct: Any development going forward should be focused at getting people to come back. If you can do that, almost by definition your going to make the existing base mostly happy. English saying: "You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time" - anybody that tries to do so is destined to failure. Even our ex-President Obama stated this once: No matter what he says, somebody will complain. He was referring to "Merry Christmas" (insult to Jews, Muslims, etc.), "Happy Holidays (insult to some Christians)... ps. My wife is from Omsk, I've been to Siberia many times! The culture there (not the politicians) is outstanding - far beyond what we have here in the USA. Of course, it has its problems too.

Did I miss a roadmap announcement? Did I miss a 1.3 announcement? Feels like complete silence from NQ on the future of DU since 1.2 came out.

Blanket rejection is not particularly informative, nor does it follow the request of "Constructive comments only please".

One can hope! Maybe they will surprise us. Maybe, just maybe, they are looking for that one thing that might bring people back, since the current number are likely disappointing. NQ? Any comment? Msoul? Any related thoughts?

Started a new thread with a suggestion that I think would fix the current problem and bring back players - all within the current framework (some new code, but nothing not already done for other reasons).

Few appreciate the current hot-spot based mining approach. Rather than complain, I thoughts I'd take a stab at describing a potential new approach which would be fairer and potentially even fun. Key in this approach is that planets won't get mined out, and new players will have a decent chance at finding good stuff. So here we go: 1) Remove Territory Scanning units (or limit their use to old planets as the new system is phased in). 2) When a player claims a tile, the Territory Unit generates a random distribution of ore in that Territory. Note this means you need to claim a tile in order to mine it, much like old timers had to "stake a claim" before they could hold and mine a spot (ok, not a perfect analogy, but close enough). 3) Players use their Scanners to triangulate on a particular ore just like the used to, and still do on asteroids. A new talent would allow for deeper scanning to reveal higher tier ores (say T3+) based on what the planet contains. This would be consistent with Proficiency talents that exist today ("Mining Proficiency" anyone?). 4) Once a local "hot spot" (local as in a few tens of meters square) is identified, a new Integrated Mining unit is placed. These units consist of a single mining unit combined with a "mining core". New talents could allow for more mining cores, or they could just be counted against a players Core Unit count, or both. Personally I favor the later. 5) The new unit could work somewhat similarly current miners and require calibration for the ore located (which makes lore sense). However, the ore is limited in quantity, and drained down. So perhaps 5000 l of ore are detected, and a mining unit can pull 100 an hour - so it would drain the pocket in 50+ hours. If one wanted to code it fancy, it could decrease in efficiency as the percent of ore is withdrawn (e.g. when 2500 l are left per this example, it would only pull 50 an hour out). That would extend the time technically forever, although for server efficiency sake, perhaps mining always stops when less than 1% of ore remains (e.g. At max you can pull 4951l from a 5000 l spot). Hopefully the mini-game goes away and one simply clicks a "calibrate" button to start the process - or when mining starts it takes N hours to complete its initial calibration (personally like that, where N is something like 2-24). 6) Similar to adjoining structures held by others, miners must be some distance apart from each other - dev's choose anything from a few meters (multiple, but limited, miners per spot), to tens of meters (one miner per spot). Players are free to have as many units running in their tile as they want to place, limited only by the number of hot spots they find. Presumably the devs will limit the number of spots when the Territory Unit initializes. 7) If a territory is removed, its random ores go with it. Thus once a territory is mined out there is little point in holding it. If a new player comes along and claims it, their Territory Unit will generate a new ore map for the territory. This implies a territory owner could remove and replace their Territory Unit every week to regen if they wished. 8) Recommended: Territory taxes be reset to something like we had in Beta, with increasing cost as count-per-planet increases. Notes: A) This does not require new planets, but rather an extension to the exiting Territory Unit logic (one presumes this is an object with associated data that controls what happens in a territory already). B ) This strengthens the use of the old and now asteroid only mining and dredger skills - making them useful for everyone, not just Roid hunters. C) There is no impact to an org that wants to own 100 tiles in an area - they are welcome to do so (presuming they pay the taxes), but they have no advantage over any other tile on the planet. Future "Territory Warfare" would still be valid, it just wouldn't be driven by an Org owning all the gold tiles on a moon, or worse, all the gold tiles in the defined universe, and being big enough that nobody can take them away. Such monopolistic behavior is not good for the economy. D) Calibration charges would still be valid - perhaps needing one per T level to allow the new units to functions (also makes sense lore wise, since higher T level ores would be deeper and need more charges to detect). E) The game loop is now critically enhanced. Every time a territory is drained dry, the TU is simply recycled, and the scanning and miner placement process starts again. I suspect this would be a vast improvement over the current calibration minigame. F) Corporate advantage of being able to find all-or-most of the hot spots on a new planet within a day disappears - giving the smaller orgs and solo players a chance to progress in the game at a pleasing rate as well. Those same Corporations can still claim a hundred tiles if they wish in order to form a community, but those tiles will not be inherently better than any others. G) Just my guess, but I suspect once news of this hit the street, it would draw a lot of old players back in. Although hardly necessary, acknowledge of a player-based-rework-idea being implemented wouldn't hurt NQ's reputation either... H) Note that the new Territory Units would be doing all the hard work - no need for planetary wide database updates - just miners reporting into the servers when clients view them along with temporary (weeks, not years) of data being stored in the Territory Unit. e.g. This should be relatively server lite impact wise. I) Asteroid mining would remain as it is today - allowing for the acquisition of relatively large amounts of rarer ores quickly - at the risk associated with the current activity. J) Multiple tiers of new miners, like we have today, would drive industry and the economy - especially if miners wore out over long periods of time (say 20 uses, using the existing damage mechanism - each calibration does 1 damage against a new units 20ish "repair" count). K) The existing bookmark system would allow players to scan their entire territory and map out future mining locations should they only own a few mining units. Constructive comments only please.

And questions have been raised along those lines... some speculate that its not really random, but based, at least loosely, on tile number. e.g. The tile number is the seed for the heat map, and that the algo has been leaked allowing those that know it the knowledge of where to go.

Well duh... its either that or drive everyone to drag as many friends as possible into the game. Of course, that seldom lasts, but subscriptions are subscriptions - cash to the bank.

Thanks - I appreciate the feedback with the detail you provided.

I could suppose this IF resource allocations were put back to Beta level. No way do we want to spend the time to rescan everything every week... that would become a full time, 12 hours a day, job. Now... if they adopted my previous suggestion of making scans public, so that we could focus on only scanning tiles nobody else has... then ok.

How about a Christmas bonus of 90% off territory taxes and schematic cost? Then just forget to expire it...

Just made a market run of my Sanctuary ore (which I always sell). Looking at all the markets, it appears the T1 price crash from 25 has slowed down, but its still headed that way. For example, 5 days ago I was successful selling Coal for 9.9 - today I priced it at 8.9. Not a huge change, but significant and depressing all the same. Our small Corp use to keep 10M in the bank and 1M on all territories for taxes. Half our territories are at 500K now, and the org has less than 1.5M in the bank. Only way we are surviving is due to the generosity of some large alt players running missions. Without that income we would be broke. Schematics count has decreased as well... and are only running essentials (like warp cells) in our factory plus a bit of ship development equipment (because if we can't at least make new, better, ships - whats the point?).

Thanks for running the numbers, that helps. Your question was the point of 6). Not going to be able to make a craft maned by 2-3 people that can handle every situation. Unfortunately. But if it survives even once, thats a win.

Thanks. That is what made intuitive sense - but this is DU - one needs to reality check intuition <smile>

Tried a version of this on the PVP subforum and only received one response (although appreciated, it would be nice if it was peer reviewed). So: Trying to understand the mechanics of PVP as I look to build a M-Core asteroid mining ship with defensive weaponry. Yes, I know I'll need someone to man the radar. Yes, I know I shouldn't fly a ship into PVP space I'm not willing to lose. Yes, I know the best defense is to never put myself in harms way. Etc. Etc. Etc. Please help me focus on understanding the mechanics per the questions below. Note that my current understanding is based upon the charts I've found on the wiki, so if those are incomplete, or wrong, please just say so. Numbers presented are base, without talents, so please feel free to point out talent impacts (preferably with updated numbers rather than a meaningless "Talents will improve on that" type statement). 1) It looks like a Large Phased-Array Advanced space radar has a scan range of 400,000m (2SU) and an identification range of 330,000m. Presumably one needs to identify the target before one can lock on and fire? 2) It looks like a Large Precision Advanced Railgun has an optimal range of 176,000m - by far the longest range of any L weapons (L Precision Advanced Cannon comes in at 44,000m). How much will skills improve upon that? 3) I'm under the impression most Pirates use S Precision Cannons, or something similar, with a range of lets say 12,000. 3a) If they are doing a flyby attack at 50,000m/s, I'm only going to have 8 seconds, but they would only have 1/2 a second to fire at me. 3b) Do most Pirates slow down to, say, sub-5,000m/s when attacking in order to lengthen their attack times? 4) Given the above, how many shots would I likely be able to issue before the Pirate closed to within his gun range? 5) What is the likelyhood of a hit, or at least them knowing they are being fire at? 6) I'm presuming Pirates will fall into a couple of classes: A) Solo who back off if their target is not easy picking B ) Solo who relish the challenge C) Gangs that will kill me no matter what ship I'm in? 7) I'm aware that tracking speed on large weapons sucks against small fast targets. Does that hold true at range or only up close (say < 20,000m)? 8) Should my ship have both, say, a L railgun in hopes of getting luck at range, and as many S cannons as it can fit for defensive fire in close? 9) What did I forget to ask? <smile> Sorry for all the attitude at the beginning of the post, but really want to stay on topic of how to outfit such a ship. Cheers!

Not to mention the entire moon being mapped in the first 24 hours. Ok, NQ, what planet are you releasing tomorrow?

Some things transfer 1 at a time, others 50, 100, and I seem to recall some 200s. One hopes this is all table driven, hopefully not individually coded, but who knows.

I could forget and forgive this in Alpha, but it absolutely should have been straightened out in Beta. That is just another sign we are really in Alpha 3 now...

By now you must realize most of the gameplay tables had at most one meeting to discuss. Materials... transfer times... all feel like someone was given an afternoon to code the entire table - just placeholders you see - we will put in real values before launch... What worse is they have added layers of code to "fix" things that are not correct in the tables, instead of just fixing the tables. (Ref: industry batch sizes which are suppose to take a minimum of 3 minutes to avoid excess CPU usage. So now there are batches of batches and weirdness like being told your out of schematics when you still have 4 left. Yet today I found a transfer unit running on a 22 second cycles - opps, forgot to layer that code onto transfer units too! In the meantime, quick hacks have resulted in some items taking 41 minute to transfer but only 47 minutes to build (ex. numbers but close))

Hi all - I love mining the classic way, e.g. what we do on asteroids now. Alas, not fond of being defenseless. So working on a Roid miner that can shoot back. Open to aligned suggestions! One quick question: If I'm reading the charts right, a Large Railgun has about twice the range that a Large Radar can detect a ship at? How does that work??? Would I be better off with, say, (2) M railguns that max the Large radars range? I rather hope to collapse a XS ships shields in a single hit as a warning, so the Large Railgun would be better for that, right? Wrong? Please explain. Cheers! (e.g. Here is hoping I'm not your next target)

If you go the the System map, select a planet, and zoom in it will tell you which ores are on each planet. Works for their moons as well. This is suppose to be current - they are definitely different than in beta.

This is, of course, exactly how territories use to work. The idea was that it would get really expensive to own more than about 10. It wasn't logarithmic in the classic sense, but did scale steeply. Back then, it was the cost of placing a territory unit - there was no "rent".