Pleione

Ah, life pre-0.23 - if only we could go back...

In a small org - we have 7 characters between the active members. Most of the alts are specialized - like I have one that is focused almost exclusively on "Handling" talents - those with "When Deployed" aspects to them. Other alts are focused on Industry and Crafting talents. We seem to be getting inconsistent/confusing results. Not 100% but it pretty much looks like whomever starts an industry determines the characteristics of the run independent of anyone who has "Reapply Talents" to the construct. Any insights?

lol - made my first run with my mining partner today. We targeted an uncommon, rumored, roid about 90 su out - it was in safe space. With 77 minutes until having its location broadcast, we arrived and discovered 26(!) other ships already there. Heading 450SU into PVP space to see if we can find an unmolested T1 Roid. Yeah, its Monday, but was hoping there would be something left.

You dream our common dream, but it has never happened. NQ once posted a "Suggestions" board, after the 1st day, we never heard back from them... most viewed it as simply a distraction. I've done better than most. A person (name withheld) was assigned to me to help pretty up the FAQ I maintained pre-0.23. Eventually management rejected it because it contained work-arounds to common bugs. Why? Because if they made it official, they would have had to acknowledge that the game had bugs... its all NQ arrogance and attitude that is killing this game.

Then why did they abandon the perfectly acceptable notion of a PVP zone where those that wanted to could, and those that didn't could simply avoid. I can not accept that destroying the work of others who are not interested in PVP is VITAL to the economy.

Not to be rude, but "*duh*". Alas, NQ turned off their API that provided any usage stats many years ago. So one has to use the stats one has.

With the rapid decline in player base as reported here is Roid hunting now generally safe or are PVPers still overwhelming them? Interested in both weekend activity and during the week when player count is apparently down a lot. About to start this aspect of the game and just curious what to expect. Of course, my ship has a radar and shield, for whatever good that does me.

One must look at the bright side, even if it is a single ray of sunshine in what otherwise is a nuclear winter: Soon their will not be an PVPers harassing those of use who simply want to build in the sandbox. Of course, it will be a short lived experience.

Ah, where to start... well probably with an advanced apology because I'm sure I'll get some of this wrong, but: Post launch we have 5 planets, not the original 12 - although they are suppose to bring the others back someday. Ore has been shuffled around so that its all still available. Jago got stripped of 2 of its Tier 1s, so you can't bootstrap there anymore. Conventional mining was removed because the data load of tracking all those tunnels was not sustainable using the tech they use. Mining machines are the "low resource" way of doing it now. Conventional mining still works on Asteroids, diluting your talent pool due to the spread between conventional mining talents and the surface harvesting and calibration talents, The surface of all planets can still be terraformed, but your not going to find any ore searching them. Planets do have NON-REGENERATING surface ore - once its gone, its gone. Surface harvesting talent points apply to Calibration bonus ores - so are worth having. Schematics are a massive quanta sink now. You have to make them using Ctrl-K which pops up a kinda-somewhat-similar panel as K still does. It takes time and money to make schematics, a lot of both in the case of tier 3+. The concept of a core schematic is gone - all schematics are now consumable. Taxes on Territories are another massive quanta sink. No limit on how many territories you or your org can own - but be prepared to shell out 500,000 quanta each WEEK if you want to mine of those territories. You can flag 3 as headquarters, but you must shell out the 500K/week if you want miners to run. PVP is pretty much the same as always. Ships now (depending on when you last played) have an options for shields, but they are not absolute protection. 4 classes of weapons, 4 settings for a shield. You can have a 25% damage reduction across all four and can shift shielding percentages - which is cool if only one person is attacking you. If its a group, your going to die all the same, just a bit slower, presuming the group uses all 4 classes of weapons. Have fun using a territory scanner. Just a rough number, but T2+ ores are like 5 times harder to find. I use to bitch about having to do 40 scans to find a T2, now hundreds are required. One teammate has been exceedingly unlucky and has done over 1000 on Alioth and its moons with no hits. We had T1 ore bots for awhile, buying at 25, but those are almost all expired now. Rumor of them coming back, with great trepidation they will do it in a manor that won't make a few lucky ones billionaires. When I was at the market a few days ago, most T1s were selling for around 10, coal I think was at 13 (Average Highest - which feels like its being manipulated, since we sold out at AH+5 recently. Kind of like it averages sale price and ignoring volume - so someone could sell 1000 units of ore one at a time at 1 and lower the Average Highest) Oh, Industry now does batches of batches to force a run to take at least 3 minutes - again a server workload hack. I say that because come on! How hard would it have been to just adjust each industries batch size so that it took at least 3 minutes? Nope, they had to add another layer of code to the process instead. Of course, this results in things like "Out of schematics. Number of schematics left: 4. Also, some Transfer Units assignments still run on 10 second intervals, but I guess Transfer Units are a separate chunk of code so the hack didn't apply. Hope you find something that keeps you interested. The number of time-gates in the game have annoyed many players. Sorry if I come across overly sarcastic or disappointed - but I'm still playing, at least for now. Hard to get excited about it though.

There is always Roid hunting... of course for anything useful, you risk being blown up. Thought shields would fix that, but of course, they way they were implemented leaves you to receiving 75% of the damage unless your on your ship and manually tune. That of course, only works for awhile, but that would be expected. And, all it takes is 2 attackers using different weapons and your toast. But All Hail the PVPers! They are the engagement center of design for the game. NQ has repeatedly bowed to these players and are now reaping that reward. I actually supported the concept of a PVP zone, an arena where players could go to strut their stuff, but that wasn't enough for them. Its all very depressing. I'm 64 years old and have been actively engaged since early 2018. I'm the "Pleione" that wrote the 30+ page FAQ I supported pre-0.23 that helped hundreds of people and ate countless hours of my time engaging on the Discord channel to learn what people were having problems with and writing up guidelines to help. This was suppose to be the "Eve Online" experience that I could enjoy from the beginning and spent the next 20 years, if I'm so lucky, to play. And today... I see it dying. Recently spent 3+ hours of travel time scrolling around in F2 sorting my talent queue. Even after deleting ~100 items I was still left with over 1300 days of training (almost exclusively in Industry and Crafting). I found myself laughing at myself when I was down to pushing the 7 day skills ahead of the 19 day skills... thinking "I should be so lucky for the game to survive until I get to this point". I find that sad. (Let ignore that a single button called "Sort by time" could have saved me those 3 hours.) What depresses me the most if the lost opportunity. This should have been a great game. Too old now for anything else to replace it (If tomorrow "Space the Game" was announced, I'd be pushing 70 before it hit the market... I'm literally out of life time to see this happen).

The big debate now is if this future recycling unit will require schematics to run. And if so, which schematics? If your recycling a Warp Beacon will you need a 5,000,000, 11 day Warp Beacon schematic to dismantle it?

With the removal of calibration mining (exchanging calibration charges for ore by simply placing/calibrating/removing/placing...) my final org member is re-evaluating their commitment to the game. They have (4) paid up accounts they run, and did calibration mining in order to mine enough Chromium (which the org has a territory with some on) to make the space fuel he needed to fuel his other efforts. Those efforts include scanning over 400 tiles on Alioth without a single T2 hit and hundreds of scans on moons with the same result. Bless him for the effort - I would not have that patience. They are turned off by taxes on territories, not to mention extremely frustrated at territory scanning. This is suppose to be a fun game, those numbers above can not be viewed by any sane person as "fun". Personally, I dread my twice weekly "Calibrate day" when I blow at least 3 hours using my 3 accounts to calibrate our 65+ mining units. That's just drudgery, which I do to pay for the territory taxes on the 15 territories involved, and to have cash left to pay for schematics. We are shifting efforts to our L core space station and hoping that Roid hunting will make for happier days. But Roid hunting requires a block of time (say 3+ uninterrupted hours) for us both to be available, and that is not common. Throw the risk of having our ship blown up because the two of us are in Roid tunnels, and, well... I just don't see it lasting.

Which requires them to write new code, not just change table entries. e.g. Lucky if they could do it in 6 months.

So in this vision you see NQ modifying taxes based on supply and demand???

Months? Get serious... this is critical... might take half a year or more!

Doesn't matter - too late now that it IS an issue. Only question remains if they will even bother. Wouldn't surprise me to see them run for month just to see if the economy fails, and if not, declare a player run economy a success (and undoubtedly claim that was their plan all along).

So you agree with Solution E in the original post?

Which is why I proposed that Plan B above wasn't ideal...

Actually completely agree. I think the game has been misnamed. Needs to become "Time Gate!"

Because it generates "good enough" returns. We are paying our taxes on 15 territories, and paying our schematic taxes, and not having much difficulty. Not accumulating any fortunes, but paying the bills.

Believe is or not you can survive on ore prices well below 25. Ran the math in another post and somewhere around 5 is the breakeven for paying taxes - and that excluded calibration ore, adjacency bonuses, talents, etc. We tend to sell at "Average Highest" + 2 and the ore always sells quickly.

Sounds simple right? Just place new bot orders at all markets. But if that happens, the first people that log in after this occurs are going to become billionaires within an hour. As of a few minutes ago "Highest Average" for Quartz was slightly below 10. So I pop on immediately after the patch comes out, buy everything I can afford (say 10M worth) of quartz at 10 and immediately instant sell at 25 (now I have 25M), do it again using the 25M and I'm at 62.5M, again puts me at 156M, 4th time puts me at 390M - do for all 4 T1 ores and I'm at a handy 1.5B. For maybe 1 hour of work. So that would be a "oops" of epic order. So Plan A: The buy bots melt their servers and did this all within the first minutes of coming up - buying up all orders under 25 and paying the asked selling price? Fair? Not really - if they had announced ahead of time the return of the bots many would cancel their <25 orders and wait for their ore to be worth several times as much. So Plan B: They announce in advance that on November 24th (my birthday!) that the bots are going to be coming on and paying 25 once again... and the rich instantly buy up as much ore as possible. Rich get richer, which is never popular, but at least the price of ore would recover quickly. Better than Plan A, but still not ideal. So Plan C: They freeze all T1 ore sell orders and then proceed with Plan B. Great for anyone that is paying attention, some will get burned "I needed that sale! My territories shutdown and now I'm screwed!!!" Maybe Plan D: The buy bots melt their servers and buy up all T1 ore <=25 and pay 25 per unit? Hmmm... getting better. Happens at some future UNANNOUNCED (no leaks guys... really REALLY) time, perhaps without even a patch being issued. I like this, but might require coding... maybe... unless the current buy bots are hard coded to pay 25 and to search for sell orders under that. I think that leaves us with Plan E: Code the bots to pay 25 and to scape the markets for any sell orders of T1s at or below 25. Implement that code in a future patch. Test that code by enabling a bot order for a few thousand in ores at one slow market where it can be carefully monitored. If it works, try again on a bigger order. Test a few markets. If all is well, run a date through the RNG code, and then implement buy orders for 100B units of ore by running some script that does so on ALL markets within seconds. Announce the change and the method used so that all understand. So my vote is Plan E: People rejoice. Fear of a crashing economy evaporate. Orders for products skyrocket due to an influx of unexpected cash. Inflation runs rampant, but such is life. Hmmm, almost sounds like RL and Covid payments... ps. As long as your messing with the bot code, have it auto-renew anytime the purchase level falls below 100M ore. And if, gasp, this was somehow all set up by hand instead of being automated - time to write that bot!

Me too. I'd say that perhaps, maybe, 1000 Patrons/Kickstarter type backers have come back. I was shocked yesterday (a weekend when presumably most play) when I actually saw another player on Madis - besides at Markets. Alioth Market 6 seems to be busy most of the time, but that is the only spot in this "universe" (of 5 planets), that I routinely see other people. And god help anyone if it remains that way and the game does succeed - landing there now is a major hassle.

Elite Dangerous or Dual Universe? Did you skip forums?

For what its worth... I reported the Sanctuary adjacency issue within a few hours of launch. It took 3 weeks to get a response from support. Once they got to it, we swapped e-mails for a couple of days and then they passed it on (I pointed out that 9 patches had been released since I reported the problem), it was fixed in the next patch. So honestly, I blame management for understaffing the customer support group.