Pleione

I would expect the answer to be "no". It appears they are rewarding people who have, via kickstarter/backer/subscription, contributed money to their effort.

Horrible idea. The old system allowed XS ships to lock on large ships (presumably because the large ship was, well, larger) at say 40km, but the large ship could not lock onto the XS ship to fire back until it was much closer. And since ANY hit use to disable the warp drive, even a paltry laser at max range, it was really broken. Mix in that XS ships were not limited on weapon size, and larger ships were just sitting ducks. Shields of course help now, but the old system was REALLY REALLY stupid.

Concur, but it will still have some impact - probably. My point is it will have some impact, potentially breaking non-PVP ships, even though this is clearly a PVP only patch.

Just to make sure I'm following: a tier 1 ship built of iron will have, kg-for-kg, half the resistance of a tier 5 ship build of gold? So essentially half the effective hit points? Hmmm, lets do the math using Antimatter as an example Iron - 4500 HP - 1000 point hit via AM results in 700 points of damage, takes ~3 hits to blow a hole through half of it (2100 HP of damage) Gold - 4500 HP - 1000 point hit via VAM results in 400 points of damage, takes ~6 hits to blow a hole though half of it (2400 HP of damage) So a bit less than 50% better. OK... (Note: 1000 pint hit is used just to make the math easy. The math scales whatever hit value you want to use)

It affects flight characteristics for non-PVP ships, but those are likely plastic anyhow, so not much.

Early talk (~2018) was about a procedurally generated universe - that people would be able to head off in any direction and find new star systems to exploit. The programmers amongst us wondered how they would handle all that data - being able to do so would have truly been a programming feat. We saw the death of that once they started hand tweaking the planets "for quality" purposes.

I really looked forward to Galaxy in 1st half 2020 per http://puu.sh/JdL7q/8c20c8b5bd.jpg now Post Release.

Kind of like the "kiss the girl" paradox where a boy is only allowed to halve the distance to a girl - he can get really close, but never make contact. This system is similar - you can rapidly reach 80% of where lifers are at, but you will never catch up. Likewise to my example, there gets to be a point where the gap no longer matters...

There is no point in this conversation. NQ is going to do what they want, when they want, under the delusion that they, and they alone, know what is best for the game. So sit back, wait awhile longer (its been almost 4 years for me), and lets see what happens.

Lets not forgot that the existing code is hardly stable - seems like they are currently requiring "maintenance" several times a week. Not the stability most would find acceptable for late beta code (yeah, I know it feels like alpha code, with this number of restarts expected for that level of code, but its not what they claim).

NQ-Entropy: "When we released schematics in 0.23, it was to address a problem that had the potential to adversely affect Dual Universe as an MMO. Players were able to be fully self-sufficient with ‘build-it-all’ factories, reducing interaction between players in the game’s economy." I would like to point out three items that were both in the original, and the December 2019 Roadmap (the last one published I believe): and The first implies I should be able to craft everything I need for my bases and ships. e.g. If I wanted to invest the time, I should be able to build a factory that can create everything I need for my bases and ships - or perhaps, like I did pre-0.23, create multiple large core space stations that combined did what I needed. I spent 1000s of hours doing that, often 12-14 hours a day. The second: note the "or even" - use of elements was primarily intended for me and my friends, with the market an option - not a requirement. The third: Oh, wait, that is now "post release" with NQ systems substituted. If the problem was lack of interaction, then perhaps the focus should have been on eliminating the NQ markets and bots and evolve towards player run ones. Not, as other have posted, "Go re-establish civilization - we have set up dozens of fully stocked marketplaces for you throughout the solar system and established a taxation system to ensure your loyalty dependance on us." The current system does not meet any of the 3 stated game goals, nor match the lore that was advertised. Go offline, re-design to meet the goals, and relaunch in a year or two. Your current path is a death spiral. Maybe spend some time monitoring other games, like Fractured Veil, and see how real customer interaction works. It wouldn't hurt to force all designers to read Tynan Sylvester's "Designing Games" book and commit to the principles it contains.

This is a classic management error - suspect they have a bunch of really talented creative people who refuse to stop creating and insist on "doing their job". Debugging is someone (lower skilled in their opinion) job to do and they won't have anything to do with it. Its a management error because management won't stand up to them - their friends, not employees. I'm presuming they are not stupid enough to be pushing new features, like the non-player driven marketplace, as window dressing for their other failures, like not being able to come to a wipe decision. This may well be complicated by severe financial pressure - e.g. developers working for stock instead of cash where management has to coddle them or lose them with little chance of replacements being found.

Consider yourself VERY lucky if they answer one of those... I'd be happy with a firm date for when they will tell us the decision.

Well.. for sure I wouldn't start again until after they wipe. They have pretty much stated they will do one, its only a question of what will remain: Blueprints for sure - everything else is in the wind - including WHEN they will announce/perform the wipe. But your sentiments are dead on. The longer they wait, the more time goes by for some other game, like Starfield, to come onto the playing field. Others, like Planet Crafter, are already there - but are currently limited play time games, so not so much of a threat. Personally, I tend to focus on one game at a time, and am awaiting Starfield, Crimson Desert, and Fractured Veil (along with updates for Planet Crafter). Dual Universe gets added back onto the list the day of the wipe - wither its first or not on that list will depend on their timing. Until one of the above happens, I'll be playing V-Rising (or maybe yet another round of Rimworld!).

Ah... and what happens if I want to play the game for 15 years and become that jack of all trades? EVE was created in 2004 I believe, so its been around for 18 years now. Forcing me to become, say, the universes best Advanced LED manufacturer has zero interest to me. Way to easy for a mega corp to take a loss and simply undercut my prices until I leave the game.

I understand that in principle. Its complicated. On the one hand, denying access to someone to the services rendered in a station isn't directly messing with them - they didn't have those services before they were put online - however it may give their opponents an advantage over them. Fair? idk. Probably is if your a Law and Order type, but not if your an Anarchist. It gets really complicated if they dynamically lose that access after storing things at the station - kind of like Putins' assets in the USA (to use a current real world example). In that scenario, I would definitely be messing up their game. Again a question of fair or not based on their behavior. But behavior is observation based and open to interpretation. For instance, could we block somebody because they were a trade competitor? It would be a way towards creating player based factions! We could extend the example by asking if I would have the right to sell their assets in order to rebuild the ships they destroyed? Who would moderate such activity? NQ? Not a headache they would want I'm sure. Another concern is RDMS. What if I, as the station owner, decided a marketplace was too much work and wanted to shut it down (or simply steal everything)? Could I simply remove the marketplace unit and then mystically own everything everyone had deposited in the marketplace containers? Who would be responsible for marketplace bug issues - like items placed for sale disappearing, or funds not be deposited correctly? I can virtually guarantee people will at least CLAIM such things are happening. Will players have to sign an EULA to not hold the station owner responsible? Also, and not a trivial issue: Last time I was into construction, one was limited to hub'ing together 10 Large containers. If that is what a marketplace used, it would be a trivial amount of storage. Our station has over 50 Large containers just for ore storage (a series of independent hubs - larger for common ores, and just a single Large container for tier 5 ores - but over 50 in total). I suspect they would need to come up with some type of "Market container" that cost a fortune to build and took up a floor or two of large core area, or perhaps a "Market core" or something. Shame they didn't figure this out when they build the original marketplaces so that they could extend it to player control later.

That's a great point. It was always our intention to blacklist any pirates that destroyed any of our members ships, with the intention of removing them from the blacklist if they appropriately compensated us for the destruction (accidents happen when your a pirate). Of course, we were simply hoping we would have that capability - but at least building the trade station within the safe zone at least gave the station protection. e.g. Don't bite the hand that feeds you...

Yeah... what really annoyed me is them creating a bot-free marketplace instead of allowing players to create marketplaces. What happened to the long promised (as in due 1st half of 2019 as part of Alpha 2 per first roadmap): "Markets: set-up your own markets and trading centers, become a mogul and build a trade empire". The later roadmap (Release in 2021 version) still has "Player-Made Markets" with the same description. Admittedly that has been pushed to release, but why institutionalize NQ alternatives? That feature is what the team I was on was working towards. We sincerely hope they pull this new bot-free market out of the game when it releases - its direct competition to player made markets and demotivating for those of us whom were headed in that direction.

Player owned Marketplaces were (are?) one of the things promised for DU. The dispensers were simply a poor, temporary, work around - our small corp was planning on paying players for raw ore by hand until those marketplaces came into existence. It took THOUSANDS of man hours to get the station to where it is - we were not going to wait until the marketplaces became reality before we got started. Remember... all this effort was before 0.23... it was the best we had to work with.

My large core space station "JITA Trading Center", was two days away from getting the last component needed for a warp beacon prior to 0.23. With the beacon, it would have been the first space based trading center, a mere 5km inside of safe space, between a fairly short 400-580km of Jago, Lacobus, Sinnen, and Symeon - and 114-355km of Aloth, Madis, Thades, Talema, and Sicari. It already had supplies of all three fuels for sale, warp cells, and misc other items. I'd say that would have had purpose, and given that NQ just announced their own (so much for a player made infrastructure), not a bad idea. Hardly "no purpose/function", which I find insulting to be assumed. It's still there, dead in space now: ::pos{0,0,18639536.3581,-6229405.6982,10517615.3317} Post 0.23, the schematic needed originally cost 840,000,000 quanta, and functionally stopped my efforts (and game play). We have about 50M quanta between the team that helped build it.

How much does that chip on your shoulder weigh? I resemble the "I did some random building" but never stated your conclusion. Shame you can't recognize opinions when stated and value that other people may have different ones than yours.

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???