dualism

If you think about VR as playing ONE character in a virtual world, then yes, it might look like the issue of distance is being downplayed by simply being able to hop into another body somewhere else. However, lots of players have absolutely no problems with that idea, even if developers even try and forbid it in their universe. This gives them an advantage that puts genuinely one-char players in a long-term bad mood. I find the '3-char family' idea pretty neat and it makes lots of things easier for the devs and better for the game at the same time. It does mean, however, that going afk will often actually be a case of swapping chars, so NQ needs to look more closely at the semi-logout nature that 2/3 chars will always be under also when the player is actually playing even. Those chars should neither be extra safe nor extra endangered when out in pvp areas in my opinion, so it's a tricky issue. What I do hope is that the three chars per account can be identified as from the same account, such as having a main name and nickname tag or so. @CalenLoki on #2 Skills, I partly disagree. Before your a. and b. "[skills] serve only two meaningful purposes: a. Because they are earned over time, they tie players to their characters. Thus preventing creating new one after loosing reputation (by griefing, scamming, ect.) b. They force you to specialise" we have that they fundamentally enable access to areas and efficiencies and prevent new players from automatically taking part in these. Having 24/7 skilling functions makes it worse that players can pay for multiple accounts and thus be in a far more automatic p2w situation than actually having to be online and only being able to skill up char one at a time through real play (and not botting a multi-account either). For me a big question is how far the skilling trees will go in terms of being a veteran and what effects this will have. The force to specialise, as you put it, will depend on what is achieveable in, say, 1 year of having an account. In one case where you can build research labs and gain science points similar in effect to skills, people rushed to research, got what they wanted and then kept gaining and gaining points to absurd levels after a while such that their ships could do warp-factor whatever if they so wanted. I also dislike the idea that younger players will never be able to effectively catch up in some games, but I realise you can't have it both ways; either skills effectively max out after a while or they don't...

I've sort of said it before, but I think it should be somehow harder to attack someone's base when they are offline because I don't think cowardly attacks should be rewarded. On the other hand, the best strategy to defend a base should not be simply to go to sleep for a week ;)! Yes, a timer activation may work, so that the defender can select the time of day when the defences fail - and thus a window when a battle must take place before the shields can be reactivated - that seems to be the plan. If turrets can have two states, then obviously manned turrets should perform better than turrets on auto. Then again, turrets are offensive defensive as opposed to purely defensive. I think it would be possible to have something like having to drop the main shields to be able to fire the turrets. That way you could have autoshields which take a long time to drain (but not forever), but actually beating the enemy requires an active battle. I imagine NQ will be doing a lot of thinking about this as it will be a major element of ermmm, let's call it 'player interaction'!

@Sparktacus"As for multiple chars per account - im honestly not sure how I feel about that. I'll need to give it some thought. " My understanding is that it is a pretty fixed idea by the devs that we will have up to 3 chars per account, with only whichever is active gaining skills. I love this idea, regardless of how NQ stands on the topic of having multiple accounts. It tries to negate some of the advantages of having multiple accounts in the first place, never mind whether NQ ultimately approves of this or not. I have long argued that distances should make a difference to actions in virtual worlds, but that the actual time a char requires to get there should not be wasted for the player. You thus need lots of useful things to do and thus break up a journey in some way, have things to do during the journey itself (holodeck, do some lua scripting, possibly upgrade ship systems during travel etc.), or have the ability to leave your journey on autopilot or in the hands of someone else and switch chars at will. Given the added scope in DU for being at a remote outpost for long times and not under attack - and then suddenly finding yourself under attack after all, I feel there would be additional temptations to have multiple accounts if that is the only way to be in several places at (almost) the same time. I really like it that NQ is willing to not try and get as many subscriptions as possible by actually allowing ONE subscription access to three chars. This gives players a lot of freedom of how to divide up their playing time on a single account without potentially wasting lots of time through the consequences of having a char in a remote place.

For me it sure helps with many problems of "wasting time" while travelling. The thing about skills is that many people will want to skill up their main char as quickly as possible, but as this includes offline time I don't see much of a problem of allocating 22 hrs a day to my main and 2 hrs to my B or C doing mining in safety or trading or whatever when I am active with them. I think this will make a huge difference to the staffing of a ship, but also the defense of bases. Calls for help will largely be for people to switch chars when it is a ship being attacked and a bit less so if it is a base which has longer to arrange defenses. I do believe that autodefences should still have reasonable amounts of power, however, while taking into account relative efficiencies. For example, four small cargo ships in formation, each travelling with a pilot only, should not be auto-defended better together than one ship four times the size with a pilot and three defenders on board. I imagine this will not be so tricky for base defences, but will still be difficult to get right so that proper battles occur with active people and not just great auto-defences.

That's the only translation problem I saw in 1.a, due to a German typo. It should read "the size of a moon". The idea is not just to have bog standard class M planets. (Oh, translating back "bog standard" should be to something like "stinknormal"...). I think the universe expansion ideas are quite far away unless there is a lot of efficiency work on how a database manages huge unvisited chunks of space kept in "non-existance" until someone flies there and changes stuff, with procedural generation to the database only when necesssary, as I have written elsewhere... but it is nice to have a dream, yes!

Well, that would be whatever way of making quanta profits as fast as possible, surely? This is why I was thinking a little bit about what absolute baselines are down to NQ's frameworks, before people move up the ranks etc. ___ Alternatively, if the market 'value' of a basic ship lowers now to only 10 quanta - and the relationship to other products in general too, then my basic mining is still at $1 per hour (15 hours required to buy a DAC, say), but each little ship is only worth 10 dollarcents. So NQ 'could' set mining speeds and mats to just 6 mins required, BUT each thruster as a ship component is now only 1 quanta or so, and nobody would put just one on their ship. Everyone would want more units, which defeats that balance right away as a knock-on effect. NOPE! - that causes quick problems either way - forget these two branches of thinking! ___ It is crystallising out in my mind (sorry for faster minds reading this anyway), that NQ should carefully choose a baseline speed, and that IS up to them! It is true that they will not be deciding what players sell DACs for, but they WILL expect a certain relationship as an aim. At the moment I am closing in on a relationship of: individual effort of 1 hour average to go and 'mine yourself a little ship' (NQ speed setting), with an expectation that 30 mins per day= 15 hrs per month would be about the playing time for earning a DAC, with conversely that selling a DAC would buy you about 15 basic ships (player balance). That might be 100x15 quanta =1500 but doesn't have to be. It is a ratio that I'm trying to identify. I realise I am possibly stabbing a bit wildly , but I'm trying to get a feeling for the landscapes. Now, my baseline is in safety at Alioth, simply mining and selling and making quanta per month that is more than my sub costs if I play > 15hrs per month. The difference between 20 hrs per month and 25 hrs average is double (20-15=5 : 25-15=10). If this looks a bit too easy to play for free, then I accept, but my imbalance is no longer a factor of 10, but maybe factor 2, or so, and DACs may end up being about 30 hrs of playtime (1 DAC = make 30 little ships = 3000 quanta). So, who will use the ships? Players who, for the risk of going into pvp, want to make quanta faster (and progress faster and have more fun?) How much better should this be on average? Maybe 20%, so they are managing to make something like 30 journey hours [attempting] of 175 profit an hour, but lose everything to pirates 6 times (4200-600 = 3600 quanta). Ok, I haven't considered fuel, but I expect it to be dirt cheap just around a solar system. Could this be a rinse and repeat activity too for slightly better ores? Yes, I guess so. You'd be losing your little ship every 5 hours of gameplay and buying one again immediately where you ressurect on Alioth. Little ships thus have a market and have a market balance just on the little ship side of: 16% making them against about 80% wanting to do more than just play it safe (every 100 player-hours 16 ships get made and 16 are destroyed). Thanks for reading my semi-diary if you are :). For me it is interesting and hopefully will be to look back on as well. I hope you like it too...

This was just an initial attempt to see if I can balance a triangle ;). If I agree with you in saying I dont think a DAC worth 150 hours a month, what do I change in my balancing? Ok, I think I have it now: if I can mine the ores for a ship in only 1 hour at a market value of 100 quanta, then I am mining at 100 quanta per hour. If a DAC sells at 1500 quanta, losing my ship is still losing $1, but a DAC is worth 15 hours a month, as it were. This is something that NQ needs to select as a "law of physics" almost: the speed of mining or also the materials required in a bp such as a small spacecraft. I realise that the DAC price will be dynamic, but there has to be an overlap between realistic bids and asks. It occurs to me that if NQ went another factor of ten lower, for example, you can get yourself a new ride with even less effort; maybe just 6 mins mining or whatever, but a DAC is now only worth 1.5 hours of digging for the same $15, which is real life earnings in many places. I've also ignored a difference between working for yourself and working for others, but I'm trying to get a ballpark idea. The next point is how this basic triangle scales up. Rare materials and design/desirability/power etc of a ship will affect the markup value more than the pure cost of the materials, but better ships will easily be worth $100 or $1000 in relation to DACs, I believe. It has been said that when destroyed, some of the mats are lost and some are salvageable, but the players who lose get nothing returned unless friends are able to salvage before others do. This doesn't seem to be a very good idea either, really. Have I read about an 'insurance mechanism' provided by NQ in some way to keep the costs of losing much lower (would also slow the advance of power by the 'winners'...)?

yes lol, trying to keep it about dacs, even as a wider topic now. I didn't manage to correlate a good dac price just now on my own tangent thread... You won't be able to buy DAC from anywhere if a local market hasn't got any, but I expect fresh cash DACs can be dropped to wherever a character is, so markets can be supplied without transportation as such if someone with dollars sees an opportunity...

My thoughts on DACs are beginning to branch towards relative prices of things and what, for example, the 'cost' of death will be. Whatever the current market value of DACs in quanta is, THIS will be the baseline indicator of an equivalent sum of dollars. If it is true that the only way inject real cash into my character(s) is to buy DACs for them, then I will have in my mind that 15 dollars (or whatever) = 1 month of play subscription OR 1,000 quanta, or whatever. This will lead me to thinking about what I am effectively losing any time I die and my ability in-game to 'earn' it back again or to deposit it as a quick injection of 'cash DACs'. Now I know that simply playing along will cost me one DAC per month payment to NQ, but how do earnings and risks stack up? At a pretty basic level and to begin with, I assume players will not have much and thus not have much to lose. The storyline says we will be ressurected naked, but I expect characters will actually be given basic avatar-bound basics back again automatically. The first thing I might expect to actually lose is an all-terrain bike or something like that, later on the most basic of space vehicles to get around in. What will the relation be of lowest-level ore-mining time on Alioth, or of 'DAC equivalent' if I want the quanta quickly? My next thoughts are just playing with numbers to see what happens... If I go with 2 hours of mining to get a bike and 10 hours for the worst ship, that might cost 20 quanta and 100 quanta, say. This means I can mine for 10 quanta per hour effectively. Perhaps I would see a value of $15 as equal to 15 hours of basic labour in-game, so the value of a DAC would then be 150 quanta. But that sounds like too much if even a basic spaceship which I could probably lose quite often to pirates is either costing me $10 or ten hours of play. Hmm - if I try a factor of 10? Basic labour in-game now $15 = 150 hours labour, then the value of a DAC is 1500 quanta. Each time I lose my ship it is only $1, but to mine myself a DAC I need to work for 150 hours a month. LOL - is it even possible to balance out DAC value against in-game time in the way I've tried? I guess I'll think a bit more about this a bit later....

Just to note that the merge point is now on page 4 of 5 and we were not considering what is now the first post and instructions https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/12901-how-hard-or-easy-will-it-be-to-earn-dac/&do=findComment&comment=80833 @Falstaf: The tricky bit for me is that NQ will be quick-starting the quanta economy by presumably initially buying the most basic ores at the market or things that can be made directly using Alioth materials. It would be a short-circuit if NQ bought DACs themselves on the market in return for quanta, so I assume players will be selling to an artificial mining or crafting market for a while. If there are only two ways to get your hands on quanta, time/activity in-game or paying cash to get DACs to sell to others, I imagine some people will be keen to pump money in as DACS and sell them to get funds, while some will think it is 'better' not to go for infrastructure quickly, but to do as much low-level mining as possible (=time) and gather/hoard DACs as their investment instead. "Absolute best" as you put it .... probably impossible to say, but I believe it will be a strategy inside DU. I think I disagree with you on price developments, however. I think the prices of low level stuff will go down over time, not up, meaning basic work in game will become less valuable over time, also in relation to the ability to buy DACs. ... I think I'll write on my semi-diary if anyone wants to branch out.

I've been having this problem in real life a bit. If you separate too much, then you begin to lose a feeling for connections and consequences - and I think it's important for conversations to mention or link to other threads, which happened. The OP did also ask about DAC overall, but in a way that is more about facts than opinions.. Anyway, an important factor in how easy to earn is obviously about supply/demand affecting the relative price. Hoarding will also be part of this. Making DACs cheaper will be that they are apparently the only way (afaik) of injecting real cash into the game, so paying to try and get ahead fast will all be via DAC supply side. Edit: this is perhaps the most important step by NQ as an answer to your question. Making DACs more expensive may be attempts to buy up and hoard DACs for a time when cash injection slows down and supporter DACs per player are running out. Harder to get means more effort in-game to get the quanta to buy a DAC. However, the prices of other things will be relative as well and that unit/currency will be quanta. People will focus on their motivations - but most will agree that doing well is part of having fun, so trying to amass quanta actively and through investments paying off is what will actually drive a lot of the focus in my opinion. DACs are only a subset of this. I suppose the critical element is how many players will be aiming to play for free and how acceptable this is for the players trying to get ahead faster by paying/investing real cash. If NQ make a great universe then I think there will be no problem for them to get incomes based on the number of active players (=monthly subscriptions).

yeah, sorry for having wider questions a bit earlier, but I wanted to see how it would probably fit in. I suppose the basic question behind it was: will earned DACs be safe/ be able to be kept safe? If I understand correctly, one place where we will be able to market stuff and buy (thus earn) DACs in game will be on MSA markets? People with an STU there will be able to store stuff safely, so I guess my question is answered as 'yes' with or without the off-topic part that should be discussed on the linked thread... How easy will they be to earn? My guess is that at the beginning the quick-starting of the market will mean we can at least generate quanta pretty much in direct ratio to playing time. People wanting to get at quanta faster to get ahead faster will be keen to pump real money into DACs to be able to sell them, so initially the DACs might be quite quick to earn compared to later on.

I just tried to look back at links on DACs like the above. I'm a bit unclear about which way an earlier decision was changed. It appears to be that NQ wanted to simplify things by making them unlootable, but under pressure is now trying to do something similar to the redemption system. Trying to understand correctly about 'dropping DACs to a character', will this mean that the DACs that supporters will have to begin with are held in some kind of account and can be specifically dropped to a character/avatar when it is in safety - either for consumption or market sale? On the ability to earn DACs (or rather the quanta to be able to buy them), how will quanta begin to build up to create market liquidity? Will people be able to buy quanta with real money, or will the kick-starting be by NQ buying up marketable items artificially for a while (as I think I have read)? edit: thanks Mod-Merwyn below

I think that the rights management and tag system will make things pretty hard for infiltrators. They will act like clearance codes and each security level will limit the damage an infiltrator to that level can do. Yes, the ability to steal a ship and cargo may be seen quite often as an infiltration objective, but I think the MSAs that this topic is about will be pretty secure on the inside [I mean the bases that get built in the STUs there], as well as being unattackable because nothing offensive will be active.

I think the MSAs will provide a good first goal for all players to get somewhere where their stuff is safe, but I can foresee there will be massive piracy going on the moment you hit space. Depending on the distance between the safeties of Alioth and its MSA moon, this will be a more or less major attraction for well armed shuttle services, or wing-man accompanyment. It is my guess that most private resource transport in and out will be well advised to pay for protection - the worst areas of the universe will be right next to the safest! Literally on the other side of this, there is the question of transportation from other planets and systems. It has been mentioned: the slippery slope between areas of risk+fun and relative safety+boredom. I hope transporting a valuable cargo does not mean flying for 1 hour in relative but boring safety, and only then running a 10-minute gauntlet of risk.

Some comments earlier were on the likely size of the universe and thus the chances of being able to go solo somewhere really remote. I put some thoughts and questions on universe mechanics on my semi-diary but not here so as not to drift off-topic... https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/12813-semi-diary-interactions-of-anyall-mechanics-and-flowing-discussion/&do=findComment&comment=80580 I think it is probable that there will be two main bands or radii in which solo play would be most viable: very close to Alioth or very far from Alioth. At mid range being solo may simply be too dangerous - but that's fine with me really as long as opportunities are around for solo players overall.

In the is solo play practical? thread there is a discussion about how far away from others a player will be able to get to likely avoid being found. The opinions are basically that NQ will only be expanding the universe as player densities warrant due to costs, and that a solo player will thus be unlikely to be able to get anywhere truly remote. I've been wondering about the costs associated with procedurally generated content when this meets changeable voxelness . I assume that static procedural generation requires relatively few memory overheads as such, as coordinates (maybe even in multiple overlay) are the seeds for what materialises at a given place. However, if people start changing things, then where they do so does need to be stored/remembered. But as my thinking goes, #15 the vast expanse of the universe still does not have to be kept track of until a person changes the conditions away from the seed generation. This in terms of database volumes, wouldn't it be similar conditions no matter whether a solo player digs in on a planet for the first time 10 light years away or 50? Admittedly, if NQ opens up a bigger radius from Alioth, then the potential database requirements will be higher, as even a solo visit by a lone traveller may have to be tracked (if he/she digs or builds), but in practice the database will look like Swiss cheese (lots of holes) slowly filling in with database instead of initial seed calculations anyway. I realise it's a complex question, but I've noticed that some points are pretty detailed in the threads here! Does anyone have some 'general knowledge' about this issue, or is it still a 'secret' how stuff like this might be managed? NP if you can't say, but I do think the degree of solo play practically possible will make quite a difference in player subscription numbers and would thus affect any cost:benefit analysis that NQ makes on universe sizes...

Well, I think the "loads" for good voice comms would certainly be an important factor and not minimal. The upstream traffic would at least in bursts (press to talk) be much higher than transmitting player decisions and text entries. However, if intelligently databased and handled, burst transmissions could be similar to downloading picture or vid files from a fast-moving library. There would be rivers of data, but players could set up which 'streams' they are on and permissions. It might be fun to see whether "shouting at your enemies" could actually slow their systems down: "severe lag down here, captain; everybody is yelling stuff...", but yes, I do think a good system design could brush any of that aside... I do think that 'live' audio would make a massive difference to the immersion factor as well as communication speeds in battle etc. and should be implemented in DU.

Thanks for the above two links on the subject of tags, which shows some of the possibilities for company complexity and operation. Am I right in assuming that this will also enable the management of quanta between players if they wish, right down to the level of the three(?) avatars each account will have, if they form a lowest-level subset organisation with asset management tags together?

Hi, I hope I'm not riding piggy-back with a part answer and part question. As I understand it, the creator of any particular item will get a blueprint so that copies can be made and become known as genuinely produced using that particular blueprint (bp). I think the plan is to allow copy blueprints as well in some way, so that manufacturing can take place in other places too by selected other people. What I have not heard about is how much protection the item has from others copying the design in a slightly different way, maybe the LUA scripting involved etc. That is what I would like to know more about... A related question might be whether created bps might have some kind of brand protection in their name, so that you know that various different items come from the same company. That's starting to be rather specific, however

Nice post and thoughts! I agree with the basic part, less so with some of the penalties because of the additional programming that would be involved. I think I'd go for increased recovery in the first few hours of "sleep" too. Edit Lethys: I think @AzureSkye(how do you link a name? - ty) means boost is over all of first freshly rested 6 hours, but skills are actually balanced to that being the 'normal rate'. Thanks @Lethys, not sure I understand: Did I read somewhere that skills will continue to be gained even when logged out? Maybe you mean that? Won't the skilled areas depend on what you select to skill, however? Will you select this before you log out? If so, then skills will be gained differently from how Azure assumes, but I think the basic idea of trying to decrease 24/7 botting or avatar sharing in some way is a good one...

I think voice communication will be pretty valuable, but obviously has bandwidth issues. If each player is receiving multiple channels in a bar-like or bazaar-like atmosphere then that would be a strain and if channels are somehow merged into one audio signal then there's quite some processing required per player at the server end. Even real air traffic control has problems of 'one at a time, please', but I would hope that at least one audio channel (from a selection) can be opened for both send and receive.

Link to the suggestions trello which says interplanetary map should make it to final release. >" Players will be able to display other planets on their map aside from ones in which they are currently located on. At the moment, we intend to limit the amount of displayed maps to ones previously discovered. " This doesn't really say anything about my mini question on planetary orbits (#10), but is possibly a step away from having long-distance scanners if you have to go somewhere first and then have it show up on a map after that. #14 It maybe ties in in some way to the shard distance visibility levels, except that I would have expected to be able to fly star to star visually if I knew my 'constellations' from whatever perspective I knew well, for example the skies as seen from Alioth.

**Topic switch to radar** - nice help on skills above - ty. I'm now starting to think about interstellar distances, the shard, travel times, goods, markets and safety a bit, which brings me more specifically to radar functions. If the ASA planet (planet with ASA on it) only has low value mats, then one of the first major market forces will be to travel back and forth to better hotspot planets and other mineables close by. I imagine that to begin with, pilots will know by sight which direction to travel in to get to a certain destination or have notes (my dest is a little to the left and 'up' of the sun ). #10 Am I wrong to assume static positioning, or will there actually be planetary orbits? But what will the travel times be like; will this be boring gameplay if often repeated? Will death and losing my little ship just be a minor setback, with me being up and running again a few minutes later, reequipped but a bit poorer? Will people begin to pilot 'afk' while they make a cup of tea is I guess what I am asking here? This will depend on how safe my journey is in the expanse of things, and so, finally, I reach thinking about "radar" functions. Presumably if the combat ranges will allow me to fire on a ship at a certain distance, then radar should work too, except that #11 computational workloads may not agree. It might be one thing for server loads to have a few players trying to lock onto a target, but a whole different game if everyone is trying to actively track everyone else over a largish volume of space. #12 will radars be anything more than a short-distance skanning and visualisation function for pilots in close battles? #13 will small ships be out of sight and 'invisible' fairly quickly in space? Will pirates looking for victims need to fly around with their eyes open instead of having scanners/radar, or will we have the old-fashioned submarine type scanning sweeps and "ping sounds" to reduce server loads?

Thanks for the acronym - yes, DACs. And a very good point made - an advantage and a disadvantage hopefully in some kind of balance in the one area, but you don't want to see it expanded to skills. (Ok, being able to buy your way to lots of resources might even be worse than a mechanism of being able to buy skills. NQ obviously cannot ban resource trading, but they can at least refuse to allow skill extraction as one of the 'freedoms within DU'!) I assume you mean skilling the avatar (although skilling the player will hopefully also be important).