ManfredSideous

Has NQ given any consideration to just rebranding themselves to Banana Republic Development Inc? It seems to be a more fitting name.

Has NQ given any consideration to just rebranding themselves to Banana Republic Development Inc? It seems to be a more fitting name.

Has NQ given any consideration to just rebranding themselves to Banana Republic Development Inc? It seems to be a more fitting name.

Has NQ given any consideration to just rebranding themselves to Banana Republic Development Inc? It seems to be a more fitting name.

We are getting tired of the only real content in the game being pretty vanity constructs which aren't functionally superior. The much-promoted space elevators are functionally inferior to element elevators. There is not much reason at all to hold and maintain space stations. Twitter, twitch, reddit and forums are all full with pretty looking ships that aren't being put to use for the lack of a greater purpose. We can't attack the much-advertised freeports and the big cities. There is no reason at all to get together, introduce bureaucracy, get organized. The only group of people who are constantly rewarded and marketed are those who are willing to put in hundreds of hours to make a few construct pretty. This game has no room for greatness for empire builders, pirates, mercenaries, warlords,, explorers, and most others who don't want to be patient architects. Just a look at the official twitter would confirm this.
 
Sandboxes are grounded on ecosystems where there is a risk/reward balance. Rewards are positioned in a way that you get more if you risk more; and the risk is typically conflict with other players. NQ seem to be inexperienced with this kind of game design but they need to focus on ecosystem-building and now. They need to make hires with ecosystem-building as the greater purpose. Entire teams need to be allocated to this. This should be prioritized over less important quality of life things like mining bots, voxel editors and such. Even mechanical PvP improvements are inferior to a functioning ecosystem. The current early implementation of PvP would keep us playing it if only we had people to shoot at thanks to a well-functioning ecosystem which makes them take risks.
 
The game needs rewards to fight over. Ore (especially high tier) should have been way sparser, more permanent in tiles, and we should have been able to fight over it (over tiles). Even if they introduced territory warfare today, there will be nothing to fight over with this implementation of mining. A meganode expires in a day, and that is the timeframe in which a hex is valuable. If asteroids will give us things to fight over, we need them today. But they need to be implemented in just the right window, so they are not too abundant which leads to zero conflict, and they are not too sparse which creates monopolies. 
 
We need things to discover, explore. The JC's "Ready Player One" approach to puzzles leads to bad implementation and waste of dev effort. The game doesn't need one major headline-making puzzle chased by only a minority of people. It needs puzzles, events, exploration rewards that are constantly respawning, that are inclusive to many players, and that don't expire; so people log in everyday and have something to do besides mining, factories and building. The rewards should be abundant and persistent enough for many others to participate. Even WoW in beta in 2003 managed to put some herbs here, some surface ore there, a treasure chest behind the waterfall to make people look for things on the map. There is no such activity in DU except mass territory scanning, which is mostly an unengaging afk activity. Wrecks didn't cut it. Again, NQ needs to get the sparse/abundant ratio right with these things.
 
We also need things to shoot at besides consenting PvP'ers. New ways to get caught while doing valued work (eg hauling) needs to be introduced. NPCs would have been a great source for this as well.  Just keep respawning a few NPCs between planetary routes and that would create content.
 
The game has so many rewards to distribute in the aforementioned activities. Blueprints and quanta could have come from exploration activities instead of inorganic daily login rewards or the bot orders.

Industry update failed to create the interaction and specialization it was supposed to create. People are mostly back to their gigafactories and t1 elements are again being sold at a loss. The update just made people go mine some meganode to raise initial capital, visit some planets for blueprints, and build some higher tier industry machines. In a functioning ecosystem such as Eve Online, trade comes from the scarcity and uneven distribution of source material (such as ore, blueprints); not from capital requirements to go into industry.
 
We should have been forced to make machines to do proper mining (or even building) too. The nanosuit does too many jobs which could have been done by interesting constructs. Making dynamic constructs for underground mines or to build our static constructs would have been an entire area to excel at.
 
There are plans for further mistakes such as taking contracts from Eve and misleadingly calling them "player-made missions". A "mission" implies there is a backstory, a unique purpose, some new experience and unraveling for people who go through it. "Put X amount of ore in my container Y" is a contract. It's a shallower activity. It might be an alternative way of making money. It's not a mission. It's not an "experience".
 
Another mistake will be invalidating miner work and opening up great fields to RMT'ers by introducing passive income via mining bots.
 
Meanwhile, everyday I see JC tweet another pretty-looking vanity design and say "possibilities are endless". And I ask myself if I should keep trusting this game's future. If he wanted a cooler-looking Minecraft then why spend so much money to design it as a single shard persistent universe at all?

Havoc will be there.

Good changes (mostly).  What is to stop me from making a small cross section L core with L weapons? Because I can see that being meta. IMHO core sizes need some built in invisible cross section to them that prevents the behavior I have described.  NQ I am a 16+ year EVE veteran that played at the very edge of mechanics even personally forcing the developer to change there game due to my creations. Let me make something abundantly clear WE , I will abuse mechanics to the absolute degree if we think it will give us an advantage over our opponents because winning is more fun than losing. So when you make changes that effect PVP or the economy you really need to have a think on how players can and will abuse your changes. Because I promise you I and WE will. I am going to shift to L cores with small cross sections and L weapons and my ship will be more potent than an XS , S , M with the same cross section.

IMHO larger core sizes need to some extent signature blooms baked into the core to combat the scenario I have presented.  I will illustrate below.
XS Core ship with  20 voxel wide front = 20 voxel wide cross section
S core ship with 20 Voxel wide front = 25 voxel wide cross section  (s core gives 25% bloom)
M core ship with 20 Voxel wide front = 30 voxel wide cross section ( m core gives 50% bloom)
L core ship with 20 Voxel wide front = 40 voxel wise cross section ( L core gives 100% bloom)
 
So you can see from the example above baking this into the cores stops the abuse that I laid out we players will do. So the next argument will be "well why use a larger core"  the answer is because they can hold more armor more container space for replacement elements and so on so you can stay in the fight longer.  Also destroyed elements should be have some material that could be salvaged by players so people can have spoils of victory in pvp.  I don't actually care about loot in PVP the experience is what I play for but I admit and understand that others see the loot as an integral part of the experience and reward for victory.  So being able to somehow salvage some monetary value from a vanquished foes battle steed will go a long way in appeasing a good portion of your players.
 
Next critique is destructible elements. For PVP this is an awesome change for non-pvp not so much. My suggestion is for non-pvp aka collision is that collision cannot break an element ( make it red) only damage it ( make it yellow). ITT several players have illustrated that due to bugs , things not loading or server / client issues desynch etc leads to ship crashes or collisions.  So I would highly encourage you with a rethink on non-pvp element damage or you will have a large part of your customers gnashing teeth.
 
In closing I just want to say that in a Sandbox MMO destruction is the seed of life. I can go on to ad nauseum of the hows and whys justifying and proving my point.  However someone did a much job than me in a much better way.   Let me introduce you to Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg from Zorg industries in the cult classic Fifth Element.   Enjoy the clip!
 
♥ Manny