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Dakanmer

Alpha Tester
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  1. You've got some serious delusions about non-PVP players that you think "check the problem from all angles" doesn't also apply to you. There are SOME who do as you say, making throw-away ships to slip in, mine a node and leave for massive profit; my friends have toyed with the idea, even, because of how you people force us to think about it just to get resources we need to build the stuff you think we've all got in spades. There are far more of us who CANNOT AFFORD TO DO PVP, and CANNOT GET ENOUGH PEOPLE TOGETHER TO DO IT. This isn't a full-time job, where everyone in an org is expected to always be online at the same time because they all live in the same time zone range. Scheduling time to go mining even inside the safe zone is rough for many orgs. If we're lucky, the people I hang with have only a few on at any given time because of work and time zones, and I know we're not the only ones. For us, our mining ships aren't built the way they are "because we're lazy and don't want to defend ourselves," but because we CAN'T defend ourselves; we don't have the people, and without one of our guys running tons of missions with alts to get money fast (which shouldn't even be a thing, but neither should many other things that are), we wouldn't have the money AND ore resources to build even basic defenses...and if we did, PVPers would just do what PVPers do and work slightly harder for easy money. See, for YOU, there's a reward to PVP. For EVERYONE ELSE, there is only risk, with no reward. You are out there (be honest with yourself, and us) hunting down ships that you then loot and fix, and try to sell back to the original owners. My feelings about that kind of behavior aside, you get all of the reward for almost zero risk. And yes, you people DO focus on ships that can't defend themselves. I don't know how many times I've been told that you guys tend to ignore ships that have guns. It's not about PVP, but easy loot. YOU may believe that it isn't, but it always was, with people wanting actual PVP fights with the actual threat of losing being the minority. And that brings us to PVP for everyone else. There is no reward, only risk, which is why you don't see orgs dedicated to pirate hunting, doing escort missions, etc. There is no reward worth the massive amount of time wasted on the majority of the trip, or the resources spent on the ships to do it. We're not searching people to kill and loot to make up for the costs. We're not swimming in resources as you originally claimed, either. Many of your ships are just as throw-away as ours, just as minimally geared as ours, which is also why you lot tend to avoid fighting solo ships that run armed (maybe YOU don't, but a trend is a trend, so don't deny that "put a gun on your ship, even if there's no ammo" is legit advice to avoid PVP). For many of us, that's all we can really afford to lose if we want the game to be at all enjoyable. Because we do other things than PVP, and those other things cost. And then there's the flight time. You've flown PVP space. You know how long trips can be between planets. You may not know that many of us miner-types don't go to asteroids to mine them for a few minutes before leaving to avoid you, but prefer to spend time eating the asteroids so we can use the ore to build better ships (you're geared towards PVP, so you focus on getting that. We're not, because we've got so many other things to do than just PVP). Do you SERIOUSLY think that REAL PEOPLE with REAL LIVES want to spend several hours watching their radar while twiddling their thumbs when they could be doing something more interesting? (For mining runs in PVP space, there's always got to be someone on the ship ready to flee because of what you're complaining about losing. Do you really think there are infinite numbers of us with nothing better to do?) "Just warp, then" isn't an option anymore because of the schematics time/costs...and because we don't have access to nearly the quantity of the necessary resources you seem to believe we've all got. And how much do you think that kind of escort service is worth, that non-PVP players can easily afford it? Just how much do you think we ACTUALLY make from just existing? Again, without mission runners, the economy would be much weaker simply because the costs for making schematics, paying territory taxes, buying ore/parts, etc etc etc, is so high, and only the super-orgs would have any resources to speak of. Nearly ALL of the risk and cost is on the side of the non-PVPers. It's not because we're lazy or coddled. It's because there is ZERO REWARD for PVP for most of us; only risk. For you, it's almost all reward with very little risk, unless you have a rival org or are a loner...but as a loner in PVP, you still have far less risk than non-PVPers, and far more reward, and even with rivals, you still get your jollies by ganking us and funding your own efforts...meanwhile, those of us who aren't the minority you describe have to use throw-away ships just so we don't lose a month of progress. You complain an awful lot about how PVPers are being wronged, meanwhile showing you have no understanding of what non-PVPers deal with. This game is a huge open world/solar system, where spending 2-8 hours of mindless travel isn't unheard-of, where not everyone is part of a super-org that can afford good ships that they can have spare personnel to defend at all times, where resources have to be split between multiple outlets (if you're a big org, you have many demands for spending that aren't PVP), and where the threat of losing a ship to PVP can be equivalent to a week or even a month of game time lost for people who can't play as a full-time job. There's obviously a lot of work that needs to be put into the game to make its PVP better, but you seem to be laboring under the delusion that this is unique to DU. It isn't. This is a genre-wide problem, because you PVPers MAKE IT ONE. It's a problem in literally every MMO with piracy that I've ever played or heard of. When there is no real reward for fighting pirates (how do you think an economy like that would function? Have you ever actually thought about it beyond "well, people would pay taxes..."? Have you thought about WHO would do it beyond "well, PVPers would do it for money..."? I doubt you have), but plenty from being one, people stop wanting to bother with PVP...except for those whose entire purpose for playing is piracy. And again, be honest and admit that that's the vast majority of all PVP encounters. Not legit PVP, but as someone else said, PVE with extra steps. And then PVP becomes what it is in DU, just as in other games: a pirate's paradise, with almost no opposition besides other pirates, and when other opposition does show up, an enemy to rally the rest of the pirates to wipe out and discourage others from trying. Rather than whining about how unfair it is for gankers who can't have easy marks with easy strategies for ganking, complain about the PVP system being massively unbalanced so that easy ganking is even a thing (yes, you probably believe that it's strategy-intensive, which is why you insult the rest of us as being dumb and not using our heads to avoid you), that there is no incentive for non-gankers to bother with PVP, that the system itself is garbage for various reasons (like line of sight not being necessary to shoot stuff), etc etc etc. Complain about the system that makes PVP so unbalanced in YOUR favor (the safe zones give us all a place to not deal with the craptastic system which, without the safe zones, would STILL favor you, because we're not pirates who drool over more piracy), not the people who don't have any interest in being target practice and breakable piggybanks for gankers.
  2. The point is to stop this sort of thing from being necessary, NOT to make fighter jet/hauler hybrids. It's nothing but a shell made out of 128 L space brakes, 144 atmo brakes, 176 L adjustors, 16 XL basic space engines, 34 L basic atmo engines, 20 L basic vertical boosters, , 12 L stabilizers (because there aren't any L wings or ailerons), 18 M wings, 10 L space tanks, 8 L atmo tanks, 24 L containers, and a few other things. It's a heavy hauler that needs far too much crap to haul, and even without any cargo turns really slowly. The voxels are mostly just a wire frame to mark where elements go for symmetry, with a very small amount for "looking cool." Tiered engines and the like are too expensive in time/resources (worse because of the schematics) at this point, especially since T2+ deposits have become more rare than in beta (a guy scanned a large number of contiguous tiles and found none at all. On Thades), and getting asteroids is a pretty big competition, so we have to work with what we can. This is why bigger elements are necessary. Tiered brakes/adjustors/airfoils would be nice, but those are more "tweaks" to the basics than realistic replacements for larger sizes. And yes, sadly, NQ will probably just continue to limit everything. From day 1, creativity in anything but voxel work has been stifled by NQ constantly saying "that doesn't fit the direction we want to go" even as they advertise the whole game as "player-driven" etc. That whole approach to development is ridiculous, and it's seriously making me think I wasted the money I spent on 13 months worth of subscriptions.
  3. I know I'm far from the only person to suggest this in the last few months or few years. I know NQ has heard it many times. We need larger flight elements. We have XL space engines, and we have tiered atmo/space engines and hovers/vboosters, which is great. We don't have XL atmo engines. We don't have XL atmo brakes or retros or adjustors, nor do we have tiered brakes/adjustors. We need: XL atmospheric engines XL atmospheric brakes XL retro-rocket brakes XL adjustors XL hover engines XL vertical boosters Military/safe variants of atmo/space brakes and adjustors L and XL wings L and XL ailerons It is beyond ridiculous how many L brakes and adjusters have to be loaded down on a ship to make it flyable. Even simple and lightweight designs can require a ridiculous number of each, making designers have to find ways to hide them under voxels so that the designs don't look like something a Warhammer orc would throw together. But looks aren't the only problem. It's also the element count. When you need hundreds of flight elements to fly a ship, the lag generated by those elements can get pretty intense, and that's not even looking at scripts that get info from/about them for display or use. When you need hundreds of flight elements to make a ship capable of flight that the achievements call for (100k m^3 of material, fly 1kt in atmo, haul 10kt in space at max speed), or even for normal high-capacity hauling, you stop caring about making a ship that looks good (they're already constrained to the volume of a square, rather than having the option to have a longer/wider/shorter build volume) and focus only on making sure you've got enough brakes, adjustors and engines. These demands for bigger flight elements have been made over and over by many people for the past several years. It would be great if @NQ would actually listen and take action on an issue that is this old. Ships requiring >100 L atmo brakes and >100 L space brakes and >10 XL space engines and >10 L atmo engines and >50-100 adjustors are butt-ugly lagmonsters, but people make them because they need/want what they can do.
  4. I get that NQ thought they were doing a good thing by changing how schematics were done, because it got more money out of the system more consistently and time gated industry for anyone without a fortune and a zillion alts, but...well, they do a lot of things that run 180 away from the whole "player driven" etc concept, and reject the most sane solutions and ideas in favor of the dumbest. That's kind of expected at this point (the mass exoduses from the game didn't happen for no reason, and a lot of people are still waiting for serious improvements and NQ to make good on their promises before coming back), so all anyone can hope for is mitigation. So mitigation. Schematics are trash, but it's what we have. Get rid of schematics for pure, product and fuel production, regardless of tier. You DO NOT need all that much complexity in production to melt stuff, which is exactly what pure/product production is, nor do you need much complexity in fuel production, since the machines aren't doing much beyond catalyzing a reaction or distilling a substance. You need more complexity to produce a screw, a pipe, an injector, a power system, or any number of parts, yet there are no schematics for those things. There should be some sanity and consistency to how a system is implemented, even if it's blatantly to slow people down and get money out of the system. For the schematics that remain, balance their costs so that what they ultimately produce isn't so expensive that people will intentionally avoid all PVP just to protect their huge investment. The costs associated with T2+ voxels alone makes them a luxury for bling, rather than viable armor for PVP. The pure ore schematics cost too much for what they produce (especially at higher tiers); the product schematics cost too much for both the inputs and outputs; and the cost to output ratio of voxels is just sickening. If you want T5 armor plating (like pure titanium), you will end up with a cost of ~148,000,000 quanta for 10m^3 of voxels if you do buy the raw ore on the MP (because we're all supposed to specialize so that the economy functions as NQ wants). Most ships require a LOT more than 10m^3 of voxels, even if we're just looking at armor plating and not all the interior work (which will also probably be really expensive). Now put that into perspective: you're not just taking a voxel shell out into combat, but expensive elements. A ship designed for combat, with the best armor plating, will likely use higher-tiered elements, which themselves can run from hundreds to around 1.2 million quanta (space radar L is no joke, and you only need one of those), bringing the total element cost into the hundreds of millions (cost of schematics to make pure + product + element + the cost of the ores themselves). And that doesn't even look at ammo costs from schematics + ore. How often does NQ think that PVP will happen? On what scale do they want it to happen? Any org that invests that kind of time and money into a combat ship, only to lose a fortune every time their voxels get evaporated, would have to be ludicrously rich...which means that the only viable PVP for PVPers is to either a) get that apex ship and only hunt helpless people, or b) make a bunch of weaker ships that only cost a tiny fortune. PVP battles (not counting pirate activity, because that's not battle) will be predictably rare to the point of being an event, if at all. Because you need a fortune to do it, and throwing all of that money (and time) away for a spectacle is just insane. The time required to produce schematics is just bonkers, so reduce their production times drastically. If you don't have a large org or a zillion alts, you'll be stuck with a small factory. If you do have those things, you'll be stuck with constantly feeding schematics into each unit, because there's no system to distribute them via a central hub. There have been a ton of good alternatives to the schematic system suggested, even before the schematic system was decided on. NQ, as usual, ignored all of those more reasonable ideas proposed by people who still believed that NQ intended to keep its promises about "player-driven" etc, and instead went with this craptastic system. So these are my balancing suggestions to a system that never should have been implemented in a player-driven game. Especially not since we're talking about digital schematics being essentially uploaded into machines that, for some unknown reason the machine's developers decided would delete its database every time produced something, and then load the next digital schematic to be used and deleted. @NQ, tell us how often you load a function in your coding, and then delete it from your computer after every time it gets called, forcing you to re-write it and re-load it into the computer. Seriously, that's how stupid this system is. You would fire anyone who came up with that method for coding, and you would be right to do it. Using time gating and draining resources as an excuse to implement it, when you would fire someone for exactly those reasons, says that you don't respect the community just as loudly as ignoring the many alternatives that were more reasonable (like requiring regular industry maintenance because of machine degradation from use, or player-created schematics that don't get deleted but require talents to "research," or any number of others).
  5. If you were really looking at player feedback and responding to it...this nonsense wouldn't have even been considered. Sorry, I just don't buy it. A research tree would have been infinitely better. Research stuff, make copies of schematics from that research, use/sell schematics, but make it cost time (you don't need money for a digital thing, and if the machines aren't using digital schematics, then what's the point of calling it a futuristic game?) instead of quanta. Yes, people can make zillions of alts to speed up the research and acquisition rate, BUT THEY DO THAT ALREADY FOR EVERYTHING ELSE, AND WILL DO THAT FOR THIS AS WELL, so think ahead, have an open dialogue where you can work with the community to get the best (i.e. the most widely supported after discussion) ideas, etc. Basically, don't just make something up at the last minute and say that it's because of community input. Because that's the vibe for this. No real thought put into it. Just checking a box in a hurry. The more of these "we listened to the players and this is our response" posts that I see, the less interested I am in seeing the final product.
  6. Like some other people, I got excited about the new gravity-inverted containers. I set up a spreadsheet and everything to see if they would be worth the exorbitant cost of production...only to find out that, by design, they do not work as anything but standard, lower-volume containers when linked to a hub. For those who haven't tried making them, the schematic costs alone are nothing to sneeze at. I built a single production line for advanced containers, with enough sub-production to make sure there's always just enough stuff to keep the assembler running. Material-wise, it's not super-horrid, but time-wise it's a monster. Producing these containers (worse for rare, and I'm not dumb enough to even consider exotic, because the plasma cost and time sink are not worth the end product) is slow, so expect to only replace containers on ships you've already built....except....not even that, because, again, by design they don't work to reduce mass when linked to a hub. In short, that means that you will now need to design new ships that put the containers at the center so that your adjusters will work properly (meaning turning doesn't result in pitching and rolling). Cost-wise, it would be better to just add more engines on a ship with standard containers, because at least then you can link to a hub and have the same result. Sooo....why bother with gravity-inverted containers in the first place, if the intent was to have them act as single-container units from the get-go? What is the point? Designing a ship around individual containers, which you have to manually distribute resources between to get the center of gravity just right, was done away with when hubs were introduced. Why bring it back while wrapping it in the c***-tease "but you have a small mass reduction of the contents" ploy? To be clear, I stopped my production of these containers. They're effectively lesser-volume basic containers that just cost a lot of time and resources to produce. That makes them worthless. No value added to the game except for ships designed around 1-2 containers with no hubs, and the cost doesn't even justify that for most cases. Maybe I'm just salty, but the fact that the official response to identifying the issue was to point out that they were intended to work this way doesn't give me much hope for the future of the game. If it was intended to work this way, but also to be changed later to work with a hub, then that would be fine, because that's the way of development...but not even that. So a suggestion for the devs, if you want a feature to be seen as actually adding value to the game: make sure it isn't just a gimmick before releasing it. This new gravity-inverted container type is a gimmick; a container that reduces mass, but only when not linked to a hub, and is supposed to go on a dynamic construct where mass and volume and center of gravity are important factors. The optimized containers at least work properly when linked to a hub, making them worth producing. If it's about mixing container types/tiers, then do something simple, and make it so that the reduction only applies if all containers are of the same tier/type (independent of size, obviously). That, at the bare minimum, is reasonable. This is a mixed rant and feedback. I wasted a lot of money setting up production, and got my hopes up that it would be worth the cost. Now I have millions worth of schematics that are worthless to me. Obviously, saltiness is to be expected, especially since it wasn't clearly explained that the mass reduction wouldn't work when linked to a hub. Something like that, for something so costly, speaks to incompetence or malice, given that it was by design, even if it was just an oopsie-doodle "I forgot to mention this really important 'feature' with this new element."
  7. Unknown Wrecks are a thing. You can "salvage" from them. Great start. But you can only salvage a set maximum volume in elements and voxels. The voxel maximum was ludicrously tiny; you can't even remove a wall big enough to walk through (that I recall). The element maximum...was slightly better. The wreck I just came upon had 4 L containers, 4 L space fuel tanks, 2 XL space engines, and a bunch of other less interesting stuff...but you can't salvage even 1 of the larger elements. You can certainly waste scrap repairing them before finding out they're too big, though. NQ, please increase the salvage volume cap so that you can at least loot the largest element, even if you can only loot one and nothing else from the construct. Having them there without being able to take them because of the maximum is silly, and a massive nerd-tease deserving a good thwomping.
  8. I've made my point clear. It's obvious that people arguing against it aren't actually reading any of it, and are instead knee-jerking about "oh, no! He's attacking pirating! All hands on deck to argue against whatever he's saying should change!" I won't post further, because it's pointless trying to argue with people who won't do the bare minimum of reading the suggestion, or the further explicitly-stated clarifications/reiterations.
  9. Try making a valid argument instead of complaining that a valid one has been presented that YOU DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO READ.
  10. Yes, people would rather just cry to NQ instead of actually learning a valid strategy...hence the nerf that pirates cried to NQ about to create the full-stop and spin-up of warp drives.... I offered a reasonable balance to an unfair advantage. That's all. Take away unfair advantages like being able to warp immediately. Fine. But balance it out so that there is NO unfair advantage. It's not whining to say "that's an unfair advantage, here's a fair solution," especially not when pirates said "that's an unfair advantage, so take it away and give us an unfair advantage."
  11. Maybe try reading what I suggested before asking that, because I spelled it out very clearly.
  12. It is trolling, plain and simple. Yes, there's a warning, just like there's a warning on a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of alcohol saying "this is dangerous." That doesn't change the fact that pirates in games do it primarily for fun, i.e. to troll, just like smokers and alcoholics use their products for their enjoyment. Blaming the people who get trolled for the troll trolling them doesn't change the fact of what happened, and trying to suggest it does only proves the point further.
  13. Yeah, it's standard pirating. But my point is about balancing the non-standard pirating, not making all travel safe all the time.
  14. It was nerfed because pirates whined about not getting enough action. Nobody said anything about un-nerfing it. I EXPLICITLY said that it should be nerfed for EVERYONE, not just slow-boaters. I'm talking about balancing, and you're trying to straw-man it to make you guys appear to be the real victims when someone says "maybe they shouldn't get to keep their advantage, since they took it away from their victims." B.A.L.A.N.C.E., not special treatment, not un-nerf.
  15. Maybe if I put it into simpler terms, you'll understand the problem: Kid #1 has a shiny toy. Kid #2 has a shiny toy. Kid #1 whines to an adult that kid #2 has a shiny toy that makes it so kid #1 can't have fun. The adult takes away kid #2's shiny toy, but lets kid #1 keep theirs. Kid #2 then says "that's not fair. If you take mine away, you should take theirs away, too." That brings us to now, where kid #1 is saying "that's not fair. I should be allowed to keep my shiny toy and have fun, even though they can't keep theirs." Except that we're talking about kid #1 actually stealing from kid #2 after beating them up for a lauhg, with almost (almost) nobody who actually stands up to people like kid #1 because there's almost no incentive to, and plenty of incentive NOT to (it's not cheap, there's basically no reward, etc). Like you people defend your shiny toy with "stop trying to take away my shiny toy," the "best" response is "just warp directly. Don't slowboat at all, because they WILL catch you before you can even respond. Here's some videos proving my point." Complaining about balance is a [filtered] move after all that whining to gain an advantage. Sure, you can slowboat out of the pipe, but that just leaves the STANDARD threat of pirate attacks, which aren't uncommon already. That STANDARD threat should be the only threat, because that forces pirates to put in the effort to chase people down, which is only fair given that the people they troll have to also put in the effort to fly for multi-hour trips.
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