Dakanmer

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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."

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.

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.

Try making a valid argument instead of complaining that a valid one has been presented that YOU DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO READ.

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."

Maybe try reading what I suggested before asking that, because I spelled it out very clearly.

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.

Yeah, it's standard pirating. But my point is about balancing the non-standard pirating, not making all travel safe all the time.

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.

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.

100% avoidable just not fly in the pipes...except when that doesn't work. My org has a guy who regularly flies outside the pipe for missions (or did before the change), and "100% avoidable" was constantly disproved. "Less likely," yes, but only to a point that was discussed quite a bit before, following along the lines of "actually, they also watch those other areas. Here are videos showing them catching people who try." If it was a simple matter of going out of the way, you would have a point, because then pirates have to chase people down the old-fashioned way. But it isn't that simple, because you DON'T have to do that when they go direct. Hey, you want things to be fun, then make sure it's balanced so it's not JUST you having fun. You guys complained about people warping before you could shoot them, so you got what you wanted, but with no balance. This is a reasonable balance. You want a spin-up time and full stop to warp so you can get some PVP action? Then have a spin-down time and full stop to leave warp and make things reasonably fair. My points about escorts and the like are still completely valid, whereas yours for keeping a feature that only really favors pirates is just "I have this shiny toy that gives me an advantage since I took away their shiny toy, and I don't want mine taken away, too, because then I won't have fun." You want fun, but so does everyone else. Balance or bust.

Short version: dropping out of warp letting people continue at max speed should be stopped immediately. Force anyone who drops out of warp, manually or upon reaching the destination, to come to a full stop, and lock their controls for a brief period (as is the case when you leave warp automatically). Long version: pirates whined about not getting enough action, and NQ delivered by forcing warp ships to have a spool-up time that could be stopped by a target lock. Pirates were happy. Pirates could use scripting to predict player trajectories, warp over, and cancel warp while retaining high speeds to catch ships that were travelling at max speed. That's total BS. If NQ insists on locking the ship down for warp, they should lock down the radar, as well as force any ships in warp to come to a complete stop when they drop out, regardless of if it's by prematurely stopping or arriving at the destination. By allowing ships to maintain max speed when dropping out of warp early, they give pirates specifically an unfair advantage over others. Pirates specifically, because they're the only ones who benefit from that strategy in a PVP game, with the ultra-rare exception of actual battles taking place and reinforcements warping in...which is a joke, because battles don't last that long to begin with due to there being no large-scale conflicts. This game needs PVP balance, not preferential treatment for trolls/pirates (or whatever helps them sleep better at night calling themselves. I've heard "gankers," and "justifications" for being one, but it's all the same). Making ships slower so that pirates could more easily catch them was just another way to show preferential treatment to them at the expense of people who already sink hours into travel time. Rather than making things slower, they should have just increased the cap and kept the concept of acceleration slowing as your speed increases according to some curve. Throwing out lame "we realize that this will make some people (everyone who even thinks of space travel, except pirates) mad, but we want more people (pirates) to enjoy the game" excuses for giving preferential treatment to pirates is not exactly a great way to convince people that space travel is worth sinking time into....unless they live to troll those who do. Stasis guns might be useful for that, but it goes both ways, and slow ships becoming slower means that there's even less incentive to bother. PVP isn't cheap. Flying isn't cheap. You can't sell damaged elements on the market. Pirates get away with it because that's what makes them happy, and they have the chance for stealing cargo. There is no real motivation for PVP orgs to fight pirates because of the cost, and since taxes go to Aphelia instead of orgs, there's no way to fund them except through donations...and good luck getting anyone but a pirate to fly for 4-6 hours playing escort, when a pirate can warp in at any moment, without any delay between dropping out of warp and shooting. Again, it's preferential treatment. Get some balance, and stop making excuses for coddling pirates. They're the ones who do the bulk of PVP, but that should not mean giving them what they want. It should mean finding ways to make other people want to, rather than forcing them to in the least reasonable ways that put them at a significant disadvantage. You will never entice people to actually do PVP without balance, and without finding ways to get non-pirates, specifically non-pirates, interested in it beyond "we don't have a choice." Because you don't need to entice pirates. They already want it. You need to entice everyone else. Entice, not force.

I'm not sure what API might be useful as a scripting noob, so I can't offer suggestions. I wanted to keep the possibility for API open as a suggestion, though, in case other people had ideas. RDMS would be great, though. Having a public beacon network, or even one requiring a subscription (players/orgs pay a recurring fee for use of existing networks owned by other players/orgs) would make it so every org didn't have to make their own, especially with the limit on the number of orgs a player can be part of. If one of the ideas is to get people to specialize on things so that everyone isn't doing everything, then that would be a big one. This one was more about being able to get the waypoint without having to go into the map and copy it. Opening the map is always lag-inducing, making it sometimes dangerous to open at all (including/especially PVP areas like asteroids and the like). Even having a right-click option to copy/clear the current waypoint would be great. I've seen the clear waypoint in a video, but there's no explanation for how to do it, I haven't been able to replicate it, etc. Adding it to API would just be icing. Thanks for responding. Usually it's a wall of demoralizing silence from NQ.

If you want people to interact more, there are plenty of justifiable/reasonable ways to do it. This is just not one of them by any stretch of the imagination, and it violates the promises made about the game, particularly about being able to play solo or with friends, or however the individual player wants. If you want to play with other people so much that you have to coordinate between dozens/hundreds of them to produce enough stuff to make anything mid-high tier, then you can play that way. Don't suggest that we all be forced to. If it does happen, I can guarantee that a lot more people (than in previous updates) will either boycott until it's reversed, or quit entirely.

Long story short, I would have only one reason to visit this new space outpost: to see it once out of curiosity, and then never again. Why should I bother going to a market that's further away from most of the actual trading going on? Fuel costs money. Travel time slow-boating is already obscene. Why should I bother going to a market whose only draw is that it's in space with 0G? Others have pointed out that moons already fill this role, but...no surprise, Alioth Market 6 is still the trade hub of choice for most people. Once something is established, it's hard to de-establish it for something else without a REALLY good reason. Why should I bother going to a market that is not near the base that took my org insane amounts of time to build? Do a full wipe, then we'll talk...but by the time I can even get there after a wipe, Alioth Market 6 will probably be re-established as the trade hub simply because, you know, it's easier to reach than space, and we come full circle to the "hard to de-establish" issue. As to other suggestions about putting markets in PVP space... Pirates own PVP space. Few orgs/players contest them. Until that changes, PVP space markets are worthless to anyone but pirates and those who can warp into their safe zones...which...why bother when you can just as easily warp to a moon and do business there? More warp locations in dangerous places doesn't entice me to use those locations. Slowboating is already a full day of time invested into doing nothing if you're going a moderate distance round trip. With the changes to max speed, where's the motivation to slowboat at all? It seems like they're just listening to the complaints from pirates (and noticing that, surprise surprise, their system of NPC missions makes it easy to make a fortune quickly using a bunch of alts on a large hauler. Almost like it was predictable. Like they could have devoted time to developing something else that wouldn't be so obviously exploited and force them to ruin space travel even more, rather than change the mission system) and completely ignoring the fact that space travel is a huge time sink already. If it takes an hour to go between Madis and Alioth at max speed (including accelerating up/down) with low/high mass, and they change the max speed to the degree that it appears they will, then going from Madis to Alioth will take multiple hours for even medium haulers. It's like they're trying to make space hauling less appealing than it already is. Now add back in the fact that it's PVP space, or rather, pirate territory...and again, what's the motivation? Find other ways to make PVP relevant to non-pirates, and to NQ, stop coddling pirates at the expense of everyone else. Balance your gameplay so that pirate trolls don't rule/ruin the PVP world as in so many other games. All told, I'm not really impressed with how NQ is doing things. Some stuff, sure, but they're going farther and farther away from the "player created content" that was PROMISED. Alien cores for space defense/mining? Sure, why not. A reason to go to PVP space, except that you still have to deal with the heavy pirate troll advantage and the serious lack of non-pirate players in non-pirate orgs dedicated to PVP. Mission system? Cool. It adds content for players who want to run missions (to a very small degree. It's still not highly used). Escort missions? Are you joking, or what? Slowboating is tedious and can go for 6 hours or longer. You SERIOUSLY think that anyone would do escort missions like that and not expect a high reward that would not only potentially overshoot any potential profits from the haul, but also be better spent buying a lot of warp cells and just warping between planets? You would need to hire at least 2 escorts to be reasonably secure against pirates. Find two non-pirate (because pirates get hard thinking about trolling) players or teams of players willing to waste 4-8 hours constantly watching their radar, and you'll be lucky...and that's before the mass/speed update, which will make those travel times ludicrously longer. More NPC markets instead of player-owned markets? Wasted time that could have been spent improving the actual game or adding features that people actually ask for. Space wrecks? Okay, sure, except for the fact that they apparently took pre-DRM blueprints to be used in their wrecks, opening up code to public distribution that should be locked. Making space wrecks really rare to the point of "you have to accidentally stumble on them once in a blue moon, under the proper star sign, and only if a 2-hump camel farts while facing north," and putting the ones of actual value in pirate territory? Wasted time that could have been spent improving the actual game or adding features that people actually ask for. New stasis weapons? Sounds good. Lowering the max speed based on ship mass? Wasted time that could have been spent improving the actual game or adding features that people actually ask for, and seriously makes me glad that my org can afford to make/buy enough cells to warp heavy loads, because slowboating just went from bad to worse. At least until they decide that pirates don't get enough action and make warping more expensive and interruptible during transit. I can totally see that happening with the way things are going. Different weapon types and sizes? Great. Versatility. Forcing people wanting to specialize in large weapon types to first train all of the sizes below, or people wanting to specialize in other talents being required to train everything else that precedes that talent (like having to get talents in T1-4 ore refining just to focus on T5), and other talents that don't feed into the one they want to specialize in? So much for specialization, when you have to get everything to specialize in something else, making you waste so much time on things that don't make sense. This may seem like a long complaint-filled rant, but honestly, I don't think NQ actually listens to most of the issues that people bring up based on their development priorities, and the lack of real interaction between devs/admin and players. So, here's some feedback, NQ. I'm FAR from the first one to put it out there. Let's see what you decide to DU with it.

I forgot to add that waypoints should also be able to be cleared via API. Not just set/get,

Some more API that should be included: Warp drive API Currently can only do warp.activate(). Should be able to do deactivate and allow for setting/getting warp destination, as well as warp cell cost. If it's displayed on the widget, it should be something players can use in scripts Warp beacon API and/or perms Currently no way to manually decide who gets to use the beacon and who doesn't

Some things are missing from LUA API that I think should be there: Get docked construct name by ID Currently you can only get its ID, except through radar. This function should be available as a general parent construct function, not just radar. Get docked construct position/orientation by ID These functions exist for getting the parent's position/orientation, but not the docked construct Get active waypoint If the player has a waypoint active, return it as a ::pos string, just as with the function to get waypoint from player position. A category for "database" in the codex Some functions use database to get information, like database.getConstruct and database.getPlayer(ID). Categories for other function types that aren't listed but can be used, if there are any others (like database), or updating existing categories with functions that aren't listed but exist Self explanatory. People can't use functions if they don't know they even exist, what they do, or how to properly call them

More on starting fresh: For people who are well-established (in resources and accumulated quanta), this isn't as big of a problem in the short term, as there are still people who have established mining outposts to feed resources to the market and build bases or constructs without worrying about always being strapped for even the most basic resources on simple or modest projects. For everyone else, though... Ore distributions make it less than desirable to have bases on most planets because of the lack of basic/T1 ores to sustain development, as well as T2 ores for space fuel and other development. For example, Sicari has really low levels of T1 ores, low levels each of a single T2 and T3 ore (only half of the territories have any T3), and after over 50 scans no kolbeckite. By comparison, Jago also has kolbeckite and some other T2+ ores, but only quartz represents the T1 section, and all of the ores have low quantities; kolbeckite, as on Sicari, hasn't shown up once in over 70 scans (columbite shows up in 40% of territories). Moons, as before the change, have almost none of the T3+ ores they claim, but reasonable amounts of two T1 ores. The problem with this distribution is that 1) the market for any T4/5 ore will be monopolized by very few, and most especially 2) expansion beyond the safe zone planets will be almost entirely for mining the rarer T3+ ores instead of building legitimate/sustainable bases that don't require constant resupply from other planets/moons of the most basic T1 ores. In both cases, logistics will have most resources being transported towards the safe zone planets out of necessity, rather than creating networks of trade, and that will put a huge strain on fuel resources, which will put the pressure on the few planets/moons that have reasonable T2 ore distributions/quantities. For those who are already established, this is less of a problem because of the ability (via taxes and resources/infrastructure) to support multiple mining outposts across many planets, but when starting fresh (assuming a wipe on release and for most of a year after), getting the resources to expand to other planets will mean not just setting up a base elsewhere, but bringing enough T1 ore to make up for the deficiencies of the new base's planet, and having enough fuel production to sustain constant resupply. Sustained fuel production requires industry, which requires a claimed territory (doing it on a space core with limited hauling capacity makes that option silly, but the only viable one for anyone without a Sanctuary TCU), which requires a TCU, which can only be built via industry on a claimed territory (the circularity of this problem is why industry in space is the only viable option unless everyone has a Sanctuary TCU, and last I checked, there is only one Sanctuary moon, and it has limited territories. Planning for orgs pooling resources acting as a limiter for how many territories actually get claimed is naïve, because everyone with a free no-tax TCU will be trying to claim their own right away after release)...sustained fuel production will require expansion to other planets, which mostly are not suitable as much more than mining outposts for specific ores, which brings it back to the core safe worlds being where everyone not running resources from those outposts back to those core worlds will be concentrated. (As things are now, most people are focused around Alioth because of the market system. All of the resources are there, and since you have to go to where the stuff you want to buy is, it's far simpler to just stay on Alioth than to expand and open up shop on another planet.) The distribution of marketplaces is therefore unjustifiable, as only one or two would be necessary to adequately service any given planet, with the exception of those that have enough resources to reasonably support a base. Jago, with its incredible ore deficiency, only really needs 2 marketplaces. Distribution scarcity, coupled with the low economic potential (taxes on marketplace transactions and territory upkeep, as well as high and scaling costs for schematics, as well as other fees, offset by the comparatively insignificant 150k/day allowance) will make the game so tediously slow that it isn't hard to imagine it being a very niche game from release onward, particularly if the plan to wipe on release is maintained (as it should be, IMO); large numbers of spaceships and bases (representing a high player count) will become untenable even with asteroid mining. The drudgery involved in starting out from scratch through becoming reasonably developed (including via specialization and trade), even as an energetic org from day 1 of release, because of the above factors of ore distribution/scarcity, taxes and the like, will be soul crushing for many. (I've spent countless hours/days collecting resources across many games, but this is obscene and takes away from the ability to do much of anything but tediously gathering resources for the first several months. Almost no PVP, almost no creative ship/base designing.) Maybe this is all just me complaining about what I see as problems of the game, but I believe these to be legitimate issues that should at the least be considered further. As with the previous post, all of this stems from decisions about the game that changed dynamics without appearing to have considered the unintended consequences (namely that they want to manufacture a slow pace in the game, and these things will do that at the cost of making it an AFK or "log in, set stuff up and get allowance, log out and play something else" game for the bulk of its first year, and then probably more of the same as it ages). There are better ways of doing that which don't make the game unnecessarily tedious: If you can put marketplaces everywhere, you can have multiple starting planets so that there isn't one natural focus of the game on Alioth. If you want schematics, you can have a research aspect to come up with them instead of buying them from the system you pay your taxes to. If you want money to circulate, have max territory count as a talent/org rather than based on tax, and allow individuals/orgs to create taxes for using their marketplaces and other services. Make it player-driven instead of the system. An allowance is fine to get money into the economy, but should probably be capped at each player getting a certain amount over a period of time, and then it gets cut off so that inflation doesn't go crazy. Plenty of ways to do things.

I decided to look at how starting fresh would be, and aside from it meaning months of building tons of containers and (many people) pooling their daily allowance to buy schematics for the most basic stuff, something else became apparent: You can't advance in tiers without mining asteroids. Because the mining option for planets/moons has been removed entirely, you can't get anything beyond T2 ores without mining asteroids. T2 are ground spawns on every planet, with the type available depending on the planet, but there are no T3-5 ground spawns. The mining units, which are supposed to take the place of digging tunnel networks, require the same tier of ore to make as they dig up. That means that while a T2 (uncommon) mining unit is plausible to make with the resources available (especially on Sanctuary), the T3 mining unit is not, because you can't access the resources to make it. Since there was no wipe to make this apparent, I believe it may be an oversight. Making it entirely necessary for people to mine asteroids for simple advancement seems like a mistake. Mining asteroids is a great way to gather a lot of ore quickly (assuming no competition), but by making it necessary, most people not in a large org will be excluded until those orgs have had their fill (I'd say half to a full year at least, given the artificially slow pace of progression via ludicrously expensive schematics, high territory and trade taxes, and a small daily allowance, which puts most player income back into the system early on, rather than circulation in a player economy). I recommend looking back at the changes and how the affect players starting from scratch. When you remove or change a feature, consider that impact, not just how it will slow things down or help with lag or other things. Those are primary concerns that improve the game, but so is making it reasonable to progress as a solo player, or even as a small org. It might make sense if all you care about is slowing things down, but there are other ways to accomplish that, such as randomizing your planet of origin (since there are multiple marketplaces on each planet/moon, there's no reason multiple starting points can't also be created), using a system of research to come up with schematics that can then be traded (solid market for that, and it would be something to specialize in), and no doubt many other ways that can work alone or in combination. Making things artificially expensive (schematics are legit, but there's no reason they shouldn't be reproducible or cheap. They're data meant to be used to rebuild civilization, not state secrets. And who are we paying all our taxes to?) while giving a daily allowance doesn't seem like a reasonable approach for the background that we're supposedly coming into (a super-advanced future where we're all refugees trying to restart civilization).