Shynras

I think this is a really important matter so I'd like to give my opinion as an avid sandbox (and voxel-based games) player, hopefully it helps. For me giving the possibility to build "Landmark style" is not a good choice: 1)You need to enter a mode where your mouse moves your pointer instead of your camera (clunky, confusing) 2)Since you can't move your camera, you often doesn't even use your wasd to move your character (to avoid losing vision), and if you do it, it feels cluncky, since you still can't move your camera 3)To make this mode viable, you will probably be able to place blocks from a good range, and this will not give a player the feeling he's really building, it would feel a lot more like a 3d modeling software than a game Regarding the building with your crosshair: 1)You need to directly place blocks, you need to move, jump to reach any spots and you always have the chance to see your creation from a different perspective. 2)You need to climb on to the top of your ship, you'll need to create ladders, scaffolding and stuff like that. It would feel more realistic. You're directly moving, placing blocks, removing them, shaping your creation. Not being able to place every single block with a crosshair view, is actually, imho, a good thing, because it make the game feels realistic, you'll need to find a solution by yourself to reach that spot and add depth to the game. In any case I'll be happy wathever you do, I can deal with that

pretty sure that's what territorial units are supposed to be. When you claim a territory, that is a safezone, but with a window of time of vulnerability. You don't risk to lose your empire overnight if you're sleeping irl

Any kind of safezone, would kill the pvp, the economy and the social aspect of the game. This is one of the most common ways a game fails nowadays. A complete anarchy should be fine, as long he community will be able to build public and relatively safe social hub

Beside the fact that you can just save $ before getting to the "bad times", they already said that there going to be an item in the game similar to the Eve Plex. If you're not familiar with it, a plex grants you a month of sub, and can be bought by players to trade in game with others. This means, that if you played for some time, when you have problems irl, you can just buy a month with ingame currency from other players. Problem solved

I'm pretty sure we will see some Death Stars on a lower scale. But I personally doubt "thousands of players" will work together to build a gigantic 1:1 ball bigger than a planet. It's not good in a fight, you'd need hundreds of players to control it, the amount of time and resources to complete it would be insane, and you could lose all in a sigle fight.

I doubt that a player will spend his time on a "shop" selling stuff all day, it doesn't make sense. There will probably be a specific block that you place and put stuff to sell, with the price you want. NPC animals would make sense, but personally, since there's a ton of work to be made on this game, this is not a feature that I consider a priority, since it requires quite some work to be implemented properly

I just hope that those skills are not going to be limited by time, like EVE Online is, the game would feel "limited" to me in a certain way. I don't want to be forced to choose a path and stick with it, while switching would be so much punishing. Depending on my mood of the day, i could build, farm, fight, trade, explore or swim, it's just not fun to be forced to fight every day, or mine every day because all your skills are on a specific tree. That's even one of the main reason people don't like starting a new account in EVE Online. Skills make the game extremely slow, grindy, and limited to new players.

Ofc, i never said the opposite. I said that with expansions they're forced to add some kind of contents that can be sold (so usually not graphic updates, no reworks, no new tecnology, ....), while P2P let them free to choose

They are not sure yet if the performance will be good enough to add such a thing

I can't find much about NPCs, will they be implemented? Personally i think it's a bad choice, since they'll require more unnecessar work on 3dmodels and animations, and still they'll probably feel clunky. So i would prefer a specific block for any purpose. i.e. you can access the auction house by clicking on the auction house block, instead of an NPC. Neither i would like NPC that can farm you stuff, or build/destroy/defend your base. I'd rather build mechanical creations to do this stuff by scripts.

As far as it could seem cool to build such a huge creation, you'll probably get bored (or die) before it's completed. Regarding the actual size of planets, I think that's perfect like it is now, for the following reason: -Less dispersion of player, more pvp. -You can easily find Bases/Social HUBs -Resources on a planet will deplete faster, so colonizing make more sense. If you live in a huge ass planet that has so many resources you'll never be able to use, colonizing doesn't play a role. -Colonizing means exploration. - and more

Regarding inflation: noone wants that to happen, and i'm pretty sure the devs knows what to do to avoid that: without an official currency or adding proper "gold sinks" Regarding "no official currency": I've played many games, where there was no main currency. In this case, players will assume a specific resource as a main currency, preferably something that has a good value, and that doesn't occupies too much storage space. I think that would be kinda fun to build high security banks, where you have to store this currency because it takes storage space (and security transports aswell). To avoid inflation you just need to make sure that the gold that enters the economy is < than the gold that leaves it. And some few other stuff.

To create a ship the best way is with a pencil and paper, so you create your first concept. After that you could: -Take a sheet of squared paper, a pencil, and design in 2d whatever you want. -Download a free voxel game (pretty sure there's some), and start building it there. A cube mantains proportions, so if you desing something in Minecraft, it would look the same in DU (and when the game releases you can optimize it) Definitely we don't need an app. If there's some sort of partial damage, where you could, let's say, aim for the cockpit or the "energy room", there will never be any kind of "public competitive ships". If your enemies knows your ships weak points, you can't be competitive. If this is the case, any corporation will have their own team of builders, and their projects will be private. Any other ship that doesn't revolve around fighting should instead be fine, and people will buy/sell those.

B2P is not a sustainable model for a MMORPG that wants to last for many years. Why? Because the money you get from the sales is limited, while you need to pay the team and the server indefinitely, so it would need a cash shop or a DLC/Expansions system. -Noone wants a cash shop that give any sort of advantages. A Cosmetic only cash shop wouldn't be enough to mantain the game financially. -Forcing the devs to create Expansions every 1-2 years, just doesn't make sense. This game is not about dungeons and gear progressions, so they can't sell that. They can't sell "new maps" like world of warcraft, because the map is already huge and free to explore. They can't sell ships/stations since you can already build whatever you want by yourself. Creating an expansion for a game like this one, would mean creating new blocks limited in use to the ones that bought it. -Creating an expansion would even force devs to create content that don't really fit into the game (like unnecessary blocks) just because they need something that can be sold in the game. And maybe in this case they would not have time to rework, let's say the "contracts system", because it's not something that they can sell as an expansion, even if it is much more needed than those crappy new blocks. -If you compare a B2P priced like 40$ VS a P2P with a 2-4 weeks trial, I'm pretty sure about who's going to attract more people. You're saying that many AAA games failed in the last year with the P2P system. Not sure about what games you have in mind, but if we take Wildstar or TESO for example, they failed because they were boring, not because the P2P system. A P2P system works in sandbox mmos, because they're always fun (if well made).

Now, imagine combats. Besides the specialized weapons allocation to various crew members, the fact that the ship is a real object and not some formal 3D image allows for incredible things: partial structural damage that must be repaired (crew members racing to fix this broken hull – FTL anyone?), but also even more exciting is the possibility to board another ship after having cracked open its hull. In my opinion, from an emergent/strategic point of view this is a very interesting alternative to the classical way of completely destroying any enemy ship during combat: instead, board it and take control! Note that we don’t know yet how much of this will be playable in the alpha or beta stage, but it will definitely be something we will support in the long term. Source: https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/01/30/multiplayer-ship-crew/

P2P is the only way to keep the game alive and evolving.

1) The game has target lock because the server will have to carry more load compared to a common fps, and the ping will be higher. The tecnology they talked about, that let the servers handle thousands of players, doesn't slow time like EVE, but instead reduce the update rate of each single ship, and that's mean that without a lock system, in a huge fight, you're not going to hit something that easily. 2)The game is supposed to have a single shard (a single server), so people from all around the world will play together, and pings will be kinda high.

i think there will be collisions, but not collision damage. To calculate the damage there's a lot of load on the server. Regarding range of weapons, pretty sure there's going to be a limit, but still ranging from 2km to 70-80km maybe.

I'm pretty sure planets don't move atm, I guess you could assume from the trailer: -The water on the planets is a static entity -A huge movable planet would be considered like a planet-size ship, would it make the game lag? dunno, probably yes. -The atmosphere is a static entity So i don't think is gonna happen, they stated already that the game isn't going to be extremely focused on realism, and this feature imo would be too much for what it offers. They would at least rework water, atmosphere and find a way to not make it lag. Probably you can't find this feature even on singleplayer games

Anchors are pretty much rotors/pistons, it's pretty obvious by looking at the concept design. They said that they're not intended for pvp, and that probably means that they're not a weapon, so you'll not be able to build a huge mechanical claw to crush an enemy ship (maybe because the collision system can't handle it, especially in massive fights). Beside that, i expect them to be quite similar to the one we have in space engineers, so we'll probably be able to build hangar doors, mechanical legs/arms, rotating turrets, and stuff like that. If this is the case, it would be huge on his own, we don't need that claw.

I found those infos here, what's your source? https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2016/02/20/builder-gameplay-voxel-tools-elements/ Building is a very time consuming activity to bear fruits, we are very well aware of this. It is also something many players practice as a relaxing activity. So if a builder wants to build without risking being attacked by a PvP player, he will have the opportunity to do it in non-PvP, secure areas. Right from the beginning, there will be a secure area of several kilometers around the Arkship (the in-game starting point). Beyond the safety of the Arkship, as players explore the universe, we are currently evaluating other possibilities for additional secure areas in the game to protect builders and their creations, as the number of players in game grows and they spread across the universe. Personally I don't care, I just want a social HUB, and a tutorial-like safezone for newbies to start safely.

As far as I know they intend to create a safezone for people that want to build safely without getting involved in PVP, it's not a suggestion of mine. Still i think that a complete anarchy would be bad, and I agree with this solution. A safezone should be intended as a social HUB(that you wouldn't have with anarchy), and everything else (building, farming, storing,...) should be limited.

I informed myself already, but this is not suggestions list, but more like a complete list of "core features" the PVP system should have. Some of these may have been addressed, some may not, that's not the point considering that they're still in early development, and they could still change their minds on a lot of stuff.

I don't really want to write a wall of text, so i'll just say straight, after life playing games, forum researching and so on, how the PVP and the safezones should be addressed. Assuming that stargates are not just istant teleports to any system in the universe, but that they can just link a system with a "close one", so you can't just reach a safezone by pressing a button: Safezones - Safezones should exist, because you can't protect your assets 24/24 since it's a game, not RL. - Safezones should be rare, or the PVP will die. And if the PVP dies, economy, building, and the social aspect will follow. - Safezones should be public. If there's a way to obtain a safezone by playing the game, this would be a feature that only huge and rich corporations would benefit. - Safezones should have banks to store your items and credits. But with a proper stargate system,where you can't just teleport everywhere anytime, you wouldn't have access to that so easily. Like EVE Online. - Safezones should not be used for farming. If you want to mine or gather materials, there should be a risk associated with it, or the economy doesn't work. And this damages the PVP too. In a safezone you should be only able to find low level materials. If you want to make money, risk your ship. - Safezones should let people build, but only ships of a limited size, like 50x50x50. And you will have to rent the land.If you want to rent multiple lands, the price goes up exponentially like Everquest Landmark. If you want to build a huge ship, you would probably have a corporation able to defend your creation, otherwise as a solo player, you shouldn't probably drive that. You should be able to park your ship on the same land you rented, so you can be safe when you logoff. Ofc if you have a huge ship, you'll need a claimed land with "Territory control units", to land it safely. - Safezones should be social HUB with recruiting, contracts, economy in mind. Safezones are 100% safe, so there's need to limit the amount of stuff you can hide there, build or farm. Territory Control A land you own, as some kind of safety features. Ofc you shouldn't lose all your empire overnight, it doesn't make sense. So there's need for time window where the land is vulnerable, and i would create a system wimilar to the one EVE Online has. Land claimed can be attacked under certain circumstances, but you can build bigger, farm precious stuff, deposit all the items and ships you want. That said, there's one last thing: Outlaw They cannot attack safezones They cannot use safezones They should be able to attack claimed territories easier than "legal" commanders. They should be able to claim a territory ( for managing purposes inside their group) but they should not have any kind of protection nor time window of vulnerability. they should always be vulnerable. They should be really low on ships/resources, in a way that they would never want to grief a building for fun, but just open a small hole, and steal what you can. Automated defenses that a player can build on his territory, should give outlaws a real challenge, so that they would not just grief and destroy everything they see.