SledgeHammer

we need a moderator here... this is sooo far off topic its nuts

It's less "Wolves" and "Sheep" and more "Wolves" and "Foxes", in my opinion. Both are capable of having equal power/intelligence, but the Foxes on average have to be a bit more cunning to get a one up on the wolves, since they aren't full time fighters.
 
That aside, I get what you're saying. I think, however, that this game will be a great boost to PvP/PvE relations, purely because of the fact that they have to rely on one another. The PvP'ers would be nothing without the ships that the PvE'ers  produce, and the PvE'ers would be nothing without the protection of the PvP'ers. Which is also why I think adding invulnerable zones could prove a bad move; If the builders have a guaranteed safe space, they don't need PvP'ers. Naturally, there'd always be someone who would buy your ships, and many PvP'ers haven't the patience to build their own. So it'd make PvP'ers more dependent on the PvE community, while the PvE community wouldn't necessarily require the PvP community to need them. 
 
You did bring up a good point on actually getting the supplies from point A to point B, and the possibility of denying a person their supplies while in route, but that whole process counts on there being someone online at all times to maintain such a blockade, which is sometimes difficult to coordinate. Rather than take your enemy out at the source, you simply delay another shipment, and they wait until your numbers thin a bit.
 
It also reduces the... magnitude, of war for anyone within the protected zone. Ships can be replaced, not a terribly big problem (though, after a while a blockade would wear on a producer) but if your facilities were to be damaged, or outright destroyed, that'd have much more of an impact on builders. Everyone has their own opinions on the war system in this game, but personally, I believe war shouldn't be something so trivial that a group of players could sit under a protected zone and just wait out the storm. That's not how it works in reality. Yes, I'm aware that this isn't  reality, but the way things are looking, it will simulate real world politics, and economics, so why shouldn't it simulate real world war too? In the real world, nowhere is truly safe from war, and industrialists often see their factories destroyed by opposing bombers. It'd make sense for this to be something that happens in game too, no?
 
Now, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any arkified zones. Perhaps in every solar system there is at least one planet with an arkified zone on it. That's fine. I just don't think players should be able to create arkified zones themselves, or they'd abuse the system.

we need a moderator here... this is sooo far off topic its nuts

Multi boxing is not pay 2 win xD lol. Multiboxing in pvp is lame and makes aeasy target for non multiboxers thats for shure tahts why few people do that. But to have to log different character to say check a market on one side of the universe and then another istead of haveing them loged at the same time is riduculous.
I do not understand why are there so many ppl trying to impose all sorts of limits sugesting ridiculous ideas.
Ban multibox, favour the defending pvp side, make free to play... it feels that half of this forum don't even want DU, they want a minecraft mmo...

I apologize if this isn't the right forum for this topic, but I didn't know where else it might fit into.
 
Lately I have seen some conversations on the forum become very aggressive, insofar as people cursing at each other and getting into really heated arguments. While I think it's healthy to be able to debate openly on the forum, there are certainly some people you might not get along with very well. I'm not going to point out any names, but some people certainly have the tendency to escalate debates into full blown attacks on one another. 
 
Which is why I want to point out a feature of this forum that I think many people are unaware of.
 
 
If you navigate to your "My Settings" page, there is a tab on the left hand side of the page titled "'Ignore' Preferences". 
 
From there you can ignore any user you'd like to, including their signatures and personal messages. 
 
 
I think if more people were aware of this feature, there would be less of a chance for discussions to break down into full blown arguments, and things might stay a bit more civil overall.
 

There shouldn't be arbitrary limits to how constructions can be torn down, regardless of how many man hours it took to build them. 
 
If you haven't properly defended your constructions, then you should suffer the consequences for it.
 
 
Jean-Christophe Baillie describes it very well in this article: https://gamerpros.co/exclusive-interview-novaquark-ceo-jean-christophe-baillie-mmo-dual-universe/
 
BB: Do you plan to introduce any kind of combat elements and PvP? Combat is a big part of many MMOs and players love the opportunity to fight each other. 
 
JC: Yes of course. It’s a question of PvP and implementing it, a point that’s very dear to us. We’re thinking of safe zones, one that would be around the Arcship (the main player starting point). It’s the ship that brought you to where you are.
 
Basically, there will be a 20 kilometer safe area where nothing can happen to you. We’ll be creating other safe areas, and players would be able to create their own grounds that aren’t indestructible. As long as players have the resources and wealth, they can make a zone that’s near impenetrable. Think about the United States. It’s not indestructible; can you imagine the whole world wanting to invade the United States? There’s enough security though, military, and whatnot that prevents that. In this game, it’d be a similar point.

No to a special player council. It detracts from the openness of idea suggestion we currently have.
 
Election will be a popularity vote or forced votes by unhonorable organisations.
 
We don't need people that have no idea about game design and game theory having equal input to professional game developers.

Dude... have you been reading my mind? I've been thinking about this issue for like a week too and I made sure to ask about it in the AMA as well.
 
One of the greatest appeals of any sci-fi game is cool looking cities and ships. But in the case of Dual it seems that just one idiot with a mission could do a lot to break the immersion. 
 
First off, I really like the ideas you brought up and I think they would actually solve this pretty well. However, I do view them as a last resort. My preference would be to use game mechanics to favor useful designs over useless/joke constructs. 
 
Here's my idea:
 
The kind of technology that the ark uses to protect buildings should take up a huge amount energy because it is actively preventing certain players from destroying/modifying voxels, and as more constructs are created it has to protect more. So in order to balance this, players have to actively pay for their use of of the arkified area on a per-voxel basis (whether this should be monetary or resources idk). If the player runs out of resources to maintain the construct within the arkified zone, it temporarily becomes unprotected and players can either destroy it, or start paying for those voxels themselves. 
 
This idea assumes that "VR mode" blueprint construction is implemented. This means that players who are just starting out and cannot yet pay for protection of their constructs in the ark-zone can do so by using VR construction and building the actual structure elsewhere. If they (as a new player) want to build their structure within the ark zone must begin a career or coordinate with an established organization to get it built and regularly payed for.  
 
While this cost of building in a protected zone is a downside, it can easily be worth the cost. Buildings within this zone are the first constructs players see when the spawn at the ark ship, so these buildings will have more visibility to new players than any other in the game with the added benefit of being indestructible. If you are seeking a place for your market, business, or organization headquarters there is no better location than here. 
 
The desired effects of this mechanic:
 
Arkified areas become functioning cities rather than just a mismatched graveyard of unused player constructs. The construct has to be providing value to an active/organization player in order to be worth the cost of it's existence. Buildings within the arkified area will not be on a first come, first serve basis. If a player decides to leave the gave for more than a few weeks, they need to consider whether they have enough resources to pay for it over the long term, and if not, consider giving ownership to someone else who can stay online. 
 
And finally, I feel that this would, at the very least, limit the proliferation of the "TTP" problem. Unless an entire organization is very passionate about paying for and maintaining Dickbutt structures it simply won't be worth the resource draw.
 
If you agree or see a major flaw in my reasoning here lmk.

Multi boxing is not pay 2 win xD lol. Multiboxing in pvp is lame and makes aeasy target for non multiboxers thats for shure tahts why few people do that. But to have to log different character to say check a market on one side of the universe and then another istead of haveing them loged at the same time is riduculous.
I do not understand why are there so many ppl trying to impose all sorts of limits sugesting ridiculous ideas.
Ban multibox, favour the defending pvp side, make free to play... it feels that half of this forum don't even want DU, they want a minecraft mmo...

Hi everyone,
 
Just to clarify on this topic:
We totally understand that First Person Shooter gameplay would be more immersive.
However, we have to take everything in account. And when we do, then we have to make some compromise.
We want combat, but combat is not the main feature of the game. Only one of the main features, equally important with building, real massively multiplayer system in a single-shard universe, exploration, trading, etc. Once this was sorted out, it was logic that we wouldn't sacrifice things like the massively multiplayer aspect just to have the best First Person Shooter possible. In that case, even if it's not the best combat mechanics (we totally agree on that), target locking combat gameplay is the answer for the best compromise. So it's not a decision led by personal taste, but really the most relevant decision on the technical aspect in our case.
 
We totally understand that it won't appeal to every player.
We are aware that our game won't satisfy everybody, and it's the same for any game.
 
Best regards,
Nyzaltar.

Lets just stop the QQ and sugestions about how to have less pvp, ALL of it is speculation and a lot of people get carried away. It will be open world free for all pvp, end of story. PVP zones and arenas are something that should not exist in new generation sanbox games... Why impose limits in limitless game? Less control is best control. There will be some safe zones and even a virtual test place to build for the sake of building, that should satisfy the desing and engineering bug we all here have.
 
Pvp will help filter out the best designs, pvp is where legends are born.
 
By the way with the sugested tag system it will be possible to create defensive organisations that can tag griefers/bullies as "red" for example, denie them access to organisations services etc. Oportunities are endless. Those organisations doesnot have to be guilds/corps/factions it can be a "treaty" against pirates or what ever. You will be able to set your defences to attack tagged people on site, track and report their locations and so on. There are literaly sooo many ways to tackle pvp just need a bit of creativity and it will ultimately make the game more satisfying, with real sence of achievement.

AMEN
 
P2P aka subscription fees guarantee a stable income and allow the devs to plan more easily opposed to perhaps random dynamic income from shops or whatever while serving as a minor anti-toxic barrier (those purely out to cause chaos on a general level have it easy if access is free).
 
As for those saving money due to getting software or stuff elsewhere for free: You save a notable amount of money if you get something like that on occasion, so chances are you can afford one subscription fee for an MMO.
 
Again, I know some really have to watch the money they spend but I could afford an MMO when I still went to school with pocket money. If you have a PC, internet and can get new games on occasion, then you surely have the few bucks per month to spend on a game like this I'd assume.
 
E: If we leave a trial aside for a moment I also realize that free to play may encourage more players to check out the game - but if it's really good even a fee won't keep those who're interested away.
 
In short: I don't want to save money short-term only to possibly have the game crash. I'd rather invest a bit into it and be able to play it longer so to speak. But that's just me. Others will prefer other models. I personally hope they settle for something that keeps them afloat, and I assume subscription fees may be the most stable income.

Ultimately I think that's where I left off my first post on this thread.
 
That even if DU doesn't use OT, they should still keep in mind the features it has for their own bookkeeping system.
 
I'd love to see Bonds etc. Not only because it means players could run their nations like real world nations, having to work out their budgets and manage their national debt. But also because it would open up the way towards player run stock exchanges. 
 
Suddenly the semantics of PVP become very fuzzy, and instead of waging wars with ships and cities (space stations, etc.) being destroyed, you may end up with wars where the weapons are the markets. Managing a large scale war would require massive amounts of planning, both from a munitions standpoint, but also from an economic standpoint. You'd have to be ready to enter a war knowing that the companies in your alliance on the market (or even nations themselves) may suffer.
 
Managing it would be horribly difficult, but you could also issue national currencies and their values could compete on an open market.

Unfortunately you completely missed my (and thread outhors) point, it is not for cryptocurrencies! Title is prety clear actualy.
It is the system they are offering to handle in game transactions and so on. Nothing to do with bitcoin or dolar or any other rl currency...

Hi Everyone,
 
This is my first post here, and like many new people here, I discovered Dual Universe through the E3 trailer this week. 
 
I'll go ahead and apologize ahead of time for this lengthy post.
 
I originally came to the forums with questions about the Market system, how the economy would scale, what kind of features the market will provide, how the market system would be secured against counterfeiting (which in this case would be cheating, hacking, etc), if there would be competing currencies and if there would be a Real Market Trading (RMT) system put in place to allow people to profit from their gameplay in much the same way that Second Life or Project Entropia operate.
 
For the most part, my questions were answered by simply reading around on this forum. So it's a nice feeling knowing that other people have the same concerns that I do. 
 
From what I've gathered, there will be no RMT system (aside from being able to pay for your subscription using an ingame tradeable item, like PLEX in Eve Online), and there will only be one universal currency (to keep things simple). Without getting into the details of the different types of markets that will be available, how they are created, how goods are moved, etc. (gameplay mechanics) , I'd like to focus this discussion more on the features that one might expect from a digital sandbox market (or markets), and how that can be accomplished securely from a technical perspective.
 
Which leads me into Open-Transactions.
   
 
My Background
 
Full disclosure here, I was formerly a developer working on Open-Transactions, however I'm not currently involved the project anymore. I contributed about ~200k lines of C++ to the project over 3 years, but I don't measure success in terms of lines of code, I just want to be as transparent as possible. I originally became involved in the project due to my interest in trading digital currencies through exchanges like MtGox or BTC-E, and my interest in bringing those types of technologies into a market that would naturally embrace them, Video Games.
 
To be clear however, I'm not advocating in any way through this post that Dual Universe adopt Bitcoin or any other Cryptocurrency. There are too many issues to consider before even taking on that task, and there's little benefit from doing it other than to have an easy avenue for RMT. None of this discussion has anything to do with Bitcoin other than they both use Cryptography to accomplish their goals.
 
I don't profit in any way from Open-Transactions anymore, as I no longer work with any of the companies that use it. I have no stake in any of the companies currently using it either. I'm the Lead DevOps Engineer for the company I work for now, and OT has nothing to do with our products in any way, nor do I ever see it becoming relevant in my current day job. My only motivation in making this post is that I see a need that can be filled in a way that benefits both Novaquark and prospective players of Dual Universe.
 
 
 
 
What is Open-Transactions?
 
http://opentransactions.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
https://github.com/Open-Transactions/opentxs/
 
Open-Transactions is a financial digital contracting system (software library) that was original developed to allow for gold to be traded on an international federated digital market securely. It (and its forks) has been used in many ways, from handling mobile payments sent through the postal service for Tunisia, to being used as the market backend for OpenSim (an open source clone of Second Life). Right now there is even discussion taking place involving using it as a contracting platform for Texas's state gold depository (which is currently in development, with the end goal of establishing a state-backed currency). 
 
It is open source, written in C++, and was originally developed by cryptographer Chris Odom. If you don't want to read through all of this, you can get a feel for what it provides based on his own presentations here: 
 


   
Open-Transactions (or OT as I'll refer to it from here on) can be seen as "PGP for Money", or rather, a suite of encryption tools that come together to create a secure market platform suitable for virtual currencies (hence the emphasis on Bitcoin in many of the discussions about it). 
 
It is built on the principle of Ricardian Contracting, as outlined here: http://iang.org/papers/ricardian_contract.html
 
To summarize for those that don't want to read that whole page:
 
"A Ricardian Contract can be defined as a single document that is a) a contract offered by an issuer to holders,  for a valuable right held by holders, and managed by the issuer, c) easily readable by people (like a contract on paper), d) readable by programs (parsable like a database), e) digitally signed, f) carries the keys and server information, and g) allied with a unique and secure identifier." - Ian Grigg

Better summarized as, "The Ricardian contract is a means of tracking the liability of one party to another when selling goods to each other".
 
It is also the core principal on which things such as OpenBazaar use to operate securely.
 
 
Open-Transactions provides, what the developers like to call, censorship resistance. In that all of the features that were created for it follow the principle that an asset issuer (a bank, a game company, the post office, whoever), cannot modify the account balances of its users. Nor can an asset issuer prevent a user from being able to transfer ownership of their own assets to whomever they want. Hypothetically speaking, this means that if I were to have a bank account operated in this system, the bank would never be able to alter my balance (empty my account) without my explicit manual approval first.  Or, in the case of a Bitcoin Exchange, an exchange wouldn't be able to steal my Bitcoins and disappear randomly one day. 
 
Because of the cryptographic proofs involved, there are also inherent protections in place for the asset issuers as well. Such as the inability to counterfeit assets (cheating, hacking, duping, etc. in terms of Dual Universe), or users altering their own account balances fraudulently. No more money could be introduced into the economy than the issuer of that currency would allow. Whether that's (just throwing a name out there) 100 intergalactic credits, or 100 trillion. This doesn't necessarily require the use of a massive database storing all of those account details either, as those details are part of the digital contracting system that tie the whole platform together.
 
To list just a few market features that OT provides:
 
- Transfers: An atomic movement of funds from one account to a different account, like a bank account-to-account transfer.
 
- Cheques A payment which is not deducted from the sender's account until the recipient claims it.
 
- Vouchers: A payment which is deducted from the senders account at the time of creation.
 
- Invoices: A payment request which the recipient can opt to pay from any of his accounts.
 
- Cash: Anonymous cryptographic tokens which can be securely redeemed by the recipient without revealing the sender.
 
- Market Offers: Open agreements to exchange a given quantity of one instrument type for a given quantity of another instrument type.
 
- Smart Contracts: Customizable agreements between multiple parties, containing user-defined scripted clauses, hooks, and variables.
 
- Bearer Securities (Bonds): The negotiable instruments created by Open-Transactions can be used as the basis for financial products such as loans.
 
- Stocks
 
 
 
 
 
What are the benefits?
 
 
For Novaquark:
 
- Leveraging Open-Transactions, Novaquark would be able to create a sandbox market platform that provides many real-world features that users might expect.
 
- They would also be relying on a financial platform that is used in the real world for holding real assets (gold, silver, dollars, swiss francs, etc.), without having to develop one completely from scratch for virtual assets. This includes potentially over a billion dollars worth of gold bullion that the State of Texas may soon be repatriating. 
 
- OT is still under constant development from cryptographers worldwide, and Novaquark could see their market platform as more of an open-source shared library to interface with rather than a whole subsystem to develop independently.
 
- If Novaquark ever decided to pursue RMT features, OT provides ways of making that work. Both on a technical and a regulatory level.
 
- OT is completely free. If Novaquark decided to fork the project to work on internally to suit their own needs, they certainly would not be the first company to do that. 
 
 
For Players:
 
- Users would be able to rest assured that no item duping could ever cause the value of their assets to drop drastically. 
 
- Stock markets for our ingame player-run corporations.
 
- Ingame nations/guilds/whatever would be able to issue bonds backed by their own ingame assets.
 
- Smart Contracts. Players could write up contracts that are self-executing depending on outside events. To get into why this is useful goes way beyond the scope of this post, but a quick google search for "Smart Contracts" should provide you with more than enough use cases.

- Player-run banks. In the scope of OT these would be referred to as "asset issuers". Not sure if this really fits into the scope consider that there doesn't seem to be a huge push from players regarding competing currencies.
 
- Cheques. Anyone who uses a Cheque from day to day knows why these might be useful to players. 
 
- Cash. The option of being able to transfer vast amounts of money by having to fly cargo containers full of cash somewhere sounds intriguing, although I'm sure many would disagree with me here.
 
- Users would be protected from an overzealous Novaquark employee modifying their account balances without their permission. I don't mean to point fingers here prematurely, but it has happened in other games and is always something that could happen.

- For the programmers among us, we can audit the source code of OT and any improvements we make to it would be seen by all of the people who use it. 
 
 
 
 
Okay, but what about the negatives?
 
 
- OT is not a simple platform to use. It was built by cryptographers for cryptographers, and I don't mean to knock on Novaquark in any way by saying this, but game developers are not necessarily the most versed in cryptography as opposed to someone coming from a financial background working on Wall St. I'm confident Novaquark's developers are extremely competent, but this may be new territory for many of them.
 
- OT can be bloaty. The shared library size is quite large on its own, I don't want to think about what the static library size looks like nowadays. 
 
- OT is peculiar about the way it stores its data on filesystems. This may not work for everyone, however people have written their own storage engine implementations for it. One of my last OT related projects was building a HyperTable backend for it.
 
- OT is not always intuitive from a developers standpoint. If you come into OT without knowing much about digital contracting, you will be left scratching your head as to what the various API calls actually mean or do. There is a community that is willing to help, but again it's probably not an overnight task.
 
- OT may be way beyond what Novaquark wants to accomplish regarding their market features. From a game development standpoint, not everyone is going to want Stocks or Bonds, and not many people have the time to figure out how to use Smart Contracts (or what to even use them for).
 
- Dual Universe's pre-alpha likely already has a market implementation, and (I don't know why you would even do this) if the system wasn't developed with an abstract interface in front of it, it may be extremely difficult to swap out one subsystem/service for another.
 
- OT is not currently multithreaded across the board, although it's on the roadmap the last I checked. I don't anticipate it will be for several more years.
 
 
 
 
Summary
 
 
If you've gotten this far, thank you for taking the time to read what I've written up here. 
 
I know that there's not a very good chance of Novaquark even seeing this post, let alone taking it seriously, but I believe that OT can fill a gap for them that no other piece of (free open source) software can currently provide.
 
I also believe that even if Novaquark doesn't use OT, that they should consider implementing some of the features it would otherwise provide; such as Checks, Bonds and Stocks. These would only work to supplement the types of gameplay that players are inevitably going to end up doing anyways. For a persistent game on a universal scale, we should have feature-rich markets.
 
I'm not the best at writing these long types of posts, but I look forward to being part of this community going forward from here regardless of the reaction to this first post of mine :-)

Unfortunately you completely missed my (and thread outhors) point, it is not for cryptocurrencies! Title is prety clear actualy.
It is the system they are offering to handle in game transactions and so on. Nothing to do with bitcoin or dolar or any other rl currency...

I can understand your sentiments on this mish, but it has been my experience that paying regular instalments actually keeps the quality of the game high and content consistent. In the past, I would not play any MMO that was free or micro-transaction based because the quality was usually equivalent to what you pay for, free = terrible. 
 
Now I have seen it mentioned that NQ is intending on implementing a PLEX system similar to EVE online, where players with extra in-game currency can purchase subscription time, and players will extra RL money will sell them in order to make up for less available play time. This I appreciate as I rarely have any amount of time to dedicate to any game, usually about 4-6 hours per month.
 
The trick with this system is finding the balancing point for the price, if buying the PLEX units is too expensive, or making in game money is overly time consuming were players have to devote considerable time in farming credits just to play another month, then this system could be bad from the beginning. I have confidence that the balance can be found early on though.

While I'd agree there needs to be a degree of skill involved, it's also reasonable to assume that advanced energy weapons would use an equally advanced targeting systems allowing users to track targets, calculate targeting solutions in real time, and avoid friendly fire.  We're also talking about laser weapons, which travel too fast to incorporate pilot skill in the way some are suggesting.  Assuming they're modeled with a modicum of realism, there will be no ballistics involved, and you won't need to lead targets.  These weapons would almost have to be partially or fully automated to be truly effective.  The cold, hard truth is that even today skill is increasingly less of a factor in warfare than technology, and weapon deployment is an increasingly push-button affair.  So tab-targeting makes sense on some level as a realistic representation of advanced warfare.
 
Something like what Ripper suggests strikes me as a reasonable compromise; skill would be required in bringing weapons to bear and trying to avoid other players' firing solutions, which is fairly analogous to contemporary dogfighting anyway.  Once within an enemy's sights, however, the technology would take over.  Hardly anything is strictly point and shoot anymore, and this would be even more true in the far future.
 
That being said, the element of player skill levels in determining the damage applied and/or the effectiveness of the targeting itself seems problematic to me.  I would rather see the hits based on the quality of the weapon and the components used in the ship as opposed the skill level of the pilot.  A higher level targeting computer--perhaps one built by a player with a higher level building skill--could result in a higher hit percentage, for example.  This would further encourage building-related specializations while removing artificial handicaps on player skill in combat.  Theoretically, a highly skilled new player with a top-tier ship could compete effectively with veterans, but doing so would be expensive for a solo player.
 
I would like to see potential damage and hit percentage seperated, with one based on the weapon quality, and the other based on the targeting computer quality.  Player skill would come into play with repect to maneuvering those weapons into position, evading the enemy, and possibly manipulating defensive countermeasures (such as shields).  I feel this would be a reasonable compromise that would further stimulate various roles within the in-game economy (skilled building, rare resource mining, high-quality refining, etc.) to provide the highest quality components and satisfy pilots looking for a more traditional sim-like experience where skill still plays a significant role in dealing damage.