Biltrex

I am SO excited for the vertex precision tool. In my experience, Voxelmancy is more difficult to use than actual necromancy.

As someone with hundreds (though not thousands) of hours into the game, I would support a wipe, with some conditions. Some things I've considered that might work and be "fair-ish": When release is ready, give all pre-release players a 4 to 8 week "head start". That works with lore, we're the "first wave" of new settlers. We keep all our talents. We keep all our blueprints. Not full constructs that can pop back in, just the plans. Randomize ore locations, so people can't go right back to where they knew stuff was. All the territory units we've purchased, we get back. Not the territories, those'll be up for grabs. But let us get back out there and grab the same number of territories we owned before. Same with cores. Put 'em in a market container for us or something, but let us have them back when we want them. I don't know what the industry solution is. I agree schematics ain't it, but I don't have the brain or willpower to try and solve that. But the market needs to be able to reward all levels of commerce... raw ore, refined ore and elements of the various levels. Maybe some basic ships elements have to be available for the pioneers to go out and get to work, but I don't think Aphelia should be stocking the market with stuff like warp cores. Those need to be player-made and driven by player demand. And profit. This is all just my opinion, of course. There's a lot of stuff in Dual Universe that's truly first-of-its-kind. Still having to make major adjustments to systems at this point isn't that big of a surprise. Having worked in software development for 15 years, I also know it's impossible to give all the users what they want. But it's also true that ignoring the best ideas (which aren't always the most popular) is a great way to alienate your base forever. First and foremost you gotta make your players want to play. Honest to god right now, every time I have to go to Alioth Market 6 I'm super annoyed. That's the kind of stuff that needs to get solved sooner rather than later, or everyone'll get annoyed to the point they just wander off into other things. I don't want to, though. I want to be a part of gaming history. There's so much potential.

First, I appreciate the increased - and meaningful - communication. It's encouraging even to hear that you have heard us, and are thinking about a thing. Personally I could take or leave the PvP - why would humanity venture out in an Arkship for thousands of years just to land and start the same petty resource squabbles? But it's a game, I get that, the emergent gameplay around PvP can drive things. One of my thoughts on building a civilization is that structures on earth are typically shaped by needs and physics. Skycrapers don't go up until we have elevators. Civilizations grow along water sources. Aircraft carriers must have spaces both for the planes they carry and the crew that live on them. Right now in DU, there's not much in the way of needs to dictate a structure. You don't need to sleep. You don't need to eat. You don't need to have storage for anything but your building materials or sellable items. One person can operate a massive battleship-sized construct, and it doesn't actually need to have any voxels, it can all just be "floating" elements. I'm not suggesting voxel/element evaluation the way Space Engineers does it, but at the moment the only reason to build buildings is to be cool, and because we can. Cities don't need roads because we hover. Planets don't need cities, actually, because you can live and do everything from one ship. I know we don't want the game to feel like going to work, but I feel like as long as there aren't more requirements put on players and structures, everything is always going to be ornamental. What's the point of putting up an tower with rooms when no one would need a room for anything? There's no clever problem solving. No one making a cool ship design that manages to fit living space for 8 people into a small area. Routing power conduits in a certain way that saves space or weight. Things like that; boundaries that help define the engineering and visual language of the civilization. Now maybe the game was never going to be that, but if nothing more is ever going to be required of structures, then if we have cities, they will be empty buildings that are essentially nothing more than statues. Just my thoughts as I play through and visit things like the city on Teoma, which is both very cool and very ghostly.

Just wanted to come and say hey, and that I have seriously been enjoying the alpha so far. Starting to build my first space-capable craft, and it's so delightfully challenging, I know it's going to be incredibly rewarding when I finally take it out for its first flight. I think that will be the itch that this game will scratch... the idea that you MADE something and it WORKS and now you can go do things with it... Anyway, glad to be a part of this amazing new venture!