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Please, do not misunderstand the title of this thread. I’m not trying to simply bash this game or games like this one, on the contrary, I will go through most of the main advertised features of this game mentioned on the homepage of http://www.dualthegame.com/#screenshots as well as some of the points in the FAQ (http://www.dualthegame.com/faq) and compare them to other games I played or heard a lot about. Furthermore, I’d like to point out that I haven’t read everything there is to read, and I’m not going to before writing this. Why? Well, because I don’t want to discuss whether what the dev’s are trying to do with one particular aspect of the game is good or bad, I am going to point out mistakes similar games made with these certain aspects and try to find out WHY those were either wrong, unsatisfying, annoying or simply bad. I may suggest possible solutions to some of these problems, for others I might just want to see what the dev’s come up with, or I might just not have a solution myself. So let’s get going with a rather light-hearted topic: Guilds, Clans, Nations, Factions, or, how the Dev’s call them, Organizations. To be honest, I read a bit into this one in the Dev-Log, but quickly decided to leave in order for this to stay unbiased. Now, what happens quiet often in MMO’s is, that the amount of Ranks inside an Organization are limited, a prime example here would be Planetside 2, where you are only given 5 usable ranks, which, in larger player-communities, is a ridiculously small diversity to have. What I have also noticed is that often the Rights and Privileges are pre-given, an example here would be “Tribal Wars” a free browser game obsessively played by many, where you have some 10 different rights and privileges which could be given to different ranks within a clan. Now I understand that some rights need to be pre-given, such as the alteration of the organization itself or the ability to hire and fire members, however it shouldn’t be limited to those, as the head of an organization I want to be able to say that no, the guy scrubbing the toilets on my battlecruiser does not have access to my military coms, period. Or the receptionist at my 5-Star hotel cannot use one of the rooms to go ‘afk’ for a few minutes. So here is a solution, I doubt it’s perfect, far from it probably, but perhaps worth a thought: Instead of limiting the organizations to ranks or some such, giving a player two “designations” to describe his position within the organization would be far more effective, which is why some military’s in reality use it. Ok so let’s take Dude Dudsen as our example. Dude has the rank of Officer in his organization, which gives him the ability to promote players under him up to the Position right below him. He also has the function of Navigator, which gives him access to the bridge since his Job is to navigate. The con for using this method would be that the player has to set up to entire systems in order to make his Organization work. The pro is that it gives him flexibility when giving privileges, instead of having to make up an entirely new rank, whenever the others don’t quite fit he has these bundles of privileges that he can give to someone. Now in order for this to work properly one would have to be tied to the other, it would make sense to tie the functions to certain ranks, since a Janitor General wouldn’t make much sense. If you didn’t get that last part, you can hope that I find enough time to make a small sketch of what I mean and upload it (it would be named Fig. 1) Alright, that took longer than anticipated, sadly I’m not done. The Player driven economy: It’d be nice wouldn’t it? Sadly, I just don’t see myself positioning my character at a wooden stall or on some square to wait for someone to buy my damn iron. I also don’t really want to sell all my stuff to an NPC vendor because he needs to make Profit off his sales, otherwise he couldn’t pay me next time I come around and want to sell more stuff, which means I make less than I could. You could, off course, say that he can just sell it for what he paid me and just pay me whatever the current stock price is. Well my dear, that won’t work because it would generate in-game-money. Imagine that everyone just sells to the vendors but the vendors never get to sell, money would be generated and overflow the market, which in turn would make money worthless. But continuing on to the next problem, who’s going to mine the trillions of tons of iron I need for my Fleet of 10 destroyers 16 support frigates 8 missile boats and that supercarrier I always wanted to have which can carry 500 fighters? I’ll tell you who, not me. I don’t have time to do that, and by the time I have advanced in the game enough to be able to do that I honestly might not want to. So who’s it going to be, you? And yes, I mean you, the dude reading this, because I don’t think you will do that for me will you? I mean why would you work to build my fleet just for fun, I doubt you would actually do that. So if I can’t hire players to build my fleet, I need someone else who’s willing…and we’re back at NPC which, if you noticed by now, are an economic dead-end. If I give the NPC a salary, what’s he going to do with it? Where does he give it back into the system? Because that’s all that economics is, giving and taking from the system. And if there is a dead end somewhere which is substantial enough, the system will inevitably crash and fail. If I don’t pay the NPC a salary I get a free Fleet and rule the Galaxy. Sure I don’t mind. But then the game would be boring and I’d play it for a few days until I have conquered everything and got bored of expanding. What might work is if I could put a NPC placeholder for me in the wooden stall I mentioned at the top of the paragraph who would sell my things. And before I forget, I don’t WANT a global trading platform where I can just put up my Iron for X money and then some random Person takes it, where’s the fun in that? Where can I rob my trade Partner, where can I betray him? It’s just so much fun to stab people in the back. While we’re on the topic of money, the games price: I’ve read what the dev’s wrote in the FAQ and it sort of, well dampened my enthusiasm. I don’t want to delve too much into this since it’s less about the game than other points and it’s also not really any of my business so I’ll try to keep it short. Dear dev-team, your game lives and dies with the amount of people playing it, for a small group of people this game will soon become repetitive and boring, for the millions you promise it can handle, it will be one of their greatest adventures. The casual gamer, which is a majority, will be less interested in a subscription-based game than a one-time pay plus in-game purchases game. I understand that you need to have a steady stream of money to pay salaries and server-upkeep and the likes, however I ask that you at least consider what I said before making your decision on the subscription final. Let’s move on to a less serious topic: Scriptable Ships and Constructs Oh boy, what to say. I understand how dev’s might think that a Script isn’t that big of a deal but, well it is, for me at least. I never learned how to program anything, granted I did tech myself some .cmd a few years back for fun, but that doesn’t nearly compare to anything I’d need to script a damned ship! Space Engineers did the exact same thing, and I see the awesome stuff like lock-on cruse-missiles and the likes, and it just makes any attempt I make laughable in comparison, it takes away the thrive to create something new and innovative. If you do scripting, next to it make some sort of easy to learn module connector platform. Where people like me with no programming experience can quickly and easily learn to make the basics work, for example a simple trade route, move from here to here, dock there and done. Or try to make a missile “script” in that sense. So that’s it for now, it’s late and I have work tomorrow. I might continue this some other time. Please comment on anything and everything I said, tare my arguments to shreds if you want. And call me out on any ignorant remarks I may have made. Also if there's anything very wrong with my English, make a footnote out of it, it's my second language and I'm always happy to learn. Have a good day.