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Some will disagree with me and claim that DU's PVP was never fun but I strongly disagree, I had loads of fun before shields came out. This is due to how PVP brings players together. Before Shields every group in the game ran multicrew ships they would have 1 pilot, 4 gunners and 2 repair guys, now this would bring people together, it was so so soooo much more fun communicating with your org mates while you all organised your firing and piloting and made sure your ship was all repaired, unlike now when you have one person on one ship running the entire ship. It no longer has that feel of comradery, it no longer has the same team aspect to it. you no longer feel as though you are an elite unit in a space ship fighting your enemy. Now I can keep going on about how bad this update was for the PVP meta and population but instead I will list some changes that I believe NQ should make to bring back the fun aspect of DU's multicrew and add counters causing fleets to create fleet comps and not just run the same type of ship. In the following wall of text I am going to address the majority of aspects of PVP and explain how the y are unbalanced and how to make them balanced and fun. Firstly Tanking. I will start this of by comparing the in-balance between shield and voxel tanking. When your voxel gets shot you lose money, as that is voxel you then have to replace afterwards. When your shield gets hit you investment in your shield becomes worthwhile as you can just leave your ship on your pad for 10mins and it will regen. When you are in a fight with voxel you only have a limited amount of HP that's based on your total elements and voxel. when you are in a fight with your shield you are carrying infinite HP as you can leave the fight to go and vent and regen your health as much as you want. when you shoot a shield you have no real feedback/sense of accomplishment but when you shoot a voxel based ship you can see every dent and every bullet hole and every explosion and feel that accomplishment. How to balance this? Set L, M and S shields to 15mil HP, leave L shields to how there are so that they still protect the entirety of the ship, make M shields only protect about half the ship and S only protect a specific direction. Now if Voxel was balanced correctly S and M shields would have a interesting part in 1v1's and small fleet fights whereas L will most likely still be used for medium to Large fleets due to the chaotic aspect. Remove the CCS Health Pool curve making more voxel less worth while, this meant that you were putting an artificial limit on ship size and not letting builders be creative, CCS will still play a role because it means you cant just build a giant ship and expect to live forever as hitting it too many times wont expose the core but will hit the CCS limit. It will also make small ship viable as they would most likely be trying to not die from the CCS Health Pool but instead will most likely die from their core unit being hit, and Medium sized ships will most likely die 50% of the time to CCS and the other 50% of the time to their core being hit. Increase the CCS value that each voxel supplies by 2.5 times what they currently do. ships will die way too quickly otherwise. Now those are the changes I would like to see made to Tanking. This isn't directly involved in Tanking but Tanking Usually has a negative affect because of this so I feel that I should mention it here in this section. NQ have openly stated that they don't like the length of fights and believe them to be too long. Now they usually nerf how your ship takes damage to try and fix this when I don't think this is the answer. When we build warship we have a goal in mind, it may be to be the last on field or to have a mission runner last long enough for a response to arrive or an armoured hauler to escape a fleet of ship after mining an asteroid. These are all goals that we build ships for, if you don't like the length of fights then you need to change the win condition as this will then make us rethink how we build ships and could shorten fights if implemented correctly. Weapons. I feel as though weapons could be used to add counter play to the game which could then interduce a fleet comp and add another level of depth to fights. First Off make each guns firing feel different. I would like to see railguns do small long holes in voxels while missiles do fat big explosions. Lasers drawing lines across the voxel as though the ship had battle scars, and leave cannons how they are as they will now feel unique. Secondly, Make M guns an anti-Shield weapon, Either give them the ability to pass damage through shields doing 50% to the shield and 50% to the ship, ignore shield resistances or do double or even triple damage to shields. This will mean shields are not he be all and end all and will force people to hybrid tank. Lastly Make S guns a weapon that can slow down targets. If S guns could nerf the ships engine speed by 2% for every hit a well piloted S core that gets behind a big L core could be a real pain in the ass and viable in large fleet. And there you have it, you now have counter play and can create a fleet composition. Conclusion. If these changes are made I believe that we would have a more fun and balanced PVP experience in DU. What do you think?

To keep it simple, the game as is can't be finely tuned enough to make mixed-size/design combat fleets reasonably viable, the combat system isn't complex enough. Every change to the existing numbers results in a lot of players sitting down, doing some math, putting some test shots down range to check their math, and then deploying fleets of copy-pasta ships built to the new mathematical definition of "best". They have no reason to deploy anything else because there is no counter to this best except more of itself. As this results in boring copy/paste fleets, this is an issue. To solve this I would suggest the inclusion of additional elements that are only permitted on one or two sizes of core, or elements that encourage people to build large/heavy to defend against (since avoiding conventional damage pushes people to build as small as possible) such as: -Bombs/Torpedoes: An exceptionally high damage short to mid range weapon with severely limited ammo, tracking, and firing cone that can only be fit to xs core constructs (perhaps also prevent it from being fired while docked to stop people from making docked-xs core turrets). -Targeting Computer: A device that substantially augments the effective range of weapons that can only be fitted to an s core construct, allowing it to better serve as a picket ship against xs bombers, and not be hopelessly out-ranged by m-core constructs. -Radar Booster: An element that augments the radar of the ship to which it is attached, such as by allowing it to spot targets at ranges longer than 2su, or having it display data on its target (shield hp, mass, ect...) -Shield Booster: A large element that recharges a target's shield (perhaps expending some manner of ammo/fuel in the process) and can only be fit to L cores. E-War: ---Radar Disruptor: A large weapon that has a chance to blind the target's radar for a short period (perhaps to all targets other than itself and other ships using disruptors) that. The chance to work is inversely proportionate to the target's mass. ---Tractor Beam: Applies a set amount of force to pull a target toward you or push it away from you. -Interstellar Drive? (can't hurt to ask): A large element that can only be fit to a large/XL core, and allows a craft to transport itself, its passengers, and docked ships between solar-systems. Uses a lot of fuel, ends up in a random location in the target system if it doesn't have some manner of beacon at its destination to lock on to. Rather obviously we don't need things to be these specific elements/ideas, just as long as whatever extra complexity we do get encourages diversity of fleet composition. Elements for larger ships should probably be quite large in size, or require large periphery items to help encourage people to not be flying the smallest thing they can fit a shield, guns, and engines to. Any thoughts/ideas?

Now you all might just think that this is an easy question. "Just do it like how it is done in EvE!" but unfortunately it isn't that easy. EvE balances out the power of large ships with the maneuverability of smaller ones, making large ships hard to shoot small ships that are orbiting them. In Dual, a few problems arrive if you tried to do this. firstly; unlike in EvE where people mostly maneuver by commands instructed by the player, in DU everything is controlled completely by keyboard input, meaning that large ships can just turn to face towards their target and have no tracking issues. (yes, I know you can do that in EvE too, but it's so niche and situational I wouldn't be surprised if 1/2 of the EvE community didn't know about it) Secondly, ships cannot reliably get in the close range that EvE ships can, since the current server limitations mean that desync happens very often unless you are very close or very far. NQ could try to fix these issues, but I doubt that it could ever be as silky smooth as EvE. Third, (imo this one should be changed) the current damage output of larger ships is so vast that it is basically pointless to try making anything small. with most non L core ships, its one shot and then you're dead, no competition. Reverting back to what it was where any core unit could use L guns is not a viable solution either. All that is really doing is pushing the problem to one side, as now any non L gun has become (even more) pointless, as well as bringing a resurgence of cube ships, which I don't think anybody wants. And although there may be some clever solutions to get over this issue, the truth is anything which isn't max core size is just not sufficient enough to stand a chance right now. any ideas on how to fix this guys?

Hello, This post is being put up and polled to get NovaQuark's attention regarding certain mechanics of the game that may or may not be intentional. After a fair number of PvP engagements in DU I've noticed that people are beginning to dive deeper into the cube meta of DU. As in construct XS/Small Core ships that are just a big brick of ridiculousness and large weapons. By maximizing the entire build space of a construct people will fill it with voxel and other essential elements to just power punch an enemy off the field. An effective strategy I must say. While it is not the only strategy in the game I'm trying to view this topic from a longer term or generalized view of the game (from my perspective... which could be totally wrong). NQ and even JC has envisioned people building amazing and powerful ships to traversing the stars and battling each other for one reason or another. However, people will tend to follow the meta until NQ makes a change that forces the crowd to take a different path. With the current stance of PvP, NQ will begin to see more and more ships produced that are just shoe boxes or cubes with no thought, effort, or design prowess behind the build. Without going into too much detail or some long drawn out diatribe, I've created a poll with: Is a simple yes or no Is an option selection based on some ideas I and others have had regarding how to kill the cube and force people to build actual ships instead of boxes. I'm asking for NQ to prevent this from becoming a thing by nerfing the cube meta and forcing people to have to build legitimate ships.

Will NQ staff be barred from participating/playing? Should they be? Will they maybe manage some of the quests? Will they set up some rules? Or will the game be total anarchy (with NQ setting up some safe zones)? I think those are some important questions.. Do we know the answers to these yet?

I'm noticing that more and more people on these forums have awesome graphics in their signatures, that happen to be quite large. In fact they are often larger than most posts! My mind is getting addled in my old age, and what I'm interested in (the words you say [type?]) is getting lost in the visual clutter. I love to see your advertisements for your empires, corporations, and hippy communes. Would you mind just making them a bit shorter? Now pardon me as I yell at some kids to get off my lawn with their stupid snapagram-book phones.