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NQ, why are you killing your one popular game mechanic?


blazemonger

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NQ-Please .. Why are you nerfing industry out of existence with even further batch increases. The one gameplay mechanic people seem to enjoy and you pretty much remove it from general gameplay to keep the backend alive.

 

Player: I need to make 20m3 voxel material for this construct.
NQ: That will be a minimum of 250m3 (may be more) so get mining one or more ore veins and be stuck with a massive surplus AND time lost to production.. Or do what we actually want you to do which is travel up and down to markets and buy what you need (and hope it is actually available) 

 

Might as well bring back NPC traders for these materials as this is going to reduce the gameplay for so many, it could even cause people to leave the game (for now).


While there may be reasons for these changes, NQ needs to COMMUNICATE them in advance, not cold drop them on players and not say a word. Initially they indicated the changes made were actually incorrect, we all thought they meant they were too much, turns out they were not big enough.

 

Not hat I have any hope or illusion NQ cares much as they seem to be more interested in creating the illusion they "fixed" the backend by removing the symptoms and not the cause (as they tend to do).

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Wait 250m3 now from 180m3 from 10m3 initially? So if I want to add a small red detail on my ship which only requires 7.3m3 of carbon fiber, the minimum I can craft is 250m3? 2500L of material? 
 

I put all the numbers down so everyone see how ridiculous that looks right, now go try it in game......it’s worst

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2 hours ago, Fendalton said:

They're doing this to help the server lag. It wasn't a gameplay decision, just a short term remedy. 

Says who?

 

It is certainly possible this is a temporary fix and it is certainly possible it is because NQ is collecting data on how this impacts backend load in the hopes of finding a solution to the issues they are having with keeping the backend up and running.

 

It is also possible NQ is doing this to make the problem go away so they can consider this resolved and move on. Or it is possible NQ is deliberately making crafting some stuff so cumbersome and expensive it drives people to the markets which is what they wanted to see happen from the start.


That they need to make batch runs longer to lower the backend load as it falls over otherwise I can absolutely understand. Doing it by forcing players to craft 3000% of the original amount to build a basic ship is really not, the correct change here is making the crafting of the existing batches longer. Same effect, less impactful to players. But then, that would require going through the data table and adjusting the numbers specifically instead of running a simple script to just increase batch sizes to hit a certain crafting time and ignoring the impact this has on gameplay. 

 

Detailing ships just became pretty much unworkable.. Unless you want to resort to very basic bland nanopack craftable voxel material.

 

The changes they are now making are OK when you are in closed alpha/beta but not when you are running a released live service game. And yes, I'd consider a game released once you start charging money to play, no matter what development stage it is in.

 

Problem is, we do not know as NQ is completely silent on this whichever way they are going. Their communication is severely lacking in this regard, not that that is anything new. Making changes like this without even mentioning it is really not good, they should start posting patch notes for server side changes as well which they have not done so far really.

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2 hours ago, Velase85 said:

Umm, while they did make some changes; you should really read patch notes:

 

I appreciate the gesture but in return I'd suggest actually reading the context of the initial post against the patch note as the latter has no relation to the point raised at all.

 

The patch note is about the batch size not showing correctly before pressing start, it means nothing regarding the batch sizes themselves (besides maybe that NQ is not using the same data table for the UI display and the actual batch size which is kind of a small red flag in and of itself).

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Maybe industry is too quick and easy anyway. Maybe 10m3 should take more time for balance and would also help servers. And if you do decide to make 200m3, it doesnt spit out 10 at a time but only finishes when completely done.  I'm definitely no expert ad I do only a little industry, but I'm sure they are working on some changes and tweaks and those will be ongoing. Right now it seems like 95% of the population feels they need to make every thing themselves. That's just a guess, but I even see a lot of brand new streamers making everything 100% by themselves, even when I point out stuff like (maybe just make a bunch of xyz and sell the excess and buy what you need). Not that they should be forced to stuff like that, feel like the game is lacking in that balance but it also could be because we in super early stages of the economy.  Who knows.

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1 hour ago, JohnnyTazer said:

Maybe industry is too quick and easy anyway. Maybe 10m3 should take more time for balance and would also help servers.

If NQ sets voxel material to need more time to craft (I actually found the existing time to be way too short) I'd not have any issue with than, even if they set it to 5  minutes per 10m3 for now. I completely understand and see the need to release stress from the backend to try and find a way to fix performance but the way it is done now is counter productive on the other side.

 

Right now, mining > industry really is the only real game loop that works well and the markets are mostly empty because the large manufacturing orgs keep their production in house so the market shelves stay empty. NQ has overall set up the game in a way that allows larger orgs to be self sufficient. If larger orgs could set up markets of their own this might change quicker but NQ choose to push out player markets well into the future still.

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13 hours ago, blazemonger said:

 

NQ-Please .. Why are you nerfing industry out of existence with even further batch increases. The one gameplay mechanic people seem to enjoy and you pretty much remove it from general gameplay to keep the backend alive.

 

Player: I need to make 20m3 voxel material for this construct.
NQ: That will be a minimum of 250m3 (may be more) so get mining one or more ore veins and be stuck with a massive surplus AND time lost to production.. Or do what we actually want you to do which is travel up and down to markets and buy what you need (and hope it is actually available) 

 

Might as well bring back NPC traders for these materials as this is going to reduce the gameplay for so many, it could even cause people to leave the game (for now).


While there may be reasons for these changes, NQ needs to COMMUNICATE them in advance, not cold drop them on players and not say a word. Initially they indicated the changes made were actually incorrect, we all thought they meant they were too much, turns out they were not big enough.

 

Not hat I have any hope or illusion NQ cares much as they seem to be more interested in creating the illusion they "fixed" the backend by removing the symptoms and not the cause (as they tend to do).

Easy solution would be to open up a lot more materials in the nanopack but increase run times a bit, so you can do short runs of T2 materials in nano.  100% agree though, we were putting together a BP for a building today and wasted so much material making the small trim items.

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@CptLoRes

This is true but the point is that while it is understandable NQ needs to reduce load on the backend currently, massively increasing minimal batch size to get to a longer production time is putting the cart before the horse.  The argument is that NQ went for the quick fix and simply applied a formula to the tables to get to a (minimal) time needed for the batch and disregarding the effect from it for things like voxel material production.

 

Now that they have further extended this time by doing another run while they now do/should know what the effect is AND not telling anyone about it at all can only mean they know but do not care for or consider the experience for the players.

This has now pretty much removed voxel material production form the already very shallow gameloop.

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Surely there must be a way that anything up to, say, 200m3 in steps of 10m3 could be set as a single batch and anything over that size is performed in 200m3 batches....

but then, I’m not privy to how they set up their industry processes on their server (probably with inflexible and fixed batch sizes) and why they literally only just realised now that their current system was untenable. 

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23 hours ago, blazemonger said:

While there may be reasons for these changes, NQ needs to COMMUNICATE them in advance, not cold drop them on players and not say a word. Initially they indicated the changes made were actually incorrect, we all thought they meant they were too much, turns out they were not big enough.

 

Not hat I have any hope or illusion NQ cares much as they seem to be more interested in creating the illusion they "fixed" the backend by removing the symptoms and not the cause (as they tend to do).

This. A hundred (or maybe 250) times.

 

13 hours ago, blazemonger said:

The patch note is about the batch size not showing correctly before pressing start, it means nothing regarding the batch sizes themselves (besides maybe that NQ is not using the same data table for the UI display and the actual batch size which is kind of a small red flag in and of itself).

This is also true. Why the interface isn't looking up the actual data table used by the industry process, is a mystifying question. Why industry has such a backend impact is also something that bothers me. The backend difference between doing 10 batches of [6 plus 4 makes one] and one batch of [60 plus 40 makes 10] seems so trivial that I marvel at their architecture choices when it has such a marked effect.

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I am in total agreement. 
This new building mistake is a game breaker for me. This game was sold as;

"

NO CHARACTER CLASS. NO PREDETERMINED ROLE.

The role you play in the shared universe only depends on your actions and your choices. Be a space pirate. A galactic trader. A cargo hauler. An interstellar industrialist. And everything in-between."

Alpha is different game from the one they gave us in Beta, And not one indicator that anything was up.

They took all choice of independent - solo play away. Don't know why they would do that. One thing for sure is that it would certainly be an issue with many, many players and they won't even have the decency to own up to it and have a conversation about it, 

Maybe they are  afraid to admit that they aren't capable to deliver all they promised us that a single shard universe would provide, That is why they sneaked this feature in to the Beta. They need money and if they told us this between closing Alpha and the initialization of Beta and the large infusion of cash as result. They would have lost all that cash. Sorta like Star Citizen selling of ships to finance their game that doesn't work. 

I for one am highly disappointed in their childish tactics,

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2 hours ago, Fendalton said:

Says NQ, although it's forgiven to not know. 

I think you missed the point of the OP somehow.. It's OK though..

 

 

10 minutes ago, Yt Noyz said:

I am in total agreement. 
This new building mistake is a game breaker for me. This game was sold as;


NQ has a tendency to go for the easy option without really considering gameplay impact. While during Alpha that was fine, not that they released the game and are charging subs, they really can't do that anymore IMO. There are very simple solutions which would yield the same result like not just looking at a target time for a batch and adjusting the batch size to match that (what seems to be happening atm) which may be an easy database query but as we now see has quite an impact on gameplay. If they'd instead (for mostly the voxel material manufacturing) increase the runtime for the same 10m3 batch to say 2 minutes I'd have no issue with it at all as a temporary measure. But that would take a bit more time to set up and NQ seems to pretty much shove anything under the "quick and dirty as we have soo much to do" and the problem with that is that they create so much technical debt doing so it will bit them back in a while when all these small things turn into a massive spaghetti of needed fixes/corrections.

It really feels like there is no proper project management going on and  decisions are mostly made on a "sounds good.. do it" ad-hoc basis.

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3 minutes ago, blazemonger said:

NQ seems to pretty much shove anything under the "quick and dirty as we have soo much to do" and the problem with that is that they create so much technical debt doing so it will bit them back in a while when all these small things turn into a massive spaghetti of needed fixes/corrections.
 

That seems to be standard anymore. Look at Star Citizen.
But I was hoping these people were gonna be better than that. But I'm getting discouraged Today I can't even get the launcher to even launch. And I can't find out if I am the only one or not.

 

 

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52 minutes ago, blazemonger said:

 But that would take a bit more time to set up and NQ seems to pretty much shove anything under the "quick and dirty as we have soo much to do" and the problem with that is that they create so much technical debt doing so it will bit them back in a while when all these small things turn into a massive spaghetti of needed fixes/corrections.

Also know as <French accent> "Relax guys, we know there is an issue and we will fix this later".

But when 'later' hasn't shown up for core problems after years of dev time, you start to worry. I didn't want this to happen. But this entire 'beta' release and the problems with it, feels like a big fat told you so. And all the signs where there beforehand.

 

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Boy I hope not! But it isn't costing me anything to hang around and find out.
I do have a launcher problem tho. It is completely dead.
But a person in another forum here as helped me figure that out.
I have to uninstall DU and reinstall a fresh download! Sucks!
And I ain't no PC guru - so cross your fingers! lol
And thanks for your input - glad to see I might not be alone in my thoughts

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