feedback Feedback after two weeks

[sellene]

So I've been playing DU for about two weeks now and I would like to live my feedback since its still beta. Overall the game has huge potential, but some concepts needs some good amount of work and planning.

I want to point out some topics that in my opinion would greatly improve the game.

 

• Remove predictability of ores in planets. As of now the community mapped out, which ore is in which planet at what depth range.
  • That leads to safe zone Moons been mined out of higher tier ores.
  • That makes will eventually make it even less fun for players that come along later, they will be mining only T1 ores.
• The force respawn needs to have a cooldown mechanic.
  • It is a thing that help makes mining less boring but helps players scan the areas too quickly because of topic above, I went to Madis Moon 1 yesterday to look for petalite and the scadium ore, I started using the scanners, brought 3 with me so I can scan 3 tiles at once. I realized that is faster to go to about the center of each of the tiles and dig  straight down until desired depth and respawn on the ship. But to my surprise people already did that, no matter where I went, the whole Moon was mined, after 3 hours of searching I found 1 tile with 5000 L of petalite.
• Scanners are useful only when there is a possibility of untouched areas, but as stated above, it doesn't make sense for players that join later to use them on safe zones planets for instance because it will be mined out.
• Ore depletion and extraction control. To slow down orgs and give solos a better chance and make resources take longer to deplet. As you will see bellow, orgs will still benefic greatly from having multiple players, its just not as unbound as it is right now.
  • Make a mining territory unit, that would allow only the owner to extract ore from 3 tiles connected to where placed for X amount a time, (lets say 1 hour).
  • Scanners can be used without it but would take longer (20-30 mins).
  • It would take Y amount of time (10 min) to claim that land for that X amount of time, but once the process starts it would show on the map for everyone. 
  • After the land is claimed for mining, the owner can only claim another after the claimed timed plus a V amount of cooldown (maybe 30 min).
  • The temporary claim process can be cancelled in the first Z minutes (lets say 2 mins) without penalties but after that it triggers the cooldown.
  • Add player and org controlled ways of marking the tiles, right now we have bookmarks but its not visual enough, too hard to determined where have you been. For orgs, make players have to send reports for locations (maybe the scan results) so the org liders can add to an Org view of the map. This later could be one of the player driven missions, to pay outside org players to scan tiles for them.
• The ship building needs an overhaul mainly because of PVP purposes, but for more immersion too. 
  • Voxels should be required to connect parts.
  • Voxels should obstruct engine and such.
  • Wings should required a bigger spacing, to avoid wing spam.
  • Wings flow check should be consider from the entire piece not just a point (people are covering them using voxelmancy)
  • Voxels need to be made much stronger so it isnt just a game of hitkills.
  • Maybe add shields and reflectors?
• The PVP system - If is going to be tab targeting I suggest
  • allowing the pilot to control some guns of his ship, not all.
  • each gunner seat to control some guns not all.
  • greatly reduce the damage the guns are doing, but also make ships reduce speed when hit and when firing.
  • Maybe add a mouse minigame to help increase accuracy and select target. Something like aiming and calibrating the gun.

 

Thank you guys for reading it, hope DU continues to improve.

 

[Zamiel7]

There's definitely some worthwhile ideas kicking around in here, but there are also some things that you might have the wrong impression on:

35 minutes ago, sellene said:

• Remove predictability of ores in planets. As of now the community mapped out, which ore is in which planet at what depth range.
  • That leads to safe zone Moons been mined out of higher tier ores.
  • That makes will eventually make it even less fun for players that come along later, they will be mining only T1 ores.

The issue here isn't with the predictability of ore appearance; it has more to do with how worthless moons are for mining anything right now. Basically, if you're spending any amount of time mining on moons (other than to get the one mining achievement for mining on 20 different planets/moons) you are straight up wasting your time. Moons have pathetically low amounts of ore, especially for anything above T1. Ultimately, moons should probably be rebalanced to actually be worth mining, but that has nothing to do with ore predictability.

 

39 minutes ago, sellene said:

Scanners are useful only when there is a possibility of untouched areas, but as stated above, it doesn't make sense for players that join later to use them on safe zones planets for instance because it will be mined out.

I disagree with this. Scanners can be useful for confirming whether a mined tile still has any meaningful amount of ore in it. It's been the case for us that we happened upon a tile that had been visibly mined, but had a mostly unfinished mega-node of T1 ore. The people mining originally didn't even come close to finishing it, but also didn't claim the territory, so we were happy to finish it for them. Whether or not it's a safe zone has nothing to do with it.

 

43 minutes ago, sellene said:

Ore depletion and extraction control. To slow down orgs and give solos a better chance and make resources take longer to deplet. As you will see bellow, orgs will still benefic greatly from having multiple players, its just not as unbound as it is right now.

• Make a mining territory unit, that would allow only the owner to extract ore from 3 tiles connected to where placed for X amount a time, (lets say 1 hour).
• Scanners can be used without it but would take longer (20-30 mins).
• It would take Y amount of time (10 min) to claim that land for that X amount of time, but once the process starts it would show on the map for everyone. 
• After the land is claimed for mining, the owner can only claim another after the claimed timed plus a V amount of cooldown (maybe 30 min).
• The temporary claim process can be cancelled in the first Z minutes (lets say 2 mins) without penalties but after that it triggers the cooldown.
• Add player and org controlled ways of marking the tiles, right now we have bookmarks but its not visual enough, too hard to determined where have you been. For orgs, make players have to send reports for locations (maybe the scan results) so the org liders can add to an Org view of the map. This later could be one of the player driven missions, to pay outside org players to scan tiles for them.

 

The issue with these ideas is that they don't actually benefit solo players as you claim they do, and only adds a mostly redundant alternative to just claiming territory. For most mining, claiming territory is totally unnecessary and even counter-productive. A solo player or an organization looking for specific ores can easily just scan, mine, and haul what they need without the need to claim anything. The only time claiming territory for mining becomes a practical need is when you discover a mega node or a tile that has large amounts of a variety of ore, which if that's the case, you'll be wanting to claim that tile semi-permanently (i.e. how it currently works). However, there is an idea here.

 

Ultimately, what will become one of the biggest downsides to permanently claiming territory will be the fact that everyone will be able to see that territory claimed on the map, and once planetary PvP becomes a thing, that means you've just painted a target on whatever you've claimed. Large organizations will have a huge advantage here because they'll be better able to hold and defend their territory, but solos and small organizations might be interested in the veil of obscurity that comes from not claiming territory. So, perhaps an idea worth mulling over is creating a way to temporarily claim territory that doesn't indicate the territory is claimed on the map. This could give players the chance to be a little sneakier in their activities.

 

55 minutes ago, sellene said:

The ship building needs an overhaul mainly because of PVP purposes, but for more immersion too. 

• Voxels should be required to connect parts.
• Voxels should obstruct engine and such.
• Wings should required a bigger spacing, to avoid wing spam.
• Wings flow check should be consider from the entire piece not just a point (people are covering them using voxelmancy)
• Voxels need to be made much stronger so it isnt just a game of hitkills.
• Maybe add shields and reflectors?

 

I think a lot of these will actually be introduced into the game; I'm pretty sure it was soft-confirmed that shields and such would be added, as well as requiring certain elements like wings/stabilizers be more thoughtfully placed. I wouldn't say that voxels as a whole need to be stronger, but I think there should be more meaningful and balanced roles for the different types of honeycomb. Right now it pretty much seems to boil down to go ultra-light with aluminum or heavy with steel.

 

59 minutes ago, sellene said:

The PVP system - If is going to be tab targeting I suggest

• allowing the pilot to control some guns of his ship, not all.
• each gunner seat to control some guns not all.
• greatly reduce the damage the guns are doing, but also make ships reduce speed when hit and when firing.
• Maybe add a mouse minigame to help increase accuracy and select target. Something like aiming and calibrating the gun.

 

PvP definitely needs an overhaul and it's planned to receive one. That being said, it is already the case that the pilot and gunner can control some, but not all guns; it all has to do with the PvP capability of the seat in question. Pilots should never be able to both control the ship and wield bigger guns though; that goes against the design ethos of the game in terms of ship design. As for damage, I have no doubt some of the numbers will change, but you have to be careful about just straight nerfing damage; the ability to replace voxels and repair elements currently would mean ships could be damn near indestructible. 

[sellene]

Thank you @Zamiel7 for your response. Yeah, I figured I might not be aware of some things since I'm very new to the game.

30 minutes ago, Zamiel7 said:

Ultimately, moons should probably be rebalanced to actually be worth mining, but that has nothing to do with ore predictability.

Didn't know that, thank you for the info. But I still think that make more more unpredictable would be a good thing, since it encourages exploration and making mining a bit more rewarding.

 

33 minutes ago, Zamiel7 said:

Scanners can be useful for confirming whether a mined tile still has any meaningful amount of ore in it.

I agree with your point, but I'll have to check how high tier ores are distributed in a tile, because the approach I've mentioned of going to the center and down to check for them would still be faster for checking for T3+ ores than the scanners. If ores become more unpredictable the scanner value would be even better and manual searching would take longer. One question here, is the scanner max range 400m of radius or diameter?

 

1 hour ago, sellene said:

The force respawn needs to have a cooldown mechanic.

What do you think about this?

 

On the rest I agree with you, thank you for letting me know that most my concerns are already being planned for.

[Palad1n]

I don't see any issue with using the forced respawn as a "beam me up" option when you are deep underground and don't want to spend the 5-10 min to get out. It doesn't impact anyone's gameplay at all. In fact, I would encourage the devs to make it a feature to allow players to simply beam up to their ship if they have an active rez node on it, with the same restrictions that you cannot take physical objects with you.

 

If folks choose to turn off respawn nodes on 1 planet so they can quick travel to another outpost on another planet, again, I see no issue with that, as they will need to find a way to travel back to the other world. 

 

Maybe the devs will give us TP hubs similar to those in the main markets in the future with limited range. 

[sellene]

@Palad1n Yeah, my main concern is the ore depleting to quickly on planets, but I think I'm mistaken. I agree with making it a function, and also you gave me an Idea. Imagine being able to create warp pods, that only carry you without items to a warp beacon. It could use way less warp cells than a ship, but the vessel is also consumed on usage.

[Zamiel7]

9 hours ago, sellene said:

I agree with your point, but I'll have to check how high tier ores are distributed in a tile, because the approach I've mentioned of going to the center and down to check for them would still be faster for checking for T3+ ores than the scanners. If ores become more unpredictable the scanner value would be even better and manual searching would take longer. One question here, is the scanner max range 400m of radius or diameter?

First to answer your question, the scanner functions omnidirectionally, so the 400m is a radius. Additionally, you can actually get the max range up to 500m with both Scanner Upgrades and Scanner Advanced Upgrades trained to 5, and it's definitely worth it. As for the question of to scan or not, I think one person would be hard pressed to beat the efficiency of 3 scanners in terms of determining if a tile is worth mining for stuff. If you're just looking for smatterings of ore, sure, just go sans scanner and see what you come up with, but if you're looking for large quantities of specific ores or T4-T5 ore, there's no way you'll beat the efficiency of 3 scanners. And working with a team, this is even more true since you can relegate one person to hopping between borders and scanning three tiles at a time, and having another person(s) mine preliminary discoveries that are only sort of worth it until you find the big score. As for where ore is found, the only determining factor that I'm aware of is depth, so they can be anywhere within the tile along X and Y axes.

 

As for the force respawn having a cooldown, I think that makes enough sense and I'm fine with it. I see it as less important with mining and "beaming up" though, and more relevant to PvP and being able to constantly respawn after being killed.