[Discussion] DevBlog: Rebalancing the Universe

[NQ-Naunet]

Alright Noveans, you know what to do!

It's time to discuss the most recent DevBlog: 

Place all of your thoughtful ruminations about the update here. ?

[iNFiDeL]

-Add more T5

-XL Containers or more container hub links (So we can actually relocate a base area/factory)

-Add maybe another planet to this solar system

-Date for the update

-Will there be a quanta reset?

 

[Finchinator]

Introduce power managment & tiered industry and reset the complete universe but let us keep skillpoints and blueprints. Also a great time to bring the new seed to the planets ^^

[Morituri]

2nd

[Elitez]

1 minute ago, Finchinator said:

Introduce power managment & tiered industry and reset the complete universe but let us keep skillpoints and blueprints. Also a great time to bring the new seed to the planets ^^

Care to explain whats wrong with the Planets? Planets are awesome!

[Elrood]

Bye, bye self-sufficiency, even with small group. Good thing i got enough hours of the game to not be worried about money i paid for it. 

[EatMyNoodle]

what happens to elements that have been cooking for 10 days when they are a 30 day timer when this patch is live?

 

[Finchinator]

Just now, Elitez said:

Care to explain whats wrong with the Planets? Planets are awesome!

Yes they are but NQ wanted to update the terrain generation etc afaik and this would provide a nice opporiunity. Yes we will nuke the complete industry but look better trees and stuff  I dont really need it but hey if you are at it just seize the day

[LocInt]

Make the game fun again!

 

Mining endlessly and then waiting days or weeks for one component to cook is unacceptable and made me quit recently.

 

Fuel usage is also ridiculous.

 

Components are too big.

 

How to fix these issues:

- Add some kind of mining laser for ships so we can mine veins fast.

- Reduce time to make components.

- Make fuel more affordable, people living on Alioth are spending more ore to fuel than crafting. Fuel should be very easy and cheap to craft, even rocket fuel since we're using 1000x more rocket fuel for one trip.

- Balance components so we don't need so many for one ship. Ships look like pill of elements.

[Olmeca_Gold]

Hi NQ

 

Nobody can dispute making everything in megafactories was too easy, linear, and out of balance. But there are so many issues with your approach to fix it.

 

 

PROBLEM 1) You are putting yourselves in quite a position with treating the game as a beta and non-beta whenever it works. On one hand, with the promise of keeping our wealth into the release, we're expected to treat the game as it's an actual launch to compete with other players and organizations. But then there is no support, mechanics can change dramatically, etc. You're also putting at least a 6-months gap between those who could exploit the unbalanced mechanics early and accumulate wealth, and those who couldn't.

 

SOLUTION: I don't really have a solution to this. Perhaps the best way to operate right now is to announce a full wipe at the end of beta if you can financially handle it.

 

 

PROBLEM 2) This update leaked to lots of people for several weeks. The knowledge put those people further ahead.

 

SOLUTION: Either enforce your NDA, or do not disclose (economically sensitive) details of how you'll change things.

 

 

PROBLEM 3)  Completely unhelpful talents just to unlock elements are a bad idea. Eve Online learned this lesson over the years and they are doing away with artificial prerequisites to start playing the game. Industry is one of the rare domains where talents actually GREATLY matter. Most production will eventually become unviable overtime without respective talents. It's bad analysis if you thought the lack of talents was an issue.

 

SOLUTION: If you want to wall element usage behind talents, you should do so behind the existing talents. This way at least people get a benefit alongside element access. A sense of actual progression and no waste of days of training.

 

 

PROBLEM 4) I am quite worried whether the game actually has enough quanta supply recipes for sufficient production.

 

SOLUTION: The game needs isk faucets besides the honeycomb NPC order businesses. I have low-cost proposals for that in the idea box.

 

 

PROBLEM 5) Machine-based recipes create lots of issues. It'll be quite tedious to teach the recipes to every single element and to keep tabs on them even in non-megafactories. Moreover, how will our investments be saved? I hope (but am not certain) the recipes will be saved under "dynamic properties" of a machine. But then we won't be able to deploy the same factory from a blueprint. It'll be impossible to move factories. So you're not only investing in the machine, but also in the location of the factory. That'll have even greater repercussions with territory warfare. 

 

SOLUTION: You should have at least made the recipes character-based. Given that you don't tolerate account sharing and ban those who do, this would still achieve specialization, yet make it way less tedious.

 

 

PROBLEM 6) Cost is an artificial and unsustainable way to motivate people to specialize. Once people accumulate enough capital, megafactories will begin popping again. Then those who can afford them will be miles ahead of others.

 

SOLUTION: To achieve truly sustainable differentiation and specialization, there needs to be differentiation in the ways the source materials are acquired. Ore is equally available to every individual. It should take organizational level effort to access some building materials; it should take outside-the-box intelligently developed systems to access others. Moreover, it should make more sense to make one product somewhere and to make another elsewhere (geographically). 

[Honvik]

I wish somethings a little focus on content was also done as well.  Its a big nerf so those who have made billions can buy what they need and those just starting out are left in the lurch.  I get why your doing it.  It is just a big shame!

[Wh00pAss]

Wonderful, now the people with billions in the bank will get even richer as they will be able to still have a whole factory producing everything and this change will mean very little if anything to them where as the little people who didn't game the system early release will get the shaft /golfclap

[Flamm]

Today finding T5 on symeon is easier than finding T4 on the same planet -> to be adjust

to find more more usage for T5 ore

once done put the T5 on veryhigh gravity planet 1.5-2G

[Vifrevaert]

are schematic just for the final product or all components - do we need a schematic for Pure Carbon for example?

 

[Morituri]

2 minutes ago, LocInt said:

Make the game fun again!

 

Mining endlessly and then waiting days or weeks for one component to cook is unacceptable and made me quit recently.

 

Fuel usage is also ridiculous.

 

How to fix these issues:

- Add some kind of mining laser for ships so we can mine veins fast

- Reduce time to make components

- Make fuel more affordable, people living on Alioth are spending more ore to fuel than crafting. Fuel should be very easy and cheap to craft, even rocket fuel since we're using 1000x more rocket fuel for one trip.

You can use some fuel efficiency to your construct. You can spand 1000l to travel in atmosphere or 100 to travel in sub orbit in 4000km/h speed.

Mining laser would be nice, but I still suffer Pending operation  Solving waitting to load new resources or dig hole would be better than any laser  in the universe

[Difficultylevel]

So the change is welcome if the rest hinted at can be implemented. But and there's always a but, this doesn't fix anything. It creates a class system of have's and have not's. So the market which was a mess to start with, as it was largely irrelvant except for converting mass into quanta to buy the assets you needed, will now still be irrelevant for anyone who isn't poor.

 

Now is the time to try this but without a fully developed system and even more importantly, a complete lack of a meta system, making careers definable or desirable, we're back at square one.

 

The game is missing so much and anything, anything, is welcome but this will not lead to the depth required because it's a finite game design loop, not one of infinite variety or viability.

 

I honestly think this is a clear example of a finger in the dyke of bad game design.

[LocInt]

Just now, Morituri said:

You can use some fuel efficiency to your construct. You can spand 1000l to travel in atmosphere or 100 to travel in sub orbit in 4000km/h speed.

Mining laser would be nice, but I still suffer Pending operation  Solving waitting to load new resources or dig hole would be better than any laser  in the universe

We have all the skills for fuel efficiency but it's still not enough. Our VTOL ships use quite a bit of fuel.

[Philosfr]

5 minutes ago, EatMyNoodle said:

what happens to elements that have been cooking for 10 days when they are a 30 day timer when this patch is live?

 

Exactly. Building our first Anti-Gravity Generator M and it's only about half finished. This is the answer I'm hoping to get as well

 

[KalisaFox]

like these changes so far, only thing im concerned about is for new players, i guess this will push any kind of industry to more of a mid game activity rather then something we all did at the start to build all our starting stuff.
However I feel we should get more talents involved in the nanopack then, allowing us to do slightly more advanced crafting there, cant really mass produce from the nanopack and if there were more talents with that, then it could still serve as a way that a starting player could at least build most basic things without needing an assembler.

[Mjrlun]

Even though the planet decision was made - the universe IMO should still be reset. This is for many reasons. First, as mentioned if this were to happen nothing you constructed would be lost (constructs, inventories, player data, etc). The reason why the universe should be reset is many parts.

First, it would function as a "refresh" of ores and territories for the players who came in later. This would be nice, as now the community is established, the economy would most likely boom more than it has ever been.
The second, is that, let's be honest... the planets right now are subpar. they were made back in [Redacted], when everything was [Redacted] (only [Redacted] players will know what this means). They look awful IMO, especially compared to what they could be. For new players, why would they be interested in planets with pockmarks of lakes, not even proper oceans, and in general chaotic random terrain. Then we look at the planets (which i will remind you were made in [Redacted]) other than Alioth, which look even worse! Some don't even have surface features. For example, Jago is literally "voxels, ocean, rocks", what happened to anything else?
Planets like Madis, or Feli, the list goes on, have very little going on, as if they were placeholders for an upcoming wipe. Why should we keep them this way?

In addition, and this can be bandaid'd manually of course, the voxels of the surface go down into infinity (the core), which is not fundamentally how planets work. they have layers. One workaround is to fix this during a planet wipe, a second is to manually go through and create an algorithm that essentially says "at this elevation under these certain conditions with this randomness replace this specific voxel with this new one".

In addition, it would be nice to add more reasons to use Caves in Dual. Right now they're gaping holes in the middle of no where which have little to more use other than being cool.

[Olmeca_Gold]

2 minutes ago, Philosfr said:

Exactly. Building our first Anti-Gravity Generator M and it's only about half finished. This is the answer I'm hoping to get as well

 

Our Warp Beacon couldn't even start because the assembler "ate" the ingredients. The support ticket was "relayed to developers" (idk what happens now). And now NQ puts 6 months between those with their beacons (and all the other stuff) and those without.

 

NQ put themselves in quite a conundrum by treating this game as a beta and a soft launch wherever it works the best for them.

[Morituri]

 

Just now, LocInt said:

We have all the skills for fuel efficiency but it's still not enough. Our VTOL ships use quite a bit of fuel.

So this is your problem with your construct. I use more efficiency construct with less consumtion. Dont blame game from your wasting resources. It s like throwing nuke to kill little fly.

There is oportunity to use VTOL, but you will pay more fuel. It s up to you and your choice.

[DarkHorizon]

2 minutes ago, LocInt said:

Our VTOL ships use quite a bit of fuel.

By design.

 

Vertical engines used to be just as fuel efficient as horizontal engines but that got nerfed by about 50% way back when.

[Morituri]

2 minutes ago, Philosfr said:

Exactly. Building our first Anti-Gravity Generator M and it's only about half finished. This is the answer I'm hoping to get as well

 

In last update, I lost my territory scanner. No refund from DEV

[Morituri]

Add some Parking Fee for those who trashes their ship next to market. Or do some administrative to permition only for good constructs and ban tons of crapy containers.