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[Discuss] We've Heard You!


NQ-Naunet

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3 hours ago, Hiturn said:

Nice changes, but reimbursing only high price schemes is going to hurt a lot of people, especially merchants.

 

What do you consider a high prices scheme btw?

I read the post differently. It seems that ALL schematic prices are coming down so that would effectively make ALL schematics "high" price imo. Let's hope that true and not only reimburse the "rich" as the hardest hit would be the small guy so not reimbursing them (including me) seems to be a kick in the gut while we are already down.

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Good job guys, I am excited myself to see how these new changes effectively change things. On another note something else to consider with markets and functionality. One of the best implementation of a great player market could be modeled after something similar to the Second Life did it. It was the best form of a player driven economy and market system I had ever seen in any simulation or virtual reality or MMO. Maybe you guys could take a look at that.

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1 hour ago, blazemonger said:

 

That is pretty much the problem though, everything NQ does plays directly into the hands of the big orgs and only makes them stronger while anyone outside of them gains very little, if anything, from them.

 

As long as NQ will allow the status quo for big orgs to remain in place, nothing of what they are looking for to change will happen.

I get that, but hate to speak for the devil here, an mmo is not a solo game. A small group of people can form an org and work together but will not be as organized as a big org. it's like that in every game, whether it's orgs, guilds, corps, ... a group of 4 friends does not do raids in any other MMORPG. a big guild does.  

If you want to benefit from this gameplay and taste all parts of the game you should join a big org, and no, i don't mean you have to join one of the top 5...  you can easily benefit from an org of 20 active people.

 

that said, i feel you, I'm not 20 anymore and I have irregular work hours, so these kinda games are typically not my cup of tea due to the fact that an org can't depend on me and I honestely cant be *rsed to go do something i don't feel like in the precious little time i have online, just because it's my time to do a mining run.

So I play and when I feel like i've seen enough of this game, i'll leave, and leave it to the active org members ... your situation may differ, but I honestly don't think you can expect from an MMO of this caliber to cater to solo players or groups of 2 or 3 friends.

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30 minutes ago, sander said:

I get that, but hate to speak for the devil here, an mmo is not a solo game.

 

That argument is really old and frankly false. Yes, it is absolutely true that as a solo player you will not be able to achieve the same things a big group can and that is clearly fine. It is however not true that it is or should be a requirement that people group up to enjoy a game or be able to set reasonable goals. MMO games like EVE and WoW are good examples of this. For EVE I'd go as far as to say that some solo activities (like exploration and mission running) are vital to the progress for large groups in game be it through markets or by being the part of an organization which operates mostly alone and "under the radar". Playing solo does not mean you are or play alone, there is a massive difference between the two.

 

The problem in DU is not that though, the problem is that, while in themselves entirely understandable to happen in developing a complex game like DU,  due to the growing pains, mistakes, loopholes and exploits left unactioned by NQ they have allowed big orgs to pretty much control the game. If NQ would wipe the game, big orgs would still have an advantage and would still be able to grow and rebuild faster but at the same time the starting point of that would be equal to all. As the game progresses, the overall balance would be maintained and new players get a fair shot at growing into ruling the universe by forming groups and alliances which can and should challenge the existing ones and that is where the conflict and combat in the game should come from. And all the while solo players will find ways to enjoy themselves and contribute to the economy be it as an explorer or as a pirate (just to bring up two options).

 

Someone recently posted this and it's IMO very true; NQ has enabled and allowed big orgs to benefit from unbalanced mechanics and mistakes to build their empires. They now pretty much pull up the  ladder to that opportunity for the rest of the player base, including up and coming bigger organizations.

While I feel that NQ overall has not actually practiced this but IMO Entropy said it really well with regards to a wipe, much better than JC ever did; NQ wil always look for the options they have to repair damage caused by (using a general term) errors they make but will and should wipe if that is not possible while they are still in development towards release. Makes perfect sense to me but at the same time I feel that the 0.23 changes would be a good example of changes that culminate in a massive and unfair advantage due to accrued damage done leading up to the patch which really can't be fixed unless a wipe occurs.

 

 

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that said, i feel you, I'm not 20 anymore and I have irregular work hours, so these kinda games are typically not my cup of tea due to the fact that an org can't depend on me and I honestely cant be *rsed to go do something i don't feel like in the precious little time i have online, just because it's my time to do a mining run.

NQ is turning the game into a grind for sure and that is not great. you're absolutely correct that many, myself included, are not looking for another job. NQ is losing sight of the need for a game to be fun in their drive to emulate RL economics and mechanics in agame.

 

 

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but I honestly don't think you can expect from an MMO of this caliber to cater to solo players or groups of 2 or 3 friends.

I strongly disagree and aforementioned massively successful and long running MMOs have pretty much shown this to not be true at all. And DU is very far away still from being in a position to measure itself against these games, especially EVE which clearly is a massive source of ideas and inspiration for NQ. maybe in 4-5 years it can do that but not at this stage.. Relative to those, DU is pretty much a toddler at best even when it has the possibility to grow into a fierce competitor.

 

 

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Adressing this to NQ,

 

This is a step in the right direction indeed. I cannot speak for everyone, but note that this whole fiasco has caused irreparable damage to players trust.

 

We need an one month subscription option. I for example cannot trust you again with 3 months of sub after this. The same can be said for my friends

and many other people i have discussed this with. Not having this option doesn't do anyone any good. If you are confident about your work there shouldn't

be an issue with this. It is sending away possible starters who stop and reconsider when they see they have to buy a 3 month sub instead of one. Everyone

i ever tried to recruit did not like this. Almost every subscription modeled game has one. Not having one at least gives the wrong impression to people if not

anything else. I have about 3 weeks of time left, if there is no such option when it ends i am not planning to renew my accounts.

 

Before this my friends and me were looking at this game very positively. Even with all it's bugs, issues and missing content we were finding ways to have fun.

Now our will to play has been shattered and we went from positive to less than neutral. Now we need some stability and time if we are going to stay anyway

that is.

 

About the changes:

 

Instead of going through the logs painstaikingly trying to refund everyone for their schematics, you could simply mark the old schematics and add bots to all

markets buying them at their old price. Also note that many of these schematics ended in shared factories, bought by many different people. Just compensating

the account that bought them with quanta might create chaos to their arrangements.

 

I think game performance has to become a temporal priority to you. A big reason changes like element destruction from crashes cannot work right now is due

to this. I don't expect the game to be optimized at this stage, but at least get it to a playable level. Alioth at a radius of 50km around the markets is unplayable

with any graphics card that has under 8 gb of vram. Entry level card for 2k resolution on alioth for this game is the 1080 Ti. My 8gb 1070 Ti almost maxes out

on memory at 1080p at my base. I have to restart the game each time i return to my base even from a little 15 km flight. The average gamer does not have

a gpu capable of handling alioth rnow. People were flying their friends to start alone at remote places because they couldnt play and now they have to use the

markets ...

 

Almost everyone finds the idea of having the schematics scattered across different planets tedious rather than an "entairtaining new business capability".

I would rather have all schematics available on a static npc like unit at all markets with fixed price.

 

ATV players opinion should not have any greater weight, than that of any other player. There shouldn't be any special treatment to them concerning game changes

and they shouldn't be recieving information earlier. They are still players they will obviously leak this info to their friends. The test server is a great idea that should

have been so from the start. It could also serve as a training ground for starters.

 

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These things will not help my small warp cells factory to work again, it costs too much. These changes could come but slower giving the way to people to keep their stuff working. You cut out many players from trading and you gave too much power to few that will decide how the market will go. Above all for players like me concentrated in Lua not making a single quanta from it because you didn't include any script protection since the beginning.

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Before we talk about the changes we’ll make in our processes going forward, let’s get back to the fundamental reason behind the update itself. What we did in 0.23 is at the heart of the vision for a game where a society of players is interacting directly or indirectly with each other through an elaborate network of exchanges, cooperation, competition and markets.
 

As it was, the current state of the game consisted mostly of isolated islands of players playing in almost full autonomy. A single-player game where players happened to share the same game world but with little interactions.
 

It’s hard to imagine how the appeal could last for more than several months for most players once they feel they have “finished” the game. It is also a missed opportunity to try something of larger proportion, a society of players growing in a fully persistent virtual world. For this to work, you need more than isolated gameplay. Players need to have viable reasons to interact and need each other.
 

In many single-player space games, you have ways to make money, and the game then offers you ways to convert this money into whatever you need in the game to progress, mostly via markets. This is the state in which we should end up for Dual Universe once all the necessary ingredients are in place, You get into the game, you farm a bit of money in fun ways, and you buy more and more powerful ships, equipment, weapons, etc., to help your character grow. The difference is that here, the ships or equipment you buy have been made by other players, instead of the game company. On the surface and during the first hours of gameplay, to a new player it would look similar to any of those other space games, but it would in fact reveal itself to be much deeper once you spend a bit of time in the game. Everything you would do would be part of another player’s or organization’s plan, everything would have a meaning. And soon you would realize that you too could be part of the content creation and, somehow, drive the game in the direction you want.
 

In its current beta stage, DU doesn’t have enough ways for people to make money because we haven’t yet had the opportunity to implement all of the necessary features. There’s mining, of course. Trading is not as good as it will eventually be because markets are not really used to their full potential. As a consequence, players rightfully turned to a solo or small org autonomous game mode. 
 

We tried to nudge people out of this with the changes introduced in 0.23. While necessary, many players expressed that the changes of 0.23 came too soon because it lacked a variety of lucrative ways for people to make money outside of mining.

 

 

I understand your reasoning and even agree with it, I don't think too many players would be hard against this, the execution of the patch was in my view.......much to be desired.

I think i will just bulletpoint:

1. Please never cram in this much to a patch again, it was the perfect storm of changes that caused players a lot of problems outside of simply just buying schematics.

2. No way in hell should a subset of players have had advanced warning of this change (even if that warning was via testing the change) in future i would reccomend that at the point of you going 'yes we are going to put this change to live' every single member of the community should know about that change the moment a single player does. In a game like wow or ff14 where players test content etc it is fine not to let the playerbase at large in on the change, it might even be preferable for the playerbase that this happen. In a sandbox this advanced notice is an incredible benefit to anyone who knows for obvious reasons.
3. Communication needs to improve, this lines up with 2 but from another angle, if you were to have given players notice of 0.23 ahead of time you would have been able to get feedback before it hurt players, the reputation of the game and your company.

4. Policy changes in support lined up with this patch......well i don't lose my head too often but last night 2 bugs totalled a ship and severely ruined another which could have been a no biggy if either we had the tools prior to patch 0.23 to  stop the ship or GM's were allowed to repair a ship and tp without a ticket.

5. mining is not a fun thing to do, really should have added missions and then added this change maybe.


 

Here’s our plan for now. We will modify the formula of the schematic prices to make it considerably more affordable for Tier 1 and still challenging and worth a commitment but less intense for anything Tier 2 or above. 
 

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This will allow most factories focused on T1 to resume their activities rapidly while keeping an interesting challenge for higher tiers, spawning dedicated industrial facilities aiming at producing to sell on the markets. We will also reimburse players who have bought high-priced schematics since the launch of 0.23 (please give us some time since it may take a few days as we go through the logs).

 

I am not sure I agree that you give anyone a challenge here, mining ore, selling to bots, buy schematics or some such loop is not challenging or engaging, don't get me wrong i understand this is a beta but can you not see how it might make folks nervous that you seem to be equating challenge with tedious grinding?

If you look at the people who probably spend days building ships, the challenge for them is getting that ship looking good and ensuring it handles well, that involves thought, skill and testing often involving multiple iterations, i would say that is a challenge and a fun one too, at least i think it is, I can't imagine a single player would class collecting t2 schematics and setting up the factory as challenging, I would again, describe this as a time sink process.


 

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The release of 0.23 also taught us that we need improved ways to test new features, both internally and with community participation. The Upvote feature on the website was a good start, but it’s not enough. 

Agreed, might also be nice to send players emails, use discord, reddit and whatever else to advertise how players can participate, i for one was not aware of this until recently, to a point that is on me but getting community participating in this as much as possible benefits everyone.
 

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To address this, we have two courses of action that will be taken. The first will be to set up an open public test server, hopefully with shorter release cycles, for players to try out new features.

 

This is great, transparency in the development for the game was a key thing highlighted for me in this patch, love this.

 

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The second important initiative is to revise the role of the Alpha Team Vanguard (ATV), getting them more involved in early discussions about new features and the evolution of the game. We are still defining the framework, so more information will be released as available. 

 

Having a subset of players have input into where the game is going is dangerous, look at eve for a lesson on why; players of the game are going to have their own agendas and it will be hard for all involved to discern agenda from changes directed at sincerely making the game better, also close collab between devs and a subset of players is treated with suspicion.....again look at eve as to why.

 

If these are the same peeps who were clued in to 0.23 and played the market accordingly that should be enough to give you pause for thought on whether continued collaboration with players in this fashion is healthy for the game, then again this may have been a pledge or something in one of your kickstarters or what not so i don't know how viable it is to ramp player involvement down in closed door discussions or testing.

 

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    Element destruction will impact the restoration count only when it occurs through PvP, at least for now (not when the ship is colliding/falling as we want to avoid having players penalized simply for crashing their ships because they’re learning how to maneuver them, for example).

    Fantastic, it will be great when game is more stable to see this also removed and crashes causing element destruction, though element 'lives' have been questioned a lot, are you looking into the many forum posts and reddit posts that put forth reasoning for why this might not be the best idea?
    Another question would be, will elements currently at less than 3/3 be restored as a lot of people, me included ended up with blown components thanks to various bugs including one i submitted that i think was added into this patch (warp spool down, crashed when it was < 30k, when logged back in ship was at 26kmh heading straight for alioth at less than <2su, 3 guesses to how my ship faired on that one).
     

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    Recycling of un-restorable elements through a recycler that will take an element as input and grant a small amount of the schematics required components as output.

    This is cool, would be really interested to know if this is going to be expanded, something like this might be a partial answer to the reward of pvp.

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We also want to reassure you that the mission system is not the only answer to offering more varied ways to earn revenue in Dual Universe. Things like asteroid mining and mining units will be introduced in the next few months. 

This got me thinking, I thought mining units were tied to territory warfare? I am sure NQ mentioned this or JC mentioned this.
If this is the case does this mean territory warfare is going to come into the game within 2 months as well? Seems like an awful lot to achieve in just 2 months if so and I imagine territory warfare to be the thing that will dwarf the drama from 0.23 if it doesn't hit a fine balance. On one hand it is great that lot's of stuff is on its way but on the other this didn't add up to me from previous AMA's etc so would be good to get clarification.

 

Also from a communication perspective territory warfare is going to be something that needs a ton of comms pumped out or players on vacation are going to come back to plundered territories if you go down the route of making a territory trivial to conquor. Now that I think about it this seems like a ton to come in within 2 months when you consider the horrendous balancing issues that territory warfare is going to bring.


 

Anyhow overall the change shows promise that in the face of a community that is unhappy NQ is willing to reflect and adjust but on the other i felt the talent reset and quanta increase was sheer panic which ended up annoying players further, so I do hope changes in future go a little smoother.

All my criticism being said and done I do like the game, it has a lot of promise and I hope it becomes a sandbox that I can enjoy like I once did SWG

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3 hours ago, Serula said:

I think you should be carefull with reseaching schematics. It can cause players with multiple accounts into a more pay to win model by having each account research schematics offline and sell them when they are back in game.

This is what happened with eve regarding invention iirc, people just threw a load of money at alts for research, hell eve is a game where alts are almost a requirement for anyone wanting to get deep into it. I already have 3 in this game , not sure many want this to happen

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I'm actually very happy that you are not scrapping Schematics because of all the tears. However, I do agree with the DU community that the cost on some of the very beginner t1 prints were too much and I like your way of handling the issue by raising the costs of t2 and above as a bar to set for those truly interested in crafting. The real issue at hand was a balance was needed to the market. Too many people got involved with crafting to the point where you saw many sell goods under the costs of the materials to make them. This MAY put a plug in that leaky dam. Only time will tell. The other thing I like is the consideration of bringing prices down in certain regards to prints that would literally takea year or more on a ROI basis. Your solutions are sound NQ. I'm glad that you do in fact listen to your community and I love this game. I can handle the market, I can handle the changes in crafting, and I respect your dedication to making this a player driven mmo. Keep up the great work and don't listen to the haters.

 

Best Regards,
DG

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Excellent. I actually proposed something like this to JC on twitter. If the T1s are made cheap people will be able to produce stuff. The high prices on higher tier stuff is ok. You can now build your own ship again without ruining yourself. 

 

The element destruction thing was a good idea but not all good ideas should be implemented. To get people to fly much (which is what you want in this game) you have to make sure that fuel is quite cheap and that repairs are cheap. 

 

Gravity and ghostvoxels and stuff often destroy ships in this game.

 

So people will fly less if the risk to crash is too high (and you risk having to pay lots to rebuild the ship). 

 

Good that it is reversed.

 

Now it is moving in a good direction again.

 

 

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57 minutes ago, bleakcon said:

This is what happened with eve regarding invention iirc, people just threw a load of money at alts for research, hell eve is a game where alts are almost a requirement for anyone wanting to get deep into it. I already have 3 in this game , not sure many want this to happen

I only have two alts. But i am considering getting a third for pvp. It is much more fun using the alts in this game than in Eve.

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What NQ did to achieve their wishes it is just temporary, once people set down again market will be exactly like they were, it is just a matter of time. This will never be like a real market experience where prices are governed by politics, lobbies, enterprises. There are no countries, no borders, no customs. No import export. When even a single player will slowly have what he/she needs nothing prevent to go back to the previous stage. Actually this game if it was not for Lua it's pretty boring and repetitive. Hopefully they will introduce more stuff, giving players discomfort and troubles to produce anything and vanished all someone did until now it's just bad. It's not with market that people will keep playing. Give real exploration, real tools to scan the universe don't let us see planets that we have not discovered yet or whatever is in the universe give us tools to use and interpret to find places that hide good rewards and worth to be discovered, all these things will anyway move the economy naturally, if there is no reason to explore there is no reason to produce anything. I'm not going to play a game where I've to join at all cost some organisation that it is just using me as a stupid miner and few are leading everything else, there is no fun in that. We play games to escape the real world now you want to try to take the real world (in terms of single player possibility) in to the game. Challenges and what keep people playing are others, not tedious and boring grinding to get money to make an industry to work again.

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My favourite quote is possibly this uderstatement of the decade:

"We tried to nudge people out of this with the changes introduced in 0.23."

 

More like:

 

Spoiler

CIX1lF0.jpg

 

But seriously, 
 

The fact is, I was already buying an awful lot of stuff from the markets and was trying to save up for an AGG... even after playing for months in an org with over a dozen active players, not solo! ... That's why I didn't stack up wads of cash.. I was using money rather than hoarding... which was good for the economy...

A mix of local building (mainly industry elements, voxels, fuel, decorations and electronics/functional stuff) 

But the rest I was purchasing: L engines, brakes, radar, other ship parts.
 

So I find it ironic that their new system basically kicked players who were playing the way THEY wanted in the balls and effectively congratulated those who had hoarded billions of ℏ...

Absolute nonsense...

I am not sure how they are going to get themselves out of this... Who wants to fly ships made by someone they have never met.. And lets face it, the ships are not going to fly anywhere nearly as well as those in Elite Dangerous let alone be as gorgeous as those in SC...

NQ effectively Comparing this game to EVE have failed in a key area... This game is immersive on a personal level.. Eve was basically a spreadsheet management game with 3rd person almost turn by turn (due to time lag)  strategy  game and industrial simulator.

Regardless of how this game was marketed, it basically came of as a kind of minecraft on steroids... akin to Second Life... with guns... and PvP... and other people... and a bit of Space Engineers...

There is no denying that the entire civilisation will, as NQ said themselves depend on players to BUILD AND DESIGN stuff... why? becuase that is core gameplay.
At the very least, if you want to fly someone else's ship, you'll likely want to fly one by either a super famous designer in game or (far more likely) by someone in your org.

Which then basically boils back down to orgs building their own ships...

And eventually noobs will, after outgrowing their speeder, want to design their own ship, too... by using the markets to buy stuff... which is what they were doing anyway.

Then 0.23 came along...


IMO, the game will just end up back where it was. that was the natural state for a game of this nature.

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6 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

We will modify the formula of the schematic prices to make it considerably more affordable for Tier 1 and still challenging and worth a commitment but less intense for anything Tier 2 or above. 

You're speaking about it NOW? After I've spent a lot of money on T1 schematics!? How about reimbursing me my millions of quanta?

 

6 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

We tried to nudge people out of this with the changes introduced in 0.23.

SURPRISE! But you know, you need other gameplay mechanics than mining and half-baked featureless PvP, to make people interested about "outside" of their domain.

 

Also, to ensure that schematics are part of the player's economy, please implement this thing:

 

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Hi NQ,

I think your have a great game already. I enjoyed it and it gives lots of opportunities to create and build stuff. This part of the game is working very well.

 

You miss player interaction? As long as ores are plenty, there is no need to interact, schematics or not. If there is a limit of resources, struggle and powerplay starts.

 

Some more thoughts:

if you want to commit yourself to a game like this and its mechanics, you want to have an idea what you can expect, because it can and should be a long lasting experience.

When it comes to the "civilization" aspect, I'm wondering what you guys think a civilization actually is... just things? Buildings, Ships and industries? That's a very limited and sad vision.

A civilization is its culture, what comes for it's environment, it's stories, it's inventors and it's visionaries. And it's not on a developer to decide what the peoples vision has to be. Deal with the fact that you gna have very different  intentions and visions and that the players will strive and fight for them, if they can do it on a "fair" and leveled playing field.

If you want to give the player the opportunity to build a new civilization, you have to decide what is a civilization made of? What technological level are you dealing with?

 

If we are talking about a futuristic realm, at the very first you have to define the energy on which the whole thing is running on. Everything else has to be related, limited and defined by energy, its disitribution and allocation. This will bring a cost to every produced item, the more energy is needed the higher the cost will be, beyond the ores. People could make income by just producing energy, selling it to a nearby factory or city for example. Just by a certain limit of energy generation you give the people a reason to deal with each other.

 

If the state of technology provides you with nanotech, every singe item shall be recycled to its basic elements and reconfigured.

Does the nanosuit provides you with food and water? It could give the game a very immersive gameplay, if you have to deal with other basic needs that just having fuel or a new engine. You have vast but empty planets and their surfaces are just there to place static cores and move some dirt?  How does there different environment effect your gameplay beyond gravity? Do I have to deal with temperature, pressure, radiation or meteroids? What a wasted gift. If just the plants have a reason to be there, it would be amazing. Not talking about computing wildlife. I don't have to hunt deer of breed sheep in a space game. But different Biomes could have a purpose, providing different kind or amount of resources and energy. Equitorial tiles could have strong solar and high biomass, arctic tiles provide freshwater or special ores. Lunar regolith could provide isotopes enriched by cosmic radiation. Different environments force you to distribute, trade and simply move stuff for a reason. Every place should have it's special purpose and reason to go there :)

 

cheers and keep the good stuff coming :)

 

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Element destruction will impact the restoration count only when it occurs through PvP

This will lead to overproducrion of items again. PvP occupies not big part of the game. Game needs ways to sink elements not only in PvP. Just fix your physics. It's not sustanible when whole ship blows up from hitting small rock. 

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I can't understand seriously. I was not going to bother to wait for the production time if I needed few elements to build a ship or upgrading my factory, I was going to the market to buy them... it wasn't this that NQ wanted? I was already doing it. Instead to buy a schematic then just allow us to choose may be once every month what schematic an industry can run according our talents. Makes schematic be part of the talents and not something to buy. If I've an industry and I've the talent I should be able to run that industry in the way I want. Buying an industry can already be expensive or upgrading it to an higher level buying "motherboards" that will allow you to produce, still according your talents, all the schematics for that level. Also you introduced something when the game it is not yet good at all in managing the industries, for example the talents that suppose to give more productivity to an element when "put down" how the hel we should know which are the industries affected and which are not when we have some of them? There is nothing that shows us the industries level.

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Here are some first-blush reactions to this. I had a fairly modest factory whose output I used to sell Core Units, Warp Drives, AGGs and pulsors, Territory Units, T2 engines and T1 flight elements when the prices were giving me a 30%+ markup over ore sell price at the District markets. If I include my assets, I can probably call myself a billionaire even though said assets have questionable worth in the current economic mess. So this is all coming from someone who wants the market to work, and has some experience in trying to use them.

 

I also just want to say that the promise that the devs are going to keep their thumb heavily on the market despite an admission that they have no idea what they're doing does not fill me with confidence. I have been waiting on this message before making any moves, and hearing that just means I'm going to try and teach myself the aesthetics of shipbuilding or something rather than touch Industry, despite having an alt character dedicated to it. I also hate to repeat rumors, but it's been said there's no economist on the team, and it certainly seems like it.

 

First, and probably most important, is that there are too many markets for too few players. I'm fairly confident in saying this even being totally ignorant of the population, because I'd see NovaQuark bragging about it if we had enough folks to justify 10 District markets, 10 scattered around Alioth, and a further 66 between the other 11 planets. I didn't even count moons because moons are dumb. It's really no surprise that we have isolated player groups, because the game basically shoves you out the door, tells you can produce everything, shows you all this free real estate and tells you to go colonize it. Obviously there's an issue of distance from markets and people claiming all the nearby tiles, but the current situation is basically worse because most of these markets probably have no population whatsoever. If they sucked it up and made the best of setting their home up to Podunk Barren Market 69 by just making items themselves, well now they're screwed! I really wish player markets had been a priority, because then at least we'd have an idea of where population centers were, even though those obviously have their own issues even if they're as difficult to make as, say, warp beacons.

 

Second, the market interface is just bad. The only useful information you can get quickly and easily is the highest and lowest buy and sell orders for a single item system wide. If you want a local price, you have to scroll - possibly through a lot of cruft - and hope you catch it. Sorting by distance is worse than useless, as there appears to be no sort to the prices and you now have to scroll through to find something that's not either ignorantly overpriced or woefully out of date. At a minimum, you should be able to sort by two parameters and see a generalized 'this many players have been to this market in the past week' somewhere. There's a whole lot of other stuff that JC said there would be an API for (which is mysteriously missing from the original post, I notice), but that's mostly for helping the market sellers and I want to keep the scope of this wall of text to why the markets are difficult to use at all. I just want to say I'd be perfectly happy to fly stuff around to different markets if I knew what I was putting there wasn't just going to rot like all the abandoned structures scattered around the game world.

 

This deserves its own line - I've spent, cumulatively, many hours since October 15th searching the twenty ores and a dozen or so items I plan to sell, scrolling down to find the first price with District next to it, and throwing that in a spreadsheet each day. This is probably a form of madness and it's kind of sad that it's the best recourse I have, but at least now I've learned a lot about spreadsheet wizardry.

 

I want to quote this because it's deeply concerning:

 

Quote

We currently lack the metrics to properly assess this return on investment time. We need a player-driven market price for the components and a market price for the products to assess the profit made by each run of a schematic. This will come when the markets start to work as intended, and we can gather more data about them. 

It's difficult for me at this point, but I am going to trust that NovaQuark has the tools to get these metrics, and just don't want to use the data on the large volumes that myself and many others have put through the District markets because said data doesn't involve schematics and does involve bot orders for honeycomb and such tainting it all.

 

There will never be a stable market price for components unless there is some use for them other than turning them into finished goods (see: some of the suggestions to make repairs to elements require Complex, Functional, or Structural parts). Nevermind the fact that it's just logistically simpler and basically inevitable for me, under the current Talent system, to be able to produce them cheaper than I can find them on the market, why on EARTH would I ever subject myself to the whims of buy and sell order supply? If I'm going to rely on another player for these orders, I will find a wholesaler who agrees to produce what I need, not hope some bozo at a market drops some hydraulics off.

 

I also feel like the first few points I made about being markets easier to use should be Priority Number One. I only currently care about the District markets because they're basically the only one that's remotely legible - I know there is a population looking to buy what I sell, and I've already given you that bit about how painful it is to even just get enough info to slightly undercut other guys vying to sell their products. The only other market I'd be remotely confident selling at is Market 17, which that Jey-numbers fellow from Discord has been propping up. Anything else would be networking or guesswork.

 

Finally, since I've not seen anybody mention this in the zillion discussions I've seen about auto-mining and whatnot: the economy is foundationally based on finding different flavors of rock from different locations. This makes the entire supply chain very one note and monotonous. If you really want to create specialization and have people trading for stuff, try adding inputs that aren't just ore. Auto-mining could return its own unique types of ore or gas or something; there could be products that require the input of grown crops or animals which is more hands-on that automining but still fundamentally time gated. Maybe each planet has its own unique gas type that isn't super valuable, but it makes stuff made using it on that planet cheaper there and you might be able to pack otherwise empty hold space with the gas to sell back on Alioth or wherever. Of course this requires a lot of development time and totally restructuring the recipes and will be its own messy balance, but everything is currently so simple, sterile, unvaried, and often tedious.

 

And my actually final bit in this rambling wish section: WHY does refining ore generate mass? More than half the pures in the game have more mass than their equivalent ore, and almost all of them produce more mass in byproducts than ore mass input. It doesn't even make sense to refine pure locally to save on shipping costs most of the time!

Edited by OwenQuillion
minor typos, clarity
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Greetings to the developers. Yes, these corrections to the previously introduced changes are needed, and good ones as far as I can judge so much in advance. Making mining easier, wow - since such a long time i was hoping for it! happy to read that mining soon becomes easier and hopefully less boring. Too much time is spent for searching an mining, keeping me away from all the things that I actually want to do. I am an explorer and a little bit a producer (or WAS, until the latest changes), but the mining prevents me from that most of the time.

Please don't forget to add luminescent glass of different colors, also add the colors pink, lilac, purple, lavender to honeycomb types. Add paints and color sprays to our possibilities as many players want t spray their ships (and bases) in fluid color flows, like yellow to white, just to call an example.

Also, wishing you to stay safe and healthy, and  that you will continue to work on this wonderful and promising game. Oh, yes, please make the environments looking more real, I could name as examples "Green Hell" or "Ark Survival Evolved".   :-)

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3 hours ago, xTru said:

PVP be cause loot.

PVP not fun anymore because dont want second hand loot. No one buys second hand elements.

Back to industry.

Thanks

Sounds like you will be able to scrap it to get parts and minerals.  Not sure if it will be profitable though.  As far as stealing ship and using or selling the parts, this patch is not a solution.  PvP needs to work for the game to work.

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6 minutes ago, Hirnsausen said:

Greetings to the developers. Yes, these corrections to the previously introduced changes are needed, and good ones as far as I can judge so much in advance. Making mining easier, wow - since such a long time i was hoping for it! happy to read that mining soon becomes easier and hopefully less boring. Too much time is spent for searching an mining, keeping me away from all the things that I actually want to do. I am an explorer and a little bit a producer (or WAS, until the latest changes), but the mining prevents me from that most of the time.

Please don't forget to add luminescent glass of different colors, also add the colors pink, lilac, purple, lavender to honeycomb types. Add paints and color sprays to our possibilities as many players want t spray their ships (and bases) in fluid color flows, like yellow to white, just to call an example.

Also, wishing you to stay safe and healthy, and  that you will continue to work on this wonderful and promising game. Oh, yes, please make the environments looking more real, I could name as examples "Green Hell" or "Ark Survival Evolved".   ?

Are you serious? Your compliments are for something that are just conjectures on how it will be. May be I missed it but I didn't see that mining will be easier and if easier in which way? You are just assuming it will be almost like free ores all around easy and fast to get. I don't think is going to be like this. About your other requests... don't hope much in a more real environment. Just an example if they introduce life may be you see something moving around that other players can't see, the server is limited and those things would be probably only on player side. Not really realistic. 

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