I finally get it!

[GraXXoR]

8 hours ago, Haku0814 said:

Players crashing, really was a good thing... and they lost items to... so they had to buy more... wait, wait! so instead of fixing the issue CAUSING people to crash *Coughs towers* they removed a key game play loop instead...

... cough... server lag and non-timely rendering speed, not the towers themselves...

The problem was that people were crashing because of ridiculous server lag and poor rendering optimisation... as in, super low LOD versions of all the constructs within a few km should be automatically loaded or maybe their build extreme outlines highlighted first in green, something like ore... before they are rendered.

 

Currently, the game seems to try and load weird, melted versions of the construct at fairly high resolution, but low fidelity before filling in the details...
This needs to me more intelligently handled.

disclaimer: 
We also are constructing a nearly 2km high tower in front of (over?) Madis MP3 that sometimes only renders once dangerously close due to shonky DU server technology...  
Have already hit it and died... twice... Once when I hit it and blew up. and a second time a minute later when I flew over to the ship and landed on it to repair it and the physics restarted again, sending me crashing a second time into the building and my other ship.
When this game delivers, it delivers with cowbells and jester hats attached.

[HangerHangar]

There have been way too many exploits to seriously consider this a market SIM.

 

IE: the item teleportation bug was literally just based on your linked containers just disabling GUI options.   So you you could purposefully kill your cockpit While making sure your linked container survived, then spawn at Alioth markets and have markets deposit into your distant container on a different planet.

[GraXXoR]

8 minutes ago, HangerHangar said:

There have been way too many exploits to seriously consider this a market SIM.

 

IE: the item teleportation bug was literally just based on your linked containers just disabling GUI options.   So you you could purposefully kill your cockpit While making sure your linked container survived, then spawn at Alioth markets and have markets deposit into your distant container on a different planet.

Or you could just, allegedly ? log off while sitting on a seat in the construct while someone piloted it beyond the threshold of your container range...

 

amusingly, the game used a simplistic toggle on or off if they player actually crossed the range threshold...

 

so I was told.

apparently...

 

Star Citizen used to have the same bug, but for oxygen testing and helmet wearing... if you went through an airlock without a helmet, you died...

if you took your helmet off outside, you died...

but if you glitched thought a cockpit window or bulkhead while in civilian clothes, you could bypass the check and  survive..

[Zeddrick]

On 3/30/2021 at 5:06 AM, Treelover69 said:

Yea, this is pretty much it.

 

They needed to actually hard limit individual's ability to diversify industry to force players into specialized industry make trade happen. Only think I can think to do would be to make it so you can only talent into X number of industry chains, and can only make things you're talented into. If it's restrictive enough, goods will flow more readily, but I doubt people want another talent/industry rework anytime soon...

I think you could make it so a player can only have a certain number of machines running at once.  200 say.  Then industrialists have to choose what they use that for instead of being able to just add intermediate production for free.

 

It would give a lot more value to, say, being a screw seller because by selling screws you reduce the number of machines the buyer needs to make things.

 

And you could still make all your own stuff, just not all at once.

[Hazard0814]

18 hours ago, Zeddrick said:

I think you could make it so a player can only have a certain number of machines running at once.  200 say.  Then industrialists have to choose what they use that for instead of being able to just add intermediate production for free.

 

It would give a lot more value to, say, being a screw seller because by selling screws you reduce the number of machines the buyer needs to make things.

 

And you could still make all your own stuff, just not all at once.

That may end up being the case when they add energy/power requirements to things.

[joaocordeiro]

On 3/30/2021 at 5:06 AM, Treelover69 said:

They needed to actually hard limit individual's ability to diversify industry to force players into specialized industry make trade happen

Lol thats the exact type of thinking that lead us to this place... 

 

How about we stop for a second before typing simple solutions for complicated problems and think how we would implement them and how that implementation would kill the game even faster for lone players?

 

If any limit is set to a single player, a group of players will overcome the limit and have another huge advantage over those single players. 

 

So you are suggesting a intensification of the problem, not the fix.... 

[CoyoteNZ]

On 4/1/2021 at 10:44 AM, Haku0814 said:

Players crashing, really was a good thing... and they lost items to... so they had to buy more... wait, wait! so instead of fixing the issue CAUSING people to crash *Coughs towers* they removed a key game play loop instead...

I think it was two hard on new players trying to learn to fly. How long do you think they would stick around if their speeder was destroyed and all the parts needed to be replaced by the ti e they managed to drag their first over loaded shipment of surface collected ore back to the Sanctuary market place?

 

I think it would be a good thing for more experienced players. But you can’t say ok, they have played for X hours, they are now experienced. As people learn at different speeds.

 

I still think the best solution would be have it for M and L cores, and not have it for XS and maybe even S cores.

 

I’m a factory guy, so I would benefit from every small ding destroying your vehicle; but the game wouldn’t benefit.

 

Also, how about Voxel damage in regular crashes. Adds character, but doesn’t penalise players as much as element death. 

 

[Zeddrick]

On 4/2/2021 at 5:02 PM, Haku0814 said:

That may end up being the case when they add energy/power requirements to things.

No, because power and energy requirements will be *per construct* and you can have an unlimited number of constructs.  So you'll still be able to have an unlimited amount of machines.  It's possible there will be power per tile requirements, but there will always be people putting a base on the join of 3 tiles, etc and making that work.

 

The best way to limit what players can do is to actually put direct limits on what players can do.  It's baffling that these sorts of limits aren't there at the moment really -- those limits are present in all the MMOs I've played except for the mobile based 'pay to win' games where paying a ton of RL money to get game-breaking amounts of power is the whole business model.  It clearly isn't the model here.  There are limits on guns on a PvP ship, for example, so they must be aware of this sort of issue.

[Zeddrick]

On 4/2/2021 at 5:11 PM, joaocordeiro said:

Lol thats the exact type of thinking that lead us to this place... 

 

How about we stop for a second before typing simple solutions for complicated problems and think how we would implement them and how that implementation would kill the game even faster for lone players?

 

If any limit is set to a single player, a group of players will overcome the limit and have another huge advantage over those single players. 

 

So you are suggesting a intensification of the problem, not the fix.... 

Actually, I don't think that's a problem.  At least not as big of a problem and it's sort of the way they want the game to go anyway.

 

Say one player has a 10,000 machine factory.  They can make pretty much everything and all they need is to make a lot of money *for one player*.  Divide up the amount of profit they need by the amount of things they can make and it ends up being tiny, so they can sell things very close to cost and end up being OK.  They can also afford to sell some things below cost until their competitors give up, etc.

 

Now take that into an organisation.  Say you need to train for a total of 3 months to get the 200 machines.  And you need to train efficiency skills for the things you're making, etc too.  And there's the possibility of the people running the jobs stealing so you need to set it up properly.  Oh and you need 50 of these maxed out players running at 100% efficiency to equal that one factory from above.  That's all pretty unlikely, there will be player churn, burnouts, imperfect skill training, etc and so you'll end up needing a few hundred people in that division.  So now you need to make a few hundred times as much profit because those players aren't going to do it for free.  And their org is going to want to make some profit for itself.  And other orgs are going to want to try to pinch these profitable players for their orgs, etc. 

 

So suddenly that's not such an easy thing to do any more, and arguably those players deserve to profit from their ability to co-ordinate.  And the need to supply hundreds of players with a reward for their efforts will balance things out and mean that the goods can't sensibly be sold at barely above cost any more.  An org can try to undercut everyone else, but everyone knows that the org needs to pay their members, etc so can wait them out.

 

tl;dr giving one single player control of an unlimited amount of production is game breaking and distorting while building a big org to collectively produce huge amounts of stuff is fun and the game working as intended.

 

 

[joaocordeiro]

7 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

So suddenly that's not such an easy thing to do any more,

But still increases the gap between a lone player and a big org....

 

7 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

giving one single player control of an unlimited amount of production is game breaking

But those "god like tychoons" the OP complained about are not run by a single player...
It takes a lot of players to max efficiency in all steps and to manage all the logistics involved. Your solution does not solve OP's problem... It intensifies it.

[Zeddrick]

Just now, joaocordeiro said:

But still increases the gap between a lone player and a big org....

 

But those "god like tychoons" the OP complained about are not run by a single player...
It takes a lot of players to max efficiency in all steps and to manage all the logistics involved your solution does not solve OP's problem... In intencifies it.

I disagree that limiting production would increase the gap between a lone player and a big org.  Perhaps it would hurt a few lone players who have huge, game distorting amounts of power at the moment (and yes, there are players out there with massive factories they run more or less on their own.  Anyone want to own up in the thread and show off how many you're running?).    Even in the orgs which run these things there are usually a tiny number of players who have access to the actual factories with the rest just mining.  And the talent points required aren't that high for someone dedicated to making huge industry setups.  I had all the T1 and T2 skills at 4 before the 0.23 reset (as well as other talents) and have 2x as many talent points now so could be well on the way to all-5 T1 and T2 production.

 

But what it would do is open up the market.  At the moment manufacturing has no value add because there is no opportunity cost to it.  There's no reason whatsoever for me to buy, say, a basic screw instead of making it myself.  I can have an unlimited amount of machines and buying raw ore is a lot less complicated because the basket becomes smaller (buy 8 things for all of T1 and T2 production).  Because of that there is no market for the intermediates.  Why would you sell these as nobody is really buying them and even if they were the effort/reward ratio would be really low as there would be no profit in it?  But if production has an opportunity cost then making those screws instead of higher level components might cost you money and you might be prepared to buy in those screws.  

 

For a lone player they would need to think hard about what they want to make and what they want to buy in, but it should be possible to turn a decent profit by playing cleverly.  They could also use the intermediates market which would inevitably develop in order to reduce their talent requirements for making things, allowing them to focus on what makes the best profit.

 

[XKentX]

Talking about fixing DU industry in April 2021 is like wondering if your sunglasses match your suit while standing on aboard the Titanic at 15th April 1912.

[CoyoteNZ]

On 4/4/2021 at 12:42 PM, Zeddrick said:

And the talent points required aren't that high for someone dedicated to making huge industry setups.  I had all the T1 and T2 skills at 4 before the 0.23 reset (as well as other talents) and have 2x as many talent points now so could be well on the way to all-5 T1 and T2 production.

 

Hahaha, my Talent que for industry is over 600 days long! If you run a mega factory which can make everything efficiently either you have a hell of a lot of alts training in parallel, or you’ve got a lot of people you’ve convinced tomstart certain machines for you, which then takes a lot of co-ordination to keep going and increasing. 

[GraXXoR]

On 4/4/2021 at 9:42 AM, Zeddrick said:

I disagree that limiting production would increase the gap between a lone player and a big org.  Perhaps it would hurt a few lone players who have huge, game distorting amounts of power at the moment (and yes, there are players out there with massive factories they run more or less on their own.  Anyone want to own up in the thread and show off how many you're running?).    Even in the orgs which run these things there are usually a tiny number of players who have access to the actual factories with the rest just mining.  And the talent points required aren't that high for someone dedicated to making huge industry setups.  I had all the T1 and T2 skills at 4 before the 0.23 reset (as well as other talents) and have 2x as many talent points now so could be well on the way to all-5 T1 and T2 production.

 

But what it would do is open up the market.  At the moment manufacturing has no value add because there is no opportunity cost to it.  There's no reason whatsoever for me to buy, say, a basic screw instead of making it myself.  I can have an unlimited amount of machines and buying raw ore is a lot less complicated because the basket becomes smaller (buy 8 things for all of T1 and T2 production).  Because of that there is no market for the intermediates.  Why would you sell these as nobody is really buying them and even if they were the effort/reward ratio would be really low as there would be no profit in it?  But if production has an opportunity cost then making those screws instead of higher level components might cost you money and you might be prepared to buy in those screws.  

 

For a lone player they would need to think hard about what they want to make and what they want to buy in, but it should be possible to turn a decent profit by playing cleverly.  They could also use the intermediates market which would inevitably develop in order to reduce their talent requirements for making things, allowing them to focus on what makes the best profit.

 

 

For intermediates to shine, they would need specialisations that go beyond L5... each one taking geometrically longer to reach...
Even better, the levels would not be discrete but continuous improvement with SP, giving you finer-grained control over your product costs and meaning that tweaking the machines daily would bring incremental cost and speed benefits as your player improved, not just once every few weeks when your player increases something from L4 to L5...

Currently, an industrialist can reach mastery in two dozen skills in a single year, but if there was no maximum level, people could choose their own level of "enough is enough" and That way, JC's weird fascination with "screw specialists" could come true...

 

A relatively new player could specialise in one single thing and be better than 90% of the population within a few weeks and likely find a buyer for their intermediate products.

 

Not the juiciest game play, perhaps... though... LOL. 

[GraXXoR]

2 hours ago, CoyoteNZ said:

Hahaha, my Talent que for industry is over 600 days long! If you run a mega factory which can make everything efficiently either you have a hell of a lot of alts training in parallel, or you’ve got a lot of people you’ve convinced tomstart certain machines for you, which then takes a lot of co-ordination to keep going and increasing. 

But the fact that it takes 600 days means that at 120 days you had all your skills 80% there. and at just 24 days you had all your skills 60% there...

This game is based on Pareto but with a finite, "mastery" limit that is identical for everyone with no choice or variation at the top.

[CoyoteNZ]

5 hours ago, GraXXoR said:

 

This game is based on Pareto but with a finite, "mastery" limit that is identical for everyone with no choice or variation at the top.

Be cooler if there was no limit, just diminishing returns, but then again if you plot that, there is still a realistic end point. 

 

Oh and catalysis when you get more out than you put in is just broken lol

[Zeddrick]

10 hours ago, CoyoteNZ said:

Hahaha, my Talent que for industry is over 600 days long! If you run a mega factory which can make everything efficiently either you have a hell of a lot of alts training in parallel, or you’ve got a lot of people you’ve convinced tomstart certain machines for you, which then takes a lot of co-ordination to keep going and increasing. 

For most items you make the T1 and T2 costs are nearly the whole cost if the build because the bot orders have distorted the market so much.  So if you get those to 5 you can keep the others lower and still have a well priced product.

 

And you can have all the T1 and T2 skills at 5 already. 

[Zeddrick]

10 hours ago, CoyoteNZ said:

Hahaha, my Talent que for industry is over 600 days long! If you run a mega factory which can make everything efficiently either you have a hell of a lot of alts training in parallel, or you’ve got a lot of people you’ve convinced tomstart certain machines for you, which then takes a lot of co-ordination to keep going and increasing. 

But also this is what I'm talking about with limits.  People who are doing this sort of thing won't be affected because they are using multiple players to do stuff.

 

If they can convince players to train talents to 5 then start jobs for free though, that's because starting a job costs nothing.  If you had a limit on the number you could run, those players would want something in return for one of their slots being used ...

[Zeddrick]

8 hours ago, GraXXoR said:

 

For intermediates to shine, they would need specialisations that go beyond L5... each one taking geometrically longer to reach...
Even better, the levels would not be discrete but continuous improvement with SP, giving you finer-grained control over your product costs and meaning that tweaking the machines daily would bring incremental cost and speed benefits as your player improved, not just once every few weeks when your player increases something from L4 to L5...

Currently, an industrialist can reach mastery in two dozen skills in a single year, but if there was no maximum level, people could choose their own level of "enough is enough" and That way, JC's weird fascination with "screw specialists" could come true...

 

A relatively new player could specialise in one single thing and be better than 90% of the population within a few weeks and likely find a buyer for their intermediate products.

 

Not the juiciest game play, perhaps... though... LOL. 

But if the number of jobs someone can run at once is limited, specialisation comes naturally.  You might be able to 'specialise' in everything but if you can't then use all those specialisation at the same time what's the point?  Why specialise in refining, say, whennyou're making large space cores and every refining line you use takes away one large space core line?

 

I'm not saying it would 't all need to be balanced properly with this in mind, but unlimited production removes the need to pick and choose what you make and if we removed it then people would need to choose.  Make a small amount of everything or specialise and make a lot of something.

[GraXXoR]

38 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

But if the number of jobs someone can run at once is limited, specialisation comes naturally.  You might be able to 'specialise' in everything but if you can't then use all those specialisation at the same time what's the point?  Why specialise in refining, say, whennyou're making large space cores and every refining line you use takes away one large space core line?

 

I'm not saying it would 't all need to be balanced properly with this in mind, but unlimited production removes the need to pick and choose what you make and if we removed it then people would need to choose.  Make a small amount of everything or specialise and make a lot of something.

Yeah. In another thread I said wouldn’t it be good if, like number of cores you had a skill that limits the number of machines you can run and maybe have a core hard limit. 
That would prevent single players and orgs from going over the top... maybe. 

[Zeddrick]

1 hour ago, GraXXoR said:

Yeah. In another thread I said wouldn’t it be good if, like number of cores you had a skill that limits the number of machines you can run and maybe have a core hard limit. 
That would prevent single players and orgs from going over the top... maybe. 

I think it would be less good at keeping orgs from going OTT, but then that's the point of an org isn't it?  I don't have as much of a problem with a massive org having massive power.  Generally speaking in other games where there are big orgs, the people who are good enough at doing orgs to create an org that big and stay on top of it are also smart enough to know not to completely strangle out smaller groups, solo players, etc because that's where they recruit from.  And it would force the bigger orgs to involve more people in the actual industry than they do now, creating more content for more people.

 

Single players, on the other hand, tend to just go for it and make something as big as they have the time/patience/enthusiasm for.  And some people have a *lot* of these things if you let them expand forever!

 

At least it would be relatively easy to try out and monitor without massive changes to the game.

 

[CoyoteNZ]

3 hours ago, Zeddrick said:

 

Single players, on the other hand, tend to just go for it and make something as big as they have the time/patience/enthusiasm for.  And some people have a *lot* of these things if you let them expand forever!

 

Destroying one player types fun to fix a different one isn’t the solution. Plus the people who are that invested into time playing the game are probably going to have alts etc so will be able to still run their big factories.

 

in the market the small specialists has an advantage over the huge specialist anyhow, as the huge one needs to buy huge amounts of ore each game session, so is unable to take advantage of the cheap smaller listings in the market compared to the smaller guy who since he requires a lot less can pick up some of the small deals.

 

Im not huge, you know work and other RL stuff limit game time, but I make a lot of honeycomb and therefore go through a lot of ore. Because of this when shopping I have to go to a market which has a big amount available, rather than pick up some of the smaller deals often listed at a better price.

 

therefore somebody smaller than me making the same product who is specialised in that product can produce cheaper than me

[Zeddrick]

4 hours ago, CoyoteNZ said:

Destroying one player types fun to fix a different one isn’t the solution. Plus the people who are that invested into time playing the game are probably going to have alts etc so will be able to still run their big factories.

 

in the market the small specialists has an advantage over the huge specialist anyhow, as the huge one needs to buy huge amounts of ore each game session, so is unable to take advantage of the cheap smaller listings in the market compared to the smaller guy who since he requires a lot less can pick up some of the small deals.

 

Im not huge, you know work and other RL stuff limit game time, but I make a lot of honeycomb and therefore go through a lot of ore. Because of this when shopping I have to go to a market which has a big amount available, rather than pick up some of the smaller deals often listed at a better price.

 

therefore somebody smaller than me making the same product who is specialised in that product can produce cheaper than me

OK, so it's an MMO.  It needs to have some sort of limits on each player, you can't have 1 player having 10,000 times the production capacity of most others.  Have you ever played the mobile MMO games where they let players grow arbitrarily powerful (usually via Pay to Win but that doesn't matter).  What eventually happens is everyone else leaves the game (or moves to a different server but a single shard game doesn't have that option) because they don't like living in a world where they can't compete with a few unassailable individuals.  

 

Putting limits on things isn't destroying one player type to fix a different one.  It's putting limits on single players so they can have fun but not be more powerful than, say, a 200 person org (it happens, I've played mobile MMO games where a single player was more powerful than a 500 person org).  That's just making it so that the game will still be around in a couple of years time and it's just common sense.

 

And it doesn't really stop people from getting big and powerful, it just means they need to empower other people in order to do so.  If I can have unlimited production capability as a single player then what's the point in ever building an org?  What's the org for?  What does it do that I can't just do on my own?

 

Small specialists aren't what I'm talking about here.  Do you have more than 200 machines running simultaneously?  Could you do away with the ones refining, etc and buy in a higher level of goods and still do more or less what you're doing now?  You probably wouldn't be affected.  The ones who would are the ones who can literally make thousands of everything and flood the market faster than the whole remaining player base can consume the items they're making!

 

As for alts, yes you might be able to do 2x or 3x what a solo player without alts can, but how many alts is someone going to pay for?  10?  That's quite a high monthly spend and if someone is going to throw that much RL money at a game they're probably going to find a way to pay to win anyway (even if it's employing people to play for them).

[CoyoteNZ]

23 hours ago, Zeddrick said:

Do you have more than 200 machines running simultaneously?  Could you do away with the ones refining, etc and buy in a higher level of goods and still do more or less what you're doing now? 

I would love it if I could find a refiner and a smelter guy who would do it for a reasonable price.

 

did I mention 640 day que of talents. I could cut that back seriously and focus on my stuff if I had a refiner or a smelter who could supply.

 

it would be great.

 

but the problem is every extra person adds an extra cut, could I still be competing?

 

also the game doesn’t have automatic deliveries, and never will. So I’d have to go to the market just as much unless I find a guy who delivers.

 

imhad high hopes for missions that I could put in orders for stuff like purée delivered to me. 

[Zeddrick]

2 hours ago, CoyoteNZ said:

I would love it if I could find a refiner and a smelter guy who would do it for a reasonable price.

 

did I mention 640 day que of talents. I could cut that back seriously and focus on my stuff if I had a refiner or a smelter who could supply.

 

it would be great.

 

but the problem is every extra person adds an extra cut, could I still be competing?

 

also the game doesn’t have automatic deliveries, and never will. So I’d have to go to the market just as much unless I find a guy who delivers.

 

imhad high hopes for missions that I could put in orders for stuff like purée delivered to me. 

Yes, the delivery missions would be useful here.  But you go to market for the raw minerals anyway, right?  Or are you just making stuff from whatever you can mine? 

 

With tiered manufacuring everyone would be adding an extra cut, which would increase the base price for the final item.  You could make the final item instead and take a bigger percentage markup while undercutting everyone, but the amount you could make like that would be limited so you have to choose what to make yourself and what to buy in.

 

I also think the 'this talent reduces the amount of stuff you need to make something' talents are broken and need to change into manufacturing speed talents (which mean more if you have a limited manufacturing capacity) but that's a different discussion ...