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Give us more ore & asteroids - less taxes! (Demeter Changes)


BlindingBright

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7 minutes ago, Nayropux said:

 

Yes, that is my point. PvP is a core part of the game. You can choose to not do it, but by doing so you lose out on the benefits. Just like if I choose to not mine, set up industry, or build and sell ships, I lose out on those benefits.

 

The game is 100% playable without entering the PvP zone; in fact most of the content is in the safe zone. You have access to every ore and item through the market, and the ability to make enough quanta to purchase them. Will it be as fast? No, but it shouldn't be as fast. This post, and thread, is just another thinly veiled complaint about how you are unable to get the benefits of PvP without PvPing. That is working as intended, in my opinion.

 

As an aside, you should definitely look harder. There are nodes with hundreds of acanthine per hour on them. :)

 

Locking something behind PvP, in this case ore veins that are not absolute garbage(we dont know for sure since PTS is a different seed, but most likely) and/or higher tier asteroids, when PvP itself is a cluster full of exploits and "interesting mechanics", is quite literally going to be what kills the game. The use of bots to scrape information from networks of radars, and ping people in discords by itself is fairly obvious that PvP is a total shit show currently. Trying to defend PvP in the state it is currently in and forcing people to buy from those who are abusing it currently is not a positive gameplay mechanic. If something is coming in to replace manual mining, even if its partially afk, it should give some fraction of what you were getting before, not the dribble that you currently get. Sure the outer planets are better, but to get most of the core ores used, you need 7 tiles on 4-5 planets to even start. Alioth is hot garbage for ore. Stop defending a totally broken system because you benefit from it.

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3 minutes ago, Nayropux said:

 

Yes, that is my point. PvP is a core part of the game. You can choose to not do it, but by doing so you lose out on the benefits. Just like if I choose to not mine, set up industry, or build and sell ships, I lose out on those benefits.

 

The game is 100% playable without entering the PvP zone; in fact most of the content is in the safe zone. You have access to every ore and item through the market, and the ability to make enough quanta to purchase them. Will it be as fast? No, but it shouldn't be as fast. This post, and thread, is just another thinly veiled complaint about how you are unable to get the benefits of PvP without PvPing. That is working as intended, in my opinion.

 

As an aside, you should definitely look harder. There are nodes with hundreds of acanthine per hour on them. :)

I see you are quite adept at ignoring any opinion that isn't yours, regardless of how it's displayed. Good to know. 

But okay, let's Tax PvE content and hamstring the economy even further by reducing the amount you can earn through mining. 

So how about we go further and make it fair. Let's Tax PvP.

Let's levy a flat tax each time you initiate PvP, of course this should be based on the core size you are attacking.

 

How about a tax when you remove an element on a cored ship, and of course if you decide to re-core it, you should be taxed on the value of the ship based on the current market price of the components used to build it. You would of course also need to pay a tax valued on the contents of the ships containers as well.

Of course we also need a weapon tax, scaled per weapon, and tier of weapon.


I mean, you could always place some miners to supplement income, or just find ships to kill to make your loss in profit, or risk getting ganked yourself to run the missions or asteroids.

I mean, it only makes sense. 

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1 hour ago, Nayropux said:

Using the numbers from Gottchar's thread, you would mine ~150kL assorted ore a day, or ~1ML a week, with this setup. At current prices, even if you were only mining T1, this is close to 100M quanta a week, for 7M a week in taxes.

 

All of this for a few minutes a day doing the dumb minigame, which you can VR to.

 

In your complaint about needed to be around all day on Saturday to race to PvE asteroids, you completely glossed over the fact that most PvP asteroids go completely undiscovered and unmined the entire week. These are available for you to mine at literally any time you desire. If you do not want to PvP that is fine, you can join up with a group who do. If you still do not want to take the risk, that is also fine, there is a giant safe zone to still have fun in, but giving up the greater rewards of PvP asteroids is a result of that choice.

According to Gottchar himself it's like 30-60min a day, pretty much every day (every 35 hours with max skills). Also you're just assuming 7 tiles, but that's not optimal and not how Gottchar was calculating it all. You also need the tiles around those 7 tiles for optimal results, and other factors. His exact words:

 

Quote

With full talents and therefore a charge every 3.5h, you can have over 36 mining units running at this rate, for a total of about 148kl of ore, per day, per player.
This requires about 20-30 territories and would yield about 80M quanta per week, if the liter is worth 80.

That leaves you with ~700.000 worth of ore if you want to use it yourself. IF you can find the ideal patch.

 

A LOT of players are solo players, only choosing (sometimes) when they do stuff with others. One of the more relaxing activities in DU is mining in a tile that doesn't have anyone near it, just you with the soil and ore! So Zen! ? The current implementation of the asteroid system is anything but relaxing nor Zen. When I want to go mining in pvp space for rich rewards, I can, but relaxed mining with a ton of others around, I cannot do anymore.

 

If the reason for phasing out planet mining is saving money on server resources for the always persistent ant tunnels we've dug under there. There is a very simple, yet effective solution. Make an asteroid belt that goes through both the safe zone and pvp space. Just create tens of thousands of asteroids, the moment someone mines or terraforms the first voxel on an asteroid a 7 day timer starts to run, after which the asteroid despawns and a new rock spawns. In safe zone you'll have access to everything, but the higher tier ores are more abundant in pvp space. There are many variations of this concept possible, instead of automatically despawning and respawning you can have an attached missioning system where if an asteroid has more then x amount of tunnels (costs x amount of data on the server) it's marked as a missioning target by Aphellia, 90% of the asteroid ore needs to be mined out and then a charge set at the center of the asteroid, which despawns it. You get Y amount of quanta based on how bad the asteroid is on the server (higher load, more quanta). Or asteroids do not automagically respawn, respawn only happens every x months or once a year.

 

There are a ton of options which don't require us to run like a bunch of lemmings on an asteroid and then quickly mine it out as fast as possible. That sounds to much like work, just like having to log in every day or every 1.5 days to set 7-10 autominers via an annoying mini game...

 

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29 minutes ago, Xarius said:

I see you are quite adept at ignoring any opinion that isn't yours, regardless of how it's displayed. Good to know. 

But okay, let's Tax PvE content and hamstring the economy even further by reducing the amount you can earn through mining. 

So how about we go further and make it fair. Let's Tax PvP.

Let's levy a flat tax each time you initiate PvP, of course this should be based on the core size you are attacking.

 

How about a tax when you remove an element on a cored ship, and of course if you decide to re-core it, you should be taxed on the value of the ship based on the current market price of the components used to build it. You would of course also need to pay a tax valued on the contents of the ships containers as well.

Of course we also need a weapon tax, scaled per weapon, and tier of weapon.


I mean, you could always place some miners to supplement income, or just find ships to kill to make your loss in profit, or risk getting ganked yourself to run the missions or asteroids.

I mean, it only makes sense. 

 

Yeah, I'm very adept at filtering out bad opinions, especially those who dance around their true motives and try to talk down to me.

 

You should definitely try operating a PvP ship some time. We have people who go through, quite literally, thousands of warp cells and hundreds of kL fuel a day checking asteroids, often with nothing to show for it. In some ways, PvE getting an operational tax is just catching up to the game PvP players have been used to since beta started. :)

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Just now, Nayropux said:

 

Yeah, I've very adept at filtering out bad opinions, especially those who dance around their true motives and try to talk down to me.

 

You should definitely try operating a PvP ship some time. We have people who go through, quite literally, thousands of warp cells and hundreds of kL fuel a day checking asteroids, often with nothing to show for it. In some ways, PvE getting an operational tax is just catching up to the game PvP players have been used to since beta started. :)


But that is your choice to PvP.  ;) It's your choice to waste fuel and time.

Just like it's a PvE players choice to only stay in PvE zones and be limited by them.

So, you would be choosing to pay the Taxes by PvPing. You've won me over. I am all for the taxes in this scenario. 

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@Nayropux I plan DU, the game, around my real life, not the other way around. So do most DU players, the ones you do NOT see very often. They find a window of a couple hours of free time at their convenience, log in, dig in a tile, get the ore, use it at their leisure, when they want to.
Autominers throw all that out the window. Suddenly, DU becomes something you need to adjust your real life around. I've done that in the past, with other MMOs, and it was horrible. Not going to do that, ever, again, no matter how interesting a game might be.

I don't want a game to tell me when to log in and punish me if I can't. I don't want to set alarms and drop everything else in real life just to keep what I already own in a game.

If autominers are implemented the way they are on PTS right now, I'll cancel my DU subscriptions and let characters expire. There are many, many other games around which would be more fun to play and won't force me to log in at specific times, risking to lose my assets if I don't.

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On 10/30/2021 at 12:18 PM, BlindingBright said:

Been on PTS now for 15 hours testing while collecting my thoughts. A lot of these changes will force players to /work/ to keep what they own in game... right now with rough calculations it looks like about /half/ of the ore dug may have to go back to paying taxes on the tiles, and thus players will need to work... to keep their land... to keep working to keep their land.

I say work, because these new loops, for many- will turn it into active work/tedium to manage. Plus, potentially half of your ore income is spent on the hexes... now you'll need to take a cut for fuel to transport/logistics. After the end of it, you're left with very little to build/expand with. For new players, it will be muuuuch harder to solo while getting a foot-hold.

So I ask, is this a move to slow players down and reduce overall server costs? As it stands this a soft-wipe of sorts, as many with "fun" projects people work on a few hours a week may now be forced into grinding to keep it going- or loose it... and if players don't come back, as it stands... you loose a tile, as it is on PTS... you also loose all the static constructs owned on that tile. 

So is this a change to reduce quanta/inflation? if so than look at the source, missions-alt runners to curb it vs creating a huge sink via land. Is this change for... data inflation? as more ore enters the game, more constructs are made- and in live(more data due to tunnels on top of that)  so more ore = data costs.  And I dare say this is the real reason for these changes, otherwise NQ will let up on them as player outrage seams to be more so than 0.23, and it hasn't fully sunk in yet for most players what these changes even mean... and while this post covers some core issues, it does not cover the ninja-changes to ship elements/flight mechanics or other core complaints.

 

  1. Give us more ore via auto-mining - more charges, more ore to pull from per hex and... some way to skip the lame mini game.. please? minimum efficiency of 25% vs 0? Nobody wants to login once/twice a day to hop around auto-mining fields to play a stupid mini game. Least while mining traditionally I can tune out and watch Netflix, with autominers- it requires just enough attention you cant let your mind easily wander... but not enough satisfaction to make it.... enjoyable. 2x more ore may not be enough, 3-4x may hit a sweet spot for most.
  2. More Roids - All safe zone roids get mined out within an hour of discovery already. fix discovery timer of 20 minutes/middle Colum! Likewise, PTS seemingly won't spawn in asteroids in time for us to check the new spawn rates.... This change will /encourage/ more people into PVP space.
  3. Lower the taxes for tiles. This is a game that people pay monthly for- not a second job. 
     

So say we all.

BlindingBright
-MTI Superlegate, Lodestar Chancellor

 

I agree by 100%

 

How ever : #3. Remove proposed Territory taxes for good.
4. Newer introduce timer based loss of property/assets in any form as long as Subscription is active. 

 

- Call To Action – Say NO to territory taxes - 

 

 

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1 hour ago, kulkija said:

 

I agree by 100%

 

How ever : #3. Remove proposed Territory taxes for good.
4. Newer introduce timer based loss of property/assets in any form as long as Subscription is active. 

 

- Call To Action – Say NO to territory taxes - 

 

 

Or, at the very least, not until there's a proper, automated way to notify the player outside the game, well before they might get in trouble for not paying taxes.

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On 10/30/2021 at 3:50 PM, Nayropux said:

 

Yeah, I'm very adept at filtering out bad opinions, especially those who dance around their true motives and try to talk down to me.

 

You should definitely try operating a PvP ship some time. We have people who go through, quite literally, thousands of warp cells and hundreds of kL fuel a day checking asteroids, often with nothing to show for it. In some ways, PvE getting an operational tax is just catching up to the game PvP players have been used to since beta started. :)

 

On 10/30/2021 at 10:17 AM, Nayropux said:

 

As for complaints about the majority of asteroids being in the pvp zone, you do have another option. NQ said they are adding more safe zone asteroids, so now you simply need to race to them when they spawn. Additionally, half the pvp asteroids on any given week go completely undiscovered, and those that are discovered rarely have anything below t4 mined out of them. There is plenty of ore on these asteroids for those who are organized, driven, and ready to take the risk for the greater reward.

So I am super confused here mate. How is it there is TONS of ore available in these asteroids and yet 4 hours later you are claiming that you have people wasting tons of fuel searching asteroids for nothing to show for it?

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1 hour ago, Starconverter said:

 

So I am super confused here mate. How is it there is TONS of ore available in these asteroids and yet 4 hours later you are claiming that you have people wasting tons of fuel searching asteroids for nothing to show for it?

They aren't search for ore, but for people mining the asteroids they can shoot at. It was in response to someone asking about the costs of PvP.

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7 minutes ago, Fyrestrider said:

This whole tax thing maybe be the end for me. I pay a subscription to play. Now they want me to work in game to keep what I have. I do that in IRL. I play to have fun. Not to do more work.

 

Vote no for Territory taxes

- Call To Action – Say NO to territory taxes - 

 

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/23750-poll-about-territory-taxes/

 

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I agree on all points! Logging in often should be an advantage for players, not logging in often should not be a punishment for players. 

The taxes need to be low enough to not punish players for which game loop they have picked.

 

taxes should be part quanta sink, part restoring hexes of players that have been gone for very long amounts of time. if you leave for 8-12 months it makes sense to loose tiles. and it could make the sanctuary moon more viable, beucase people can move things there and not worry about loosing that tile if they are gone too long 

 

there is inflation in dual universe, for instance a piece or ore might be 50 instead of 5. but its only one extra zero right now
but if they arent careful they will hit deflation even harder than new world did 

IF I have to go mine an asteroid to work on my base and ships.. fine
but if i am sitting around waiting for an autominer. or honestly
if at any point a player logs in
and is like..
i need to wait before i can do X
and so they log off
you've lost 

my nightmare is people having to grind up savings for many months before they can safely expand 
oh I better save X amount before I claim tiles or ill be stuck in the mining loop to support the tiles

but I do not mind the core concept of... x% of your tile's profits go into taxes
since some tiles will have more profit than others 
but it should probably start with a very low tax and increase with more tiles

right now making a lot of money doesnt hurt the game, it means you can make huge things and people can actually buy them 

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I don't have a strict opinion on the details. All I want is a well populated game. My general inclination is for stuff to be realistic, take lots of time, lots of effort. Maybe only ~20 times faster than RL so you can spend an hour a day getting done what would realistically take a couple days IRL to do. However, most solo players probably need more instant gratification. While I don't like it a bunch, it doesn't hurt too much to cater to a big chunk of the player base. In turn, solo players will simply have to live with big corps being overwhelmingly more powerful than them. It would be true either way but whatever the end result is. For the game to be fun for me, and we all know this is all about me, we need the game to be reasonably playable for solo people so we have a decent population of players to help pay for the servers and populate the planets so I can have an immersive game.

 

Many of the facts I've read here don't look great. I like the general direction of auto-mining of hexes, but it kinda feels like we got out the pool, hopped the fence and jumped into the deep end of the pool next door. 

 

Personally I don't think we can truly balance things until more base features are added or we will need to fully rebalance over and over. Want to avoid getting off topic, but until we have power systems in play...well the whole game is going to need a rebalance at that point.

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NQ this new patch is either gonna make or break your game. But based on the information gathered from the test server its really not helping you at all. after .23 patch you lost about 1/2 of the games population and because of the redundancy  of the game its been bleeding its self to death ever since. The new auto mining update its a smart Idea to remove the ant tunnels that we all created on planets to gather ore, taxing tiles is also a great way to remove clutter form the server by long gone players, but the way you are implementing it; you are putting the noose to your head. 

How about you up the mining yield and lower the tax rate so solo players and small orgs are able to survive the game while  you turn your head away at the bigger picture which is exploits and orgs that use them. A big example is the accidental schematic sale you once had for top tier items. you know who bought those schematics and yet you never did anything about it, or the orgs that dual bot the game for pvp.

Well enough bitching and moaning on my part. The auto mining units and tile taxation is a good idea, if you manage to balance the yields and tax fee accordingly. But still you wont even out the playing field for solo players and small orgs with this update, until you wipe the server and wallets then you might regain some of your player base again.

This update should have come out with the beta release instead of implementing it now half way through your beta phase.  Sorry to say it but you are working backwards.

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On 11/4/2021 at 4:46 AM, Asesino said:

NQ this new patch is either gonna make or break your game. But based on the information gathered from the test server its really not helping you at all. after .23 patch you lost about 1/2 of the games population and because of the redundancy of the game its been bleeding its self to death ever since. The new auto mining update its a smart Idea to remove the ant tunnels that we all created on planets to gather ore, taxing tiles is also a great way to remove clutter form the server by long gone players, but the way you are implementing it; you are putting the noose to your head.

How about you up the mining yield and lower the tax rate so solo players and small orgs are able to survive the game while you turn your head away at the bigger picture which is exploits and orgs that use them. A big example is the accidental schematic sale you once had for top tier items. you know who bought those schematics and yet you never did anything about it, or the orgs that dual bot the game for pvp.

Well enough bitching and moaning on my part. The auto mining units and tile taxation is a good idea, if you manage to balance the yields and tax fee accordingly. But still you wont even out the playing field for solo players and small orgs with this update, until you wipe the server and wallets then you might regain some of your player base again.

This update should have come out with the beta release instead of implementing it now half way through your beta phase. Sorry to say it but you are working backwards.


Cleaning in this case will not solve anything, teams and organizations in any case will NEVER be equal to a single player and should not be. It is not logical why 20 - 100 people do something, and should spend or receive as much as 1 person. It is not possible to align anything here, period. And that's enough to claim 1 player for what people of 50-100 people have. who spend on organization, on detachment, on politics, on the combat fleet and other issues. You DO NOT have to be equal to the organization in a WAY.
 

For single players there is a tax-free sanctuary, for those who do not want to grow and actively develop in the game. For those who want to dig deeper into the ground and build sand castles, enough places there :) do not forget about it. That NQ was given such a place.
 

But if you are trying to get out of there and go out into the big world, then play by the rules of the big world, I don't see anything surprising here.

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On 10/30/2021 at 10:18 AM, BlindingBright said:

 

  1. Give us more ore via auto-mining 
  2. More Roids 
  3. Lower the taxes for tiles.

And unicorns.  Can we have those too please.  Full marks if they excrete T5 ore when fed schematics.

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Right… where to start…

 

-Claiming hexes-

     Put simply, allowing players to place TCU with so low a cost as was seen on the PTS will allow players or groups with stockpiles of them to temporarily claim huge amounts of territory, and while the taxes on such a volume of land would inevitably force said claimers to relinquish it later, it would give them a significant amount of time with which to scan the hexes, cherry-picking all of the best ones and leaving everyone else to pick through what’s left. Allowing old tile scans to display the new auto-miner values for their respective hexes will have a similar effect, allowing persons or groups with massive stockpiles of old scans to sort through them and locate the best hexes to claim far more quickly than anyone (or any group) that has to scan tiles to determine their content.

 

If you don’t want new players or orgs to be forever handy-capped in the area of territory-mining when compared to persons or groups with these stockpiles already prepared when the patch drops, I would strongly suggest that you keep the TCU deployment cost as it is now (significantly higher cost when you already have several deployed/owned), and that you make old scans not depict the new auto-miner values.

 

-Upkeep on the miners-

     There are some days I can do this because they are weekends, or holidays, or snow-days, ect… but like a lot of other people I do already have a job. An upkeep feature that requires more or less daily tending in the form of a mini-game that needs to be played multiple times to keep producing enough t1 ore to break even with the new hex-tax will quickly become just another grind.

 

I would advise that this area be altered to reduce the amount of upkeep required. As the hexes are taxed once per week, matching to this pace may be ideal (such as by extending the time the calibration lasts, and reducing the speed calibration points are accrued to match, thus maintaining the same maximum number of miners for all players).

 

-Taxes-

     A tax on hexes is practical, as it adds in a badly needed money-sink for the game and allows new players to not be forced to fly half way around a planet to find somewhere to get started, but a million per week will destroy new players that don’t join established and experienced players before they try to pursue this path of play. At the same time, it isn’t going to significantly hinder large groups, as they have the option to simply withdraw from undesired hexes without any substantial drawback in order to minimize their expenses.

 

In this area I would have to advise making taxes per hex scale to the total number of owned hexes, as a flat tax rate will substantially risk disheartening new players that see a million a week as an enormous amount to try and manage, while doing little to diminish the overwhelming volume of cash owned by many of the richest players/groups.

 

If you are trying to reduce in-game cash, you may also find it practical to adjust missions. Randomized start and end locations for each player (as opposed to having every single player in the verse having the same missions with the same start and end locations), shorter durations for both the time it is available to be accepted and the time in which it can be completed (perhaps a week), and making them non-repeatable (with fresh randomized missions being added to the list regularly).

 

-Asteroids-

     This one has a couple of issues.

Re-spawning all the asteroids at a single time just pressures everyone that wants to mine them to be there on the starting line the moment it happens. The safe-zone players worry that they won’t get what they need, so they all rush out and strip everything in the bubble, leaving anyone late to the game to wait a week before they have their own opportunity. Meanwhile the dominant pvp-org/alliance has the numbers to simply either scan down every non-bubble asteroid simultaneously, or watch their d-sats to know what asteroids people have just found and subsequently send their own explorers and pirates to chase off/kill the original finder and then strip the rock of the best materials, leaving all those that can’t compete to eventually just write-off hunting the pvp asteroids all together. It also causes people not living in an optimal time-zone to just feel left out/ignored, as this part of the game may be entirely inaccessible to them simply because of an inability to get on due to things like needing to be at work preventing them from getting on at all when they would otherwise need to be on to have a chance at getting an asteroid.

 

Adding in more asteroids will obviously help with the safe-zone rush cleaning things out before other time-zones get on, but so will altering the cycle-time (perhaps reducing it from a week to 50 hours) so that asteroids intermittently spawn more often and at all times of day.

 

As for the pvp asteroids, the most effective thing I can think of to prevent one group from driving everyone else out of hunting them would be to limit the range of the dsat and allow asteroids to spawn beyond that range from all of the planets/warp-pipes so as to encourage the exploration of otherwise empty space and allow stealth-mining to be a possibility.

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Image a huge asteroid belt running through the entire universe, slowly rotating so that freshly spawned asteroids starts at one end and finally despawn when leaving the universe at the other end. And then you angle the plane of this asteroid belt so that all asteroids first have to travel through PvP space before entering the safezone.

 

Voila. You now have a realistic meta where people get first pick at the good stuff by traveling to the PvP zones with hotter and hotter zones as you get closer to the initial spawn point of the asteroid belt in the universe (at the cost of a very long travel distances). And the asteroids that are not mined in the PVP zone are left as "scraps" for the safe zone miners with some hidden gems here and there that PvP miners have missed. And how much "scrap" that is left for the safe zone, is simply balanced by the total amount of asteroids spawned.

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