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DEVBLOG: MINING UNITS 101 - Discussion Thread


NQ-Deckard

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My main concerns are:

1:  Higher Tier ores being so rare.. and only one few nodes. This will create very high Prices and limit availability hugely. 

     - Needs to be like current. Some amounts of higher Tier Ore, uncommon but not rare on Tiles.

2: Tier 2 mining units needing Tier 2 parts to build, Tier 3 mining units needing Tier 3 parts to build, etc.

     - Should be like Manufacturing, you don't need uncommon parts to build uncommon elements, you use uncommon parts to build advanced elements.

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18 minutes ago, CoyoteNZ said:

Can we have a blog on how calibration works, the bonuses etc. It was very lightly covered. Hopefully there will be a tutorial in the patch when it comes live which doesn’t use up your charges to learn. 

Yes. I agree here. It looks very complicated and the only comment about it was that it was easy. 

Need video tutorial done on this.

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6 minutes ago, CaptainBlack said:

2: Tier 2 mining units needing Tier 2 parts to build, Tier 3 mining units needing Tier 3 parts to build, etc.

     - Should be like Manufacturing, you don't need uncommon parts to build uncommon elements, you use uncommon parts to build advanced elements.

This is incorrect. If you're making a Tier 2 element you need tier 2 parts. Tier 3 parts for tier 3 elements. You can however assemble the part in a machine that is one tier below. The equivalent for mining units would be to allow T2 mining units to mine T3 ore

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11 minutes ago, Torsten said:

This is incorrect. If you're making a Tier 2 element you need tier 2 parts. Tier 3 parts for tier 3 elements. You can however assemble the part in a machine that is one tier below. The equivalent for mining units would be to allow T2 mining units to mine T3 ore

You're right. NQ wanted so badly to add more uses for exotic ores they messed up their own manufacturing progression system.

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Hello. First of all thank you for creating an article about the mining mechanics, to clear things up.
Now, Communication from NQ should be definitely more consistent. I would have not had an issue with NQ removing old scan data, but once you stated you would not remove them myself and probably many other players spent countless hours and days preparing for the update and scanning territories. Much time was spent on this. 

Continuing, since i feel NQ mostly listens to people complaining, not taking into consideration that people not complaining actually like the proposed modification to the game i would like to state the following:

a) I absolutly like the idea that any territory outside of Sancturary should be Taxed regardless if any mining activity/industry/ leisure / holyday apartments or whatever activity there is. There should be no exception to this rule.
b) If any territory is not payed for in taxes the rights to that territory should be lost, no crying about it.
c) Please dont increase the T3+ abundance on planets. I like the idea that T1&T2 ore is enough to mine on planets and you can build and have basic elements with this ores, for higher tier ores you need to go into space / PVP space (risk reward )
d) Please dont decrease T1 and T2 abundance on planets. There should be enough for people to swim in this low tier ores
 

Thanks 

:) 

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1 hour ago, Doombad said:

NQ listened to feedback and changed their minds. That’s life. That’s work. That’s how it goes. I am glad they listened.

#1 It listened to feedback by those who yelled the loudest. The loudest and most annoying do not represent the rest of the customer base. Not to mention that many

#2 Changing their minds is often also called reneging on a deal.

#3 So your boss changed his mind on the work you did the last two weeks and decides to not pay you. You OK with that? If so, please share his contact details and I'll inform your boss of the happy news.

 

So here we did work the last two weeks based on the information NQ gave and we did work for nothing, without any rewards/pay. And don't give me that "You can still use that info till Demeter launches!" BS, because if I knew what I know now, I would have done something else with the time spend flying ships, placing them perfectly, scanning, rinse and repeat. 200 scans go Poof! I have no issue if that was just with the scans I already had.

 

Hell, if some people had the drive to scan entire planets, good for them! This doesn't solve any problems for the regular player, this makes the matter way, way worse for the regular player. Why? I'm not saying, because then NQ will 'fix' the alternative as well. You'll see when we're done... I suspect the crying will be way, way worse.

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3 hours ago, RugesV said:

Or buy out scans for game time. Every 50 scans would equal 1 game day.

Hell, no! The time I spent ingame on scanning is way more the 1/365th of $70 (~$19 cents). Compensate ingame effort with ingame compensation. 1 million quanta per scan sounds about right.

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3 minutes ago, Cergorach said:

1 million quanta per scan sounds about right.

Last time i heard of people hiring out scanning services they were about 100k per scan. I know inflation has been crazy since missions, but a million sounds a little high 

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Will the current mining talents still be in the game, and if so will they still be useful for mining asteroids? 

 

Can mining units be built by assembly units one tier below the tech level (like all current elements)?

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2 hours ago, Doombad said:

NQ listened to feedback and changed their minds. That’s life. That’s work. That’s how it goes. I am glad they listened.

Not exactly true. They said they would to it one way over the other. The people wanting it that way was happy and went about their day. The ones that wasn't happy made a huge stink about it. To NQ that sounded like everyone was protesting their decision, but the "keep scans" crowd didn't have a reason to get involved because they had seen the "Confirmed: Old scans will be valid" text in the Demeter QA video. Thus feedback was biased, as it always is, when one side has a reason to speak up and the other one doesn't.

 

 

For NQs sake I hope they don't push an ingame NPS survey (how likely are you to blah blah) anytime soon. On second thought. I hope they do. They'll get five big fat 1s from me

 

 

 

 

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6 hours ago, NQ-Deckard said:

Hello Noveans,

 

We'd like to hear your feedback on the latest Devblog about Mining Units.

 

On the PTS the recalibration cool down was 48 hours. In the post you said 24 hours

 

Second may I request the lua API be documented please.

 

Third well done, scans needed to go as the rewards for old scans was all of the mega nodes we got.

 

Fourth, my scans! 

 

Fifth, please talk about HQ tiles.

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7 minutes ago, space_man said:

 

On the PTS the recalibration cool down was 48 hours. In the post you said 24 hours

 

IIRC 1st round PTS it was 48h, 2nd round PTS it was 24h. I did note that it was changed

 

Imo it doesn't really matter either way as in both rounds of the PTS (and the post) the calibration lasts 48h before it starts to drop. Only thing cooldown affects is how often you can get the above-ground ore rocks and how fast you can bring a mining unit up to 100% calibration

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We have over 7000 scans, we worked hard for those scans, but you don't want to give us an advantage, fine.

 

I have totally maxed mining and terraforming talents.  I can get through the dirt and mine literally millions of liters of ore a day, by myself.

 

Under the new structure, with limited calibrations, how can anyone with 1 account ever hope to amass anything?  I have 6 accounts.  All six accounts calibrating synergized mining units will take more than a week to mine what I can mine in an hour now, free mining on any planet.

 

Unless you plan to DRASTICALLY reduce material costs or enact a way for us to mine more efficiently with our own time investment, you are setting a hard cap on what can be mined that is minuscule compared to what we can mine now.  And now we have to pay taxes to even mine.

 

And asteroids in PVP space is not a replacement for planetary mining.  Also why are you refunding mining talents if you can still use them on asteroids?

 

I understand you had a database issue, believe me my high end computer struggled to dig what I dug.  But you have gutted the core game play of this game and created a hard cap on the resources an individual or small group can gather while increasing the cost to do so.

 

I think our manual mining single scoop record is about 525L.  Please tell me how going from 300-400 tier 1 every 5 seconds is going to be replaced by 100L an hour?  I guess if I only mined 3 minutes a day it is an improvement.  But as someone who's personal record was almost 6 million ore in one day, your new system leaves a lot to be desired particularly from those that are will to put in the time and effort to get ahead.

 

Your new system will promote lots of accounts and afk game play.  May be good for subscription sales, but is horrible for the game in the long run.  All hexes will be claimed.  Then after  you finally get a good hex you will enact pvp and make us defend it 24/7.

 

You all have your sights set right down the crapper and are destroying the gather/crafting aspect of this game which draws the majority of your existing fan base.  You want to cater to the PVP community because PVP games have the highest player base.

 

Problem is your PVP interface is frankly boring.  Compared to the likes of Elite Dangerous PVP feels more like an arcade game and less like a space simulator.

 

Frankly I don't care about PVP besides the obvious and inevitable march towards PVP everywhere with making it very difficult to manufacture what is needed to even PVP effectively.

 

So mine forever to make items that you will allow anyone to destroy.  Add a tax because you can't figure out how to create a functional economy.  Having bots buy ore sets a cap on what anything is worth.  Make it difficult to mine and the cost of ore goes through the roof making the manufacture of anything not worthwhile.

 

I hardly play this game anymore if it is because of the pending operations while digging the the dirt or because I see the writing on the wall that you a making a slow methodical march towards and all out PVP MMO when that is not the community that is bolstering your subscriptions.

 

Sure watching someone that talks like a used car salesman that has had too much coffee create explosions on the screen is more fun to watch then the player that spends days, weeks even months mining and creating structures and ships that I know you will eventually allow the first to annihilate the second in the hopes it will sell more subscriptions.

 

Good luck with that. 

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To those that claim NQ caved to whining carebears: 

The loudest whining was from those scan-hoarders giving out ultimatums like "if you wipe the scans, I will have wasted 1000s of hours in my beta-life, so all the most important players (incl. ME!) will quit if you wipe... etc."  Thankfully, NQ listened to the reasoned arguments of those that cared about the game community more than their robber-baron-thug-life.

 

That said, NQ should have just made the initial decision to wipe and communicated that, rather than change their decision. NQ destroyed some level of trust.

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Only been playing for 4 weeks so this change has little impact on me. Don't have many tiles, don't have any scans, don't own anything of importance. The economy is so lopsided that it's very very difficult for new players to get into the game. Maybe this will make things a little easier?

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Good riddance to manual mining. I hated it with a passion. I hope the devs do not hang on to their initial numbers for ore pools and tax rates with a death grip. Once exposed to the actual markets these numbers will probably become obsolete rather quickly. Having said that the core idea behind the automation of mining is something that I support 100%. Thank you for this NQ.

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5 hours ago, yamamushi said:

DU is becoming the opposite of the game we were promised in Kickstarter.

Anyone who backed this game before Beta knows exactly what I'm talking about.

 

How's your  French these days? ;)

Sorry, but I could not resist.. Hope you are doing good ..

 

In all fairness to some of the old guard who since have left and not been seen for a very long time, they saw this coming for a very long time. They were not wrong and they were frequently berated by NQ and laughed at by a number of Alpha backers who now seem to come to this very realisation even when it's not being said out loud..

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Error in the dev blog? 

For example, if a territory has a pool of 100 l/h of a given ore and each mining unit is capable of extracting 50 l/h, then you need four mining units to maximize your extraction capacity, and any additional mining unit beyond four won't give you more yield.

Should that read either 2 mining units or alternatively 25 l/h

Or, am I not understanding something?

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All of this really just exposes that DU is still very much in Alpha, if not pre-Alpha. 

 

People crying about compensation is just silly tbh.

 

You (should have) understood this was really an exploit in the making and so started scanning like mad to know where to speed run and claim territory on launch of the patch and take advantage. You probably even scanned claimed tiles because you might just be able to stake out the claim and pick it up as it seems abandoned.

 

NQ finally listened for once, realized there is an issue here and showed they do have a spine as they corrected course. They did the right thing for the game; you took a chance on what you should have known was not a good thing for the game and an exploit and so you lost out. Tough luck.

 

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7 hours ago, Olmeca_Gold said:

I left the game a while ago but just logged back to tell NQ this.

 

The bottom line currency of every MMO is active time players spend to achieve things. In any MMO, resources/items take time to extract/acquire. In DU, ore used to cost significant active player time (even when extracting meganodes) which in turn made it valuable. 

 

This design removes the time requirement to achieve anything in DU. It gives any player the capability to do one-time time investments in setups to passively acquire virtually infinite resources. It is practically only slightly different than giving players buttons to conjure as much resources as they want

 

If I am not mistaken, one look at the numbers is enough to understand each tile will yield at least 1-2 milion M3 of ore to it's owner per month. A single account can run perhaps 25 or more tiles (on it's own and it's organization's name) until the taxes get too costly. That's 50m m3 for each account. And people get more accounts, let alone the subscription-free alpha accounts until the launch. 50m of ore can be turned into so many ships and elements. And that only costs 7$ (if accounts are paid at all), plus a negligible amount of active time (calibration) and taxes. All that can be equivalent to approximately one hour of one's time. And can be scaled up to hundreds of accounts. That's a ludicrous amount of ore for just one hour of player time. Basically infinite ore. The only check and balance is the total number of tiles. I'm pretty sure that number is way higher than what's needed to support the entire DU economy. Infinite ore availability. That's where the economic meta would end up in 1 year or less (the time it takes people to spool accounts, gain territories, deploy their stuff) with the current design.

 

It all goes downhill from infinite ore. Infinite resources means infinite ships. Infinite ships means PvP loss does not matter. Losses mattering is an enormous premise of any space sandbox MMO.

 

I'm not even starting with why active resource gathering activities are important in MMOs and how there will just be no value in actively mining after the meta settles.

 

This is not how you design a proper space sandbox. This is how you end up with a glorified Minecraft. You could as well design a non-MMO where people construct on their own servers then invite bunch of friends to fight or show off their constructs.

You are from Eve, I see by your avatar ... Well, in Eve, too, the resources are endless :) And I will reveal even more mystery - in all MMOs the resources are endless, yeah .. If you did not know.
 

And the mining of miners will not allow you to have more than 48 miners per character, which will give you + -150,000 liters of ore per day, which even a week it will be several times less than you would dig with your hands. And finding tiles and tiles with a sufficient number of t3 + is no longer so and easy as you described to yourself here. So you obviously did not attend the PTS and did not try to figure out how it all works .. not to mention the decrease in the mining efficiency after 2 days.
 

Do not worry that there is a lot of ore, here people worry that there will be little of it.

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