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Game breaking for new players


Sm0key

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A new player comes into DU. Wants to build his AMs. Gets to a point he is ready to make Uncommon AMs. For t2 production. Sees alioth moon1 has chromite. Builds a ship. Flys to the moon. TO FIND ZERO CHROMITE SUFACE ORE...

 

Before you say well they could just buy it... As a EXPLORATION game why do I just want to buy all my stuff from market and NOT ACTUALLY EXPLORE!!

Also as I can see buying ORE has zero bots selling. Let a wipe happen = broken game.

 

Please fix this.

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37 minutes ago, Maxim Kammerer said:

Yes, but he needs to scan for ores first - just to find out that all valuable T2+ tiles are already taken.

 

the sad part is the catch 22/44/88 of being a new player:

  • You have to pay taxes and cannot mine ore in any substantial amount to overcome the taxes
  • You need to choose between taking the ore you had an buying mining units, mining units and flying blind getting your mining operation going to start getting ore and using like 8+ charges to start getting ore and not having the talents to do it efficiency. Or using ore you have in the nano crafter and not having the talents and burning a ton of mats making things.
  • Choosing between taxes or a territory scanner to not pick up tiles blindly.
  • Not having access to missions, asteroids, or any profitable content to keep it going while waiting for miners to produce 12kl per day until you can start building a meaningful ore operation and cover the taxes when you have 3 days before they kick in and hope you can sell what you make or the ore straight up.

 

Its doable but its certainly a lot tougher to get off the ground now.

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A new player lands on Sanctuary with his special TU and selects an area. The territory is tax-free forever.

There he collects a few ground ores and gradually builds the MiningUnits S from the Nanocrafter. He sets them up and then gets his ores 24/7 in addition to collecting 20L of ore.
After a while, the ore is enough to buy better ships, to expand a base or to look for Alioth in order to capture an area there.
The whole game was simply slowed down for new players in terms of progress. We old players are just lucky that we have already built up everything important for us and many still have reserves.
I would say that in the past you could achieve everything you wanted in the game within a month, but now it will take much more time, maybe even a year or more.

 

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Everyone seems to ignore that you have a territory on Sanctuary which is free. Even a new player can craft a bunch of nano-crafted mining units there - and each calibration can surface spawn over 3K of ore that can be harvested in 2 minutes. So, its easy to get over 20k of T1 ore a day with just 10 minutes of effort (after a few days of skill training and surface harvesting), and you can spend additional time harvesting T2 ore (there are loads of it) for additional cash.  In fact the problem for a new player is getting the ore to the Markets to sell...
There ARE barriers to graduating beyond this that NQ has to address - I have suggested adding Tiered Territory Scanners for example.

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4 minutes ago, JayleBreak said:

Everyone seems to ignore that you have a territory on Sanctuary which is free. Even a new player can craft a bunch of nano-crafted mining units there - and each calibration can surface spawn over 3K of ore that can be harvested in 2 minutes. So, its easy to get over 20k of T1 ore a day with just 10 minutes of effort (after a few days of skill training and surface harvesting), and you can spend additional time harvesting T2 ore (there are loads of it) for additional cash.  In fact the problem for a new player is getting the ore to the Markets to sell...
There ARE barriers to graduating beyond this that NQ has to address - I have suggested adding Tiered Territory Scanners for example.

The obstacle to transporting ore was partially solved with the advertise-a-friend programme. The small 2-seater car has a small container. for a start, it is very cheap and inexpensive to maintain. with it, you take something to the market 1-3 times and can then buy something bigger.
At the same time, the programme gives you 1,000,000 skill points for the start.

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16 hours ago, Warlander said:

Its doable but its certainly a lot tougher to get off the ground now.

 

Its marginally doable if you dont considure pvp. 

 

If you considure the chances of being hunted and losing your ship and cargo then its an unsustainable mechanic. 

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3 hours ago, JayleBreak said:

Everyone seems to ignore that you have a territory on Sanctuary which is free.

Not that long ago everybody was saying get out of sanctuary as quick as possible because it is a dead end. And now suddenly it is supposed to be the solution?

DU was already a brutally hard game for new players before Demeter, and to me this only highlight how NQ is not fully understanding the consequences of their actions.

 

Remember that while on this sanctuary tile, the new player is not only supposed to mine enough resources to buy a ship (that may or may not work properly once NQ nerfs the brakes), get a TCU, a scanner and buy a tile somewhere. But he is also expected to have enough free resources to experiment and learn the game mechanics.

 

Oh.. And as a new player he/she is also very likely to crash a lot, so he will need resources for that too..

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1 hour ago, CptLoRes said:

Not that long ago everybody was saying get out of sanctuary as quick as possible because it is a dead end. And now suddenly it is supposed to be the solution?

DU was already a brutally hard game for new players before Demeter, and to me this only highlight how NQ is not fully understanding the consequences of their actions.

 

Remember that while on this sanctuary tile, the new player is not only supposed to mine enough resources to buy a ship (that may or may not work properly once NQ nerfs the brakes), get a TCU, a scanner and buy a tile somewhere. But he is also expected to have enough free resources to experiment and learn the game mechanics.

 

Oh.. And as a new player he/she is also very likely to crash a lot, so he will need resources for that too..

 

Also I did a test on ground rock harvesting over a 24h casual gathering session and noticed that for every rock I harvested I could visually see like 6 rocks around me despawn most times so even if they wanted to harvest the rocks the harder you grind the more it just wipes out a tile.

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1 hour ago, CptLoRes said:

DU was already a brutally hard game for new players before Demeter, and to me this only highlight how NQ is not fully understanding the consequences of their actions.

NQ always favoured the well established player population over new players. Demeter is just another step in this direction. This continuity suggests that they are well aware of the consequences in game. But it seems they do not understand the consequences irl. There are not enough established players to pay the bills. DU and NQ will not survive with a lot of new players. Designing the game to keep them out makes no sense.

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2 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

Not that long ago everybody was saying get out of sanctuary as quick as possible because it is a dead end. And now suddenly it is supposed to be the solution?

DU was already a brutally hard game for new players before Demeter, and to me this only highlight how NQ is not fully understanding the consequences of their actions.


I find tragic the outcome of NQ's logic.

So we had an exciting start of the game with some learning curve issues but interesting. Followed by no more content/interesting things to do after a few weeks of game play.

 

NQ's solution for the decay of interesting things to do after the initial phase is to make the initial phase infinite.
Players now have to work really hard for months without any joyful reward to get a basic ship

Game 2 years ago:
Welcome to the game, you can mine, craft, explore, design.

Game now:
Welcome to the game,
Please buy a ton of industry and blueprints before you can experience crafting
Please acquire 1M quanta before you can mine
Please join an alliance before you can explore.
Please get 10M quanta to buy parts before you can design.
If you don't want to spend entire days if grinding or idle looking at some progress bar, choose another game.

@NQ: To make the game more interesting, in the long term, add more interesting stuff to the game. Don't expand the decent parts of the game into infinite.
Everyone likes cake. Buy ppl won't eat cake 24/7....

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2 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

Not that long ago everybody was saying get out of sanctuary as quick as possible because it is a dead end. And now suddenly it is supposed to be the solution?

I don't consider it a  dead end (I'm actively building on my Sanctuary territory), but  having said that the most consequential MMOs have all had there newbie zones (don't tell me you never payed your dues killing rats) and  they could be considered dead ends because they were just the first rung on a ladder that you moved up.  Perhaps a problem with DU. Alioth provides everything you need until you are ready for the end game if that holds any interest. A two step ladder is not very interesting. 

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49 minutes ago, Maxim Kammerer said:

NQ always favoured the well established player population over new players. Demeter is just another step in this direction. This continuity suggests that they are well aware of the consequences in game. But it seems they do not understand the consequences irl. There are not enough established players to pay the bills. DU and NQ will not survive with a lot of new players. Designing the game to keep them out makes no sense.

 

It why I always say NQ tries to impliment schematics, sinks, or taxes at the large orgs and it basically is nothing but a speed bump and since they dont impliment sinks based on how much you have vs arbitrary sinks across the board it only ends up hurting most players and even more so new players.

 

Take scematics for example we were able to make whatever we wanted and had a good sized industry and had all the talents to make what we wanted from that and pivot to making parts we needed at the time. suddenly to even think about using our industry we built we had to turn around and pony up 200mil in ransom to get it out of m0th balls. For a new player upfront that probably does not know you can right click any element in a core and apply talents they likely will replace schematics over and over again as they go through their talents.

 

and if NQ isnt always trying to cut your brakes or knee cap you all the time they add sinks like Destructible Elements at a time when their system was buggy and would break parts even if you had a soft landing. Honestly with new players not having PDs at their disposal let alone skills and less braking power with the finacky placement system they no longer have the time to sit around and teach themselves how to fly or build a proper ship with the PD bonuses, fuel saving, or stats to properly fly. Combine that with a limited amount of ore coming in and insufficient talents to make scrap you could easily wipe out a daily supply of ore turning it into scrap.

 

Personally I think new players should get a system that gives them T5 talents the first week they player T4 talents the second week they play, T3 Talents the third week they play, T2 the fourth week they player, and T1 Talents the fifth week they play since you basically get 1mil exp per week you want to give new players a fighting chance that goes away to give them a sense of what max skills can be like but to get things done in a way that helps them learn while they get their talents going as well as 1mil h per day starting out for the first week and lowering with the exp bonus. It would also be helpful if there were missions that gave out ship parts, industry parts, elements, or voxels as their payout along with cash to also help get them going.

 

With this current system it also needs to be based on what is in your tile per 100l/h in the cost of the taxes. If you can only produce 500;/h of T1 ore as a new player with all other ores being rare and sparse you would think it should only cost a new player or anyone stuck with non prime tiles 500k-h per week and not a mil per tile per week. Anything higher per T1 and it should add 25-50k in tax by 100l/h. It makes sense to charge people with prime tiles more since they are getting better returns. The fact that NQ said you get more then you pay in taxes just means you can buy up every tile on a planet and cover takes and make money which makes no sense if you dont try to stem it in any way if you own an obscene amount of tiles.

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I agree with many of the criticisms on the current new player experience but the next major update (Juno) is all about new players and the FTUE (first time user experience). This is not the time to whine and complain, it would be far more useful to have player insight into specific areas that need improvement and detailed suggestions on how to fix them.

 

Percent based taxes, new player talent boosts, Warlander has the right idea here. What else can we come up with? Newcomers really need clear and accessible pathways to the various professions (miner, hauler, trader, explorer, etc). What are your ideas on how best to accomplish this? Should the devs add a sub-tier of weaker industry units? What kind of missions would new players enjoy?

 

I think the wreck salvaging mechanic could be used to promote exploration again. Maybe also add meteor showers that randomly deposit large clusters of ore on the surface? You could really do a lot with a mechanic like that. Add a telescope to detect when the event occurs, a scanner to show which tiles it hit, then repurpose the existing ore scanner to help players find the point of impact.

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Sanctuary was a dead end only because the ores there were limited to the one area. No matter what you wanted to build there, you always needed transport to bring more resources to Sanctuary.
In contrast, Alioth had almost infinite ores in the ground and a free choice of the many tiles available there.
So the impasse was true at that time.

Now with Demeter, you can set up mining units there and also build a base without any problems and develop much further than before the patch. It is and remains an important first step. If more players settle there as a retreat and new players spend more time there learning and building up, it will also become busier. Currently, trading activity is also increasing there.

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22 minutes ago, Msoul said:

What else can we come up with?


Most concepts used in Empyrion are valid for this game.
 

In the empyrion servers I play, the starter area does not have rare ores, but resets the basic ores more often.
Players don't need to "own" land to mine or build. But they can "own land to prevent others from mining or building.
Crafting any element takes less than 2 minutes.
NO blueprints are needed.

NPC structures and patrols provide the majority  of "rare" elements to noobs
there is an infinity of stars for ppl to run away and hide if they don't want to be found.

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29 minutes ago, Msoul said:

I agree with many of the criticisms on the current new player experience but the next major update (Juno) is all about new players and the FTUE (first time user experience). This is not the time to whine and complain, it would be far more useful to have player insight into specific areas that need improvement and detailed suggestions on how to fix them.

 

Percent based taxes, new player talent boosts, Warlander has the right idea here. What else can we come up with? Newcomers really need clear and accessible pathways to the various professions (miner, hauler, trader, explorer, etc). What are your ideas on how best to accomplish this? Should the devs add a sub-tier of weaker industry units? What kind of missions would new players enjoy?

 

I think the wreck salvaging mechanic could be used to promote exploration again. Maybe also add meteor showers that randomly deposit large clusters of ore on the surface? You could really do a lot with a mechanic like that. Add a telescope to detect when the event occurs, a scanner to show which tiles it hit, then repurpose the existing ore scanner to help players find the point of impact.

 

The whole problem is now that mining units are time capped like exp gain for talents and further hampered by time locked charges and a time based treadmill of taxes that has a set speed you are expected to play  at.

 

NQ is better off just dropping players off on some random planet instead of sanctuary or doing the tutorial and just giving them a tax free tile that is set up with a starter hut, some basic industry for parts/voxels, basic mining rig setup, and a ship. Then just do the tutorial on site for things they actually need like building a basic hauler, repairing, refueling, basic ship engineering, and building additions to their hut. Everything you can do via the academy should be part of the actual game and given right there.

 

I have complete faith NQ wont bungle the new player experience.

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2 hours ago, Zarcata said:

Now with Demeter, you can set up mining units there and also build a base without any problems and develop much further than before the patch. It is and remains an important first step.

You are joking, aren't you? My Sanctuary tile has 340 L/h coal, 70 L/h quartz, 39 L/h hematite and 13 L/h bauxite and I do not think this is unusual. How is a new player supposed to "build a base without any problems and develop much further than before the patch" with these resources?

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25 minutes ago, Maxim Kammerer said:

You are joking, aren't you? My Sanctuary tile has 340 L/h coal, 70 L/h quartz, 39 L/h hematite and 13 L/h bauxite and I do not think this is unusual. How is a new player supposed to "build a base without any problems and develop much further than before the patch" with these resources?

125l coal
125l coal
90l coal
70l quarz
39l hematite

= 5 MiningUnits.

= all 24hours durch kalibrierung 5x ~4000 Erz (T1) = 20.000 T1Ore a Day
= ~ 530L every hour = 530x24 =12.720 T1 Ore a Day

= 32.720 T1 Ore a Day
= 229.040 T1 Ores a week.


Edit: 257.600 T1 Ore for Ore-Bot on Markt to 25q = 5.726.000 Quanta for a "Beginner" in the first week, taxfree, only with the sanct-tile.
Edit: actualisierung:no TileBoni 10-60% 


Edit: with fullskill you can make the bauxite too. its only 13l/h but every day the calibarte ore ~4000 is nice to have. the calibrate point  is cap 10/10 so ist ok. with 6 Mining units. So you can make : 

+13L x 24 = 312 a Day / 2184 week
+ 4000 x 7 = 21.000 /week
= 30.184 ore per week more. (30.184 x 25q = 754.600 quanta)

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