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@NQ Devs can you at least talk to us?


Warlander

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I consider this as you are our landlord and we pay you rent the first of the month every month while we want to live here. When you first build this appartment building you promised lots of things like a swimming pool, pool tables, workout center, and more. You still havent delivered on much of that but still every chance you get you dip out on us or dont want to talk to us when the electrical wiring is burnt out in one of the rooms, or the ceiling is leaking, or whatever it is going wrong. Instead you keep coming up with strange new rules about what we can do with the appartment we pay you to rent like lights out at 6, you cant own pets, or you can have to rent two apparements to swim in the pool. And still the first of the month you want to hold your hand out for more money while the AC has been out of 3 months like some kind of slum lord landlord.

 

Its time for a conversation on why things are going so wrong and not just ask players with feedback and ignore it and laugh on your vlogs about the strange rules you impose or just saying ha you have to pay taxes without any context to why you needed to do such drastic measures in the first place. Its the things you created in the first place like unlimited free coffee and snack bar in the office that was the issue and now you want to punish everyone else who didnt eat it for wanting to work out in the gym.

 

Lets have a conversation please.

 

Its getting to the point where you created a problem then tried to fix it by creating more problems then punishing everyone else who didnt exploit the game with adding more problems and more problems on top of that.

 

If you would have made the origional mining system well enough people wouldnt have exploited sanning and built massive industries. To which you tried to stop that with schematics and made the problem worse. You then add missions to bring in trillions of quanta that requires no actual gained quest items or actual industry parts you can make or buy as the turn in for the money. You then decide to punish everyone else who didnt exploit that by brining in taxes and gutting the mining system and making it tedious so you have to pay more taxes.

 

This is all your own doing layer by layer of create problem, inaction, bandaid solution.

 

You guys are human, make mistakes, and cannot see everything coming. There just comes a time and place where you guys have screwed up enough to amit what you are doing is wrong, and learning from those mistakes instead of constantly making the same mistakes over and over again in different ways.

 

This game is still salvageable unlike your forclusure salvaging system.

Edited by Warlander
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Good text Warlander.

Would be good if they indeed listen instead of laughing away issues. I do get the feeling people at NQ dont see the effect of this all, its not my resume that will look bleak, Its not my job that is on the line if more players drop and DU crashes, my investment is slightly over 250 euros, something i can easily miss when stepping over to something else.

Since day one Pre-Alpha the communications issue was known to community but the ideas kept on coming. we even got a nice website to follow progress and what was going to be added and what not, all canned, so it must have been around the last time we were told they do something about communication they actually did, killed the sites where we can actually follow prograss, killed the community page as we would get something much better ingame (where is it then) and stopped communication but threw in videos with as communication "we show your question on the screen" well only if they like it i get the feeling.

Frankly the need for communication is overrated and is only needed when shit gets out of control or follows the wrong direction, when good shit happens in general nobody cares much about communication (two way communication, as one sided communication seems to be no problem)

 

The problem here is that there is no logic behind made choices and cost reductions are named technical issues. And all the latest additions, oh sorry, scrapping of features is Beta unworthy, this is alpha stuff that has been done, you are redeveloping basic ground works in a beta game where you ask real money for per time unit. That is a general no-go but well, you went there. Now be brave Square enix style and go back to the drawing board, sink the monster and be brilliant. Final Fantasy 14 was not developed brilliant, nope First itteration Sucked so bad (https://www.looper.com/304287/why-final-fantasy-14-was-such-a-huge-flop-when-it-launched/) players asked the company to sink it, and guess what? They Listened!!! And rebuild it to the epic game it is now: "Square Enix has confirmed that Final Fantasy 14 now has 25 million registered players

Do your math, be wise, be smart, be brilliant and make history, or just struggle some more, kill few more features add new colors to grass and see if that helps

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I realize that you are looking for a more official response but I believe I can address your questions/concerns to some extent. Do keep in mind that I am not speaking on behalf on NQ here. My aim is solely to provide additional context so that you can better understand NQ's design decisions and the motivations behind them. It is possible that you will strongly disagree with my points, and that is perfectly fine. Just take them into consideration and use them to enhance the quality of your own feedback and suggestions.

 

On 12/11/2021 at 3:40 PM, Warlander said:

saying you have to pay taxes without any context to why you needed to do such drastic measures in the first place

 

The devs knew that players were going to hate taxes but determined that it was a necessary evil to prevent land hording. Official context for this decision was provided in the territory upkeep devblog and NQ-Sesch also commented on it during the November 10th Demeter Q&A vlog. If that is still insufficient, my most recently forum post also details the rationale. Now there has been debate about whether the current tax value is disproportionate, but NQ are monitoring the situation and so far it seems players are managing to turn a profit. It is by no means a perfect system, but it gets the job done.

 

On 12/11/2021 at 3:40 PM, Warlander said:

punishing everyone else who didn't exploit the game

 

There is a lot of misinformation being tossed around on this topic. First let me clarify that exploiting is when a player knowingly takes advantage of an unintended game mechanic or bug for personal gain (see this NQ support article). Some would have you believe that you missed out, and that everyone else has amassed billions upon billions of quanta through exploiting. While I fully admit that there were exploits and exploiters, the overall wealth disparity was primarily brought about through differences in progression scaling and not the abuse of exploits.

 

On 12/11/2021 at 3:40 PM, Warlander said:

If you would have made the original mining system well enough people wouldn't have exploited scanning and built massive industries.

 

I fully acknowledge that said players had it easy but that does not automatically make them guilty of exploiting. The old mining system and the schematic free industry system were both intended game mechanics in their respective times. The real issue you are highlighting is that NQ has raised the progression curve, thereby making it much harder for newer players to catchup. This is a very fair criticism and as far as I know NQ have not directly commented on it yet (please try and be patient, you may need to wait till after the holidays). In my personal opinion, this difficulty spike boils down to DU slowly transitioning out the beta phase (hurry up, reach endgame, test stuff) and moving towards release (slow down, don't burn yourself out of content before we can add more). Now I am in full agreement that the wealth gap needs to be addressed but I believe raising the progression curve was the correct decision from a design perspective. Sure, starting out on a capital sized ship wielding the holy sword Excalibur sounds great, but true enjoyment comes from overcoming hardship and earning that reward. Its a classic example of how game developers protect players from themselves.

 

On 12/11/2021 at 3:40 PM, Warlander said:

This is all your own doing layer by layer of create problem, inaction, bandaid solution.

 

You guys are human, make mistakes, and cannot see everything coming. There just comes a time and place where you guys have screwed up enough to amit what you are doing is wrong, and learning from those mistakes instead of constantly making the same mistakes over and over again in different ways.

 

Yes there have been many mistakes and many band-aid solutions but that is exactly what beta is all about. The current objective is to push out game features as fast as humanly possible with the intention of performing cleanup and polish later. Yes the devs could work on streamlining the talent queue system but is that more important than adding a space map?

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3 minutes ago, Msoul said:

he devs knew that players were going to hate taxes but determined that it was a necessary evil to prevent land hording.

This is simply wrong.
- You can connect territories to an active subscription.
- You can bind territories to the talent system and insert a maximum number, just like there is a limit for cores.
- You can limit the areas by the calibrations, because otherwise they become too expensive without generating ores as payment.

One did not have to bring taxes into the game!

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43 minutes ago, Msoul said:

The devs knew that players were going to hate taxes but determined that it was a necessary evil to prevent land hording.

 

I very much doubt this played into the consideration as those who "land hoard" do so in many cases because they have vast amounts of quanta they can throw around. And this new taxation actually makes it more lucrative for them to do exactly that.

 

It's still entirely unclear what the reaons for the taxes is/was. It makes no sense at all in the current limited game play  and really only detracts and reduces opportunity for players ingeneral.

 

Taxes generally come with a flipside, they are acollective payment to have a governement oversee and execute maintenance and construction of public spaces and services. Here it really just is a quanta sink, in many cases just taking half of whatever players can extract from a tile with nothing to show for it.

 

The taxes as introduces in Demeter simply do not make any sense from a gameplay perspective and NQ has yet to provide a single good reason why they needed to implement this. But expecting NQ to step up and actually enagge in this conversation is idle hope as they won't.

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21 minutes ago, Zarcata said:

This is simply wrong.
- You can connect territories to an active subscription.
- You can bind territories to the talent system and insert a maximum number, just like there is a limit for cores.
- You can limit the areas by the calibrations, because otherwise they become too expensive without generating ores as payment.

One did not have to bring taxes into the game!

 

Hey Zarcata, I can see how the talent method could work to prevent land hording but could you please elaborate a bit on the other two methods. How do you connect an active subscription to limited land ownership? What part of owning land gets too expensive when you limit mining calibrations?

 

2 minutes ago, Jake Arver said:

I very much doubt this played into the consideration as those who "land hoard" do so in many cases becasu they have vast amounts of quanta they can throw around. ANd this new taxation actually makes it more lucrative for them to do exactly that.

 

Sorry Jake but am having trouble seeing how the new tax system makes territory ownership more lucrative for land hoarders. Could you elaborate on this further?

 

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4 minutes ago, Msoul said:

Sorry Jake but am having trouble seeing how the new tax system makes territory ownership more lucrative for land hoarders. Could you elaborate on this further?

 

Let's review my comment in context once more..

I very much doubt this played into the consideration as those who "land hoard" do so in many cases because they have vast amounts of quanta they can throw around. And this new taxation actually makes it more lucrative for them to do exactly that.

They have massive amounts of money, they can send out scanners in numbers and round up any tiles that have value, gaining unlimited resources in the proces. There is a good few who sit on HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS, often aquired from exploits, and they can afford to pay the million a week without even looking.. many times over.. Many of these exploiters also can now start farming ores in unlimited numbers and sell the ore to then sell the quanta they make from it for RL $$.

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Just now, Msoul said:

Hey Zarcata, I can see how the talent method could work to prevent land hording but could you please elaborate a bit on the other two methods. How do you connect an active subscription to limited land ownership? What part of owning land gets too expensive when you limit mining calibrations?


Hi, 
NQ wants to tie the area and ownership to an active subscription soon anyway (not with Demeter).
Accordingly, the current HQs will not be safe forever, but only when the subscription is also active. I'm very curious to see how many players will take a subscription break and then still want to come back if they lose their subscription. My question now would be, does this only count for the HQ Tiles or does it also count for the Tile on Sanctuary.

 

So if it's attached to a subscription as a backup, the taxes are no longer necessary.

The same applies to land and its use, why should a player claim a lot of land if it no longer has any use? That players used to take land to secure ore deposits in large quantities is obvious. But now it just doesn't make sense. The few fields that are very lucrative with the ore values are now distributed anyway. So now it's just a matter of low or average fields in terms of production. But what's the point of blocking if you can only use a limited number of calibrations anyway?

 

However, I don't understand in the whole discussion why it is bad if players occupy a lot of territories. The solar system is huge and offers about 1,000,000 territories.
 At the same time, they can always fill the solar system with more moons and planets.  Even if that would not be enough, then you can bring new solar systems into the game as a further step. At the moment, however, we are still far from needing more space, we can certainly with the current player numbers without any problems let each player take 500 tiles.

 

 

Quote

HEADQUARTERS
Each player will be able to assign five territories as their headquarters. These territories do not lose ownership when offline and remain in the players' ownership even if taxes are unpaid for longer than the two week grace period. This feature is only available to player-owned, not organization-owned, territories. We will monitor how this develops; in the future, these territories may be subject to the loss of their headquarters state if the account in question is unsubscribed; however this will not be the case in Demeter.



 

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8 minutes ago, Jake Arver said:

They have massive amounts of money, they can send out scanners in numbers and round up any tiles that have value, gaining unlimited resources in the proces. There is a good few who sit on HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS, often aquired from exploits, and they can afford to pay the million a week without even looking.. many times over.. Many of these exploiters also can now start farming ores in unlimited numbers and sell the ore to then sell the quanta they make from it for RL $$.

You can pay for areas with tons of available quanta, but it just makes a minus on the player. The number of calibrations is very limited. A small number of territories each player can have, quanta doesn't matter.
So you can't generate unlimited ores, because you don't have unlimited calibrations.
How many MUs can you reasonably run at the moment? 30-40? Means you could set up 3-5 MUs with good fields and need only 5-13 fields. So what do you want to do with more fields, except burn your Quanta reserves for taxes?

 

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Thank you Zarcata. I still think taxes were the most effective solution but I do understand your points much better now. Hopefully NQ adds a delay for HQ tiles and inactive accounts so players can still take short brakes. I also really like your idea of eventually scaling up the universe. Fingers crossed on that one.

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2 hours ago, Msoul said:

I realize that you are looking for a more official response but I believe I can address your questions/concerns to some extent. Do keep in mind that I am not speaking on behalf on NQ here. My aim is solely to provide additional context so that you can better understand NQ's design decisions and the motivations behind them. It is possible that you will strongly disagree with my points, and that is perfectly fine. Just take them into consideration and use them to enhance the quality of your own feedback and suggestions.

 

 

The devs knew that players were going to hate taxes but determined that it was a necessary evil to prevent land hording. Official context for this decision was provided in the territory upkeep devblog and NQ-Sesch also commented on it during the November 10th Demeter Q&A vlog. If that is still insufficient, my most recently forum post also details the rationale. Now there has been debate about whether the current tax value is disproportionate, but NQ are monitoring the situation and so far it seems players are managing to turn a profit. It is by no means a perfect system, but it gets the job done.

 

 

There is a lot of misinformation being tossed around on this topic. First let me clarify that exploiting is when a player knowingly takes advantage of an unintended game mechanic or bug for personal gain (see this NQ support article). Some would have you believe that you missed out, and that everyone else has amassed billions upon billions of quanta through exploiting. While I fully admit that there were exploits and exploiters, the overall wealth disparity was primarily brought about through differences in progression scaling and not the abuse of exploits.

 

 

I fully acknowledge that said players had it easy but that does not automatically make them guilty of exploiting. The old mining system and the schematic free industry system were both intended game mechanics in their respective times. The real issue you are highlighting is that NQ has raised the progression curve, thereby making it much harder for newer players to catchup. This is a very fair criticism and as far as I know NQ have not directly commented on it yet (please try and be patient, you may need to wait till after the holidays). In my personal opinion, this difficulty spike boils down to DU slowly transitioning out the beta phase (hurry up, reach endgame, test stuff) and moving towards release (slow down, don't burn yourself out of content before we can add more). Now I am in full agreement that the wealth gap needs to be addressed but I believe raising the progression curve was the correct decision from a design perspective. Sure, starting out on a capital sized ship wielding the holy sword Excalibur sounds great, but true enjoyment comes from overcoming hardship and earning that reward. Its a classic example of how game developers protect players from themselves.

 

 

Yes there have been many mistakes and many band-aid solutions but that is exactly what beta is all about. The current objective is to push out game features as fast as humanly possible with the intention of performing cleanup and polish later. Yes the devs could work on streamlining the talent queue system but is that more important than adding a space map?

 

I dont need an official response or acknowledgement, pat on the head, or a cookie from NQ.

 

This game is doing down the drain and unless they start to change the ingrained academic nature of what JC built and start turning it into a game and start communicating with the community DU will never become andything and will fail in 1-2 years if not sooner if they keep doling out the punishments rather than developing a game.

 

The devil is in the details and agile development & communication is the only way to save this game from itself.

Edited by Warlander
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2 hours ago, Jake Arver said:

 

Let's review my comment in context once more..

I very much doubt this played into the consideration as those who "land hoard" do so in many cases because they have vast amounts of quanta they can throw around. And this new taxation actually makes it more lucrative for them to do exactly that.

They have massive amounts of money, they can send out scanners in numbers and round up any tiles that have value, gaining unlimited resources in the proces. There is a good few who sit on HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS, often aquired from exploits, and they can afford to pay the million a week without even looking.. many times over.. Many of these exploiters also can now start farming ores in unlimited numbers and sell the ore to then sell the quanta they make from it for RL $$.

For someone who has hundreds of billions, the effort/reward ratio of automining is all wrong.  Automining hundreds of tiles is going to require playing the minigame for hours every day in order to make what is a relatively small amount of money for someone who has that much already.  There is deflation at the moment, meaning the value of a quanta is steadily going up.  IMO the best way to have a lot of money right now if you have hundreds of billions is to just sit on it and do nothing.

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1 minute ago, Maxim Kammerer said:

Or to block as many good tiles as possible to sell them later for profit.

But it costs a lot of money to block the good tiles.  1 million per tile per week.  If you block 300 tiles that's 300 million *per week*.  Yes, you might be able to profit from them at some later point, but it's a risk.  The value of the tiles will always be limited by the ore cost and that's low right now.  If it's still low in 6 months someone will have invested many billions keeping those tiles waiting with no way to ever make that money back.

Which is why taxes work against the large-scale hardcore players.  They just don't work well against the smaller and more casual ones.

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3 hours ago, Zarcata said:

You can pay for areas with tons of available quanta, but it just makes a minus on the player. The number of calibrations is very limited. A small number of territories each player can have, quanta doesn't matter.
So you can't generate unlimited ores, because you don't have unlimited calibrations.
How many MUs can you reasonably run at the moment? 30-40? Means you could set up 3-5 MUs with good fields and need only 5-13 fields. So what do you want to do with more fields, except burn your Quanta reserves for taxes?

 

Why did you go out of your way to start writing in color?

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1 hour ago, Snipey said:

Why did you go out of your way to start writing in color?

I like green and can read it better on black than white. In addition, here should eh times some color in the forum, is already bad enough to endure the gray winter weather.

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1 hour ago, Zarcata said:

I like green and can read it better on black than white. In addition, here should eh times some color in the forum, is already bad enough to endure the gray winter weather.

 

I use the Light Style, cannot stand white text on dark background (yeah, I know it's not so "gamers like", but neither am I) ... bue it's not like there is much to read now anyway, I just come by from time to time now ...

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On 12/13/2021 at 3:22 PM, Maxim Kammerer said:

With 60 alts they are for free and I guess there is a significant intersection between the billionairs and the guys with that many alts.

True, but only until the game releases and then they'll have to pay a sub for each of those 60 alts.

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8 minutes ago, Zeddrick said:

True, but only until the game releases and then they'll have to pay a sub for each of those 60 alts.

Yes, release will stop it. It is very likely that there will be some kind of wipe (partial or full) before release that will make the claimed tiles obsolete. However, the main purpose of a beta is testing and balancing. The conditions should be as closed to the final product as possible. Yes, I know that the "bata" is in fact the alpha and the "finished product" will be the real beta, but that dosn't make it much better. NQ will need to find a balance between newcomers and established players as well as between casual and hardcore players (not to speak of exploiters). I don't think they will get that under control after release if they don't care now. I'm afraid some weeks after a wipe we will have the same mess as before (once again).

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