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MU's are compromizing the building system


Serula

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The whole MU system is starting to burn me out. The problem is that you are implied to use all your charges and not waste any. It's a dopamine trap like many mobile games are. With the current implementation that means you have to calibrate every single day. I experience this as a somewhat stressfull time pressure. Ofcourse I have 3 alts so I have to spend more time on doing all the calibrations. Since the start of Demeter this is pretty much all I've been doing in DU and I didn't spend any time building. It's really difficult for me to ignore the addicting dopamine triggers but I managed to stop picking up all the surface ores because that was an incredible time sink. I really kinda want to stop mining like this all together but that also means no resources unless I go space mining which requires a very expensive scanner on a ship large enough to support it which I don't have yet and I'm also not looking forward to doing that because it's an even bigger time sink before I can start to mine anything. This mining mechanic is in my opinion compromising one of the few good gameplay systems DU has which is the building system.

 

The simplest solution or at least a better implementation of this system would be to lower the speed at which MU's lose efficiency and also slow the speed at which we get charges so we only have to calibrate every few days or so. That opens up time to do other things.

 

@anyone: How do you feel about the current state of gathering resources? 

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The whole MU game loop sucks. I have found it's much more bearable if you don't bother to harvest the bonus ore after calibrating and don't care about winning the mini-game. Just plop down three area scans and take the best spot you see... I still get over 90% more than half the time doing that (which should not be the case, so I suspect the game is manipulating the mini-game to make it winnable most of the time).

 

Most of my mining is on HQ hexes and Sanc, so I can safely let them go inactive when ore prices are too low to pay the tax... if they're too low to pay the tax, they're low enough to just buy the ore I need.

 

Since it looks like ore prices will continue in free fall for a while, I have other revenue streams to pay taxes - primarily Aphelia missions and mining T1 on asteroids and selling it to the bots (which doesn't require high grav/atmo/lag fest landing at D6.)  I'm not sure it's a good idea for the only viable revenue streams to be selling/providing services to NPCs. But unless the market gets substantially stronger or taxes are substantially reduced, bots are really the only income option.

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Just skip the calibration bit (click through it) and don’t pickup the ore. It takes me less than 5 minutes a day (in total) to manage my 7 territories worth of MUs.
 

Territory costs are 7 million per week, I’m selling the ore for 19 million.

 

I don’t get why people complain about this game mechanic which chucks loads of ore at you to build with.

Edited by Shredder
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They removed VR for missions, but never brought it back. Factories are still buggy and stop after server restart.  I doubt they are reading our feedback..

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I returned to the game with Demeter and spend a bit of time "fixing up" my base first, setting HQ tiles and then looked into the MU, it's clearly a "feature" driven by non gameplay choices and reasons, specificalyy financial ones for NQ.

 

I set up four "pockets" of three connected tiles for each T1 ore on Alioth and have an alt who just goes around and calibrates each setup on consequtive days. This works pretty well actually and doe snot take that much time. I copy the surface ore locations to a textfile and collect them once every two weeks. Using a hagboard this is fairly fast.

 

It seems to me, and I am now moving to that, Asteroid mining is where you actually make the most gains in collecting ore. As an experiment I will start a new toon and see how well he can do getting into asteroid mining. I plan to stream the whole thing so that will be fun ;)

 

And no @SneakySnake, he'll stay in the Safezone for at least the first weeks, so you can't have his ship :D

 

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You say you got 3 alts plus your main so thats like what, 80 MUs? And if you calibrate them and do the harvesting then yeah, you're a full time miner not a builder at that point.

 

I got 4 MUs for the 1 tile so sell the T1 ore. I calibrate once every like 4 days and then just build the rest of the time, not bothering to harvest the ore.

 

You gotta decrease your MU count or just stop mining if you want to build full time, I dont know why anyone would put themselves through that

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7 hours ago, Shredder said:

Just skip the calibration bit (click through it) and don’t pickup the ore. It takes me less than 5 minutes a day (in total) to manage my 7 territories worth of MUs.
 

Territory costs are 7 million per week, I’m selling the ore for 19 million.

 

I don’t get why people complain about this game mechanic which chucks loads of ore at you to build with.

Less than 5 minutes????

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26 minutes ago, Sabretooth said:

Less than 5 minutes????

Yeah, clicking on a MU and clicking calibrate, then exiting calibration after it initialising but before you play the mini game, takes less than 15 seconds in total. That (with good skills) bumps my calibration score up by 60% without even playing the mini game. I do that calibration with 6 MU per day. The MU are all close together, and the territories are all surrounding my base.

 

So probably less than 5 minutes in total… 15 seconds per MU, x 6, that’s 1.5 minutes, not including walking 2 meters between each MU…

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18 hours ago, Serula said:

The whole MU system is starting to burn me out. The problem is that you are implied to use all your charges and not waste any. It's a dopamine trap like many mobile games are. With the current implementation that means you have to calibrate every single day. I experience this as a somewhat stressfull time pressure. Ofcourse I have 3 alts so I have to spend more time on doing all the calibrations. Since the start of Demeter this is pretty much all I've been doing in DU and I didn't spend any time building. It's really difficult for me to ignore the addicting dopamine triggers but I managed to stop picking up all the surface ores because that was an incredible time sink. I really kinda want to stop mining like this all together but that also means no resources unless I go space mining which requires a very expensive scanner on a ship large enough to support it which I don't have yet and I'm also not looking forward to doing that because it's an even bigger time sink before I can start to mine anything. This mining mechanic is in my opinion compromising one of the few good gameplay systems DU has which is the building system.

 

The simplest solution or at least a better implementation of this system would be to lower the speed at which MU's lose efficiency and also slow the speed at which we get charges so we only have to calibrate every few days or so. That opens up time to do other things.

 

@anyone: How do you feel about the current state of gathering resources? 

 

There are so many better ways they could have implimented MUs since it was supposed to make mining "less tedious" and instead made it a lot more tedious.

 

In terms of building you first get a whole lot less ore than you used to in general that you then have to sell a portion of to cover taxes, then choose between making parts, elements, and then voxels, and then dont have much time to do anything since its going to take you an hour and a half to blow 10 charges, chase down the ore and potentially have to delete parts of your builds if the ore spawns in the floor, and then waste time going from rig to rig and trasfer ore the MUs have produced. Its a lot of BS for no gain and screens you cant skip as the MU loads up.  On top of it all you have to pay taxes to keep the whole thing going.

 

There are so many things they could have done better to reduce the tedious nature of the MUs in general or taxes:

  • Instead of Taxes NQ could havve built in some kind of prospecting tile upgrade system to get money out of the game to upgrade the resources on your tile. If you are on Alioth for example you could pay 20,000,000h to buy the upgrade to have Malachite on your tile or 30,000,000 to put Acrinite on your tile, and 1-5,000,000 per ore tier to add 10 L/H per ore to a tile and it would have instantly burned out most of the money from the game without the need for taxes and created a prospecting system to where you dont need to calibrate if you had trillions or billions and made baked tile stats more lucrative for building the land up.
  • NQ could have made the MUs just spawn the rocks per hour onto the ground instead of needing to calibrate anything since it should essentially do that automatically without a time based "Are you still playing" mini game. Since rocks arent barely even worth picking up as is with 20L per rock it should take some effort to actually mine if you have to mine anyways and with the rocks that spawn should have been based on the nodes in the mini game on how much it spawns per hour until you wanted to swap resources.
  • MUs should have only needed to be used to initially start a MU and then it should have just run off of Nitron so you dont have to babysit MUs so much since you are essentially chained to a location since VR does not let you get bonuses or talent perks and you end up wasting the charge essentially since you will have to do it more frequently with the efficiency loss.
  • The Charge duration should have given a player a week between starting an MU before the efficiency drop even starts so that you can actually do something else rather than this new boring meta that industry or anything else in the game does not require this much tedium to do anything since there really is no other mining substitue beyond weekend asteroid runs or cutting to the chase of just running mission to get money and just bypassing the whole MU treadmill or kicking rocks.
  • They should have allowed more active MU mining via Dynamic Cores so that you can actually fly a ship around land and mine three tiles at once and used the amount of MUs you wanted to put on a ship and the mini game minus the charges to just locate a virtual node that has actual sizes and ore pools built in without the voxel ore and let the MUs go to town until the node finishes and the MU lazers stop and you rinse and repeat. Chaining people to a grouping of tiles is not good for the game.

 

The whole MU system is lacking, boring, and time wasting and it either needs a serious QoL pass, buff, upgrade, or whatever to make it more viable or run off of gas or whatever to negate the need for charges since it should just produce more in general rather than playing the mini game since no other element in the game for industry, piloting, pvp, etc uses this BS to do anything. Its not our fault NQ didnt know how to make a viable mining system that had world healing, proper resource seeding, that eventually turned into unlimited ore and quanta via the mission system that required removing traditional mining from planets to begin with.

 

Lol less tedious my ass.

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19 hours ago, Serula said:

The whole MU system is starting to burn me out. The problem is that you are implied to use all your charges and not waste any. It's a dopamine trap like many mobile games are. With the current implementation that means you have to calibrate every single day. I experience this as a somewhat stressfull time pressure. Ofcourse I have 3 alts so I have to spend more time on doing all the calibrations. Since the start of Demeter this is pretty much all I've been doing in DU and I didn't spend any time building. It's really difficult for me to ignore the addicting dopamine triggers but I managed to stop picking up all the surface ores because that was an incredible time sink. I really kinda want to stop mining like this all together but that also means no resources unless I go space mining which requires a very expensive scanner on a ship large enough to support it which I don't have yet and I'm also not looking forward to doing that because it's an even bigger time sink before I can start to mine anything. This mining mechanic is in my opinion compromising one of the few good gameplay systems DU has which is the building system.

 

The simplest solution or at least a better implementation of this system would be to lower the speed at which MU's lose efficiency and also slow the speed at which we get charges so we only have to calibrate every few days or so. That opens up time to do other things.

 

@anyone: How do you feel about the current state of gathering resources? 

I hate it it’s made me

not want two

play this game anymore I haven’t built anyting or worked on my base sence the update I find the rate at witch MU get Material ridiculous I tride space mining it did not work for me just wasted fuel and time and found  all the astroids I visited alredy mined out I just wish NQ would roll back and scrap this update it’s killing everting I liked about this game for me I may just need two go check out star base and see if they fix this game later on maybe if enough people stop playing they will see they sucked the fun right out of this game I can’t even build anymore and I’m not spending a week grinding a crapy amount of ore I went from 100m worth of cargo a week two about 4m hell no I need way moor material two build  

who in thier right mind would want two spend months two build a ship two pvp in and lose it sounds real fun 

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18 hours ago, Shredder said:

Yeah, clicking on a MU and clicking calibrate, then exiting calibration after it initialising but before you play the mini game, takes less than 15 seconds in total. That (with good skills) bumps my calibration score up by 60% without even playing the mini game. I do that calibration with 6 MU per day. The MU are all close together, and the territories are all surrounding my base.

 

So probably less than 5 minutes in total… 15 seconds per MU, x 6, that’s 1.5 minutes, not including walking 2 meters between each MU…

OK, So you have to be there in person?  No VR. 

EDIT:  I just tried it in VR and it worked fine even without skill.  I guess it depends how far your calibration goes down.  Anyway thanks for the tip it will save time.

Edited by Underhook
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I will admit it takes a fair amount of time. There is tricks to make it more manageable:

 

-Don't harvest ground ore/ paste coordinates into a list and do it only once the tile is littered. (hey blazemonger, what is a hagboard? are there lua  scripts able to sort coordinates and arrange them into the most efficient path? a bit like racing works atm)

 

-For those where you don't harvest ground ore (I'll pick up t2 and beyond, I'm not harvesting quartz ground ore) you don't need a good calibration, I think the absolute worst case (destination spot at 0% density, no skills, battery empty) you gain 35% calibration.

->slap down ONE largest circle where the MU is, set destination on brightest spot, done, why use all the battery and all that time and effort on t1 with 98% calibration left?!

 

-This one is a zero-sum game, but you do have a few liberties: if you apply better handling skills on a MU, the base rate stays the same. Meaning a MU that was left standing, but upgraded will need aproximately 80% calibration (optimal) to pump it's 100l/h fully. If you put the MU back down anew the base rate will be adjusted; desirable in cases like 100-150l/h where you don't want a second MU. The other can be useful in cases where there is like 190l/h, have one machine pump 100l/h at ~80% optimum, and one pump 90l/h at ~75% optimum. You might be able to "reset" handling skills placing the MU in VR didn't try I have alts.

GONE AFTER I COME BACK A FEW DAYS LATER

So yeah according to how important I deem the MU I'm sometimes also only spending a couple of seconds on them. I do agree though that it's very tamagotchi'ish, and requires a lot of tending to (sitting two more accounts since demeter, putting me at 4 accounts with max charges... sigh). So here is my take: I don't think any longer that the tax cycle should be longer, even mediocre tiles are profitable if managed reasonably well and it's trivial to fly a mission a week to finance a few tiles if you want all the ore to yourself, and if the ores prices are in the cellar, you can just buy it instead of mining it. I wouldn't complain about a 10-14 day tax cycle but I don't feel it's a necessary improvement anymore. But to ease the micromanagement I think even players with a single account who want every last liter might enjoy. The thing is if you lessen only calibration charge time, we will do more of it to minmax, same if you lengthen only how long the calibration lasts... The only way would be to change both in equal proportions... So we have like 4charges/day (skilled) and decay starts after 3 days, instead of 6 charges a day decayiäg after 2 days. Would reduce tamagotchi activities by 50% and I think most could appreciate that, the issue is: it effects newcomers worse. ATM if you want the most profit possible and quick, you should have the least tiles possible and aim to harvest surface rocks every 24h. So there should allways be at least 4 charges a day, one for each t1 on sanct.

 

 

 

Sure back in the day you could mine 200k in an evening, if you went hard at it. Now you need 8333l/day for that... Then again manage 3 tiles well for a year... that's a quantity of ore I wouldn't want to grind 4000 liter vein steps for...

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I'd expect this mini-game mechanic from a game design intern or a really small indie game where resources are truly limited (not a 50+ person studio with millions in funding). 

 

This is what happens when you develop a game with no experience, but are too arrogant or immature to read player feedback.

 

NQ has only ever whined about player feedback...maybe because it's always intense critically. It's intensely critical because the game needs a lot of improvements. 

 

Running an alpha / beta but rejecting feedback because it's hard to hear is beyond counterproductive. They whine about a lack of resources, but aren't using the resources they have in the community of testers. 

 

Instead of actually engaging with feedback, they've (more than once) told the community that they don't need the opinions of "self-appointed experts" and that we don't really understand "how hard it is".

 

In other words, they are taking it personally instead of professionally -- rather than respond to feedback on its merits, they feel the need to lash out at their own customers and remind us how difficult their jobs are (as if that's even relevant). Every game dev that's ever worked on a project understands how easy it is to lose perspective. Player feedback is gold and it's baffling how readily NQ throws it in the trash. 

 

At this point, I'm looking forward to anything that can humble NQ. Maybe a catastrophic release. Maybe their sub numbers post-demeter.

Whatever it is, it will be painful but critically needed. NQ can't move forward until they figure out why they are incapable of reading and processing feedback from their own testers in advance of vomiting features onto production. 

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Amen.  NQ 's disregard borders on abuse of its  player base - the shear number of tedious repetitive task that produce minimal gains for the time spent range from harvesting to calibration to the inventory rats' nest, repair tool, etc etc. - carpal tunnel, anyone?   Add the poor execution of markets, the talent tree roach motel (los cucharachas entrada para no salir),  and the twice ruined economy (first hyperinflation due to influx of mission cash, then flooding the market with cheap ore - massive deflation)  push this game to a point where I have question whether it makes sense to keep playing at all.

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5 minutes ago, Overstimuloredom said:

"Player feedback is gold"

 

You don't deal with the general public, or changes often, do you?

 

I'm not saying that customer feedback is always positive, but it is extremely valuable.

 

That's not really a subjective stance...understanding feedback is a massive field and companies (across every industry) that care about customer engagement generally outperform their competitors. This is very well-researched.  

 

Direct feedback is a vital part of any comprehensive analytics pipeline. I'm not saying it should be their only data. 

 

It's even more important in gaming, because it's a difficult discipline where it's very easy to lose perspective; anyone that's worked on a game dev project knows that devs can't "play the game as if they are just players".

 

You need outside feedback from real players -- not just anonymized analytics, but real feedback. Usability testing and processing feedback from real players is an industry best practice for a good reason. 


Beyond all that, it's about perception and customer service. Companies that are well-regarded by their customers do better -- that's also very well researched. If it looks like you don't care what your customers think...that's not helping NQ. 

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"Direct feedback is a vital part of any comprehensive analytics pipeline. I'm not saying it should be their only data. "

Should have put "direct" in italics. If I tie a noose around my belt, lay the rope over my shoulder and pull; the pants crushing my nuts, that's direct feedback. If you stop me midway to tell me it's going to hurt, that's just feedback.

Also
"That's not really a subjective stance...understanding feedback is a massive field and companies (across every industry) that care about customer engagement generally outperform their competitors. This is very well-researched. "

I got like a strong hunch that the people that do that for a living would care to differentiate between economic success, customer satisfaction, feedback and engagement. I'm not so convinced the differentiation is in the best interest of the customer.



Feedback matters on a macroscale, to sort out the most common issues. Personal opinions don't. I work in the private-public sector, right at the intersection between the public and the institutions, we introduced a big change in fall, I'm not gonna dox myself more, other than saying it affects everybody who lives here, on weekly to quarterly basis (and has nothing to do with corona ?). We switched over to the national standard, the standards of our neighbouring countries are even stricter. But actually the new system is more convenient in all aspects, frankly our small region of aproximately 100k inhabitants were the only ones who kept doing it like cavemen. It's just that exactly 4 "edge cases" cause huge waves in the perception of people. It's still more convenient overall, but as you said "it's about perception and customer service": there was the old way and people were used to it, acting normatively, and then there are some people who are way more affected than others. The new system is progressive, the more you cause, the more it affects you, with lots of direct feedback involved. In the old system those particularely concerned could offload theirs onto the community, by having the institutions deal with what they cause, and everybody be affected equally at the end of the year, with very little direct feedback. Anyway because of the old way setting the norm, even those barely or should I say rarerly affected bitch and bitch so hard everytime they stumble upon the revelation. My life quality dropped noticeably, eventhough in theory, my job got easier. Wanna know the stats? Out of approximately 14400 visitors on 80 days, around 15-20 complaints a day (6 and a half hour days), sometimes short remarks, some going into 10 minute long shouting matches, it's a spectrum pretty evenly distributed, we deal with absolutely all stratas of society. So far with all that feedback: 20-30 times we don't set the weather nor the weekday lady but we understand it's upsetting, 9 times oops our bad very comparable to quick bugfix because of an oversight, exactly once [filtered] right I'll talk to my superior about it. The others? Talking out of their ass, grasping for straws, bordering on verbal abuse, usually all at once. In theory it is me who wields authority over them, and it's unwise for them to be on bad terms with me, in practice I can't deal with any more antagonism. I'm not there to haggle but they're all convinced they can set out the terms for themselves, just because of how things used to be... Sigh

So my perception in such matters changed drastically, and I was allready quite the cynic before that. That's where my weird take no bullshit diplomacy comes from, and why I had to those nitpicks at the top of this post. Because I'm not impressed and the generous use of italics smells like the same condescension I deal with everyday. A lot of posts do TBH. I happen to agree that when it comes to recreative stuff, the best design strategy is to allways aim for pure customer satisfaction. I just have an inelastatic demand for a single shard sandbox mmo, that checks a bunch of boxes even if I must admit the end result of having boxes checked has usually been quite sobering so far ?. IDK what the haters are doing here there is other options they don't tire themselves to cite, some with merit. Call me a simp or a stan, but I am still impressed with 30000kmh through hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers of actually present space, even if it's empty ("well to pilot at those speeds..."?), and I don't see anybody else pulling something comparable off before NQ else I'd be there and not here. But tbf it's a niche game and a good showcase of why most of the time, it's probably better self-regulate the scope of your projects into something more manageable if not quite as impressive. Then again if you say it like that can't all the early access titles be categorized the same way? There it is again:

"it's about perception and customer service" must seem like barely saying anything to you, but to me it's about the only part of that whole text that carried a strong meaning. Don't take this like an insult afterall I'm rambling way worse. TLDR I believe less and less in "feedback".

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Regardless, by now there is a well known loop that happens with NQ and the community.

 

NQ; We are very excited and have this cool new feature that nobody really asked for, ready to be tested on PTC!

Community: Man, this is rough. So many bugs, and this will cause lots of balance issues.

NQ: Great feedback! It is nice to hear that you are all as excited as we are!

Community: Erhh. The bugs and balance issues?

NQ: Rejoice! After a week of limited PTC availability and no changes we are now pushing the new feature live! Everybody not chased away by this patch can now look forwards to our next surprise in about 6 months time!

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10 hours ago, Underhook said:

OK, So you have to be there in person?  No VR. 

EDIT:  I just tried it in VR and it worked fine even without skill.  I guess it depends how far your calibration goes down.  Anyway thanks for the tip it will save time.

You don’t have your talents, though. I forgo my talents and just use VR, wishing I didn’t invest in those talents.

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14 hours ago, Doombad said:

You don’t have your talents, though. I forgo my talents and just use VR, wishing I didn’t invest in those talents.

Yes, as it turned out claibration talents were a waste of TP.  The skill that give us more calibrations was the only one required.  Who new.

Edited by Underhook
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I agree I mentioned this in a different thread. They seem to think that everything in the game has to be tedious and I don't know why that is. % scans for asteroids why not one scan? Like you mention how bout calibrate once every few days or a week? Tile tax is definitely too high. Most if not all tiles should have some uncommon ore on it. It is very difficult to make space fuel the way the ore is currently being managed. My favorite thing in this game is tinkering with ships and flying them which made hauling mission a great thing for my play style. I'm hoping they expand on the things we can do with our ships aside from pvp which is a in game wealthy players game. I can't afford to risk my ship and my cargo, nothing in the game is worth that risk. Might want to consider bringing surface nodes back with a vengeance now that there is no mining. Bigger nodes you mine like you did under ground but on the surface but should make them bigger than the original ones they were pretty small. I really use to enjoy doing that when I first started playing you could hover around and scan you pov for nodes. Uncommon surface nodes would be helpful. There are things that can be done to fix this we just have to wait and see what they come up with but one thing is sure many things can be A to B I think most players are like me we don't need hoops to jump through and time sinks we need the opposite we need an abundance of resources and menial tasks should be direct and fairly quick. There's no need to time sink everything and drag it out. those are the biggest issues I see while playing.  

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I was already getting hacked off with scanning... I have never found a meganode in eight months of playing. Calibrating mining units is another way to drag out our time. NQ should think about what players like doing in game and that's acquiring resources, of course, but also building, poducing, trading and blowing stuff up... 
 

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Take taxes away. Give us power. Make the fuel for power units obtainable only by Quanta. Make a lack of power on a construct = abandon state after some duration. 

 

The power unit fuel part I think should not be Quanta only, although NQ wants a way to remove Quanta so my proposal keeps that at the moment. 

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