The Grand Haul - Panacea Update

[DarkHorizon]

When Panacea was dropped it brought along a long requested feature, player scrapping abandoned constructs at the marketplaces and districts. It triggered a seven day timer before players would be able to take over constructs left behind by others.

 

The first wave of 'The Grand Haul' as I call it, has since come and gone. Players have since had time to take stock of their recycled stock, what did you get?

 

 

The Darkquisition -to put my own personal twist on it- has officially surpassed 2.5kt of previously contained or otherwise dismantled goodies (#1). More still awaits on ships that I'll be taking home personally. Pictured are 2M, 4S, 3XS (#2). 2M are undergoing further repairs.

 

No larges of course, predictably the markets were scoped out so I opted instead to make some active sweeps of the districts with a small stock of cores to claim what I could

 

[Distinct Mint]

This "event" was just like the previous bad events where some people got everything and most got nothing.

 

Not everyone can take time off work to camp constructs all day. I have a 2 hour slot each day to play, so there was nothing for me by the time I could log on. Not sure how this could have been avoided (for me), but the effect is the same regardless. The rich got richer, the rest of us had to shrug again and know this booty was never meant for us.

[Knight-Sevy]

It's a non-event that should never have happened in the game.
The stuff should not have been put back into circulation on the server: at best deleted or at worst put back in the owner player's inventory with a timer before allowing reuse.
 

NQ acts as if it were the major feature of the beginning of the year for Dual Universe.
 

"Look we do everything we can to destroy and prevent groups of fairplay players from PvP but we allow all PvE to grief for free and steal things from people who can't defend themselves. Lots of fun "
 

I was happy with the new VPT tool but again I feel like throwing up.
Damn though I love this game, I'm not complaining usual with all the latest nerf to save the servers.
 

But I have the impression that NQ are really laughing at us.

[VandelayIndustries]

23 minutes ago, Knight-Sevy said:

 

 

"Look we do everything we can to destroy and prevent groups of fairplay players from PvP but we allow all PvE to grief for free and steal things from people who can't defend themselves. Lots of fun "
 

 

 

I've always thought this was weird as hell for NQ to take this kind of stance. I can befriend you, you give me RDMS to your tile so we can team up, and then I can steal every single thing you own. I know personal responsibility.  Then now we can claim and steal from people who leave something for a few days. Steal whole tiles, constructs, whatever, with not even a chance of pvp or defense.  But when we ask for more things or even 1 planet to be pvp, in the zone that was created for just that, no....no we can't have that. NQ is weird as hell.

Edited February 19, 2022 by VandelayIndustries

[Koffye]

55 minutes ago, Knight-Sevy said:

"Look we do everything we can to destroy and prevent groups of fairplay players from PvP but we allow all PvE to grief for free and steal things from people who can't defend themselves. Lots of fun "

 

 

 

I had written this on Discord:

 

"It is still the wrong choice to abandon core ships and structures. Create magic BP for everything, that the returning player have still their assets. Or else this player will directly quit again if they choose to sub again
Just a punch in the face for old players"
 

 

I can't find any good words for this 'event'.

[GraXXoR]

I always wonder if the people making decisions at NQ exist in a parallel world to mine where common sense means a totally different thing.

 

I am in the Japanese time zone (UTC+9) which made the whole “event” unavailable to me. 

[blazemonger]

NQ has decided to move in a direction which may not be agreeable for some, and guess what.. That will be the case for _anything_ NQ does. 

 

I can see how this choice is two faced, on one hand it is a possible turn off for players who left if and when they decide to "try again" and find their stuff is all gone.

On the other hand, I can also see how it has always been very clear that the only place your personal stuff is ever going to be really safe is on your Sanctuary territory.

 

I certainly can agree that the feeding frenzy NQ created around markets is the less desirable option and that there have been suggestions of far more elegant and "game play" options to achieve the same result. On top of that, there is no requirement for anyone to make the rounds in person (it's easy to work around that) to reset the 7 day timers on their container or advertisement constructs and so it is not unlikely that in a week or two the whole thing just starts over and the now cleared pads are filled with junk again.

 

NQ does not have a habit of being creative in their solutions, in fact they are not a company to actually deal with issue, they mostly obscure or work around them and the reasons for that can only be speculated about but I think that badly (if at all) documented spaghetti code is probably at least part of that.

 

 

 

2 hours ago, Knight-Sevy said:

"Look we do everything we can to destroy and prevent groups of fairplay players from PvP but we allow all PvE to grief for free and steal things from people who can't defend themselves. Lots of fun "

The funny bit here is that the exact same applies to the current state of combat gameplay in game though, but that is probably something you'd not want to see.

 

There is no "fairplay" in PVP right now. You get locked, you are pretty much dead. If you are a non-combatant, you have no recourse to mitigate the risks of PVP. As it stands, combat in DU is pretty much a one-sided affair if one of the involved parties really has no interest in such engagements. PVP in DU generally is pretty much about " steal things from people who can't defend themselves" outside of arranged fights.

 

 

2 hours ago, VandelayIndustries said:

 I can befriend you, you give me RDMS to your tile so we can team up, and then I can steal every single thing you own. 

I am not sure how this is a problem. If you place trust in people, you run the risk of getting taken advantage of. It's the same thing in many other similar games.

A fair point would be to say that RDMS and the options to check on new org members is something that needs work, but in principle, I have no problem with sabotage and spying gameplay. The problem here is the players who can't keep their personal wet dreams in check and just abuse the mechanics to grief "because they can". But that should never prevent those that will "play the game" and RP their way into a position where they can sell out or call in their actual friends for being able to do that.

 

This is a sandbox MMO and the game has clear RP angles, stuff like this come with the territory but as with so many things in the game, NQ really has not fleshed out all the options and facets of gameplay yet. And we can only hope they eventually will, or the game may turn into a griefing party..

[GraXXoR]

We have our organization set up in such a way that any one person could only access one aspect of our org. 
 

personally I think the whole trust vs risk aspect is very interesting overall and being backstabbed by a new org member is always at the back of our mind. 
 

Each of our OGs is SL in one org and legate in the central org. We transfer assets to and from the central org from the outer orgs as needed  any new players we add as members or legates of the outer specific orgs. That keeps our main coffers safe form pillaging. 
 

of course if an OG turns coat then we’re potentially FUBARed. 

[CptLoRes]

NQ tried very hard to avoid this will all soft of 'solutions' that obviously where never going to work, so the timer based parking restrictions where always needed.

But as usual NQ made it worse by being indecisive and waiting to long, and then overcompensating when they finally went there and not thinking it all the way through.

 

For example having a staggered timer on the unclaim for different places or randomized on each constructs to extend the big one time inital unclaim event to have a 24h or more time window, would have made it so that players did not feel left out.

[Cybob19]

Yeah I threw everybody out, rushed home, and still got only a ship with 6 basic atmo l and 2 l containers or something like that. Felt like an idiot for not respecting speed limits.

 

I am pretty sceptic though, when they announced the community seemed to like it quite unanimously... Except for a handful being worried about inactive players badmouthing the game. Now that the cards have been dealt there is a lot more salt.

 

Magic blueprints are not the solution, put the timer too low it's trivially easy to magic BP your ships, put it too high and everything is still littered.

 

The solution would have been to unspawn the ships with a little video, like the sanctuary shuttle has, but that suggestion went entirely moot, not sure anybody reacted at. I know it's cheap and anti persistence/immersion. But also it bridged the gap between different interest groups perfectly. Now that the asset flipped hands, we can leave it as it is anyway.

 

 

In the same vein I'm pretty confident somebody posted the best solution for the speed limits: make the highest speeds require constant fuel burning.

He was promptly "debunked" with "cant got past 30.000kmh... (so same principle but downwards from 30k then wtf stop hyperfocusing on winning arguments rhetorically). Many lines of text were wasted to write down a whole balancing scheme.... I bet we are going to get core speed limits, and I bet people are gonna give NQ shit for it.

 

We don't need to write their game for them, we need to inspire simple and feasible things à la "damn why didn't I think of this". And in my experience those get hardly any visibility, I feel like the forum is more like complaining for sport.

[CptLoRes]

3 hours ago, Overstimuloredom said:

 I feel like the forum is more like complaining for sport.

I am 100% guilty of this. But for me this is a conscious decision since I am getting more enjoyment from writing forum 'trash' then playing the game. And also NQ is making it very easy to continue complaining..

 

But despite everything I am still hoping that against all odds this game will somehow be turned around and make it. Which is why I am still here I guess.