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ATHENA (0.29) UPDATE NOW AVAILABLE - discussion thread


NQ-Wanderer

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24 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

 

No one thinks this is fun...it's a huge waste of time and electricity. If I wanted a screen saver, I'd put on a screen saver.

 

There's a not-so-fine line between "hardcore" gameplay and "boring as all F" gameplay. 

 

If the most attractive thing about slowboating is that it gives you time to do chores IRL...well, that's literally the opposite of engaging gameplay because it's forcing you to do anything else while the game plays itself. 

 

There's no rationale at all behind this game design choice. They could have hired some random person from one of those slightly scammy "game design" colleges and been better off than whoever is making these decisions. 

Let's compare to EVE Online (again), there the traveling of huge distances is also risky, especially on AP. Also very boring imho when going the long (save) way around. That game is still around after 19 years... Although everyone has been saying the same thing during those same 19 years "EVE is dying!", the same thing they've been saying about DU. Imho the slowboat mechanic is core to DU. Just forcing you to do that with the missioning system might result in boring gameplay afk, but it is imho also a choice to do it or not. But part of the problem is that it's one of the few large quanta sinks available in the game, besides the NPC buyorders (which everyone hates)...

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Thank you :) Elevators underwater are working again.

 

It would still be nice to drain water but I am certain it is now bottom of the pile of things to add give you can see really well under the water with the update so good job there too. 👍

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34 minutes ago, Cergorach said:

Let's compare to EVE Online (again), there the traveling of huge distances is also risky, especially on AP. Also very boring imho when going the long (save) way around. That game is still around after 19 years... Although everyone has been saying the same thing during those same 19 years "EVE is dying!", the same thing they've been saying about DU. Imho the slowboat mechanic is core to DU. Just forcing you to do that with the missioning system might result in boring gameplay afk, but it is imho also a choice to do it or not. But part of the problem is that it's one of the few large quanta sinks available in the game, besides the NPC buyorders (which everyone hates)...

 

I get what you're saying, but Eve is still around despite some of its older mechanics, not because of them.

 

Copying features from a 19 year old game (as DU has done in multiple places) isn't generally wise.

 

Slow boating as a concept hasn't aged well...especially when there's not much to do otherwise as you say. 

 

The existence of NPCs in Eve makes a huge difference for its mainstream appeal...and even then most players don't make it past 90 days of play time.

 

I personally dislike comparing DU to Eve because overall Eve is a much more mainstream game. It's hard to compare with DU, which is lacking a lot of the core elements that make Eve more accessible to mainstream players. 

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1- Nice skybox & new map ✔️

2- Better lighting & glossy voxels - better visuals ✔️

3- Colliding passed ! Only moved 3 elements out of 20 ships ✔️

4- Blueprint preview awesome ( just needs the alignment thing for static or space megastructures ) ✔️

5- Nice new containers ( needs rethinking on stats ) ✔️

6- Exotic parts & engines ✔️

7- New shields ✔️

8- Alien Cores ✔️

9- FTUE & Awesome outposts ✔️

10- Speed nerf = Missions nerf 

11- Warp graphics too dizzy 

 

9 out of 11 for ME ONLY

Edited by Habitant
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The Athena patch broke shadows, see images here: https://imgur.com/a/g2MrWdo

 

* The vertical shadow artefacts on the wall in the first image were not there pre-Athena. The wall is a 1:7 slope.

* The second image shows a 1:2 slope, again with artefacts that were not there pre-patch.

* Disabling shadows removes these artefacts, images are taken with "medium" shadows.

* Adding additional voxels on the thinnest parts makes the artefacts disappear.

 

I'll reference this post in a ticket too, I just wanted to get this out there in case someone else have the same issue.

 

 

Edited by Yoarii
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14 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

...Copying features from a 19 year old game (as DU has done in multiple places) isn't generally wise...

I'd disagree, if its managed to keep going for two decades then they've obviously done something right. The trick is being sure you're copying the good mechanics and not forgetting to add in your own stuff that makes the game better.

 

19 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

...It's hard to compare with DU, which is lacking a lot of the core elements that make Eve more accessible to mainstream players. 

image.png.51f2778b8ece91135f2af6f85d04d3a1.png

Accessible... right... (you set yourself up for that one)

I didn't get in to EVE until it had its legs under it already, but as I recall hearing at the start it didn't have much. Some cool ships, one massive shared universe to explore, and enough content to keep people interested while CCP worked on more stuff.
-Mining was boring (to me), because it involved sitting and shooting at rocks for several minutes at a time,
-Hauling was boring (to me), because it involved picking up a package, hitting the autopilot, and going to do chores for several minutes (or hours) at a time,
-Combat missions and belt-ratting were fun, because I got to go blow stuff up,
-Working out what to fly with what fittings was fun, because I like building/functional customization,
-Exploration was fun because there were new things to see, great rewards, and the universe-size paired with site-respawn made it so that odds were if I found something I was the first there to loot it, but still had to be quick and careful to make sure someone else didn't come in and kill me while I was working.

 

DU is far from perfect, but it has potential, NQ just needs to get it sufficiently playable with enough content to keep people happy while they work at adding to and improving it (and quit wasting time trying to balance everything in pvp so as to force their idea of what combat should look like before they add in the actual balance mechanics like power/capacitor/heat that would make the desired play a natural thing). 

-The visual improvements are nice,

-The missions are annoying (because I was flying those) but they needed what NQ did to them for a while now,

-The stasis-gun and alien-cores are welcome additions to pvp stuff (still need more, especially power/heat),

-The speed nerf seems a rather poor solution to a problems resulting from the simultaneous additions of shields that were as powerful as they were and a CCS mechanic that made people feel armor was irrelevant on top of the already existing issues resulting from core-size-capped-weapons and a lack of any balancing mechanics like power/heat to prevent people from just building an engine-wall with guns, 
-The adjustor-speed nerf seems an overly heavy-handed solution to tracking being near irrelevant because of how fast people can turn (I get that you don't want people swinging battleships about like a kid with a sugar rush pretending a flashlight is a lightsaber, but you've just taken the fun out of my favorite multi-purpose s-core by making fly in atmo like it thinks its a fully loaded L-core freighter).
-We still need more to explore (nine planets and a bunch of near identical moons doesn't take much to have gone and seen all of. A gas-giant, a lava-planet, and something larger than Alioth with mountains and mesas so big it becomes easier to fly between them than it is to fly over them in the planet's abnormally high atmo would be swarmed by older players even if the resources were trash just because they'd want to see new planets).

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17 minutes ago, Taelessael said:

Accessible... right...

 

Exactly my point, though....if Eve Online of all the MMOs in the wild is more accessible than DU, that spells serious trouble for NQ.

 

A wide variety of people can join Eve and have fun (even if it is only for a few months)...DU doesn't even have NPCs to shoot at. That alone makes it less mainstream and accessible than Eve, never mind the horrid UX and bad tutorials. 

 

16 minutes ago, Taelessael said:

DU is far from perfect, but it has potential, NQ just needs to get it sufficiently playable with enough content to keep people happy while they work at adding to and improving it

I don't necessarily disagree, but that time has come and gone. Athena is their last major update after over 8 years of development.

 

This idea that DU will be fine if only NQ has a bit more time to "add content" is puzzling to me. They've had the time. It's come and gone. People have been waiting for that magical content for years and years and years now. 

 

There's nothing in NQ's years of development that convinces me that they can speed things up and improve the game enough to scale it...not in the limited time they have before release.

 

IMO post release updates don't matter if release goes poorly, because at that point they just won't have enough money or time to make the game commercially viable.

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1 hour ago, blundertwink said:

Exactly my point, though....if Eve Online of all the MMOs in the wild is more accessible than DU, that spells serious trouble for NQ.

...

I don't necessarily disagree, but that time has come and gone. Athena is their last major update after over 8 years of development.

 

This idea that DU will be fine if only NQ has a bit more time to "add content" is puzzling to me. They've had the time. It's come and gone. People have been waiting for that magical content for years and years and years now. ...

EVE has had 2 decades to work out their "accessibility".

 

I'm not saying NQ will magically solve all their problems if you give them another month,

I'm not saying that DU doesn't currently have what appear to be unfixable weaknesses when compared to EVE, 

and I am definitely not saying that they haven't made some egregiously stupid decisions that have done a lot more harm than good (like ticking everyone off with this ongoing wipe-stupidity).

It's not in great shape, there is obviously a significant chance that it will all just go belly up sometime in the next twelve months, and for all the grand oversimplification we get up to in these threads I do recognize that there's no relatively quick and easy solution to its problems, but it isn't dead yet. 

 

If you decide you're done waiting and you'd rather go else ware, then that is your decision and I wish you the best of luck. Seeing as I have the time and little better to do for the moment (and they've already got my money), I think I'll stick around a bit longer and see if they manage to fix the ship before it sinks.

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This update made all my L core ships seem a lot heavier :(   It feel slow, sluggish and boring!  I liked the whole way much better.  I dont mind having the XS and S core go much faster but why make it so boring to pilot heavy ships? especially with a 20000 km/h speed limit :(  im pretty disappointed about that!

 

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20 hours ago, Cergorach said:

Erm... You can do single account missioning perfectly ok. A 5-10M quanta payout 3-4 times per day, 4+ days per week is still very nice quanta (close to 100M), especially after wipe/launch. But flying for hours between planets isn't a good time in my book (wasn't good before, isn't now). I enjoy the puzzle, optimizing, setting up the infra, etc. But missioning itself is grindy as all F!

 

If you liked it before, I see no reason why you wouldn't enjoy it now... You just need to adept a little bit...

but the point is having to fly in a straight line for hours isnt 'gameplay'.  its terrible and stupid and just another example of a gameloop badly implemented. 

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Ok, the mission nerf means new people coming into the game right now will have an extremely hard time getting schematics.

 

Now if you wipe the game I think someone needs to look into possible price changes for the schematics.  Not sure what they could be though.

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18 hours ago, Cergorach said:

 Although everyone has been saying the same thing during those same 19 years "EVE is dying!", the same thing they've been saying about DU.

 

Difference is EVE has been well established, has a consistent userbase large enough to support he game and so if CCP messes soimething up some will grumble and may leave sure, but it's a relative small percentage which is nearly always replaenished by new influx of players. EVE, for all intents and purposes, is self sufficient  unless CCP really blows things up.

DU however has yet to show it is aviable game long term, has no consistent population to speak of and really has no chance of surviving until NQ pull their heads out of their you know what..

"EVE: dying since 2003" is a meme, DU has yet to show it is able to stand on it's own feet and really has yet to take a first breath on its own.

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22 hours ago, Cergorach said:

Let's compare to EVE Online (again), there the traveling of huge distances is also risky, especially on AP. Also very boring imho when going the long (save) way around. That game is still around after 19 years... Although everyone has been saying the same thing during those same 19 years "EVE is dying!", the same thing they've been saying about DU. Imho the slowboat mechanic is core to DU. Just forcing you to do that with the missioning system might result in boring gameplay afk, but it is imho also a choice to do it or not. But part of the problem is that it's one of the few large quanta sinks available in the game, besides the NPC buyorders (which everyone hates)...

eve missions can be done in a nights play session.. they dont need you to afkl for 6 hours... EVE also has good npcs... so its a much more engaging game.

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I believe I have found a problem with speed reduction (I would certainly want it fixing if I was making the game).

 

The issues is when the ship reaches the max speed that its going to travel at, it will keep burning space fuel trying to reach the speed you thought it was going to reach. While I am sure the system is working as intended its going to cause people to get stuck in space (I was luck to notice) and could actually become "the meme" for DU first time player start, from finding out the hard way. My argument for fixing this is simply that at no point dose this mechanic happen when flying except for this one (that I have noticed). As a result please can this be fixed so the ship stops using fuel when it reaches the arbitrary max speed now imposed upon the ship just like it used to do when ships reached the actual max speed before this update?

 

Also I have 'tested' this mechanic myself now and I still do not like it. Due to it being unrealistic and it adds 30 minutes each way just flying in safe space - sanctuary to one of the moons of Thades so it must be adding many hours to every other destination never mind a journey with a return trip.

 

To end on a positive note I have liked all the visual changes I have noticed - space engines, retro-rockets, clever on and off for the ore colours depending on the tool being in hand, etc. :)

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The blur that you're using when traveling in space at high speed hurts my eyes.  Traveling at 20,000 km/h didn't make anything blur for US astronauts and it doesn't need to in game.

The new engine effects look cheap.  Almost cartoonish.  I'm not opposed to some of the "fire" effects instead of the blue light, but it was a shoddy job on their design.

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On 4/28/2022 at 10:00 PM, Taelessael said:

EVE has had 2 decades to work out their "accessibility".

 

True. The problem is that NQ seems to not take notice of the evolution of EVE and what CCP has done over the years to streamline and optimize that acceessibility. They instead seem to have chosen to be inspired by EVE and reinvent all the wheels again themselves insteead fo paying attention and using the wheels which now work and/or just copy the rims and completely forget about the spokes.

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Noticed problems:
- Old desyncs are back. Ship is already warped, but the other player don’t get this information
- Killed/Cored ships still have the dynamic ship icon. Only in the gunner window you see them with with ‘cored’ icon
- On the cored ships the pilot seems to survive the kill. You can jetpack over to the cored ship and you can say hello to the pilot. (desync?)
- Combat log is spammed with: You have killed the control unit
- No player kill announcement in the combat log anymore.
- While piloting, your Avatar is flying away (literally. You see your own Avatar Suit flying away)

- An enemy ship is targeting you. You are getting the red message on your screen which say which ship and the owner is targeting you. This message can appear mulitple times, even hours after the engage happened and it is reproducible via leaving gunner module and re-entering it


QoL got worse:
-Warp Destination (blue) and Destination (green)

  •  Great idea in the beginning but it is worsening the gameplay experience. If you have a warp stop in the pipe, you cannot see the green destination marker anymore  (blue and green marker overlaps)
  • Suggestion: After warp start, remove blue marker! (or give us the old system back!)

 

 

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No good.

 

Client Update Athena: Microsoft Visual C++2015-2019 Redistributable (x64)

 

Setup Error: 0x80070666 a newer version of Microsoft Visual C++ is already installed.

 

I can not recover from this error. Game dead for now

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10 hours ago, Koffye said:

-Warp Destination (blue) and Destination (green)

  •  Great idea in the beginning but it is worsening the gameplay experience. If you have a warp stop in the pipe, you cannot see the green destination marker anymore  (blue and green marker overlaps)
  • Suggestion: After warp start, remove blue marker! (or give us the old system back!)

Lets tweak it slightly:

- Use left side of the icon for warp destination, right side for destination. That way, when they overlap they form a whole. When they don't, it is clearly evident they are in different spots.

- Allow us to hold shift when setting warp dest to also set destination to the same place.

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  • 2 weeks later...

WEIGHT CHANGES Are draconian.............went to add an engine to a not very heavy ship ... it dropped the thrust and top speed...wtf? lets talk rockets..... which idiot thought this up......rockets decelerating....now they are more useless.crashing in buildmode repeatedly has been annoying.new warp/engine/brake visuals are cartoonish......if we wanted wow wed be playing it

 

in general athena has some nice features or ideas.......but alot was heavy handed nerfs....played as an update.

 

effects....i log in for ten minutes and log out.......where hours used to be spent ingame.

long term effects........ i was going to get 3 accounts.......not sure ill even bother with 1 now

 

 

opinion.........launch ready you are not..... currently its just not fun 

Edited by Maliciouss1
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