UEF PLUS! A simple additional feature for DU that helps everyone.

[Megabosslord]

I've long suspected that if a new DU player can't get airborne in the first few hours of gameplay, we're losing players. The initial DU loop of building your first space-ready ship is fun for some, but it's niche. The starting speeder is 'meh'. Every other space game just gives you a starting ship that you can pretty easily fly into space right out of the 'dock'.

 

But there's a problem, right?

 

If you give every new player a basic space-ready ship it frigs up the economy. A glut of ships, parts, and destroys ship-builder income.

 

But there's a simple solution:

 

1) Make the UEF store (much) bigger.. Or have 10 of them around the starting locations.

2) Allow players to take their ship token (which already locks it out) to a terminal at the store and pay a fee equal to X% of the price they set for the ship, to submit the token. (This terminal is most of the new code.)

3) The ship spawns in the UEF store on the existing style of 'for sale' display.

4) New players - or any players at all - can walk up to the display, and choose 'test flight' 

5) The ship spawns on a nearby pad with pilot rights only, restricted to the test pilot who chose 'test flight'.

6) The 'test flight' player can test fly the ship for a period of time (or until they die) after which it de-spawns and the player is returned to the store.

7) The player can then chose to buy the ship from the store. The tokenised original is ported to the pad, and the seller receives their moula.

 

Ship builders make money. Creates no ship/parts glut. New players can go flying in their first 5 minutes after FTUE, even before they have any money, and get a taste of what's to come. 

 

Thoughts/comments: go. 

[GraXXoR]

There needs to be a "virtual test world" where the player can test the ships they are interested in free of interference in a virtual environment.

This has been suggested before, but doesn't seem likely.

 

Likely NQ are not really open to any more suggestions in reality. It seems they still haven't even finished the list of requests from the Kickstarter, let alone listening to us lot tell them what we think is best.

[Megabosslord]

2 minutes ago, Jinxed said:

There needs to be a "virtual test world" where the player can test the ships they are interested in free of interference in a virtual environment.

This has been suggested before, but doesn't seem likely.

 

Likely NQ are not really open to any more suggestions in reality. It seems they still haven't even finished the list of requests from the Kickstarter, let alone listening to us lot tell them what we think is best.

Thanks. Yeah, that's what I thought. It's kind of annoying they're expending dev effort on stuff like fiddling with bezier curves when there's some easy wins to make the franchise more profitable.

[Mncdk1]

6 hours ago, Jinxed said:

There needs to be a "virtual test world" where the player can test the ships they are interested in free of interference in a virtual environment.

This has been suggested before, but doesn't seem likely.

 

Likely NQ are not really open to any more suggestions in reality. It seems they still haven't even finished the list of requests from the Kickstarter, let alone listening to us lot tell them what we think is best.

They could just copy/paste the hauling challenge, remove all the challenge related stuff (or leave it, who cares), and spawn the ship for test flying. Maybe keep the default ship choices to test against, idk. But they have a closed off playground already, I don't think anyone would mind if they just reused that area. Better than nothing.

[GraXXoR]

2 minutes ago, Megabosslord said:

Thanks. Yeah, that's what I thought. It's kind of annoying they're expending dev effort on stuff like fiddling with bezier curves when there's some easy wins to make the franchise more profitable.

 

For me, the #1 priority is PLAYER CONTROLLED MARKETS.

 

For a game that is ostensibly "player controlled" it's stupid how many bots there are.... bot ore digging, bot or selling, bot scematic purchasing, bot land registry and remote disable of machinery, bot mission givers, bot mission receivers, bot marketplaces, bot taxmen, bot safe zone.

 

Players actually have very little agency at all in this game.

[blundertwink]

2 hours ago, Jinxed said:

 

For me, the #1 priority is PLAYER CONTROLLED MARKETS.

 

For a game that is ostensibly "player controlled" it's stupid how many bots there are.... bot ore digging, bot or selling, bot scematic purchasing, bot land registry and remote disable of machinery, bot mission givers, bot mission receivers, bot marketplaces, bot taxmen, bot safe zone.

 

Players actually have very little agency at all in this game.

 

100% -- the design of DU makes no sense anymore. A game with no NPCs where players also don't have the power to do anything....yeah, that's a "bold" design choice for sure. 

 

There's no real reason that NQ hasn't rolled out player markets other than being stubborn and having a poor design vision.

 

They have had ample time in the last 8 years. They have instead focused on refactors to existing features...usually making the overall gameplay worse. 

 

I mean...are you telling me that they coded the markets without player controls in mind...despite saying this was always a planned feature...? Puzzling at every level. 

[kulkija]

3 hours ago, Jinxed said:

 

For me, the #1 priority is PLAYER CONTROLLED MARKETS.

 

For a game that is ostensibly "player controlled" it's stupid how many bots there are.... bot ore digging, bot or selling, bot scematic purchasing, bot land registry and remote disable of machinery, bot mission givers, bot mission receivers, bot marketplaces, bot taxmen, bot safe zone.

 

Players actually have very little agency at all in this game.

 

Yes please PLAYER CONTROLLED MARKETS as described at Kick starter.

Also whole "D" is missing in RDMS. D=Duties. RDMS is not yet finished.

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1949863330/dual-universe-civilization-building-sci-fi-mmorpg/posts/1692359

Quote

How can one create a market?  

Markets are built within a construct. It starts with a Market Unit, which is an Element that you can craft or buy, and that you deploy somewhere in the construct. Various levels of Market Units will exist to stage the maximum number of orders it can support. Skills will also be involved to know whether you can operate a market of a given level.

 

Quote

Will there be market NPCs?  

Yes, to help boost the economy we will introduce market NPCs, or “bots” (we prefer this term because they won’t have a physical presence in the world). Bots will appear as buy or sell orders in the list of player-made orders. The difficulty is to make sure that they stabilize but not disturb the natural market dynamics driven by players, which involves a bit of AI to get it right. Bots will amplify player activities, not replace them. If you set up a market in the middle of nowhere, isolated, don’t expect thousands of bots to come and sell you everything you need! Note: this may be different in alpha, as we will use bots on market to provide you with assets that you cannot yet craft. 

In the long run, our hope is that bots will become less necessary, or even completely disappear, as humans take over the whole economy.

 

 

[blundertwink]

28 minutes ago, kulkija said:

In the long run, our hope is that bots will become less necessary, or even completely disappear, as humans take over the whole economy.

 

Ah, one of many, many kickstarter statements that hasn't aged well. Over 6 years on, and some of the most fundamental aspects of the game as outlined by the KS are still missing with no ETA or planned ETA. 

 

Many games are designed, developed, tested, and released in 6 years or less...for reference, NMS was developed in about 3 years by a team of <20. 

 

NQ's team is twice the size (or more) and they've been developing this since NQ was founded in January 2014. 

 

"But DU is so much more complex" -- eh, yes and no. Do a deep dive into how NMS procgen actually works and tell me it is a "simple" game...it ain't so simple. 

 

My point is that there's something rather wrong with DU's development and by now it's unfortunately clear that there's no fixing their issues. 

[Mncdk1]

4 hours ago, Jinxed said:

 

For me, the #1 priority is PLAYER CONTROLLED MARKETS.

 

For a game that is ostensibly "player controlled" it's stupid how many bots there are.... bot ore digging, bot or selling, bot scematic purchasing, bot land registry and remote disable of machinery, bot mission givers, bot mission receivers, bot marketplaces, bot taxmen, bot safe zone.

 

Players actually have very little agency at all in this game.

 

Much of what you're mentioning here would fall into either "NPC" or "game mechanics" categories.

 

Schematics: Who else should seed those to the players? As the system is now, if bots don't seed schematics on the market, people can't build/expand their factories at all.

Land registry/remote disable: That's just game mechanics. You put down your TU and pay your taxes. It's just a game mechanic, it's not "bots". And if the game doesn't remotely disable machinery on tiles that run out of money, then who should do it in their place? Give the task to a player? So the player should get that mission from a bot?

 

I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.

 

I do agree though, that players should have been given the ability to set up their own market terminals, so they could try to compete with the Aphelia markets.

[Bobbie]

.

[Noddles]

6 hours ago, Mncdk1 said:

 

Much of what you're mentioning here would fall into either "NPC" or "game mechanics" categories.

 

Schematics: Who else should seed those to the players? As the system is now, if bots don't seed schematics on the market, people can't build/expand their factories at all.

Land registry/remote disable: That's just game mechanics. You put down your TU and pay your taxes. It's just a game mechanic, it's not "bots". And if the game doesn't remotely disable machinery on tiles that run out of money, then who should do it in their place? Give the task to a player? So the player should get that mission from a bot?

 

I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.

 

I do agree though, that players should have been given the ability to set up their own market terminals, so they could try to compete with the Aphelia markets.

The reality is that a lot of these things shouldn't have ever been bot/npc driven actions after the first month. 

 

Tile maintenance should've been capped by the amount you could protect as well as power. Tile taxes should have been a player system of taxing people to mine or build on your land. 

 

T1 schematics should've never existed. T2+ schematics should've been created through a research process. 

 

Player markets should have been the standard within the first few months after an initial amount of currency was generated. The rest of the money could them come from the standard UBI. Currency sinks could have been driven by market taxing and costs to be on sanctuary. 

 

 

[Mncdk1]

You have some good points, but I was addressing it from the point of view of what do we have today. In that light, just saying "schematics shouldn't be sold by bots" would mean that we can't build anything anymore.

 

The point I was trying to make was simply, that just because an economy is player-driven, doesn't mean that nothing should be seeded by bots/NPCs. You can see that in other games that NQ have been inspired by.

 

NQ just needs to not seed industry parts, industry machines, ship elements, and so on. But we have to get started somewhere, so NQ is seeding schematics. Just like CCP is seeding skill books and BPOs in EVE Online.

[GraXXoR]

5 hours ago, Mncdk1 said:

You have some good points, but I was addressing it from the point of view of what do we have today. In that light, just saying "schematics shouldn't be sold by bots" would mean that we can't build anything anymore.

 

The point I was trying to make was simply, that just because an economy is player-driven, doesn't mean that nothing should be seeded by bots/NPCs. You can see that in other games that NQ have been inspired by.

 

NQ just needs to not seed industry parts, industry machines, ship elements, and so on. But we have to get started somewhere, so NQ is seeding schematics. Just like CCP is seeding skill books and BPOs in EVE Online.

I thought the point of my post was fairly clear in that I was talking about the fundamentals of the game being bot drive. not suggesting a solution to “what we have now”.
 

I don’t generally seriously suggest solutions because 1) I’m not a game designer 2) NQ aren’t listening. 

[Mncdk1]

1 hour ago, Jinxed said:

I was talking about the fundamentals of the game being bot drive. not suggesting a solution to “what we have now”.

 

The reply talking about what we have today was for Noddles post. His fix to the problems we have today seemed to be "the entire game should have been completely different", which is why I said the part about focusing on what we have now. The reply to your post was further up.

[Megabosslord]

On 5/3/2022 at 2:19 AM, Jinxed said:

 

For me, the #1 priority is PLAYER CONTROLLED MARKETS.

 

For a game that is ostensibly "player controlled" it's stupid how many bots there are.... bot ore digging, bot or selling, bot scematic purchasing, bot land registry and remote disable of machinery, bot mission givers, bot mission receivers, bot marketplaces, bot taxmen, bot safe zone.

 

Players actually have very little agency at all in this game.

Here's a question: Wouldn't the Reverse Dispenser (which they've also been circling forever) and/or money API (ability to automate payments based on container contents instead of manual money transfers only) fix this? One of these SHOULD have been done when they first did wallets, per the discussions at the time.

 

If we could build our own merchant systems in-game, it would solve this and a dozen other problems at the same time. (My OP suggestion above is just an easy out for NQ to stop-gap a secondary problem.)