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Ask Aphelia Episode #4 - Discussion Thread


NQ-Nyota

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That was cool. The topics were all very interesting and the quality was top notch. A wallet API, even a read only one, would be really helpful for tracking market and org transactions. Hopefully you are able to implement something to that effect ahead of player markets. Chalana also looked really nice, it must have taken ages to build all of that.

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So just wanted to provide some feedback.

 

1). The Atmo XL questions...  The dev who responded said they think ailerons and wings go up to L, but they don't.  Ailerons and wings only go up to M and people are putting 200+ wings on their ship because the Stabilizer L is extremely inefficient on both size and drag.

2). You showed off all of that awesome voxelwork but didn't give any credit to the artist in the description.  Makes me very sad.  :(

3). If you foresee a bunch of exploity bugs around the player market...  shouldn't you be trying to implement prior to release so all bugs and exploits are ironed out prior to release/wipe?

Edited by fridaywitch
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I really thought the design team would know that M wings and ailerons (thanks Friday) are the largest available. And I was hoping someone would acknowledge walls of Atmo engines are really unattractive. 

 

But nope.

 

Secure trading of DAC for quanta in-game seems like it should be one of the highest priorities out there, because RMT are important. Trusting people to give you money in-game for some transaction on a website seems like an absolutely horrible plan. Hopefully someone in charge can see that.

 

We can and will continue building giant player markets with hundreds/thousands of dispensers, because you don't think player opinions matter on the subject and it won't benefit enough people. Stop by Gottmart or Midway Station sometime, for some examples. You talk about performance issues, we create performance issues.

 

Your creative director's newsletter made it sound like the energy system was coming soon, and your Q&A made it sound like it's months away. You should really have a meeting.

 

And of course nothing about a release plan, or a date, or any other reason we should be playing right now. So many of us aren't. Subscriptions are getting cancelled across the board, but I'm sure your accounting department can tell you all about that.

 

Edited by Tional
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"there is some cool things about player markets" .. no NQ, it was part of the Kickstarter pitch as coming to the game and has been on the roadmap pretty much until the second to last one. Problem is that you implemented markets is a way that is cheap and risky as the M15 debacle exposed quite painfully. And the fact that you clearly have not bothered to actually start work on getting this to players is at best disapointing.

 

And then  the answer on the energy system _directly_ contradiscts the Creative DIrector's "letter" which set up energy as coming.

 

It's good to know that NQ will be opening up DAC to RMT .. It will offer a decent path for many to recoup the pledge made 5 years ago. What is interesting is that it sounds like there is no plan to make Quanta an item you can sell on the markets, just trade for goods.. oh dear.. Goldsellers will have a field day with this one, not to mention this may wel imply that DAC can be lost as it must be kept in inventory or in a container..

 

Overall once more it feels like one part of NQ is pretending like there is no release a few months away and just keeps babbeling on as if you are stil lin Alpha stage of development.. but wait.. you actually are.. And release is just a label you will stick on what you have now to try and make enough money to actually complete the game.

 

The more you say, the more concerned I am this is not going to end well.

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These are getting better.

I think the addition of large wings should be made available as a priority. Yes, I understand even with large wings we will take them and add 20 or more to carry as much as possible.

 

I will be honest that it didn't hit me about the size of an XL core is, until now.

 

Thanks

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What ever size ships and static cores that they decide are viable.  I would just like a cohesive labeling and naming system, and a complete set of elements for each size core.

 

Right now it's all wacky and incomplete.  New players shouldn't have to find out that they bought or crafted the wrong sized element after the fact.  Especially when it comes to the more expensive elements like the AGG.

 

I spend a lot of time wondering how things like incorrect names, or lack of L sized wings could be put off for so long.  It's a bit frustrating to find out that it's often because NQ didn't even know it was missing.

 

I try not to bug them over and over about that kind of stuff, but it makes me wonder if we all need to be bugging them more.

 

Should we all be filing bug reports about the missing L sized wings?

 

 

 

 

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No XL cores because those would be bad for performance. Too many elements it would need to load.

Okay then give us larger-tier elements so we don't need to spam them? Not priority, not happening.


NQ shoots themselves in the foot and then point at their wound as an excuse why they cannot walk further.

The reason we use L and XL engines instead of a million XS engines is convenience and so that don't HAVE to spam all the XS engines. They would also cause severe performance issues, understandably. But you gave us larger elements to avoid that issue. Only that you stopped halfway through, with some flight elements not going larger than M and requiring us to spam a multitude of them to get the required performance out of our flying constructs.
And now NQ points the finger at that and the resulting performance issues to justify saying NO to XL cores while at the same time saying larger elements to tackle that issue are not on their scopes either...

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Four things:

 

1. Very little matters until you make decision on a wipe.

 

2. the construct tear down feature could be added to the recycler element along with the proposed recycling features mentioned in the recent CEO letter. 

 

3. Instead of XL cores maybe give us a way to permanently "link" or "group" cores that act as one core in that you can have multicore BPs and their Rights and Tags are all linked but as far as the game loading them is concerned they still act as individual cores?

  

4. As for Player Markets being super complex. It seems that the dev team's aim is to make a player controlled market that mirrors the Aphelia Markets which make it far more complex than it needs to be.  I would propose the idea that the "Player Market" could just be an element that acts as trade hub for local dispensers. When a player market is put down it gives the owners of dispensers in a given radius (radius could be determined by rarity or talents) to list their goods on that player market. You could even have multiple terminals link to this hub via the code system used on dispensers. This would put all local goods sold via dispensers into a UI that resembles the Aphelia markets. This allows for players to have their goods listed in a central location but avoids some of the overly complex design hurtles with making Aphelia style markets controlled by players. Another downside this avoids is making dispensers and physical stores being obsolete. You can have dispensers located in a physical store but also have your goods from that dispenser listed on a centralized market. I think this is much more useful than a copy of Aphelia markets which can easily be exploited and take considerable amount of development time. 

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The problem with slow/painful deconstruct of L cores is that static core BP placement/alignment is a nightmare.

 

If you try to place a static in alignment with another L core and mess it up, having to do a whole bunch of work to pick it up again, or wait for a repair unit to deconstruct it, means it could take hours or days just to place the core where you want. This is exponentially more of a nightmare if there is a wipe, and we have to place multi-core buildings again. Fix fine control on core alignment and placement (and vertical stacking for towers!) and this problem is solved. 

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23 hours ago, Metsys said:

NQ shoots themselves in the foot and then point at their wound as an excuse why they cannot walk further.

The answer was laughable. The argumentation flawed.

 

So, loading one XL core would equal the cost of loading 8 L cores, so?

 

By not providing XL cores while players clearly ask for them you force players to build multicore constructs which means a few things:

  • it's risky
  • It's cumbersome
  • It directly impacts the number of constructs other players can load in depending on their settings
     

Quite honestly, if an XL core actually takes 8x the resources to load in than the same construct on 8 L cores then I’d say the way NQ has designed this is not done very well. For one, the voxels are meshed and effectively 1 XL mesh should really load faster than 8 L meshes PLUS loading elements on one XL core should also be faster.

 

Did NQ consider that players who have set their core count to load at 100 core will see half a ship if there is 98 cores on grid and a multicore constructs enters the area? How would that work?

 

It is _EASY_ to provide for XL cores to be viable:

  • Can't be used in multicore designs
  • has a limited element count
  • Can only be used in space
  • Only limited number of XL cores per player/org
     

NQ has said XL cores are possible, so why does NQ not communicate"OK, so we could do XL cores but with these conditions/limitations" and see what the community says, as in you know.. maybe actually engage with us to get proper feedback? How difficult can this be, I mean really..

 

NQ never thinks in solutions, they never think in options which could achieve an objective, in conditions under which an option would work.  It's always what they can't do, what would be a negative impact on performance, what would be a lot of work. Generally, NQ always tries to create reasons to not do something. It is this attitude which has caused the game to be where it is. Not setting correct priorities and spending to much time on debating/arguing excuses to not do something.

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