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Talemai is solid proof that ore distribution with infinite ore pools that can be claimed is terrible for game


Snapsis

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8 minutes ago, Snapsis said:

This kind of effort should absolutely give some results.

It is the wrong way to go about it in this game though.

You need to "cast a net" scanning ever 4th tile or so, and with about 7 scanners solo you can do that pretty quick.

 

oh i have scans where i scan in roses, in triads and with singles in separations of 1 to 20 tiles i have tried pretty much every search algorithm i can throw at this using my brain or course. My last one was HPFS style search system where you select a set of tiles and scan half then the half of the half and so on NOTHING!!!!

 

Also by looking at the pattern of previous finds and doing a search in what should be a host spot and nothing

 

Edited by Aseennav
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The way the pros DU it is to take 7 or more scanners at a time in a container and place them on blank cores as you hop and skip every 3 or 4 tiles in a straight line. Then you turn around a come back to read the scan and pick them up.  Once you hit something good, then you scan all around it and follow the heat to the center.

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1 minute ago, Snapsis said:

The way the pros DU it is to take 7 or more scanners at a time in a container and place them on blank cores as you hop and skip every 3 or 4 tiles in a straight line. Then you turn around a come back to read the scan and pick them up.  Once you hit something good, then you scan all around it and follow the heat to the center.

That is what i do, i have a stack of XS Cores and 6 scanners

 

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The kind of investment talked about here just to find some T2 tiles is ludicrous, and it is no wonder why the game is unable to retain players.

 

And the problem is such a fundamental design issue with tiles being a finite resource that players can keep for as long as they want. Meaning that NQ must make it VERY hard for players to find good tiles to try and delay the inevitable problem of running out of valuable tiles. But that is NOT a solution, since it leads to a game that is no fun to play what so ever.

 

The solution then is to have a well balances game design with planned out loops that players can enjoy. Like for example territory war to prevent tiles from stagnating with the same players indefinitely.

 

But a making a long term plan for a good and balanced game design and then executing it, is something that NQ has proven multiple times that they are incapable of doing.

 

And they have never been able to come up with answers to some of the fundamental issues we the community have been pointing out since the very beginning. And I still remember one of the first things we questioned was how having finite resources in a persistent world would scale. And the answer 7 years later was that it did not..

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2 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

The kind of investment talked about here just to find some T2 tiles is ludicrous, and it is no wonder why the game is unable to retain players.

 

.

.

.

 

Started a new thread with a suggestion that I think would fix the current problem and bring back players - all within the current framework (some new code, but nothing not already done for other reasons).

 

 

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1 hour ago, Pleione said:

 

Started a new thread with a suggestion that I think would fix the current problem and bring back players - all within the current framework (some new code, but nothing not already done for other reasons).

 

 

Sounds like a solid idea but NQ doesnt seem to be able to implement this. Most of what they have done since beta launch is small tweaks or just downgrades. The current mining system is pretty different but only because they had to do something about the server load and its a pretty simple system at that.

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4 hours ago, TonyTones said:

Sounds like a solid idea but NQ doesnt seem to be able to implement this. Most of what they have done since beta launch is small tweaks or just downgrades. The current mining system is pretty different but only because they had to do something about the server load and its a pretty simple system at that.

 

One can hope!  Maybe they will surprise us.  Maybe, just maybe, they are looking for that one thing that might bring people back, since the current number are likely disappointing.

 

NQ?  Any comment?  

 

Msoul?  Any related thoughts?

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8 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

The kind of investment talked about here just to find some T2 tiles is ludicrous, and it is no wonder why the game is unable to retain players.

And finding actual T2 tiles is just not worth it, on the Discord DU Action House, a Natron flower (7 tiles), sold for 25 million quanta.

 

natron2flower7.png

 

With a max skills you can make a little profit off it. Unless you take into account the risk and/or cost of flying back to Alioth Market 6 to get some decent quanta for it...

 

There's a reason why since 1.2 release the DU AH has had a ton of T2 and even T3 flowers and patches on it. The folks doing the actual finding are not interested anymore in T2/T3... My assumption is that it is either not worth their time anymore and/or they already have enough of it on Alioth or any of the other safe planets/moons...

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9 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

 

 

The solution then is to have a well balances game design with planned out loops that players can enjoy. Like for example territory war to prevent tiles from stagnating with the same players indefinitely.

 

This game already had a normal mining design. It was based on digging ore by hand. You invest time - you get a reward. But as we know it is quite expensive. Therefore, there is an easier task. Quickly staked the tile and sit on your ass exactly. And the mining units will get everything themselves. Just keep paying taxes.
If you take a lot of things that were buried by "improving" the gameplay in 0.23 and later, then this is essentially a different game. And this game is more and more like offline grinding in a mobile game. Sit and wait for your farm to complete the cycle.
I remember how on the beta there were ships with multi-layered sometimes composite armor. Tried different combinations. And it consumed a lot of high-level resources. Not to mention the fact that the thrust-to-weight ratio also had to be kept in balance. And now there is actually no armor. No need for voxels, no need for engines and loads of fuel.
Nerf, nerf, nerf...
All they could think of was a nerf for the sake of a momentary gain in server power.
But it's all like playing jenga. He pulled the element without calculating everything and starts to crumble in another place.
Let's be honest. When a game goes down the path of cost reduction, it is about the end of the development cycle. And by the end of the life of the project.

 

P.S. Regarding the possible awareness of the distribution of ores.
As in Occam's razor, everything has a simpler explanation.
In any normal game, before going into production, there is a closed test. (or pts test).
If you have access to the test server, then nothing else is needed. It is unlikely that there will be different planets on the test and in production.
And it is enough to know the tile numbers. It seems to me that this is the simplest and most likely explanation. THIS IS JUST MY HYPOTHESIS.

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4 hours ago, TonyTones said:

but only because they had to do something about the server load and its a pretty simple system

There are tons of good ideas in these forums - even some concerning the server-load long term to help them keep the costs down.

But whatever NQ does is totally weird, if the honest intention of NQ is to keep the game alive.

 

Bring back classic mining and fill those damn holes after 1-2 month if nobody was there again.

 

Make some energy limitation PER account to reduce to much load from factories. So the Multiboxer still have a reason to multibox for what they're happy to pay.

 

There's multiple formula which might work perfectly for DU. But NQ just cant or wont find them.

 

The rat race discussed on the topic is just an UNBELIEVEABLE thing to me. Ridiculous. 

I really blame NQ to let the game die, obviously. I'm not playing the game since release because I'm not fancy to loose all my progress again. And this will happen for sure, somehow.

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3 hours ago, ColonkinYT said:

If you have access to the test server, then nothing else is needed. It is unlikely that there will be different planets on the test and in production.

 

Yes, this how some people got immense ammount of good stuff from first "wrecks" attempt too. Just going for same sports as test seedings.

 

Its endemic problem of DU, that system is always rigged against not just new or casual, but just mid-tier players. Not only they need to survive tense, but legit competition againts active organizations and just 24/7 veteran players with lot of alts, but also exploiters and people with huge insider edge. 

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4 hours ago, ColonkinYT said:

This game already had a normal mining design. It was based on digging ore by hand. You invest time - you get a reward. But as we know it is quite expensive. Therefore, there is an easier task. Quickly staked the tile and sit on your ass exactly. And the mining units will get everything themselves. Just keep paying taxes.
If you take a lot of things that were buried by "improving" the gameplay in 0.23 and later, then this is essentially a different game. And this game is more and more like offline grinding in a mobile game. Sit and wait for your farm to complete the cycle.
I remember how on the beta there were ships with multi-layered sometimes composite armor. Tried different combinations. And it consumed a lot of high-level resources. Not to mention the fact that the thrust-to-weight ratio also had to be kept in balance. And now there is actually no armor. No need for voxels, no need for engines and loads of fuel.
Nerf, nerf, nerf...
All they could think of was a nerf for the sake of a momentary gain in server power.
But it's all like playing jenga. He pulled the element without calculating everything and starts to crumble in another place.
Let's be honest. When a game goes down the path of cost reduction, it is about the end of the development cycle. And by the end of the life of the project.

 

P.S. Regarding the possible awareness of the distribution of ores.
As in Occam's razor, everything has a simpler explanation.
In any normal game, before going into production, there is a closed test. (or pts test).
If you have access to the test server, then nothing else is needed. It is unlikely that there will be different planets on the test and in production.
And it is enough to know the tile numbers. It seems to me that this is the simplest and most likely explanation. THIS IS JUST MY HYPOTHESIS.

The test servers have always had different seeds for random generation. That's not really the issue. People getting information about what's going to be in a patch 3-4 weeks ahead so they can plan/buy out markets is an issue. 

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1 hour ago, Captain Hills said:

Bring back classic mining and fill those damn holes after 1-2 month if nobody was there again.

 

I don't disagree with the premise at all, but I believe this would take them a long time to develop.

 

"Healing" a terrain back to its original seed isn't hard at all, but conditionally "filling holes" based on the proximity of player structures is much, much harder. Orders of magnitude harder. 

 

You'd need a fairly complex algorithm just to understand how to "fill holes" back to an original seed, but conditionally based on distance to player constructs, without creating an invalid mesh with holes.

 

How do you avoid doing vertex-by-vertex checks to ensure you aren't too close to player crap?

 

Granted, I haven't thought about the challenge for very long, but I just don't see any easy path to implement something like this.

 

"Just fill the holes where players aren't around" sounds like a simple enough idea, but really...the implementation would be massively difficult. 

 

In other words, it isn't going to happen...if they tried, it'd probably create a huge mess. 

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4 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

 

"Just fill the holes where players aren't around" sounds like a simple enough idea, but really...the implementation would be massively difficult. 

If tile is owned assume digging is intended.  If tile is not owned/abandoned AND distance under 1000m terrain data not requested by client(s) for 60 days, revert to seed.

 

Not perfect, but not hard to work on edge cases from that point. 

 

8 minutes ago, blundertwink said:

if they tried, it'd probably create a huge mess. 

The fact that I keep seeing patch notes that are very similar to off-hand and under thought suggestions I made leads me to agree.  Do we have to hold NQ's hand and lead them in minor quick fixes?  At least give credit for suggestions that led to a related patch.

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5 minutes ago, Wyndle said:

If tile is not owned/abandoned AND distance under 1000m terrain data not requested by client(s) for 60 days, revert to seed.

 

Not perfect, but not hard to work on edge cases from that point. 

 

Those edge cases can be nasty :D 

 

Let's assume terrain data is streamed in chunks as it usually is in large open-world games.

 

If you reset one chunk to a seed, that isn't good enough. You would need to also verify that each neighboring chunk still connects properly without holes.

 

And if you don't reset an entire chunk to a seed, things again get complex and highly contextual in trying to reset part of a chunk to a seed. We also don't really know how terrain chunks relate to tiles. One tile could be multiple chunks...or one chunk might span many tiles. 

 

Not to mention NQ now has to track which chunks have been "seen" by users in the last X days under Y distance, which itself can have many performance implications depending on how they implement it.

 

Point being: this isn't easy to do. 

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4 hours ago, blundertwink said:

You'd need a fairly complex algorithm just to understand how to "fill holes" back to an original seed, but conditionally based on distance to player constructs, without creating an invalid mesh with holes.

Using normal 3D meshes yes, but not with voxels. All you have to do is to reset the voxel deformation back to default and voila normal filled in ground again. Remember that when you are removing something in a voxel space you are not really removing anything (doing so would corrupt the voxel structure), and instead you are just tagging the unused voxels as 'hidden' so they no longer render and cause collisions.

 

Edit.

And even filling in the holes is not the true optimal solution, since the main performance issue is that there is no culling performed what so ever when NQ is streaming voxels to the client.

 

So when you are flying over or just standing on the ground, NQ has to stream every underground hole and voxel change in your affinity regardless of if you can see them or not. So the entire thing is just another result of NQ's trademark "just make it work and fix it later (but they wont)" approach to game dev.

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2 hours ago, CptLoRes said:

So when you are flying over or just standing on the ground, NQ has to stream every underground hole and voxel change in your affinity regardless of if you can see them or not. So the entire thing is just another result of NQ's trademark "just make it work and fix it later (but they wont)" approach to game dev.

I think the craziest symptom of this oversharing is the way you used to be able to see all the tunnels inside the planet you were digging in, if you managed to clip your head through a tunnel wall (which wasn't as rare an occurrence as you might hope...). What's the point of my machine even knowing about things that are entirely outside my ability to perceive or affect.

 

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57 minutes ago, Kezzle said:

I think the craziest symptom of this oversharing is the way you used to be able to see all the tunnels inside the planet you were digging in

 

This is still true for asteroids. I assume it is still true on planets as well, there are just fewer tunnels to see now.

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2 minutes ago, fiddlybits said:

 

This is still true for asteroids. I assume it is still true on planets as well, there are just fewer tunnels to see now.

Oh, I'm sure it is. They just removed the ore, they didn't stop us digging like moles, if we wanted to :) The underlying tech didn't get any better, or better optimised. Filed under "too hard".

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Hi

 

Since we (The Prospectors) are being discussed on the Talemai claiming I felt it necessary to give a little insight into what actually happened.

 

This is our game loop and has been since the start of Beta.

We specialise in scanning and run an Auction House off the back of scan results allowing players to buy/sell hex data

 

We have been prepping for a new planet since launch and are prepping for the next planets.

 

Our team was 10-12 Players with 18 Scanners each and scanned majority of the planet in around 12 hours.

In beta we had ~100k scans and had mapped most of ION (every single hex)

 

The ore distribution from single megas in a hex to blobs of ore for mining units changed scanning forever. 

You no long need to scan every hex.

 

There is no cheating, there is just super organised players working together for a common goal.

 

We opened our doors in Beta and had over 120 players mining for us. 

Those doors remain open and you are all more than welcome to come and join then fun of scanning, calibrating and hex management.

 

Get in touch with me on discord (ZeroPainZeroGain) if you want to play with us on the next planet

 

Thanks 

ZeroPainZeroPain

 

 

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Thanks for speaking up, @ZeroPainZeroGain. Eye-opening organisation, that. Disturbing in some ways that it's possible for such a small number of players to fully map a world in half a day, but then, if you look at DU's tech base from another angle, it's entirely appropriate for a survey to take so short a time...

 

It's consequential, too.

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2 hours ago, ZeroPainZeroGain said:

We have been prepping for a new planet since launch and are prepping for the next planets.

 

Our team was 10-12 Players with 18 Scanners each and scanned majority of the planet in around 12 hours.

In beta we had ~100k scans and had mapped most of ION (every single hex)

 

The ore distribution from single megas in a hex to blobs of ore for mining units changed scanning forever. 

You no long need to scan every hex.

 

There is no cheating, there is just super organised players working together for a common goal.

 

We opened our doors in Beta and had over 120 players mining for us. 

Those doors remain open and you are all more than welcome to come and join then fun of scanning, calibrating and hex management.

 

1 hour ago, CptLoRes said:

So to sum it up. Broken game design, is broken..

 

Just now, Kezzle said:

Thanks for speaking up, @ZeroPainZeroGain. Eye-opening organisation, that. Disturbing in some ways that it's possible for such a small number of players to fully map a world in half a day, but then, if you look at DU's tech base from another angle, it's entirely appropriate for a survey to take so short a time...

 

It's consequential, too.

Thank you for making this known to everyone.  In eight lines you proved me wrong and showed just how flawed the design is without name calling or hurt feelings.  Bravo.

 

:)

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On 12/22/2022 at 3:27 PM, ZeroPainZeroGain said:

Our team was 10-12 Players with 18 Scanners each and scanned majority of the planet in around 12 hours.

Good information, but...

12x18x12x4=10,368 scans

12 people, 18 scanners, 12 hours, 4 scans per hour, assuming 100% efficiency.

Talemai has 52,922 tiles. The tiles on the moons is another ~7,500 tiles. Minus a few that aren't player accessible. That meant that in 12 hours you did (at best) 1 in 6 tiles scanned, which is insane in any world! 😉 But not the majority of the planet scanned. Or did you mean the majority of the T2+ tiles found?

 

@KezzleTo fully map the world and moons,, a 12 man team working at close to 100% efficiency would need to work weeks to get it done. That is pretty hardcore behavior imho... That they needed only 12 hours of hardcore activity to get most of the T2+ patches is what's rubbing folks the wrong way. But that's mostly by people that don't want to do that level of work, organization and/or brainpower...

 

Imagine how much quanta a dedicated team of 12 players would be able to gather doing organized missions effectively? Week in, week out...

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As mentioned, high tier ore is now distributed in hot spots the same way as with the MU mini game.

 

Meaning there is no longer any need to scan all the tiles, since you can find all the tiles worth having just by scanning periodic tiles in a system.

 

And as I said many years ago, I still think ore should be distributed based on geographical features.

 

Coal should be found in segments with lots of forest etc, metals in mountain areas, silicon at deserts and gold along the coastline etc.

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