LurkNautili

I would like it in terms of the aesthetic and in terms of having a justification for making space even harder to get to, but in terms of what it would do to the flow of the game I'm not on board with the idea. You can raise the delta-v requirement of getting into space even without the crutch if it makes sense from a balance perspective (as in you don't need extra justification in the form of having an easy way to get out of the gravity well). I do agree that the lore is kind of silly in many places. The whole notion of "kyrium can absorb energy and therefore a container made of kyrium is safe to be inside when decelerating at 500G" is silly and definitely not how physics works. Also I agree it's a bit insane lithobraking anything that massive into a planet you intend to inhabit. On Earth we consider those kinds of collisions extinction level events (read: you'd probably prefer a nuclear war to what would happen if something like that crashed into Earth). And don't even get me started on the whole quantum suicide respawning thing (there are so many more sensible stories you could justify respawning with). So yeah, the narrative could definitely use some tweaking, as a lot of the sci-fi is on the nonsensical Dr. Who level of scientific accuracy (though at least Dr.W does it with a wink and a nudge, aware of the fact that it's silly and wildly unscientific) -- however the gameplay it results in makes sense. Having to start from "scratch" matches their vision of emergent gameplay nicely, and you definitely need to have an area you restrict people to initially to cheat a bit of critical mass population in the start of the game. Can't have it turn into a single player NSM-esque experience by making escape from Alioth and the ark zone too easy.

I'm pretty sure French timezone was implied. But like I said, I'm not too fussed about it personally -- so long as the game gets made eventually.

It is technically delayed, actually, since they did say when. But no big deal, really, these things are expected to happen. Try not to stress too much about it, NQ team.

It's not just the Minds, though, it's the lack of the right mix of cultural values, as well as some other things.

There are a few reasons why I feel its unlikely we can recreate anything that has values similar to the Culture within the confines of the game, or even a similar structure "politically", or at least not one that would be stable. Banks' own notes on the socioeconomical underpinnings and background/prerequisites of the Culture are a good read: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm. I found them quite enlightening. But I do think it would be cool to have a structure/group similar to the Culture in game, I just don't see how that would be feasible within the given context.

How is that supposed to resemble the Culture, exaclty? As an avid Banks fan, I'm a bit confused here. I'm pretty sure they don't have a political system like that, or those kinds of goals/values either.

Hoo boy... I don't think I could come up with a comprehensive list even if I tried... There have been far too many. Here are some off the top of my head: - Minecraft - FortressCraft Evolved - Interstellar Rift - Natural Selection 2 - PULSAR: Lost Colony - Avorion - Empyrion - Endless Legend - C&C (Tiberian Sun, Red Alerts, etc.) - Zero-K - Global Agenda - A bit of EVE online - Planetary Annihilation - Firefall - Fallout (all of them) - The Black Watchmen + The Secret World(Do these count? A&B games are somewhere between sci-fi and fantasy) - Kerbal Space Program - Robocraft - Half Life(s), Garry's Mod, numerous other HL2 mods - Space Engineers - Subnautica - Antichamber? Sci-fi? - Supreme Commander - Mass Effect series - Portal series - FTL: Faster Than Light - Metro series - Fallen Earth - Face of Mankind - Anarchy Online - Lots of other forgotten Sci-Fi MMORPGs - Systemshock, bioshock, deus ex, doom, quake, UT.... So many others I must be forgetting as well... Good thing we're narrowing it down to just sci-fi games. [EDIT: Oh crap I forgot the sandbox side of things apart from minecraft... Let's add: - 7 Days To Die - Citadel: Forged With Fire - Dark and Light - Wurm Online - Blockland? - Plus a bunch of sim/tycoon games like rollercoaster/zoo/whatever tycoon - Oh and there's Starforge, too... (tried very hard to forget it and almost succeeded) Do we count Flatout and Liero as sandbox games? What about the Grand Theft Auto series? I played all of them between GTA2 and GTA IV ]

Well, despite being a huge Blender fanboy... For a simple use case like that, I agree with others above who've recommended Sketchup, it's probably striking the best balance between easy and feature rich enough for your purposes. If you were doing more detailed modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering, etc... I'd recommend Blender. But for quick ship concepts for a novice? Definitely Sketchup.

Well, I've already reserved "Bob"... [EDIT: For the 6K reward... My ID card will have LurkNautili]

Like I said in another thread on the same topic, we'll need some actual metrics (gathered in game and probably via polls or something) post-launch to see whether something like this would be worth it to NQ. The model itself seems sound, it's just that we don't know if the solution to the optimization problem it entails includes this kind of alternate model or not, without the requisite data. Arguing based on gut-feeling whether there would be enough call for this to make it viable or not is a waste of time. In principle the concept is sound, and though a couple of valid concerns have been raised, I don't think they're insurmountable. Ultimately NQ's the one who has to run the numbers to figure out if it's worth pursuing.

You're assuming that you can create an alt that can generate a DAC with only a very small amount of play-time. I don't think that assumption is justified -- but we'll have to wait to either hear from NQ or see the game economy live to draw any definitive conclusions.

For games where the play is carefully curated and balanced, p2w is possible to thwart. Take for example a game like counter-strike or something, where every aspect of the game is controlled, and there's no progression/time element when it comes to in game power etc. In these kinds of situations, it's quite easy to prevent RL structures of socioeconomic stratification from bleeding over into the in-game world, and "p2w or not" as well as "is or isn't mechanic X p2w" are valid discussions, whenever you allow people some small avenue of influencing the game with money (cosmetics, boosters, etc). In stark contrast to this, in MMORPGs and the like, I actually believe it's fundamentally impossible to prevent such bleed-over, assuming that it is game mechanically possible to gain power advantages over other players (certainly the case in any game where you can form alliances freely, create almost arbitrarily powerful ships with enough resources, as well as gain control over areas, and so on -- as you can in DU), and that you can arrange to exchange some in-game good for RL money (be that via legal means or not). Arguing whether something is or isn't "pay-to-win" is ultimately just debating (to me) boring semantics. What matters to me is that real-life power and influence can and will bleed into DU no matter what the devs try and do about it, and what the discussion ought to be about is how NQ can make the game enjoyable for everyone despite this fact. If anyone wants more detail on my thought process regarding this RL-to-in-game dynamic, I'll have to find some older posts in which I give some examples etc.

Doesn't that logic apply regardless of payment model? Even with DACs you could: 1. Create an alt (or just use your main) 2. Train that account to become very effective in generating quanta, via trading or whatever 3. Use the profits to buy DACs and keep playing for free I think I'm missing some underlying assumption that's not mentioned here.

They wouldn't need to pay more, though, assuming this payment model would be deployed as an addition to the subscription and DAC based systems some time after launch. If price per game time is determined by the subscription cost per month divided by average play time per month per player over the entire player base, plus a margin to compensate for the loss in revenue from people switching to a more favorable payment model, the people who play more than that average get to keep doing what they're doing with subscriptions, and people playing far less than that average can get a slightly cheaper deal. Like I said, for NQ it becomes an optimization problem, where they have to balance how many new clients they could get by lowering the bar of entry for people with very limited time against how much they'd lose by offering a cheaper deal for the people, who would otherwise have had to pay a full subscription instead, paying slightly less for a small amount of actual hours played. The result of that optimization would determine the pricing of that model, tuned in such a way that it results in an increase in profits for NQ. Whether or not that can be done or not will depend on statistical data that we don't yet have, but in principle the idea is sound, as far as I can tell.