All Activity

@Adrbin as much as it could sound a good idea, the way the game currently works today would heavily exploit having subscriptions that only count while you play, example, one could leave a character amassing talent points indefinitely or have HQs that essentially would never get abandoned since their sub would not run out, simply by not logging in. Being really honest, I feel that a better monetization approach for DU would have been doing something similar to Second Life, where you can have your account and play inside the world at no cost, but some parts of the gameplay are only available for subscription. In that case, owning territories outside of Haven could be something only allowed for subscribed players, along with no passive talent point generation for free accounts (but in that case, you could generate talent points by doing other thing in the game) and smaller limits on things they could have (constructs, orgs, etc). Those players could still play is most aspects of the game and could also "rent" territories from subscription players if they wanted to, the limits would be mainly to prevent abuse. IMO, that would allow for more people to experience the game, which in turn would mean more people could actually enjoy it and subscribe for longer periods, and at same time the game would have way more players around and feel more "alive" overall. In the end, this is an MMO, we can't forget the "massive" aspect of it. Another good monetization approach (that could combine with above) would be selling cosmetics, like pets, skins (elements/characters), etc. Those have absolutely zero impact in the gameplay to the point they can't be considered P2W, and would still give them some decent money flow, as many people end up buying cosmetics in games. DU has a good proposal as a game, and I can understand if they slowed down development for lack of funds, but that kind of change could help creating a feedback loop where they get more players, more subscriptions and end up being able to create more content, which repeats the cycle.

Hey Nyota! Thanks for your reply! Really happy to hear back! I'm not sure if you heard anything from the team, but I ended up improving my script so it can actually separate stuff (kind of roughly, though it does separate the elements from the voxels) and it seems to be working well in my Blender tests Here's some other previews on what I've done, using a wreck and a ship I bought at UEF for testing. They are both imported from my script to Blender, no extra editing required: Looking forward for more updates on the exporter feature, really nice to have that around! Update: here's an example of how it looks importing it into Blender, might have exaggerated the "no editing" since I still changed the color, but yeah, no manual selections or anything

Hum presque un an plus tard le constat est plus qu'alarmant , j'étais bêta testeuse grâce à un ami , je me suis éclatée lors de la bêta mais quand il a fallu payer pour de l'abonnement j'ai renaclée , tout abonnement au delà de 10€ est trop onéreux pour moi .... là je rejoue mais sur le serveur gratuit Steam Les trucs que je n'ai pas apprécié lors de la fin de bêta se résume à : les schémas , ok sur le papier ça pouvait être une bonne idée mais ça ajoute un coût de fabrication dont on se serait bien passé , une plus grande complexité de jeu aussi comme si le jeu était pas déjà complexe .... sur la version démo les schémas ont un peu changés à la fois en mieux ( les modèles génériques sont plus sympas ) mais aussi en pire , sérieux un schéma par fabrication ? Même les machines outils de maintenant se servent pendant des années du même fichier de calibrage par modèle ..... Si vous voulez conserver les schémas ok mais faites en sorte que ce ne soit plus des consommables , que les schémas génériques se transforme en spécialisé à la première utilisation ou virez les tout simplement .... Les frais de location de tuiles ..... je croyais que DU était une simulation de reconquête spatiale , des frais à l'installation ok mais après ? Laissez les joueurs se débrouiller entre eux mince ... c'était pas prévu de devoir se battre pour les tuiles ? Du pvp de planète quoi ... c'est ce que DU nous promettait au début ... que le joueur ai une tuile inaliénable au départ du jeu ok , au passage ce serait bien de pouvoir la bouger .... mais les autres tuiles devraient pouvoir être attaquées /conquises et défendues Le jeu demande de payer des quantas trop régulièrement , ça démotive la plupart des joueurs qui jouent à DU pour s'amuser , pas faire un second travail dans un mmo . côté pvp spatial ... j'ai trouvé l'interface des vaisseaux de combat trop complexe , franchement je m'attendais à une ergonomie digne de star conflict ou au moins Wing commander IV, on en est à des années lumières de ces jeux , ou d'Elite .... bref c'est pas amusant . Côté minage .... c'était parfait lors du début de la bêta mais après il y a eu les extracteurs de minerais et l'impossibilité de miner traditionnellement hors des astéroïdes , meilleur manière de flinguer la feature qui était une des plus géniale du jeu J'espère encore que vous ouvriez les yeux à temps mais j'y crois guère mais merci pour ces années de jeu , le concept du départ était bien mais vous êtes allez trop vite du côté Métaverse alors que les gens ne sont pas prêts et peut être pas envie , et franchement qui veut faire un travail au sein d'un mmo ou un metaverse en devant payer un abonnement ? Les seuls prêts pour ça sont sans travail mais ne peuvent pas s'abonner sauf à leur fournir une monnaie en jeu qui puisse leur permettre de s'abonner à l'image d'Eve online ou de Dofus

The only thing that could have saved DU, is replacing NQ with a more experienced company.

There were layers of problems that prevented either feature from working reliably and JC had time enough to address it before his departure. Even with significant churn at each major update many still had worsening performance and/or enjoyment with each iteration. The reduction in dev manpower became plainly obvious shortly after launch. So no, just adding those features would not have "saved" DU.

All they had to do was add AvA and territory warfare like promised... And more people would have been attracted but NoOoOo They should've kept JC

Unfortunately it isn't. There is no DU2 in production. They have been announcing what these projects are (sometimes listed on their job postings): a car combat/arena game, an action RPG, and a third, smaller project, with the action RPG being their bigger "AAA" ambition. Because nothing says success like not finishing one game, still charging people a monthly fee and pretending there's any sort of dev going on when there isn't, but thinking you have the ability to work on three other game projects at the same time...? Yeah, these people definitely learned their lesson from DU about ambition, honesty, and focus. For sure.

I do recall seeing something about NQ working on a UE5 project. Perhaps that could be DU2? As for the NQ's will to end DU, I suspect that it is only being kept online to recoup as much as possible for the investors. The mesh exporting tool gives a glimmer of hope that DU2 may be able to import the constructs but hope and NQ are an unstable combination thus far. Obviously I am still interested, but my enthusiasm is near-zero.

This might sound privilege, but if you cannot afford €13 / month or €0.43 a day then you properly should not play DU. i would try find a game that is free or only have a 1 time fee if i was you. your economy says NO. Personally i would say DU isn't worth 13€/mon, NQ has pretty much given up on DU, there are only token updates from time to time. I think at this stage it is a pet project that they don't have the will to terminate. Only chance that DU will ever be something is if 1 of the other project NQ has diverted resources to is a total and complete overhaul of DU

After a long time I came back to the game thinking I'd give it another chance, but I stopped playing because instead of enjoying the game, I'm constantly stressed about the subscription. I have real world concerns that prevent me from playing the game every day, let alone 24/7. Instead of looking forward to playing again, all I can think about is that I won't even be able to achieve anything in the game for the money I paid. If I bought a month actually spent in the game, I would immediately enjoy the game more.

Hi Valencia! I loved the blinged out Lucy, that took some patience with all of the light placement. Well done! Thanks for allowing us to use Lucy for the Scavenger Hunt.

Hi Nyota! Thanks for the nice words about my Lucy in the contest. Feel free to use her for your scavenger hunt.

Thanks BBDarth. We'll have more details next week, but thanks for that!

You have my permission to use mine such as it is. BB Starwaltz I think thats how I spelled it.

Noveans! A huge thank you and a high five to everyone who entered our Pimp My Iron Contest! Such imagination and creativity, I can speak for all of us here at Novaquark that we were all very impressed with the designs you came up with! A huge pat on the back and bravo to everyone who submitted their version of the Iron Stalwart! That said, even though the competition was fierce and more than one of our NQ voters exclaimed, "How can I even choose one Stalwart as the winner!" The votes were counted and checked thrice and the winners are: 1st Place: Tictaq 2nd Place: Fenixpenix 3rd Place: An0ubis Please give a cheer to all of our winners! And be sure to head over to the Alioth Exchange and get your blueprint of Tictaq's winning Stalwart entry! (Right in the center, you can't miss it.) You know you want one. In addition... Get ready for the Stalwart Scavenger Hunt everyone! If you entered a ship into the Pimp My Iron contest, you now will also have the chance to have your Stalwart used in a Scavenger Hunt that will happen in the near future. More details to come on the Stalwart Scavenger Hunt, but we hope some of you will let us use your Stalwart redesigns as part of the hunt! This is optional: Please note that we will only use your Stalwart ship entry in the scavenger hunt if you give us the permission to do so. Expect more details all about the Stalwart Scavenger Hunt early next week! 😎

Hi Wolfram, I like that idea! I have forwarded your question over for review to see if it's possible. I'll let you know when I find out more.

Now, that is a feature! Tempted to get a subscription again. 😄

And it probably is running on one instance lol --- like there's player-run servers for non-MMOs that see more multiplayer traffic than DU. Otherwise I have to object to the phrase "amazing server tech" because as we all saw many times, their tech never scaled. The premise of the tech never made sense to begin with, so of course it didn't work even at small scales. The entire notion of the single shard was amateurish in retrospect. It served no real benefit and if the game had managed to scale, it would have imploded the world even faster. There's a good reason the Enterprise world is moving back to on-prem infra; you can't just throw an MMO ON AWS and expect it to scale without breaking your bank! That very idea is so amateurish it still makes me cringe. A theme-park style MMO would be a different equation, but the only way DU was ever going to work was with about 10 times as much funding, a bespoke game engine, and NQ standing its own metal. DU is almost lucky that the game's core design was so bad that it didn't attract a mess of people. Even if they were successful in attracting a bunch of players, I think the way they built it guaranteed the game would never work at any scale -- and if they could support it technically, they sure as hell wouldn't have been able to support it financially.

It's been a while since I've looked into DU. The last time I played was during the big change with mining claims, etc. Just doing my annual check-in and it seems like not much has changed since then. It looked at player counts and it struck me how ironic the whole concept of DU is now. They spent so much time building this amazing server mesh tech and now the whole game could run on a single server instance 😄 I couldn't help but laugh at the irony of it all. This will probably be my last check-in. To all you other kickstarters out there: so long and thanks for all the fish!

@NQ-Nyota I noticed there's an glTF option to export the constructs in, which is awesome! I've been looking at ways to work with those files so they have matching colors to what was originally in-game, to avoid doing it by hand, and while it seems to work well for the voxels/honeycomb, I've noticed the elements share some material with the rest of the mesh. Here's an example of two blueprints I had in my inventory, one from a wreck and another from a personal project: The wreck looks good, the elements seem to have the same material as some gray parts from the ship (I think it's gray plastic), but the other one the elements seem to have got the same material as my lumin details, making it look really weird Any chances we can at least have a separate material that doesn't map to any honeycomb for those elements, just so this doesn't happen?

Winners for the Pimp My Iron contest will be announced today (April 10th) at 18:00 UTC on Drack's stream! Join me and NQ-Deckard as well as our host Drack as we take a tour of the Stalwart entries and also announce the winners! We hope to see you there! https://www.twitch.tv/xdracksx

Don't re-read the ToS or community rules.

100% -- just don't hand money over to any Kickstarter project if you expect something back. Otherwise, it's your call on if you want to effectively donate money to a for-profit enterprise. Kickstarter's customer isn't end users, it's businesses. The other issue here....end users represented <5% of NQ's total money raised. So on one hand you have a ton of people representing <5% of the funds, and on the other real investors you have actual obligations to. Crowd funding doesn't really work for MMOs. DU was one of (maybe the top?) KS game in the year it launched, and you can't build a competitive MMO for 500k pounds! The most successful KS projects ever haven't crossed $50 million in funding, while the typical MMO pipeline raises around 4 times that amount through traditional channels. Even DU raised >$20 million, and this from a guy with zero experience in game dev at all. So, yeah, CrowdFunding kind of sucks. Go figure, and entire model based on the "honor system" doesn't work well with capitalism.

Yet again I'm left with the impression that NQ is not an honest company with integrity -- tell new players the honest state of development It's been months and months that they've been hiring only for new game projects and have shelved DU's dev, but they just don't want to tell people that their "subscription" money is being used elsewhere. For a company that once promised to "do much better" with transparency and communication, they are very committed to the opposite.

The tile tax was introduced in order to make it difficult for people to ackquire too many tiles, and in turn have too many resources that the (weak) servers have to manage. Since there is now probably hardly anyone left playing the tax makes no sense at all and should have been removed. But I guess, you actually need a DEV to do that, and there is no one left that works on DU anymore.