[Call for Demeter-related questions]

One thing that would have made this tax implementation go over a bit smoother is if this patch also introduced the Duties part of RDMS. At least in relation to territories. Meaning you could collect duties or sales tax from players that are not you or part of your org but have constructs on your territory. This on the surface sounds like just passing the buck but I see a big reason for the negativity against the new tax as is it punishes people for holding territory with any purpose other than mining. This would give non miners, solo players and small orgs the option to be on someone else's tile while paying a modest fee to the territory owner.

 

This also encourages/gives reason for players to group up, play together, create cities and communities. The flat tax without adding a function to make money from these types of projects hurts orgs and players creating community spaces for shops etc.  This is likely in the plans for the future but if that is the case NQ sharing this information would help the community see the logic behind your design and reduce the rage to seemingly haphazard implementation.

 

Another small way to make this less painful is add talents to org management that help mitigate territory taxes. This is a great example of giving people ways to play outside of mining, building or pvp. Many people come to this game for things outside of those three paths. Is DU still billed as civilization building MMO? 

[Call for Demeter-related questions]

On 10/29/2021 at 11:14 AM, Doombad said:

Large ships stack them because so many atmo brakes are required.

 

Maybe you could point us to your ships so we can compare. Large ships may have 60+ atmo brakes. I am curious how you do that without stacking them.

 

Let’s also skip the “don’t make large ships argument.” This is a simpler problem for smaller ships.

Those ships should not be possible in the first place. I get around it by building purpose built ships. A heavy amto hauler, a heavy space only hauler, modest all around hauler as a few examples. The game balance is busted with no limit on how much crap you can stick on a core. All in one ships that have so much bs on them they can do everything well with the only drawback of using lots of fuel is so broken and needs to be fixed. 

[Call for Demeter-related questions]

What is the benefit of a flat tax on territories. I love that it is now a weekly maintenance but the old exponential cost increase worked so well. Why was that system dropped? It worked so well to make it a manageable cost for solo players and small orgs but also did a pretty good job of reining in large orgs of taking over. The flat tax is just oppressive and a blunt instrument when we needed a scalpel. 

[Call for Demeter-related questions]

On 10/29/2021 at 10:16 AM, Shaman said:

I am loving the changes so far (especially the ability to play your most recent emote), but I would like to mention:

1. I don't think you should be taxed for the first tile you place on a planet, just like how the first tile was free pre-demeter, so that you can safely have your house on a tile without it being evicted if you leave too long. Not doing this will leave most planets empty as many people will migrate to space. IK you guys are taxing for mining but I think its a bit unfair if you don't want to - e.g. you sell ships and money can be few and far between, so could you guys maybe consider changing this? Perhaps you could add an option to your tiles where you don't get taxed, but can't mine either?
2. I'm usually pretty stoic about changes you make, but the new brake system really struck a nerve. these things are too flat and large to fit on the outside of sleek / detailed ships. can we see some changes so that we don't have to scatter them around our constructs like plate armour? maybe xl brakes?

thanks! -Shaman ?

I honestly think this is a problem across most ship elements as they are using size as a factor in balance. I would say large atmo engines are one of the worst offenders. You have a clunky elongated cube that is so hard to make look good in any design that is not chunky industrial styles. Most people bury them as best they can having only the tips poke out.

 

There has to be a rebalance of elements with some type of quantifiable limitation on the core. This would allow NQ to rebalance elements beyond "if it fits it sits". Small Core Dynamics have no reason to have the ability to functionally fit XL Space Engines, Large Shields and even a DSAT all on the same core.

 

The balance of the game will always be broken until there is some limiting factor to how many elements you have on a ship beyond fuel economy. You can brute force a ship by strapping on 50 engines of each type with 50 Large fuel tanks and do pretty much anything you want. This makes for terrible looking but highly functional ships. This is by far the biggest weakness of ship building and balance in DU and is somewhat easily remedied. 

[Call for Demeter-related questions]

I do not get the complaints over the brake change. They are airbrakes... Almost every ship of mine works just as well as it did before. A few brakes need to move but it is not that hard to rework your stuff. Did you think airbrakes where always going to be allowed to be buried in voxels? 

[Mining talents reset with Demeter update - Discussion thread]

16 minutes ago, i2eilly said:

+1 For PVP talents.  You have changed so much over the past few months with regards to PVP.  For example the statistics of voxels and the weapons statistics . Giving us a PVP point reset would really help out as some of us wasted a lot time training talents geared towards the old PVP voxel and weapon statistics.

Honestly I think this is more of a fundamental issue with the pvp talents being so granular. You could spend all your time/points over months on a certain meta then suddenly the meta changes and you have months of points tied up in off meta talents. 

[Mining talents reset with Demeter update - Discussion thread]

Honestly I think terraforming talents are just as effected in this scenario as mining talents. They are much less of an asset when mining asteroids. Full talent reset would be overkill but I would suggest including terraforming talents in this reset as well. 

[DEVBLOG: THE FUTURE OF DU - Part 3 - Discussion Thread]

This is all very nice sounding. Progression.. gameloops... these are the things we wanted to hear. Thank you! I hope you guys keep talking to us rather than having an unnecessary veil of secrecy going forward. Transparency goes a long way. 

[DEVBLOG: THE FUTURE OF DU - Part 2: Under the Hood - Feedback thread]

This is going to be a bit of a rant and a apologize in advance but I have spent 100s if not 1000 hours in this game at ths point. You are going to have a very efficient, smooth running game that no one is playing if you do not add features. You are basically telling people to keep paying for a sub while you correct major backend mistakes and take away options that destroy 1000s of hours of player work in HTML.

 

I understand the logic of fixing backend issues but why are you putting out two dev blogs about it? This was basically two devblogs making excuses for why development is so slow. Why are you not putting out devblogs about features that are being worked on? We are not under NDA anymore. There is no risk in telling the player base what is coming down the pipe even if it is subject to change. If you are trying to move the needle to get more people in the game this is will have little to no impact.

 

This is a niche game that takes a decent PC to play. If you are looking to get very casual players in, I very much doubt your minimum specs will ever be low enough. Everyone I know who plays the game regularly has little to no performance issues minus a few edge cases. Most of those players are not playing the game as nothing but quality of life additions and useless minigames like shipwrecks have been added since Beta.

 

There are no alternative ways to play the game. If shipwrecks were relatively plentiful but hard to find that would be an alternative gameplay loop and with the addition of recyclers having the ability to recycle elements that is a whole new way to play the game outside of mining and manufacturing. I appreciate the fact that NQ is reassessing the situation but these devblogs are evidence to me that you still don't get it. Your players are leaving because there is no sign of progress towards new features. If new features are coming in the future just talk about them so we will have something to look forward to. Something to build towards and prepare for. 

[0.24 Phase One - Discussion Thread]

I think the game looks and runs better in almost everyway. Sadly the exceptions make the game look horrific. Many metal materials have a weird glazed ceramic looking reflectivity. This has an especially bad looking result on Galvanized and Stained metals as they have a really extreme normal map that causes this glaze to look like metalkc leprosy. It seems to be most noticable during the day when the metals are reflecting the atmosphere. Is this a known issue? Is it going to be fixed? 

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

22 hours ago, Sinfil said:

you guys do know that when warping to a planet outside of safe zone you dont warp into atmo so you can still be shot down by pirates thats exactly what they do. follow warp points and wait for people to exit. what movie or game do you know that allows you to pvp or be shot down while in warp thats one of the points of warp. 

As it currently works you always warp into the planet safezone even to the outerplanets. If the planet safe zone is closer to the planet atmo or non existent it would help solve my problem with the current state of warp. 

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

6 hours ago, ELX987 said:

here is another thing to consider, when atmo pvp comes, this entire arguement will be invalidated as all of you will be scouring for warp cells to escape pirates.

 

warping is a time trade off not entirely a safety tradeoff

 

think about the future before you contemplate a addition

For sure. Atmo pvp will change everything but that update is ... very far off based on the pace of NQ patches thus far.  My concern is the game is basically at a complete stand still atm. Again, my opinion a big contributor to that is warp nullifying almost all PVP. 

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

4 hours ago, SneakySnake said:

There is no need to change the warp. NQ just need to remove the safe zones.

100% agree that just removing planet safe zones in PVP areas of space would likely fix most of the problem with warp in its current state. My list of suggestions could be as simple as just implimenting one of them to help the problems I have with warp's current state. 

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

6 hours ago, ELX987 said:

for once i have to say that a thread is driving away from real problems, this is a prime example and here is why this thread irritates me:

 

1. warp is fine, is semi balanced, and is a working system as well as an essential one. there is no point to nerfing/buffing the mechanics of warp, period.

 

Warp feels like it is in a good place to you because it is easy and overpowered. Just like the schematics nerf felt to industry. It was nessecary but most people hated it because they were used to doing it the easy way. 

6 hours ago, ELX987 said:

2. warp cell costs are not in any way unbalanced and also create a nice sink for the economy, besides no one really warps heavy haulers around unless they get caught, which is a reward for being smart about your hauling.

I have warped heavy loaded ships before because I knew it was 100% sure thing that I would arrive at my distination without ever having the possibility of being shot. Depending on what you are hauling and your margins are it is totally worth warping for hauling. Now I doubt anyone is going to be warping full loads of gold but many other things are viable to warp/haul.

6 hours ago, ELX987 said:

 

3. removing the ability to warp withought a player beacon would kill gameplay for many people, as well as make things unnecessarily difficult.

I agree with the sentiment of wanting player beacons  to be important but just making it where you can only warp to them would break the game as it is currently. There has to be whole new implementation to make that work. 

6 hours ago, ELX987 said:

 

its hypocritical that the community pushes for NQ to reverse the scehmatics, which were not needed at all, and then asking for stuff like this.

let NQ just fix the exploit that is an issue, and let it be, warp is fine and there is no need to create problems that didnt exist.

You assume I think schematics are bad. I love what schematics did for the game. I think the roll out was poor but it was 100% necessary. People who whine about schematics are just sad they can't be a two man org or solo and make everything in the game. It is not because it is bad for the game. It is bad for how they want to play it. This isn't Factorio. And yes, I do think warp is OP as I literally haven't traveled without using it since it was implemented. Instantly getting to a planet with safety 100% guaranteed should not be so cheap and easy that I can do it for every interplanetary trip I make without even thinking twice about the cost. That is broken... convenient but broken. 

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

4 hours ago, Gottchar said:

I really wouldnt mind trying slowboating and building a ship for it first and all. The main reason I think people like to warp instead of slowboating is not necessarily just pvp, it is also the fact that slowboating means doing nothing at all for 5 hours, except for watching netflix until you are there while checking if you are being attacked.

 

As much as I would love people to shoot stuff, so other people buy new stuff from me, as long as slowboating means hours of nothing, I understand people rather avoiding it.

 

When I see:

 

Hours of doing nothing and chance of being shot at VS cost of warp cells

 

the bad thing on the left there isnt "chance of being shot at", it is the part where you do nothing at all for multiple hours.

I agree having to fly for five hours also sucks.  One interesting thing would be to have different levels of warp. At max warp it instant but at half warp maybe it takes 30 minutes and slowest warp it takes an hour. Of course warp cell cost would adjust accordingly. My main point is thete had to be some gray zone between instant 100% safe warp and showboating for 5 hours and being vulnerable to pvp.

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

1 hour ago, Kruzer said:

Warp right now is perfectly balanced. The cost of warp cells to haul cargo is significant.  Crippling warp just to make it even easier for some psychopath to grief someone is hardly 'balanced'.  I fail to see what could possibly be added to the game by doing so.    

When was the last time you had to fight off pirates when hauling? Never?  Me too! When was the last time you slow boated? Alpha? Me too! Because I always warp everywhere without ever being in danger. Not good for the game.

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

3 minutes ago, BoomHeadshot said:

You all should just shut up and wait for the next patch before complaining about game features.

We know what the features are.. they are on the PTS right now. Unless hauling missions can only be made in pvp zones it won't help the issue I'm talking about very much. 

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

17 minutes ago, JohnnyTazer said:

Remove the ability to warp to planets moons.  Only Warp beacons.  Make Space stations have some protection so you dont lose them while sleeping.  Then, you can watch people have wars over them, because they are now valuable.  Finish RDMS so the Duties are involved, so people who deploy Warp beacons can charge Quanta per use.  BAM now all the sudden you have dynamic interactions, and orgs will rise and fall, and war over the ability to control warping to planets (can always do slow boating, smuggle style han solo).  This would add so much to the game.  Civilizations would start to form around planets. 

Agree this could be a solution. Just rying to push NQ to do something with the balance that can help right now with very little dev effort. All what you said above is cool for when they have time to make it all work. There are many solutions they can do down the road but they take time. Just some clever reblancing can help the game come alive.  For now atleast. 

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

1 hour ago, ShippyLongstalking said:

- building: not stable, voxels still not working correctly for some players 

- PVP: not developed, not even fully designed, and combat is hella boring when it isn't a lagfest 

- mining: still not performant, still a monotonous mole simulator

- politics: the most political thing in DU is people flaming each other in the forum or discord 

- economy: haha, that's a good one 

 

So yeah, I get where you're coming from, but there's a laundry list of fundamental issues beyond the balance of PvP as it exists today. most of the core PvP concepts aren't even close to being developed, never mind balanced. 

I agree with 90% of what you are saying but just blasing NQ I'm trying to propose simple solutions that give the most bang for their buck. Seems like NQs biggest hurdle is development time. Trying to suggest things that could make a big impact with just changing some numbers rather than developing new or better systems. It is obvious the game is half backed atm. 

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

2 minutes ago, Shredder said:

The solution is really simple. Change the warp exit points to random locations 2 su outside the safe zones.

This is a good solve too. Not sure about making slowboating the safe method. Not even sure how that would work. 

[Instant warp with 100% safety is bad for DU]

From what I can see in the current state of the game Warp's current functionality is clogging up the entire game. Here are my thoughts:

 

The element degradation feature was added to the game to permanently lose items from pvp. This would make people need to replace items through crafting or buying them off of the markets. This is what the game needed to get the economy rolling. Unfortunately almost no items are subject to this degradation due to the fact that most people are warping with 0% chance of being in a pvp zone unless they choose to be. 

 

Warp in its current form is wildly overpowered. Warp cells are relatively cheap, warp is instant and guarantees your safe arrival at your destination. We went from having to slow boat from planet to planet for 2-6 hours to doing it in 60 seconds with no risk. With almost no reason to slowboat in the game and 100% safe warping from planet to planet there is no reason to pvp (the only way to take items out of the game). This is to me the biggest factor of the stagnation of almost every aspect of the game outside of mining and voxel building.

 

I think this can be fixed purely through balance changes. Here are some suggestions that might help:

 

• Warp cost increase (to make warp less viable for everyday use)
• Removal of safe zones around planets in the pvp zone (to introduce window of vulnerabiliy to pvp when warping)
• Reduce max warp distance to 250 SU (this would work in tandem with other things on this list nerf warp's avoidance of PVP)
• Reduce warp speed (Something relatively to the actual distance that you are traveling rather than "instant" to bring back some of the travel experience from prewarp days)
• Warp Interdiction (I like this the least as it takes dev time to create new functionality)

 

I post this not as some game designer wanna be. Just trying to give an objective player perspective. 

 

What are your guys thought? 

[NQ Devs forced to play DU Solo]

23 hours ago, Physics said:

We would also like to take this opportunity to explain what are our internal rules when a member of our community becomes a Novaquark employee:
 

1. His/her personal accounts are suspended for the time he/she is a Novaquark employee.
    
2. He/she is given an anonymous player account so he/she could still continue to play the game, however, some specific rules apply to such an account:
     a. The Novaquark employee behind should not reveal his/her real identity and/or he’s part of the company. 
     b. He/she shouldn’t join a player-run organization with this account either, for neutrality reasons.
    
3. He/she is given a NQ account, mostly to test things, and occasionally to communicate with the community in-game (if such opportunity arises). Nothing done on this account (coming usually with more powers/rights than a player account) will be transferred on any personal account.

 

@Naunet This is what I'm talking about. Nothing to do with God Mode official NQ accounts. Obviously no NQ God Mode account should be in an org. The fact that if someone is part of NQ (designing game mechanics) cannot really play the game as it is actually played by the community there is an inerrant disconnect. You will not get the real DU experience playing it solo. This creates a environment ripe for NQ development to be paper designs instead of taking into account how people are actualy using the game mechanics. 

[NQ Devs forced to play DU Solo]

7 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

 

 

With much warmth, the phrasing in this post is a tad sensationalized. Nobody is being forced to do anything.  Yes, we have rules about how to conduct ourselves while using our NQ Dual Universe accounts, but the rules are not all that surprising, unique or scandalous. They're also public, as I see some forumers have already quoted our official communications about 'em here. 

 

We are encouraged to interact with the community in-game. We just can't participate in certain aspects of gameplay like, for example, joining a player Organization under our NQ names. Doing so would absolutely cause negative ripples re: favoritism. I can imagine it now... players coming to me with things like:

- "Why did you join their Org and not ours? What do they have that we don't? I'm sus."
- "NQ is signaling support for one Org over another, officially, and that's not fair - look at how much recognition they're getting! Why can't my Org receive official backing!!?? What's really going on here?"
- "Omg, what special advantages is NQ giving that Org that we won't get?! I bet they'll be fed insider knowledge about the next patch!!1 They must have friends in high places..." etc.

Please also consider that our accounts are "fully loaded"/have "God Mode" abilities, which would give staff an unfair advantage (within the context of regular play) no matter how you slice it. It makes sense to me that we'd want to maintain a firm boundary between staff and player accounts to avoid any conflicts of interest or cries of unjust behavior.

 

Someone, somewhere will find a way to take issue with whatever any game dev staff choose to do or not do in-game. It's just how the cookie crumbles in MMO-land. We have personal accounts we play on to experience the game as you all do. I personally paid for a subscription, because I strongly agree with the point that products must be thoroughly explored and understood by the employees that touch them.  (Edited to add this note: employees are not obligated to pay for subscriptions to personal accounts! I chose to prior to being hired because of my interest in Dual Universe.)

PS - This was a valid and interesting subject to bring up, and I appreciate that you have all remained civil about it. Disagreeing with the rules we lay out is fine, and I hope my two cents provided some clarity. Keep those critical thinking caps on!

 

 

 

 

I'm more referring to NQ when they are on their personal accounts.

[NQ Devs forced to play DU Solo]

If you don't know NQ Devs are forced to play DU solo and are discouraged to play with the community. This is virtually unheard of in the Games Industry. In fact companies are usually doing everything they can to make sure the devs are playing the game. It is no surprise that these Devs end up just not playing the game at all. The result is they have no clue how people are actually playing the game and continue to develop the game in a vaccum. If the worry is that devs will cheat and use insider knowledge to get ahead then maybe be more transparent with your development so they will have very minimal advantage. The game is suffering exponentially more for having a dev team that is completely divested from the live game and community. All I ask is that NQ change their policy about devs playing the game as it is doing nothing but harm to the development. 

[DU as Civilization Gone Wrong (Poor game design)]

Not sure why they are not looking to City Building systems that worked like SWG. A city leveled up and had facilities and function that did not exist outside a city. This could be implemented via TCUs. I think this is a fundamental flaw in their approach to making a "Civilization Building" MMO with zero city building features.