DecoyGoatBomb

PART ONE: REFINING OUR PROCESSES 
As promised last week, we would like to give you a glimpse at the changes, improvements, and additions we have in store for Dual Universe. 
We’ve learned many lessons since our beta began seven months ago.  Going from a backer-focused game in alpha, under NDA, to a public, wide-open beta with many new players gave us a lot of insight in several areas: processes, economics, and gameplay. In this blog, we’ll focus on processes with the latter two being the topics of subsequent blogs. 

THE LONG HARD LOOK
At Novaquark, we’re still a fairly small team. Given the ambition and complexity of this game, it can be quite a challenge to make the right decisions on how to make the most of our resources. To date, we’ve been focused on bug fixing, stabilization, balancing, scaling, and improving our server and database infrastructure - plus firefighting when necessary - to make the game work better. 
 
Not to say that this is all behind us; it never will be (such is the way of MMOs), and we know some bugs and exploits still need to be addressed - this is a beta after all. Still, we paused earlier this year to ponder what the next phase of development of DU should be, to stay the course of the original plan or adapt to how things have evolved since beta began. After taking a  long hard look at everything we’ve learned from the beta, we decided where we need to focus next, based on what we think will be best for Dual Universe and its community. 

“IF IT’S BROKE, FIX IT”
Maintaining a live game while we continue to develop it ended up being quite the leap from our tightly-controlled alpha environment. As much as we prepared for it, actually doing it was a whole different beast. That’s probably one of the areas where the reality check was the most brutal for us. The world of Dual Universe is a persistent one, and every time we introduce something, it impacts the player and the delicate balance of its economy. There’s no safety net, and player feedback often came once bugs or balancing issues had already impacted the game’s common universe. 

Let’s start with how we plan to improve our processes and quality control, because this is an area where doing something wrong can have a major impact on players. We have three goals in this area: 
 
 
Gather feedback from players earlier in the process, so that when new features and changes are introduced in the game, their impact on the persistent universe is properly measured.  Have a more flexible and collaborative development approach that will allow us  to take player feedback into consideration, modifying plans when we’re able.   Overall, improve the quality of our releases, which means fewer bugs and exploits, and less hot-fixing.
  When it comes to gathering feedback from players earlier, we are evaluating some options on how we might get feedback on game design ideas from players at an earlier stage before they have actually entered the production pipeline. We are already seeing significant improvements in this area since the launch of the public test server (PTS), which lets us test prospective new features, improvements and bug fixes in a non-persistent environment where it won’t impact players’ progress on the Live server. If enough players test features on the PTS, we’ll be able to prevent bugs and balancing problems from making their way to the persistent universe. 
 
When we deployed 0.24 on the PTS first, players gave us invaluable feedback, helping us to identify several issues that we were able to address before they reached the production server. Although  our PTS-to-production process isn’t perfect yet, we are still working to improve it and think it’s getting significantly better with each iteration.  In the future, we will expand the use of the PTS to testing prototypes of features, outside of regular releases, so that all players can give their feedback as early in the development process as possible. 
 
Another major improvement to our processes that we are addressing is flexibility. On our way to beta, we had a fairly rigid roadmap that was dictated by the necessity to lay the foundations for all of the gameplay pillars for beta as well as fulfilling our promises to our backers. While the overall plan and long-term goals for DU haven’t changed, we need to be able to adapt to the feedback of players along the way whenever it’s feasible. For example, if we decide to make a major overhaul of our mining mechanics, we need the flexibility to iterate as much as necessary until we find the right formula before we move on to something else. 
 
Although they may not be visible to players, there are many other things happening internally  that have already proven to improve our releases. First and foremost, our internal release process is undergoing a revamp, based on the learnings from our past launches. We’ve allotted more time for QA than we used to, and we will postpone a release if we think it’s not ready (as we did  with the 0.24 update.) These new processes are still being refined, but we’re seeing improvements already.
 
We remain steadfast in our promise to deliver the best game possible. We feel confident that the changes we’re making now to our processes are a big step toward making that an attainable goal. 

Ready to discuss part 1? Click here.
 

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? 

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? 

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? 

I could not disagree more here. Warp is severely unbalanced and warp cells are way too cheap, especially in requirements to make them. Currently is is very viable quickly to just throw together your own warp cell facility to cook your own as it's easy, cheap and has a very fast ROI.
 
Warp needs to get gated and the efficient use of warp needs to be  a long train.
Warp beacons need to come down in both production cost and material requirements to allow gating warping to planets behind a very long train/specilization
 
Talent tree:
 
Propulsion efficiency (x2 multiplier for training time)
1 Fuel use and max thrust +10%,unlocks atmo engines XS and S
2 Fuel use and max thrust +10%
3 Fuel use and max thrust +10%, unlocks atmo engines M and L
4 Fuel use and max thrust +10%, unlocks space engine XS and S as well as Atmospheric Propulsion specialization (+5% thrust per level)
5 Fuel use and max thrust +10%, unlocks future atmo XL
 
Space propulsion efficiency (x3 multiplier for training time)
1 Fuel use and max thrust +5%
2 Fuel use and max thrust +5%, unlocks space engines M and L
3 Fuel use and max thrust +5%
4 Fuel use and max thrust +5%, unlocks space engine XL as well as Space Propulsion Specialization (+5% thrust per level)
5 Fuel use and max thrust +5%, unlocks Warp Drives (can lock beacons only)
 
Warp Drive efficiency (x4 multiplier for training time)
1 Reduce cell requirement for range -10%
2 Reduce cell requirement for range -10%
3 Reduce cell requirement for range -10%
4 Reduce cell requirement for range -10%, unlock Warp Drive Solution Specialization (-5% time to warp spool up per level)
5 Reduce cell requirement for range -10%, unlocks ability to lock  planets for warp destination
 
 
This would make Warp a goal for a character to achieve and give the character purpose in the scope of being a pilot/hauler. It sets up roles and careers.

One of our team members crashed into a base before warp finished between Alioth and Madis.
he continued to warp for another 30 seconds or so but then blew up on exit from warp.

Warping does seem to take place in "real space"  so there is that....

In that case, how about Warp interdictor technology that can sit, powered up in wait along well travelled routes and attempt to catch warping ships in some kind of mini game...
The ships are pulled out of warp by the interdictor and have a cool down time before they can warp again.

Personally, I think Elite Dangerous supercruise is the best implementation of warp so far... it has an excellent interdiction mini game that would lend itself to DU's select target approach.

How dare BOO PvP in the PvP zone. How rude of us to play the game according to the rules set forth by NQ.

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? 

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? 

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. 

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? 

Warping is indeed a stupid feature. It should be the quick but risky way to travel. Slow boating should be the slow but safe way to travel.
 
The solution is really simple. Change the warp exit points to random locations 2 su outside the safe zones.

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.  

Additionally, as this thread was shared internally I have received a response regarding the validity of the claims presented here: "I can confirm that we did not pay anything. We're not even in contact with this journalist."
 
This publication created a feature without our involvement, and it's clear to anyone reading that they're not up to speed on what's actually happening inside of Dual Universe as of 2021-02-16. ?‍♀️

Feel free to disregard the article, or just enjoy it for a laugh if you'd like.

This thread has been locked: do not put NQ staff member LinkedIn profiles here! I shouldn't even have to say that. I'm really disappointed.

You can express your upset with the game and speculate about us all you'd like, but leave windows to our personal lives OUT of this arena. Please.

I don't want to come to work worried about what I'll see of myself here - some of us may be public facing, but I implore all of you to treat us with respect. Respect our privacy, please.

Pick apart problems, not people. 

I spoke with a little streamer again tonight who plays with a group of a few people.
At the beginning so motivated that they wanted to do everything by themselves, the projects progressed then the weariness of their group as planned.
Now that they have made their main base, their piece of industry, a few ships and their showroom. What's left for them to do?
Nothing the turn of the game was over for. They are leaving now ... DU is still losing players who have been hyped.
If you are not a LUA or voxel artist, boredom happens very quickly ...
We need that promised PvP, let us have a little fun. Give us areas to attack and defend with huge amounts of resources and we're doing massive things/impresive in this game.
PvP won't prevent huge city creation just for the LULZ or to show off its power / abundance of resources ...
The one and only have keep the player these are interplayer events which keep motivated the last meager troops remaining in the game.
It is starting to become urgent to act.
More control of players, end of markets managed by bots and PvP everywhere outside Madis / thades / alioth area.
Only a few months to act before losing the most loyal ones (the new ones only stay 2 or 3 weeks ...)

I understand that some of you are angry at NQ for the latest patch and other various shenanigans. In a way, I agree with you; i'm not picking any sides here. But this criticism has turned into toxicity. Some people believe that it is acceptable to pick apart and beat Novaquark with hate instead of calmly and kindly giving helpful advice on how to make the game improve. Some people believe whenever someone comments a different opinion about the 0.23 update it is their primary objective to thrash back and pour salt on them because 'no one can say nice things about the update'.  Some people believe that since the game has turned out slightly different from what they expected they must alert and discourage everyone from playing the game because it is a 'scam*'. Some people believe that just because their experience is ruined they must ruin it for everyone else. And some people just jump on the salt bandwagon even if they have never set up an industry unit in their life.
 
I will repeat what I just said. I am NOT saying that 0.23 was either a good or bad of an update. If you hate it, that's fine. But people like this are becoming a large excrement deposit on the Dual Universe community. You might have heard that recently a forum conversation got out of hand when an individual exposed a LinkedIn profile of an NQ employee. That is flat out unacceptable. If you are one of the people like this, instead of beating this game and its 50 employees down, just LEAVE. This game would be much better without people like you anyway.
 
* I have watched the trailers many times now. in my disgustingly baist opinion it's not. (sacré bleu!) misleading? maybe slightly. But let's be honest here, for games that require player interaction, they all are. Take a look at the Starbase trailer for example. Just like Dual's trailer, they both include massive fight sequences, which take up half of the trailer runtime. Sure they are technically possible, but definitely aren't ever gonna happen apart from the rare few events and such.
 
I know that I will get a wave of salt from this post, just like my previous ones. so please be civil. I won't be responding to any of the people that are hating for the sake of hating or people saying the game is bad without giving at least a bit of constructive criticism. If you feel so inclined, just shout at a wall instead. 
 
 

It’s true. NQ policy is they cannot be part of any org or group etc. NQ also ensure they do not run any risk of being accused of favouritism.
 
Edit: explained from an NQ post with yamamushi.
 

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:
 
His/her personal accounts are suspended for the time he/she is a Novaquark employee.
  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.
  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.  

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. 

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.  

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.  

After spending a while in the test server, I am very pleased with this patch.
 
reflection 
The launcher is a bit big but overall a huge improvement  The lighting changes are good and planets look better overall.   Mission system was good although I would love to be able to make more than one mission a a time.  10 or 12 minimum.  The org wallet is good but we could have some more functionality in it like giving daily limits on what members can withdraw or use.    Warping between planets i saw some more lag than usual and may result in players with lower bandwidth getting crashes   
Some things to consider in the future test servers  
1.  seed the markets with very low cost stuff in the test server so we can try things easier 
2.  no talent points make is hard to test things  you may want to allot some for us to assign in the future 
3. you can further reduce lag ion ships by giving us XL atmo engines and L wings as the computers don't have to do as many calculations for fewer elements.   This will make ship designers very happy as the backs of ships wont have to be a huge flat surface.  

Yea thats just stupid, they need to separate the RDMS.  Give money- take money- collect goods -sell goods etc etc

Knowing more about how the game mechanics are turning out I think this can all be done with an augmentation to TCUs.
 
Why not have a TCU be a player bound incorporeal object. This would be their one and only TCU. Once put down it can claim adjacent tiles overtime either through UI or with a smaller TCU extender item (that can only be placed adjacent to TCUs). Each additional tile would get exponentially harder to claim and maintain. This TCU's territory could be committed to an org or the player. The main TCU can be destroyed but after a cool down period it can be placed on an unclaimed territory. 
 
I think this encourages orgs to control zones rather than a patchwork of individual tiles. It allows for more territory (zone) based game mechanics. Also, this would allow individuals to have atleast one TCU that they will have throughout therir entire DU career. Just throwing it out there.

Great post. It gave me some ideas.
 
When they implement orgs in the game, they could do the following:
 
Each org gets an Organization Territory Unit and several organization static cores. Once that territory unit is placed, members above a certain rank can deploy and edit the static cores ONLY within that territory in close proximity. Them more members you have, the more cores the org gets (maybe even one per member?). If the org reaches a certain size, they get more territory units.
 
This would allow orgs to build bases/cities and create the clustering you talked about. They could also get a lot of the other benefits you mentioned. Maybe they train skills faster when inside the territory/ base? That kind of thing would work.