Dupont

I don't think they fully understand the implications of this boneheaded maneuver. No industrialist is going to spend any more money on expensive schematics until the damage is known. Completely ridiculous for me to spend 90 million on setting up a pipeline just to compete against someone who can do it almost for free. 

I have no choice but to wait a month or two for the markets to settle and if I keep playing just to hoard up my cash until then. When all industrialists do that, the shortage of elements that people are complaining about will just get worse (except for the ones with "free" schematics). If people can't buy the stuff they need, then they quit too. The cascade effect of this is really pretty bad. JC should be pissed, as his vision for the post 0.23 economy just got flushed down the toilet.

OMG... All that agony and players lost to the debacle of patch 0.23.  All for nothing....
 
One careless NQ person really messed up the game bad. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
 
Now that there are hundreds (thousands?) of super expensive schematics in circulation there is absolutely no point in investing the time and energy to buy schematics anymore.  By the way, why is there a pool of 2 million schematics available for a 47 million quanta schematic?? 
 
Isn't the whole point of the high schematic prices to limit how many factories can make an element? Then why have 2 million of that schematic available? If they had 10 sell orders each, then this massive blunder could have had limited damage.  
 
I just spend two weeks of grinding T1 ore to buy something that is now worthless. An expensive schematic is supposed to be like a patent, it is supposed to limit your competition. You pay the extra cost for limiting the population of your industrial competitors. Now, there is no point in being an industrialist for months until the economic dust settles.
 
Why do I feel like I am in an abusive relationship? Perhaps I need to take up some other vice like drinking or start dating a really large mean woman with two teeth.

I don't think they fully understand the implications of this boneheaded maneuver. No industrialist is going to spend any more money on expensive schematics until the damage is known. Completely ridiculous for me to spend 90 million on setting up a pipeline just to compete against someone who can do it almost for free. 

I have no choice but to wait a month or two for the markets to settle and if I keep playing just to hoard up my cash until then. When all industrialists do that, the shortage of elements that people are complaining about will just get worse (except for the ones with "free" schematics). If people can't buy the stuff they need, then they quit too. The cascade effect of this is really pretty bad. JC should be pissed, as his vision for the post 0.23 economy just got flushed down the toilet.

If they were smart, then every schematic purchased would have a timestamp and ID of the purchase event. That way it would be very easy to pick out a window of time that a schematic has changed hands. I can't imagine that anyone would try to implement an economy that is so important to the game without double-entry bookkeeping.
 
Any database developer that knows SQL could have identified the faulty transactions with an hour or two of labor. Really, there is no excuse not to invalidate those transactions or drop a negative balance on those accounts if the money is gone.
 
No need for a rollback. Just a few hours of following the money trail. Seems like that would be worth keeping the trust of many players, wouldn't you say? 
 
At least tell us which schematics and how many were purchased for almost free so the poor fools that are industrialists won't spend the money on those. Tell us which elements are tainted so we don't end up competing against somebody that has 100x more industrial capacity to build them. Or just take those schematics off the market. Do something!
 
I just spent the last two hours watching videos of upcoming space MMO's for 2021 on youtube. The DU concept still could have the best future, now if NQ could only stop screwing up..

I don't think they fully understand the implications of this boneheaded maneuver. No industrialist is going to spend any more money on expensive schematics until the damage is known. Completely ridiculous for me to spend 90 million on setting up a pipeline just to compete against someone who can do it almost for free. 

I have no choice but to wait a month or two for the markets to settle and if I keep playing just to hoard up my cash until then. When all industrialists do that, the shortage of elements that people are complaining about will just get worse (except for the ones with "free" schematics). If people can't buy the stuff they need, then they quit too. The cascade effect of this is really pretty bad. JC should be pissed, as his vision for the post 0.23 economy just got flushed down the toilet.

If they were smart, then every schematic purchased would have a timestamp and ID of the purchase event. That way it would be very easy to pick out a window of time that a schematic has changed hands. I can't imagine that anyone would try to implement an economy that is so important to the game without double-entry bookkeeping.
 
Any database developer that knows SQL could have identified the faulty transactions with an hour or two of labor. Really, there is no excuse not to invalidate those transactions or drop a negative balance on those accounts if the money is gone.
 
No need for a rollback. Just a few hours of following the money trail. Seems like that would be worth keeping the trust of many players, wouldn't you say? 
 
At least tell us which schematics and how many were purchased for almost free so the poor fools that are industrialists won't spend the money on those. Tell us which elements are tainted so we don't end up competing against somebody that has 100x more industrial capacity to build them. Or just take those schematics off the market. Do something!
 
I just spent the last two hours watching videos of upcoming space MMO's for 2021 on youtube. The DU concept still could have the best future, now if NQ could only stop screwing up..

Yeah, there doesn't seem to be much consideration from NQ of the time and energy people have invested into building up their assets and estate. When you betray that trust, many people never come back because it can easily happen again. If you lent your car to a friend and he trashes it and doesn't even apologize, are you likely to loan them your car again?
 
If they spent a little bit of extra effort into thinking of how to preserve people's existing infrastructure, and make sweeping changes only for new things (like in the new star system), then players would not have been so alienated.
....
 
It's an easy thing to happen for game developers in general. They live, breathe, eat and sleep in that universe so they start thinking that everyone else playing does too.

In the attempt to be as realistic as possible, the game design makes certain false assumptions. For example in real life, if you are faced with challenges you can't just quit and do something else, so you are pretty much a captive audience to reality.  In a game that isn't the case and you can easily walk away.

Game development requires a keen understanding of how much hassle is too much. At what point does the pain overcome the fun?  Violations of trust lowers that inflection point quite a bit.
 

A warp beacon costs 20-30M to make, it is sold for much more because it takes so long to make and because people want to make back the money they paid for the schematics. The same can be said for any t3+ item, the price is not dictated so much by the raw materials but the build time and schematic price. 

Now that plenty of people practically got the schematics for free, there is no way anybody who paid the normal price for it will ever make his money back. The issue may not hurt you, because you don’t do industry, but it does hurt a lot of other players.

Sure. All I can do is guess at NQ's intent at the moment.
 
I think they were trying to expand the dynamic range of scarcity and capability of items produced by players. I suspect they were surprised how quickly players moved from low tiers to high tiers, so they attempted to widen the gap between low end and high end items to have something to strive for.  Well, we all know how well that worked, closing the barn door and all that.
 
So future players, in theory (I'm guessing here), would have the benefit of staying interested in the game longer because it takes longer to get to the high tiers with the added requirement of cooperation from other people. In my opinion it was a sideways attempt at creating more social interaction. If this was done from the start, then it was the right thing to do. The sin was destroying all the hard work and efforts that people already put in for months and months, which did not respect their time.
 

I seriously don't understand why NQ insists on destroying the ability for the market to stabilize. So we had bots buying ore , then the bots slowly got eaten away and people started trading ore with each other again. Prices were beginning to stabilize in the upper teens , then bam without warning suddenly the bots refill their orders today. Everyone buys out the lower orders and sells to the bots and we are right back to everyone dumping ore to the magical bot orders.
 
How in the world do you ever expect any player market stability to form when you insist on a whim destroying whatever pricing has stabilized. Not to mention the fact that you make it even harder for producers to acquire ore in bulk because everyone is selling it to bots. No one knows your bot plan , so I'm certainly not going to post buy orders above the bots , because for all I know if I wait a week or two you won't refresh them and then I will have bought a bunch of ore at twice the going rate.
 
I mean seriously where is the common sense that your haphazard bot orders are unhealthy to the game world. At least if you said "we are permanently having bots buy these ores at this price" we could actually plan around that. Same would hold true if you said "after this batch of bot orders there will never be bots buying ore again". You don't however communicate any of this with the player base. This paralyzes the markets because producers cannot properly plan pricing , traders risk at buying and selling products is forever at risk at the carpet being pulled out from under them.
 
I mean truly , you have central bank like power with these bot orders and apparently none of the common sense that would generally be required of people in those positions. No one knows what your doing, no one can anticipate when you'll wave your hand and completely unhinge the market again. Seriously , please treat the player base with some respect and either tell us your plans with the bots or just remove them and let the players actually control the market without your random sledge hammer bots.
 
  
 
 

I was mostly kidding, but your argument was essentially that supply is bad because the suppliers think the demand is weak. That's not a demand problem... that's a problem with the suppliers' confidence.
 
There's only a demand problem if sell orders are on the market and no one is buying.

On second thought, the core idea of slowing down unrestrained growth is good, but maybe maintenance has its own problems. If people don't play for a while, you end up with a lot of "decayed" areas or items which could have the side effect of creating slums.  Also, you want to welcome someone back who hasn't played in a while. Decay due to loss of maintenance has the opposite effect and could turn off returning players.

So, the resistance to unhealthy growth needs to happen at the time of construction. Perhaps the next voxel you place takes a fraction longer or takes slightly more materials based on how many are already there. Once it is built, then leave it alone with no maintenance.
 

Now I understand. Thank you. Yes, I agree with you on that for sure. 
 
At the moment, I am personally deciding if I want to put a 10 million quanta element on the market  - the tax and storage costs aren't free if it doesn't sell.

Well, the first thing should be a limit on how many cores you can have simultaneously, now we're at 17 but this can easily be expanded by creating your own org. I bet NQ can find a reasonable number between 17 and literally hundreds that could both please anyone and prevent the 500Lcore tall towers.
 
The second thing should be finding a way to despawn constructs after X time from the owner's last login, let's say a month. Ofc you'll find magic blueprints in your inventory to redeploy everything as you come back.

I agree, however economically speaking, there is no such thing as "pvp for profit".  PvP is a less-than-zero sum game overall.  There is always less value in the economy after a PvP fight than before one.

The only practical way to have PvP activities inject money into the economy is to have AI enemy bots as targets.  In addition to the loot of the kill, the amount of economic injection can be tweaked by using game-provided bounty rewards like the login/universal income/helicopter monies but you actually have to work for it.
 
 

I agree, however economically speaking, there is no such thing as "pvp for profit".  PvP is a less-than-zero sum game overall.  There is always less value in the economy after a PvP fight than before one.

The only practical way to have PvP activities inject money into the economy is to have AI enemy bots as targets.  In addition to the loot of the kill, the amount of economic injection can be tweaked by using game-provided bounty rewards like the login/universal income/helicopter monies but you actually have to work for it.
 
 

It's still a bit weird that all the planets are devoid of fauna, moreso as I mentioned in my DU Video Review that you can hear birds singing but there are none to be found. 
 
If NQ continues with the mentality that only players should create content Dual Universe will very soon become a dead and empty Universe. 
 
 

I get the idea behind 0.23 but it was never going to do any kind of economy jump start, just the opposite. Why does economy suck? Because the game loop is unfinished. Without risk activities involving pvp for profit, everyone is a builder and no one needs one.

One of my close RL friends has stopped playing DU and it kinda sux because we now live in different states and DU was a great place for us to hang out together.
 
However, like others the frustrations overcame the benefits, so I started thinking about why. My conclusion is that the changes in patch 0.23 were an attempt at "behavior manipulation", and it did not work as intended.
 
The vision was to force people to interact using the market as the social glue. However, that can't work due to the following (in addition to being too boring):
 
Industrial Incest
 
Say what??   well...hear me out.  The end goal for many people is to have a ship or a fleet of ships. So, either buy them or make them.  The path of mining and selling ore to buy stuff is boring and torture to get enough cash. You literally need to find, mine, and transport several meganodes worth of ore to buy a couple of decent ships. That's a tough way to go.
 
So, people prior to patch 0.23 just made their own factories. This at least was fun and was challenging with figuring out how to make a cool factory. However, one thing I noticed is that there is a very high degree of re-use of different materials and parts in the production pipeline. I believe this is the root cause of undermining two of the most important pillars of the game. (bear with me here - it will make sense in a bit)
 
1. Pillar One:  Having different materials on different planets to create zones of differentiation. - this should in theory lead to strategic assets to fight for and defend.
 
2. Pillar Two: Market specialization.  People would "in theory" build specialized factories.
 
In order to specialize in a practical way, a thing needs to be able to be built from a subset of all that is available. As it is, you cannot build a ship with a subset of minerals at a tier, as you really need all of them (in a practical sense)
 
Think of this as a tree - for specialization to work,  the production path from the root (ore) to the leaves (elements) must be separate. However, the DU industrial pipelines double back and use parts from the other branches, so it is no longer a tree but more like a vine, that twists and turns,  crossing inherited paths as in the incestuous royal blood lines of the middle ages.
 
Since the required parts need prior parts which themselves need a most of the broad spectrum of refined pures, you really can't have specialization because to make most parts of a ship, you really need a full industrial setup.
 
However, now with expensive schematics having a full industrial supply line is almost impossible .... by design (JC's vision). The only alternative is to spend your whole day going shopping for parts - very hard to automate because people are not reliable in a game environment. Mission contracts only work until the doer gets bored of it. You are essentially trying to buy someone else's time with your own.  It is a net loss unless you bring in real money through selling DACS (monthly subscription tokens).
 
If this was an attempt to create more interplanetary traffic to give pirates more opportunities for plunder then it failed.
 
==> It's like putting 80% of the spices in your cupboard into every soup you make - too much variety per soup recipe is a bad thing because all soups will taste same even though you have 25 different spices available. If every soup recipe has to use 20 out of 25 overall, then the cooks have to shop at the same stores and the spice vendors can't specialize.
 
........
 
The right way to implement this would have been to make advanced, rare, and exotic mineral be available on only one planet (even on zone in the planet) , but make the industrial pipeline not dependent on having all of them. This is, I believe, a big game design flaw - the interdependence of late stage production elements on using such a large percentage of possible inputs. What's the point of a palette if you need all of it anyways?
 
No element should need to have more than 10% of the possible ores in game required to build it from scratch, and it should be possible to build a complete fighting ship with less than one third of them. Enable parts alternatives, like space fuel variants, but with different characteristics.
 
For example missiles would need lithium and railguns would need nickel, but missiles would not need nickel and railguns would not need lithium at all. This would create different technology trees based on what organization controlled what territory. Now you have battles worth participating in and joining up with friends. Food for thought for the next star system?
 
Social glue needs to be based on adrenaline, not chores.
 
I want to spend my limited time either being creative or fighting for a common goal with my friends, not shopping.
 

Me too, I got over $400 in it as well. The only thing that's keeping me going is the upcoming open test server. With regular synchronization with the "real" server, I think you will get a large surge in PvP activity on the test server.
 
I am calling it the "mayhem" server because you can try out your expensive ships without any loss of fuel, scrap, parts, or ships. I predict that is where people will go to have fun, and the real server will be used to gather materials and build the ships.  It will in effect be an "arena" for some wild battles - why not? nothing to lose !
 
If it is "synced' to the real server once or twice a week then I predict you may very well see a resurgence of the player population (but on the test server !!)

I've been wondering about that too.
 
Without knowing more about it, I admit I'm speculating. However, if I (as part of the community) can assist with ideas before it is published then it is worth the risk of being wrong.
 
So, it feels like the mission systems glosses over a few things. In particular, it seems that it is aimed at the sponsors of missions being wealthy executives that are running complex operations.
 
1. I don't think there are that many people that need help with missions right now.  Money is more valuable than time thanks to the expensive schematics and lack of strategic goals.
2. Also, I suspect the rollout with the mission system will have lots of people wanting to do missions to make money, but very few people spending money to create missions.
3. The game can't afford the player frustrations of another botched module rollout so soon after 0.23. To be blunt, a missions system does not really address the issues with shrinking player population at the moment. A bit like arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
 
so - my recommendation is to either hold off on the mission system until there are more activities to do  than people to do them  or as mentioned in the post above - use bots to create the missions to inject some cash.
 
Given all this, I believe in the dev team. They totally came through when fixing the usage of the markets and making mining tolerable in pre-beta last summer. I know they have the skills and ability - its just a matter of focusing on the things that make restoring the player population a priority. I don't think most players have left permanently just yet. Most are waiting, but as time goes on...
 

I'm a huge fan of "PvP zones".  Maybe down the road they could throw PvE ships into them too where every PvP player descends on them, competing for its cargo and loot.   Please create PvP centric areas where people can fight with their ships.  Where they know others interested in PvP will be. 

I agree, at this point the activity for players in the DU community is far too low for any sort of a comeback based on player creation alone. NQ needs to create the foundation on which content can be generated.
They need to change their stance on having everything being only player made otherwise their numbers will continue to go down and Starbase will continue to rise up

So we know that with the next patch that NQ is going to add in the mission system.
However, after giving it some thought NQ, I feel, needs to understand the environment the game is currently in.
With the onset of the .23 patch they've added in more sinks and almost no faucets. So in the end, the economy is in the crapper and no one is able to make much money unless you're a market guru and know how to capitalize.
 
However, even then barely anyone will be interested in engaging in the game because they all feel they have to mine in order to do anything. Or Join a large org to get anywhere.
 
When adding in the mission system, the way you can help the community is to add a balance to it by having Bots auto-gen missions for people to engage in.
 
The current status of the community, barely anyone is in a realistic position to generate meaningful missions and honestly it's on NQ to create a solid foundation of plentiful missions that the community can at least start off at. Then eventually make their own when the community is thriving again.
 
Adding in this new feature without a foundation for the community to start off at will only lead to the mission system being identified as another sync and barely a faucet for anyone else.
 
These missions need to be plentiful in number so EVERYONE has a chance to at least grow individually or as an org.
 
So as far as turning this ship around that's a SOLID way NQ can do it. PLEASE DON'T LET THIS POST FALL ON DEAF EARS!!!

Without going into too much detail... the .23 patch is poison for the game and needs a serious redo to make this game fun.
 
While a handful of people only enjoy the markets or industry... more people play the game to PVP and really... there's no reason to even play.
 
After yesterday's PVP event everyone on both sides of the field felt like the couple hours we spent killing each other was totally pointless and unfulfilling.
 
The money is in PVP and if NQ doesn't do something to revert or change .23 to be less restrictive and make PVP more fullfilling and fun then this game will die... Please take a lesson from the pages of some of the other failed indi games and understand where they failed and why. So you don't repeat history.
 
NQ devs don't even play their own game because they either hate sandbox games or already find this game to be extremely boring.
 
More suggestions:
 
Discovery/ Market: Schematics were probably the worst direction to take for the game. The redo would be to allow players to create their own schematics for their own custom made elements that would feature totally unique stats. Discovery/Salvage: Make the NQ built elements (from T1 - T5) the standard and then allow player's creativity to spur immersive gameplay by creating their own schematics. PVP: Remove the perma-destruction restore counter and replace it with Element efficiency mechanics where the elements performance & efficiency is based on the elements health. Each time the element is restored to full health it will lose 10% max performance and efficiency PVP/Salvage: Allow people to use parts required to make the element to restore the element's efficiency & performance Voxel/Design: Redo the textures on panel and painted voxel... because right now.. it's pure $#!7 PVP/Discovery: Asteroids... Asteroids everywhere with GOOD ORE DEPOSITES that are PVPable PVP/Discovery: DEEP SPACE SCANNING so we can actually discover stuff in space PVP: Interdiction for warpping ships PVP: Harpoons and Tractor beams PVP: We desperately need 1st person shooter AvA... and Not lock and fire otherwise you're going to completely lose the community. People will log on to see what NQ has done for AvA but when they find out it's lock and fire they're going to insta-uninstall the game. So you'll experience a spike in activity and an instant loss in subscriptions because people will change their credit card numbers because there's no easy way to unsubscribe from this game. Market: The Market bots were removed a bit too soon or the execution of their removal was not carried out well. The mass exodus of the bots created a vacuum the community wasn't 100% ready to fill. Reintroducing them in a small amount was a good way to walk back some of the extreme approaches done to the game.