Mordgier

It'S jUsT LiKe ReAdY PlAyEr OnE!!11!1!

I admit I last played Factorio back in May 2018 according to Steam - so my memory of bots is rusty - but I know they lagged the shit out of my Bobs an Angels modded base. I can't imagine DU handling logistic bots - although it'd be neat and sure better than magic links.

Sure - but logistic bots throughput is generally not sufficient for mega factories - even if only due to their effect of slowing down the game. Most mega factories try to use bots sparingly or even just for slapping down blueprints. I do agree that Factorio would have been a better game if logistic bots could only build. Either way Fortress Craft and Satisfactory get by with no bots and do so well. I think at this point it is fair to say that Satisfactory has set the bar for what a 3d factory building game should play like - and DU doesn't come close at all. I am very much not a fan of the linking system in DU at all and think that it is a fundamental blocker to interesting factory design in DU - it manages to both make building anything too easy and too tedious all at once.

It's a full loot pvp mmo. It's going to be as toxic as EVE, Ark, Atlas, Rust, DayZ, Tarkov and so on where winning is winning and the end justifies the means every single time. So yes, design that is focused from the ground up on preventing griefing is necessary. I think not offering free trials is one of the few things DU does right from a game design perspective.

It's a deliberate time sink. The idea was to create a massive time investment in creating a factory and thus create a 'time' value in already produced components. This worked for the first few weeks where it made way more sense to just pay more for built elements than to spend weeks waiting for your own production line to build them. Yet a month in, everyone who cared enough had their own lag factory that would freeze their pc for 2 minutes straight when they whipped out their link tool and also produced every element they could ever need. So the price of elements fell below the cost of minerals. Oops. There is a reason Factorio, Satisfactory, Fortress Craft etc all force you to use physical conveyor belts to connect your industry - it's a natural level of complexity that makes mega factories hard to build - but for whatever reason DU decided to use magical links and timesinks. Now they want to fix the 'problem' of the fact that everyone has a mega factory - and want to do that with crippling factories with power requirements rather than actually adding more design elements that go beyond "Do I have enough containers and transfers?" - because right now that's what factory building is in DU - building enough containers and transfer units. That's it.

I'm all for NQ taking feedback and suggestions - in fact if they did that - would not have the sad state of current pvp or mining. Yet they're not the ones asking here. This is just the community talking about what they wish NQ did and NQ not at the table. On topic - we have no idea what exactly is even required to capture a territory - and to me that is sort of the elephant in the room. JC did mention in an interview that only outside hexes will be attackable from a claimed hostile hex. Which as I understand suggests that it is not relevant who owns what hexes - as long as I don't own a hex adjacent to you, I cannot attack. What exactly 'attack' means, I have no idea. What are we attacking? What is the victory condition and the loss condition? None of these are defined and everything that I can speculate on sounds horrific. Do we attack the TCU? Horrible - I hide mine so deep you'll have to fall for 10 minutes straight to get to it. Make TCU above ground. I shall encase it in an L core that is entirely made of steel. And surrounded by several other steel L cores. Just for laughs. Also - still 10 minutes underground. I don't see any of the mechanics in the current game as remotely plausible for theory crafting how territory control will work.

Speculating: NQ doesn't know how it'll work either.

Steam would add tens of thousands to the game and the bulk would refund their way out half way through the laggy tutorial - the rest would fight with support for a week to get their refunds for exceeding their 2 hour refund window.... Probably not the best move.

Do you have people you hate so much that you'd refer them in? Such cruelty....

Do you play DU as a past time - not as your job? What do you like about it if so? What do you not like about it?

I don't get what this drama is all about - this response is pretty clear. If you want to accuse someone of cheating, submit video logs to NQ. Frankly NQ should ban anyone posting such accusations on the forums. Reddit generally already does as it's witchhunting.

So you have no binds in Madis?

Ha - we found a 2.4mil limestone meganode - and the guy who went to clear it out logged off about 400k in....and we never saw him again....well I mean I see him on Discord....but he's not playing DU....

I mean....that alone would be a start. You think mining would be what it is today if JC had to mine all the ore to build his castle?

The definition of a 'beta' has dramatically shifted over the past 15 years - at least in the gaming world - the definition remains: A Beta phase generally begins when the software is feature complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs. 15 years ago an MMO beta was a largely finished game. Maybe some end game content missing, some placeholder assets, a few quests unfinished, balance issues and so on... But you'd get a full vertical slice of the game. Meaning - every single core feature of the game was functional. For example, Anarchy Online went into beta in 2000 and released in 2001. By the time it was beta, the bulk of the game was done - it was buggy, unbalanced and riddled with exploits - but the content was there. Now you have DU 'beta' - and core features of the game are actually non existent entirely and those that exist are all dysfunctional in some way. There isn't a single thing in the game right now that I would consider ready for release. DU is by no means a 'beta' in a traditional definition - there is no justification for calling any product that is missing fundamental core features a 'beta'. By definition beta is feature complete, but buggy. DU is at best Alpha. It doesn't matter what NQ choose to call it - it's Alpha. By definition. So that's why people are complaining. You can't really sell DU as a 'beta' and have so many features not just 'not developed' - but apparently still in the drawing board stages. All the interviews with JC and the rest of NQ staff have been pretty indicative that they do not have any idea how atmo pvp will actually work, how avatar pvp will work or how territory control pvp will work - I don't mean that they don't have it in game - I mean that they appear to have no idea how it will work at all besides theory crafting how they 'envision' it. It's gotten no further than what JC was talking about during the kickstarter in 2016. Anyone with any history in development looking at just the planned features on https://upvote.dualuniverse.game/ sees a solid 2 years of work. When those are complete, assuming DU doesn't go the way of Worlds Adrift - then the game will be in Beta - meaning another year of polish to iron out the bugs. So players have every right to be upset about how incomplete this beta is. With that said - the harsh reality of life is that games are not developed for free. Given the staff levels and funding, and expected burn rate, it's extremely likely that the decision to launch Alpha in the current state was to create some kind of cashflow - even if only to further use that cashflow to secure loans and investments for future development. I do not blame NQ for launching the 'beta' as is, or for charging for it, AWS doesn't host their servers out of charity and NQ devs do not pay their rent with their passion for game development. I do think that the bulk of the community gets that point as well - but are still disappointed by the current state of the game. That's exactly where I am. I am disappointed by DU. I kickstarted, and have 2 paid accounts on top of my 2 pre-paid ones, and will keep the subs going because despite the fact that the game isn't in the state where I want it to be - I realize that it will never get to a state that I want it to be in without continued cashflow. On the other hand I can understand why someone may not wish to pay monthly for a game they don't even log into anymore....

That's how it goes. Some streamer gets an hour long interview and we are stuck either giving them views or staying in the dark...

DU makes the common mistake of confusing tedious gameplay with challenging. For example, getting T4 ore is simply tedious. It's a time sink. There is no skill involved. It's literally just bite down on something and sink in 10 hours looking for nodes. It's time consuming and tedious and the only real 'challenge' is forcing yourself to suffer through the waste of RL time that it is. In short - mining is a time sink. Industry isn't much different. Anyone can build a giant factory that will produce everything given that they are willing to sink in enough time to produce 500 transfer units. There is no real challenge here either - and that's strange given how countless games have managed to lay the foundation for how industry design games can be challenging by having complex ratios and the like. Factorio, Satisfactory, X3/4, Fortresscraft Evolved - I could go on, but all of these have industry design challenges that DU simply does not. Industry in DU is a time sink - assuming it works right - which it frequently does not with "unknown error" constantly breaking production lines. So the two most fleshed out features of the game are simply time consuming. I would say that currently, the only actually challenging aspect of DU is voxelmancy - and ironically - it's the one that should NOT be challenging at all. Anyone should be able to sit down and build a passable looking ship without having to resort to watching hours of youtube videos and hunting for voxel libraries...

The issue is the game is at least 90% tedium no matter what 'path' you pick. Industry? 90% tedium of fighting the lag of the link tool or the random breakdowns where some random element simply stops working. Mining? - mining is 100% tedious. Pvp? 90% waiting around. Ship Design? Voxelmancy is 100% tedium. Trading? 90% tedium of flying around from A to B. And the lessons haven't been learned..... NQ adds 'wrecks' which are also 90% tedium of flying around looking for them....

I really hate commenting on that page. The UI is abysmal. Rather than dumping the idea box, perhaps turn into "Upcoming Feature Discussion" - make it impossible to create new threads there and post say the top 20 features from the upvote page there as individual threads. Let people discuss these features on the forums in the specific thread for that feature.

You get to ask questions. NQ gets to pick if they're worth answering. You get to ask detailed questions and get detailed answers. (maybe) Others get to add their opinions to it as well. It's interactions with the entire group involved. The current "Go on twitch at the right time and beg a streamer to ask your question" is a massive turnoff for me. Streamers have their own ideas of what DU should be and should not serve as the go between the community and NQ. In the past I've seen this managed by the CM creating a weekly "Ask the Devs" thread where people get to post questions. Then the CM pushes the popular questions from the community to the dev and comes back with answers and these are archived for future reference.

There is very minimal NQ presence in the forums - and really minimal activity in general. Things like the "Idea Box" - may as well be called "The Idea Trashcan" because I'm pretty sure NQ doesn't look at it. I think you as a company need to figure out just want you want this forum to be and frankly if it even makes sense of it to exist. If you are focusing on discord, why invest your time in the forum? If you want the forum to thrive, then you need to actually have a reason to be here - which means NQ presence and to also drive the community to the forums. At this point if you want to hear anything from NQ, Discord, Reddit or even Twitter appear to be quicker to show information about NQ communications. NQ needs to communicate with the community - I don't care if it's via the forum, a reddit AMA or whatever. Getting on a twitch stream with some streamer is NOT communicating with the community. It's NQ and a Streamer talking about stuff and we get to sit in the back like kids watching adults talk. It's not OK. If you just 'clean it up' and add a fresh coat of paint, it won't fix the core issue that this forum is largely pointless. Until NQ starts being active on the forums and actually interacting with the community here, it's going to remain largely dead.

That's all find and good - and as long as we agree that the test was a failure - we're on the same page. That was not how JC seemed to see it on the stream which is why I made the post in the first place.

It's obviously not ready - that's why it's in 'beta'. Although given that you could claim that what we currently have isn't enough to be called a vertical slice...it's hard to argue that it's anything more than a proof of concept of some of the gameplay elements....

As of yesterday we could not claim a fully smashed ship as our own on Alioth market.

Sure and at the scale they are leasing servers they have to 'right size' them rather than overprovisioning 10 fold as OP suggests because it would be a colossal waste of money. The very purpose of going to the cloud is elasticity so you can scale up and down as needed. Nevermind that there is zero indication that this is capacity related and not related to db blocking or some other issue that is not related to capacity at all.