Mordgier

That's wrong, though -- people don't post here because no one is playing the damned game.
 
It's the same on other channels like Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit -- no one is posting about DU anywhere. If it were merely an issue with people not liking the forum negativity, you'd see activity...somewhere on the Internet. 
 
 
First, I don't know why you think this is low-hanging fruit. Anytime someone explains how "easy" it is to implement something, I have to roll my eyes. Granted, you do acknowledge that it's just your perception that it'd be easy.  
 
All we know is that dev has been historically very slow and that the project is 8+ years old -- that doesn't communicate a flexible, simple codebase to me where this would actually be "low hanging fruit". Tax rates are not likely so flexible -- it means introducing new networked variables for every TCU and introducing a level of dynamism in the actual tax rate recurring "jobs" that might not be so trivial. 
 
Also, we do know that NQ's dev resources are now split among 4 projects. We do know that player counts have only decreased since launch. 
 
We do know that NQ implemented taxes as a means to control cost; it has little to do with design. 
 
To speak to the idea itself...I'm not sure that this idea will be so impactful. 
 
Adding incentives like a tax break doesn't magically transform a poorly designed feature (like combat in general, to be real) into something engaging and fun. If PvE alone isn't enough to create engagement (which I 100% agree that it isn't), I don't see how any level of incentive will really make the game more popular!
 
In most games, combat and fighting is the engagement point...saying "this isn't enough and won't work" only underscores how impossible it is for NQ to make this game scale. Even with tax breaks...will that be enough to 1000x the number of players? That's what it'd take, at a minimum...and that doesn't even matter if NQ can't retain those players. 
 
I get that the community here is negative...maybe unfairly at times.
 
Still, the game's population and the reality that even NQ is focusing on other projects...that's completely relevant to every idea as it speaks to the core of how NQ views the product and what steps are realistic for them to take...and puts any idea in a grim but fair context: which is that the game needs a lot to turn around from where it is today. 

And some of us asked NQ multiple times from day 0, "how are you going to solve the obvious technical limitations and scaling issues with this design?".
And for years NQ/JC would only shrug and say "don't worry guys" or something to that effect. But guess what, the problems did not go away.
 
And by now the history of DU is pretty much just a long list of community "we told you so" issues being proven right as time went by and NQ continued to ignore the feedback.

The lying started for me right at the start of beta. They had videos showing territory warfare and atmo-pvp. Both don't exist to this point in time. After several years. And that was under JC. They were just making things up without having anything to back it up. For me that is lying because they knew they had nothing but were still using it as an advertisment.

今更？！！ 　As we say in Japan, "Ima sara?"..... Oh, so *now* we're down to a double digit player base they are talking about monetization?
Another one we use in situations like this is...
後の祭り! Ato no matsuri..... meaning, "the festival is already over..."

Microtransactions with the current population is going to be pretty much the death throes of DU. There is no way MTs can raise useful amounts of cash with these numbers. Unless MTs stands for Mega Transactions.

What do you even mean by "server engine architecture"...? Why would you want a backend that's failed to scale at every turn -- especially one that's likely vendor-locked into AWS? 
 
Regardless, there is a way to buy it off them...clearly NQ is wanting to be acquired.
 
Their timing and strategy sucks...because they are hoping their early trademarks around "metaverse" and whatever patents they hold would make them an easy target for some big entity investing in the metaverse.
 
Of course, Microsoft just dropped their metaverse project and no one believes Meta's platform will amount to jack shit. There's no "big entity" left other than Meta, and they have no need for NQ's silly trademark or poorly implemented tech. 
 
People in this metaverse space are dropping like flies for a good reason.
 
I do believe NQ's leadership genuinely believes in web3 (hence their announcement that their current development focus is on metaverse tooling like "3d blogging")...and this belief absent any evidence, valid use case, or basic understanding of the technology in general is (as time will prove) not a healthy way to run a company. 

I mean...this is actually true. 
 
NQ doesn't engage meaningfully with any ideas or discussions here.
 
They really don't want any idea, suggestions, or feedback unless it is "balanced" with compliments and praise, too. 
 
Maybe NQ would disagree, but this is a lesson NQ has taught the community many, many times over the past 8 years. It's demonstrated over and over with their actions over the almost-decade it's taken them to publish a vastly unfinished "game". 
 
So no, they really don't want your ideas. You're free to post ideas in the general forum...but they will not be read, they will not be considered, they will not be acknowledged. 

At this point, it's a really bad idea to put a lot of effort into DU in general...there's no reason to invest a bunch of time in a subscription game where there's only a few hundred people playing at a time. 
 
If NQ has 10,000 subs (which they likely don't even have that), their employees would make about as much revenue as DU delivering DoorDash 8 hours a workday...likely more.
 
When it comes to picking where to invest your time, I don't think DU is a great place...because there's no way they can hold the current player counts and stay online forever.
 
Yeah the company has made really bad choices that have frustrated and annoyed players like the OP...but even if you put that aside, it would be a weird choice to invest a lot of time in a game that is not sustainable. 

I've been trying to stay positive about this but it's getting more difficult:
 
You see, in beta - after NQ said they wouldn't wipe, and with the only way to paste voxels out of a BP was to make it DRM free - I made all my money selling DRM-free BPs. Like, ALL my money. I did a little mining, did a few asteroids, but I never flew a mission. I just sold voxelmancies. A LOT. Like, ~3 billion quanta worth of BPs.
 
When NQ back-flipped on the wipe, it wasn't so bad (losing 2 yrs of earnings). I could always just open shop again, and start selling my BPs from scratch, right? And there would be a bunch of new players to sell to as well. Wrong. On both counts. As predicted, there weren't a bunch of new players sitting out there just waiting for a wipe to begin playing. And barely any marketing for launch. Worse, because my BPs were DRM-free, folks got to keep my creations, even though I lost the money they paid for them. NQ gave 2 yrs of my work away at launch. I can't sell those BPs again now, as they're already out there, folks were 'born' with them at launch, and increasingly they're being pirated and distributed. If NQ had been honest about the potential for a wipe from day 1, and that they didn't really care about the value of players in-game IPs, that they'd just give our stuff away for free, I would never have sold DRM-free BPs during beta. 
 
It's harder now to invest the same time and effort again given NQs track record of shanking players - especially those who put serious effort in. 
 
Discuss.

Hell no! It's a pure and bland sandbox, it has the potential for us to tell good stories. But the DU setting itself is virtually not existent, at the start of beta there was some hint of something more during events, but that was quickly squashed when the previous CEO left...
 
DU is the equivalent of mom getting a big box of LEGO, yelling "VROOM! This is a spaceship!" turning the box over in the middle of the living room. "You just crashed on a new planet, you need to rebuild!"... "I'll check back on you when you're 18 and I can kick you out of the house."... 😉

DU is lousy sci-fi, since there is so many inconsistencies and hardly any correlation between what you do in the game and the technology available. So a more correct term would be space-opera.
 
For example everything must fly in DU, but there is no advanced technology or Lore or anything in the game that would justify a society based around flying.
 
And one moment you have nano transformers doing hand-wavy magic and resurrection pods that can transfer you across the universe in a split second, and the next you are running around picking up glowing rocks from the ground.
 
Kinda reminds me of Star Wars where people are living in a western movie but then suddenly have all sorts of crazy technology for whatever fits the short term narrative, without any thoughts as to how having access to such technology would impact a society as whole. I mean just take a look at something as simple as the invention of the iPhone, and how much smartphones (and the internet) has changed our society in a relatively short time.

Right because it was a wish list of things JC wanted in a game - without ever sitting down with real game designers to sort out the mechanics for these and then engineers to see what it would take for these to work as described - and then to do a POC and then road map it publicly. 
 
I'm willing to bet you that a lot of these roadmap items were placed there with no feedback from the dev team on feasibility. 
 
I've worked in places exactly like that - where client provided list of deliverables had items on them that any of the company engineers would have said were not feasible with our infrastructure and could not be provided with the resources we have.  For example a place I used to work promised a client that we would improve our guaranteed uptime from 99.9 to 99.999 because sales folks doing the contracts "didn't think it'd be a big deal" for us to do that - and we found out that we were on the hook AFTER the client was presented the new contract....needless to say we failed to deliver. Of course IT guys got the blame for failing to meet the SLA....
 
The DU map is no different - it is full of things that cannot be delivered regardless of dates because nobody sat down and asked "How would this even work?" before throwing it on the map.

Please have some respect for the devs. Coding DU is bad enough, being required to actually play it too feels like just kicking someone when they are already down.
 
I know how many of us feel about NQ, but please find some mercy in you for the devs - they've suffered enough without having to play DU.

Please have some respect for the devs. Coding DU is bad enough, being required to actually play it too feels like just kicking someone when they are already down.
 
I know how many of us feel about NQ, but please find some mercy in you for the devs - they've suffered enough without having to play DU.

So the cost of DU is not really CPU cycles but CloudFront - DU uses Cloudfront to push out all the voxel data. Any construct or terrain change you make is stored in cloudfront and pushed out to other clients as needed and then stored as cache by your client, at least till the cache is invalidated. Just how much data is pushed is easily tracked by checking your cache size folder. For the estimated costs it's pretty easy - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
 
You can confirm this easily by the way - 
 
 
Keep in mind that NQ likely has a contract with AWS that is for negotiated pricing, it's pretty rare for any significant users to just pay the list price.
 
That's why mining had to go and that's why constructs have to get destroyed if not tied to a paid account - else they are forever sent out to other clients and NQ pays for it.
 
Tracking millions of autominers is just a bunch of rows in a table - it's not a significant cost really. 
 
As to why NQ made the AM timer 24 hours instead for 20h like the "daily" timers in many games - it's because they have a consistent history of failure to learn from the mistakes made by other games.
 
"Daily" timers being either set to a specific reset time or less than 24h to avoid the constant 'shift right' for the players has been standard practice for some time in other games.
 
I had previously posted a breakdown of what I estimated NQ to be paying for hosting and how many players they needed to cover their staffing costs with the profit assuming France average DEV costs + taxes - and that post got deleted and I took a 3m ban for it sooo uhh not doing that again - you're welcome to draw your own conclusions though...admittedly I did also state that you shouldn't buy into DU because of that data because well...uhh...DOA.

Please have some respect for the devs. Coding DU is bad enough, being required to actually play it too feels like just kicking someone when they are already down.
 
I know how many of us feel about NQ, but please find some mercy in you for the devs - they've suffered enough without having to play DU.

Please have some respect for the devs. Coding DU is bad enough, being required to actually play it too feels like just kicking someone when they are already down.
 
I know how many of us feel about NQ, but please find some mercy in you for the devs - they've suffered enough without having to play DU.

Please have some respect for the devs. Coding DU is bad enough, being required to actually play it too feels like just kicking someone when they are already down.
 
I know how many of us feel about NQ, but please find some mercy in you for the devs - they've suffered enough without having to play DU.

Please have some respect for the devs. Coding DU is bad enough, being required to actually play it too feels like just kicking someone when they are already down.
 
I know how many of us feel about NQ, but please find some mercy in you for the devs - they've suffered enough without having to play DU.

A sneek peak of r new engeneeering screen:
 

they didn't, check w1zard's post in this thread, the image is taken from this article https://www.vrheads.com/8-quick-tips-and-tricks-survive-pvp-combat-elite-dangerous

it's not even a careful photoshop, you can still see the "4" from the heat etc..  quick and dirty just like everything else.   

why do you even need to resort to that to tease a feature supposedly releasing in a week, anyway?

find 10 differences I guess?

I don't think this will ever be completely fixed.
 
IMO, massive battles in this game will never be possible...it struggles to scale even with a low player count on a platform famous for on demand hardware -- if they can't make the stack work even with so few players, it doesn't work. 
 
Unfortunately, very early on they believed they had invented groundbreaking tech that would make the game scale...but this was also from someone that hadn't worked in gaming before...
 
The academic theories about how it "should" scale in the real world were never challenged, tested, or fully understood.
 
Their early prototyping was not done correctly -- someone with experience in gaming (or tech in general!) would have known to challenge the many absurd ideas or assumptions about this product that never were never realistic, especially around scalability. 
 
The technical core of this game was based on foundations of sand, which makes the game's many design issues even harder to solve...but also means that issues with lag will never likely be solved, even and especially if they somehow manage to attract more players.  

So the cost of DU is not really CPU cycles but CloudFront - DU uses Cloudfront to push out all the voxel data. Any construct or terrain change you make is stored in cloudfront and pushed out to other clients as needed and then stored as cache by your client, at least till the cache is invalidated. Just how much data is pushed is easily tracked by checking your cache size folder. For the estimated costs it's pretty easy - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
 
You can confirm this easily by the way - 
 
 
Keep in mind that NQ likely has a contract with AWS that is for negotiated pricing, it's pretty rare for any significant users to just pay the list price.
 
That's why mining had to go and that's why constructs have to get destroyed if not tied to a paid account - else they are forever sent out to other clients and NQ pays for it.
 
Tracking millions of autominers is just a bunch of rows in a table - it's not a significant cost really. 
 
As to why NQ made the AM timer 24 hours instead for 20h like the "daily" timers in many games - it's because they have a consistent history of failure to learn from the mistakes made by other games.
 
"Daily" timers being either set to a specific reset time or less than 24h to avoid the constant 'shift right' for the players has been standard practice for some time in other games.
 
I had previously posted a breakdown of what I estimated NQ to be paying for hosting and how many players they needed to cover their staffing costs with the profit assuming France average DEV costs + taxes - and that post got deleted and I took a 3m ban for it sooo uhh not doing that again - you're welcome to draw your own conclusions though...admittedly I did also state that you shouldn't buy into DU because of that data because well...uhh...DOA.

So the cost of DU is not really CPU cycles but CloudFront - DU uses Cloudfront to push out all the voxel data. Any construct or terrain change you make is stored in cloudfront and pushed out to other clients as needed and then stored as cache by your client, at least till the cache is invalidated. Just how much data is pushed is easily tracked by checking your cache size folder. For the estimated costs it's pretty easy - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
 
You can confirm this easily by the way - 
 
 
Keep in mind that NQ likely has a contract with AWS that is for negotiated pricing, it's pretty rare for any significant users to just pay the list price.
 
That's why mining had to go and that's why constructs have to get destroyed if not tied to a paid account - else they are forever sent out to other clients and NQ pays for it.
 
Tracking millions of autominers is just a bunch of rows in a table - it's not a significant cost really. 
 
As to why NQ made the AM timer 24 hours instead for 20h like the "daily" timers in many games - it's because they have a consistent history of failure to learn from the mistakes made by other games.
 
"Daily" timers being either set to a specific reset time or less than 24h to avoid the constant 'shift right' for the players has been standard practice for some time in other games.
 
I had previously posted a breakdown of what I estimated NQ to be paying for hosting and how many players they needed to cover their staffing costs with the profit assuming France average DEV costs + taxes - and that post got deleted and I took a 3m ban for it sooo uhh not doing that again - you're welcome to draw your own conclusions though...admittedly I did also state that you shouldn't buy into DU because of that data because well...uhh...DOA.

So the cost of DU is not really CPU cycles but CloudFront - DU uses Cloudfront to push out all the voxel data. Any construct or terrain change you make is stored in cloudfront and pushed out to other clients as needed and then stored as cache by your client, at least till the cache is invalidated. Just how much data is pushed is easily tracked by checking your cache size folder. For the estimated costs it's pretty easy - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
 
You can confirm this easily by the way - 
 
 
Keep in mind that NQ likely has a contract with AWS that is for negotiated pricing, it's pretty rare for any significant users to just pay the list price.
 
That's why mining had to go and that's why constructs have to get destroyed if not tied to a paid account - else they are forever sent out to other clients and NQ pays for it.
 
Tracking millions of autominers is just a bunch of rows in a table - it's not a significant cost really. 
 
As to why NQ made the AM timer 24 hours instead for 20h like the "daily" timers in many games - it's because they have a consistent history of failure to learn from the mistakes made by other games.
 
"Daily" timers being either set to a specific reset time or less than 24h to avoid the constant 'shift right' for the players has been standard practice for some time in other games.
 
I had previously posted a breakdown of what I estimated NQ to be paying for hosting and how many players they needed to cover their staffing costs with the profit assuming France average DEV costs + taxes - and that post got deleted and I took a 3m ban for it sooo uhh not doing that again - you're welcome to draw your own conclusions though...admittedly I did also state that you shouldn't buy into DU because of that data because well...uhh...DOA.