Mordgier

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.

Fair points - our cloud hosting bill is about 25M per year so given our scale we've never paid list for anything but I have no idea how low the bar goes for "You pay list and you don't" - I admit my general mindset is that "list price isn't real price" but I might be totally out of touch here...
 
Org scale is not the only thing, sometimes "unique' use case that can serve as whitepapers/case studies for the vendor or proofs of concept that they can use to secure other clients can be used to reduce pricing at least in the short term. AWS going around pointing at NQ as a K8 cluster success story in the gaming world given Amazon's push into game hosting via GameLift might be enough for them to cut them a deal - but who knows. 
 
You're also right about the compute costs not being 'insignificant' but I just have no way to know how intensive or not their backend is because none of the data points are visible to us. All we do know for a fact is how much data DU pushes to clients by looking at our cache size. 
 
I'd love to have more insight into the DU backend - especially  given that DU is a fairly unique concept - but doubt it'll ever be public data.
 
 

Of course, these things cost absolutely no dev time to implement and test in game, they will appear by magic!
🤯

Alpha Team Vanguard used to exist with that goal and after all the entire Alpha and Beta stages of the game were supposed to exist with that goal, and here we are.

I won’t say I was a white knight, but I did try hard not say inflammatory things about the devs or the state of the game for a long time, thinking it counterproductive.
Recently I’ve realized it doesn’t matter, because they are steering this thing into a ditch no matter what we say, and I’ve turned sniping NQ whenever it suits.

Illusion of content.
 
Before many felt like they had nothing to do  - they had a factory that could produce everything and they just needed to sink in hours mining to throw in the ore to get the stuff out on the other end.
 
Now - they need to sink in months of mining to get the same factory running again. They have a 'goal' now - to get back to where they were a week ago - or they can quit.

Dont worry. They never listen, so everything is fine for release

It has been postponed indefinitely after release. This was confirmed in a podcast here in December 2019, which was later shown in a roadmap.
Podcast here with timestamp to the ava/cvc part: 
 
 
 
And of course, after listening to it, I couldn't help making memes. Link: https://imgur.com/a/uVOYJT0
 
It was just funny to see how no one had a problem except a few who pointed out the problems that already existed there. But blind trust didn't help anyone. The unpleasant awakening of the majority came later. And today we are where we are.

So far my patience has been rewarded by everything I ever did in the persistent world getting deleted.  And it does not appear that NQ have learned from past mistakes.  I think they will just mess it up again and end up with another broken sandbox.
 
I think I might have run out of patience now.

I fixed that for you ...

Yeah, sadly NQ don't have a great track-record keeping promises.
 
(31:58) "Whatever you do after beta starts is going to stay in one way or another... You will get what we call for the moment 'magic blueprints'... blueprints with everything included in it so you will be able to respawn the things as soon as we restart the server. So we don't like to call it 'wipe'... The key thing is the beta is really the start... You can start to invest yourself in the game. We guarantee that you're not going to be losing everything at some point... the universe is blank again, and you have to start from scratch."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syku-NmSg4s&t=1918s
 
"With future wipes, as much of your assets as possible will be kept between before and after the wipe, in particular constructs will always be preserved, if necessary with special one-time-use blueprints ("Packaged Blueprints") that do not require ingredients..." ⬇

- Survival elements like oxygen and energy? 
- NPC enemies like wolves or spiders? 
- Weapons for the avatar to kill NPCs or players?
- NPC ships that attack you?
- Meteoroids that hit planets?
- Mountable mining units on ships?
- Planetary mining (besides on asteroid)?
 
This is exactly why I play Space Engineers, sign me up for this! 

I think you may have a very different concept of "relative stability" from others - because what I recall is people being unable to log in and unable to finish the tutorial because of the crippling lag...

I think you may have a very different concept of "relative stability" from others - because what I recall is people being unable to log in and unable to finish the tutorial because of the crippling lag...

I think you may have a very different concept of "relative stability" from others - because what I recall is people being unable to log in and unable to finish the tutorial because of the crippling lag...

Cynical reality, that there is nearly no enough "old loyal players" to make game financially viable. They were only useful to keep game alive (to extent), so NQ not clearly told them that they planning to wipe, nurturing false hopes (i'm sure plan was there since pretty much Beta start). All this "we discussing it iternally" wiggling around.
 
So now any pretense is dropped, NQ (ultra predictably) decided to gamble in attempt to make game more attractive for new wave of players. If it work or not -- another question. This tho makes old people "disposable" (in relative sense of risking to wipe their progress).
 
I was trying whistleblow and explain this NQ long-term plan of "use them, then wipe them" for years for folks around here, but gathered only hate.
 
 

So I finally make the choice to leave the game behind me for now. I really do not see how the current company will be able to make this work and I feel their attitude and overall outlook on what they are doing will help any chance of a revival of the viability of the project. And no amount of pushing the buttons to try and see some movement will have any effect I believe. Maybe I'm wrong but I do not think so.. I see no reason to spend more time supporting a company when I do not see much of anything to make me believe they can and will support the game.
 
So there, all you haters can rejoice as I'm out.. been a good few years but unless things change drastically, this game will not make it.
 
And no, you can't have my stuff..
 

My Day 1 gameplan is to read steam forums, and reddit and this forum and laugh and laugh and laugh.
 
Wait you guys are actually going to play this and not just laugh at suckers who fall for this 'release'?

Played the game since early alpha and NEVER left a ship, or anything else at a market, it is rude and inconsiderate to other players, you could argue that it is just as 'toxic' an activity.  Sorry but I am glad NQ have done something about it and I salute the player that took it.

serves you right for squating the landing pad. Thanks to people like you considerate people have had trouble finding a place to land near market terminals.
It's all water under the brige. You ship along with other 40 (by me personally) or so were scrapped and its parts found a new home with people who know how to park. 
 
It wasn't about quanta, in case you were wondering. I considered it a community service, thanks to which markets aren't laggy and everyone has room enough to land
be it L sized, klingon or even chinese ?

@BertBerto
 
There is no "NPC ports" in Dual Universe. 
 
It has been clearly stated for quiet some time that your personal stuff will only ever be safe on your single Sanctuary territory
That ships left at markets would in one way or another be lost has also been on the table for a long time now.

With the Demeter update, the emails sent out, the devblogs and the discussion here _clearly_ informed that any ships left at arkets woudl be open to be taken by other players after 7 days.
 
I get the frustration and I can also see the argument that what NQ decided to do here is probably one of the worst options they have but also the least effort for them.
 
In the end though, if you choose to take a break and ignore any updates or news coming from NQ, than that is really you choice and you just experienced the consequences of doing so.

This is cute.
 
Imagine thinking that a game with 100 players is viable.
 
NQ has 68 employees according to LinkedIn.  It's safe to assume that they are burning through ~5m a year - in short they need 50k paid accounts to break even.
 
 
 

This is cute.
 
Imagine thinking that a game with 100 players is viable.
 
NQ has 68 employees according to LinkedIn.  It's safe to assume that they are burning through ~5m a year - in short they need 50k paid accounts to break even.
 
 
 

You're wrong here - DU uses Unigine for rendering on the client side but their server tech is proprietary. There is nothing wrong with running on AWS. AWS offers phenomenal scaling capabilities and is a fantastic solution for game hosting where player counts vary through the day and life cycle of the game.  It is frequently cheaper and better performance to host via AWS than in house if you are expecting a major difference between your high and low loads.
 
It would have cost NQ far more to buy whatever silly number of physical hosts they would have needed to host the game when it launched - and then what? The player count is likely less than a third of what it was a year ago.
 
The game engine and hosting were far from the primary failure points of DU. The lack of a game and the complete and total failure to listen to the community played a bigger factor.  JC literally played the game with infinite resourced and complained that mining was too easy despite never having mined.