NQ-Naerais

Thanks I believe that is related to the DU Bot going on vacation, but it is on my list!

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.

Discuss below!

You mean like this? https://www.dualuniverse.game/tutorials

The search will only scout out existing support articles, it is not tied to a bug tracker. Right now, we do not have that accessible outside of our NQ teams. Hope that explains it for you.

Remember, if you've used up your fetch for the day, you can still ask for help from the GMs

We're aware that it's not working for orgs and are looking into it.

I'd like to clarify that the team is trying to find a solution for this, however yes, it's not officially supported.

We do not allow account transfers sorry. Locking.

Is it just when you are using quotes? Glad to know you're sticking around, thank you

Gotcha Ahem. Join the party! I wonder what THIS button does.. Aren't update fun for everyone Thanks for the report and your patience. ❤️

I will try follow up, but please understand fixes aren't instant. Reports get reviewed, then prioritized and put into a queue for programing/fixing etc. Then testing before release. It won't be that fast (we all wish it could be ) Thanks for the reply.

As Blazemonger said, It's not you. it's us. We've temporarily disabled it.

We definitely have some optimization issues going on, but I'm afraid that's where the excitement ends.

We never changed any fonts, so I'm unsure what happened. But we did have a few hiccups as you saw.

Which blue dots?

Do you have any suggestions on what you'd like to see?

It is part of the default theme we updated to. We're not crazy with the layout either, but shuffling it is not a high priority just yet. Trust me when I say I'm planning to take a torch to it. Want to bring along the marshmallows? Thanks for the feedback!

I've let the team know. Can you please open a ticket here: https://support.dualthegame.com/hc/en-us thank you

https://support.dualthegame.com/hc/en-us please

Hello and welcome aboard. Sorry to hear you had such a rough arrival. We know the starter area is rough, the team is working on ways to reduce the lag as well as make the tutorial a little easier to digest. But these things take time. Right now, if you like, we can move you away from the starter area to get you started, just open a request here: https://support.dualthegame.com/hc/en-us

No burnings, but let's mind the language please. To answer some of the questions/comments... We do have internal test teams, and yes we all play on normal non-admin accounts. We also have internal playtests on our dev builds.

We know this is a sore spot, this is still something we're working on. What other kinds of 'punishment' would you want to see?

We are still investigating, but haven't any details worthy of sharing yet. We want to get you all back playing asap.

SecondLife! There is a step back for me - nice! Welcome aboard