Samedi

Am I the only one wondering who is at this "round table discussion with members of our PvP community"? 

btw folks, having multiple cans linked to one fuel hub has one big downside... it would also limit output link count... so it wouldn't be really practical unless whole hub would only provide one data uplink aggregator and kept OUT ports of individual fuel cans intact.

I have never met an mmo that was not always in a permanent state of development. They grow, they change, they adjust, they rebalance, they add expansions small and enormous. Sometimes they even get it right.

Ita nice to see Novaquark finally listen to the cries of their community. I hope it's not too little too late.
 
I remember Deckard saying to ke directly that adding NPC PvE was never gonna happen due to the conflicting ideals for the game being player driven... I am glad they're realizing how badly it's needed. I may come back for a bit when this gets added.
 
Side note, jettesoning cargo is something you'd see if a real pirate was on your @SS. Instead of stopping players from doing it, with items being deleted.... drop the items as a lootable container behind the ship to be used as a decoy/dropping weight. Pirates can then double back for the package. Add more gameplay, don't restrict it further... I am so tired of yall restricting gameplay, so much I could / did in Beta can no longer do on the launch game because of that mentality. 
 
Apart from that, you didn't address the largest complaint right now on Steam reviews, and that is the game is a second job to play. It still needs some heavy balancing, and nothing in this post about the future has even hinted at that.  You can try to stifle players, but whales are still running alt mission running/field mining... with the solo player left to eat crumbs..  
 
All that I see left in terms of players are mostly hard-core PVP holdouts. Most of the PvE crowd beyond pure builders have already left... and a lot of them feel pushed out by PVP, and how BAD the pvp actually is. If you don't improve the overall combat experience...  will just end up with meh PvE, and lackluster PvP. 

i would suggest to reconsider the "for a single fuel tank"  bit.
a problem that all advanced Flight Huds have is the number of links on the control units. mainly the fuel tanks are the limiting factor, as whenever you have a bigger number of fuel tanks, those consume so many links, that we are unable to link all elements needed to control the ship to a single seat.  there are some workarounds in place, like not linking the fuel tanks and going via core and talent levels to try to get the correct amount of fuel in each of the fuel containers. but this is painful, difficult and honestly nothing we should have to do.

Just implement this change as a fuel "hub" allowing 10 fuel containers per fuel type to be accessed via one link and the problem would be solved, and wouldn't cause a risk,like increasing the general number of allowed links might do.

Hagbard.

Hello Noveans,

It has recently come to our attention that a number of static constructs have been deployed at an altitude above what we previously had defined as the vertical limit of around 1000m.  At this time we are unsure why this limit is not being applied as intended, and we are currently investigating this issue in order to resolve this.

As we are revisiting this limit while it is not currently functioning, we will be exploring our options to implement a more adjustable approach in order to have different limits for different planets. If successful we will also eventually be including this value at a later date in the shipped atlas.lua file, allowing Lua control units to also read this value for each planet and use it to fly above static constructs.

Why are you stifling my dream of building a tower that connects a moon to a planet!?
We also want to be clear about the reason for this limit, it is not here to stifle your dreams of building large towers and structures made of multiple static constructs. It is here, so we can ensure a reasonably safe boundary layer for atmospheric flight by all our players without the concern of encountering a random building in your flightpath while flying at high speeds. Chances are, the build limits will likely be slightly more accommodating than the previous system and allow for slightly more building height in the end, this however remains to be seen.

So what about the existing constructs that are not adhering to this restriction?
Well, as we are unsure why this build limit suddenly deactivated and we are refining it anyway. We will allow these constructs to remain for two weeks beyond the implementation of the new height restriction system. Two weeks after the new restrictions are in place, we will begin removing  or moving any static constructs beyond the defined altitude limit of each planet to ensure they are not inside the boundary layer. Keep an eye on the upcoming change logs for a list of the altitudes for each planet.

I hope this clears up any and all confusion on the topic, and thank you all for reading.
- NQ-Deckard

Greetings Noveans,
 
As many of you may have noticed, there have been no Market Bot buy orders available recently. We wanted to give you an update about this topic. 
 
The Market bots were initially designed to help kickstart the Helios economy for the launch of Dual Universe. It gave all Noveans a chance at earning more quanta at the beginning, in order to jumpstart the global in-game economy.
 
We have been closely watching the amount of quanta obtained selling to the Market Bots and we have determined that Market Bots are no longer needed and this ability has now been turned off, which means that players will no longer be able to sell to Market Bots.
 
A note from NQ-Entropy:
 
Just to establish some background, before Market Bots started running out, the T1 ore buy orders were the first quanta faucet in the game economy, with missions coming in second. Another point of note is that since the start of the game the total amount of quanta in the game has never stopped climbing. It was honestly a scary level of inflation for the early state of the game.

One of the reasons we had mentioned when we did the release wipe is that the economy was in trouble and the state and health of the economy is something we are paying especially close attention to after wipe. While we didn't communicate on this, and perhaps we should have, is that we knew we needed bot buy orders on launch, but we were unsure as to if and when we were going to refresh them. We know that there was some confusion about this and we do sincerely apologize for any miscommunication. However, it has become apparent that keeping bot orders refreshed would not be a good thing for the economy, and ultimately the game at large.

So let's talk about the game itself, there's a couple of things I want to mention. The realities of a game with a pseudo-economy and a real market is that we are in a basic version of supply and demand. If the supply for a resource is too high, the cost will fall. Unfortunately, it was too idealistic to think that everyone could free-farm a T1 ore territory cluster and make guaranteed (and quite high) profit. On average ore buy orders were seeding 3 to 4 times as much quanta as was being sinked by territory taxes.

The second thing I’d like to mention is that for most players there is no requirement for your territories to always be online. HQ territories still allow you to build and run industries. The only thing onlining a territory does is activate mining units and if it is unprofitable to do so, you may choose to offline/HQ your territories.

Territories and mining units were never meant as a means to print infinite money, sustainably, with no risk and limited effort. The tradeoff you are making when activating a territory and running mining units is paying tax for access to resources. What you do with those resources, and what is possible with those resources is up to you, and to an extent, the state of the game and its economy. It may be that it's a good time to make a profit on the market, but it may also be that you just need extra resources for honeycomb, scrap, or materials to run industries and make items you need.

If it is the case that the supply exceeds the demand, and as a result of that, prices sink, then it may be that the best solution for you is simply to go buy those cheap ressources at the market and take advantage of the surplus of resources. The more people do this, then demand should rise, and so will the cost, until we find some sort of equilibrium.
 
Adding another thing: Ultimately one of the main things that matter in all of this is fundamentally balancing our supply versus our demand. When it comes to T1 ore, the barrier to entry is incredibly low, even a starter character can have a basic mining unit setup over a couple territories in a few days. The question is, how many people as a rough percentage of the player-base are needed to supply the game with the resources that all players require? We fundamentally don't expect all players to need or want to gather resources, that's why markets exist. The real question is if that number is too high and too low. The issue that we are seeing now I believe is that while bots were still active, mining units were a good form of income for everyone, because the prices were artificially pumped up. That will not be the case anymore and we will have to find some form of equilibrium between people willing to farm resources and people who ultimately would prefer to buy them at a competitive price. For those staying in the MU field, as with any competitive endeavor, it will come down to organization, talents and preparation to stay competitive if you truly wish to make good profit selling ore from MU.
 
The counter-balance is that if resources were ever too expensive and demand was higher than supply, either due to some sort of market interdiction, or other similar phenomenon, anyone is free to pay for a couple territories to start flowing resources into the economy to rebalance the supply and demand or to acquire resources at a “cheaper” price. 

It could be that it requires too few people to supply the game with the resources it needs, and in that case, we have levers we can ultimately use to change the balancing of the game and make the demand higher, such as making crafting more resource demanding, or introducing more element sinks.

Finally, a note on buy and sell orders. We understand that without infinite buy orders the market feels less fluid. This is the reality of the size of our economy at this point in time. People will have to get more used to utilizing buy and sell orders as opposed to instant buy and sell. Don't get tricked by players putting up low buy orders, put up a sell order at a fair price and people will buy it. Make no mistake, people out there need ore, and are willing to pay for it.

We understand many of you enjoyed using the Market Bot orders, but ultimately this amount of quanta flowing into the economy could not last. We will be continuing to monitor the in-game economy very closely.

Dear Noveans,

With the launch behind us, it’s time we give you better insight into our direction of development for Dual Universe.

Before the release, our Creative Director gave an overview of many upcoming game features, and we want to expand on his letter by giving you a more precise look at what we’re working on specifically in our upcoming updates.

We are currently continuing to focus our work on the initial stabilization and resolution of issues following the launch, and we are also working on update 1.1 which we are aiming to release in December.
 
What’s Coming in Update 1.1?
 
Kickstarter Rewards: Part Two

We want to take this opportunity to thank you once again for your incredible support and patience. Kickstarter backers are the supporters that helped start Dual Universe. We’re working hard to deliver your rewards.
 
In update 1.1, you can look forward to the following:

- Two versions of pets, with a total of eight variations.
 
Automata Tier 1: Automata Nora-SP pet_agnes_tier1.mp4
 
Follow us on our social media to see the others in the coming days!
 
Automata Tier 2: Automata Nieve Automata Tier 3: Automata Spud-7 Automata Tier 4: Automata Max-E  Automata Tier 5: Automata Elite  
Anicham Tier 1: Anicham Scrap pet_alex_tier1.mp4
Follow us on our social media to see the others in the coming days!
 
Anicham Tier 2: Anicham Comp Anicham Tier 3: Anicham Max 
- Avatar skins for both body types:
 
(Gold/Sapphire/Ruby/Emerald/Diamond/Kyrium Kickstarter and Founder packs)
Alpha Team outfit
 
Follow us on our social media to see the others in the coming days!

(Silver+ / Contributors / Sponsors / Patrons)
Arkship Passenger outfit (Bronze) Military outfit (Gold+ / Sponsors / Patrons)
Arkship Passenger outfit (Silver) Earth Legacy outfit (Silver)     (Ruby+ / Patrons)
Arkship Passenger outfit (Black) Earth Legacy outfit (Black)
- New emotes:
(Gold+ / Sponsors / Patrons)
Dance
Cry
Thumbs down
 
Follow us on our social media to see the others in the coming days!
 
Thumbs up Just DU it  
(Ruby+ / Patrons)
Victory Threat Facepalm Silly dance Salute  
- In-game titles
 
Features
 
- Grid Snapping: with this feature, when deploying a blueprint, you can snap to the grid of another already placed core, like when placing a Space Core Unit. This feature will help you to align cores perfectly with one another while deploying blueprints.

- Steam Achievements

- Element recycling : dismantling elements back into a portion of their components.

- Eight new talents linked with schematic creation.
 
Looking further into the future, What’s in the 1.2 Update?

- Tactical Map: a visual display providing a tactical view of surrounding constructs detected by your active radar.

- New tools for finding wrecks and a minor revamp of the radar system.
 
- Changes to the Deep Space Asteroid Tracker and the asteroid system.
 
- Adding the ability for repair units to use scrap.
 
- New Orbital Delivery Challenge.
 
----------------------------------------------------------
 
We still have a lot of development planned in the longer term which you can read more about in the letter from our Creative Director, and we hope that we’ve given you a clearer picture of our immediate direction for Dual Universe. We will update you should this planning change significantly, and look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback in this forum thread.

It’s been an incredible month since launching Dual Universe. We’ve worked hard to address issues, and though we always want to do better, we hope you’ve enjoyed the game so far. All across Helios, wonders are already taking shape as you bring the game to life. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build in the coming months and years. From all of us here at Novaquark, thank you for being a part of our game.

Yep, that's the other thing. Keeping the machines loaded with schematics is tedious in the extreme, even for a small factory. I've got 8 assmeblers right now, and I can never keep them (and the machines that supply them with parts) all happily fed!

If the idea is to discourage mega factories, then they should have done something where the difficulty started lower, but scaled exponentially - so it was easy for small setups and much harder for large ones. This feels like the balance might be a bit off. In order to stock all the machines for a long time, I'd need a hell of a lot of money, to make a hell of a lot of schematics.

I don't have a problem with there being some money sinks, but the whole tile tax thing does seem badly thought out (like so many aspects of the game design).
 
I grabbed a nice tile on Alioth near District 3. I started building out my factory there, completely forgetting about the tax. A week later, boom - nothing working until I pay my 500k.
 
For now I've done it, but I'm seriously contemplating decamping the whole thing to Sanctuary, even though it will be a massive hassle. I'm not aiming to be making 10s of millions a week, so that rent is subtantial.
 
The stupid thing about this from a game design point of view is that I like being based around a relatively high population area like D3, as it means that there are people around most of the time, which gives me a sense that I'm actually playing an MMO - even if a lot of the time I'm just doing my own thing.
 
If I move everything to Sanctuary, I'll spend most of my time on my own (even though my tile there is also near the equivalent District 3, it is deathly quiet compared with Alioth).
 
So the net effect of this bit of game design is to discourage me from basing myself near other people - which does not seem like a positive for an MMO... 😕

I posted up a small example for my Modula scripting framework.
 
It's still early days, but hopefully it will be of interest to someone, somewhere (possibly in a galaxy far, far away...).

Sorry to see another talented old Player go.. you did so much for the Player community and created the kind of content this game needs.
I was in doubt if i would return as well, but am giving DU a try again now...
even though they broke their promises.
Thx for all you have done for DU!
Hagbard
 

It's not ridiculous in context. It's just the straw that broke the camel's back. A snarky reply ignoring the actual concern. Like others have pointed out, if they're allowed to do it, so can you and have no fear of breaking the rules, you could surround the markets with "legitimate" buildings for whatever reason, or multiple players could do it for different reasons, and NQ would be unable to take action by their rules.

It isn't about autopilot either, Arch said himself that his script shouldn't encounter an issue because of the auto-avoidance stuff he has built in. It's the principle of changing the rule to avoid them taking action against the clearly offending construct. Until NQ remembers why they put in that rule in the first place (for performance and playability considerations) likely nothing will be done.

What people on Discord, this thread and the other thread clearly don't understand is that NQ literally created precedent for other people who have tiles connected to markets to do the same. It isn't about ArchHUD, autopilot or even missions, for that matter, it's just that accordingly to NQ-Rubicon's own words, the market rules are only enforced within Aphelia (market) tiles, nowhere else. So if players decide to build towers obstructing markets or spam screens with advertisements on their connected tiles, they are allowed to do it, based on what was said.

 
The precedent is now set, it's NQ's "official" statement about the subject, and honestly, I'm tired of that subject already. I already got my punishment by NQ for talking on the subject and don't want to get into that rabbit hole again, just to get punished again. So much hassle.
 
Anyways, let's see how long this holds up and this interpretation of the rule stays valid.

You me both... twas the 0.23 exodus of players.  I was 2 days away from my warp beacon to start cooking and came back to discover a 800,000,000 (yeah, if memory serves, it was 800M, later reduced to 200M) schematic fee to start up the warp beacon factory.  Left the game until a few weeks ago after that point.
 
Only good news:  once you start racking in quanta, just start making 12 hours of schematics before you call it a night.  Those T1 Product smelters will run for awhile is you load them with 500 schematics each.  Still feels its a crappy solution that just adds distraction and worse, frustration, to the game.  e.g.  it makes the game less fun to play, not more.

Yup. 'Tis a pitiful and inelegant mechanic. Better than "You have to pay upmty million Quanta to start your machine" that was the first iteration of schematics that drove me instantly out of Beta. But "making players do busywork" isn't adding to the USPs of the game that might raise it above the competition.
 
Yeah. Scaling doesn't seem to have been a consideration in the implementation of the "stop the servers dying from overwork" mechanic. I guess a thousand facs of 100 elements each is just as server-killing as 10 facs of 10000 elements.

That's why I'm just focused on building a base on Haven - property tax free - and having fun flying the ship I designed at the end of beta specifically to be able to get flying with nothing but a source of T1 and a nanopack.
 
I did build a fuel factory and a general workshop to make things I can't nanocraft. Maybe I'll get back to bigger ships when the markets are healthier, but I don't expect to ever claim any taxable land. That was a PITA in beta and I'm just avoiding it now.

I'm an addicted player, although very grumpy about it.  I have 6 tiles on Alioth's south pole, within linking distance of the marketplace there.  All 6 are completely mined, and heavily produce Quartz - my main cash ore since my factory uses it the least.  Cash for taxes is not a problem.  Ore for building is.  I'm completely dependent on calibration charges now since I've already raided all the adjoining public tiles and stripped them of ore.  Really throttling me now.
 
So the 500K/week/tile isn't a problem for me, but sure would be if I, god forbid, only wanted to play a few hours a day (or *shudder* a few hours a week).  In that case, Sanctuary (if I was a backer), and Haven otherwise would be my only option. 
 
Whats making me grumpy:  Constantly running out of schematics!  Not particularly fun to finally get my XL assembler up and running just to discover a single run schematic takes 8 hours to build.  Just sucks the fun out of what is suppose to be a creativity game for me.
 
Oh, I've reported it as a bug a week ago, and of course have not heard back, but adjacency bonuses apparently don't apply on Sanctuary.

Understand.  Play any way that makes you happy.
 
Personally, I like to deep dive and do solo what would make a team of 6 proud - but these taxes are really bumming me out.  Have to learn to play when not tired too - sent 500,000 credits to the wrong org, because, you know, the UI doesn't just let you deposit to an org wallet, you need to search your org name each time, and mine is a superset of another.
 
Also feels like it won't be long before I hit a tax ceiling I won't be able to break through - just in terms of hours per day per character they can spend creating schematics, presuming I can find a way to fund them.

Patch 1.0.1 states "Fixed a potential exploit", was that exploit actual misused? Do you have a way to check that? And if it was misused, did you roll back the misuse?
 
Because during the last two years during beta, NQ has fixed exploits, but never the misuse that was done with them. That resulted in the economical mess in DU that required a complete wipe. If NQ doesn't roll back exploit misuses, we'll be at the same state in another two years (another wipe)... So that's why I find such info important.
 
Edit: Patch 1.0.3 states "Fixed an exploit.", that sounds like it was actually misused. So where the misuses rolled back as well here? What happened to the accounts that were exploiting?

Well, almost a week into this.  Was really excited, but now it feels like all I do is pay taxes.  Taxes to add territories, Taxes to build anything non-trivial, trivial taxes to sell.  I can't tell you how many times I've run out of Tier 1 Product schematics after leaving for a bit of sleep just to discover I'm out of them again in the morning and nothing happened overnight.
 
Taxes every WEEK to keep what I've built.
 
Not feeling very good about this right now.
 
Update:  By "a week into this", that's after playing for years, disappearing after 0.23, and coming back about a month before launch to refresh the mechanics in my mind.

You need to research the Axe... 😉
 

Yes, completely agree. There are many little immersion breaking details like this. They are not catastrophic, but are a constant low level irritation. 

There a quite a few minerals and their derivatives that defy physics in this way and its silly.  Refined product should never weigh more than the sum of all its components.  I pointed this out at the beginning of BETA and everybody seemed to think I was crazy, so, dont expect to get any support.  It annoys me because a science fiction game should be based in science.  If you cant understand basic science such as 2kg plus 1 KG does not equal 6KG  then what the hell else is wrong.

Having wood come from carbon and oxygen isn't unreasonable, those are the basic elements in most organic matter anyway (and hydrogen, but they want to keep the low level products 2 materials). 
 
I guess what annoys me is that the game does so much right: silumin, duralumin, inconel are all real alloys, for example. Of course I'm not expecting modeling real world properties or anything, but the idea that "you refine ores to get rid of the mass you don't want and get the pure element inside" is so basic it breaks my immersion a little bit when it's so obviously violated.