Zeddrick

Javascript has inconsistencies, sure. But array subscripts starting from 1? It's not right.

You'd think it would be compatible, but Lua is a bit of a mad language though, why couldn't they have picked Javascript! andy@smiley:~$ lua Lua 5.2.4 Copyright (C) 1994-2015 Lua.org, PUC-Rio > function foo() >> return 0 >> end > function bar() >> return false >> end > print(foo()) 0 > print(bar()) false > if not foo() then print("yay") >> end > if not bar() then print("yay") end yay > if foo() == 0 then print("yay") end yay > if bar() == 0 then print("yay") end > Looking at the list of changed functions, there are going to be a lot of upset people using DRM protected LUA scripts when this comes out!

I don't think this is any different from things like the stacked element changes -- you could spend money on a construct and then NQ is happy to break that and send you back to the original builder for repairs. The original builder might not want to help you, and then you're on your own. It's not a very good way to encourage users to create content in a game which relies heavily on users creating and selling content. I know of people who stopped shipbuilding because of the element stacking changes, for example. You can un-DRM by picking up the element and re-dropping it. Then you have to re-boost and re-apply the new version of the code from whoever wrote it. If it isn't a standard LUA script you can download or buy you're SOL.

But this has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. Did you even read it or did you just skipread 'PvE' and 'PvP'. GO back and actually read it. Explain how your brainfart is even remotely relevant to what I said?

So long as the PvE enemy is still there and you defeat it in order to get the wreck back that's cool too! I just don't the idea that your shipwreck is somehow teleported back for you. You fight something and in wins they should get your ship.

Assuming nobody is a coward, they're fine with losing the ship to PvE if they lose a mission, right? I don't really see why dumping a ship in PvP space would be *worse* than exploding it. The player can just abandon it if they want, and then it's just like it would be if it got exploded in PvE. Or if they fancy a challenge they can try to save it and they might have some fun doing that. Or are you suggesting that they lose a PvE fight and just get to keep their ship? That's PvE for cowards.

Nah, I want to fight the other people who come out to try to get the ship. And hopefully the ship is still intact, just ran out of time in the mission. So it ought not to be defenceless.

I meant why are they playing PvE, which is a combat game. But you knew that, right?

Why? Either you lose the ship or you get dumped in PvP space and your location is broadcast. If you don't want to PvP you just force respawn and lose the ship, which is what would have happened anyway. Or if you feel lucky you can try to get back to safety and perhaps save something you would otherwise lose. Either way the PvP groups can go to the location and fight each other for the ship or just because they saw each other in space and wanted to shoot somebody. Seems like everybody wins. I mean, some people are suggesting you should get to keep the ship anyway after losing at PvE, but if they're that risk averse why are they playing a combat game at all? Where's the fun in not risking anything? Perhaps the lower tiers could have small rewards and be for the cowards while anyone willing to risk their ship gets to do higher tiers and get better rewards?

I reckon it would be easier to just supply the data as nested dictionaries instead of JSON in the first place. Perhaps with on-demand loading of the data to deal with things which are rarely accessed.

For consequences of losing a mission, please dump the player somewhere in the PvP zone complete with their ship in whatever state it was in when the mission ended and somehow announce the location to everyone. The player get the possibility to not lose their ship and PvPers can join in with the fun!

Missions *still* inject an unsustainable amount of quanta. Look at DAC prices. It only works because of the low player count at the moment.

Do you think they know that ^ means XOR in most programming languages?

If a company that size is trying to do three things at once then either they're doing very insubstantial things or they're doing it wrong. Put the focus on one thing so you can be agile, create feedback loops with users and respond to change requirements fast. Most likely they have a stack of tech, a product that's failing and no idea what to do next so they're just arsing about with whatever crazy ideas they come up with to see if anything works.

Do you think it was really lying early on (implying intentionally deceiving knowing full well they would not be able to deliver what they were promising)? I think there was a lot of naive optimism and overpromising, probably because JC was new to the industry, but IIRC the actual lying started happening after 0.23 and JC's departure. IMO that was probably the moment the company realised they couldn't deliver on their promises and started, for example, to use 'constructive ambiguity' to charge people to play in a persistent universe which they knew they were going to delete later. And, as with everything else it was trying to be, DU was a poor successor to eve online too. The real selling point was if you wanted a game which had all of these different facets available that could grow over a very long time. I think with proper focus and planning DU might have got somewhere really good after, say, 10 years of growing had it not alienated most of the players early on. SO I don't think it was really lies.

Completely disagree with the 'what brought anyone here was the building' comment. Look at the few people who are still here, a lot of them have 'alpha' tags. Back when there were a lot of people interested in DU it was mostly people who came through the alpha and early beta stages of the game. Those people came because of JC's original vision of the game and nothing since then has succeeded in drawing even a fraction of the same number of players here. As a building game DU is mediocre at best. Voxels are slow, hard to work with and really really bad at very simple things like 45 degree rotation of part of a construct, curved surfaces, etc. Also the detail is coarse, there are minimal surface texture options, etc. Look at the difference when you start adding decorative elements, etc. If voxels were good enough we wouldn't need elements. It's sort of nice for a video game because it means that there can be skill, but the problem is for the less skilled and less patient people there's a ceiling which means that most people have built everything they want to build within a month or two and then the building game part ends for them. The rendering engine is also poor, rendering voxels and elements at different distances so you can see through doors as you approach them, for example. Factory gameplay is fun for some, and quite detailed with a bit of depth although NQ seems to have completely forgotten about concepts like opportunity cost which would have turned it into an actual game with optimisation decisions, etc instead of an exercise in just putting more and more machines down forever to build everything. If I put a machine down there should be something else I can't do because I chose to run that machine, then it would be good. Again you'll get to a point fairly quickly where you have done a big factory and only a few will want to continue on from there. Your point about PvP is a good one. Being able to go shoot those people who are stealing your ship (or fly up and board theirs while they loot you or whatever) is something which would have added a lot of depth to DU. I spent a fair amount of time doing PvP and I don't find being on the opposite side of that (shooting someone on an asteroid) to be very much fun after the first couple of goes either. Other types of PvP are fun but the game relied on multiple PvP focussed groups developing to provide PvP content and that didn't happen (partly because of limited reasons for it to happen) so PvP never really took off enough to attract a large crows. When I was a computer science student a lecturer put a picture of a duck on the board. "This is a duck. It can swim, fly and walk but it isn't particularly good at any of these things". And went on to explain how if you try to make your software do too many things it isn't very good at any of them. And I think this is the problem with the original DU in a nutshell. You can go back and find JC quotes to the effect of "you've seen all these features before but not all in the same game". They tried to make it do too many things. And we all liked that because it sounded like a great game, and that is the only thing about DU which has ever attracted a large enough crowd to sustain an MMO. Nothing they have done since has drawn people in and retained them in the same way. Everyone will have their favourite part, but will admit that it isn't perfect and needs more work. But I don't think any single part of the game is strong enough to carry the game without significant work. Any sort of 'take out all but XXX' change would instantly lose most of the players and the remaining game would fail to attract replacements, so they're stuck. Based on the things NQ is saying it looks like the studio are doing something along the lines of what you suggest, but it won't be DU, it will be a completely different game that isn't held back by trying to do too many things.

The thing about web3 is that you can make all your money upfront doing some scammy crypto-token thing and then move on without having to get the hard part right at all.

The fact that you can post this and not get a ton of replies telling you that you'd be mad to sub for 12 months because the game is dead tells us everything we need to know about the current state of DU.

All kinds of bad things would happen in a game as small as DU with a public ledger. For example, if I sell you something like a beacon then I know which entity in the ledger is you and I know everything you buy and sell from then on. Really one would need to have 10s of thousands of trading entities at a minimum to make it work properly. And I don't think the blockchain adds anything here. You still have to trust NQ to actually put all trades onto the blockchain and to track entities inside the game and ensure that only one in game entity is represented by each object on the blockchain. At that point they might as well just keep their ledger in a database and give you an API to query it, the blockchain adds nothing at all besides noise, buzzword compliance and the illusion that someone is going to somehow magically create a tradable commodity out of it and make a lot of money from that on the side.

I enjoyed the changelog. The dancing gnomes were my favourite.

The beacon exploit thing reminds me of the time when they gave everyone cheap schematics in beta and just let them keep them because taking them back was too hard. I mean, it should be really obvious that this was dodgy and really easy to find where the beacon went. It's not like there are many of them in the game. And surely it should be really easy to see who ran the maintenance unit on there. This is not just going to go away, everyone will remember that the second strongest PvP group in the game cheated to avoid losing the most expensive item in the game and NQ just let them get away with it, just like they let people keep all those schematics. Of course looking back at the schematic thing now it seems fairly obvious that they had already decided to wipe the game and were therefore only prepared to go so far to keep things running. It makes me wonder what decisions they have made about the current game if they won't put in the effort to take that beacon back? It's a far cry from the NQ in the first month of release swinging the ban hammer for exploits ....

But most likely their PC was compromised by something completely different and this is just a symptom.

PVE will save us all!

I enjoyed the whole requisition thing when it was first done. It was good content and DU wouldn't be the only game to make you lose your stuff if you stop playing without putting it away correctly. Given the problems with people losing constructs due to org construct slots and it being hard to see that I think a magic BP would be better actually. I did enjoy the post wipe for a while, it was fun building back up again and it did get a lot of people back into the game who hadn't played in a long time. But I agree that it was a missed opportunity because, as many of us predicted before it, they just made all the same mistakes again and ended up right back in the same place as a result. Perhaps they will try it again?

But the alternative is worse, right? The game puts everyone into a shared space and if people are able to claim bits of that space and then disappear forever (like they could in beta) the result is going to be wasteland around all of the premium real-estate because nobody will ever have a reason to give back a market 6 tile, high quality mining tile, etc. They will just leave the game with those in HQ mode in case they ever want to come back. Rich players can just buy a DAC, use it to sub a new toon for 1 month, give it some HQ tiles and then unsub it so they can hold a very large number of tiles, thereby inflating the value of tiles and supporting their DAC purchases. The maintenance unit does make it easier now to take things apart, although if you have a huge amount of stuff then yeah, that's still work. Perhaps people with huge holdings are better off selling them or handing over their org to someone who still plays when taking a break? And isn't that better too? Do we really want a load of orgs run by people who aren't even bothering to subscribe any more? At the moment though I don't think anyone has to worry about what will happen to their stuff if they take a 3 month break....