Zeddrick

The SSL part just proves who you're talking to. If you have no idea who you're talking to then yes, any SSL certificate will do. But even then a scammer who hacks the proxy you're using /controls the wifi hotspot/whatever can't pretend to be the website you're visiting and serve you up malware. You actually have to visit a site that the bad actor controls (Let's Encrypt does do some validation and will not just hand out a certificate for a site you don't control). So I can put a site behind SSL using lets encrypt, but not a site called dualuniverse.com. For something like DU, that means that the download comes from their URL and the certificate has to point to their URL. If a bad actor tries to redirect the download to somewhere bad and the download does proper endpoint verification then that won't work.

The error the OP posted has nothing to do with code signing (it's a zip file and you can't sign one of those) and everything to do with some malware detector or other detecting a trojan. It might be a false positive, but if it were then you would expect others to have seen the same thing and as far as I can tell nobody else did. So probably what happened is the OP has a trojan of some sort which modified the zipfile and that then got detected by the malware scanner. Or perhaps DU is coded badly and there was a man in the middle attack.

Completely agree that they planned for the wipe for a long time. It makes a lot of sense of things that happened over that time (for example the schematic giveaway not being rolled back). It makes me quite distrustful of the company as a whole and makes me think that taking my money and using it to fund other projects while running DU on a shoestring knowing it will be short lived is definitely something they would do.

Yeah, this. Scammy games, IMO, are games which just intended to take peoples' money and nothing else. I think NQ genuinely did have plans for DU, and are even now still trying to make it work. If it were my business, though, I would also be putting a lot of effort into a replacement revenue stream at this point and it looks like that's what they are doing. It's hard to fault it even if it is sad, from our POV, that NQ the company doesn't want to put 100% into DU and then go down with the ship. Same. I'm still playing DU even today as my 6 month subs start to expire and most of my characters start to go away. It was fun and I got my money's worth out of it. Even the really successful developers can succumb to the blockchain BS it seems: https://venturebeat.com/games/ccp-games-raises-40m-for-new-triple-a-web3-game-in-the-eve-universe/ I have yet to see a genuine blockchain based app that didn't also have a trusted entity somewhere in the value chain, undermining the whole proposition but so long as there are idiots prepared to put in money for buzzword compliant blue sky projects the crypto world will keep retrying this over and over and over and over. I wish NQ and CCP luck with this but in the words of Dragons' Den "I won't be investing, I'm out" ...

Yeah, trying to develop an ambitious game in a small studio is a big ask to begin with. Trying to do so when the game is not the 100% singular focus of the entire company is complete suicide. It became obvious when DU launched and it turned out that 'the future of DU' was dancing avatars that the company didn't realise how short their runway really was and that trying to collect sub money and just make small tweaks wasn't going to cut it. And now the big 6 month crunch is here (where people who took out 6 month subs when the price rise was announced have to decide whether to pay again, at a higher rate, or walk away). This is the end of the runway and we're still on the ground. Right now without a seriously big thing happening I'd give the game 4-8 weeks.

This is just badly designed. I have heard that people who play using DAC are unsubscribed briefly when one DAC expires and the next has not yet been applied. Even if this gap is very short like 5 minutes the constructs loaned by that character to their org are withdrawn and need to be manually redone. The same could happen with a credit card error or similar. I know of people who lost constructs like this because everyone has a lot of notifications and I don't think anyone really reads them. When someone loses their work like this they are almost guaranteed to quit and it's hard to imagine why it was left like this. You would think there would be big red messages every time the player logs in for the whole time the constructs are counting down. How hard can that be?

If easy anti cheat is free, how does the company that makes it make money?

That aged well ...

So for me, there were all sorts of small failures along the way (many in beta, some since) but they are all really just details next to the central problem. One of the key features of the design for DU was that players would provide *all of the content*. That meant that the game just needed to provide the mechanics and frameworks and literally everything else would be player driven. Now players did actually try to do this. There were people who created puzzles, etc for people to solve, created factions who fought each other, tried to build whole cities and many other interesting things. The game and its developers seem to fight against content creators at every turn - recent examples being ship builders being put off because the stacked element checker means they have no way to know whether or not they are selling ships which will error 6 months later and warring factions being put off because nobody can shoot each other in battles. Putting that aside though, I think that the one thing this game has proved beyond all doubt is that a game with solely player built content does not work. You need to have some other content created by the game itself first in order to create gameplay loops that players can do when they aren't doing any group content. A player needs to be able to just log in, play for 1/2 an hour, enjoy that time and profit from it. So the one thing I would have done right away is add some background life to the game. Put creatures in that might attack the player, make some basic challenges on the ground and in space, give players something to shoot at and reasons for doing so (protect base, get resources, whatever). That would also give them a reason to team up, live in walled villages or space stations with a large shield, etc. Some of this was in the original game design videos which were put out. Then I would have built on it by adding more of a survival element to the game, adding PvE and NPCs to allow players to make their spaces more interesting. I can build a huge space station but it has nobody in it at the moment, let me make it more interesting, make a bar where NPCs come and players I let in might be able to get missions from those NPCs. I think that would have given players much more of a sense of shared purpose and struggle and a reason to come together into groups and play together. As it is the game is, frankly, boring. It's a game relying on player created content which literally deletes player created content on a regular basis made by a company which has no problem with breaking existing content and blaming that on the players trying to create it. The world itself, and the constructs the game allows you to create, are fairly static and uninteresting too and it is difficult to come up with actual functions for many of the rooms in a construct. I can add a bed but it has no use. A lot of the cool stuff I see is just huge empty shell buildings with one or two rooms because people made them to look pretty rather than because they needed the space for things.

More importantly. none of the people who actually play the game were impressed either. Organising and preparing for that sort of a fight is not a trivial and stress-free task and when the final result is both sides agreeing that they can't fight each other successfully because of the game then that's another huge fail. For me these types of fights were the only reason I was coming back and it's hard to see that there will be many more in the near future when they end like this, would you want to put in the hours and suffer the stress for that result?

On Friday evening there was a battle for the Gamma alien core. I know a lot of people aren't interested in that sort of thing, but I also know that at least 80 players were involved, possibly more. People would have begun logging in at perhaps 8pm UTC and I'm not sure how lont the battke went on for, many would have had 2 or 3 hour sessions at least. If you look at the usage graph on steamdb (https://steamdb.info/app/2000270/charts/) you can see that the numbers aren't very different from the numbers over other weeks. You can see the downward spike where the servers needed an emergency reset after we had tortured them for a few hours. What you can't see is an extra bunch of players logging in for the fight. There are around 100 concurrent players there, and even an extra 30 would have pushed the numbers up significantly. I'm not really sure what this is telling us about the steam numbers but they certainly aren't an indicator of the health or otherwise of the game as a whole. The steam DU community seems, at a glance, to be disconnected from the rest of us.

FTP games are nearly all horrible. For online games I only ever play ones with a sub now.

Well many of us saw what happened last night when under 100 players tried to kill each other. Neither side could shoot each other properly. At one point both seats on my ship were shooting the same target and getting hits but the guns were firing in completely different directions. With 100,000 they would need to spread people out more, meaning more planets, more solar systems, etc and then it might scale.

No, even eve online at over 400,000 players is still too small to go F2P. And it took them a loong time to get there. No way anyone thinks they can go from single digit thousands of players to F2P funded by cosmetics in one go. I mean, is it going to bring 100,000 players? Will they stay long enough to buy anything?

It has a player count in the 10s of millions. DU has a player count in the single digit thousands. That means that if BDO spends $1,000 creating a player skin which sells for $1 it only needs to sell 1,000 to the 12 million players to break even. The same maths in DU means it would need to sell to something like 1 in 5 players just to break even, and not cover any server costs at all. Games which go F2P need a huge upfront investment (loss making) to create a large player base to sell to.

I saw the advert somewhere else actually so it might have been paraphrased or cut down from that one. The question with going F2P is 'will it make more money than the sub is making'. IMO that's a definite no at the moment, even games like eve online with a giant playerbase can't make that fly and have to keep the sub as well as other monetisation. The other question is 'will it bring more players?'. For me that's a 'no' too. There are people who think it will, just like there were people who thought a wipe would do the same. And for a short while those people would be right, just like with the wipe. But then all those free players will leave again without having paid anything, leaving behind constructs, etc which will need to be stored (because how do you remove those if you aren't using sub expiration -- it's not just a case of removing things, DU would be fundamentally broken if there were no subs and this is just one example). If I were NQ I would absolutely not want to do any sort of F2P. Really F2P games fall into 2 categories (some do a mix): - cosmetic only ones. You pay some people to constantly create a ton of content to the players. That's the product and the game is just a vehicle to sell that stuff. The game wants to have a low run overhead so the people who buy nothing are not such a drag on everything. DU is server-heavy and, given the amount of changes we saw to reduce server cost, not a game with a low run overhead. Also you need to constantly make new content so you need a large player base to spread the content creation cost across. - something like a season pass pretending to be a sub. In an MMO that means nerfing the game heavily for anyone who doesn't buy the pass. A bit like alpha in eve. But DU finds it hard to retain players at the moment, nerfing them would make it *really* hard to retain them and if people don't want to sub why would they use the season pass? -Pay to win. Here the free players are effectively the product which is sold to the whales as a group of people to be better than/beat/etc. DU doesn't really revolve around adversarial content much so what would the whales pay for? Also this needs a large population of non-whales because it's not very much fun playing in one of these games if you aren't a whale so there's a lot of player churn. The last thing DU needs is a lot of player churn. For me the sub is really the only way to go. I think in any case sub games appeal more to older gamers -- by the time you get into your mid 20s you probably have a ton of bigger subscriptions anyway ranging from netflix/spotify/whatever up to power bills, council tax and mortgages and suchlike and the sub cost is really irrelevant. I could buy over 4 one-month subs for the price of the '5 guys' I ordered last night, for example. I think this is also the demographic DU appeals to anyway because of the slow pace and patience required so the sub model is a match. It's also the only one which really works with low player counts because the income from the sub matches the costs the player incurs. If I were NQ right now I would be looking at other ways to take the technology from DU and roll it into other games which would have broader appeal to replace the revenue they currently get from DU as it winds down. I would also be looking at ways to design those from the start to be F2P friendly so I might be hiring someone for that ...

I used to just use a regular script for this type of ship but now I have a special script I wrote which does the hovering for me. I hit space to go up and when I let go it slows down and holds the height I stopped at. I can tap c or space to nudge up and down at that point. The lua in the flush call which does the hovering looks like this: -- Vertical Translation local verticalStrafeEngineTags = 'thrust analog vertical' if (verticalInput > 0) then unit.setEngineThrust(verticalStrafeEngineTags, 1000000000) end if (verticalInput == 0) then local verticalStrafeAcceleration = (-vec3(self.core.getWorldGravity())) -- force to keep us hovering. local accelerationCommand = verticalStrafeAcceleration * (1 / math.cos(math.rad(curMaxDeg))); Nav:setEngineForceCommand(verticalStrafeEngineTags, accelerationCommand, 0, 'airfoil', 'ground', '', tolerancePercentToSkipOtherPriorities) end if (verticalInput < 0) then unit.setEngineThrust(verticalStrafeEngineTags, 0) end Where verticalInput is 1/0/-1 for up/hover/down. Engines which point down will get the vertical tag automatically. Edit: Actually you probably don't need the (1 / math.cos(math.rad(curMaxDeg))) stuff as that's for when the construct is flying by tilting at an angle ...

Not saying that those things won't raise money. They won't raise as much money as the sub. So do it as well as a sub is good, going FTU and relying on that stuff to pay the bills is suicide.

If you want a centralised server-heavy game like DU to be non-subscription you might as well ask for chocolate to rain from the sky! Eve added all of these things, but it kept the subscription component as well (there are alphas but nobody really uses those seriously except as alts). DU absolutely would not work as a FTP game. I could have 100 free accounts and mission run or automine with them. Don't let the free accounts do that? It would be broken from the start like the Alphas in eve, which are more of a 'try before you buy' type of account than anything else. DU has limited free-to-play already on steam and it didn't solve any problems. I'm pretty sure the rest of that job advert talks about the exciting new projects the company is working on so I don't think it's necessarily a Dual Universe role being advertised. IIRC the advert doesn't mention things like MMO, 'our current product' or anything like that.

You don't even need the tag IIRC. Just point them down with a regular flying construct script and use space to go up/c to go down. It's how the 'magic carpet' worked. I'm not sure if it will hover or not, if it doesn't you might need alt-space/alt-c or some lua for that. I can't remember. When I do this I have a special script which allows vertical-engine-only ships to fly horizontally by pitching or rolling.

Yeah, when you can't even have someone build and sell a ship and have someone buy it and use it without issues that's a huge fail for the game.

It used to be that you could ask a GM to fix these and it would be OK again. Someone on discord says that tickets are actually responded to quickly sometimes now so you could try that? Also IIRC sometimes that element state corrects itself after some time so you could wait a day and hope it goes away.

I shouldn't have to be still saying this, but: This is utterly ridiculous. The ship has been working for months and the elements aren't actually stacked at all. This is another generic, unmodified ship which others are flying without any issues. It's just a bug. It seems to happen after ships take some element damage or get repaired by a repair unit or something. Can you please just turn the damn thing off. If any of the other 12 people still playing want to stack elements I honestly don't care any more. Let them. Just stop making me spend hours playing 'hunt the element' and 'debug the ship' on a ship I didn't build and don't even know where all the 'Adjustor L' elements are. And no, I don't want to go back to the ship builder and ask them to fix it. I have seen shipbuilders complaining that they get a constant stream of 'my ship has stacked elements' and they can't really do anything about it either. NQ Please just find this code, press ctrl-a and hit delete. Everyone will thank you for it.

Well, if I were new there might be more mileage in the game. But I've been playing since before beta and done everything now so I'm mostly just playing occasionally for the fights and sometimes I run a mission or build something. The wipe added a few months of interest re-treading old ground but now I'm just running the occasional mission and even that has been buggered up now, the last 2 times I ended up losing all my money though due to problems with the game. Without being able to run missions it's difficult to justify even having more than a couple of the accounts any more - PvP is pretty much all I'm sticking around for at this point and I either need 1 or 2 of those depending on whether or not I can multi-box. And multi-boxing hasn't worked the last 4 or 5 times I've tried it for different reasons. I think a bigger problem for the game is the percentage of people on these forums with the 'Alpha Tester' tag. It's most people still here. And we're probably all feeling the same now.

If there is a message saying 'you cannot use a VM' then that's different from previous things that have been done. Even if this is accidental you would think it would be an easy fix. GFN is more interesting. It does work but only if you are on Steam. There was a suggestion made in a discord I'm in that this is to inflate the steam numbers? Seems like mo good reason for it to be switched off of it works. I'm planning to unsub all but one account when the subs end because of the unreliability of dual boxing over the last few months. Not sure if I will find enough to do with just one account though.