Zeddrick

When I tried to play in a VM it actually printed 'you can't play in a VM'. That looks pretty deliberate IMO, not just something broken by accident.

This one is my personal favourite. No diagnostic at all. It seems to appear when you put your username and password in so quickly it thinks you might be a bot, although people who actually are using automation to log in to their account still seem to be able to do so, so who knows what this is for? Perhaps it's just yet another poor-quality cockup?

Yes, thanks. I did eventually restart the PC the next morning and that did, in fact, make it go away. I was just really cross with the game at that point for other reasons and this was the last straw. I set out with my shiny new repair unit to see if I could 'create some content' but all I got were freezes (3 minutes to exit a seat?!), stuttering (my previously-OK-for-the-whole-life-of-DU machine can't run the game properly any more as it takes up a lot more resource now) and wierd behaviour for the disassembler that surely can't be intended and then finally I got locked out. At least I didn't get the element stacking thing again yet ...

Tried to play, was having a wierd error where my ship bounced up and down for a couple of minutes with controls/panning/etc locked every time I tried to get out of my seat. Eventually I got fed up and started doing 'end task' and restarting. Now I get this: Happens every time I try to run before I even get to the login window. No obvious reason why, and at this point I can't even be bothered to investigate it, This type of thing isn't a big surprise any more really. I'll just unsub again and go back to Stellaris because at least it works.

I notice you added 'as a subscription product' on the end of that statement as though there were any viable alternatives to it being one. What would you do instead. As I see it the alternatives are: - make it a one-off payment. In this case the initial investment is significantly *higher*, probably 4+ months of sub. How does that make it more likely to attract new players? Seems to me this is mainly of interest to the players who stopped playing and as you said those aren't enough. - make it f2p with a cash shop or whatever. Seems like a cash shop would struggle for the same reason the game struggles, lack of content. I mean, if they can't afford to make enough content to keep things interesting for subscribers, how would they afford it with less money. They'd sell a few things up front sure, but what do I keep coming back and buying? DAC? Isn't that like a sub? And even if you could do something other than a sub, things like mining units, missions, etc would be even more broken if you could run an ever-increasing number of characters by adding a new one every few months which you could then keep forever. And right now some of those things are primary content for a lot of players. I don't know if anyone thinks there is a growing player base here, or even disputes the decline. It's just that some of us think it could get better because it's not dead yet. Personally I can see a change in the pace of development and a genuine attempt to turn things around and I'm hoping that they come up with a winning formula soon. It's a shame we're here after so many chances to get it right but it is still possible for the game to do a No Man's Sky IMO. They just have to use their limited resources effectively and come up with some genuinely engaging gameplay.

Or perhaps someone signed up 200 more alts to farm missions?

Sure. Agree with all that. But forum posts don't actually run up server costs either. The point I'm trying to make is that if you're here complaining or just talking down the game then the game still has you. And there are a lot of people in that category. Look at the numbers right after the wipe -- most of those people were bitching on the forums for months before and not playing and then suddenly wipe and a load of them came back and played. So long as the game still lives in enough peoples' heads then it can't be a dead game. And the number of people making 'dead game' posts, ironically, shows that the game still lives on in quite a few heads, even if it does so rent-free because they aren't playing any more.

It will only be dead when you and the many others like you actually give up on it. You are here and even though you seem to be one of those who wants to help push it over the edge by putting others off playing you clearly haven't walked away yet and neither have many others. People are just waiting and if there's a turnaround they might still come back. When I go 3 months without seeing a single 'game is dead' type of post here, on reddit or on the discord is when I'll think that the game actually is dead. I'm an infrequent visitor these days but I see them all the time right now.

An interesting possibility would be to allow people to pilot and gun on ships while in VR. They would have no talents, so would be less effective than they could be, but you could, for example, put 5 gunseats on a mission ship and draft people in to defend it when it gets caught in the middle of PvP space. Similarly allowing docked constructs to be protected from being attacked (at the expense that guns don't work until they undock) would allow various types of constructs to carry defensive fighters and draft people in to pilot them when they get attacked.

Great, thanks for the reply and I'm looking forward to the update.

Thanks. Presumably for damaged ships this also includes fuel in fuel tanks, ammo in ammo containers or guns and anything else which acts like a container? And all of these things will need to be tracked down, repaired to make them accessible and then emptied before I can auto disassemble a ship?

A Great set of changes. I have a couple of constructs I'm looking forward to auto-disassembling. Will the repair/disassembly unit also be able to empty containers and schematic bays as it disassembles? Or will I need to empty the 250+ containers in my starter factory one by one and then empty all the schematic bays before I set it to work?

Are you talking about Alchemy here? Wasn't that a feature that was broken because everyone was using an item duping bug in their refineries that CCP didn't know about so the calculations they used to work out the quantities was completely off. I don't think anyone actually used that feature did they? People also seem to think that there is just one entity holding all the plasma in the game. What do you think the members of Legion would do if the alliance just sat on it all and kept everything like that? Do you think that they could keep doing that forever without people deciding not to show up to defend it? Do you think Lodestar could? Plasma is a group activity which means whoever the group is who gets it they will eventually need to distribute it one way or another in order to keep their members happy. So regardless of who controls these things it's just a matter of time before they become widely available because either one group will be selling a lot of it or a lot of people will have some. And the same was true for OTEC -- the Mittani could control the price of technetium to some extent but not completely and it would never have been possible to completely stop the flow of it as the members of the alliances defending the moons would eventually want to get some of the rewards for that.

You don't need warp beacons either. You just want one. Get a ship and fight for it or get in line and buy one off the market.

Some of the people who have plasma are literally getting up at 3am for fights, taking the day off work, etc.. this is endgame content and the people who want it without putting the effort in want it on easy mode. Compared with what you have to do at the moment to get a plasma, no amount of the current PvE in the game could ever compare with it. PvE is just mining and trucking stuff about, perhaps occasionally getting exploded because you can't run away fast enough. IMO endgame means competing against other players for something. If you put endgame content behind something where the primary challenge is to endure repetitiveness (like eve PvE, for example) then it diminishes the value of it and isn't really endgame content at all any more. Feel free to disagree...

There are like 30-40 people showing up to defend the cores maximum. There are hundreds still playing the game. If you can't take it back even for a short time then you are all bad and we should get to keep it all! Seriously though everyone is talking like there is no possible way to get plasma because one group is hoarding it. I can think of at least two ways -- join one of the groups fighting over it or form a new group and try to take some plasma. Yes, that's hard, but this is supposed to be endgame content and it's supposed to be hard. Some people in here seem to just want some other way of doing it so they can just sit in the safezone and do a thing that will lead to them getting the endgame rewards without playing the endgame. If you want the reward without playing the game just be patient and wait until you can buy it off the market. It's bound to happen eventually. And yes, it's boring as ... to sit on the honeypot. Come and shoot at it!

Actually there was a real point in there. Admittedly I didn't spoon feed it to you.

Dear NQ. Game too hard. I can has easy mode?

There very definitely is! And not just on GPUs. I've written plenty of bad code which ran better in some places than others and then tidied it up and optimised it and the gap closed. A good example is AMD vs Intel (a few years ago now) where the Intels were a lot better at running bad code than the AMDs but after optimising the code the gap would close. Anything that used a 'REP' instruction would do all kinds of bad things for AMD but not intel. In GPU terms your bad code might make too many accesses accross PCI. One generation might do those 5x faster than the other, so you see it more. Then when you tidy it up and take those out completely the older gen catches up a bit. But you are right about the newer architecture thing, that happens too. They may be accidentally relying on something that doesn't happen on the older cards and profiling on all the different families is the only way to find some of that.

I'm just monitoring using the standard tools that come with windows. It turns out my card is a 2060 and not a 2070. It might have been tuned a little with MSI Afterburner a year ago to optimise for low power etherium mining, I can't remember. I just went over to the D6 market and ran around for a while. I didn't get any lag, but the GPU didn't go over 75% the whole time (it does seem to use more than it used to) and sat at 60% for most of it. The CPUs were in the high 80s most of the time. What was more interesting is when I stopped moving and just stood still the CPU use went down to around 35% but the GPU use crept up to 100% (just rendering almost the same image over and over). As soon as I start moving the GPU utilisation drops off again, which is a sign that the CPUs are the bottleneck and can only drive the GPU at full speed when they don't have many calculations to do in order to render the scene. I have seen people complaining before somewhere else about DU performance and saying they were using a 1080. In terms of 'better' and 'worse', that's a very subjective thing. a 1080 is an old card now (they're in the 4000s now I think?) and in my experience with programming for NVIDIA cards (admittedly doing business software not games) is that the generation does matter with these things. Usually the higher generations have faster memory, better handling of memory caches, memory read combines, etc and, most importantly, better and faster access to CPU main memory. So if you have a 1080 and you're running some optimised piece of software (a benchmark, for example) then the 1080 is going to really shine because it has a lot of SMs. But if the code is less optimised then the newer generations of chipset can add more value by accelerating the less well optimised operations. It might very well be that the 1080 is better at running well optimised code but a 2060 is better at running bad GPU code? Memory leaks do happen for me (with 32G of RAM). I've seen the memory used by DU creep up over time (I usually have about 10G free but when DU creeps up it can take it all) and a lot of others report the same. In particular I noticed it when mission running, I would have to re-log after the 5 hour run through the PvP zone, even though the machine had done very little during that time, or I get bad framerates when trying to land. Also after PvP battles I sometimes need to re-log to get the framerate back to where it should be.

I'd argue that while high twitch numbers do indicate success of a sort low ones might just indicate that twitch isn't really relevant to the people who play DU. I'm one of those, I'm not really interested in twitch at all but have been playing MMOs for decades. I think DU is the sort of game which is going to appeal more to the long-time gamers so it might very well be that a sizeable portion of the DU player base simply don't care about twitch at all.

My point here is we're just guessing because NQ won't tell us the real numbers. But if we all agree on one consistent guess then either that guess is a high estimate or it's lower than the real numbers. In the latter case someone will probably correct us. I think it's unlikely that if, say, there are 100 players on steam at any given moment that there are also 2,000 logged in without steam. for me the idea that if the game is peaking under 150 on steam it is peaking at under 1,000 including non-steam sounds about right. We know that there have only ever been under 25,000 unique characters subscribed (and many of those will now be unsubbed, etc) so 1,000 concurrent is probably between 5% and 10% of the whole player base logging in all at once. Feel free to suggest a better guestimate ...

We should just adopt some sort of standard assumption like 'take the numbes from steamdb here: https://steamdb.info/app/2000270/info/ and multiply by 5', which is probably about right most of the time. If enough people quote the same stat and actual numbers are higher then NQ will want to correct it ...

Rather than making a ton of posts, why not post all of your ideas in one post? Literally half of the front page here is one person's ideas.

Why is 'sort by price descending' not a good way to filter the scams? Are you really suggesting there should be some sort of 'filter scams' button so only the people who want to be scammed will get scammed? Or that the game should be some sort of safe space where scammers are not allowed?