Zeddrick

Yes, but there are a lot of ideas posts. It's not that they're bad ideas, more that the low volume of other posts turned the general forum into an ideas forum as soon as they were merged. I mean, NQ could just name it 'ideas we never read' if they want to set expectations correctly ...

But what if your construct is on someone else's tile. Suddenly you loose everything (sorry, the devil made me do it). Just grab the tile and requisition the constructs....

I think people should lose their starting tile too. Right now there are a ton of them and no good locations for actual new players, but nobody really uses them. Pack up the player's stuff into magic BPs, give away their tile and when they resub they pick a new starter tile and get their BPs back. Make Sanctuary tiles the only permanent ones and sell STUs in a cash shop. IMO.

Game is slow. Want it faster. We disagree on the detail.

No, it's not completely wrong. Although your example does work in your simple scenario it's just not relevant for a big, grown up software project where there are managers who have a giant list of things for developers to spend time on and need to select the ones which generate the most value. Say you can write a piece of code in a week and optimise it in 3 weeks. That 3 week task is going to be on the list. Now say the code is only taking up 0.1% of the CPU for users running the game. The absolute most that 3 weeks of developer time is going to get is a tiny speedup even if the sub-optimal version is 100 times slower (or whatever). If you try to optimise *every single piece of code* you will spend 4 times as long developing everything and end up with the sort of product where development is really slow and the product is brittle because devs are constantly making tiny changes to the logic for no reason other than premature optimisation. Actually that does sound a bit familiar..... What you need to do in order to do proper optimisation is look at the whole stack running and target the optimisation where it actually matters. You use stuff like call stack sample profiling and flame graphs to identify the areas where optimisation has a real, tangible benefit and that's where you allocate the developers time. Perhaps also measure memory allocation patterns and network requests to see what can be combined/reused/cached/etc. But you can't do that until you have everything there. Something might be taking 20% of resources now but later when another feature is added or something changes then that might not be true any more. An example would be optimising the voxel->mesh rendering and then adding the mesh server later, meaning now the optimised code only runs when you enter build mode instead of every time you see a new construct so the time spent optimising it bought you nothing. Once you have the big picture you pick your targets, cost them and 'We could get a 20% game engine speedup with 3 person-weeks' goes onto the backlog alongside 'fix XXX bug', 'add YYY feature' and 'make dancing avatars' and then the team selects based on whatever goals it has been set. As it happens I don't think DU has a massive problem with lower level optimisations. My PC has a 2070 in it (I think) which is not bad but also not bleeding edge and it rarely gets up to above 50% utilisation even when the game is laggy and frame dropping. Likewise I have about 10 gen10 intel vcores which don't often get thrashed very hard either. What I see is memory use crawls up over time and CPU use/lag goes up to match, which is a sign that the game has memory leaks. Also when there are a lot of network events (I go to market 6 and lots of things load) then it can get really laggy. That's a sign of bad server-side or network code usually and the game does thrash the network sometimes. For me the game started to get worse in performance terms when there was a project to move from a dynamo-db based storage tier to a hand-crafted backend. At that point I started getting lag, poor framerates and problems loading constructs in various places (flying over the ODY base in beta at a 3k height, for example). I don't find this too surprising really as the decision to spend an 'innovation token' re-inventing distributed operational store tech rather than using one someone else already made seems to have been motivated by lowering operational costs rather than making things better. Generally you get what you pay for with this sort of thing.

I heard that building was bugged after the last update? Timing is perfect ...

So they don't clog up general chat.

Actually I was being a little sarcastic there -- I would rather have a finished game with more actual actual well designed game in it (gameplay loops, things like missions actually being part of the in-game economy, reasons for territory wars, etc) even if it's not optimised than a fully optimised shiny, but empty, game so I can walk around my pointless city construct at 60 FPS and look at all the other players wandering about wondering what to do now they finished building. But I do write code from scratch from time to time and for this sort of very complex code it's really silly to try to optimise it right at the start. Optimisation is hard and painstaking. You spend hours looking at small pieces of code in the NVIDIA profiler (or whatever) trying to see where your code is memory bound, where it's bound by the available instruction pipelines, where it's bound by the speed of accessing global vs local memory, can you make the code use a register instead of a local memory reference, etc. It takes a long time and what you really don't want to do after you spent all that time is start refactoring the code and/or changing the structure or logic of the code. Because when you do that you have to start doing a lot of the optimisation all over again. One would hope that, at this stage, al the underlying logic of the game was settled but we are still talking about redesigning a lot of the features of the game and, IMO, some of the fundemental design decisions of the game (using the client to do the physics simulation for an object, for example) are going to need re-thinking in order to make it a scalable and sustainable game without wierd behaviours (like ships freezing 4km up). If it were me I'd finish all of that and get it right before I started to optimise the dead-ends.

Usually programmers start optimising software once they've finished writing it.

I think it was you who victimised you when you said " When is the rest of the community invited for these talks? Or is it custom to talk to the "aggressors" in a game and not to their victims" , which is why I said 'self proclaimed'. Thing is, the PvP round table would have gone ahead with or without NQ. They were invited. You could organise whatever round table you like regardless of whether or not they show. If it's popular they would definitely come to a second one. You seem to want someone else to do it all for you.

Given that the PvP community got together, created the event, invited people from DU *and streamed the whole thing so you can see exactly what happened*, I imagine you'll get your invite when you quit whining and organise an event for yourself and any other self proclaimed victims who want to join in. Seriously, the round table event got explained a couple of times up there in the comments.

The kickstarter is a tiny percentage of the 21 million in funding they had so far. We have no idea what they promised to the private funders who provided the rest. It could have been 3D blogging and blockchain BS for all we know.

Because there are still a few people playing happily and it's not fair that they aren't annoyed and miserable like the rest of us? Seriously, why would anyone make this change now. There is literally nobody who thinks 'the game really needs that brake change in order to be better' and nobody who is just waiting for it to happen before they get back into the game. But there are at least some people who would hate the change, hate that all their ships broke and quit. You'd have to be barking mad to even think about doing this right now. But then again it wouldn't be completely out of character for them either ...

Not wrong. Perhaps we should all go on strike and refuse to build any more pretty stuff until the bugs are fixed?

There was ever a lot of sub money?

Yes. Quite a few days later, without notification and with the anti-afk script I was using nerfed it did, in fact, start working again but still did not feel particularly professional. Breaking the anti afk thing makes GFN useless for DU anyway because it logs you out every 8 minutes and DU is a game where spending a lot longer than 8 minutes doing absolutely nothing is part of the core gameplay. The AFK timeout makes DU on GFN about as useful as a chocolate teapot most of the time so I will probably be asking Nvidia for a refund now.

It would be great if you could share some of that long list sometime. Give people a bit of optimism for the game's future and all that ...

Well, at the start of the game Steam peaked at nearly 800 *concurrent* players. FOr the 'old guard'? Well Sanctuary moon has under 1700 plots claimed and many of the old guard have more than one account. So there aren't that many 'old guard' players either. My theory is most of the subbed player base right now is just mission running alts. But in order to get that they had to put the price up by 30% to give steam their cut. And that price push definitely did reduce the number of players in the game. So the whole steam/wipe thing looks very much like a net negative to me. At the very least a missed oportunity.

I think 10,000 subs is likely a large overestimate. Right now Haven has 22,000 tiles claimed, meaning that only 22,000 distinct characters have ever been subbed. 10,000 accounts would imply that nearly 50% of the player base who started are still subscribed. But that 22,000 includes all the steam accounts which were refunded by exploiters, all the 2 week free accounts for people who previously subscribed, etc. But you can tell from the activity on the markets (and around them) and just looking at the lack of change in the game that there are a lot fewer people playing now than there were then. I'd say 5,000 is probably generous. The steam numbers tell a similar story. Even then, a lot of people were pushed into getting long subscriptions by the price rises, need for long subs to get the reward packs, etc. A lot of people are running their accounts on DAC too which they buy with quanta because mission running is so broken they can easily make enough to buy a lot of DAC. That money was probably long since spent so I bet that monthly sub income is looking really small right now.

Title says it.

If I were a realist I wouldn't still be here. People here are either optimists or past players hoping to be proved right.

Yes, I'm not talking about flatlining, I'm talking about reversing the decline (i.e. getting people to come back). It will be easier than people make out. Go on reddit, discord or even here and there are a ton of people who don't like the game and aren't playing. But they are still here and still watching. The game will only actually be dead when all those people stop coming to reddit/discord/this forum/wherever at all. Right now if NQ does something exciting (like releasing a long term roadmap and hitting a couple of successful releases with convincing new content) those people will still know about that and some of them will start to change their minds, tell their friends or whatever. It worked with the wipe -- look at how many, myself included, said they wouldn't play after the wipe but still did anyway.

Yes, the player base was shrinking pretty quickly towards the 'unviable' point it got to in beta. The sudden 1.2 release feels like a panicked response to this. Otherwise why suddenly drop alien cores and a whole planet, for example, without even teasing that it was coming? That having been said, it was a pretty decent release and a good step in the right direction. They obviously are thinking about some of the right things. IMO what is needed in order to reverse the current decline (as opposed to just flatlining for a while before resuming it) is for there to be a longer term roadmap of big and exciting features to retain the interest of the player base. Re-introducing planets and alien cores isn't going to cut it here IMO. It would need to be actual new and interesting things that people can look forward to. Full marks for actually listening to the things the players want (more reason for ad-hoc encounters in PvP space or a gameplay loop to replace planet mining/calibrations for example) and giving the players some of those things. I expect what will happen, though, is the features which didn't make 1.2 will become 1.3 and perhaps we get another planet and a couple of alien cores. Which all just feels like stuff we've done before.

So the board for bug discussions is bugged? Of course it is.

And dancing avatars. Don't forget the dancing avatars, they were a big deal. So when my ship crashes because all the breaks got turned off because of Novaquirks I can get out and dance around doing my happy dance.