Zeddrick

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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 ....

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 ....

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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" ...

Hello everyone,
 
We understand your concerns and why you would suspect that we intend for Dual Universe to go to a free-to-play model. Without going into detail about the open position, we can however let you know that there are currently no plans to change Dual Universe into a Free-to-play model for several reasons, “Cost-per-User” being one of the major ones. Nor do we have any plans, or intents to introduce any "Pay-to-win" microtransaction systems into Dual Universe. This position is open for another project and NOT for Dual Universe.
 
We hope this cleans up some of the assumptions that are being made in this thread.
 
Best regards,
The Novaquark Team.
 

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.