Zeddrick

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?

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.

That aged well ...

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?

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.

There is A LOT that went wrong. But the fundamental problem has always been communication.
 
Here is what NQ said during the kickstarter.

 
But as we all know, this lasted only a short time before they went the complete other way and started to ignore the community instead.
And remember this was back when the community was under NDA restrictions and played with the sole purpose of testing and giving feedback on early game play no less!
 
And NQ was never able to receive constructive criticism. If you played the cheerleader and told NQ how great they where, they would interact and be all smiles and thumbs up. But any type of constructive criticism or legitimate concerns with the game design and it would be radio silence or at best some boilerplate  "don't worry guys" and "we know best" type of answer. And when things would boil over and the entire community would rage, we would get some "we hear you" type of deal with promises to do better. All promises that where broken over and over again..
 
And that is why the community turned toxic against NQ, and things are the way they are today.
And it is basic math really. When testers are telling you that things aren't working, but you ignore them and keep doing the same things. Then chances are that you will fail.
 

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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...

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

And it is highly unlikely that NQ will deliver.

It was a joke. But since there are only a dozen of us who actually post (first week noobs still thinking the game has a future and us shitposters) there's really no need to split the forum into single digit readership.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

Title says it.

There was ever a lot of sub money?