Zeddrick

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

I think this is the third time I've posted about this and now I'm really annoyed about it.  I have a ship which has been working for a long time.  It's a diligence without any modifications (besides those made by a very enthusiastic ally when I entered the PvP zone).  It certainly doesn't have any Janko'ed elements.
 
So today I get into the ship (which worked when I landed it) and have no error messages, but mysteriously the space engines don't work.  Try to land again but some of the brakes don't work either and this is when I find out.  Boom.  Rep a bunch of things.  Run out of the lunch break I was playing in but have to keep going or my packages will expire.  I'm sure work won't mind if I just play a broken video game some more.  Eventually I try again, try lots of things like resetting cache, using a different chair, etc but nothing is working.  Ask for help in the help channel.  There are some pretty nice and helpful players in there who tell me there are no GMs and I'm basically SOL.  I land without crashing this time (because I'm expecting it).  Now we're well over an hour into my quick 15 minute 'set it flying' play session.
 
Then I go into build mode and then, and only then, do I get the message "some of your elements are colliding and have been deactivated".  FFS really?  How long have we had this 'feature' and how hard is it to get this stuff right on a ship which has never had any janko'ed elements and is basically a design from the start of beta that has been working ever since.  
 
Seriously NQ. DU was never perfect, but this is a lot worse than it used to be.  Things like this really spoil the experience for people who are just trying to play the game and seem like overkill compared with the small problem of cheating by element stacking.
 

The whole concept of sanctuary and, to some extent, haven seems broken to me.  The only reason I have a Sanctuary tile is because the STU in my inventory was annoying me so I went and put it somewhere.  The problem with Sanctuary in particular is we are playing an MMO, which means interacting with other players, which means being somewhere where other players are so the market is stocked, there are things to look at, you see other people out and about, etc.  Sanctuary breaks this by being an 'exclusive' space where most people can't have a tile, which means that there won't be many other players around.  That makes it a bad space to use for developing any sort of base or whatever (nobody will see what you make, markets won't be stocked, etc) so nobody really lives on these tiles, making the problem even worse.
 
And they made they sky a horrible orange colour.
 
Haven is pretty similar actually.  People can settle there, but the large number of claimed tiles means players are far from markets, making them bad places to live.  Nobody can sell, unclaim or transfer their tile so a lot of the ones nearer the markets will be used by players who have stopped playing or who are alts, making the claimed area a bit stale.  I have a nice Haven tile and would like to use it, but the area around it is empty and making use of it is pointless so I moved near the districts like everyone else.
 
In order to be useful the areas around the moons will need to be more like the tiles around districts, able to eventually be reclaimed if someone leaves the game to keep the area around them fresh and actually used.  The 'I can leave the game and keep my constructs safe here' feature is OK up to a point, but you can't move your static constructs back to the safe moons anyway and this functionality could be enabled some other way with a special aphelia-owned long term storage tile which hides unused constructs or whatever.

I have a random text generator which is more believable.
 
Two dead end technologies rammed together with word salad does not a product make.  You might convince some naive people to invest money, but then their expectations will be that you can turn nonsense into money, which is a hard expectation to meet.

It wasn't a third person game, original Elite was first person like E:D is.

I have a random text generator which is more believable.
 
Two dead end technologies rammed together with word salad does not a product make.  You might convince some naive people to invest money, but then their expectations will be that you can turn nonsense into money, which is a hard expectation to meet.

I have a random text generator which is more believable.
 
Two dead end technologies rammed together with word salad does not a product make.  You might convince some naive people to invest money, but then their expectations will be that you can turn nonsense into money, which is a hard expectation to meet.

This is on the right track.

I hope to be able to tease you the update 1.3 with the management and the attribution of the energy :



 
I am joking.
 
I hope to see quickly what it will look like in NQ version

It makes me also why they refused to have idle tunnels "collapse" after a while, especially on the territories which had been completely mined out. Should've been easy enough to code a check for active player constructs in the tunnels to cater for buried bases.

A friend of mine once said "Never attribute to malice something that you can attribute to incompetence", and I think that holds true here.  It seems pretty unlikely that someone set out to break the game here, because that would be counter-productive for everyone.  But incompetence?  That certainly sounds believable doesn't it?

With the mining units, though, you aren't really meant to calibrate each mining unit every day.  24 hours was always the minimum but the intention was that you would calibrate after the efficiency starts to drop, which is a lot less frequently (Can't remember exactly, 72h?).  I expect they just picked 24 hours because it's a day and nobody complained until now because everyone was just picking them up and re-dropping anyway for the high tier and ignoring the calibration game for the lower tiers.

Seems like 22 hours would work better and not really change the max yield much.

Both of them!

Thanks, I had no idea I qualified for a pet at all and the game didn't bother to tell me I had one (unlike the outfits where it showed me them when I logged in).

Turns out when I hit 'P' I can turn it on and this thing is flying around behind me now.

If I force respawn, will the pet die too?  I feel bad about that ...

Thanks, I had no idea I qualified for a pet at all and the game didn't bother to tell me I had one (unlike the outfits where it showed me them when I logged in).

Turns out when I hit 'P' I can turn it on and this thing is flying around behind me now.

If I force respawn, will the pet die too?  I feel bad about that ...

Today my characters received an e-mail entitled 'Unlock new pets and skins now in Dual Universe'.  When I open the mail it shows a picture of the new outfits and the text 'New skins, new pets, new emotes awaits you in Dual Universe'.

I was briefly excited because I didn't think these characters qualified for any of this stuff, but when I logged in I found out it was just a pack of lies.  I am not able to unlock any pets or skins and no skins, pets or emotes were, in fact, waiting for me.
 
Does anyone else think this is just outrageous clickbait?  If you're going to make a release where half the content is only available to alpha backers, send this message only to the alpha backers and send a different one to the rest which talks about blueprint snapping, recycling and, well, whatever else there is.
 

Chat actually worked in the 90s though.
 
Not disagreeing with you, just adding my frustration lol
 
I played Everquest back then, and you could create custom chat windows, send different types of messages to different windows.  Private messages would open in a popup window.  You could customize the text color so you could tell important messages from less important ones.  You could even send links to items in chat, so someone else could click the link and see the full description of the item.
 
It took them a few years to make all of those improvements.  But they recognized that allowing players to communicate with each other in the game, was vital.
 
When you see another player in DU it feels like you're on opposite sides of soundproof glass, and all you can do is wave at each other and hop around hoping to get their attention, so maybe they will switch to the right chat channel and possibly see what you are saying to them.
 
 

You might be mistaking cause and effect.  I have been wondering if DU is failing because the company is trying hard to find something to replace it with instead of trying to make it better?

Reminded me to buy NMS while still on sale.  Thanks!

IMO this has always been the problem with DU, that things get taken away at the same rate as they get added.  Only since release things have been taken away and nothing was added to replace them, which is even worse.  I was hoping that after release we would get an exciting 2 year roadmap by now with big and interesting things to motivate us to keep playing.  Perhaps genuine territory warfare, some form of interactable life on the planets to make them interesting, NPCs or other content to make cities worth building, AvA combat so you can go shoot the person who killed your ship while you were mining on a roid, etc.  Also space whales.  Space whales would be cool too.

We're all just waiting on those dancing avatars to save the day I guess!

The wipe was a much needed levelling pass because:
- some players had used large numbers of beta accounts to make billions from mission running, preventing the game from having a sensible economy
- players who left felt like they wouldn't be able to catch up and wanted a wipe to catch up again
 
but:
- players are once again making billions per day from mission running.  The economy is going to be just as broken again
- the wipe worked when it comes to getting players back.  But there was a reason most of them left and the game is arguably less of a game now than it was then.  Online player counts are crashing hard now (game peaks at a little over 200 now in steam vs 800 at launch)
 
So the wipe was a total fail and, as many have predicted, we will shortly be back where the game was before the wipe happened due to the apparent total ineptitude of the people managing the game.

A cash shop is just putting lipstick on the pig at this stage, frankly, and will not work.  In order for a cash shop to work there has to be a sensible number of players who actually play enough to want the in-game items.  In any case, when you have a game where everyone is mission running and the number of characters you have determines how much money you make, most people will find it hard to justify paying for that silly dance move (or whatever) when they could spend the money on a 1 month sub for another AFK mission character.
 
The wipe was a second chance.  But the thing about second chances is you have to actually take them instead of repeating past mistakes.

The wipe was a much needed levelling pass because:
- some players had used large numbers of beta accounts to make billions from mission running, preventing the game from having a sensible economy
- players who left felt like they wouldn't be able to catch up and wanted a wipe to catch up again
 
but:
- players are once again making billions per day from mission running.  The economy is going to be just as broken again
- the wipe worked when it comes to getting players back.  But there was a reason most of them left and the game is arguably less of a game now than it was then.  Online player counts are crashing hard now (game peaks at a little over 200 now in steam vs 800 at launch)
 
So the wipe was a total fail and, as many have predicted, we will shortly be back where the game was before the wipe happened due to the apparent total ineptitude of the people managing the game.

A cash shop is just putting lipstick on the pig at this stage, frankly, and will not work.  In order for a cash shop to work there has to be a sensible number of players who actually play enough to want the in-game items.  In any case, when you have a game where everyone is mission running and the number of characters you have determines how much money you make, most people will find it hard to justify paying for that silly dance move (or whatever) when they could spend the money on a 1 month sub for another AFK mission character.
 
The wipe was a second chance.  But the thing about second chances is you have to actually take them instead of repeating past mistakes.