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@blundertwink It was just a constructive suggestion... It was never meant to let players build without limits, that's why I suggested a non-production environment for the builds and a QA. Btw. the Worlds Adrift Devs didn't design their QS, they used another company's OS (SpatialOS) and that was one of the primary reasons for their troubles. But let's not derail the topic and rather look for solutions instead of problems. peace

I can't stop wondering, why the PvE part, at least the exploration, is not done like in Worlds Adrift. The tools are here, the community motivation is here... Worlds Adrift didn't have much in terms of gameplay, but the exploration was one of the major pillars and it worked. How did they do it? They let their community build the things to explore, in the form of player built and very creative islands, and a great deal of puzzles. So why not? give the players an environment (like the PTS or the Steam-Demo world), give them an asteroid as a base, some L-cores and unlimited amount of materials, and let them build hundreds of exploration sites. Then do some QA and put some loot at the end of the puzzle, on a weekly timer or something, so it doesn't get farmed indefinetly. Add some PvE-ships at the sites that respawn at some point. Scatter the sites somewhere in safe and PvP space and let players search for them, build maps, calculate META-farming-routes, make ambushes, etc. It's not like it's not being done on a smaller scale, with speeders, outposts, museums, and such...

Yes, the disconnects are quite often now.

Hey community and dear NQ, Reading this https://massivelyop.com/2023/02/17/leaderboard-do-you-prefer-first-person-or-third-person-perspective-while-gaming/ reminded me that at some point there was a feature list with a voting option and we had third person view with quite some support on the list. I personally find third person much more immersive and role play supporting and since this is not a shooter I really don't see any downsides. In addition, outfits and pets are nearly pointless in first person as you never see them actually. So I'd kindly suggest adding a third person camera as an option, so everybody can play as they wish. Thank you!

This is some really exiting news and I wish the NQ team a great success! Just please be very cautious with this part: "finding ways to encourage multi-crew ship setups". This alone has the potential to counter all efforts to bring more people to PvP, if it means "the game mechanics make sure, that a multi-crew ship is better than an equal amount of players with solo ships". Many players enjoy their independence and prefer to depend on their own skills. Group play and coordination is a great advantage on itself and doesn't need enhancement by game mechanics.

Yes, you are totally right here. I guess it's about time we get a function on right click "disassemble construct" or at least "highlight all elements and voxels"... And regarding remaining scraps, I suggest gravity gets enabled, so these rooftops fall to the ground and look more like ruins. To each their own, I imagine there would be some broke folks who gather all materials to sell or build, or even bored orgs who create a "clean up" company, why not some missions as well. My point is, there is by far not enough stuff to explore and find in the world, which pushes the explorer type players away, so why reduce it even more on purpose? Solutions to the very much valid points you make can be found.

Dear NQ team, The "Tra$h to treasure" concept is a welcomed change, as this would bring new game loops into play (salvaging and exploration) and reduce the load at markets. However, I would suggest to never despawn constructs after they enter the abandoned state outside of market areas. For one, the many abandoned constructs contribute a lot to the sense of a populated world. There is sometimes even this post apocalyptic feeling, which fits into the lore, as not everybody would survive on a foreign planet due to the many threats to human life. So the abandoned settlements create a genuine atmosphere and are an asset to the game world I would prefer to keep. It would be great to find an abandoned ship somewhere in the desert five months from now that nobody else found (or wants). Not because of the quanta, but because of the exploration aspect. The wrecks so far were sadly not the success I hoped, since they are so few and impossible to find. If anything, I'd suggest lower their value to a minimum and let them respawn randomly in higher quantities everywhere. Another thing is the risk that abandoned constructs bring. Many hate the tall towers, but these are one of the very few things that brings some risk and fun to the flying. They could become a problem when they don't load on time, but this is a technical challenge I hope you can solve with time. If anything, increase the render distance even more, so we can see all constructs from far away. However, without these constructs, the flying will become a lot more boring. I know a lot of folks use popular autopilot scripts and prefer to take the back seat, but I am sure even more enjoy the flight physics and like to pilot manually. To them, having to avoid some obstacles is a welcomed gameplay loop and the more the risk, the more the fun! Have a great day.

This right here is the solution to exploration, worlds adrift is the best example that it can be achieved, with all the player created islands and structures. Let creative minds be creative, establish some kind of quality assurance for the creations and throw them into the game!

Great video, sHuRuLuNi, many things on point, especially the most needed pve/pvp mix, the inability of players to provide such content themselves and the detrimental skill system. One thing though, please leave out survival mechanics like the constant need for food and water. Enviromental hazards by all means, like the need for a proper underwater or space equpment, but not the constant need for grind. This turns fast into a chore, take the water in Last Oasis for example. Such survival mechanics have their place in the respective genre, but are not so different from the current tax system, forcing players to focus on something else than what they actually feel like doing.

I don’t know, why I’m writing this. Maybe because there are still a lot of nice folks here on the forums who like to analyze things. Maybe because I’m just so sad that yet another game with great potential bites the dust, along with all the others like Worlds Adrift (will always be missed) and Last Oasis. Maybe I just hope this won’t happen again with the next magnificent virtual world (Lauri, please, read that paper!) A lot has been written about what went wrong here. But the root cause? It wasn’t bugs, nor performance. Not even the totally unenjoyable ship to ship combat or the massive inequalities resulting from all those exploits. I’d argue that it was the “hearth of the vision” itself, as depicted in the “0.23 and What We Learned” devblog and the notion that one can force players to socialize in order for them to build a civilization. In this line of thought, 0.23 was just a symptom, not the cause. I believe that the explanation of the mindset behind 0.23 in this devblog caused more damage than the patch itself, since it clearly showed that this was not a single bad design choice but the foundation itself is flawed. And, I’d argue that some of the well-minded and more influential bakers, who created a filter bubble for NQ supporting this vision, played a role in the eventual downfall. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. The reason, why forcing people to socialize doesn’t work, is trust, or rather the lack of it. Apart from already formed groups from previous games, people need time to build trust and they like to decide for themselves, when their trust level is high enough for certain interactions and more socialization. It’s very important for players to have this time for building trust. This also includes time for development, since strong relationships require equal footing, as opposed to master-slave relationships. The need for this time is also the major benfit of safe zones and why “gankboxes” fail. Prior to 0.23 it was somewhat working in DU – players were slowly developing and starting to build trusted relationships. This came to an end with 0.23 and players were no longer able to develop on their own. They didn’t have the time to build that trust anymore. And since most people don’t enjoy applying for jobs in their free time and working for someone they don’t trust, they left. For those of you interested in the theory behind this, here is the research paper explaining the major reasons for the failure of DU: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180316/315615/The_Trust_Spectrum.php Just one citation: “And above all, it makes very little sense to try to forcibly push a relationship up into the affective range of the [trust] spectrum; odds are excellent that the game is too narrow in breadth, and if the game is broad, that the players in question already have some deep relationships. You can’t ask them to drop a best friend to make room! In many cases, it might be better to instead design a game to work with the trust level that is already there. Or to effectively work on maintaining it. At the very least, the game should only invite intimacy rather than force it.” See you in Starbase and let’s hope for the best. Peace, out.

@Hexonymous This argument with the beta is probably not the most reasonable one... since I can't say it better, I suggest you read this here: https://massivelyop.com/2020/12/31/vague-patch-notes-dont-be-the-mmo-beta-defense-squad/

I am impressed with how surprised people are with the current state of the game. So many of the basic online world design laws were broken here, rules known for years, that all this has only been expected. Including the (IMO justified) community reaction of the vets. Just read the knowledge gathered here by experienced mmo designers: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/laws-of-online-world-design/the-laws-of-online-world-design/. This is exactly the rule explaninig the community reaction: Mike Sellers’ Hypothesis “The more persistence a game tries to have; the longer it is set up to last; the greater number (and broader variety) of people it tries to attract; and in general the more immersive a game/world it set out to be–then the more breadth and depth of human experience it needs to support to be successful for more than say, 12-24 months. If you try to create a deeply immersive, broadly appealing, long-lasting world that does not adequately provide for human tendencies such as violence, acquisition, justice, family, community, exploration, etc (and I would contend we are nowhere close to doing this), you will see two results: first, individuals in the population will begin to display a wide range of fairly predictable socially pathological behaviors (including general malaise, complaining, excessive bullying and/or PKing, harassment, territoriality, inappropriate aggression, and open rebellion against those who run the game); and second, people will eventually vote with their feet–but only after having passionately cast ‘a pox on both your houses.’ In essence, if you set people up for an experience they deeply crave (and mostly cannot find in real life) and then don’t deliver, they will become like spurned lovers–some become sullen and aggressive or neurotic, and eventually almost all leave.” It's almost not even worth the time to dig deeper here in more profound mistakes like the strong focus on "player socialization" and trying tho "nudge" people to work together without creating the right framework and conditions, since these subjects were also analyzed and the consequences for any pvp mmo are known for years, see here https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/a-uo-postmortem-of-sorts/ and here https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/02/11/the-eve-upset/ (that last one is especially interesting in the light of the recent robbery of the Empire). Basically, with the strong focus on big orgs and actively punishing small orgs and solos, this is a one way ticket to the failure from a pvp perspective and no bug fixing or nicer plants will change this. On the contrary, you shoud try to prevent big orgs, if you want your game to stay fun for longer. Here is a citation from the last source in this regard from a designer perspective: "...Because of the external pressures of sheer survival, you tend to try to join a clan of a reasonable size, and then the clan gets drawn into alliances of a certain size, and so on. There is safety, and strength, in numbers, and the game system is essentially zero-sum for any given conflict. And given the way in which time equals power in EVE, there is a natural tendency towards growth, solidification, and continued existence. What you end up with is an ecosystem with a classic power law distribution of social group sizes, a scale-free network which is extremely hard to destroy. This isn’t the first time we have seen this phenomenon in competitive virtual worlds. Famously in Shadowbane, single guilds would tend to come to own entire servers, because the game system there was also zero sum. The result led to boredom, because in a game premised on conflict, the notion of a single eternal empire is dull. Scale-free networks are notoriously hard to kill. In fact, mathematically, if you start randomly removing connections in the network, you have to remove a ridiculous percentage of the total to make it cease to exist as an entity. This is how guild social structures can survive for years..." Here is another citation, randomly picked from the above mentioned sources, regarding how to let communities emerge, without forcing them directly. "... Related to the last one–what I now know more about regarding how the Tragedy of the Commons and the Prisoner’s Dilemma are reflected in the lack of communal action, has just reinforced my thoughts on the importance of the Other and so on. Simply put, I think that the things that drive community are: shared interest to get everyone in the same place; limited resources that you need to cooperate over so everyone gets enough; and an enemy you have to fight to keep out (and often, I think that I have served the role of said enemy in this newsgroup). Yes, communities form without the enemy, but they seem to fragment into cliques and manufacture an enemy within themselves (again, like this ng many times!). Shared interest by itself doesn’t really drive community. It drives acquaintanceships. And acquaintanceships are easy to come by, there’s no need to make a whole honkin’ game for them...." Yes, there are ways to support community (and thus civilization) building, but not by repelling the small groups away. That is, if the game should even do something about it, since this will happen on itself, given an interesting game. Further reading for those interestred: https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/09/forcing-interaction/ o7

Hey guys. It was December 10th, 2022. I’ve just found a schematic for a flux capacitor at the highest peak of Feli. Later that night I was watching these visionary writings on the screen in my bunk and remembered this day two years ago, the focal point for the things to come: “It's indeed at the heart of what we have tried to do with 0.23 to make it more like the game is a "society of players" rather than solo/small group self-sufficient entities.” Spending another three months in the mines I finally managed to finish my time machine and came here and now to warn you. Dual Universe released officially in the summer of 2022. It was a huge success. The initial wave peaked at 33104 players... Six months later, only 700 players were spread in the vast universe at peak times. How could this happen? The devs analyzed the dire situation and did the unthinkable. They wiped it all. Let me loosely quote the results of their analysis: “What We Learned from Season 1 Let’s get that settled right away: a lot of things in the first season didn’t go as we expected they would. Many balance mechanics either didn’t work or backfired altogether. We wanted to create a game in which PVP can be enjoyed by solos, small groups and large communities alike. … We thought it surely would make the game quite enjoyable for any playstyle. Well, it didn’t. I could fill dozens of pages with our analysis, but I think it’s better to jump to some of the bigger conclusions. Clan member numbers exponentially increase the power of a group. Solos and small groups didn’t have the necessary tools to defend themselves. Large clans bottlenecked the progression of smaller groups. The grind, omg, the grind.” I wish this never happened to Dual Universe. But the vision… There is time. Save this game. Please. This is a pvp game. Well, not yet, but the mindset of the players is tuned to a pvp game. In pvp games there is no such thing as “all players hugged each other, drank some wine and lived together happily ever after”. It’s a competition, and the blockade of Lacobus because of the Thoramine showed clearly that the quotes apply fully here as well. The big orgs were, are, and will be self-sufficient, and use anything to their full advantage, including the markets, as a weapon to keep others weaker than them. Naturally. The benefits of being in a large organization come from the numerical superiority and the communication alone, and are sought after by many players, as soon as they find their footing in the game. You don’t need to further increase these benefits, like limiting solo pilots to xs weapons, or to a single radar type, or making it nonviable to build and maintain their ship alone. On the contrary – if the benefits of being in a big org are not limited intentionally, you lose most of the player base. One of the very few successful pvp MMOs of our time has several anti-zerg mechanics for exactly this reason (google “disarray anti zerg” as an example), others try limiting the maximum size of orgs (which doesn’t really work). It’s not about the game style and setting, it’s about player interactions in a persistent open world pvp game. I could go deeper into stuff like the Bartle's taxonomy of player types or the Maslow's hierarchy of needs in order to explain what motivates players to play a game, to have fun and to generally feel good while playing and thus stay and keep playing. To "nudge" them will backfire. But this is all said and discussed countless times. The question is, can the vision of building of a universe by a society of players coexist with a fulfilling solo/small scale gameplay? I believe it can. *Most of you know, what I’m quoting here. I hope, the one I’m quoting doesn’t get offended by this. I have great respect for him and truly hope his game succeeds. I just wish that such things don’t happen that often to these very few magnificent and extremely difficult to create games, which try to provide a persistent single shard pvp universe to their players.