kulkija

Ok - just have to get this off my chest:   I liked the game a LOT more at 0.22.  I thought replacing the mining approach was ok - until I saw someone with 80+ mining units in a single segment.  That does NOT look exciting.  Shields are cool, will give them that.  Emphasis on PVP when the rest of the game is in such bad shape was annoying.
 
Don't know how, but honestly feel they need to stop (perhaps in 3-6 months when players drop?), go back to the original premise of a player driven sandbox, and abolish the trend of "Its a sandbox, you can play it anyway you want... so long as we agree with your approach.  If you don't, we will force you to agree to our approach."

Yeah, maybe aluminum ships won't go extinct. I did try to rework some of my ships with the light materials (carbon fiber, marble, etc). In most cases, I could not find a suitable replacement. It just doesn't look how it was intended with the textures available. So I switched back to aluminum in those cases.
 
The issue I have is this continued practice to impact several other areas of the game while trying to "fix" something else. If you keep using this solution of fixing one part of the game by 100% ignoring the consequences elsewhere, you are going to impact parts of the game that are in good shape to the point where they are worse than the thing you are trying to fix. The simple solution that ignores all the consequences cannot be the go to choice every single time.

This:
Not gonna happen.
Many constructs have so complex Honeycomb or so much that this is just impossible.
 
 

If schemas go away I'm in favor of full wipe.
Please revert also Territory taxes to old system => No territory tax but old system with Increasing fee for extra territories.
If territories with mining units need upkeep make MUs to consume Nitron.

Honestly, I didn't really like the honeycomb changes, it took quite a bit of realism out of the building aspect, and I really liked the realism aspect of this game. I understand things need balancing and well, even though some things like the max speed cap and floor aren't very realistic, I understand they are balance etc, now HC mass should not me messed with. If you guys want to balance it, why not do it by only changing resistances and HP? We don't need any more dumbed-down systems on his game.
 
 
I have to agree with @Deathknight here, I'm honestly tired of those "discussion" threads where you ask us about feedback but it goes nowhere, feels like we're just here talking with the walls or a door. I understand you all want to be more "open" and in-touch with the community, but if you're not going to do anything with feedback just don't ask for it, it's gonna save everyone's time.

While I understand the idea of fairness to those starting the game for the first time on launch I disagree with the packages being labeled as a thank you to those who have contributed to the game over beta and prior. They are all merely accelerators to those people who wish to pay the cost of subscription for 3-13 months.
 
if you truly want to thank those who have contributed to the game development the reward needs to be something that somebody signing up for the first time on the day before launch can’t get.
 
There are two ways that this glaring absurd play on words can be remedied.
 
1) Call the packages what they are: Accelerators for those who want to front the cost of subscription 
2) Actually thank the beta and alpha people in the community that actually pulled money out of their wallets believing in this game, by providing them with something that others won’t get.
 
I love this game, but we are not children.
 
A brand new player who signs up for 13 months, 1 day before launch, is gonna get the same “reward” as those that have already put time in.  

I think you should ask yourself what you can do to keep those players after wiper for 3-6 months. Because I have a hard time imagining that most won't leave in their first month. DU at launch is nothing like DU at the launch at beta. This is going to be a grindfest!
 
Shams streamed recently DU again we were flabergasted what new players should be doing: It was picking up rocks or running atmo missions with your starter ship, both would leave you quickly bored out of your mind. Especially when new players crash their ship and need to walk 50km... Asteroid mining might be fun, but getting everything needed to get there is going to take a TON of work! And I suspect that many underestimate how much work.

Hearing the news of the broken promise that the reset will happen infuriated me. I really hated NQ for it. Not people personally by the way. Why hate? because like many others I have invested thousands of hours in this game. At least 87 million talent points and loads of stuff and quanta that I worked hard to get without cheats or using exploits. Invested a lot of quanta in blueprint copies that will be gone after the reset. I feel NQ has stolen our time and our love for the things we created.
I really had so much stuff, my underground warehouse has more than 100 expanded containers XL and more than 150 containers L filled to the rim will elements, pures, ores, products, half-products, cores, fuels and what not. And there was another warehouse, maybe with half the capacity as the first one. I'm also extremely pissed that I will loose my territories. Especially the territories where I mined for Tier 5 ores. Endless searching for the T5 ore deposits... The loss of ships is also what I'm angry about, especially the large one I was building and I won't be able to finish it soon. I has all rare military stuff on it and a lot of hours of voxelmancy, so I won't be able to restart with building it in 2024 maybe... There are ships that were abandoned which needed a lot of rework to make them the way I like them. They will be gone forever because they were initially built by another player who might not return after the reset. No core blueprints on those. Lost labour and love for these ships.
 
Now I know this is just a game for many people, but for some (like me) this is a game I really wanted and I waited for ages until it arrived. Real life sucks so much for some (like me) that living in this virtual world makes real life worth living again. This sounds serious and to some of you maybe pathetic, but those people don't know how real life can be hell. So DU is part of my life and yeah I know it is pretty sad.
 
So rebuilding my virtual life... it all means grinding to get quanta, an enormous amount of elements and an incredible amount of honeycomb that are in our builds and in the core blueprints. To rebuild it we will not be needing our creativity, but me personally I will have to grind for atleast a year to bring everything back that I will loose. I am not gonna do that... Do I even have the courage to put in the time and effort and risk another wipe in 2023 or in 2024? I don't know. I sort of like the idea of starting over, not bothering to become rich like I was, but purely playing DU to be creative. Sort of retire but still live in Helios. But at this point I'm still really numb and I will see how this goes. Day by day. They might say this will be the last wipe. Don't think I will ever believe you again, NQ. You betrayed our trust when you discarded the promise not to wipe again. I apologize for the long and possibly boring rant. I hope DU will survive, but if it doesn't because of the wipe... don't blame us veterans who turned this virtual world into a vibrant creation. Which was built by the players... but potentially destroyed by the makers...

Well, people said that.  Some of the parts of the event were visible in Alpha but the problem was not solvable and, I believe, more pieces were added after alpha.  As I understand it NQ expected the event to take years to solve while it actually took about 6 months and this caught them by surprise.
 
But it wasn't particularly well hidden.  I'm fairly certain that at least one of the objects was right next to one of the districts or a commonly used market on Alioth.  There were also public forum posts about it and it was discussed on the discord.  Accepted that some people don't engage with these things but this was meant to be a group puzzle solved by a group.  And if you aren't engaging with the wider DU community it's true that you would miss out on these things.
 
 
There really wasn't ever very much of it at all.  Just one node to mine.  I agree that making it have an actual, valuable use now would be bad because what there is of it is either in tiny quantities or held by people who didn't earn it.  But there's no real reason why it couldn't, for example, be a voxel with non-useful properties (make it very heavy with low HP, resists and CSS perhaps).  Then it can be used for decorative purposes only.  That doesn't really break anything and would, IMO, be a well-deserved finger-up to anyone who RMT'ed it (IDK whether or not anyone did).
 
As a game which is meant to be a persistent-world MMO where your actions are persistent and matter I think keeping things in the game to make trophies is actually a good thing.  A good use of a city, for example, would be a place where people could display the trophies they earned while playing the game.
 

Well, I have to disagree with the 'mis-guided' part.  The story of it is similar to the story of a few other things in DU -- a group of players got organised, put in a LOT of hours of grafting, wrote LUA scripts to help them, and thereby acquired clues quicker than everyone else.  Eventually they solved the puzzle while the rest of the clueless masses were blundering around and complaining in discord that it wasn't fair, they couldn't compete, we must be using hax, there was an NQ employee helping us, etc.  Which should sound familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to certain other discussions.  In fact they were just on the losing team.  Some people weren't aware of the puzzle at all, but that was one of the things that made it so much fun to solve.  The whole thing felt very 'ready player one' at a time when JC was using that reference a lot and it made the first few months of beta a lot more interesting.
 
Preserving the Thoramine wouldn't really hurt anyone because there's nothing that we can do with it anyway.  I'd really like to be able to make mine into voxel and create a statue with it.  I'd make one of JC and put it somewhere so the whiners could see it and tell me how mis-guided I am!  It would be hillarious.  And not much work for NQ.

Most of the players who had some have permanently left the game though and I think a lot of it was sold to someone who wasn't involved so it's not a great loss.

What a lie. Everyone could solve the puzzle. The puzzle as there, in the game, everyone could find the obelisks, everyone could solve it.. ^^

The problem with this analogy is that i honestly don't care if NQ "survives" if they can't fulfill their end of a transaction that we entered into.
 
It's sort of like if i walked up to a Lemonade stand and ordered a glass of Lemonade and they were like "Ok coming right up" and then took my money.
 
And then after considering the cost of lemons, and sugar, and the labor it would require to juice the lemons.  They came back and said
 
"Oh boy we're so sorry but our business just couldn't survive if we made you a glass of lemonade, so here's a nice glass of water instead.  Now could you please step aside so we can sell some lemonade to the next person in line.
 
I get it that it's more profitable for NQ to launch the game again, but what about the launch that i already paid for?
 

actually the 30k speed cap at the time was all the server could handle, calculation wise  because that was all the server could handle reliably
NQ actually said 30k was all they could do...reliably in relation to other ships near you, calculating their position relative to you.  (Prior to that in pre-alpha it was 20k)
 
 
So it wasnt just an arbitrary number there was a reason for it.
 
now the cap is 50k and they have added mass into it,  Clearly now the server can handle 50k reliably after further optimisation
and before you go on about the 250k warp speed, there wasnt any warp drives in pre-alpha, you had to schlep at 20k to all the planets.

LOL, I think you find that the 30K was at least fair and not as arbitrary as you might think since the current scientific consensus is the max speed of the universe is the speed of light (or close to it), which means the speed limit has a basis in current scientific fact (just missing a few zeros off the max speed). 
 
As for making it about mass, this is completely unrealistic and therefore chosen, hence arbitrary.

If we were going to make an arbitrary system it would be a max speed set at light speed (Ish) and then the engine performance on the ships would determine the max acceleration to this max speed, which is the thing that is no longer part of the game and anyone who actually had to fly from point a to point b before they made the change compared to now really does not like this change at all.
 
Only the PVP's who could not fly their ships well enough to get a hauler before it reached max speed had any issues with the previous way it worked. I know they use the excuse of the missions but It only increased the time to make these missions at least one person running them said it made no difference to the way he does them. So I am not convinced this is anything other than a bad change and you will never convince me otherwise.

Since we now have a confirmation of a wipe at launch, how about  a contest  for new UEF ships. Give us some parameters, and let us submit our creations.

I want to play the game.
 
But it's hard to imagine ever regaining my former levels of enthusiasm knowing that NQ was willing to sell us all a "Launch" and then take it back and sell it again to someone else.
 
I'm sorry but that's just not how you do business.

Good points
I agree by 100%
What you wrote, made me think this:
 
I think we all agree about current problems. Direction of development is off
 
If NQ really does listen us , are those problems on us?
 
This I like to say to NQ:
Respect original vision and go towards it.
Ignore proposals which  may lead to wrong direction.

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/24639-shedding-light-on-a-novaquark-internal-discussion/
 
Having schematics removed was one main reason for wipe.
Now schematics issue is resolved without wiping. There is no real reason for wipe.

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/24639-shedding-light-on-a-novaquark-internal-discussion/
 
Having schematics removed was one main reason for wipe.
Now schematics issue is resolved without wiping. There is no real reason for wipe.

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/24639-shedding-light-on-a-novaquark-internal-discussion/
 
Having schematics removed was one main reason for wipe.
Now schematics issue is resolved without wiping. There is no real reason for wipe.

No need for NQ to be rocket scientists to know that 0.23 did not go as planned. And after reducing the schematic prices down from insane to high to at least prevent every single player from leaving the game, it was total radio silence about the issue for years. And it was only mentioned again recently when it fit their narrative to suddenly admit subscriptions where bad, and use that as an excuse for yet another server cost reducing patch.
 
And the worst part in all this is that they are now doing EXACTLY the same types of mistakes all over again, ignoring feedback and pushing game breaking changes while pretending everything is fine.

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/24639-shedding-light-on-a-novaquark-internal-discussion/
 
Having schematics removed was one main reason for wipe.
Now schematics issue is resolved without wiping. There is no real reason for wipe.

Blueprints will be useless because so many changes. And more to come
 
About progress.
Personally I do not count Talent points as a "progress". They are 100% afk game-play.
 
For me progress is what I've done in game by actually playing it.
- got my Alioth tile
- created my base
- created small in-house factory for my orgs needs
- Created Space station and bought space elevator. (Again serving my org)
- Collected all elements and materials to spawn my AG ship from Alpha BP
- Bought several cool ships
-e.t.c
This is progress. This I hate to loose
 
 
 

I don't care about money of my subs.
I don't care about talent points because they are 100% passive nonsense.
I don't care about quanta or constructs.
 
I do care about my time. Time I've invested to this game.
 
I'm 66 years old, my time is slowly coming short.
Life is most valuable asset I have. Ever day, every hour i spend in this game I have less and less of my time left. It is not infinite.
 
@NQ When considering this wipe issue, please respect your players time.

This is probably not far off. JC envisioned DU to literally be box with sand and _everything_ in it was to be done by players. In the "design" as it went to alpha, there was an ark ship location which led to a tutorial location and from there you had .. nothing.. and the players were to do it all.
 
Players were supposed to organise, be the ones to build markets, and so were given the option to "do everything" in an org structure and work towards that. Orgs create wealth and from it create marketplaces where they sell their output, competing with each other. And from that competition other things can organically evolve, including conflict. That was the idea of the game's main design and to be honest that sounds not terrible to me. (and in broad strokes, pretty much describes EVE, which is the big inspiration for DU).
 
 
The player markets never happened though, that is now all controlled by NQ. The rest of the game is still in a mode which really drives orgs to become self-sufficient entities and they do not need the markets at all in either direction. And NQ just keeps trying to make this a player problem while it really is a core design problem of the game which they just refuse (or are incapable) to see, regardless of how clearly it is being pointed out to them.