Kezzle

Trouble is, they're a symptom of NQ's approach to "developing" the game. And they're inexcusably poor. They're just busywork.

No one has yet demonstrated what a "3D Blog" even is, let alone why anyone would want one or what function it might serve. All that word-salad seemed to do was suggest that DU is an example of one (???), and that they think that the "incentives" in DU are enough to get people "3D Blogging".
 
Pie in the sky. 
 

I don't think Sanc can be used as any measure of how many "old guard" have stayed in the game. I don't believe any of my Org, who're all pretty much Alpha players, some with a couple or three "backer" accounts have placed STUs on Sanc Moon. The problems with issuing STUs mean that Sanctuary tiles have no distinct reason for grabbing and are only being claimed by a few old timers who like the place specifically, or are doing it "because they can", or any other personal reason.
 
In similar vein, I don't think any of my org-mates are using actual money to play the game; that's all  been paid up-front, years ago. Might be a couple of "discount annual sub" alts in there, but mostly running on DACs they bought with packages.
 
I have never seen a player from another Org. I've seen their ships and statics, but never actually managed to bump into one in person. I don't go to the busy markets, but back in beta, there were always bods around-and-about on Madis. Either the necessity of leaving your hutch has reduced, or the numbers are well down on that period.

There's a very timeless and wise adage about game design that's very relevant for NQ: nothing is ever the player's fault. 
 
Designers that fight against this ideal invariably make unpopular games.
 
I'm not talking about dumbing things down to the point where there's no complexity, I'm talking about good design through UI, UX, feedbacks, affordances, and (to a lesser extent) tutorials.
 
There's a world of difference between stupidity and ignorance, and it's really unwise to assume that a given player even cares enough to find the "right way to do something" when the game is so disengaging overall. It's DU's job to motivate players to find engaging gameplay and tell players how to advance.
 
If players don't understand how to play the game in a way that gives them the means to advance, that's objectively bad design.
 
Honestly, most people don't give two shits about the economy in an MMO, they care about markets -- because they want to buy things to advance in the game, not to get rich for its own sake. 
 
The vast majority of MMO players engage with the economy as a means to an end -- profit isn't the main driver for most players,  gameplay is. 
 
 
Which is a big part of the problem, that the only people still playing have been playing since Alpha...
 
If that's the only crowd around, the economy will never reach any point of balance or fun because there's simply not enough players.
 
The issue of balance can't be solved when the design assumes a level of scale that will never, ever materialize. And that scale won't materialize if NQ believes things are fine, but people are just playing the game wrong. 

Satisfactory has literally 158 times more people playing right now compared to DU. 
 
So...the vast, vast majority of people that do enjoy factory building games play something else. 
 
DU has ~0.36% as many players compared to the people playing Satisfactory and Factorio right now...so even if DU only attracts a factory building type of crowd, it's massively unsuccessful in that genre. 
 
Granted those are very popular games, but the point is that DU is immensely unpopular no matter the type of player. DU is not even close to the same league as those games in terms of popularity -- by a huge, huge margin. 
 
So far, NQ hasn't shown any vestige of a plan to improve the game through updates or a change in strategy. They keep staying the course and wondering why no one is playing. 
 
My advice is to enjoy DU while you can (if you enjoy it) because I don't see any evidence that it can survive as a commercial product with NQ maintaining the status quot. 

I think the craziest symptom of this oversharing is the way you used to be able to see all the tunnels inside the planet you were digging in, if you managed to clip your head through a tunnel wall (which wasn't as rare an occurrence as you might hope...). What's the point of my machine even knowing about things that are entirely outside my ability to perceive or affect.
 

"We" don't need schematics. NQ needs schematics, in order to make megafactories difficult to run. If NQ make using schematics easier, they defeat the object of the game system's existence. 
 
What "we" need is for the servers/software architecture to be able to handle large quantities of industry, then the scourge that is schematics can go away entirely.

I think the craziest symptom of this oversharing is the way you used to be able to see all the tunnels inside the planet you were digging in, if you managed to clip your head through a tunnel wall (which wasn't as rare an occurrence as you might hope...). What's the point of my machine even knowing about things that are entirely outside my ability to perceive or affect.
 

Word.
 
It's not feature-complete and many of the features that are "done" aren't; they're tentative frameworks for placeholders.

Science fiction differs from just fantastic nonsense in that it does not ignore the existing physics, mathematics and other sciences. It adds what is missing, what is not yet there (not invented, not seen, not developed technology).
Relatively speaking, there are liquid engines with N thrust. And for the interest of the plot, engines with a thrust of 10N, 100N, 1000N are needed. And in science fiction, this is more or less justified (often authors use existing hypotheses that have not yet been proven, etc. Which, by the way, are strictly scientific (but may be erroneous. A vivid example is the film Interstellar. None of us have seen a black hole. But at the same time, it view, effects of time and gravity are based on scientific hypotheses.)). It does not ignore existing science.
 
What we see in places in DU suggests that this supposedly "science" fiction was written by the humanities. Which of science only learned to subtract and divide (budgets). Because in some places the fundamental foundations of the universe are being violated (by the way, we still don’t know why exactly this is the case with us. We just see how it works).
 
I already wrote about speed. Now let's talk about transmutation. Nobody is embarrassed by the fact that the weight of some things increases many times compared to the original substances? How is that in general? According to what everyday experience did we take 2 liters of plastic and get 2 liters of gold (we don’t take the chemistry of catalysis - there, purely theoretically, if you do not take into account energy consumption, you could get substances, but the mass of the starting substances can be more and not less). What is the weight gain due to? from what kind of black hole did something that doesn't exist fall out and add matter? And so periodically everywhere such inconsistencies.
 
If we turn a blind eye to them, then let's replace the engines with horses, wings with carts, spacesuits with armor, and we will go into space on horse-drawn carts. After all, in fact, with such a quality of study, little will change.
 

It's lousy scifi. Largely because its acquaintance with science is no better than nodding, and its fiction is no more original or thought-provoking than Mills and Boon.
 
It's not even, really "Space Opera", for me; that genre generally has some sweeping grandeur to it which DU doesn't even begin to approach.

Hell no! It's a pure and bland sandbox, it has the potential for us to tell good stories. But the DU setting itself is virtually not existent, at the start of beta there was some hint of something more during events, but that was quickly squashed when the previous CEO left...
 
DU is the equivalent of mom getting a big box of LEGO, yelling "VROOM! This is a spaceship!" turning the box over in the middle of the living room. "You just crashed on a new planet, you need to rebuild!"... "I'll check back on you when you're 18 and I can kick you out of the house."... 😉

It is a paradox. The game has so few players that it feels empty, but at the same time the planets are so small that a dedicated group can literally scan everything of worth in a short time frame.
 
So to sum it up. Broken game design, is broken..

I think the craziest symptom of this oversharing is the way you used to be able to see all the tunnels inside the planet you were digging in, if you managed to clip your head through a tunnel wall (which wasn't as rare an occurrence as you might hope...). What's the point of my machine even knowing about things that are entirely outside my ability to perceive or affect.
 

I think the craziest symptom of this oversharing is the way you used to be able to see all the tunnels inside the planet you were digging in, if you managed to clip your head through a tunnel wall (which wasn't as rare an occurrence as you might hope...). What's the point of my machine even knowing about things that are entirely outside my ability to perceive or affect.
 

I think the craziest symptom of this oversharing is the way you used to be able to see all the tunnels inside the planet you were digging in, if you managed to clip your head through a tunnel wall (which wasn't as rare an occurrence as you might hope...). What's the point of my machine even knowing about things that are entirely outside my ability to perceive or affect.
 

It's not much of an addiction... I'm feeling zero pangs, or urges to log in... 
 
These forums tho'....
 

It's not much of an addiction... I'm feeling zero pangs, or urges to log in... 
 
These forums tho'....
 

It's not much of an addiction... I'm feeling zero pangs, or urges to log in... 
 
These forums tho'....
 

It's not much of an addiction... I'm feeling zero pangs, or urges to log in... 
 
These forums tho'....
 

Let's be honest here, DU never really stepped out of Landmark's shadow, with only exception being VPT.  And that shadow wasn't even that long considering that besides voxelmancers, nobody really even took notice it ever existing.
 
And when it comes so called "web 3.0" it is little more then bunch of irrelevant academics riding the current facebook meta shtick, The reality of it all is that after years of wasting billions Facebook has very little to show for it and in light of falling revenue has been cutting staff and funding left and right, particularly in their metaverve bits.  It did not even manage to match Second Life-s feature set and that was at the time touted as "web 2.0".  Back in 2007-2009 a lot of big corps rushed into SL to build their presence in the "next big thing"  and were mostly gone 2 years later and SL returned to its previous size and scope of catering mostly to creatives and sims online crowd that has found new home ther after EA shut the service down.
 
Second life really does fair job at what its name says, to many it offers a chance to live an alternative lives unbound from harsh realities of their "real" life circumstances. But it has always come with caveats.  Having a presence in SL can run you into hundreds in monthly fees to own your dream virtual land and hourse and plants;  into thousands when you're a creative building an experience for others to enjoy within its ecosystem.  Moreover it still requires  relative expensive hardware to have a decent experience inworld.
 
And hence the problem,  web 2.0  never really solved the hight barrier to entry to take part in, nor did it ( for the most part) offer general performance sufficient to really gamify the in world experience enough for mom and pops dropping their plants vs zombies on the phone and dive neck deep into their virtual lives.  As a result it quietly flizzled out and second life/active worlds and few others  returned to player populations they have had in years prior to the whole media frenzy.
 
So called facebook's web 3.0 doesn't even have that media frenzy behind it, barriers to entry are pretty much the same and user experience  shallower than 15 years prior.  Voxels are not exactly an important part of the equation here.  Voxels are a very old tech first showcased On Siggraph in late 80's. While i find working with them in game an interesting challenge, they do not really make creative process particularly more accessible for Joe Average, they don't scale particularly well and certainly don't offer more immerive user experience. It's just pixel art in 3d.
 
I'm sure there are few people of the sort listed in that NQ post who will make a nice buck "consulting" and land a few gigs speaking on dev panels, but that is far as it goes.  You can certainly make a career of spinning that water in the bucket but it's certainly not the next digital revolution, not unless it will work on joe's 250 buck laptop and using it is not as simple as playing with a lump of clay.

I've said this before, but the biggest sink in any MMO is player churn.
 
What percent of WoW items and gold are just sitting on inactive accounts collecting dust? Likely the vast majority of all the money and items ever "printed" into the game. 
 
Honestly, I'm not sure I much care about the "economy" of any MMO, overall...I'm just not the sort of player that cares to "play the markets" as a facet of gameplay.
 
What matters to me is that earning money is fun and that it is motivating because there's stuff I want to buy.  
 
In games, that is the primary driver of a good economy in my opinion -- actual interest in wanting to earn and spend money because it drives engagement with the game, overall. 
 
Earning money just to pay taxes is an objectively stupid design idea that undermines the whole point of having a currency system in games to begin with! it isn't to create a fake economy just for the sake of having an economy. 
 
This isn't complicated stuff; it's like they put quanta into the game without understanding why currency exists in video games. Game economies are not at all like real world economies.
 
NQ needs to step back and think about how to make their game fun; the state of the economy really doesn't matter if there's nothing fun to do with it.

Aye, true enough. But it "used to be something" even if only a little thing (more significant if it'd been available at the very beginning to all those to whom it orter've been available), and now it's even less. Yay. Almost a microcosm of DU in that one "development".
 
I can only echo your "Le sigh" comment from a little while back.

Some whales are blue, others are pilot...

Beta?
Even beta is a stretch, since the closest thing to a consensus on the definition of a beta is the product's main functions and roadmap is laid down and the product is essentially feature complete but unpolished and with placeholders (scaffolding) in place where functions are incomplete.

This game is nowhere even near placeholder complete. LOL.
I used to call alphas masquerading as betas "balpha products" which even that I find to be generous.

My personal opinion is this game is still a pre-release, early access, alpha grade entity with less polish than a secondary school's first wind orchestra practice.