Sabretooth

How does NQ envision the game? That we all just have a base, make some elements and voxels there to build small PvP ships and then immediately fly into the PvP zone to fight each other? Whoever dies first lands back on their base and can "quickly" set a new BP and fly to battle again?
Shit, and I really thought we were supposed to build cities-villages-an entire civilisation that is full of great creative masterpieces, each building can present its builder in its own way, and from walking through the area and looking at everything you can only marvel at what players could create.
I'm currently in the process of tearing down cores again, abandoning my plans for a Borg construct, because I'm simply already way over the corelimit and I would otherwise lose everything. At the moment I wouldn't even care about the loss, because I'm not even sure if DualUniverse is still the game I want to play - I might be better off in Minecraft.

Its like if the government was like hey we will give you 40 tiles and a ship and you end up building it all and the government turns around and taxes you to try to default you, cuts your breaks, trys to sabotage your industry, abandon your vehicles, kill your mining rights, turn the industry green with MUs that do less environmental damage, kill the economy to bankrupt you, and then tells you that you can only use x% of your company vehicles or structures.
 
They asked for this, they dont like what game they made, and not they want to kick people off the land who are paying or freeloading alike since we dont do what they wanted which was to make us fight each other.

Since the player slots where unchanged in the original announcement, it makes more sense to talk about the org slots numbers as a separate issue.
 
Or to quote NQ:
Each Novean will have 15 assignable organization construct slots, with an additional 10 available from talents. And my issue with NQ trying to limit cores beyond technical limitations, is pretty simple. DU is a building game, so for f**** sake let players build.
 
And it cannot be ignore that many of the current famous landmark (no phun intended) structures in DU are passion projects made by solo players or small orgs, since the big ones tend to be mostly PvP oriented.
 
So my original question stands. How did NQ manage to conclude that those numbers where acceptable for any long term player enjoyment in this game? And to me this shows a frightening amount of disconnect between NQ and how players interact with this game.
 
Even I as a mostly inactive small time solo builder with minimal core usage in the game, did not even need to finish reading the announcement before I knew for certain what a shit storm this would cause.

I completely understand why NQ needs to limit core counts (that's part of why we started asking about sustainability back in 2016/2017), but it never made sense for them to pretend everything was fine so that a precedence for core usage was made and then suddenly.. wham! The 'beta' soft-release for example would have been much better timing combined with the 'release' wipe.
 
And if NQ had forced the 15+10 core limit, then no amount of investment money would have saved the game. So while not a democratic process, there is no commercially driven game company that can afford to ignore the player base.
 
And my biggest concern at the moment is trying to figure out how NQ managed to conclude that those 15+10 numbers would result in a functional game that players would want to play. Especially when combined with how the MU system works.

@NQ-Deckard Posting here because the devblog discussion thread is a little busy discussing core slots?.  I know you are rethinking the detection system already.  But i wanted to add a bit more feedback on how the current detection is working.  
 
I have a very small speeder type ship.  And after the stacking detection was enabled, several elements on it were flagged, despite being placed without any exploit.
 
On the front here, on each side i have three S Atmospheric Brakes, placed directly on top of each other, and then an adjuster placed directly on top of the brakes.  All placed simply, no trickery at all.  But the brakes and the adjusters were all flagged as stacked.
 

 
After rebuilding the front of the ship.  I moved the center brakes, to account for future air brake obstruction too, and repositioned the adjusters.  And nothing was flagged at this point.
 
I checked, and double checked. 
 

 
Then i made a blueprint, and created two more of the same Speeder.  
 
I also checked the new constructs, and they had no elements flagged.  So i compacted one of the new speeders, and flew to Lacobus.  Where i uncompacted it, and entered the command seat to fly it, and that's when i got the red message on my screen telling me that elements were stacked.
 
So the two speeders on Alioth are both still fine, the original, and the one made from a blueprint, i checked when i got back to Alioth.  But the third speeder, when uncompacted on Lacobus, has elements flagged as stacked.
 
And just to make things a little weirder, once i got back to Alioth and uncompacted the speeder, no red message on the screen, and no flagged elements in build mode.

While I'm not so sure about how this is phrased, I agree with the sentiment.  
 
With over 8 years on the project now, it's really beyond stupid that it is only just now that NQ is actually doing the math on the cost of player scaling...when this is something they've been asked about dozens of times since the forums opens around 2016. 
 
It's like building a casino...but not doing any sort of calculations about revenue until after you're done...then realizing you didn't put enough slot machines on the floor and your casino will never work. Yes, it's a problem. Yes, it was your most fundamental job to figure this out. 
 
So now we have to rip out a big part of the floor and redo it because someone forgot that the purpose of a casino is to make money...of course, a casinos takes a lot less time to build than DU has, so I understand the analogy is not perfect. Yet again, NQ is stuck because JC didn't want to do any work to understand a vital part of the business early on. 
 
With that being said...NQ doesn't have a bunch of great options at this point. Either they raise prices or lower limits. 
 
IMO throwing more money at NQ in the form of higher subs is not appealing...for example, a $15/month sub is as expensive as any other AAA subscription MMO -- there's no way in my mind that DU will retain people at that price. Not with the quality of product they are offering in return. 
 
I do think NQ is likely overreacting some. Of course DU can't support each player using all 1000+ cores...but that's very, very unlikely to happen. Hell, that's being downright optimistic -- come release time, I expect something like 10-20% of players won't even utilize a single core...that they will churn well before that... ?‍♂️
 
TLDR: This was a very avoidable problem that NQ is overreacting to solve because they are too optimistic in thinking that "all the new players" will be building at scale when most will probably churn quickly. 

I see a lot of people here are easily convinced. Only took NQ 1 time to be a little bit honest and lots of people agree like slaves.
And peoples also believe that it is the complete truth, while im convinced its not. I think a expensive and difficult project like the vertex tool is costing more money than it will bring in. But hey, lets introduce that and cut away something else!!
 
This is not a problem that nobody could not see coming, why such a drastic rule now? They could have said in July: in a year with release, there will be a core building cap, so dont go overboard with your builds. But they act like its something they had never seen coming.
Everybody knew there was a 30.000 player test, but it seems nobody at the office was thinking about 30.000 players having 100 constructs with each construct having 100s of elements. But now everything is a suprise and will cost too much money to implement.
 
I think a lot of players are afraid that this game might make it, and thats why they are afraid to quit. So they suck up every excuse NQ has for changes and hope for the better.
I am certain the goal is not to make this game work, its to experiment with the things they can do.
 
Most developing games ive played just added stuff to the game before release. This one only removes stuff.
Ill be watching DU vids and posts and keep an eye on this 'game'... See if it will ever be a succes. And if it is a succes, what kind of game is it?

Its just short sighted in the sense that it might keep them in the black in the short term but the subs they will lose due to this will in 1-3 months time put them again back into the same situation or worse. 
 
What are they going to do then?  Voxel complexity hard limits? Target industry? More nw avondonment features?
 
They could have said we needed to cut down on all the constructs of people who arent paying us and even if you are an alpha backer or beta key player you are the ones who are going to be limited. If you have an active sub you get 200/200 for being an active paying customer or that there could be different tiers so that if you have a T2 sub you get 400/400 cores for $20 a month and it keeps doubling from there since as soon as you are inactive it pretty much gets avandoned anyhow so getting more for your money is mutually beneficial for NQ and the players.
 
It was dumb of NQ to ever offer Alpha backers a totally free account and beta players free accounts until launch and is part of the reason this is the way it is currently.
 
If the problem is money then they need to really start making money in either tier subs to entires people to spend more to get more or actually having some kind of fluff shop if not a full on cash shop.
 
Either way they need to find new sources of income or they keep cutting off segments of the population off from wanting to play their game which makes their situation worse over time and creates more of a cycle of cutting more costs and spending all their time trying to punish, grief, and restrict their dwindling player base.
 
 
 
 
 

Im rage quitting this game, im in rage of the devs with their stupid limitations which gets all the fun out of the game. Also every limitation is a message that you have done a lot for nothing.
I can say goodbye to all my work of the last 10 months... What a waste of time this game turned out to be!
 
Please be honest and put this game back in alpha state, because this is NOT a beta!
 
Could you devs start a discussion of the game that started in august 2020 and the game you are trying to make, so we all can be honest and know what we can expect?

Im rage quitting this game, im in rage of the devs with their stupid limitations which gets all the fun out of the game. Also every limitation is a message that you have done a lot for nothing.
I can say goodbye to all my work of the last 10 months... What a waste of time this game turned out to be!
 
Please be honest and put this game back in alpha state, because this is NOT a beta!
 
Could you devs start a discussion of the game that started in august 2020 and the game you are trying to make, so we all can be honest and know what we can expect?

Im rage quitting this game, im in rage of the devs with their stupid limitations which gets all the fun out of the game. Also every limitation is a message that you have done a lot for nothing.
I can say goodbye to all my work of the last 10 months... What a waste of time this game turned out to be!
 
Please be honest and put this game back in alpha state, because this is NOT a beta!
 
Could you devs start a discussion of the game that started in august 2020 and the game you are trying to make, so we all can be honest and know what we can expect?

Here's my feedback in video form, I tried to keep it short. 

This effectively kills my ship shop going forward, had just spent months building it up with Skyexplorer and a couple friends in preperation for new sexy voxel tools to make a new, exciting ships- and have a place to display them. Even if we all committed ALL of our accounts and alts, it'd not be enough. and none of us would have any personal cores to use.

I'm officially in protest of these changes and won't be playing much until this is sorted/finalized. This is the only change since playin at beta start that has elicited this strong of a reaction.

I actually thought I was going to play Dualuniverse for decades because I just really enjoy building things, especially because I'm a huge fan of Startrek and I'm fascinated by the Borg, I wanted to build a spacestation based on the Borg constructs. So now I'm even more restricted in the size and number of cores and even have to go so far as to demolish my station. 
 
Seriously, NQ, what do you think should keep me in the game now? If I can't keep building, what should I do? I don't like this "PvP" with click and shoot click and wait! I also don't like 1-6hours afk flying through space for missions! I just wanted to spend years building here, as promised in your advertising, and spend my free time that way. So do I have to switch to Minecraft now?

I welcome the try to scale the org constructs in some way. the core limitation of 275 was really not bearable for larger organisations. We had to split up in several sub-orgs for all our constructs and the managing of this was a nightmare, because of the 5 orgs per player limit.
 
BUT:
If I have with all talents just 25 org construct slots, this is quite an issue.
I mean, you have just a few personal construct slots.
- Most of them are already occupied with the cores for the mining units.
- So if you want to build a fancy building and more than 1 single ship, you already need several of your org construct slots for yourself
- Preparations on a larger scale will be nearly impossible

In my case I currently build a city layout so that other players and I can build a realistic (still small) city later. A project like this needs a layout and a structure before it really starts, or it ends in chaos. Currently I have already ~150 cores placed and filled. But projects like this, that need a massive amount of cores for preparation before others can benefit from it, will be nearly impossible. Because everyone have to be in your org (remember the 5 org limit) and has to give you some of their org construct slots before they get anything in return (and be honest: how many will do this?). And even if I get enough slots from people beforehand and I spend massive ressources and time - it can be all lost if just a few players leave the org/ reassign their slots/ cancel their payment. Then the core limit drops and the already placed cores will be abandoned...
 
This will really kill many larger projects.
With this system, you can only start big projects, if you are already big. Big projects from small groups that form a larger organization later will be nearly impossible. So this may be okay for large orgs, but will make it way more difficult for smaller orgs to rise even if they are really active.
Better invent some milestones.
For example: You start with 50 Cores for your org, and with achieving several goals (spend massive ressources/quanta) you can scale up this limit and it remains permanent. So even a small group can get to a decent amount of org cores with the time if they are active (this idea is absolutely not perfect, it shall show just another direction).
 
A system like the announced one that is so fragile that a few leaving/reassigning/inactive members can destroy your organization with the reduced core limit - that is not really thought to the end.
 
I understand the reason and I appreciate that you are try so solving this.
But this is the wrong way NQ.

Personal slots are very much involved, even if they aren't changing.
 
Players don't have enough personal slots to lay down all their mining units, they use org slots for that. Unless MU are rebalanced to reduce the number of cores needed to reasonably run them (since you can practically put all of 2 on most outer-world hexes), a lot of players are going to have a private org, maxed skills, and next to nothing to share with their group-org (people they are supposed to be playing with because this is an MMO) because they are using over half of everything they have between personal and org slots combined just to avoid feeling like they are missing out on their MU-ore.

very short answer: not enough. sorry
 

Exactly!!! And how much of a game is there left then?

Oof, i hope these numbers get adjusted. My little org with 2 players and 4 accounts is well over 300 constructs. We have 41 mining bases, over 30 ships, and a 3-hex base on madis that is mostly paved.  Taking that down to 100 constructs would mean reducing our "stuff" by two-thirds.

I have 8 mining constructs that will now come down.  I have a ship museum that will now lose its structure and most of the ships on display.  I have a two core hangar and 4 cores if parking that will be torn down and my few remaining ships will sit on the ground.  Building was what I enjoyed most.  There is no more reason to gather resources if I can't build.  

I mean, I thought it was blindingly obvious: space stations might be big, but individual stations are rarely close together (meaning only the player building the station can impact their own load time), there's no terrain to render, and generally less traffic around them so system o/h is far lower than ground constructs - plus incentivising players to move into space would drive more traffic necessary to drive progression and at a minimum one-step closer to PvP.
 
Sometimes I wonder who's calling the shots at NQ and what on Alioth they're thinking (or not thinking.)
 
[EDIT: Please also let us convert statics to space and fix BP alignment, so we can just BP our ground bases and move them onto a deck in space.]

just wait till they announce voxel complexity caps or TU limits. Next I can see them caping industry units as well or script limit caps.
 
they should have just wiped the server with geo reset and downsized as tht was the time to full wipe and set standards and they wasted the op. Really the need to d
ownsize the scale of the solar system is its too much for the server to handle apparently on top of core limits.
 
Either way they will need to full wpie at some point the way things are going.

My two cents. 
 
NQ please pay attention to this post. If you continue with these changes, myself and 8 of my closest friends who play are simply done.  This does not include my discord friends around the world who are saying the same. 
 
Games like this, in beta (theoretically) are public betas for a reason.  These betas answer bleeding questions from all angles, players, providers, and designers.  The end result should be streamlined product based on a set of production and product goals.  That said, Dual Universe is supposed to be a sandbox.  Please revisit that term before you continue reading.
 
There are quite a few of us who come from other games, large, small, beta, alpha, hated and loved.  Most of us have been gaming for many, many years.  DU has a specific demographic that really enjoys what this game can do.  Part of that demographic is a collection of "epic" players - players that want to do something huge in a game world.  Build a castle, build a city, build a starport, build a space station, build an empire, build a legend.  We need far more than a single one of those players for the game to develop a truly functional economy and playerbase.  During the foundational stages of this game, you're building the core of the playerbase, supposedly loyal to a fault, who will encourage others to join, who will stream, be the public voice, the advertising, the leads, the reason why others want to play.  When those others join the game, whether they join the voice who encouraged them or some other 'org', the end result is the same, they mostly want to be part of something epic, or build something epic themselves.  Many, many people have built epic level structures in this game thus far.  I'll call epic anything larger than 20 joined L cores for now, but maybe I'm thinking too small.  Lets go with 20.  
 
I can name, for hours, the incredible structures that exist in this game.  Some are plain, without accoutrement, and simply legendary in size.  Some are small-ish and so detailed you can spend days wandering their halls.  These structures exist to create a universe of diversity and a future scale of living that will accommodate thousands, not simply the meagre playerbase that DU currently has.  Us "epic" builders are not building these structures/ships/cities for ourselves to stand on the top and say "Look what I have done!," we're building them with the goal that future players will say "Look what they did" and want to join us and become part of this epic universe. 
 
Yes, there are some truly independent, solo players that fall outside this realm, but this message isn't to address them.  
 
You're about to kill off the reason some of us came to this game:  Epic design.  I first saw the starbase and ship museums on Youtube the day of beta launch.  My first thought was "I need into this, I can see an entire massive station, docking rings, construction bays, vendors, people trading, piracy and dark deeds happening in the underbelly."  Think babylon 5, lets go there with an example.  My first thought was simply, lets build something amazing that everyone wants to be part of or blow up.  This includes ships, a fleet prepped for my friends, new players, or just to give away.  Lets build a station where they can trade those things.  Lets make alliances with other orgs that also build legendary things on planets, and on other planets, in space, and even PVP groups. Lets build a massive hub for trade and exploration, and ships to match!
 
Then the factory changes.   Made sense but made some people mad.  Fine, we moved past that hurdle.  Then the mining changes.  After some math, patience and scanning, we can adapt to that too. Digging wasn't as fun and this allowed us to build more!  Ok, we can handle this.  
 
Now, I'd have to own 6 accounts to keep what I have built.  Simply to exist. Simply to keep some miners going so I can make voxels to build..what?  What would I build?  No more cores, space, static or dynamic.  I'll be all out.    Sure, players can donate slots.  This also can lead to trust issues, blackmail, and all kinds of other nefarious issues.  Fine, prepare for them as an org leader and buy more accounts to ensure the trustworthy hold the key cores... but wait.  What about new players?
 
When your playerbase becomes increasingly vocal that certain changes are going to cause not a ripple, but a tidal wave, in your game, its time to take heed.  Those players are your advertising, and believe right now that on discords around the world, and message boards everywhere, people are angry, disappointed and worse.   There are changes to the game that haven't been asked for, but are being done for financial reasons, some of the player complaints and requests are being completely ignored, and others are finally being implemented but with half-hearted effort.  
 
Its time to listen to the players.  Work out the core issue, the core counts. Figure out org cores, maybe attach a set number to only a Superlegate of an org and restrict him to super of only one org.  Something that makes more sense than each player having to donate core space and being able to hold it over an orgs head.  Don't forget, many of us come from Eve.  I've got a few suggestions, if you're interested PM me and lets go from there, I'm not interested in being lambasted on a forum by a few trolls.  But you need to listen to the players, because you're on a dangerous precipice from which you may never drag back your legendary gamers. 
 
Just my two and a half cents. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

For a game based on building, they certainly don't want us to build.
 

Dear NQ,

I had to make a forum account to make this post, but it's been brewing for a long time:

It is painfully, nakedly, embarrassingly obvious that the latest changes to Dual Universe were dictated by factors outside of the current game play or the community needs/requests. You are not hiding that you're dealing with server costs - whether computations or monetary - and removing tunnels, taxing tiles, limiting voxel complexity, and now limiting cores are all remedies that seem to be aimed at your daily AWS bill.

AWS is NOT the right infra for DU to use. Any working IT professional knows that AWS is only good for:
a) Prototyping
b) Established businesses with healthy margins and relatively static costs, with occasional high-demand bursts of money-bringing activity.

Dual Universe is out of prototyping, but the business is not established and your AWS costs seem to be ballooning relative to your revenue. How else can the recent changes be explained?

I don't think anybody asked you to remove the hand-mining completely, I was expecting auto-miners to just pick up the ore from the tile so I don't have to. And once it's gone, we pack up and move the MUs to a new tile. There is no justification for taxes on tiles at all: not from the game lore perspective, nor for any problems for players. If anything the only request from players was to deal with towers that are above >1Km height, and then you auto-HQ'd them at the last moment.

And do you think anybody wants their constructs to be more plain? I get it - you compress the constructs for storage, and the more complex structures don't compress as small. But that's none of my problem as a paying customer, and I certainly don't want to hear about it and I don't want the game I'm paying for to change for the worse because of your failure to build an RL business model or to change me enough money.

And now with the core limit changes you're completely over the top. I'm sick and tired of you dumping your problems on us. Maybe you're all eating instant noodles and nobody got their X-mas bonus, I'm sorry about that, but you don't need to punish players for it. There are plenty of people who would pay more money if you could just show that you'll use it for the benefit of the players:

1. Hire a creative director who will oversee the direction of the game from start to finish. We need lore, we need story, we need immersion. Most of all we need the changes to make sense in the context of the game, and not make us worry about your RL business model.

2. Hire a technical director who will oversee the transition of your infrastructure to a self-hosted or dedicated-hosted model with CDN integration like CloudFlare that can be used to deliver unlimited game assets over high speed HTTP for a laughable cost of $200/mo. Run from AWS, it's killing you, like it has killed many-many start-ups.

3. Hire an economic director, or two, who would oversee your RL business model and the in-game business models that are available to players and the over-all economy and its direction.

I understand that you'll need money for all of that, but you have a very intelligent game that attracts mature and established players, who can save you financially if only you can renew our hope that you truly intend to make the best space game possible. You have an excellent start so far, but you've hit a rut that would require creative financial models to overcome.

We as paying customers don't want to lose any game features and complexity, ever. Just like we wouldn't want our own house basements to get randomly filled with dirt. We'd pay for it to stay dirt-free, but you just won't give us the option.

We want you to build the best space game ever and we want it to become popular and we want to be able to sell/trade currency and accounts down the line for real money like all successful MMOs do. There are so many aspects of monetization that you're not capitalizing, yet you're obviously suffering an urgent financial crisis. Worse off you're wringing yourself and the player base with endless stress, which can seemingly be resolved, if only you could stand back and reassess what it is you are planning to create.

Please take notice of this pivotal moment and open up the honey, even if it comes with an increased price tag of multiple tier VIP memberships, paid core limits, paid talent boost implants and so on. Use whatever remaining hardcore player base you have left to soar on top, not sink to the bottom.
 
Good luck!