Sabretooth

I've been thinking about this a lot, after rage-quitting over Demeter. How did DU end up so far removed from what was described on Kickstarter - what we thought we were getting, or what we had in alpha and early beta?
 
It occurred to me there is an observable pattern in NQ's dev decisions:
 
Problem #1: Fresh after launch. Players are setting up advanced factories too quickly. 
 
Instead of leaving basic manufacturing alone, or just auto-installing the new schematics for all players for the first couple of tiers, or coming up with more elegant solutions that extend end-game content without messing up existing player effort, like adding costlier tiers with higher specs, or any other solution that let players keep the factories we had built, nope. NQ bricked everyone's work completely. All the time invested in setting up our factories, layouts, linkages, was wiped. Unsurprisingly, a tonne of players leave.
 
Some of us stayed, not realising the culture at NQ had now been set for the next big challenge...
 
Example #2: Underground tunnels are causing performance issues.
 
The problem with mining wasn't that it was boring. That was a bad excuse. Players had already proposed the solution in the old voting system - a gem mechanic. If it's so boring, which is it still used on asteroids? Underground mining was about system O/H. It could easily have co-existed with surface mining. But instead of, say, writing a crawler routine that decays old tunnels when there's no player in proximity - which totally makes sense, and adds more interesting gameplay (i.e.: get buried alive if you AFK underground, caves collapsing...) - or wipe-on-claim, or just randomly propagating new dirt, or cellular automata, or new ore, or a bunch of other ideas, NQ reached for the hammer again and wiped all terrain, wiped all scans, wiped all underground mining, took away all our work finding ore deposits, buried our bases, and offered a tokenistic excavation request system that was slow, simplistic, under-resourced, and didn't consider 'add earth'. There were a dozen other ways to solve the problem, without creating new problems, and without losing so many players.
 
Next comes Panacea...
 
Example #3: The game engine still can't handle rendering too many constructs at once.
 
Here's where we are now. Instead of waiting for the upcoming salvage mechanic to wash out, or taxing constructs, or height limits, or larger static core sizes and better alignment between cores (this would enable better LOD since players wouldn't need multiple L statics janked together to build a base), or otherwise improving the actual engine, it feels like NQ are reaching for the hammer again, and not the scalpel. The Panacea announcement (here: https://www.dualuniverse.game/news/panacea-update-added-to-roadmap) brings the following change:
 
"Organization construct ownership (construct slots): a new way of assigning available construct limits to organizations."
 
It took ~2 mths to max out construct management talents to get enough cores to build a large base. That meant surviving without training any other talents, which meant sacrificing in-game money (refining skills) and time (like ship and movements speed). It was a full month just waiting for the final level of the advanced specialisation. Now, it sounds like NQ are going to nerf those skills, reduce the number of constructs available, while also potentially forcing many players to demolish parts of their bases to get under a new cap. There are going to be a lot of pissed off people. Again. 
 
At the heart of all of these problems is a single truth: a prevailing attitude at NQ that the player's effort, creativity and ingenuity is disposable. 'Kicking down the sand castle is good, because it forces them to rebuild it.' This attitude is implied by the oft-repeated analogy that DU is a bunch of toys in a sandbox. The toys/sandbox metaphor is not only directionless - not a great dev strategy - it is also condescending. It trivialises the elegance and art of what players do in DU. DU is sculpture, coding, architecture and engineering. And it is this artfulness that attracted players early on. It drove the economy - creating demand for manufacturers and miners, in turn promoting space traffic. But best of all it attracted more people - the no.1 dependency of the whole ecosystem. The more our creativity is enabled - not by capping our number of cores, but by finding ways to give us MORE cores - the more free advertising the game generates for itself on video, streaming and social media sites.
 
Until NQ begin cherishing the time spent by players, all our creations, as much as we each cherish them ourselves, they will continue to impose collateral damage with every release. The very worst part of this pattern isn't even the dwindling number of committed players - which is bad. The worst part is, the original vision of enabling unbounded creativity was good, if only it hadn't been speared 5 minutes after launch. DU could have been bigger than 'Second Life.' (For those who never played Second Life, at it's peak it had 1 million active players and turned over $130m a year after inflation - with zero PvP.) Instead, the "player generated content" part of DU is incrementally nerfed, and DU is turning into nothing more than a shelter for EVE refugees.
 
There are many who may still return to DU if NQ start showing some care and respect for the players' time, creativity, and ingenuity. But that means not taking a hammer to everything, every time the devs face a challenge.
 
Use a scalpel to make changes - and preserve what players have built.
 
[EDIT: I’ve excluded a 4th example of hammer vs scalpel, being the screen tech API. For now the HTML/SVG nerf appears to be on hold. In this case, again, due to issues with the rendering of HTML/SVGs NQ was preparing to take the hammer to all the work done by players on screens, and many common LUA scripts, rather than surgically parsing problem tags. Like core caps, this is still TBA.]

It is an issue, I lended my alt to somebody I know IRL and even though I've known him since preschool and we have contact regularily, it was awful and unmanagable.
 
I'd give him what he needed to progress every time he found himself in front of an obstacle, he'd rip out all the elements, build something less functional for 3 days, try his luck once at what he wanted to do, and then either decide it was beneath him or waste another week on a crappy method. Like the guy was convinced he'd be mining faster if he first carved a tunnel grid into the tile, spent easily like 2 days tunneling before he turned his scanner on once... And thus I watched him fail upwards, and just kept providing him with more stuff, and more RDMS priviledges he kept constantly whining for instead of using the [filtered]ing game mechanism I tried to teach him for once.
One day I show up and he basically helped himself for about 800kl ore... That is after allready having splurged every quanta he ever made when we split up bounty. Yup after he spent his, he started taking my half. Allways for projects stupider than the one before too, the guy had never hauled more than 300t and was sinking his ressources in a dynamic L core that filled out the whole space of the core, by the time I kicked him out of my account. Honestly I tolerate him bc I know him IRL, but it's really impressive how imperveous he is to advice and how talented he is to allways try the worst method first, which compounds into something truely awful because he can stick with something for years if it half worked once, and keep blaming it on the cirumstances if doesn't work when it shouldn't. Skilled all my talents to lvl3 too, even the ones I have at 5 on my main, he was just too special for any kind specialisation or planning ahead..
 
So yeah we need something beyond RDMS and the mere trust that participants will hold their end of the bargain. Noobs risk to be exploited, orgs risk to have monitor their members constantly.
 
At the moment we could like, gate certain zones, with double airlocks that assure there is allways just one person per lane, then transfer unit what they bring or get, out and into the lane, let LUA track the whole thing... But omitting the design and programming challenges of theftproof member bays... So what you happen to request 400kl you need to either stay in "decontamination shower" until the transfer unit is done or have a superlegate present?! Sure we could do loads of bookkeeping via LUA, but that's like a full-on programming job, and not the most fun at that, and you might still hit some hard walls.
 
So there are ways, but it's far from optimal, or even feasible for many players that are not programmers... There should be way, way easier solutions that don't require extensive knowledge of LUA, human ressources, and building an out-of-bonds glitchfree base.
 

Warfare is an important key feature that NQ uses to lure people into the game and has never sold this as a racing game and while I am sure that there could be some kind of draw to racing or space racing as a genre I think doing so could be done to an extent.
 
NQ would need to:
 
Making a proper waypoint system that allows for multiple waypoints as a list and an element that players can interact with that with a yes/no checkbox to download the coordinate list. Another element that has a que list of players interested in racing as well as a number of participants for each race. Some kind of security system that you can have public ships for racing that if they try to leave the territory it will automatically enguage an autopilot to take it back to a preset location for that ship. Some kind of auto repair system so that while in that territory the ship can be linked to a container within the teritory that will automatically repair damage so that ships are good to go with minimal or no effort. A auto placement system for qued players to where it gives them temporary access to racing ships and removes access once a race has been completed and will automatically take all ships back to the starting race positions for the next race. Some kind of perms to flag PvP within specific tiles as part of a racing system for races that lasts until a race is complete and tied to the racing Que Element in which a tile owner can have PvP flagged, set up teams or independent teamless options as well as the allowed weapon types or sizes as well as what can share perms in terms of what can be damaged in the case of interactive portions of races like triggers for collapsing parts of tracks, obstructions like voxel walls, etc as you could also allow the spectators to man turrerts orsomething.  
Many of those things have many uses beyond just racing as NQ should never shift their focus to any one thing in DU with so many things missing or being needed in game beyond racing.
 

I think as with most thing we post here this is a good idea, and that also as usual NQ will not have the time to even reply and mush less implement.
 
And with regard to this, I for one would VERY much like to see support for proper analog joystick input in this game.

Solo/Duo newb here, 3 months in. I know The taxes are a real stumbling block for someone who doesn’t have their feet under them yet, but the daily login bonus by itself covers one tile. bought our MUs one or two at a time.
 
Demeter definitely changed my plans, no more earthworming for easy $$. So I’m not doing industry. I actually took over an abandoned factory, but I don’t see ever having the ore input needed to run it -but that’s another story.
 
My wife and I play together and have mining units on 6 tiles. I work 40-50 hours most weeks, sometimes more. No problem keeping up with calibration,paying rents out of it, and still getting my building itch scratched. The teamwork helps, makes it more fun for sure, but my point is that it’s not slavery, and you don’t need an org to have fun in this game.
 
I think maybe you had unrealistic expectations and got disappointed by them. It does suck to see how people used to get rich off easy mining and realize you aren’t going that route, but there’s still plenty of opportunity -just a longer windup to it now.

Yes because Orgs can outcompete a solo player in pretty much every section apart from creative things such as ship building and voxelwork. This game is based on civilization building and players organizing together. You can of course play solo but it will be hard - which I see you already experienced.

Your criticism is just "game hard when alone" and half the things you mention are new player mistakes such as going into pvp space without shields/radar or a clue what a pipe is.

C ya

@Chorum Sorry, but you flew in the pipe. You should be prepared in advance before you fly into the PVP zone. Maybe this picture helps you for your next trip.
 
btw: there are no territory taxes right now, so dont cry.
 

What does unrealistic expectations mean?
The game itself didn't want to offer rules per se, but to give players complete freedom in how to play DualUniverse. complete player-driven economy and co. There were no schematics or taxes, so you didn't need Quanta, but had to trade with players yourself. No matter if a ship or a voxel template, you just paid in ores. What was good about the system? Exactly, you could dig up ores whenever you wanted. There was no time limit neither in hours, days or weekly cycle. You could just log in and play.
Currently, however, in order to play, you have to play some mandatory content, unless you mine your previous possessions and move back to Sanctuary. Alternatively, you mark your territories as HQs, but then you can't use the industry without owing taxes. Meaning, without these mandatory contents, one's game is slowed down tremendously, worse, once you enter the hamster wheel, you have to run, run, run or you go back for a break to recover.
At the moment, if you want to play relaxed, just stay on sanctuary, set up your 4-5 MiningUnits there and build what you want with T1, you also manage to exchange T1 for other T-ore at the market. However, everything then in very slow play. I think a lot of players are now just bothered that a bit of that freedom has been taken away from them that drew you into the game in the beginning.
 

Im sorry but I think you started this game, wanted to get rich in 1 day and when that didnt happen you decided to abandon the game. A thing a read a lot here on the forums, written by new players who barely played a month. Maybe these people should search for more information about the product they are buying instead of just jumping in and afterwards complain about the game.
Cant say im gonna miss these new players who come into a game and when they are not top of the list within a week, they quit.
 
I have been a solo player for 16 months, been into the pvp zone only once and I warped. Got my sanct tile and a space base.
Easy playing as a solo player, but some people are not satisfied unless they rank among the highest.
 
 
AND WHY DO PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT TAXES DO NOT JUST BUILD A SPACESTATION THAT IS TAX-FREE????
I can go for weeks on my station, just building stuff. Only fly off to get some market items or do missions to make some money. It wont get you rich but it does give you fun gametime instead of doing the chores for taxpayement.

Im sorry but I think you started this game, wanted to get rich in 1 day and when that didnt happen you decided to abandon the game. A thing a read a lot here on the forums, written by new players who barely played a month. Maybe these people should search for more information about the product they are buying instead of just jumping in and afterwards complain about the game.
Cant say im gonna miss these new players who come into a game and when they are not top of the list within a week, they quit.
 
I have been a solo player for 16 months, been into the pvp zone only once and I warped. Got my sanct tile and a space base.
Easy playing as a solo player, but some people are not satisfied unless they rank among the highest.
 
 
AND WHY DO PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT TAXES DO NOT JUST BUILD A SPACESTATION THAT IS TAX-FREE????
I can go for weeks on my station, just building stuff. Only fly off to get some market items or do missions to make some money. It wont get you rich but it does give you fun gametime instead of doing the chores for taxpayement.

Im sorry but I think you started this game, wanted to get rich in 1 day and when that didnt happen you decided to abandon the game. A thing a read a lot here on the forums, written by new players who barely played a month. Maybe these people should search for more information about the product they are buying instead of just jumping in and afterwards complain about the game.
Cant say im gonna miss these new players who come into a game and when they are not top of the list within a week, they quit.
 
I have been a solo player for 16 months, been into the pvp zone only once and I warped. Got my sanct tile and a space base.
Easy playing as a solo player, but some people are not satisfied unless they rank among the highest.
 
 
AND WHY DO PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT TAXES DO NOT JUST BUILD A SPACESTATION THAT IS TAX-FREE????
I can go for weeks on my station, just building stuff. Only fly off to get some market items or do missions to make some money. It wont get you rich but it does give you fun gametime instead of doing the chores for taxpayement.

Im sorry but I think you started this game, wanted to get rich in 1 day and when that didnt happen you decided to abandon the game. A thing a read a lot here on the forums, written by new players who barely played a month. Maybe these people should search for more information about the product they are buying instead of just jumping in and afterwards complain about the game.
Cant say im gonna miss these new players who come into a game and when they are not top of the list within a week, they quit.
 
I have been a solo player for 16 months, been into the pvp zone only once and I warped. Got my sanct tile and a space base.
Easy playing as a solo player, but some people are not satisfied unless they rank among the highest.
 
 
AND WHY DO PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT TAXES DO NOT JUST BUILD A SPACESTATION THAT IS TAX-FREE????
I can go for weeks on my station, just building stuff. Only fly off to get some market items or do missions to make some money. It wont get you rich but it does give you fun gametime instead of doing the chores for taxpayement.

Now that's what a physical manifestation of trolling looks like. LOL.

which dev tripped over the roid generator ....again

I was planning to spend some time running asteroids.. but it looks like someone at NQ forgot how to start the asteroid event..
a shame.. and odd how this seems to not be an automated process integrated into the game.
 
cron must be a tool unknown to NQ
 
Well, NQ now has two opportunities to show they meant their "we will do better" this time around..  It will be interesting to see how they respond to this (tomorrow)..

About a month if playing solo with only 1 account?
Let me provide some calculations to you. One mining unit provides 230 l/h with maxed handling talents.
With good recharging talents 1 player can maintain around 30 mining units running simultaneously.
That being said, that's 165kl daily, so it's around 23 days to fill 20L containers. So if you are playing in an org with, let's say, 3 players, you would need to use such a hauler once a week.

No no nooooo!
Please stop asking for more rules and limitations. You are only confining yourself.
If you dont want to use or exploit something what you think is wrong, then just dont. You wont get any praise or anything from that, only you yourself will know about your 'good' action, but (imo) thats the path of becoming a good human.
 
I do agree that they made hovervessels a bit obsolete. Thats a bit to he fault of demeter as before that, I wanted to  have a giant hovervessel on each planet collecting ore in VR and pick some up when you got there yourself. There was no need for owning a tile. Now you cant mine without owning a tile which makes the giant hovervessel project obsolete.
 
Maybe they could add a function or a hover-only dynamic core that can have industry.

Seriously, as a gamer, I don't care what technology is behind it to make the game run stably and with high quality.
I play to have fun. Content isn't fun in any game when constant lags and disconnections dominate the game. It's also no fun to get into a game where various content is promised that isn't even there or possible to be implemented.
There are thousands of games on the market, all of them offer "something" that makes them good and attracts players. Sometimes more players, sometimes less players. The greater the selection in a game and the higher the quality, the more players are attracted. World of Warcraft had more than 12,000,000 subscriptions in its prime. There were so many of them because there were hardly any good alternative games, which over time started to affect the status of the game when there was more and more choice on the market. In general, the game market became bigger and bigger over time - think about it "in the past" a gamer was a NERD - today he is a hero and even earns money with luck and planning.
What DualUniverse needs is content that attracts and positively engages gamers. It also needs diversified content in the game to attract many interest groups. Right now we have the voxel game, which only attracts a minority and with luck can pull some players away from Minecraft. But then what? The "PvP" is so broken, players prefer to stay in other PvP-based games, especially since there is only one type of PvP here and other games offer whole different PvP activities: (AvA, different arenas, battlegrounds, rated battlegrounds, openWorldPvP, castle battles, ship battles, faction wars, guild wars, ...). What's more, this content is very easily available when players come home in the evening and just want to "play" for 1-2 hours. Turn on the game and play, just log into a battleground, get invite and off you go....the same principle exists in the PvE area. Dungeons, raids, quests, world bosses, world riddles, achievement systems, collection systems, pets, mounts, housing, professions.....
Even sandbox games like ArcheAge offer a minimum of game content to keep players positively engaged. A player needs to have a choice between mining for a higher goal or just playing free for a few days and relaxing while playing.
Right now, DualUniverse is a niche product because it attracts a tiny minority of potential players - and therefore customers.
 

Its very difficult to read and understand as your post looks like one long sentence.
Could you edit your post with some spaces between some parts?

Its very difficult to read and understand as your post looks like one long sentence.
Could you edit your post with some spaces between some parts?

Its very difficult to read and understand as your post looks like one long sentence.
Could you edit your post with some spaces between some parts?

Its very difficult to read and understand as your post looks like one long sentence.
Could you edit your post with some spaces between some parts?

I cannot agree with you here.
Like ALL STATIONS are build so the gravity pulls you. I have mine set up so you have the best view. I dont use planet gravity for this and never thought that way.
My space station is kind of cube. But since you can flip space cores, you can land of the sides too! So my base has 5 sides that are flipped and can be landed or walked on. (Thades best views video on YouTube, in the last 20 seconds or so the entire base is in sight so you can get an idea of what I mean)  
Maybe you base is flat but mine is not. 
 
You can VR to Meranda Xirsea Store and check the base out yourself and experience how transition between flipped cores are done. Walking down the stairs to another flipped core requires looking down or youll be pushed into space.
 
Also not adding a small downward thruster to solve your irritation, but choose to be stubborn and complain  (which has taken up more time and energy already than just adding a almost none visible thruster) to me is a strange decision.
If you could add 4x4 for almost no costs or room, why dont you do that?
 
Try to relax and look at these pics (s & xs core) and try to spot the downward thrusters. (MEX or Meranda Xirsea on DU creators)
And I think you will admit that something this small should not be a problem for any ship builder. Rebuilding a multicore space station is!
 

And this is what we tried telling NQ since 2017, but they never even acknowledged that there might be a problem until suddenly Demeter.
 
- We think you are underestimating how much people are going to dig, how will you handle the persistence server load?  Silence...
- How will you deal with fixed resources (ore and tiles) making it so that new players will have a harder and harder time staring the game since all the best spots will be taken?  Silence..
- This game is really difficult to learn for new players and the building system requires lots of resources to learn proper. How will you solve this? Silence...
- Can this game really function without PVE? Silence..
- How will you limit people from advancing to quickly but still have fun building?  Silence...
- The lag city stress test (pre-alpha thing before we had District 6 to highlight the same issue) shows that this game will not scale anywhere close to what you promised it would. Is this going to be fixed before release? Silence...
- Why is there so little progress being made with regard to improved game loops?  Deafening silence...

Yeah, clicking on a MU and clicking calibrate, then exiting calibration after it initialising but before you play the mini game, takes less than 15 seconds in total. That (with good skills) bumps my calibration score up by 60% without even playing the mini game. I do that calibration with 6 MU per day. The MU are all close together, and the territories are all surrounding my base.
 
So probably less than 5 minutes in total… 15 seconds per MU, x 6, that’s 1.5 minutes, not including walking 2 meters between each MU…