Megabosslord

For now we only have clues: the Panacea announcement included core cap changes, and comments from Deckard above and elsewhere suggest they're trying to reduce load. This quote implies it will only impact solo players and those using multiple orgs... But I have pretty low faith right now in NQ's "we think we've found a very good solution": PS: This remark that orgs are an "infinite fountain" is also a bit off. Esp. for those of us who just had a single org and expended the 2 mth wait time to max the org specific skills.

If they wrote a script to combine 3x3 L cores into 1 XXL core for the purpose of optimising all markets across the game, the same script could be used to consolidate players structures where multiple L cores are snapped together. (This only works where players used blank cores to build though, because the BPs snapping is still broken. However, in a perversely fortune outcome, because BP snapping is broken, most players were always forced to build on blank cores.) Another incentive for players to consolidate to the XL/XXL cores would be elevators travelling further. It's also a pain having multiple L cores stacked and having to skip elevators at every core boundary. [EDIT: ...Unless markets are already on a secret dev-only XL core which would be even more disappointing.]

Easily fixed. XL cores cost 16x an L core (in this example). The player is still constrained by the cost of honeycomb making multiple XL cores prohibitively expensive. [EDIT: Most bases on Alioth - excl. towers - fit in a 3x3 L core matrix. Even the marketplaces?]

The most demanding assets for the DU game engine are multi-core bases - and the likely reason for the imminent and disastrous core cap changes - with many of these structures located in more populated areas. Even to build a runway a player must add multiple cores to their base, even if buildings only occupy 1-2 cores. This is suboptimal for the game engine. Here's a clearly visible example: Take this pyramid near market 13 on Alioth. The player is currently forced to use 17 separate L cores to form the structure, which means the LOD processing in the game engine is trying to optimise each of the 17 cores separately, impacting game performance. Meanwhile, a single very large core would enable the game engine to render it as a single optimised shape:

I would also add valuing your players time and input, and making sure you have relevant talent in your design and dev team, i.e.: DU's core functionality around building and scripting in LUA hasn't been materially improved since alpha - and still has some issues that were raised by players back in the original alpha Trello like static BP alignment. It feels like there's no one inside NQ really driving improvements there.

I played EVE too. Got bored. (TBH also lost a lot of money to pirates on a risky haul and didn't have the motivation to rebuild.) The sci-fi game market is huge right now - partly due to the whole space travel zeitgeist. The PC gaming market is also twice as big as it was during Second Life's heyday. There's also a massive demographic wave of players coming who grew out of Minecraft, took their billion dollar spend into Roblox, and will next come looking for something pitched more at adults - but still in the building/coding genre, and ideally also tapping into the space trend. I reckon if NQ got this right, they could easily exceed Second Life.

Underground mining could have stayed in hexotree. My main gripe with the terrain wipe (separate to the loss of underground mining, scans and owned nodes, which was a separate issue) was the way the wipe was handled. I had 2 slow, failed excavation requests, and a base left floating so high in the air I can’t get to it, no easy fix for ‘add earth’, and no certainty now it won’t happen again if I rebuilt the hard way.

We’re in agreement. A hybrid of the two was a good idea. But dropping the ball on one just leaves you with a bad copy of something else. But if you had to choose, a Second Life reboot is a better opportunity than an Eve reboot given the current state of the market, the age/condition of those franchises, and the standout feature of DU (the voxel engine.)

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.]

Sadly Demeter revealed a new risk factor. Risk factor #1 was that they'd stop caring about the stuff we'd built and wipe. This risk seemed low in early beta, but increased with the geometry reset. Risk factor #2 was that they would do some kind of partial wipe (e.g.: only wipe quanta, or only allow a certain number of magic BPs) and it would become lottery whether the way you'd played and what you'd built would survive. Demeter also raised the risk here as well, with tokenistic effort to satisfy some players. The new risk factor #3, is that while they might intend to preserve player-made content, they'll accidentally mess it up. After Demeter - and the shoddy excavation request system that only served a sub-set of players anyway, and then didn't work very well (my 2 excavation requests failed and there was a clear attitude that it was like they were doing us a favour). Or, the way they just bricked my space elevators, and support suggested reinstalling the game - this now seems like the most likely outcome at release. "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence." - Hanlon's Razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

So that’s two calls (scans and abandoned tiles) where what you’re actually saying is NQ made the wrong call, announced it, then changed their mind at the last minute to the right call. If that’s the case, and you’re right and I’m wrong then: (A) Why are the initial decisions so often wrong - if indeed they are wrong, and it’s not that they just don’t suit you personally? (B) Why announce any decisions at all? Players are only going to act on announcements, then become frustrated when they change. (C) Still doesn’t explain why, when the decisions change, the back-pedalling is done quietly. Only makes it worse. I don’t know where they announced the scans reversal. I stayed up till 2am for the Demeter release, logged in, and they were just missing. A reversal should have the same airtime as the decision it is reversing. (D) You’re making a deal with the devil when you pardon sloppy stakeholder management because it suits you. Next time, when the reversal goes against your wishes, you are hoist on your own petard. (E) NQ rolling the dice on their IP like this, flinging mud at the wall to see what sticks, is reckless. In 25 yrs experience developing larger systems than NQ/DU with many more users, my shareholders would have skinned me alive for free wheeling like this with their investment.

Where is your base? I set up on Alioth when 4 hexes from a marketplace was a long way away. That inner ring of land around the ark ship is mostly long abandoned now for the reasons I described. And I’ve contacted dozens of those players. Anyone who is waiting till launch to play again has no reason to expect anything will work properly by then - given factories, ship mechanics, LUA, ore locations are already unrecognisable from a year ago. But let’s say you’re right - and I still don’t think you are - it’s no excuse to announce one thing, then stealth-patch for the other with no comms. If you’re going to backflip because of a few late complaints like yours, reset the timeline for the change, explain why, and give everyone a chance to be heard - not just a few players who hang out in the forum.

The ‘curious project/simulation’ and other aspects are all linked. I saw a lot of folks criticise DU for being too focussed on building and creativity, but that drives the whole economy. In my time as a builder I spent a billion quanta buying ore and parts for my builds which in turn drove factories, miners, and space traffic. Cultivating the builder community feeds everyone. No builders, no demand, prices drop, and whole thing dies.

So frustrating trying to pull down a L core. With max select area ~1/50th of construct it took forever. Then there's a microvoxel somewhere in the core you can't find. I'd say this is even more important with statics. With no alignment grid-snap or a silhouette (so you can see which way it's facing when placed) it's highly unlikely your first placement attempt is going to be as desired.

I have donated some stuff to other key DU influencers to give away. I might donate more once it's clear who's still playing - still got some time on my sub - as it seems some of my favourite people have also taken a break or are in crisis. DM me on Discord and I'll put you on my list.

You only skimmed the post, right? Frustration with the neighbour (and it was actually several neighbours I'd tracked down, all who left a year ago with no intention of ever coming back - one who asked to be paid in Starbase to handover DU assets, all with very abrasive comments on DU and NQ), combined with waiting 9 mths for the solution, given hope, then having it deceptively taken away again, were only the final straw. No. It was death by 1000 cuts. Demeter screwed me. It took away the ore I'd mapped but hadn't mined yet, took away my scans (another last-minute reversal, after doing MORE scans because we were told they'd be kept). It ganked my space elevators (Caterpillars thrown out of alignment by geometry reset combined with 'manual control' crash). It trashed my base (which was high on a terraformed ramp, meaning after the geometry reset it was left floating high in the air, inaccessible, for which there was no 'excavation request' type solution despite my raising it during PTS: Then I wasted hours and millions in quanta setting up mining ops that got locked up by the core overlap bug, put in 2 excavation requests that failed, had a ship tokenisation error. All this after I'd been wrestling for weeks with problems trying to get a multi-core static BP ready for sale, and gradual realising there was nothing on the horizon to improve head-aches for builders like this: I still had big plans, having spent months building the giant floating island with a system in mind to convert it to space cores and build this: But my base and space elevators were fragged, my support requests were getting incrementally less helpful replies (like suggesting reinstalling the game to fix what was clearly a game bug) and there was no light on the horizon that NQ were ever going to do anything to make dealing with L static and space BPs easier. If anything, it was getting harder. I'd previously gotten rolled on the "new screen tech" API that mooted 3 mths of work on my multi-player roulette table, and still had a backlog of a months work updating ~150 screens in my store. The only thing I had left to look forward to, was the promised abandoned subscriber tile clean-up. Then a worrying thought entered my head. "What if NQ back-flip on this, like they did on scans?" I mean, surely not twice in a row, right? But to be safe, I thought I better come here and say a few words about why I thought wiping unsubbed player tiles is a good thing: That post felt redundant, because it had already been decided. And there are obvious reasons for it, beyond my post: Like the performance improvement of not rendering abandoned constructs - which is inevitably only going to get worse. Or the disincentive to unsubscribe on a whim and mothball in-game assets till launch. Anyway, Pann had liked my Tweet saying this was my favourite thing about Demeter... Finally, a win. Then, a few hours later, NQ steal-patched HQ tiles for unsubbed players. The several players around me who despised DU, who'd played for a few weeks and quit over a year ago, were protected. It was precisely at that point that I realised I had zero faith left in where DU was going. No way of knowing. No trust in any announcements made. And without that, there's just no way to plan projects on the kind of scale that I like to work. Projects that take months and hundreds of hours. That's what it really boils down to: WIthout at least a little predictability on what is coming next, or a clear process and probability for getting a feature request considered, there's no point investing any significant amount of time in the game. And predictability has dropped to zero.

The screen API killed a lot of in-game dev - incl. my multiplayer roulette table.

...after >10,000 views on YouTube, and many hundreds of hrs building: Death Star https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/j8zxhd/its_operational_death_star_test_flight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/jdc5st/districts_9_5_6km_11kms_visible_from_the_death/ Roulette Table & Poker Machine https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/k74cws/this_took_longer_to_build_than_the_death_star/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/kotnkm/some_epic_code_optimisation_to_get_this_working/ Spinning Radar https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/n8fhou/megabosslords_infinitely_spinning_radar_no_fuel/ Emperator https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/o8z3xg/the_emperator_sneak_peek/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/o4uev9/market_shown_for_scale/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/o1xflv/no_other_game_comes_close/ Hologram Projector https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/ohzbvi/a_huge_thank_you_to_those_whove_stopped_by/ Stuff Like This https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/orvc46/todays_voxel_challenge_everything_about_this/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/mwp6xw/til_voxel_landing_skids_work_great/ Giant Floating Island https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/pzntme/floating_island_progress_week_3/ ...and a store with 50+ more DRM-free BPs. It's NOT the constant bugs. This is a beta. They're a small studio running on fumes. It's no surprise having to fill in a dozen bug reports after every release: https://imgur.com/a/y4sPbpE It's NOT the constant nerfs - losing our factories, HTML/SVGs, megas/scans, terraforming, LUA randomly deprecated, ship designs ganked by new element mechanics... also to be expected in a beta (even if it is soul-destroying.) It's NOT having all my suggestions ignored - even the most basic QoL improvements which 50 other people also asked for since day 1, and still today: https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/pu9eoc/watch_my_spirit_broken_in_real_time/ Sorry Xerrass. NQ just don't listen. It's NOT the lack of vision or inspiration. JC's 'emergent gameplay' pitch was awesome bait. Now we're all being shoe-horned into a vanilla same-as-every-other-game meta, but maybe that's the price of doing business. If it means more players, also fine. It's NOT the community. The community were awesome - although many good people have also left. No, I loved this game - despite everything. Eyes wide open. The issue is trust. As a beta, the only point of investing time is if you trust the studio to respect your effort. NQ have crossed from flaky to deceitful: showering us with platitudes while stealth-patching and quietly reversing stated plans. If we can't trust them to respect our efforts, and we can't trust anything they say - any declaration now is potentially the opposite of what will happen. Every back-flip is attributed to some last-minute complaint from someone, but it's never clear who, or how many, or what the forum was to be heard, and how long discussion was open-then-closed-then-opened-again. And because of the ham-fisted way they've handled letting players who quit long ago just leave their garbage laying around forever, tying up resources without paying a sub, there are absolutely no consequences to just walking away - which probably the dumbest design decision in the history of a game. TL/DR: NQ caught lying. Again. No pre-nup.

I guess you never played Atlas. Or Last Oasis. Or Conan Exiles. Or Rust. Most other MMOs with base building give you at most a week on a decay system.

You mean my 6 arguments. Did you even read the whole post?

You can deposit ~3 mths worth of tax in the tile account. That's plenty long enough to come back and top the account up again.

You realise this is actually happening, right? And I'm just endorsing the decision NQ has already made. Try to keep up.

There's some debate over on Reddit about the merits of forcing abandonment of tiles for inactive players. Here's my list of reasons it's a GREAT idea: (1) NO MORE SKY GARBAGE: Before the advent of the space elevator many players built large towers to get to space, now an endless hazard when flying around. As unsub tiles are claimed and their towers demolished, we can get rid of the sky garbage. Like this monstrosity that has been left abandoned for a year: (2) NEW ORE: Randomly unlocking tiles when a player's claim expires - not just now but forever - means new ore deposits will open up indefinitely, allowing new players access to mining. Currently, rich deposits are already tied up by those who moved fast after Demeter. (3) ACCESS TO MARKET: New players getting around in speeders need proximity to market - much more than advanced players with many large ships. Right now a new player can't get a tile close to market to set up their base on most worlds - esp. Alioth. Opening up tiles near market will greatly improve gameplay for new players. (4) MOST UNSUBS ARE GONE FOR GOOD: Folks keep saying that losing tiles will stop unsubs coming back. I've contacted several unsubs on Discord to try to negotiate cleaning up the death traps they left behind, or to allow me to expand my base into an adjacent tile. None were interested, even if I offered to pay their sub for them. One said he'd come back only if I paid him a large sum of money in Starbase. They've had plenty of warning. More press and comms than any other change before incl. Twitter, Reddit, Discord, forums, email notifications for a month, plus independent coverage: https://massivelyop.com/2021/11/19/dual-universes-demeter-update-will-introduce-territory-upkeep-costs/ https://mmos.com/news/dual-universe-will-be-taxing-territories-come-the-demeter-update https://game-news24.com/2021/11/24/dual-universe-s-new-demeter-update-has-automatic-mining-land-taxes-and-visual-improvements/ https://www.mmorpg.com/news/dual-universe-adding-territory-upkeep-fees-to-prevent-land-grabs-maintain-economy-2000123692 Anyone who wanted to mothball their stuff has done it by now, or had friends or an org in the game to do it for them. The current and new player experience is more important than wishful thinking on returning unsubs. (5) LOOT AS PVE: Rolling the dice on a paid territory claim in exchange for possible loot is the closest thing we've had to PVE since the old puzzle ruins and shipwrecks - that we haven't seen any of in forever. For those who like buried treasure, there's the extra fun that they'll need to dig for some of it as well: I wish all those PVEers who want to go dumpster diving good fortune, because... (6) NO WINDFALL RICHES: Concerns that looting will create a windfall of resources forgets the fact you have to pay for the territory unit and tile claim. And that we're only talking about statics, not ships which contain the bulk of valuable elements. Aside from ore left in containers looting won't bring big windfalls and at current prices it will often be less than the cost of claiming the tile - making it a risky enterprise. I say go for it, and again, good luck. This could become a long-term pass time as new tiles keep opening up in future. Personally, I think the unsub purge is brilliant. I can't wait. What do you think? [EDIT: With NQs 11th hour back-flip on this - again - just hours after this post, I’m out. ~1000hrs in since alpha, I’m done. This was the only good thing about Demeter and they stealth-nerfed it. It’s a bad call, but worse, we can’t trust a word NQ say. Bye folks.]

The same people who whined that scan results were going to be kept, will just whine again when the same folks who did the most scanning before, just beat them again. (Plus they kinda missed the point, that so many tiles won't be tied up anymore cos of taxes.) Changing plans a week before the update tho, with very little comms, was a bad idea. [EDIT: Well that moots everything. New scans don't work now anyway.]