Megabosslord

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.]

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.)  

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.)  

Completely agree with most of what you say but you lost me right at the end there when you started talking about Second Life and EVE.  Both of those games are old, established and still running and you can go and play them if you want.  The whole selling point of DU was supposed to be bringing together elements from these (and other) games into one game.  And it was always meant to be a game.  True that second life has no PvP (although I'm sure I remember reading about flying penis attacks?) but the makers also claim it isn't a game.  And IRL corporations invested real money in it too.  I don't think it's sensible to make DU a 'game' without challenge, and in a game with no developer-generated content you will always need to have player conflict, i.e. PvP, in order to make it an actual game and not just a theme park generator.

To be fair the planet reset in Demeter was largely because of the new hexoctree data structure, used to more efficiently render voxel planets.
 
But beside that, I think your points are spot on. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is a phrase that keeps coming up when discussing NQ actions.
 
And this is made even worse, since players have to watch NQ make large sweeping changes that overall worsen the game play, while actual features that would improve game loops and enjoyment get no love what so ever. And it feels like NQ has gone into some type of maintenance mode that you would normally only see on older well established, and feature complete games.

Most of what is mentioned here has no relevance to performance at all. It is about cutting cost, removing what they can to reduce the AWS bill. If it was a performance related concern then, the freed up resources should have been re-used to improve it which has not happned, in fact I distincly hav ethe impression overall performance has gond down since demeter as I believe NQ has removed server capacity which is (now) no lionger needed, again wi the objective to save cost.
 
Draw distance for other constructs is worse, notably around busy markets but in general too. Pre Demeter I saw the neighbours towers when I logged in, now they are not seen unless I fly right up to them, as soon as I have covered about half of the 3 or so KM. Doors, forcefiels, landing geear and animatd elements in general do not spawn in unless you are within 30 meters, leeaving floating constructs all over the place, yet mining units are seen rotating from hundreds of meters. Why is that? NQ is not saying when asked..
 
How is NQ ever going to be able to implement things like TW on planets and even CvC, let alone AvA with this server limitations? What will happen if and when NQ gets to a release of some form and they will see the hopefully tens of thousands of new players they will need to stay alive? They have litterlly cut of their arms and legs to stay alive and these do not just insta grow back when they need to get up and start running.

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.]

...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.

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. 

Great ! Would love to see the new update .
my suggestions :
- Reduce tile tax to 500k and test it. 
- Remove elements obstruction completely. Why obstruction is good ? Voxel designed ships for players by players. Players can hide elements inside voxels so they look cool and be protected for pvp. 
- PvP voxel importance increase in resistances they provide.
- Building : cores alignment if you want to deploy a large number of static (or space) cores in line with your adjacent tiles. Blueprints and degree alignment by eye is simple but not accurate for large constructs. Settle ^^
- Dont nerf org cores count too much . Maybe increase a bit and see ?
 
Thank you 

...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.

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
 

...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.

This is exactly why I quit also. I loved this game. Spent months building a race track and eventually earned great quanta from the location once it was finished. But I absolutely hated being lied to and treated like a commodity, rather than a customer, by the developers. 

We would have given them a million chances to get it right if they were just honest.

Right or wrong is measurable, as is everything. DU is bleeding players. Worse, they are bleeding long-time, dedicated, and influential players. 
 
NQ clearly has no plan and have gone silent. There is no excuse.

That is an straw man argument since nobody argued against PvP.
 
The argument was always against making PvP more importation then building or any of the other 6 pillars, in a game that was sold as "make your own game" and clearly had a focus on persistent open world building in the kickstarter. I.e. make the game you sold us.
 
But the simple truth is that NQ sucks at game design for both builders and PvPers..
 

...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.

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.
 
 

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.
 
 

...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.

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.
 
 

I get where you are coming from and thank you for posting your opinion in the topic what Pann is monitoring for this subject ?