Mornington

All those statements are allmost exact same statements i gave to the german discod chat and some communitys who know me well...

A lot of people were upset about the 0.23 and named it as the "Downfall" of DU.
Cooperation over creativity is not theyr cup of cake and they havnt yet appreciated the possibilitys of a singleshard-server.

Many others see this as a major step towards the goal on what DU should be like.
DU as a playerdriven virtual civilization needs to have most of the challenges not be reachable without others.

What we got with 0.23 is not yet what has been needed to force a kickstart to this virtual civilization, but its a good Start.
And i know some who see DU still as a game like many others and not as an oppurtunity to have something completely different.
Something thats gonna less longer than any other game or hype.
Something that evolves with every step towards its goal, but where the devs have allways the goal in mind.
Build us the biggest virtual singleshard civilization game... Not just another Sandbox, but a virtual World.

Thank you NQ, that you allways keep course towards that goal.
Sometimes with learning or experience curves and sometimes ways some dont understand.
But heavyly focussed towards the goal.
If you ask me... i guess i undstood what the game can be.
I see the Vision behind it.

And even if im wrong i wouldnt let this project down.
You DU an awesome job NQ

Just DU it

Greez your #FanboyNr1 ^^

The points will be applied after a brief downtime starting at 9 am UTC | 4 am EST on December 17th.  
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
 
Hello Noveans,
 
December is halfway over, meaning the arrival of the new year is tantalizingly close! 2021 is sure to usher in some big changes, and we couldn’t be more excited to experience those with you. ?
 
While we were rolling out 0.23.1, we noticed that players who had talents in training lost what was accumulated during our downtime. So, in the spirit of bringing out the old and ringing in the new we would like to offer everyone 1 million talent points (~1 week’s worth) to not only replace lost points, but also as a bit of a holiday gift! Build, explore and be merry!
 
Thank you for your continued support. We sincerely hope that you and yours enjoy a restful holiday season!

Sincerely,
The Novaquark Team
 

NQ, if you could make only one more change ever in your game, this is the one you should make. 
 
There can be no 'community' without communication. 

NQ, if you could make only one more change ever in your game, this is the one you should make. 
 
There can be no 'community' without communication. 

Introduce a new industry machine, or tie it to the recycler, that will allow you to place an item and give a chance (talent based) to receive the schematic for that item. Even if its been damages in combat. Obviously, you would have to repair it, but the item should be destroyed in the process of discovery.

Seems nice.
But can we have tools to communicate in the game ? We  can't leave a message to someone that is not connected, or even talk to someone that is not in our friend list or near us. It's the only MMO i know where the players can't really communicate in the game. ??
 

Core destruction in crashes is vile atm, especially if you're in anything larger than XS and crash on a planet/moon with no cores on the 'local' markets. 
Especially given the seemingly random way the game assigns damage during crashes. 

0.23 and What We Learned

In reading through the reactions from our community regarding the recent 0.23 update, we’ve gained some valuable insights. 

Before we talk about the changes we’ll make in our processes going forward, let’s get back to the fundamental reason behind the update itself. What we did in 0.23 is at the heart of the vision for a game where a society of players is interacting directly or indirectly with each other through an elaborate network of exchanges, cooperation, competition and markets.
 
As it was, the current state of the game consisted mostly of isolated islands of players playing in almost full autonomy. A single-player game where players happened to share the same game world but with little interactions.
 
It’s hard to imagine how the appeal could last for more than several months for most players once they feel they have “finished” the game. It is also a missed opportunity to try something of larger proportion, a society of players growing in a fully persistent virtual world. For this to work, you need more than isolated gameplay. Players need to have viable reasons to interact and need each other.
 
In many single-player space games, you have ways to make money, and the game then offers you ways to convert this money into whatever you need in the game to progress, mostly via markets. This is the state in which we should end up for Dual Universe once all the necessary ingredients are in place, You get into the game, you farm a bit of money in fun ways, and you buy more and more powerful ships, equipment, weapons, etc., to help your character grow. The difference is that here, the ships or equipment you buy have been made by other players, instead of the game company. On the surface and during the first hours of gameplay, to a new player it would look similar to any of those other space games, but it would in fact reveal itself to be much deeper once you spend a bit of time in the game. Everything you would do would be part of another player’s or organization’s plan, everything would have a meaning. And soon you would realize that you too could be part of the content creation and, somehow, drive the game in the direction you want.
 
In its current beta stage, DU doesn’t have enough ways for people to make money because we haven’t yet had the opportunity to implement all of the necessary features. There’s mining, of course. Trading is not as good as it will eventually be because markets are not really used to their full potential. As a consequence, players rightfully turned to a solo or small org autonomous game mode. 
 
We tried to nudge people out of this with the changes introduced in 0.23. While necessary, many players expressed that the changes of 0.23 came too soon because it lacked a variety of lucrative ways for people to make money outside of mining.

What We’ll Do Now
 
The vision expressed above still holds. We want people to consider going through the industry specialization only if they intend to become industrialists and not necessarily to sustain their individual needs; however, we understand that it’s too soon to press for intense specialized gameplay considering the lack of sources to earn money. 
 
Here’s our plan for now. We will modify the formula of the schematic prices to make it considerably more affordable for Tier 1 and still challenging and worth a commitment but less intense for anything Tier 2 or above. 
 
This will allow most factories focused on T1 to resume their activities rapidly while keeping an interesting challenge for higher tiers, spawning dedicated industrial facilities aiming at producing to sell on the markets. We will also reimburse players who have bought high-priced schematics since the launch of 0.23 (please give us some time since it may take a few days as we go through the logs).
 
We will keep monitoring the price of schematics to see if it makes sense to increase or decrease the costs. The right approach to set such a price would be to evaluate how much time it takes to recoup your investment by selling the products that the schematics allow to produce. It should be a few months so that the investment is a real commitment and it makes sense to plan for it.  We currently lack the metrics to properly assess this return on investment time. We need a player-driven market price for the components and a market price for the products to assess the profit made by each run of a schematic. This will come when the markets start to work as intended, and we can gather more data about them. 
 
Feedback and Testing

The release of 0.23 also taught us that we need improved ways to test new features, both internally and with community participation. The Upvote feature on the website was a good start, but it’s not enough. 
 
To address this, we have two courses of action that will be taken. The first will be to set up an open public test server, hopefully with shorter release cycles, for players to try out new features. This will also allow us to explore ideas and be more iterative. If all goes according to plan, this test server should be introduced for 0.24, the next release. It will mirror the content of the production server with regular updates to sync it. 
 
The second important initiative is to revise the role of the Alpha Team Vanguard (ATV), getting them more involved in early discussions about new features and the evolution of the game. We are still defining the framework, so more information will be released as available. 

What is to Come
 
In the short term, we will push a few corrections to improve 0.23, which include:
 
Ships will now stop (be frozen) when their core is destroyed in PvP, making them easier to catch. Element destruction will impact the restoration count only when it occurs through PvP, at least for now (not when the ship is colliding/falling as we want to avoid having players penalized simply for crashing their ships because they’re learning how to maneuver them, for example). Recycling of un-restorable elements through a recycler that will take an element as input and grant a small amount of the schematics required components as output.
The next major release is already in the making and will be about the mission system, a first step toward giving players more fun ways to earn quantas. We will reveal about it shortly so that we can get as much feedback as possible.
 
We also want to reassure you that the mission system is not the only answer to offering more varied ways to earn revenue in Dual Universe. Things like asteroid mining and mining units will be introduced in the next few months. 

This list is by no means complete, but should be a good jumping off point that gives players reasons to fight and to explore, opportunities for pirates, new ways of making money, and a plethora of other activities our creative community will think of even if we didn’t. 

That’s it for now! We want to thank you again for your support and patience as we progress along this beta road! See you soon in Dual Universe!

Want to discuss this announcement? Visit the thread linked below:
 
 

Hi, 
 
there's a topic I have strong opinions on, but I'm genuinely curious what other people think and why.  
 
Trade in this game on the markets is anonymous. This is the only MMO, from the many I've played, where this is the case. It has consequences, most of them bad. 
 
While it does mean you can't pirate your buyer, steal goods back and re-sell them (which may be irrelevant now anyway), it also means you can't tell if the people you are buying from are the same people who just stole from you, or people you are currently at war with (when that comes in). 
 
JC claims to be all about the realism, but in what world can buyers not make any choice about who they buy from? This takes a significant choice away from players. 
 
The only choice I can make to e.g. not fund BOO is to not play this game at all. 
 
Anger about the latest update just funding insider info fueled mega-corps would be confirmed or refuted if we had trade transparency. It would also give us a choice about what to do with that anger. 
 
I want economic choice. 
 
The obvious glitch here is alts. IMO that's a cancer in MMOs. 
 
We have means in the real world to protect ourselves from fraud, but nothing exists in DU to enable services like SMTH to actually 'credit check' avatars. 
 
Small orgs are hamstrung with recruitment because it is too easy to create burner alts to infiltrate, gain intel on and attempt to asset strip smaller orgs.
 
All it takes for you to be targeted in deep space by pvp with a hold full of ore is that one guy, who came along mining and wanted a lift back, who's friends with a guy, who can lock on target and head straight for you. 
 
Before anyone says 'you're imagining the problem' consider a conversation I had in forums the other day. 
 
Someone claimed to 'represent the community', despite the fact that the account they posted on was only one day old. 
 
When challenged for trolling, they explained this was an alt account they were posting on because their main account had been banned from posting on forums due to profanity. 
 
I tried to explain that the ban applies to the player, not the account, but that call to logic fell on the deaf ears of "I've paid for it, so I'm entitled to it", to paraphrase. 
 
I understand that dynamic IPs and remote machine access make it impossible to accurately identify where alt accounts are all controlled by one player. 
 
What I really want in this game is to have ways to see info on other avatars that help me make an informed decision about whether that avatar is just a burner alt / puppet account controlled by someone with a very different agenda. 
 
I'm not asking NQ to make spying impossible, that would end the fun for a lot of players. 
 
What I'm asking is that they put something into the game universe that is similar to the kinds of tools employers in the real world can have access to when offering jobs, or that banks can have access to when offering a loan. 
 
JC claims to want to build a community, but how can we do that when we can't even send mail to other players in game, or when avatar names are not linked to forum / discord names? 
 
Call me cynical, but my first thought when JC talked about the mission system was 'how can it work outside the safe zone'? why pay for a delivery when you can just get your mates to gank the courier en route. 
 
 

NQ can't really decide for themselves if they want solo players or not

Hi NQ, 
 
this is for you. Why do you mess up people's playing experience with no consideration of how people actually work in groups? 
 
I'm in an org. We have org constructs. Obviously every one of them has a core placed by one 'creator' but a lot of them were co-operatively built by two or more people. 
 
It's Monday morning and I'm off work, but a lot of people in the org are currently at work. Today is my weekend.  
 
This update you've just done now means I can't edit Lua on org constructs during my day off. 
 
Instead of a total re-write of all existing constructs you should have made it so creators got to decide if it applied or not, and given them the option. 
 
Instead you are taking power away from players and wasting our time. 
 
What next, are you going to delete all existing RDMS so we have to re-write it all and our org falls apart because our mates can't access stuff we want them to because we are at work? 
 
wow, nice move.
 
 

in case of any doubt 'Johnny', if that is you...
 
“You,” “Your” or “the User” refers to the person who uses or visits Our Website.
 
If you thought forum bans related to fictional entities that have no legal status then I suggest you seek professional psychiatric help. 
 
If, on the other hand, you think NQ's rules just don't apply to you, then a 'member of the community' is not what you are.
 
At least not a respectable one whose word should mean anything. 

This right here is problem number one. 
 
Telling your customers that they should do what you want. 
 
That is disgusting and disrespectful customer service. 
 
It is also 100% incompatible with the 'emergent' gameplay he claims he wants to see. 
 
Problem number two is they are increasing barriers to entry into a full game experience before they are building enablers that allow people to overcome the barriers. 
 
They need to rebrand this game as DON'T. 

You are taking comments out of context to suit your narrative here.
 
Of course, taking this comment on it's own it is absolutely fair en makes sense and no one is disputing this nor saying it is not fair.
 
With the new changes and the lack of any balancing measures surrounding it, such as a wipe or otherwise, large organizations, especially those which have taken advantage of the mistakes, loopholes and exploits NQ left untouched mostly and allowed them to enrich themselves both financially and in stockpiling expensive and high end elements. These org have a _massive_ advantage since they are able to reset and reconfigure very quickly to the new changes and likely have started doing so already while (once more) taking advantage of the information available prior to the patch, some taking advantage of information they got through their ATV members who had access to the patch early on a separate server. No need to deny this as I know this to be the case (alts are a wonderful tool).
 
Once the patch goes live, these orgs, which also made sure to buy up most of the higher tier elements in advance to cerate shortages, will not be able to quickly both re-config and will dominate and dictate markets. As of tomorrow, large orgs and especially those who took advantage of aforementioned situations, will have a huge advantage and will pretty much be able to control markets to boot. NQ designed the changes this way as they want to see smaller orgs and solo players not be able to fend for themselves but instead force them to use markets. That is pretty much what JC said on the Q&A.
 
So yes, in the context of these changes and with the well know issues which started in the week prior to beta release, Large orgs will have a massive leg up which fromwhat we know and have heard is pretty much by design.

That may be the problem.  I'm here for entertainment.  I live in an actual society.  So factories have been crippled.  Well, ok it was interesting to expand my factory and be able to create new equipment to expand my capabilities in the game but, babysitting a factory was getting a bit stale and probably wouldn't have held my interest for too much longer.  So now that has been hobbled and I'm supposed do what instead of managing my factory?  Mine?  No thanks.  Make screws and schlep them 30 km to the nearest lag fest that pass for markets?  Again, no thanks.  Maybe, take what little wealth I've accumulated and piss it away on PvP.  That could be fun but, the current combat mechanic is pretty much at the level of being a graphical text adventure.  There is so so much that needs to be added content wise before worrying about forcing specialization. 

Survivorship bias.
 
I see the same thing on the official discord and reddit - the numbers are way down, a lot of the names I'm used to seeing are just gone. The two orgs I played with are dead, 60 players in one and 20 in another - and the discords are silent.
 
But hey the people who are still playing are OK with it...
 
Once again, my biggest issue with the changes is that they are putting up barriers and adding extreme levels of grind without adding any additional content.
 
JC keeps saying that industry isn't for everyone without grasping that the only reason everyone is doing industry is that industry is all there is to do. 
 
Raising the barrier to entry into industry will indeed make fewer people do industry - but there is nothing else to do. So what are they going to do? Same thing I'm doing - playing a different game.

JC: Hmm, the PVP, yea, not this patch, not next patch, the one after maybe don't know probably something have faith. We fixed alt+f4 !!! now you need to alt-f4 20 times post kill and hope that the ship you killed does actually slow down each time you do. That's PVP !
 

You dont need to be a genious to understand that playing factorio /satisfactory where miners are real people is not going to work.The game is so lacking of content that the little available is behind obvious walls of grind.To fix it the developers rush to build addittional walls . If this trend continues the game will fail. Developers should focus in adding content not more walls to hide the lack of content.
 
The only way to enjoy long term is to build pretty or industries, so they plan to make it harder to extend the duration of the content with more mining, something that industry guys like me won't do. There are people who do not like the industry that came for the rest of the promised experience, they are willing to do some chores but their patience will fade away as soon as they discover that there is nothing to do.
 
They will mine, build a ship the size of their patience and then leave.
 
 
 

In way we now having extreamly IMMERSIVE civilization gameplay.
 
Incompetent goverment robing the poor with taxes to "fix" own mistakes and to benefit the rich. How can civilization building pillar go closer to fascinating depths of realism. 10/10.

I don't want to say this but after watching a replay of the livestream I almost feel like JC is out of touch with the actual game?  Like does he play it at all and if he does, does he get the same level of support that the masses get?  I get that he is the 'visionary' and is looking forward (like waaaay forward) of game development, but holy crap FIX the stuff that is broken.  If that doesn't get done, every thing you stack on top of it is going to be broken.  First thing to start with is CS.  If you don't think there are problems just hang out in the tech support channel in Discord.  There are people there that are paying for the game and haven't been able to log in for weeks and the ticket system is a running joke.
 
Yet they are going to do a MAJOR balancing change to industry and introduce a MAJOR new mechanic with schematics.  If this doesn't have disaster written all over it, I don't know what does.  How much do you want to bet linked containers gets broken (again) when this is launched.  I mean I still have random lock ups of industry machines that can't be resolved unless I pickup and replace the unit.
 
I also get the 'bug' where the game just freezes for a couple min. then goes back to being usable.  The 'fix' for this is to reboot my computer.  Sounds reasonable but holy crap there are some nights I have to reboot 2-3 times, and that is just not normal.
 
And don't even get started on the hot mess that is the anti-cheat software.  I had it go off once when I started watching Netflix.

I totally get this is a beta and stuff is subject to change.....  Please however remember most of us are paying customers and expect some fun and support in return for the time and money invested in your game! 

Like many, I came to this game from viewing the trailers etc. In them they promise a great deal of freedom, no classes and the ability to DU whatever you find fun. For me, the majority of my time in DU has been to build the factory and skills, with long (boring) hours mining to create it and then make and sell ships to fly and fight with.  I felt this sounded the perfect game for me and invested a lot of time to do just that and ended up with 4 accounts.
 
These changes push industry and therefore ship building to be only practical for the big orgs with enough members to fill their wallets and afford the schematics.  Within a big org only a few trusted players will realistically be allowed access to these very valuable schematics. What is left for everyone else to do?  I'm not going to pay for four accounts just to be a human mining bot to enable only a few chosen players have all the fun.   
 
Additionally the advertised "no fixed classes" is not true if the goal of these changes are to put every viable role behind a huge time(and therefore pay) wall of specialised training to make it competitive. Think about it... If only the minority of players get to experience parts of the game they find fun, then majority of players will quit and the large orgs will not be able to sustain themselves.  

How about a "fix" for industry and other activities is to make them more interactive and even fun!?!? E.g. they player running the factory has to do tasks which therefore automatically scales down production as humans are the bottleneck.
 
Selling my industry machines doesn't even come close to recover the time, quanta and real money invested. No doubt it's too late to read these comments and make changes to the patch, so can you at least consider refunding the months of wasted skill training?
 

For me is actually unclear what is the problem.
If it was/is :
Markets overall were not being used as much as they were intended to
 
This is a sandbox game; come on....
WE the players decided not to use those crappy markets.

You at NQ may try to force us to play the way you want, but we will not. Unless you give up principle this being a sandbox.

Make markets better, analyze what really is wrong there, make markets more appealing, remove all that junk and garbage around them them, ,fix lag there, fix supply, ( now you are limiting supply)

And then WE may start to use them.
 

 

there are so many other aspects of the roadmap that should have come in first, before this can even work
 
you said you were going to employ someone who actually knew anything about economics at a degree level
 
I'm guessing you have not done that, because they should have advised you against this

there are so many other aspects of the roadmap that should have come in first, before this can even work
 
you said you were going to employ someone who actually knew anything about economics at a degree level
 
I'm guessing you have not done that, because they should have advised you against this

there are so many other aspects of the roadmap that should have come in first, before this can even work
 
you said you were going to employ someone who actually knew anything about economics at a degree level
 
I'm guessing you have not done that, because they should have advised you against this