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michaelk

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Everything posted by michaelk

  1. I honestly believe if JC had unlimited money and time, he still wouldn't make a "great" game. It takes experience to design a game. It takes even more experience to design a persistent multiplayer game. It takes humility to recognize when you're wrong. No amount of time or money will teach humility. JC wants players to "think differently about the game" -- he doesn't want to understand how his customers play and enjoy the game. Nope, it's somehow our job to change our thinking and play the game in the way he wants. This won't change in a few months or years after six years of development...the issues with DU aren't just technical or financial but philosophical. We've seen some improvements in how NQ interacts with the community, but ultimately...? NQ somehow thinks the community ought to serve one man's "vision" instead of the other way around.
  2. I was browsing the YouTube recently and saw an ad for DU pop up. I wondered about all the people claiming that NQ is so thinly stretched and simply doesn't have the resources to patch their game quickly... I do believe NQ has found success in one avenue: bold advertising that does its job. I doubt they'd still be throwing money into adverts if they didn't convert. Why should they care if a player plops down $20.00 and never plays after day one because the new player experience is only getting worse...? That's called $20.00 in your pocket. That's a win for NQ as a company, even if it is a failure for NQ as a developer. Do I really think that NQ is so devious and shady that they're going full-on "No Man's Sky" with their marketing...? Honestly no...but that's the net effect. I want to keep coming back to see how this game changes, but we've already seen their design philosophy (or lack thereof) multiple times and there's no reason to think it'll improve as the project gets even more complex and convoluted. Unless there's a core change in design leadership, my belief is that NQ (despite genuine intentions) is almost a vaporware company profiting off adverts that fail to depict the game...then take advantage of the subscription model (and Xsolla's shady practices) to deny refunds. That might not be what they set out to do intentionally, but they want to keep the lights on and revenue is revenue.
  3. Odd. It is very concerning that these updates seem to be mostly geared toward existing players. Why? Existing players aren't the issue -- they are so diehard they'll keep playing even if the world was literally aflame lol. Nerfing industry to make it harder for new players is incredibly counter-productive. Frankly, NQ's primary concern right now should be improving the new player experience, because that's literally the only way the game will grow. If they engineer the game's design around today's niche player base, how will this reduce the churn rate? The beta launch showed how much work there is to be done to fix the new player experience (count those ghost speeders -- there's massive churn) -- with release being <1 year away, the focus should be revamping tutorials, reworking UI to make it more clear/clean for new players, and cleaning up the new player experience overall. Who freakin' cares if the diehard players have all the stuffs...? Fix that later or wipe pre-release. The harder it is for new people to "get established", the more the churn. There's a lot more money to be made attracting new players vs. trying to prevent existing ones from churning. They'll come back after updates if they buy into the core premise/promise -- but they won't come back if they churn after a day of play because they don't believe the game will ever live up to the trailers. IMO, this should be a much more urgent thing -- they don't have much time before release based on their dev velocity. They need to sit down with a notepad and watch completely new players try the game and set their dev priorities accordingly. That means having the humility and wisdom to take a step back and look at where the game is actually weak instead of trying to push forward with features that won't make the game easier to swallow for new gamers that NQ needs to survive.
  4. Many trials require a CC to activate -- so that they can sneakily auto-bill as soon as the free time has expired. People might have unlimited different emails (thanks gmail aliases), but few have unlimited credit cards or billing addresses. It wouldn't be hard to lock this down to prevent players from abusing a trial. Also, trial players wouldn't need the same level of persistence. If you fail to activate billing by the time your trial is up, why persist those assets? Remove them from the game after their trial expires. No abuse, no clutter. If they want to pick up where they left off, activate billing within a certain time or start over. They already sorely need garbage collection in general. Trials might reduce this clutter by letting people play DU and decide they hate it before littering the world with speeders. If the "civilization" is already so toxic and the game so ripe for abuse that new players "must" pay money to make the design work....well, then it really isn't going to be an "MMO", it'll be a niche online game full of toxicity and NQ will have a hell of a time attracting new players. Or is that already where we are? I can't tell sometimes :D
  5. This game should have a trial option (as most paid subscription MMOs do). Clutter is NQ's issue that they should solve -- there's still a massive graveyard of speeders from all the beta players that played for a day and never came back. That isn't a problem that will go away on its own. The solution to clutter isn't to deter people from trying the game or to filter out those that aren't "serious". Subscription games don't work very well if everyone on a sub plays hardcore every day. People that "pop in" on occasion are the ideal player demographic for NQ and will pay the bills for the rest of the player-base. I get that this will remain as-is for beta...and probably a good idea...but for launch? They need to open things up a lot unless they are actually scared for people to try the game and believe a 3-month minimum is the only way to deal with high churn rates (which...seems plausible).
  6. Great. If you're so keen to help NQ, you should have no issue paying for the OP's month of sub. Otherwise, I don't think it is worth the $7/month. The value of $7 varies a lot based on each person's life situation and geography. It isn't our job to keep NQ's lights on or to invest in their game so they can make it better. That's why they did a kickstarter and obtained millions of dollars of investor money. We're paying for a product, not running a charity. I also don't see any time credited to my account. The fact that the player base has to complain just to get what NQ promised because of their major mistakes is just business as usual -- NQ has earned a rep for bad communication and not caring much about their own community...forgetting to credit people like they said they would only reinforces this reputation. I hope this time they at least offer an apology...somehow I doubt they will.
  7. Analytics have been industry standard in games for years now. Even single player games are heavily invested in analytics -- beating a boss or clearing a level often sends an event; devs needs to know what percent of their players are making it past the first levels so they can make balance decisions based on objective data, not a select few twitch streamers or hardcore fanatics. Analytics cut through the rampant speculative "I know so many people..." sort of statements by surfacing actual data. The hundred or so people you know aren't at all statistically relevant compared the whole of the beta test population... NQ should already have a keen sense of how and when players are dropping off -- but they've made numerous mistakes that are typical for first-time devs with no experience in the field...so I honestly don't expect them to have reliable analytics despite the relative ease of implementation (if they are going to use Xsolla for subs, they could use many of the robust analytics providers out there). Solid analytics are even more important in a subscription model -- especially when you are a new developer with very (very) limited game design experience -- seeing exactly how design changes impact the economy and player base is absolutely vital. Of course, if NQ does have data like this...they'd never share it unless it makes them look good. As the OP points out, it seems like they lack even a basic analytics framework and have had to rely on streamers, reddit fanatics, and JC's sacred "intuition" to stay informed.
  8. Back to the original topic, why people are quitting DU. People like this, frankly. The discussion about PvP becomes instantly aggressive if not hostile. It isn't about articulating an opinion, it's about insisting over and over and over that the only opinion that matters is their own and that anyone that doesn't understand how important PvP is just needs to "deal with it". I've seen a lot of name calling and ranting without articulating anything of substance beyond a demand for PvP and an insistence that the game will die if their whims aren't met. I don't really see the point in trying to create a society with people in this demographic. I know there are plenty of PvP players that aren't like this...but there's too many that are. The PvP mentality seems to extend to every interaction they make with players in any context, and that just isn't fun or interesting for me.
  9. I would be utterly shocked if this was the case...that's way more complexity than is plausible, IMO. Remember that NQ doesn't have their own game engine. This sort of tech would likely require them to develop their own engine -- and create a massively complex system to implement their own blockchain/torrent-driven physics system when physics are perfectly fine running client-side. Lag is easy to explain -- they picked a bad game engine that they'll never be able to fix. Unigen2 is designed for benchmarking, not production games. There's no way to ever fix low-level code issues. There's zero evidence this engine can actually scale because people just don't use it for large professional projects. Every MMO that's tried to use Unigen2 has been cancelled already (though to be fair, there's only a few examples of games using this engine, so not exactly a real sample size lol). We'll just have to live with the fact that DU is going to run less effectively than more professional titles that either develop their own engines or use a commercial engine with a track record of success.
  10. I definitely disagree, and I feel the stats available are fairly clear. Minecraft is still growing in popularity (24 million copies in a year alone...far more players than DU will attract across its entire lifetime). In other words, more people bought Minecraft in this last year than have ever signed up for Eve Online, by a massive margin. Yes, it being in a persistent online context is a very attractive feature for creative players and builders. This idea that a builder game can't be a success because there's just not enough to do or there's not enough interested players is not grounded in any real evidence. One of the most argued things on this forum is PvP -- if it were really so obvious that a builder MMO is "impossible" or inherently boring, this wouldn't even be a discussion. It's up to NQ to understand how these demographics work -- and that you aren't going to capture both the hardcore PvP demographic and the creative builder demographic in your first-ever title as a game designer. This mis-match of genres is a big reason people quit -- we all know there are lots of PvP players and lots of creative players out there....but both living happily in the same game? It's extra complexity that DU just doesn't need on top of its mountain of technical and design debt.
  11. People love to presume a lot about the tech without evidence...the idea that DU runs poorly simply because it is an MMO and requires complex network interactions isn't backed up by facts. If that were the case, CPU/GPU usage wouldn't be spiking so severely for no evident reason. Also...optimizations can't just be an afterthought that happens late in dev. When devs talk about beta-phase optimizations, they don't mean re-writing core aspects of the engine (like how voxels are highly dependent on CPU)...adjusting some shaders, optimizing models, and fixing small issues can yield a lot of performance, but there's a limit to how deep you can go before you're ripping up the core and potentially refactoring huge quantities of code that depend on said core. Ever done a build that becomes a nightmare because you didn't plan things out? And it seems like fixing it would be many, many times more work than starting over...? DU doesn't have a custom engine...so already there's limits to low-level optimizations. Normally, you'd trust the engine's developer to optimize....but Unigen2 isn't exactly a big name known for well-optimized AAA titles...in fact, it is mostly used for benchmarking and has very few titles to it in general. The titles it does have tend to be simple games like puzzles (or canceled projects that were never released). The choices you make early in dev are absolutely critical.
  12. I know I already posted once...but also Xsolla. If NQ had an actual subscription system, maybe they wouldn't need to ask players to dump in a forum because they would have proper exit surveys. If the process to cancel wasn't so scammy and purposefully obfuscated, people would be less angry and provide better feedback. Asking why people are quitting really shouldn't be an afterthought because you won't get objective, actionable data. It's too easy to dismiss complaints here as "just one opinion" when you don't have real data...devs are human beings that become intensely personally attached to projects, especially after so long. Objective exit survey data might help cut through some of that anxiety.
  13. Personally, I think it's a bit humorous even if also a bit sad. Like...these are really, really basic things that NQ simply didn't think about for the last 6 years? I've said it many times before, but game design as a discipline isn't as easy as engineers like to think, and DU wasn't designed by an experienced design team. It was designed by JC, who doesn't have experience in either game dev or game design...he's an academic with little experience in the private sector in general. Players can see this fact in every feature of the game today. I think DU is an excellent case study for why game design is even more important than pure tech. I think it is mean to say DU is "just a tech demo"....but it feels that way because it wasn't led by the game's design, but by the tech. This is the type of product you get when you build things to make them work instead of building them because they fit into a carefully balanced design. They were so concerned with making stuff work, they never seemed to stop to wonder how things should work.
  14. As others have said, tech issues and tedium (lack of content) are big deals...but I think some users aren't even playing long enough to be bothered by lack of content. Following DU for years, I tried to get my partner hooked on the game because he loves building games and will spend hours and hours constructing monuments to OCD. ?‍♂️ For him, it was presentation and initial UX. 1. Initial impressions are really important...the tutorial was not a great first experience. It bugged out and required him to reset and he got annoyed navigating the starter area and listening to the voice over. 2. Initial UX...The UI simply doesn't look like it belongs in a professional game -- it creates a perception that the game is very "indie", as the UI was clearly made by engineers and not designers. It also makes it harder to learn the game -- clunky UI/UX on top of an already complex game. 3. Initial speeder...when he finally got to Sanctuary (I had to help him find the drop ship because of all the market clutter ?) that first speeder visit to unclaimed territory was...not great. The visuals greatly reinforced the idea that this was a niche/indie project and not a "real game". I got him one of the starter flying ships, but still a lot of travel time to get back to his hex because he re-spawned at some point (for some reason ?‍♂️). 4. Initial progression...breaking surface rocks and being told to go back and forth to the (rather far) market didn't help him understand what to do or how to get starting building, especially since the tutorials were very broken back when he started. I tried to help him get started mining but he basically quit after digging a hundred or so meters lol. Mining rocks is monotonous enough without digging through hundreds of meters of flat polygons. I'd bet a healthy number of those ghost speeders belong to similar players that never truly gave the game a chance because it simply doesn't feel like a professional, modern game should for a paid monthly sub. It is hard to reconcile the promise of a vast space sandbox builder where you can craft and manipulate civilization itself with tutorials not working, simple visuals, and a clunky UX...and all this is just to give the game a chance...never mind some of the content/tech issues that are usually only relevant after you've bought into the premise and played for a bit.
  15. Uhm, sure...that code would definitely work lol...so easy! Definitely is something they need to fix, but give me a break with slapping down pseudocode and saying "it's easy".
  16. Sounds like a great event! Hopefully the first of many. Best of luck to the organizers and racers. Ignore dumpeet -- they are just here to troll...
  17. I really am extremely impressed with what the community has built in the time since launch. I think it goes to show how successful an MMO civilization builder sandbox could be -- players have the creativity and drive to build just about anything. Having dreams doesn't make you an idiot. Lots of DU players have been eagerly following the game since its inception for the same reason. I think many space games fall into a sort of trap where they sell players on an ambitious promise that plays on their dreams. People wouldn't be here if they didn't want to be epic space nerds hauling cargo or mining or freakin' programming in LUA lol. People naturally have an attachment to dreams -- especially in today's crap salad of current events. Frankly though...there's a fine line between trying to exploit those dreams in marketing for profit vs. having a real plan to deliver the promised concept...and I'm not sure which side of that line NQ ought to be on yet.
  18. Enjoying DU means you'll need to forgive a lot of sloppiness, a complete lack of UX, and ample bugs. The reality is that NQ doesn't have any previous experience in game development. Of course the product they make is going to be more unpolished, rough, and unconventional compared to most other games... That doesn't mean it is 100% 'bad', but it will be weaker in some areas than you might expect. Design, graphics, stability all come to mind. If you can't see beyond those flaws, probably isn't the game for you.
  19. I get it, but my perspective is that this ship has sailed a long time ago. I think the "division" in the community exists because the vision for this game is so ambiguous and poorly articulated and the state of production is so rough. If everyone was having such fun with the game as it exists today, it wouldn't feel like a division...but because the promise and potential of the game are so mismatched with its implementation today, there's a lot of angst and commentary about what needs to be "fixed" to make it complete. I guess my point is that NQ created this problem by launching such an incomplete project as a "beta" then pitching it as the end-all game for every space nerd's niche whims. I think a lot of people really, really want to believe in that promise and would rather blame each other than developer NQ...as soon as you recognize that NQ really doesn't have a plan, you're basically giving up that this game will become the promising civilization it was pitched as. There's still a lot of time for NQ to change directions -- until then, I agree that the player base needs to be patient with each other, but also understand that these discussions are inevitable...not because they are being pointlessly divisive, but because the incomplete and unknown state of the game's design invites speculation, discussion, and strong opinions...especially because many players feel so strongly about DU's potential and vision. The thing that would fix a lot of these issues is real leadership from the dev responsible for designing the game instead of big fat question marks whenever someone asks about how their game will work...I hope that players can be united enough to push NQ to do its job more professionally.
  20. I don't understand why you think calling it something different will change anything...people are well aware of who this "combat" is against and slapping a new label on it won't change anything. You may not like the term, but it isn't a misnomer. The issue isn't that players have opinions about "combat"....it's that NQ doesn't have any sense of design leadership. If NQ was competent enough to actually design their game, people wouldn't be so scared that they are being "forced" to compromise. The divisions within the player base exist because of how NQ decided to design, market, and present their grossly unfinished game -- many of the arguments about PvP aren't even arguments about the game...but rather its future, which is pure fantasy and speculation at this point. "How will PvP affect my buildings" won't stop being a question just because people call it "combat" lol. Absent any actual design or structure from NQ, of course people will debate more -- not our fault the game is mostly question marks left open for debate! ...stop quoting JC like the random whims and ideas he spews out on streams mean anything other than the fact that this game has no cohesive design leadership. People love to quote JC as if everything he says is some sacred promise. You can find plenty of things he's "promised" in the last 6 years that didn't work out.
  21. I sympathize -- and sometimes wonder why PvPers still have enough patience for this game. People have talked about NQ's mountain of technical debt before, but I wonder about this a lot. Even if they wanted to work on PvP exclusively for the next year straight, I wonder if they'd be able to accomplish much. How many outstanding issues would they need to fix before they can make progress on PvP features...? Even with a year, they'd probably make some really bad choices because NQ doesn't really care about game design as a discipline -- they prefer the "use JC's intuition then fix it" model. This...isn't so great for game dev. If every player on this forum (which NQ doesn't read lol) banded together to push NQ to move PvP forward, I bet it'd just be business as usual for NQ...especially if they have so much tech debt that they can't make progress on any content in general which seems to be the case. And when they do finally drop a PvP feature...? It'd probably be a buggy, poorly balanced compromise that pleases no one. I wouldn't be that surprised if PvP remains "as-is" for a long, long while because of their ever-growing technical debt. When you have a bunch of tech debt, the last thing you want to do is start touching a feature that you have no confidence about -- and its really clear that NQ has no confidence in their understanding of PvP (or hell, player interaction in general). Personally, I don't think PvP will ever really "work" in DU -- it just isn't remotely thought out, even today...I'd be really shocked if NQ manages to improvise their way into a well considered well balanced version of PvP. If they do pull that off, it'll take a long, long time and a lot of painful trial and error. TLDR: I don't believe NQ has the design or technical experience to create a good PvP experience...not without a ton of iterations they can't afford.
  22. Meh, mining does suck. I don't think it's difficult, but it is boring. For how monotonous it is, the concept isn't very clear to new players. It isn't like the OP gave up immediately because they want "instant gratification", they tried until they got frustrated...regardless, they aren't the first person to complain about mining -- and complaining about this bad system doesn't somehow mean you are demanding instant gratification. Big difference between something being hard because it's difficult and something being hard because it is brain-numbingly monotonous...
  23. Sorry, but this isn't the place to post demanding a reply from NQ because it won't happen. I wish it worked like that, but it doesn't. Frankly, this forum barely has activity from players, never mind NQ. Good luck, but yeah...don't post in a forum like this telling people not to reply. You won't get an answer from the horse's mouth no matter how many places you post your question. You could stand outside their office with these questions on a massive banner and still not get an answer. That's just how NQ rolls.
  24. It's sad how the OP knows where this topic will probably go...devolving into people raging aimlessly, blaming other players for NQ's objective lack of design leadership. DU is already a very bold promise -- be anyone, do anything, assume any role, etc. etc...We've all seen the trailer. They want you to imagine DU at the grandest possible scale. When people come here to discuss how PvP or PvE ought to work, it's wildly divergent because it's still all a fantastical idea. Instead of talking about the game as it is, we have no choice but to argue about generalizations and theory...and NQ doesn't help matters by leaving it all an enigma. Every player will imagine something different for what DU should be because it was marketed in such a broad, ambitious way -- combine that with a vastly incomplete product and no details from the development team and of course people will have strong and divergent opinions...not like there's much fact to go on. My point is that I don't like people reducing this topic to "NQ being yanked around by a bunch of whiners"... Intentionally or not, NQ created the conditions for players to be vocal about the direction of the game by not providing a direction themselves. Not anyone's fault that this ship is being steered by a captain that plots their course on whimsy and rumor.
  25. Unfortunately, I don't agree with this sentiment. These emergent gameplay concepts don't happen spontaneously. No, these niches will not appear "naturally" simply because some players "don't want to do stuff". No, it isn't just "up to us" to create roles and build emergent gameplay concepts. It isn't up to us to "mesh" with what NQ is creating, it's up to NQ to create something that works with these gameplay loops and has a structure that encourages specialization. Emergent gameplay doesn't just happen out of a void. That's not what "emergent gameplay" really means. It actually is up to NQ to cultivate these concepts. The idea that specialization will happen naturally isn't grounded in any evidence. The fact that the game as it exists now doesn't "mesh" with the NQ's vision is on them...players won't conform to this vision just because, it requires careful rules to create this virtual galaxy which NQ doesn't seem to understand...which is the OPs point.
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