michaelk

They'll likely launch in 2021 as their current "roadmap" indicates. It'll be a catastrophe, but they can't stay in pre-release bleeding subs forever. As I've said before, NQ's inexperience as a game designer is really, really obvious at this point. They don't know what demographic they want because they don't know what game they want to make...It's still just a bunch of vague ideas and rough dates with no actual plan. NQ is developing the game like some stoner with a "great idea for an MMO, trust me" -- a lot of really basic typical first-time developer mistakes: over-ambition, thinking you can improvise design elements instead of having a plan, thinking a tech prototype will scale into a full game... It wouldn't be so easy to "force" NQ to compromise their "vision" if they actually had a vision.

You are giving NQ a lot of credit thinking that they have game design plans. ? This fantasy roadmap does suggest that they wanted to make ships producible using the industry system. That might add a nice ability to quickly rebuild a vessel for a fee, but that's not even on the map until "post-release". Granted this whole roadmap is kind of trash. There's 14 major bullet points between now and the end of "release" scheduled for 2021, so they'd need to average releasing 1 major feature each month for every month until the end of 2021 to meet this... Amusing how they have "play in a smooth and balanced game world" as a bullet point. Sounds like a plan lol.

Riiight...you have the "right" to blame random people not associated with a company for the decisions that company makes because those people have opinions which are different than your own....? And I'm the one beyond help...? It doesn't matter what "made" them decide things...NQ has decided they don't want your demographic in this game. Grow up and move on or figure out how to "influence" them like those damned carebears -- or just keep whining because NQ isn't making the game you and your buddies want.

And I'm saying it's stupid to do both. Blaming players for NQ's decisions is useless and becomes nothing more than people demeaning players that enjoy different things than you. Nothing of importance to say beyond value judgements. The only party that matters is the one that actually has the power to make decisions. Not a hard concept.

Again, you're 100% missing the point. Not a shock. I'm well aware of what Carebear means colloquially. People that love to throw that derogatory slang around tend to be some of the most sensitive whiners, and you're kind of proving that point. This idea that any player group is somehow responsible for NQ's decisions is completely baseless. People come here to waste their breath and attack noobs/carebears/whatever -- as if those players are the reason NQ hasn't given you the experience you want. I also dislike the direction NQ is taking toward PvP...but blaming some group for "influencing" NQ is pointlessly hostile and irrelevant. People ought to be responsible for their own decisions. This idea that NQ is helpless because "a bunch of carebears want safety" is completely meritless. Excusing NQ's decisions because "bad players want stuff" makes no sense. It's as if they have no responsibility and the only problem with DU is all the players you don't like.

1. Hoping for a speedy recovery for your wife. 2. Uh, who cares about the fucking refund make sure you're okay and go to a doctor lol

Right. Holding a company responsible for the decisions they make with their own property is somehow radical, whereas whining and crying about how "carebears" somehow "made" NQ do something is reasonable...? Give. Me. A. Break. Whining about how NQ isn't listening to you is a lot more "carebear" than people that prefer building to PvP. It's utter madness to react to a decision made by a game dev by blaming other players for that decision. If anyone is a sensitive snowflake that can't handle reality, it's people that come here to whine about "carebears" and noobs instead of realizing the obvious fact that it's NQ's game and they are the only ones with the power to make decisions about it. If you think they are listening to any one group (which is amusing because they don't listen to anyone) it's their decision to do so.

Stop blaming other players for the fact that NQ hasn't designed their game yet. It is up to NQ to make good decisions, and I'm sick of people just deflecting blame onto a group of players they have a personal issue with. If you want to blame someone for "ruining" the game, blame NQ for putting virtually no thought into the design details of this game. The balance between building and PvP obviously needed careful consideration. Don't blame "carebears" for their utter lack of foresight. It's funny how NQ listens to no one ever....but when they make decisions you don't like, it's somehow the carebears' fault? Stop it with all the deflection and bashing "nerdlings" -- it's completely childish and devoid of any shred of logic. How about you hold the party solely responsible for making decisions responsible for their own decisions like adults instead of throwing tantrums blaming other consumers that have paid their fair share to enjoy the game...?

As if it's difficult. It would take them minutes or seconds...we didn't create these forums, NQ did. NQ is just lazy as all hell -- they can't be bothered to spend the 30 seconds it would take to copy-paste information across the communication channels they created. JC strikes me now more than ever as an uber-arrogant windbag incapable of humility. He'll go on and on about how great the tech is and how just like Facebook or Twitter the community of DU is more important than its tech...but is too lazy or incompetent to fix one of the biggest complaints about the company he leads: lack of communication. ?‍♂️And that's like the easiest problem in the world to solve. His solution is to go on streams and keep talking because he likes to hear his own voice a lot more than he likes to listen. Can you imagine any group of professionals not engaging with customers because "we like discord better". It's arrogant, it's unprofessional, and it's just bad business. If they can't figure out how to keep their customers informed which is among the most basic things any company can do, do you really think they are making good decisions with the rest of their company? Do you really think they've made great decisions in the last six years for that matter...? Apparently "deal with it" is their go-to. I hope their investors "deal with it" when they realize that ~10-20k active players isn't enough to sustain a company. EDIT: PS discord does have an API, so I'd assume basic things like important announcements could be easily automated to broadcast to all channels they've created -- not a hard thing to do.

Tired of these interviews to be honest...anything important? I started to tune out when he compared DU to Facebook or Twitter talking about how important the community is vs. the tech. I think JC likes talking about how great DU is a lot more than he likes working on the game or communicating with customers lol.

Good lord....the more I hear about the tech the more amusing it is when people say "the game isn't optimized yet" as if it's just a few little things that need tweaking. I hope this isn't true but I believe you lol. For a game like this to even use Unigen is odd to me, never mind 3rd party assets. Every single dev that's ever plugged in a third party asset knows they aren't remotely AAA quality. More like a solid C or C- if you're lucky. Really don't understand where all the time has gone if they haven't even been writing their own shaders...is NQ a money laundering operation or something...?

Yeah like....they used Xsolla for their subscription service. They can't even be bothered to make a big boy billing system, which is a huge deal for initial impressions and customer retention...so if they won't even do that for their customers, I don't think "recruit a friend" is a big deal to them. NQ really doesn't want new players it seems (or the players it has even lol). Their business model is just bizarre.

I don't know where to begin with this, but I already know that this user is just here to troll pretty much lol. I don't know how in the world you'd think trapping players is "the most reasonable sandbox mechanic". A new player exploring the market wanders into the wrong place then is stuck forever or forced to respawn...and that's a "good" gameplay concept...? Playing in a sandbox doesn't mean you get to throw sand in people's eyes just for the hell of it. Crime must be balanced because it's a game, not real life. Being stuck in jail until you die because you had the gall to enter a door around a market simply doesn't make sense as a gameplay mechanic and never will. It makes zero sense to design a civilization game, then actively discourage players from ever entering a building for fear of being trapped. The other thing I want to point out is that every time I've seen someone throw out the term "carebear" they are doing it in a tantrum and seem to be some of the most sensitive people willing to resort to insult and shouting. It's a wicked and wonderful irony that I truly relish. How about discussing game mechanics without pejorative value judgements...? Wouldn't that be great...

Shields would be a great answer -- make voxel-based armor almost irrelevant because if voxels work as armor that'll always encourage ugly abomination craft. HP / Shields (and probably firepower) need hard limits based on core size -- PvP shouldn't be a contest of who can slap the most crap onto a construct or it will always feel lopsided and encourage ugly ships. It's really frustrating that 2 months after launch they still don't even have ideas on how to balance and improve PvP, never mind timelines. I'd agree with JohnnyTazer -- changes are probably months and months away.

I think it's clear that NQ made people unhappy and is allergic to apologizing. It wouldn't take much for JC to post something like "We're sorry that we've angered some players with this action. We're still learning how to moderate the game and we're listening to feedback. This is beta for us too." Some people have a visceral reaction to disorder and vandals. We are a society that tends to idolize law over morality and order over individuality. Of course some people will demand harsh punishments; it's just how some people think. To them, justice will always be about punishment. The context doesn't matter -- rulebreakers are rulebreakers are rulebreakers. They don't care if the rules are vague -- "everyone should know what is right and what is wrong", and those that refuse to buy into their moral postulate are simply evil. They'd probably like to see these players hit with real life prosecution...for being digital vandals in a beta. It's just how "lawful good" people think. TLDR: The more of this topic I read, the more I feel like it has less to do with the situation and more to do with people's core views on justice, punishment, and rules...and the inability to think beyond the letter of an end user license agreement.

Right? It's called thinking ahead. If you know that things will be upgraded in the future, build them so they can be...updated in the future. Don't claim it is because players want to keep their stuff...it's because you didn't think about how to future-proof the tech. Let's hope that they think about this more with the next updates...because we're not even out of beta yet, they shouldn't introduce "legacy" type content before public release lol.

Unigen2 as the game engine. The use Python, golang, C#, and C++ on the backend (yes all 4). They use more than one database tech (Postgres and MongoDB) in addition to Amazon's DynamoDB and Elastisearch. They use a variety of AWS-specific services; fairly certain the main game servers run off AWS. This is all public info, I'm just a nerdy sleuth.

Yeah, you aren't going to get it clarified by NQ. If you don't want player perspectives, this isn't the place to post...NQ isn't going to look at most of these posts, never mind reply. Terms like these are designed to be vague. Yes, "inappropriate" can be literally anything. There's no way they will lay this out explicitly, ever. This is industry standard and normal. It is meant to be subjective because the line for inappropriate is often vague, even in real life courts. This is how most MMO terms are worded...whatever devious stuff you have in mind, you're probably fine...

100% love that they made a forum account to post this. Finally a perspective by the people for the people lol.

If it takes NQ weeks to fix major exploits, there's bigger issues at play. If it takes NQ weeks to even open a ticket, there's bigger issues at play. If it takes NQ days to acknowledge an exploit, there's bigger issues at play. People have been making MMOs for over 20 years now...I don't understand how NQ struggles to handle well-understood concepts so poorly. Patch exploits quickly because they ruin the economy. Make sure your customer support can answer tickets within a reasonable time (6 weeks is absolutely absurd). We are doing our part as players by paying the price they set...if they still can't afford enough support to move tickets along or fix exploits promptly, something is very wrong. $20/minimum for each player that joined beta isn't a tiny amount of money. It is definitely enough to scale up support and open tickets...and if isn't? That's still their fault for not doing basic math to figure out a workable price that would allow them to scale the game...

There's a big difference between support being "delayed" and them not looking at tickets at all, sometimes for weeks. I'm not saying it is okay to not report a bug or exploit, I'm saying it doesn't matter if you do. NQ hasn't had any sense of urgency to fix major issues for players unless they are shoved in their face like this heist. You're right that the lanes of support aren't equal. As players, we give way more support to the devs than the other way around. If the support team is truly so busy, hire more support. That's why we pay them real-life monies. That's why they got $22 million in investments. So they can support their product. When should NQ be done "growing" into their shoes? I'd say 6 years is long enough to grow up and hire enough staff that you can process reports of thefts/exploits. Honestly, I'd agree with everything you said if it weren't for many players having their tickets ignored. It does create a perception that NQ doesn't have any sense of urgency when it comes to their paying customers...and only seems to act quickly when it embarrasses them. Maybe I'm way off-base and there are players that have had great experiences with NQ promptly dealing with theft/exploits, I just don't hear about any of those...

Agreed, but they've had time to make a patch that fixes this exploit... It's hard to patch an exploit when you refuse to even look at the tickets or research the problem. A very simply "we are aware of these problems and looking into it" would help massively, but instead we don't even know if NQ recognizes this as an issue (even after someone stole a whole market lol). NQ wants people to report exploits and bugs instead of taking advantage of them, but then when people do....they ignore it. So sure, making actual fixes to the code to prevent exploits is 10000x better than manual dev intervention, but we can't even get them to acknowledge issues or read tickets...

If NQ wants us to 'report' and leave things alone, they need to improve their communication. Players report theft all the time and seem to have massive trouble getting their tickets looked at. Trust is a two way street. If players can't trust NQ to help when they suffer exploits...why should anyone feel obligated to help NQ? They're the party actually making the monies...so why does the community have to help them cover up their technical sloppiness when they don't have any sense of urgency with the community's tickets...? Fine, we'll report exploits. Just give us a few weeks. I don't really care that these players were banned, but they should also be issued refunds for unused time because NQ shares plenty of responsibility due to their sloppy tech, imprecisely worded EULA, and inability to use the features they invented to secure their own property. Further, if they promptly ban these people, they ought to put just as much urgency on other community tickets instead of only seeming to care about theft when it happens to them...Frankly I feel this theft did more good than harm long-term, but only if NQ uses it as a learning experience instead of reacting with embarrassment and anger.

Not a very good example. It's more like if someone lied and said that your house is almost done...so you pay them and realize the foundation isn't even laid. Then they shrug and say "well we SAID it was still in construction...your fault for misinterpreting, even though we definitely exaggerated in the marketing materials..." PS if someone is going to charge you rent for a house that's not remotely livable, that's pretty scammy and unethical...

People are saying this because of experience, not to troll NQ. I hope that the OP has their ticket answered promptly, but the experiences of most players is that it won't happen. I can only imagine how frustrating it is....sloppy / bugged game feature means you lose everything, then NQ doesn't place a priority on answering your ticket? It's a double "screw you" to their customers...every day that they don't answer drives the OP away from the game and encourages the jerks to keep ruining it for other people. I am all for people calling out NQ on their absurdly slow response to exploit reports...whatever it takes to get them to actually help their paying customers.