michaelk

This is super helpful, the mining tool isn't exactly intuitive! Personally, I hope that they streamline mining...virtually every concept in this game is fairly dense and not aided by their UI design -- they could make the basic steps of obtaining resources more clear while still making it take just as much time! My fear is "it isn't so bad once you figure it out" will be the general attitude...and that DU will become too much a niche product to keep funding it at the levels it needs. Especially if something so basic as mining requires this much explanation, which I really appreciate you doing. ?

Has NQ even said anything about these problems? All I see on their social channels are posts about how much fun people are having -- no mention of issues, timeline for fixes, or apologies. Generally no reply to anyone complaining in the comments. They didn't even bother with an apology in the email where they reset all our passwords. I also have seen some people on these forums that just want to shut down anyone with anything critical to say about DU. If mods are also shutting people down on discord? It isn't a good look for a community. I get it if you are mad that people aren't seeing the game for all its potential...but NQ needs to at least say something about the problems people are having, never mind quickly fixing them as people would expect of an MMO at any public launch. "Sorry we didn't expect it to be so popular, give us a week to fix things, and we'll credit every account 1 free week of playtime" would go a long, long way to keeping people interested and happy. Radio silence and trolly "loyal" fans is not really a winning strategy imo. (if y'all alpha players that saw the game at its best really want to help NQ, be patient with new players especially if the issues are clearly NQ's fault)

Same thing happened to me. Definitely qualifies as "broken" when the tutorial literally dumps you into the ocean with no way to advance Being able to advance text helps, but hopefully a community resource / wiki will come together so people don't have to rely on (buggy) in game tutorials.

How about some acknowledgement from NQ? All I see from their Twitter are screenshots of "how great the game is and how much fun people are having". They bungled the release and are just doubling down on the marketing efforts to attract more people instead of being honest, taking a step back, and fixing the problems. That will only make this issue much worse. Every new player they attract that has these issues will feel betrayed and angry. First impressions matter, and NQ hasn't even made an effort to be honest about them... Looking at their social media it's like the release had no problems at all! If I were an investor, I'd be panicking right now, too...because they bungled the release and seem to have zero self-awareness of that fact...and seem to want to hide that from new players which will only make more new players angry and not come back. NQ should acknowledge the rough launch to deter new players from jumping in until they've fixed extremely basic problems. Otherwise they are just digging a deeper hole.

Which is the fault of NQ execs, not their gamers and customers... The rushed a release when every dev working on this project likely knew it wasn't ready. Their password system doesn't even work, and that's extremely basic and critical! That will always be a recipe for disaster and stress -- it isn't "whiners" that makes life stressful for customer service and dev, it's leadership. The leadership decided to push a game that wasn't ready so they could get more funding rolling in on a monthly basis, and it backfired. Else their leadership was naive enough to believe their product was ready. Holding leadership accountable does have a point, because all those people working sleeplessly are doing so not because "gamers are whining" but because they decided to launch a product and ask for money before it was ready. I get that people are loyal because they've seen how great the game can be...but sycophants can ruin a game as quickly as "whiners" if they attack anyone with completely valid criticism.

This is a really weird take to me... Y'all know they are asking for money, right? They're asking us to pay for a product with the promise that it will be at least somewhat playable, if a bit rough and buggy. That's a fair expectation for a public beta launch. The OP hasn't been able to play because of unusually bad mistakes with a lack of infrastructure available at launch (20+ million dollars raised didn't seem to go to auto-scaling servers!) and an inability to securely handle passwords, which is extremely basic. I want DU to be a great game, but it is 100% acceptable to whine when the game you purchased doesn't really work. This was not a "smooth" beta by any stretch. If it was free I'd think differently, but people are paying for a time-limited subscription to a product they can't yet enjoy. Each day they can't login is money wasted. The "gain" on doing this topic is holding the company accountable for their shoddy launch -- because we all want this to be a great game and it will absolutely be ruined if they can't get on track quickly. How many failed logins do you think people will do before giving up and writing the money off as a loss? If this initial group of new players goes away, it might be years before they can earn them back with fixes and improvements... Great that you're loyal to some game company, but that's even less helpful than people "whining" that the game they paid for doesn't work.

I will definitely keep coming back to check on the progress. I really want a game like this to be successful. I think there are some major downsides to the single-shard idea in general. I do hope they get figured out! Nothing will ever stop high bursts of player activity -- large battles like Eve or player-made cities. If they can't adjust quickly, I wonder how the game will play out at scale. If they are running on Amazon servers, I know how AWS autoscaling works. It isn't exactly fast in the context of gaming! Spinning up servers in response to spikes (e.g. player battles) is difficult because by the time you can respond, it's often too late. Of course you can solve all scalability issues with money -- e.g. by paying for a fleet of servers to idle so that you have more time to respond to spikes. As far as contracts go...there's nothing stopping them from spinning up servers, they just might pay a lot more for instances outside their contact. That they seemed unable to scale up for the first weekend makes me wonder what the heck was going on. It makes me nervous that some part of the technical design itself may never work exactly as promised. They surely know how important first impressions are and a lot of new players probably won't be coming back with the same mentality -- they won't be as forgiving if issues don't get fixed soon. I hope I'm wrong! Expecting great things from DU!

I've been following DU obsessively since it was first announced, and know from experience that MMOs at launch are rough at best. Even more with a beta launch... Still, it's a little vexing that this game was built on the promise that everyone can play together in a shared world -- that's a huge part of the marketing. When the servers crumble almost right away and remain unreliable through the weekend, I'm not sure if they really took this promise seriously. Most big launches have struggles in the first day or so, but I had different connection problems on my extremely fast internet through the whole weekend. If they can't scale at launch, how are they going to scale when players have created huge organizations and battles? If they had marketed this as a public alpha, I think people would be more forgiving. I don't really think this is a beta version -- and frankly I believe they have years to go before the product is refined enough to launch or even call a beta. I have strong No Man's Sky vibes where marketing materials capture a concept that the game itself doesn't replicate. I will definitely come back and check out the progress, but I don't expect it to be really playable for another year or two. In my cynical mind, I can't help but wonder if the motivation to go to a subscription model was because they knew it wouldn't be ready for a while and need a more steady source of funding to keep afloat. PS: to top it off, I just got the email about resetting everyone's passwords...I know first-hand how hard tech is, but I have strong doubts that a company can delivery an extremely ambitious cutting-edge multiplayer experience when they can't even handle passwords securely...