michaelk

You know you have nothing to say of substance when you resort to arbitrary judgement values like "carebear". 
 
If you care so much about PvP, how about playing a PvP game?! DU isn't a PvP game. It's a building game with PvP slapped on top as a crude afterthought, with core pillars of the PvP gameplay unknown or undecided by NQ...and with no known ETA on changes. 
 
Welcome to DU's Alpha. Be patient or just move on and play a game with actual PvP as a core feature. DU isn't that game.
 
Frankly I don't understand how they will ever create anything close to "civilization" if they attract that crowd of people that loves to throw around "carebear" like it's the ultimate pejorative. Bears are great. Just visit pride sometime.
 
Some people think combat is insanely boring (especially DU's version), others think coding in LUA all day is boring, others think mining and hauling is boring. If you can't get over the fact that different people like different things, why bother playing a multiplayer game at all...? 
 
Anyway....I'm over people whining because PvP doesn't yet work. Nothing really works yet. Everyone is in the same boat.
 
It isn't because "carebears" want to avoid danger -- it's because NQ hasn't come close to finishing their game. 
 
Get over it, be patient, or move on. 

There's nothing wrong with warp avoiding PVP. Combat doesn't work right yet and the only valid reason to do it is for willing participants to test it.
 
When I can add reasonable defenses, e.g., shields, so I have some chance of surviving an attack without taking a huge loss, then it would be fair for me to have to take a risk commensurate with the reward if I succeed. (Currently, the reward for mining outlying planets is nowhere near enough to justify any risk of combat. It's also not enough to hire escorts if you're going to sing that tired refrain.)

I do think it is a waste of time in the "beta" (read "alpha") stage.
 
Of all the many things to fix and implement, events should be near the bottom of the list. 
 
It's also a waste of time based on the YouTube views for the video...4,000 people watched the video. 
 
So...why are they doing this, exactly? For a few hardcores? For free press that gets less than 5,000 views? For JC's obsession with Ready Player One style events...? 
 
Very unlikely that even minor effort to put together the email and video is worth it for this level of engagement. 
 
(Edit: to compare, Satisfactory put out an announcement about gases earlier today; their 3 minute video has over 30,000 views -- and they are a single player game without a sub, so...people that say that DU is dying aren't pulling it out of thin air. Just ask the on-average 40-50 people online at any time in DU's reddit lol -- even for a single player game the engagement is abysmal) 

I do think it is a waste of time in the "beta" (read "alpha") stage.
 
Of all the many things to fix and implement, events should be near the bottom of the list. 
 
It's also a waste of time based on the YouTube views for the video...4,000 people watched the video. 
 
So...why are they doing this, exactly? For a few hardcores? For free press that gets less than 5,000 views? For JC's obsession with Ready Player One style events...? 
 
Very unlikely that even minor effort to put together the email and video is worth it for this level of engagement. 
 
(Edit: to compare, Satisfactory put out an announcement about gases earlier today; their 3 minute video has over 30,000 views -- and they are a single player game without a sub, so...people that say that DU is dying aren't pulling it out of thin air. Just ask the on-average 40-50 people online at any time in DU's reddit lol -- even for a single player game the engagement is abysmal) 

This is not true for games because money/assets frequently go out of circulation when players stop playing. Beyond that, DU has money sinks when buying from bots which remove quanta from the game.
 

With regards to the support team, if there was an actual triage done on the incoming tickets the team would be able to better prioritize and bucket the tickets. What this means is that, for instance bug reports get picked up and passed on faster as the CS team do not actually do anything wit these. Currently it seems that they only pick up tickets related to log in issues quickly and the rest just stays in the queue. It just seem there is no real management of the queue which is IMO a big reason why the backlog remains in place.  Having been in this business for many years in management capacity I see the signs all over.. 

The issue isn't really support....support would have all the bandwidth in the world if the game wasn't so buggy.
 
The core issue is that there's so many bugs, support is constantly backlogged. I hope that no one really thinks that NQ's support just isn't doing their job...I think they're doing the best they can with the amount of tickets and staff. 
 
The real way to improve support is to eliminate bugs...which is supposedly the point of doing beta testing to begin with. I think NQ's dev team is more focused on feature dev and game balance (things they should have knocked out in alpha) rather than bug fixes, so of course support will always be struggling to stay on top of things. 

The whole 'built and driven by players' premise is in part, what attracted me to the game. The problem is like in the real world, there must be people willing and able to do the extremely tedious, everyday small things. The issue is most of those things quite frankly, make for horrible gameplay. Silly me for misunderstanding remote controls and lua script as a stepping stone to automating the tedium such as mining, running to and from markets, etc. Boy I was wrong.
 
A game, almost by definition, sets up a fantasy situation where we can become the best gun, the top mogul, the fastest smuggler, the best builder, the richest pirate, through a series of challenges, training, forethought, and even a bit of grinding. In doing these things we advance through our chosen area gladly knowing where we want to end up. 
 
In this game, the only way to advance in any significant way is to find others to do the tedius grunt work. Even if this game had a million players, the likelihood of finding enough people happy to pay real money to do tedius virtual chores month after month with no advancement is very very low. That is where the automation and the NPCs are supposed to take over. To allow a greater number of players feel like they make a real difference and are getting somewhere.
 
Doing this will take a LOT of code crunching, debugging, testing, patching, in other words TIME, to implement this in a meaningful, playable, and comprehensive way. Based on the games progression so far as heard from alpha backers, and the fact that the game got to this point now YEARS after first alpha release, I can not see this happening until many more years. I just don't see this experiment of DU becoming much more than a niche game. Guess I could be wrong ?

JC comes from academia background,  and the whole DU progress kinda resembles basic research project, which by its nature usually has very flexible time scale and  focused primarily on gaining knowledge but not particularly on practical application  ( for as long as grants are awarded) 
 
The trouble is, commerical products generally tend to resemble applied research, where time tables are tight, research goals are clearly defined and negotiated by its originators, and application is expected on particular budget.

I'd suggest you don't use a real email for your username...like, I shouldn't know your full name and that you live around {CENSORED}
 
Also...makes it super easy for bots to scrape and spam. ?‍♂️

Very much this is key. @NQ_Naunet many well meaning people on these forums alone have made tons of suggestions over the last few months. The devs seem to pass over the simplest ones and shoot for some grander picture that we/I have yet to understand. As it is we still do not see details in updates and have to find game breaking rules by shear accident.
 
I may be wrong, but the corners that are cut seem very likely to appeal to the few instead of the many. I guess like I have said, time will tell.

If that does happen, maybe NQ should take the hint.  
 
If a majority of their players aren't interested in PvP, they at least need to make it easier to swallow. Relax industry a bit. Make blueprints a real game concept instead of a hacky item in your inventory and link them cleanly to industry.
 
Your ship got blown up? It should take almost no time to rebuild a fresh copy from a blueprint. If your factory doesn't have the required raw minerals, it shouldn't be hard to order them from the nearest market for automatic delivery or buy the right to build it from a friendly org. 
 
Industry could also be the bedrock for NPC (gasp) vessels that patrol civilized areas -- giving players more security, pirates more targets, and builders a fleet of craft to create and maintain. If a group of players keeps pirating your NPC fleet, that conflict will lead to PvP. It would also give an advantage to defenders, which they already want to do. 
 
I was surprised that they nerfed industry because I thought it would be a great foundation for actual civilization mechanics -- like quickly rebuilding vessels and building a limited fleet of NPC craft to facilitate more automation and QoL. More automation helps everyone -- you can pirate NPC haulers transporting goods or get drawn into PvP because you want to defend your org...not just because you got ganked. 
 
This insistence that there be no NPCs and that everything must be run only by players is really pointless. There's no game design justification at all, just JC's weird RP obsessions. 
 
Industry should be the bedrock for more automation, more scale, more QoL. 
 
Instead....NQ has opted to make the game even slower and more arduous. It's like they know that their off-the-shelf engine and off-the-shelf servers won't actually support the cities and civilization they pitched, so now they need to make sure the game is "slow" enough so that getting the stuff to make civilization is a grind fest. 

Then Maybe, and only then they should not have made this a mining simulation. How many people in everyones direct circle in real life are miners? now in DU its a 99% even tho some say no it isnt. Wel probably the leaders of massive orgs who have minions to mine dont have too but for all others its a mining sim.

Personally, I think the problem is the exact opposite...they had a really vague vision that appealed to a lot of people, but never articulated it into a detailed, cohesive design. 
 
It's like the show "Lost"...when everything is a mystery, it appeals to a lot of people because the imagination works to fill in the many gaps. Once you realize the writers have no freakin' clue what they are doing, the appeal starts to vanish.
 
After six years, DU is still in the "Lost" period where the appeal of the game is almost completely driven by the mystery and promise of what comes next. If you think about it too long, you realize they're even more lost than we are. 
 
People love to talk about how DU "isn't the right game for you" because of wanting too little or too much PvP...but it's always been up to NQ to communicate what type of game this will be. They still don't know. They're still knee-deep in smoke monster, unable to fathom a bigger picture. 
 
This isn't an issue with some players wanting peace and some other players wanting "free" PvP. It really isn't. 
 
The issue is that NQ still isn't sure what game it's making. Dig up all the past promises and explanations you want, the fact that "but PvP needs to work THIS way" keeps coming up over and over and over and over again is proof that they haven't written the ending...never mind figuring out how to actually get there. 
 
It really doesn't matter what you think the smoke monster ought to be...cuz trust me, the writers have a really different and probably stupid perspective. 

Personally, I think the problem is the exact opposite...they had a really vague vision that appealed to a lot of people, but never articulated it into a detailed, cohesive design. 
 
It's like the show "Lost"...when everything is a mystery, it appeals to a lot of people because the imagination works to fill in the many gaps. Once you realize the writers have no freakin' clue what they are doing, the appeal starts to vanish.
 
After six years, DU is still in the "Lost" period where the appeal of the game is almost completely driven by the mystery and promise of what comes next. If you think about it too long, you realize they're even more lost than we are. 
 
People love to talk about how DU "isn't the right game for you" because of wanting too little or too much PvP...but it's always been up to NQ to communicate what type of game this will be. They still don't know. They're still knee-deep in smoke monster, unable to fathom a bigger picture. 
 
This isn't an issue with some players wanting peace and some other players wanting "free" PvP. It really isn't. 
 
The issue is that NQ still isn't sure what game it's making. Dig up all the past promises and explanations you want, the fact that "but PvP needs to work THIS way" keeps coming up over and over and over and over again is proof that they haven't written the ending...never mind figuring out how to actually get there. 
 
It really doesn't matter what you think the smoke monster ought to be...cuz trust me, the writers have a really different and probably stupid perspective. 

Personally, I think the problem is the exact opposite...they had a really vague vision that appealed to a lot of people, but never articulated it into a detailed, cohesive design. 
 
It's like the show "Lost"...when everything is a mystery, it appeals to a lot of people because the imagination works to fill in the many gaps. Once you realize the writers have no freakin' clue what they are doing, the appeal starts to vanish.
 
After six years, DU is still in the "Lost" period where the appeal of the game is almost completely driven by the mystery and promise of what comes next. If you think about it too long, you realize they're even more lost than we are. 
 
People love to talk about how DU "isn't the right game for you" because of wanting too little or too much PvP...but it's always been up to NQ to communicate what type of game this will be. They still don't know. They're still knee-deep in smoke monster, unable to fathom a bigger picture. 
 
This isn't an issue with some players wanting peace and some other players wanting "free" PvP. It really isn't. 
 
The issue is that NQ still isn't sure what game it's making. Dig up all the past promises and explanations you want, the fact that "but PvP needs to work THIS way" keeps coming up over and over and over and over again is proof that they haven't written the ending...never mind figuring out how to actually get there. 
 
It really doesn't matter what you think the smoke monster ought to be...cuz trust me, the writers have a really different and probably stupid perspective. 

I feel your pain, but Windows 7 is now 11 years old (yep, makes me feel old) -- extended support ended almost a year ago and Win7 support is limited to extended security updates only. 
 
So...you're going to need to upgrade your OS to play games at some point in the near future no matter what...

All I can envision when people talk about warp interdiction is gank squads sitting around cackling about nuking any ship that warps in. Whats that players alternative? Oh yeah slow boat hours of RL time to get to a planet to still be intercepted by the gank squad, or add hours to try and maneuver around to come at the planet from non traditional travel lanes.
 
There is no simple solution here thats going to be palatable to the general player base. I would much rather see warp removed entirely and max speed cap be removed. My guess is the server tech simply cannot handle ships moving that fast which is largely why warp works the way it does.
 
If you want warp to require risk by dropping outside of safe zones etc , then weapon ranges should be dramatically reduced to allow some chance for a ship to out maneuver another and escape a fight. ECM or other defensive measure need to be added to under such a scenario.
 
You don't solve the lack of PvP by simply turning unsafe space into gank town.   

Unfortunately, the devs don't really engage with players. 
 
The community managers do a great job, but you won't get a dev response here or anywhere... 
 
The reality is that the devs don't really know -- they've struggled to plan out or explain how most features in the game will work at release.
 
They are very much a "trial and error" sort of dev shop -- they tend to make big changes and see how things shake out instead of planning meticulously. Unfortunately, for a game like this, it tends to backfire. 
 
Here's the official roadmap -- but based on this schedule, it's more fantasy than reality. They'd need to start pushing major features each month to stay on track, and it isn't even clear how some of these features will work...
 
 
 
 

Large-scale PvP can't be the endgame. I don't mean it shouldn't, I mean NQ physically can't support it. 
 
As a select few corps become more and more powerful through inevitable consolidation and conquest, the scale of combat becomes harder to manage.
 
The "cutting edge" tech (lol) really doesn't help -- large battles will always require exponentially more server resources than small ones. NQ can't support huge daily battles without incurring considerable cost. There's a reason Eve does time dilation...if you think NQ has "solved" the problem of exponentially scaling multiplayer, try doing even small-scale PvP...works like a dream, right? 
 
I get that DU was pitched as this grand single-shard concept where player limits don't matter and everyone can come together in big cities and battles...but the tech just doesn't work like that and never will, no matter how "optimized" they make it...which, using an off-the-shelf engine and off-the-shelf AWS servers limits what you can actually optimize. 
 
The only way there's a massive PvP battle endgame is if NQ can throw an army of hardware at it -- which will only make sense if there's a large population of casuals/semi-casuals that help subsidize this expense...and so far, NQ hasn't seemed that interested in mainstream appeal. 
 
TLDR: large-scale PvP can't be the endgame because their implementation of single-shard isn't robust, scalable, or affordable enough to support it. 

Hi! New-ish player here with a question for the Devs. I wasn't sure where to post this exactly so, I figured I would drop it here and hopefully, they will see it. Anyway, as a female gamer, this is the first time I have played a Voxel type game and so far, I am fairly impressed. That being said, when I look at what is being projected for the future of DU, I am a little concerned about the game loop. This is my understanding of what DU will be in the future. Mine, build, make ships, fight other players constantly to hold on to that which I have built. Repeat. So far, no mention of NPCs, no real exploration, or jobs outside of always having to be prepared for war. I am not asking that anything necessarily be changed, I would just like to know if there are any plans in the works for non pvp players like me. Will I actually have a place in this game?
Again, this is a question for the Devs, not player speculation. 
Also, please do not just tell me to stay on Sanctuary. That is just demeaning and dismissive.
Thank you!

True, true, good and yes
 
It's encouraging to see the changes in the CM department over the past months. How that translates down the pipe into the company is what remains to be seen.. Let's hope for the best and a positive change by NQ in this regard. The work and input from the CM team is appreciated for sure!

That's all it is, Bobbie! You nailed it.  Our 'style' is just... normal, empathetic conversation. (Unless we're dishing out super formal information, like a warning or big announcement.)
 

That's certainly not how we view it, I can guarantee you that. The fans who post here on the forums are incredibly insightful.  

Each of DUs social (community) spaces has their own little ecosystem. There's something for every player personality, and that's valuable to us:
Forum posters tend to be more technically minded and informed about industry practices, enjoy writing long-form/thoughtful feedback pieces and more often than not have been around since the beginning of the project. The overall vibe I get is similar to walking into a library - it's a quieter, more studious atmosphere. Forums are an amazing place to house information long-term, and I personally really enjoy them. (A large part of my personal enjoyment comes from how well forums showcase people's personalities! I think it's one of the better places to bond and have meaningful conversations.) Discord is excellent for allowing NQ to take a quick community "temperature" check! If we want to see how any one thing is affecting fans in-the-moment, Discord is a great place to look to make a fast assessment. (The next step after that is to come here and see that "temperature" elaborated upon.) Discord is also great for general fun/joking around, and for spreading key information rapidly. Reddit falls somewhere in between the forums and Discord. It's a widely popular, easily accessible platform that tends to attract newer players, which provides NQ with the opportunity to better understand the new player journey. It has its own chat feature and also allows for long and thoughtful posts, though it seems to be used mostly to showcase builds/ask general questions. The demographic that posts to Reddit skews a bit younger and tends to have their fingers in more than one gaming pie, which enables us to keep tabs on what else might be grabbing fans' attention in the gaming world. I personally view platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter & Youtube as belonging to Marketing first and foremost. Those are spaces where NQ can promote DU, not necessarily where we as a community team might go to source important feedback. (Occasionally we'll get the odd constructive Youtube comment, but that's fairly rare.) So as you can see, every space provides NQ with something meaningful. We pull insights from each space to compare, contrast and ultimately develop a well rounded picture of how our players think and feel. They're all important to us for different reasons. No one space is better than another - just different!
 
Now to address the title of this thread: "Will this be another Cyberpunk 2077 disaster?" The short answer is "in all likelihood, no. Thank goodness."  
 
You can make some loose comparisons I'm sure, but DU and Cyberpunk (and the companies that created them) are very different beasts. If you're interested, I encourage you guys to check out an in-depth article I read earlier about the Cyberpunk situation: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/style/cyberpunk-2077-video-game-disaster.html
 
NQ has certainly encountered some growing pains (that's no secret!), but we're working through them. Even in the short time I've been here, I have seen growth! ❤️ Take for instance the following is official communication from us: 
 
This is in direct response to a large majority who felt we did "too much too soon" with 0.23. We agree! We hear you, we see you, we are going to try something different next time.
 
This is JC saying that, while we tried our very best, in terms of testing new features we fell short this time. We will and are making improvements on this front, which hopefully means 0.24 will be a vastly improved experience for all.  
 
(Those quotes were taken directly from this post, for those who are curious to read more.)

It'd be more fair to compare it to "No Man's Sky" -- an indie game marketed with bold promises and "exaggerated" ads that failed to match the final product.
 
Like NMS, NQ is still pushing ads that they know don't match the actual product. They're selling a promise, not a real product.
 
I don't think it's a fair comparison to CP2077, which was made by a big studio with real resources and a lot of experience. For anyone that thinks DU is "so much more complicated", no...you can't compare running off AWS with an off the shelf Unigen2 engine to creating a game and engine at this level. Apples and oranges. 
 
Both NMS and CP2077 have something in common: devs that are willing to own up to their mistakes.
 
CDPR issued apologies and refund offers -- they know they'll need to work very hard to earn back trust and players with future patches (personally think the game is fantastic, but my hardware runs it fine). Hello Games learned to resist the hype machine and let their work speak for itself. 
 
I don't get the same sense of humility and urgency from NQ...granted their product is pre-release, but they don't seem interested in earning back customers or apologizing or learning at all. Their 0.23 note was basically "meh, here's why we are right..."
 
They've already dismissed us forum folk as negative "old school" people with nothing constructive to say -- they'd rather focus their community efforts on reddit where people only post pics of their creations and downvote anything negative.
 
NQ isn't mature as a company and it shows not just in their product, but their entire philosophy when it comes to customer communication and outreach. 
 
Like always, NQ needs to learn from other examples in the industry instead of retreating into their shells to avoid the very criticism that beta testing is supposed to elicit. 

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