apollo0510

Hey Sabre !
 
Neighbour ( in the belts ), nice to see you are still alive !
My customer support ticket just went through, to delete forcefully my account and all my personal data.
I had enough of this abusive relationship, just as you described it.
No need to waste any more of my life time with this bullshit.
Feel much better now.
 
Greetings

one word : uninstall.

one word : uninstall.

Hello everyone,

here is a lengthy impression from a noob, who has not followed the game prior to "release", not been in beta.
 
I actually joined this game by chance because I was frustrated with Star Citizen being not a playworthy game after 10+ years of development / funding campaign and a budget of a frecking half a billion dollars. In a rant about SC someone mentioned DU, I pictured it as a mix of minecraft and space engineers (with simplified physics though) but as a MMO.
The possiblilities for constructions and on top of that a seemingly powerful scripting layer sounded amazing. Good enough for me for starters, even if subscription-based.
 
The first worrying thing I noticed (apart from bugs), people asking in the help channel for an admin and being told, those are not reading this channel and the only option to get your problems fixed ("maybe" and after a period of "days") is to file a help ticket. Customer support seems non-existing or only in a homeopathic dosage. On a game that allegedly has been released AND is subscription-based, I want to point out again!
 
The bugs I and others encountered (on my side primarily regarding the daily challenges) seem to be around for years according to people that played the game from the start of alpha.
 
Now don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun in this game, even though I did little more than building up an industry, moved to Alioth after six weeks I spent wasting to build a mediocre space ship, found a nice org, moved to their HQ and rebuilt my industry again. I have not been to other planets apart from Haven and Alioth, no T2+ mining bases, no PVP, etc
 
What I conclude until now is, that this game is not much more than a sceleton of game content around mining, industry, construction and ship building. Everything feels not fleshed out, rather prototypical and quite incomplete, at least when judging from the perspective of "ordinary" games. The features that stand out, are the possibilities to create constructs and I dont know any other game that offers that to this degree (even if much more is imaginable). And that part gave me a lot of fun. I totally understand, that for someone who is not interested in that at all this game is devoid of worthwhile content.
 
In my personal game experience so far, the greatest challenge is to earn money, especially since the challenges are broken and the air delivery challenge got removed, which by the way I enjoyed quite bit, it tought me how to fly and was my main source of income (the space challenge is much less fun and even more bugged and less profitable so I skipped that most of the time). This is another observation I made: it seems to happen quite often that if a feature doesn't work in the game, it is not being fixed, it is not being improved, it's just being removed making the game even more bland.
 
Since it is hard to get money (maybe I am just too stupid, but it seems to happens to a lot of new players), game progress is even slower. I have a hard time to pay the rents for my 2 territories on Alioth and the schematics I need to build stuff. The only worthwhile mission is the 180k delivery on Alioth, which for me takes around 20 mins (though I frequently effed up my atmospheric reentry and damaged my ship so this mission becomes a loss, but of course this is on me). I would like to build up my base, but I can't afford an L-Core (not to speak of territory scanners and other 1million+ components), I would like to build ships, but I need to spend a lot of my play time to  get money by doing missions and produce the few articles that can be sold on the market with a margin, get my mining bases going, ferry around ore and products, etc.

 
What worries me a lot from a game development perspective, is the slow progress. And this seems to be the case for a long time, according to alpha veteran players.

In all honesty and of course my view is highly subjective, but at the moment this game feels like a disregarded bastard child that has been cast out to the streets in rags by its step-parents to beg for money in order to pay the debts of its dead father.
I am a SW developer myself and daresay, I have an idea what can be accomplished in a certain timeframe with a certain manpower. What has been anounced for the next patch, given the time frame of MONTHS is - again I feel sorry to say it - just outright loughable, close to customer fraught.
 
I have not followed the game development, I don't know what has been promised over time, what has been changed, who got fired or replaced and how that affected the development.
For now the game is enjoyable to me, especially since I found a nice org. We have great plans and want to build a city (no, not to rent apartments to people and nonsense like that) just for the sake of the challenge.
 
What I am worrying the most at the moment, is that NQ might not even have the ambition to bring this game further and make it successful. It _feels_ like it is being run on a sceleton crew just to get some subscription money to cut the investor's losses until it runs out of subscriptions and then is being shut down for good.
And these worries demotivate me to actually creat some awesome stuff in the game, because this takes a huge amount of time and effort. Who wants to do that when he is afraid that it all might be taken offline in a couple of months?
 
And that would really be a shame, because I see the potential.
 
DU is not the first game that has been thrown out to the market unfinished (not just unpolished) (No Man's Sky anyone?) and with technical difficulties. Most of these issues could be solved with further development.
 
A small example:
The problem with the delivery challenges not registering my delivery, therefore making the quest stuck forcing you to repeat it in total, could _probably_ be solved by giving the player a button on the progress screen (beside the container for the delivers) to activate a function that recounts the content in the container and set the mission progress accordingly. Or reset the progress and allow me to empty the container and fill it again.
 
A large example:
 do believe this game needs PvE as an additional game loop for players who shun PVP but want some action. From what I have seen so far, what is possible with scripting (like archHUD) to steer the behaviour of ships, this is not a far stretch from having automated ships that could act as NPCs. What else would be required
- a possibility for ships to function without player control. Maybe via an additional AI core, which makes the ship functional and fulfills some basic decision making (fly to a location in space, scan for targets, attack targets until destroyed, fly to next location, rince repeat until either dead or "finished with the patrol/out of ammo" fly back to the spawn point or end of mission point - reset ship)
- with the scripting possibilities the behaviour parameters can be randomized so that not very ship flies the same route, behaves the same, etc
- it would require a mechanism to spawn those ships, shouldn't be too hard, it works for asteroids, already
- We already have ships, there is not even a need to design new ones, they just need to be able to act as NPCs, a huge range of variants could be created
- I would strongly suggest that these NPC ships should also be able to fight and be thought in the protected zone not just in the outer PVP zone. NOf course not within the small zone around the celestial bodies and maybe not between Alioth, Haven and Sanctuary, to have a real peaceful area for new players. But in the outer region and around the planets at the rim of the protected zone it should be possible. Therefore this requires the possibility to activate your weapons and target NPC ships.
If PvE was only possible in the PvP zone this wouldcause rampant ganking issues of PvPers that hunt PvE-players, so there should be an PVE-only zone. But this does not rule out to have more challenging and more rewarding NPCs in the PvP zone which add another level of action and conflict and give PvPer an incentive to defend these areas against the cowardly "Inners" to have an edge in resource income.
 
This would give players the possibility to have some action, risk their lives and ships, and gain loot on success. For noobs like me having the chance to loot some Tier 3+ elements or voxel material (and maybe even other stuff in the containers) that would be enough incentive to play this game loop and in a later stage to go to the PvP areas and risk more for more reward.
 
Ok, so now some desicion makers at NQ might say, "we do not have the DEV resources to do all that". Well, let the community help you! There is an insane amount of creative talent out there. Make a community challenge out of it!
- Provide the basic mechanism to create an autonomous ship (like an AI core element that acts as a control unit)
- Provide the scripting API to control that AI core. It can be rather basic at the start, we are in space! We don't need navmeshes and expensive AI libraries and stuff like that!
- Organize it as a community challenge, hand out the AI cores (start with XS only, and limited number), let the community build and design, observe what works and what is too performance straining, what functions should be optimized into C++ routines, etc.
- Provide prices for successful designs or let the community decide.
- Finally proclaim, which NPCs shall be taken into the game, have them spawn.
- Rince repeat the whole thing with S, M, L, XL, maybe later with expanded AI.
 
If it is undesirable, e.g. in terms of griefing, to have a lot of autonomous ships in player hands, or too performance-intensive, have the AI cores removed from players completely (which would be a pity, really), or have them limited, by supply, on a per player/per org base, or disallow armed ships in player hands, or all of it together. Personally, in the long run I would probably be satisfied with having an autonomuous  taxi/ferry ship, that can fly on its own to my outposts, where I can un/load it via VR, to ease the resource gathering. I dont need a personal USV noob hunter craft that rampages through the inner zone and griefs people without me even witnessing it.
Though it would be cool to have a carrier ship that can spit out lots of combat drones.... yeah the possibilities are endless, at least in theory...
 
Long story short: this game has a lot of issues, but even more potential. It would be reassuring if NQ would demonstrate some long-term commitment. I don't see that at the moment not even ideas. Be honest to your community. We dont want this game to fail!
 
I for myself do not need a "Ready Player One" or "Metaverse" vision. This movie's story was about a dystopian, virtualized but totally disfunct and impoverished society that went astray big time. Who the hell wants that?
Not me for sure! I just want a decent space-themed MMO with a great degree of creative freedom that is FUN to play and enjoyable after a hard day of real-life work. Should be doable...
 
Regards, Kaine Vulpayne

It looks like NQ has filed some patents for their "game engine".
These patents deal with spatial subdivision combined with object subscription techniques.
I read those patents, and they seem awkwardly  generic. 
Basically every 3d onlinegame could / should use those things.
Yet, the patents were granted.
 
So maybee, the point of the NQ business is not to run an online game at all ...

I don’t think they are even listening to that.

NQ’s gross arrogance has them deaf, dumb, and blind.

Currently NQ are trying to reduce server load.
Their #1 method to do so is to dissuade new players from signing up and clogging the servers with their noob activities.
Their #2 method is apparently to do everything in their power to reduce the number of current players renewing 
 
Basically there is so little fun left in this game that NQ are on course to achieve their ultimate dream of zero server load within a year of release.

Playing this sionce alpha this is kinda the general NQ improvement strategy.
What you forget is that the term Improvement is not clarified. NQ never uses improvement if a feature or game thingy is actually changed to make player experience better,
 
Improvement is only used when talking about cost effectiveness, server load, game stability, scrapping features etc.
 
In DU improvements Never produce a better gaming experience, 0.23 was their Best industry improvement.
Adding Talents was an improvement untill people noticed that the max talent was close to the previous "normal"and thus everything got downscaled and talents were needed to get back to previous levels.
 
Improved mining gave us mining units but before we had those i hauled in kilotons of ore per day on sanctuary alone, now abit less but thats an improvement? to whom.
 
In general we get limitations and improvements and all those do is scrap features or minimize them.

I tried to have a discussion with people on DU Discord about this. It was like talking to six year olds...
 
 I asked, "where do the people who make things get their money from to buy ore and for their schematics?"
They said, "from selling things they don't use themselves to people who don't make things."
"And where does those people's money come from to buy the stuff?" I asked...
And they said, "from selling ore to people who make things..."
 
They literally couldn't comprehend the circular argument and the massive schematic (outgoing) faucet.

No wonder the world is in the current state it's in when people have no idea how simple maths works.

Are you guys ( and girls of course ) asking for consistency ? Seriously ? Are you asking for stuff that makes sense ? Wrong game ...

They are already snapping together. Tried that yesterday. I put down two mining outposts next to each other. And when you align the borders , then suddenly they snap perfectly together. The mechanism works differently than expected. Its not like you can place one construct on top of the other and then move with cursor keys. No. Instead you have to carefully align the borders manually, and when they are close, they snap.

Are you guys ( and girls of course ) asking for consistency ? Seriously ? Are you asking for stuff that makes sense ? Wrong game ...

It's pretty clear that the design purpose of asteroid mining is to force us to be undefended targets for the griefers - or call them gankers if you like. Useless wastes of air, IAC.
 
Of course NQ wants to discourage sz mining.

NQ is again demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of player psychology. You can't force people into PVP zones when they don't have the tools to make a proper evaluation of the risks and rewards. People will always try to minimize their risk and maximize the reward, but PVP is such a black box for most players that few are willing to risk what is probably the only mining ship they have against a threat they don't understand for a potential reward they cannot estimate. Why would someone go out solo in a ship that is probably completely helpless against pirates, spend up to an hour hunting down an asteroid only to find that the aforementioned pirates have been waiting there to pick them off the moment they get within range? What are the odds of that happening? I don't know! That's the whole point! I don't have enough information to calculate the risks or the rewards and the cost of a miscalculation is my whole ship being destroyed in an instant.
 
A basic asteroid in the safe zone might not make you rich, but it won't cost you your new ship unless you're a bad pilot. I'm aware that there are tricks players use (which I will not describe here) to find asteroids without quite as much risk. However, pirates will eventually adapt to that and once they do, the only rational choice players will be able to make is to join an org with mining ops well protected enough to run off or destroy any pirates that come by. Before long, large orgs will have it so that they're in a PVP zone but are at no risk of actual PVP (losses anyway) while small orgs and solo players are largely stuck sucking overcrowded rocks in horrific lag for what will soon become a chump change reward until they finally get sick of it and either join a larger org or quit entirely.
 
And don't get me wrong: large, organized orgs were always going to get access to the best content anyway, but joining up with them shouldn't be the ONLY way to do it; not in a game that's advertised as allowing people to play however they want.

Schematics are just stupid. Remove them already and fire the person that came up with that idea, thanks. 

1. Way too expensive to be considered a "useful" game loop
2. Only being craftable in inventory is beyond frustrating for your smaller/casual audience.

It will kill your game in the long run. How is money distributed to players? By selling ores to bots? *Insert big brain .jpg here*
So the entire goal of this game is to grind T1 ore to sell it to bots, to be able to afford schematics for their production. Buying stuff/parts from other players in the markets isnt worth it since they will put the schematic price on top.

I quit during alpha/beta when schematics were introduced and came back to review this on release. This system is still beyond garbage, considering I have to manually look up all the schematics needed for a product. Should at least give people the option to "Que up all required schematics for this element" button.

Cheers

Warning : this thread may contain traces of content.

Last night I took one last slow walk around my complex on Sanctuary. I symbolically shut down the factory, flipped the switch on the mining units, deactivated the DSAT and sat in the chair on my rooftop observatory and took in the view one last time. The silence was deafening. 
 
I felt a little emotional as the time I'd spent working on all this had been one of the most difficult parts of my life. Every time things had been difficult, I'd found myself retreating into this game as a form of therapy to help me through the events going on around many of us for the past few years. I think in a world that feels totally out of control at times, its amazing that we have the technology to be able to immerse yourself into being somewhere else like this.
 
Out of the probable thousands of games I've played since being a youngling I can say proudly that Dual Universe is one of the very few that has made it into my upper echelon of games that I love and have spent a significant amount of time with.
 
So I just wanted to write this positive thread to say thanks to NQ for the development of this game. It's not a perfect game by any means, there's still glaring omissions in features as well as bugs galore but its a special game to me nonetheless. I sincerely hope it manages to ride the storm over the coming weeks, months and hopefully years to reach its full potential as I feel it deserves it. I've played all the other similar and inspired games such as Elite Dangerous, No Mans Sky, Space Engineers, Starbase, Star Citizen, Empyrion, and Eve Online but this one holds my interest in a way the others didn't. 
 
I took one final screenshot from the observatory before descending the lift one final time to the habitat area that I never got around to working on. The enormous empty room contained a solitary bed and a bonsai tree. I made one more cursory check of my Nanopack to make sure all the blueprints I would need for the coming journey were there before laying down on the bed and stared at the slightly janky ceiling voxels.
 
Lets see whats out there...

Ok so we like to get into things. So today while heading up to a rudimentary space station I made...
[Deployed an M space core and added some voxels just a surface - do try to set it up away from the warp point, fairly off the planet, as people launch from all over the place, you don't want them to fly through an "asteroid field" to fly away from the planet (or don't worry about that and call it CCP/EvE-style "emerging behavior"? No thank you), and try to put some lights on it, so people see it from a decent distance - avoid accidents - just my advice]
 
So having mostly flown third person up to now (it suits), seeing the ship from behind and above, today I thought, hold on, this is not how its in reality. Astronauts don't have a camera following them form behind and above, to understand where the ship is going. 

So I challenged my self to make it realistic.
 
And the fun began
Issue no 1 : there is no marker to where the ship is going. That's fine, but it does help when you design the ship, to put some structure in front of the cockpit, or command seat, not too much to block all the view, so that you can relate to this fixture around you regarding the direction you would travel if you just pump the volume erhmm gib gas, erhmm hit the gas petal, erhmm whatever. I got it!! When you use the force!  (lower case f to avoid misunderstandings)
 
[Obviously you can use the thrust/direction markers that the cycle-my-thrust/direction-viewing-options-thing gives you and it just shows you an arrow of where you are going and the thrusts of engines airfoils, adjustors etc, so don't worry about it too much, I was just playing around.]
 
Now what I wanted to do  was dock with another ship in space, that was ECU-parked just above me space station. Never-mind that I think its not possible if the ship is unoccupied, even if you own it, to dock with it, but still how would you see where you are going when you dock. The early game/small ships just have cockpit, so most of the view of what you see is above you, its not easy to gauge what's underneath. So I rolled the ship over and tried to dock upside down.  Which is kinda how and why and the whole science and engineering of where they place windows on spaceships etc.
 
It was fun. I was glad I was able to use autopilot to get back. Do try the 'Albatross' "Add-on" to start with, it has no auto pilot, but you get a feel of what these add/help with, then get 'ArchHud', needs a bit of reading but there are videos in Youtube too about it, Its not perfect, but to me its nothing short of brilliant and hats off and kudos to the people that gave this to us and maintain it. This is nopt worth a buy-me-a-coffee folks. If you can and I will when i can I'll give 50 to these guys that did ArchHud. [its also reassuring that "The Man on the High Castle" in DU is a professional automator and AI aficionado [aficionado to say the least, but imo its still early days for AI]. Good chance it will take a lot of the fear out about what should be allowed to be automated and what not]
 
So overall it was a great experience today, I no longer feel so dismissive of how real spaceships are quite automated these days, you can still fly it, if designed properly around the idea of control but also how pilots would want it made (yeah the airline industry had a bit of trouble/teething problems with planes and if you hear what percentage of automation planes had before and how much was added in the new ones, you will freak out, its very small compared to what you think and it was already a big enough number, above 50% I believe - not sure whose fault it all was really but I am glad its better now)

So in closing, if you ask me if it bothers me that come game launch time, the DU solar system is going to be modeled as the Sun revolving around the planets, vothered really. Even in real space flight, they sometimes use this "old" model anyway, not in all situations ofc, but for some things, you can, so I hear.
 
And anyway it was very reassuring to hear that space companies have a meme or whatever you call it, that just because it works in Kerbal Space Program, it doesn't mean it really works, i.e. in that respect too, we are getting back to reality in real space. That is also good news . Still, imo, KSP was a milestone in gaming, and it will forever remain such.
 
I can assure Dual Universe has won me over fairly fast over Kerbal Space program 2 that is coming up. But I would recommend the experience of KSP 1 and hopefully 2 to anyone that does have the time for it. 
 
With KSP I  got certain things fairly fast. Why docking is the most difficult thing to do manually in space, landing on a planet at a specific place probably also, but other simple beautiful things like in space, the natural, given, direction, is not the line, there are no lines really (oh you can and we will make them) but as far as au naturel is concerned, everything moves in circles, arcs, curves. Even by a tiny fraction infinitesimal amount (of movement), you can always orbit something in space. Even a galaxy. Even if Lagrange is your uncle, its just two orbits canceling out.
 
25 years I waited for this. Oh I played the early space games Like Privateer etc, but there was one game, to me, that at that time was the best of them all, that never made it past beta (the word beta didn't exist back then). I believe it was called Planetary Raiders, but I might be mixing it up coz the company who eventually bought it kinda messed it up (called it something similar). It did have a funny thing called a cockpit shot. Only time I ever lived as David and survived to tell the tale of killing Goliath. Rare. Lucky. Just aimed for where I thought the cockpit was and fired everything I had. 
 
So yeah I am rather anxious. Will DU make it? Tune in in a couple of weeks!

Steam is a good choice in my opinion.
 
Are we encouraged to switch to subscribing through Steam? We probably should. Start strong with our big player number? "Invade" Steam and knock Counterstrike off the top of the list of how many play what at any given time? Yeah right.  I am not aiming that high. There is hope, expectation and then there is hubris. Anyway good choice, Steam is. Personally it suits me. You upgrade to a new PC and you have to go to a gazillion game sites to download all your games again? Steam for the win!

I was just trying to convince a friend to play this game with me. Thank you for this information. Of course I will not drag him into this hot mess.

I was just trying to convince a friend to play this game with me. Thank you for this information. Of course I will not drag him into this hot mess.

Well, subscriptions have run out a week ago. For me personally, DU has shut down. And I am not even feeling sorry.

Well, subscriptions have run out a week ago. For me personally, DU has shut down. And I am not even feeling sorry.

@NQ-Nyota Can NQ pause territory tax & subscription fees so we can all take a break while you guys decide?
 
Thanks.

Yes, wiping talent points on any account (beta-key or paid) is a definitive "I'm gone" too.
 
How can it possibly be a good thing to hold a knife to the throat of the entire player base? How do they expect players to want to invest time and effort into something that may get deleted? Yes, any MMO have a limited life span, but this is so demotivating. It's not like new players don't become aware that there's a wipe hanging over our heads considering the discussion comes up over and over in general chat.
 
I love (some parts of) the game and the community, but I am utterly disappointed in NQ.

I don’t even understand the concept of taxes. It’s like teenagers came up with the game design. 
 
so much of this game design revolves around aphelia that players are demoted to secondary tier members. So much for player controlled. 
 
more like players controlled… by big brother. 

Nonsense bot missions to bot receivers that have no relevance to actual market stock or availability of items. 
 
Have to buy permission to make stuff from bots on a machine by machine basis. 
 
The only central markets that exist are bot run and must pay the bot tax to sell your wares. Players become mere clients. 
 
Sell ore to bots. Ore disappears.
 
Pay bots to activate your mining machines and equipment in a particular area of land for a specific time.
 
Remotely deactivated by aphelia for non payment… what kind of nonsense is this?
 
same goes for industry. 
 
the whole lore and head canon for this game is so dystopian and arbitrary it’s as if zero thought went into it…