TonyTones

Its very difficult to read and understand as your post looks like one long sentence.
Could you edit your post with some spaces between some parts?

I can't help but laugh at the MU implementation. I was begging for MUs because mining was just such a nightmare:

 
So I hoped MU's would help remove a lot of the tedium from the game and actually make it fun to play....
 
Except when we got MUs it was totally not what I had hoped for....I wanted to remove tedium - not add more!

The entire economy has been broken from the beginning. Buying billions of ore just to process and sell it to NPC buy orders should never have been a thing.

So, as predicted T2 and some T3 prices are often below T1 bot prices by now, which makes those hexes very unprofitable, considering that you can often claim 500 ore/h T1 hexes, but nothing like that for T3+ and in most cases you rarely have a T1 above 100 as secondary ore on them. 
NQ said they watch marketprices and will act accordingly. The time to act is now! Either lower hex taxes, or introduce buy bots for T2+ at logical higher price levels than T1, else no one will be able to afford keeping those T2+ hexes, because they just cost more than you can earn with them even if you keep nothing for your own use (or alternatively add buy bots for finished products).
 
DU isn't remotely close to a playerbase where there is any ore scarcity with the currently available mining hexes which would drive the prices up!
(and please, i dont want to hear anything like "players aren't supposed to own more than 1 or 2 T2+mining hexes" or any of that, because without mining there is barely any gameplay left that is directly supported by the games systems)

They recently scrubbed the names from the log files this app used to grab info from.  You cannot get market data on the players / org names anymore.

I think the progress has been very impressive.
 
At this rate by this time next year NQ will have successfully reduced the player count to 0 and finally go the way of Worlds Adrift like I kept saying they would...

Well, last year more correctly to call it "downscaling", game pretty much moved towards saving money/making it somewhat more passable for relativly close "release".
 
While such more grounded approch not bad thing on its own, its obviously gone far from game that was promised on KS. Basicly we ended up with some space-themed Landmark with same negative perspectives.

...after >10,000 views on YouTube, and many hundreds of hrs building:
Death Star
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/j8zxhd/its_operational_death_star_test_flight/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/jdc5st/districts_9_5_6km_11kms_visible_from_the_death/
Roulette Table & Poker Machine
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/k74cws/this_took_longer_to_build_than_the_death_star/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/kotnkm/some_epic_code_optimisation_to_get_this_working/
Spinning Radar
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/n8fhou/megabosslords_infinitely_spinning_radar_no_fuel/
Emperator
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/o8z3xg/the_emperator_sneak_peek/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/o4uev9/market_shown_for_scale/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/o1xflv/no_other_game_comes_close/
Hologram Projector
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/ohzbvi/a_huge_thank_you_to_those_whove_stopped_by/
Stuff Like This
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/orvc46/todays_voxel_challenge_everything_about_this/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/mwp6xw/til_voxel_landing_skids_work_great/
Giant Floating Island
https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/pzntme/floating_island_progress_week_3/
...and a store with 50+ more DRM-free BPs.
It's NOT the constant bugs. This is a beta. They're a small studio running on fumes. It's no surprise having to fill in a dozen bug reports after every release: https://imgur.com/a/y4sPbpE
It's NOT the constant nerfs - losing our factories, HTML/SVGs, megas/scans, terraforming, LUA randomly deprecated, ship designs ganked by new element mechanics... also to be expected in a beta (even if it is soul-destroying.)
It's NOT having all my suggestions ignored - even the most basic QoL improvements which 50 other people also asked for since day 1, and still today: https://www.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse/comments/pu9eoc/watch_my_spirit_broken_in_real_time/

Sorry Xerrass. NQ just don't listen.
It's NOT the lack of vision or inspiration. JC's 'emergent gameplay' pitch was awesome bait. Now we're all being shoe-horned into a vanilla same-as-every-other-game meta, but maybe that's the price of doing business. If it means more players, also fine.
It's NOT the community. The community were awesome - although many good people have also left.
No, I loved this game - despite everything. Eyes wide open.
The issue is trust.
As a beta, the only point of investing time is if you trust the studio to respect your effort.
NQ have crossed from flaky to deceitful: showering us with platitudes while stealth-patching and quietly reversing stated plans.
If we can't trust them to respect our efforts, and we can't trust anything they say - any declaration now is potentially the opposite of what will happen. Every back-flip is attributed to some last-minute complaint from someone, but it's never clear who, or how many, or what the forum was to be heard, and how long discussion was open-then-closed-then-opened-again.
And because of the ham-fisted way they've handled letting players who quit long ago just leave their garbage laying around forever, tying up resources without paying a sub, there are absolutely no consequences to just walking away - which probably the dumbest design decision in the history of a game.
TL/DR: NQ caught lying. Again. No pre-nup.

I really dislike the line of reasoning that says that NQ is listening to the "wrong group" -- I see no evidence that NQ really engages with player feedback in general...that's one of the main complaints about this studio. 
 
Beyond that...it's weird that people think they are being "influenced" by some cabal of players as if they are children incapable of making their own choices. 
 
There's plenty to debate with NQ's choices, but at least give them credit for making the choices they have. Right or wrong, these are NQ's decisions and they alone have the power to make them. 
 
I'd love to see evidence that there's any group of players that NQ actually listens to or engages with, because I don't see that here in the forums. 

Hi @TobiwanKenobi and others,
 
We are investigating this issue, we have made an update to reduce the instability of the obstruction value which was a bug causing your ship's engines to randomly change the obstruction over time even in mid-air.
However, it seems that the obstruction has another problem; this one.
We can't give an ETA, especially since the team is taking a break for the holidays. But be sure it's in our bug list we're investigating.

like i wasted my money on a 3 month subscription
to be more fun
still pretending its in beta                  admit its in alpha

I feel _________________   
 
This game needs ________________
 
NQ is ____________ and should ______________
 
Insert dissertation here.

Hello,
 
I am not here to talk about Demeter the pro/cons.
This is a personal list of improvement I see that could be added to the game and would change player life quality.
Some of the improvement are more for new players, the goal is to make the game less confusing for them.

Some of the improvement can be complex to develop, some others are easy.

Blueprints / Tokens
Blueprint should update while the elements in container change.
When you are preparing all the element to deploy your blueprint, you inspect the blueprint to see how many of each elements you need. While you are filling the needs, the blueprint should update.
  We should be able to deploy compacted construct without having to select the nanopack.
As we can have only 1 compacted construct and that the compacted construct can be only in the nanopack, there is no reason to have to select a specific container to deploy it.
  Add a shortcut to deploy the compacted construct
We could use the same shortcut (Alt+B), if the player has a compacted construct in his nanopack it deploy else it tries to compact the targeted construct
  The error message displayed when you try to deploy a blueprint from the wrong container should be more explicit.
If the blueprint you try to deploy is in the other container (not your current selected one) it should display a message like "Select your 'nanopack' to deploy this blueprint" and not "Invalid element".
  Allow blueprint to be deployed with element having less life.
The player should be able to use element having less life to deploy a blueprint. By default, if there is enough full-life element in the container it would take those, but if not and there is less-life element it should take them.
  Show the construct as an hologram when deploying
When deploying a blueprint, the player should be able to see an hologram of the construct to help him for placement. (more useful for static and space construct). This option could be deactivated via settings for performance improvement.
  We should be able to use a token without having to select the container it is in.
Currently we get a very confusing error message when trying to use a token from a container that is not the one selected. Many player don't understand what's happening.  

Surrogate
Add a filter "show owned only"
Display surrogate owner by the player
  Add a filter "show company only"
Display surrogate owned by companies the player is in.
  Allow multiple filter to be checked in same time
  Save selected filters
Player should not have to select filter every time he opens a surrogate, they should be saved client-side.
  Save station sorting selection 
By default every time, surrogate are sorted by "most used". If the player want to have them sorted alphabetical he has to do it on every search.
  Add possibility to save a search as bookmarks
For people that use a lot VR, they search for the same names/filters all the time. It would be great to be able to save the search as a bookmark. The player could simply click on it and it would load his saved search. (search, filters and sorting)
  We should be able to use "Surrogate VR Station" in VR to switch station.
A player in VR could be able to use a surrogate station while being in VR. It would prevent to have to exit and enter again when we want to switch Station. Of course the initial station will always be the point of origin.  
 
Piloting
Add an option for player to start in 3rd person view then entering in a piloting seat.
Most of the player are piloting ship in 3rd person view. This could be done by adding a way to switch the view in Lua or via game settings.  
 
Mining Units
Add Lua API to it
We need a way to manage the MU in a construct as any other industry unit.
  Available Mining Unit charge should be displayed for player
Currently if you want to know this information, you have to open a MU. This information could be displayed on the right of the player's quanta.
Charges  3/8        Balance 1 000 000 h
  Add a possibility to skip mini-game
Many player just want to apply the default calibration percentage to the mining unit, they don't look for the additional rock.
It would be great to have an option to apply the default percentage without having to load the mini-game, in that case no rock would pop and no bonus would be applied.
  Notification should contain the MU element name
It would help to keep a track of which MU has been calibrated in a specific construct when you have to manage multiple MU for an organization.
  Notifications should have a specific filter for MU
The player should be able to display only notification related to MU.
 
Avatar
Keep auto-run enable when opening a window
All user interface opened while auto-running should not stop the auto-run. Currently I can't check a market price while auto-running.
  All locked screen should be unlock with ESC
Currently if you are locking the screen with "TAB" you can't unlock it with "ESC". But if you are locking the screen with the chat, then you can't unlock it with "TAB" and you have to press 2x "ESC".
  Allow player to close channels
Chat interface has too many tabs. We should be able to close them so only 1-3 tabs would be displayed. For every channels we should be able to choose if we want it to display when a new message come in the channel or not.
  [19.12.2021] Add time to whisper chat
When you get a message from someone, sometime you miss it, there is no way to know when this person sent you the message. (5 minutes?, 5 hours?)

  Map
Split constructs in 3 sections (dynamic, static, space)
For people that have access to many constructs the list is sometime very long and hard to find a specific construct.
  Add a way to hide a construct from the list
Some construct have no interest (multi-core building, showroom ship, ect...). We should be able to hide some constructs from the map drop-down with an option to show hidden construct.
  Keep the previous selected tile filter.
It's mainly when you are scanning tiles, you want to display your scan results. But every time you open your map, you have to go and select again the scan result filter.  
Add a search
Most of the time we know exactly which construct we are looking for. Instead of having to go though all the construct list, if we could search for it it would help us a lot. Of course the search should stay if you close the map and open it again.
  Add a RDMS right for organization's constructs to allow member to see constructs in the map
Currently only legates can see constructs on the construct list. But sometime you give right to an org construct to a member and he has no way to locate it on the map.
 
Building
Allow player to switch engines / weapons
It would be nice to be able to switch engine of same type/size on a ship. Example switching "Basic Atmospheric Engine L" to a "Advanced Military Atmospheric Engine L".
It would make the life easier so we don't have to deal with the placement, links and tags. Of course the applied talents would not be saved.
  Add a shortcut to start a new link from previous element
This is more when you are setting up factory, but can be also the case when you are linking your engine or containers. It would be nice to be able to have a shortcut that will start a new link from the previous element.
Example: I want to link 10 engines to the same fuel tank, I start a link from the fuel tank and then go on the back of my ship. Link first engine, hit the shortcut, link the second one, ect...
Same if I have to setup 5 Metalwork Line for a specific production.
  Add a shortcut to swap link direction
This is more for the factory but could be also used for button with PB. Would be nice to be able to change the link from "OUT" to "IN" or vice-versa.
  Increase the jetpack speed
When you have to go through all you L core to make a link or something else it takes a long time. Would be nice to be able to fly very fast with a modifier key. This speed could be configured in the settings.
  [17.12.2021] Add an option to delete voxels
With some limitation (max 3m³), but being able to delete last voxel in a construct we want to remove. I will reduce number of time we have to ask NQ to help us when we want to remove a construct.

  Effects and Sounds
Add possibility to remove certain effects
For some people effect in the factory are not needed or glowing rocks are glowing too much. Would be nice to be able to choose which effect we want or not. 
In some area there is too many effects, it's lower the game immersion.
  Add more sound channels
It would be nice to be able to reduce the "industry sound" or other noises while maintaining the sound level of other sources.
  Add color filters for color blind people
Some colors are very difficult to see in the game. Also the Nvidia filters are not supported so we can't use them to help us.
 
Missions & Jobs
[18.12.2021] When creating a mission, the parcel containers for the origin/destination should be sorted alphabetically.
If you have multiple parcel containers (10+ in my case) you have to search for the one you want to select.
  [18.12.2021] The weight of the package should be displayed in the "Reward & Collateral" section.
There is 3 parameters to take in consideration when you are setting the reward/collateral: the distance to travel, the value of the package and his weight. (warp cell calculation)
  [21.12.2021] Increase the number of mission player can create.
Being limited to 3 missions is not enough. If you start to use that to create content and give mission to carry your goods, you need to be able to create a lot of them.
As the mission system is based on reputation, if you are creating too many mission that no one will pickup then your stats will be bad.
  [21.12.2021] Add a notification when someone answer your job.
Actually you have to check all the time your job to be sure that you don't have miss an answer.
  [21.12.2021] Add the date/time of message posted in communication.
Actually we are not able to know when someone as answer our job, as the game is worldwide and we are not all in the same timezone it's hard to follow without this information.

Also been a while since the last in-game poll. I guess their dumpster they throw feedback into is full

Polls showed numbers.
 
Ridiculously low numbers.
 
They showed how many people participated in the polls.
 
Those numbers were 2 digit numbers.
 
I would also try to hide that.

Background / Summary
I backed DU early on and have three accounts - honestly, I tried to give my beta keys away to friends, but no one wanted them.  So, I have a character dedicated to mining / refining, one to piloting, and one to industry.  All three have some combination of radar, gunnery, and ammo skills.  Each of them is around 50M skill points.
 
My play time prior to Demeter could be classified into three categories, active, passive, and mindless.  The active playtime involved building, pvp, asteroid mining, or using the markets.  I’m sure most of you reading this know the autopilot time as you scanned an asteroid or traveled to a planet.  This is the passive; dare I say AFK time.   What I call mindless time includes digging around in an unclaimed tile, you could simply zone out, watch a video, or listen to music.  I liked this time, it was relaxing, easy, and still offered progression without any risk.
 
Prior to Demeter, On average, I spent about 3 hours each day playing DU.  About half of this time was active or mindless mining and the other half was some mix of ship building, industry, or solo pvp.  Occasionally, I would spend an entire session repairing my ship because...well you dicks with the giant towers know why.
 
On an average day, I would generate $46M.  About half was ground mining and the other half Asteroid mining.  This worked out to about $30M / hour of money making activity.

With the advent of Demeter, the mindless playtime has disappeared.  My playtime has shifted to only two categories and the overwhelming majority of my playtime is now active and focused on three tasks - calibrating, hauling ore, and picking up ore from the bonus ground spawn.  The passive time is almost non-existent and involves flying 60km on the same planet.
 
After playing the minigame 15 times, trudging out to some random spot to collect between 2 and 4k ore, and then doing my best impression of a garbage man picking up all the auto-ore from 14 containers, I generate on average $10M over 90 minutes or about $6.7M / hour.  I could probably generate $30M / hour asteroid mining again but that would be at an opportunity cost of the passive ore mining or I would have to fully dedicate my entire 3 hour play time to money making activities.
 
The real takeaway here is that my money making active playtime has shifted from scanning and mining to babysitting autominers and picking up ground ore - both steps down in the level of fun and engagement. Sure, I could go back to asteroid mining exclusively and will likely get to that point but for the purposes of this dsicussion, I focused on really exercising the auto mining system.  
Additionally, to keep the automiers at a reasonable level (not even optimal) I have had to set timers, reminders, and build a spreadsheet to track the decay so I’m hitting the right autominers at the right times and carefully balancing my calibration charges.  While I’m perfectly capable of managing all this, it is quite annoying and doesn’t lead to long term engaging gameplay.
At the current market rates, I’m able to generate about $5M per tile per week.   My tiles are probably slightly above average but are all T1 and similar to most of everything else I have seen around Alioth - so nothing special here.  
 
I have seen several posts of people complaining the taxes are too high and hopefully the next section will help show how to make automining profitable.
 

Setup
I put some of the refunded mining skills into the “on deploy” auto mining skills on my main mining character and had all three characters train to 4 4 3 3 (Calibration Charge Optimization / Efficiency at 4 and Improved versions at 3).  So, as far as investment into auto mining goes, I’m pretty deep but not outside of what most folks can do with a week of skill training.  This gives the three characters the ability to comfortably manage 60+ autominers across 14 territories.   A single character with 10 days of training can easily handle 7 territories - perhaps not at a perfectly optimal level but enough for a good profit margin.
 
While I was fortunate enough to have some scanners already available, I haven't found many territories that couldn't turn a profit with proper management.  The tiles that had 500 of one ore are best as you can get 4 miners working that tile with no leftover.  But most tiles offered at least 3 full miners and some partial miners.  The proximity bonus is key so simply picking a spot that has 7 open tiles will almost always yield a profit.
 
I currently have 14 T1 Territories with 7 being very bauxite heavy and the other 7 evenly distributed across all 4 T1 ore types.  There are 63 autominers currently running with the lowest base rate being 70 and the highest being 125.  With the territory bonus, the optimal rate ranges from 126 to 226 per hour with most clustered at 183 per hour.
 
For production bonus purposes, the tiles are clustered around a center which means one tile gets a 60% bump and all others get a 30% bump.
 
In order to maintain this, I do need to log in every day so I don’t overcap my calibration charges.  My characters generate 5.7 calibration charges per day and if I don’t use them every day, I lose 1.4 charges.  With current skills I can refill between 60% and 72% if I get lucky with the minigame.  If I don't get lucky, it's around 57% which means I need to calibrate when a mining unit decays to between 30% and 50%.  While I may over cap the 100%, I found calibrating when the unit is between 40% and 45% is the safest time.  The tracking sheet below highlight the units that need adjusting.
 
Given the base rate of 125 for most of the miners, I can usually get 4 full miners on a tile and one partial. On the 60% bonus tile I see around 1.1KL / hr of total ore and my lowest tile currently generating around 500 L / hr.  Optimal generation is around 700 L / hr on average.  I have also found that unless the unit is on a 60% tile, a rate below 90 would be better deployed elsewhere as it relates to spending calibration charges - there is something to be said about convenience so I have a few mining below that rate, but they are lower priority to calibrate.
 
Bonus Ore
Each day I spend about 15 calibration points and get an average of 3k bonus ore which works out to 45,000 L in bonus ore or about $2M income.  Getting the bonus ore is relatively quick but tedious and feels like a chore.  The bonus ore makes up 20% of the weekly income so it is unfortunately required to maximize the tile.  Without the bonus ore, I would still see a profit but it would reduce down to $44M / week (still not bad).
 
Sample Tracking

 
 
Financial Analysis
Initial Investment
Territory Unit: $175k -> $2.45M
Territory Claim Fee: $500k -> $7M
Small Static Core: 12K -> $168K
Basic Mining Unit L: $175K -> $11M
Container L: $300K -> $4.2M
-------------------------------------
Total Investment: $24,800,000
Time to setup: 8 Hours
 
I should note I have a ship with two L containers that handles the logistics.  This ship costs about $15M.
 
 
Maintenance Costs
Nitron Fuel: $70,000 / week
Scrap for those unexpected times:  $250,000 / week
Territory Tax: $1,000,000 / week -> $14,000,000 / week
-------------------------------------
Total Maintenance per week: $14,320,000
Maintenance Time: 90 minutes / day or 10 hours each week
 
 
Income
Raw Sales: $72,000,000
 
 
Balance Sheet (Week to Week expectation)
Expenses: $14,320,000
Income: $72,000,000
-------------------------------------
Net: $57,680,000
 
Given the initial investment of $24,800,000, I fully covered this investment in 4 days and had a first week pure profit of about $16,600,000.  
This works out to a little over $1.7M / Hour of play time in the first week. I expect around $6M / hour of playtime next week
 
Territory Summary

 
Daily Log

 
 
 
Bugs
Can’t access the Calibration menu that tells me things like when it was last calibrated and the location of the surface ore pop if I have no calibration charges Tooltip on Adjacency doesn’t have a % indicator -  should be  “a 30% bonus” not "a 30 bonus" The small 50L of ore are physically much smaller than the normal surface rocks that only deliver 20L of ore The harvest time on the bonus ore is not scaled with the regular surface ore - it takes less time to harvest the 50L and 150L rocks than it does the normal 20L ore The bonus rocks are labeled incorrectly, they show up as their pure counterparts instead of the raw ore label; Aluminum Rock vs Bauxite Rock
Improvement Suggestions
As mentioned in the Q&A, the transition screens on the minigame are painfully slow.  Can we eliminate or speed them up? The current reasonable cap of calibration charges is 9.  You can get more by investing more skill points but 9 feels like where most folks will end up given there are far more interesting skills to train.  I’d like to see this cap at least doubled if not tripled (or removed all together, why cap it?)  If I decide not to play for a few days, I over cap and there is an opportunity loss. Where can I see my current calibration charges?  Or is the Autominer UI the only spot?  I’d like to be able to see the current calibration charges on some character screen. The minigame is prone to RNG which causes a reduction in income for things that are outside of my control.  Could we have some of the mining unit skills affect the size off the tools in the minigame so that if I choose to invest points in those skills, I see my efforts less affected by RNG? The bonus ore is nice for the minigame but it's a chore to go out and collect it.  Can we have it simply deposited into the container The surface rocks offer a performant way to create a small faucet and give new players a way to earn money.  However, the way they are designed is both tedious to gather and painful to look at. Could we instead have larger nodes that leverage the mining talents spawn on the surface and offer the same amount of ore just more concentrated?  We could even add a piece of equipment that allows me to scan my territory to identify these pockets or leverage the territory scanner.
 

Hello,
 
Excellent post, one of those post that NQ should read and take in consideration.

Thank you!

 

A+ on all your points,  The shitty skybox is the easiest thing they can change but knowing NQ i very well doubt it.  I cant believe they changed it in alpha.  There is no way someone could think the nebula looks good compared to the old skybox they had.  
 
As far as civilization building game, ive said this for a long time, its not.  There is no civilization when everything is done by yourself.  No reason for cities, no reasons to explore, no reasons to take precautions or have risk traveling to an outer ice planet looking for rare ores.  Everything is safe, your avatar never dies.  All around just terrible.  NQ really needs to watch this video.  But the only actual hope we have in reality is if NQ loses the rights to DU and another company steps in to develop it and make an actual game.  NQ has proved incompetent time and time again.  As shown with something as simple as fucking up the skybox. 

I delayed this as long as I could ....
 
 
 

+1

Someone already mentioned new player experience but I'm giving it a try to give detailed feedback. I am not new, but am currently going through the game on an alt as a new player with 0 quanta on sanc. I have 4 autominers now on Sanctuary but my tile only has 13 bauxite (others are just over 100). I automine a total of 116 ore per hour. I received 10k T1 from calibration. I can sell that to bots for 250k or less. Schematics to build M industry, parts, and refine pures is 5m or so. I can do all tutorials and get 1.5m?  That means I have access to 2m maybe.
 
I can get to space barely but will take much more time to get a ship that's able to do missions for example.
I can't buy a DSAT (18m) or schematic let alone equipment to build one in order to asteroid mine.
 
What that leaves is a waiting weeks for autominers to produce enough ore to make quanta or surface mining for 10s of hours. Even if I work my way up to mining on Alioth, still lots of afk waiting. Besides joining an org and getting free things, that's the options here. Is that intended? is there a solution in the works?   
 
Others have said get rid of early game schematics. That would help
 
To clarify, my issue with this is there's nothing to do early game because factory and asteroids have a huge quanta barrier. 
 

+1

+1

Yep.. just making things harder with nothing added and leaves me asking "why bother" when I log in and start something. Why gather ore? Why build that ship? Why build anything? just to pay tax?

Yep.. just making things harder with nothing added and leaves me asking "why bother" when I log in and start something. Why gather ore? Why build that ship? Why build anything? just to pay tax?