Novean-61657

Depends on which engines you are talking about, if graphics engines then yes, if talking about the 'cloud' data then maybe. The design for the infrastructure is pretty genius , especially when you consider that this game started many years ago. Assumptions where that the 'cloud' would become cheaper, and it did, but probably not by as much as what the original designers thought it would become cheaper... But that architecture is the backbone of DU, not something you can quickly or easily change, especially not at this point in time. So I wouldn't say that they game is fundamentally flawed, but maybe a choice was made years ago that everyone needs to live with now.

Yes, at this point I should quit. But I have trouble doing so, it might be some form of Stockholm syndrome or straight out addiction...

I extended my main's subscription by a month via a Markee Dragon code so I'm not stuck with a recurring subscription. I was starting to get out of my DU rut, doing some calibrations, some cargo hauling, looking at my prices at M6 again and adjusting some (down), planning my next factory redesign (in PowerPoint), making plans. That was yesterday.... With the most recent 'announcement' I'm back at feeling negative about DU again. I don't hate that T1 bots are now gone, I hate how NQ is so gawddarned wishywashy! At this point it just isn't that smart continuing playing working DU, I don't see DU existing for much longer (looking at concurrent players on Steam and the tile growth on Haven week by week). And even if there are some investors willing to continue dumping money in DU, I still have very little confidence in NQ that in another two years we wouldn't see another wipe... My issue is that I'm still not willing to completely let go of DU, is that having an addiction? Any other people having the same issue? That you know you should let go, give up and play something that is actually fun...

Yep, exactly!

You don't actually play for free, your computer needs to run and that costs energy, and depending on where you live, that can be quite expensive... Here in the Netherlands it's getting towards €1/kWh. So those mission loops people are running are costing power, and since you need your computer running to run the long missions, that costs power, probably a LOT! Back in Beta I ran missions 4.5 days/week 12-16 hours per day. I have a SUPER efficient mini PC (4800U) with integrated graphics that can actually run the DU client at very low settings. At those very low settings, it still consumes 40W, the monitor that's connected takes 55W. At current power prices here, that's already €4.38 PC/account/week, that's ~€19/month per PC running missions... I could get that to half if I turned off the monitor for most of the time... And that's on a pretty good and efficient machine (probably only the Steam Deck will be more efficient and DU doesn't currently run on a Steam Deck... A 1080 (Ti) machine can easily pull 250W, easily €60 PC/month. More modern cards will up that by a LOT, A heavy 4090 could easily start to cost €100-€200 when run day in day out...

But they left the door open in one of their statements... So I wouldn't be at all surprised that if they are still around in two years we would see another reset. Because honestly, I have no indication (beyond blind faith) that they've fixed the underlying issues with internal processes that caused the inflated economy during beta. If their communication and development 'improvements' are any indication on that, I have no hope that there will no reset in the future...

@NQ-Nyota It seems NQ has not bettered their communication skills at all and is contradicting itself again. During a lifestream Deckard mentioned that the T1 bot orders not refreshing was a bug and would be fixed. Now, it reads as if it was intended behavior... Normally people say that you shouldn't shoot the messenger, well I have some choice words for Deckard and NQ-Entrophy that aren't very nice... And thus not allowed on these forums. But maybe shooting the messenger is a good idea if no messenger will want to go out here and get shot, maybe they'll send in Deckard and NQ-Entrophy as then messenger... My issue isn't that I think it's bad that the T1 bot orders are gone, I think it's a good thing. But my issue is the contradicting information from NQ that streams forth from it's rotting orfice, that might not be a nice description, but it's accurate... As how else could you describe the NQ communication channel for the last couple of years. No improvement in communication dependability, first say one thing, then another, and finally do a completely different thing! Every time this happens my motivation for playing DU gets a negative tint. I needed to decide yesterday if I wanted to extend my subscription for my main, I finally went with a 1 month extension at the very last moment, that should give you some indication of how I was already feeling yesterday about DU (and that was already better then during the last couple of weeks). If I had to extend today, it might have had a different result... It looks like every week less and less concurrent players, I also see a huge slowdown of new players (new Haven tiles)... It feels like this ship is going down, or is it already sinking and is NQ trying to get as much out of it before it goes under completely?

Unless you're on a T2/T3 tile, running 4 T1 miners isn't really efficient, unless you're on special tiles that allows for 4 T1 autominers at 80+L... With max skills you could that running with two max automining talent characters...

If these people control the manufacturing as you say, they wouldn't sell the ore at all, they just would sell the products for more and use the ore to produce more... But people will asteroid mine and will mine more then they need or want, especially of the safe zone asteroids, which includes T2 ore. I'm seeing higher prices at M6, but that might be due to speculators after the recent patch, fear, etc. We'll see in the next few months how that develops...

NQ has said so many things that didn't happen at all or way later or completely differently... It's difficult to find NQ information back with the deluge of information around launch, but I got the distinct impression that they indicated that we would get them this year. But the release notes for 1.1 and 1.2 completely contradict this. The slide also indicated four phases, as it's already the 19th of November, I doubt we'll see three phases in 50 days...

To be fair, part of the fun during beta was the 'finding out' and 'figuring it out' aspect of DU. That's imho why this 'relaunch' is so boring/annoying for folks that played during that time, just reinventing the wheel. But that review hits a lot of nails on the head. The question is, is this what NQ intended with DU, give minimal information to new players and let them educate themselves or let the community do it. I also suspect that this is why this reviewer ran into these issues. Normally people start playing DU after seeing someone doing some cool gameplay, like flying...

Well... They are smart enough to make you give them money to play their game they allow you to smack around. You're not smart enough not to have given them money in the first place. Even if you have billions and have people sell you their DAC, at some point you gave them money. And looking at you're 'Alpha' state, you were stupid enough to give them money during beta... 😜 @Zeddrick Can you score us? 😉

These changes will also increase T1 sales. My mining patch on Alioth is primarily Hematite with Quartz as a secondary. When I went back to do the calibration I stopped the autominer and selected Bauxite or Coal (whichever I needed at the time) did the calibration, went back to Hematite or Quartz and started the miner. This eventually didn't supply me with all the Bauxite/Coal I needed, but it went a LONG way. Now I'm 'forced' to calibrate what I mine, which is more logical imho, but also annoying! 😉 It does lead to less work (not having to stop and start each miner), but it means I'll have to trade Hematite and Quartz for Bauxite and Coal, which is more work in turn... Sure I could also mine the Bauxite and Coal, but that's often not even half an autominer, imho a waste of resources.

What someone else said, you shouldn't, unless you want to. I've been struggling with that myself. I have four accounts, my main's subscription is lapsing on Monday and I'm considering not extending. The other three have longer (already paid for) subscriptions due to beta subscription issues on my main... The last couple of weeks, constructing more stuff I just wasn't motivated for it. I was trying to keep my ~40 mining tiles up and running and have let that slip the last couple of weeks as well a few times... DU is a grindy time pit, that I'm redoing the same thing I already did the last couple of years in beta (a few times), rebuilding industry and infrastructure. It is boring and quickly losses my interest. And EVE Online (and other projects) have been gaining my interest... What I've considered the last few weeks: - Giving up completely on DU, it's a timesink that's not very fun a lot of the time and not very fulfilling. It's uncertain future also does not help. - Just not extending my characters after the current subscription expires and just dip in once in a while when I feel the 'itch'. But that isn't a good idea because my unsubscriped characters will eventually go POOF(tm) and I would have to start from scratch again... - Extend the subscription for a month and see if we have a good Blackfriday/Cybermonday/Holiday sale in the meantime. Where extending the accounts doesn't feel like throwing a lot of money in a pit, just a little money in a pit... Ingame: - Deconstruct the 40 mining tiles and put it all in storage. - But what if they fix the mining pricing just or a few weeks after I put it all in storage? - Rebuild the factory line again for more efficiency and expand what I build, but it's such a chore... - Build a couple of ships and do something different in DU Meanwhile it's not as if I have nothing else to do... - EVE Online seems interesting again... - I bought a ton of games during the sales that are actual fun to play... - I have a very fun 3D printer kit (Voron 2.4 350) that takes 30-40 hours to build and would be actually interesting to build vs. redoing the DU factory again... - Some other fun and interesting tech projects... So yeah, it's actually difficult to let go of DU and in my case that might or might not happen shortly... As for your specific issues: a.) NEVER run pvp space missions during the weekend! Depending on your timezone, I already stopped running missions Friday afternoon (during beta) as some people pirates in other timezones already started playing. With the current player population, pirate population and only two pvp space planets I'm not even sure how safe pvp space is during the rest of the week, maybe I'll find out... b.) Currently you can sell your ore at M6 for 13+q/L, all your 450k coal. Also, the weekend might not be the best time to sell as many people want to do the same. c.) Why are you using 3 accounts to mine just a coal flower? My 4 accounts can optimally (and that might be something different from what you think it is) 'service' 225 auto miners (at max skills), with 3 per tile, that is 75 tiles. Trust me, that's a lot of work! d.) Always check downtime announcements in the discord if you are doing time sensitive stuff, especially if you're cutting it close. They often do announce late, so you might be buggered either way... 😉 e.) If you're short on cash, do the 180k Alioth mission with you three accounts at the same time (540k per run). You can do that pretty cheaply in an expanded Apex (UEF ship), someone is/was also selling an lvl5 BPC version for it which helps immensely. Add a couple of containers to the hub to get the 30k storage you need for 3 accounts. You can fly the 'cheap' way through atmo, takes about 45 minutes to and from. Or you can do it way faster through low orbit, but that does consume T2 space fuel... f.) You can mine the 'old' way, but only in asteroids. Might not be your thing, but I wanted to do that eventually as well.

1.1 comes quicker then I expected, but still over 2 months since 1.0... But at this rate 1.3 would be early April... Also keep in mind that the holiday season isn't the most productive in software development (lots of people taking a break/vacation)...

How exactly was industry anything but a “click, check, drag and drop schematics” game? The only part of industry that was ever interesting was designing the factory, not actually deploying, connecting and setting up each element at a large scale... While it might be 'interesting' the first few dozen times, but after element 'a couple hundred' it starts to suck badly! How was industry 'fun' when you set it up and then ad-infinitum just put in ore in one end and pulled out finished elements from the other? Now you just add schematics to the Assembly lines, Smelters and the T2+ Refiners... Just grind up an f-ton of quanta to put in days worth of schematics, so you no longer have to do that once every few hours for every schematic element. The last few weeks I was already down to twice a day, I just hit once a day... Once a week: Here I come! (but just not from industry) But I'll probably keep doing it, just like the stupid calibration mini game *twitch* *twitch*, because we want to build sh!te and sh!te requires elements and honeycomb. We want to fly stuff, especially those rad ships some of the other players designed... The little devils want quanta for that! Greedy gits! 😉 My conclusion is: Quanta is the source of all evil in DU! But small industrial organizations will not die, nor will market competition. Due to all the grindy sh!te, there's a hard limit how much a person can do in DU, sanity dictates that there's also a hard limit to how much a player will do without benefit. Because if a small industrial org can't make any money on industry, neither will a large org. If something is not profitable, you need better skills. If you have perfect skills, if it's still not profitable, you buy IT and then sell it for a profit! Don't make stuff that isn't profitable! And when it becomes profitable and you don't have any stock, you're already too late to make some!

I dislike the idea to force players to do missions to get rare or exotic schematics for particular types of elements. But you could do variants of the schematics/elements. Think 'rare' schematics that require a bit less resources to produce or 'exotic' named schematics that offer a bit more performance (with possible drawbacks). Like "Icarus's Wing M" x% additional lift, but works on a (smaller) smaller range of degrees (up or down).

Imho it would be simple. 1 T1 ore is worth 1 token. You give our Great Beneficial AI a liter of T1 ore, she gives you a token. She stores the ore and anyone can buy it back at 1 token per liter T1 ore. No free tokens, no missions for tokens or ore from that bank pool. No taxes needed for tiles, no taxes needed for schematics, no taxes needed for market transactions. You want missions? Sure, the either players run their own or the AI pays you in schematics. Markets? Player run markets. They need to build them, if they want to charge for their use, give them options to charge for it.

@kulkija There are player markets, there were already there in Beta, they just don't run the same way as the the 'Markets'. The Market Unit is called a Dispenser. Gotchar left the game, but there are other big player markets like Koscos, but that one is temporarily closed because they couldn't keep up with demand... That linked dev blog post is not the original, that's no longer on the site, but can be found via archive.org: http://devblog.dualthegame.com/2014/12/04/from-barter-to-market-economy/ And if you look at the author, that is JC and that person is no longer working for NQ anymore, for a while now... Now, a 'realistic' economy it was never going to be, never in a 1,000 years would there be enough players to make that happen. Even EVE, far bigger, does not have a 'realistic' economy, it never had. It does have an economy, which an economist can analyze, but it's not 'realistic' due to how the game (mechanics) work. The current problem with DU is multifaceted: 1.) This is the THIRD incarnation of the same game (Alpha, Beta, Release). People expect to pick up where they left off during the previous era, but many things have changed. Old players have a huge advantage over the new players, not due to TPs, BPOs, etc. But due to knowledge. Sure things have changed, but I (and others) have a pretty good idea how things work, the details might be a little different. But still people expect a mature economy we had at the 'end' of Beta, while the situation is more like the start of Beta... 2.) 'Release' is not yet ready to be a final 1.0 release, but NQ got pushed into a corner and had no other option then to release in this state. Thus we're stuck with the NPC buy order refresh bug. Not that big a deal compared to other issues since launch... 3.) Many of the experienced players that still play are not doing that with as much dedication as with their first 'age' (Alpha or Beta). I started with Beta release and I'm not spending as much time/work on DU as I did during the first few months of Beta, I'm seeing/hearing the same from many other 'old' players. And still after a month I was probably farther then I was in Beta after a couple of months, purely due to knowing what I know. But I'm not expanding as fast as I could, because I've done this many times already during Beta and now again. I need to rebuild my factory for the third time since Release. Because it needs to scale differently (again), that's already almost 500 industry units and over 150 containers, when I'm done that's going to the thousands of industry units and containers, been there, done that! It now feels more like a chore and I don't want to do that rebuild in a weekend or even a week! The fun part (for me) is designing the factory line, the tedious part is putting it all down, linking everything manually, renaming stuff, putting in all the schematics and then maintaining the darned thing! This results in delayed growth and in turn in less demand on resources, specifically ore. 4.) The market/players/economy isn't ready for enormous operations that flood the market... Yet... I mine 60-70% of the ore I use myself, I buy the rest. Previously that was a few hundred thousand ore every other day or so. After this weekend I finally was able to put in an order for a million T1 ore. I saw great sales this weekend, far more then the weekend before that, everyone is slowly scaling up everything across the board. That just doesn't mean more stuff to sell, but also more stuff to buy. My mining operation is maybe at half of what it could be and maybe 25% effective, but the market (or I) is just not ready for almost 9 million T1 ore per week from a single player (four accounts). But it will be! That almost 9 million is the max I can automine and harvest with four accounts, it doesn't scale beyond that. So if you specialize early (heavily in one specific activity) DU and the playerbase isn't ready for you yet. That is why there is more supply then demand at the moment and why the buy prices are slightly below the NPC 25q/l. As production facilities become more mature and there's more quanta in the economy (mission running), the T1 ore hunger will become bigger. With a couple of side notes: This assumes a steady influx of new players and a healthy demand for Elements. If we come to a point that most people have everything they want/need and very few things need replacing, demand for T1 ore will drop fast. I personally didn't reach that level in the 1.5 years I was active during beta though and Element destruction has been 'improved' since then, so I expect that the average casual player won't see that for years if ever! 5.) NQ is time gating everything, they want us to slow the F down! We see that in their planning, in their implementations, etc. That could be a resource issue or a design issue, I suspect both. A not so clear, but very slow down method is the schematics system. People freak out over 500k quanta per tile per week. But schematic production can cost as much 2+ million per day per account, 14+ million per week per account of 56+m per week for four accounts. This slowed me down a LOT the first 5 weeks, I see that happening with others as well. The introduction of the schematic talents will probably make it worse. Sure, I expect discounts, more production lines, fast research, etc. But overall I expect it will become an even bigger quanta sink, while simultaneously sucking up millions of talent points. My personal conclusion: Many folks want too much, to fast (including myself). I'm seeing exponential growth, but there's still a time axis on that! I'm also thinking that people see other people's stuff and expect to achieve that as well, tomorrow and forget the amount of work and knowledge went into that player ship. And you can't do everything and expect to be the best at everything.

Looking at the issues since launch that clearly have a higher priority then the T1 buy orders: The Sanctuary Territory Unit issue took over a month to fix. My guess is that they've not even started working on fixing this. NQ is notoriously bad at communication, thus the 'known issues' list in the patch notes isn't even complete. IF you really want that 25q/l you can go to the Alioth Moons, a lot closer. I don't know how much T1 ore you have to sell, but unless it's millions, you can sell pretty well within 10% of the 25q/l (at market 6). New players have the same options, even more so because they can use the Market hubs to go with a backpack of ore to the closest Haven or Sanctuary market...

Not an issue for me. Clear cache?

vs. the generic backlash of 'where's my XL cores' in general? Nah, what's happening is that NQ is trying to space out 'content' like it's precious gems, but they are doing it so extremely slow that chances are good that the really dedicated folks might hit hard limits (set by NQ) and just leave. No ranting on the forum or Reddit (as that has no effect on NQ direction/choices), just POOF(tm) gone... I would also argue that in the case of XL space cores, I doubt that any org has hit the hard limits on L space cores quite yet (1600+ with max skills, you can already have in game). No, the issue is not the max amount of cores, but that each XL core is 8 L cores, that just means that folks need a lot less toons to get the same size space station... Less toons means less subscripts for alts...

That might be a little misleading if not put into context with other MMOs, look at the first month of Lost Ark or New World. They start on launchday with massive numbers and then quickly start to decline. Lost Ark recovered a bit after after loosing more then half their players in two months. New World numbers kept plummeting. Compared to that, the decline of player numbers isn't that bad. It;s just a LOT less players overall. Also keep in mind that these are the average number of players online, not players that have played that day. I suspect you're also seeing here less time per account/player being played. After the initial rush people are slowing down, getting back to normal. Etc. That is not to say that DU is in a healthy state, but not as bad as the graph might indicate... What might make matters way worse and won't show in the Steam Charts is the fact that a LOT of DU players from alpha/beta have subscription time, either from the KS, Foundation packs, DACs, or just bought many months or years already. That money has already been spent by NQ and we'll have to see if those accounts/players will still be around when their subscriptions/DAC run out...

After two years of beta... Have you not learned that no amount of complaining, cursing, helping, etc. will change anything to the way NQ runs the game or their business? Over those two years I've moved through all stages of grief and am now thoroughly stuck in 'Acceptance'... 😉 At this point the complaining and 'improvement' attempts by community members just isn't particularly useful to anyone really... Let's try to get everyone quickly through their grieving stages to acceptance. Those who cannot are doomed forever to roam the forum and... REDDIT! Oh the horror! 😉 That said, I'm still wondering if I'll still be around 'playing' (or should I say 'working') DU, come the new year? With this 'launch' I'm already playing less then during beta. I'm also seeing 'makers' in DU (of ships and LUA) just prioritizing DU a lot less then during beta, some have left already (again?)... The 'big' updates seem to be released slow and 'light' on new content. I'm doing the resource/quanta grind, but you'll eventually get burned out on that. Better hope you'll have some reserves ready before that happens...

So after the first month of beta there were Territory Scanners at 10 different markets? I wouldn't dare put my hand into a fire, but I'm calling BS! They are now available at 8 different markets...