Emptiness

All they needed to do was make glass clear and disable glass-glass collision.  Let glassbe intangible to other glass. 
 
Basically allow glass to overlap or be placed completely through other panes of glass and the problem goes away
 
—-
 
i stopped playing for a few months but just came back last week because I have built a new computer.  
 
For me, it’s the few, nonsense decisions in the physics/chemistry of the crafting that gets me 
 
concrete is T2

building building materials as opposed to requirements for spacecraft building materials are insanely expensive. 
 
T-zero building materials should be a thing. stone, rock, wood. Basically all the shit people used to build stuff with from the 20th Century BC should be mineable in open cast quarries. 
 
glass should be craftable from sand. 
 
mining coal for wood is just so, so stupid I’m inclined to use the r-word when I think about it. 
 
seriously, just no!
let us farm or plant renewable patches of land for wood harvestables. 
 
you can harvest renewable iron, coal, aluminum, chrome, sodium and others but trees and flowers are not harvestable... ffs!! 
 
Mining is an abomination.  
 
but for me, one of the biggest wtf moments is:

rockets are higher tier than Space engine....
 
what the actual... fudge!!?!!

I already shared this story in Alpha forums, but think in context its worth repeating for everyone.
 
There is indy game -- Holdfast: Nation At War, generaly napolenic wars fps focused on organized event-battles (up to 200 players now I believe). At start -- 3-4 people without serious prior gamedev experience (Mount&Blade modders), tiny budget of personal savings. 
 
Obviously, they stuggled hard. Constant tech issues, lack of content, bad balance, turtle pace development -- you name it. Classic indy collection.
 
Yet, once game hit early public access, they took unprecendentaly transparent, humble and, retrospectivly, pragmatic stance:
 
Hodfast devs were activly present on forums and available for questions and discussions (granted, with several day lag and limits, but still), so feedback loop on was extreamly fast and up to date.  Roadmaps were humbly cut/narrowed to things they actualy can do (without BS) + great deal of honesty with setbacks. This greatly increased trust of community, obviously. They played with players regulary (at least once per week) participating in event battles as common grunts. This given them unprecendented understanding how game actualy played in practice, not theory, balance, patterns, what is fun/boring etc. Some bright heads in community were allowed to tinker with game to some extent, that produced a lot help. One such enthusiast was so good with tech side of game, they invited him to join team as programmer. Extensive help of community also allowed to produce pretty top notch localizations with 0 costs. Well, they given participants free code copies of game (I was one of translators, so observed all this kitchen a bit from inside).  
Armed with such approch devs grinded way to release with greatly improved product. No chances for that wihout community support/participation. Sure, at the end game still far from perfect and probably never be unversaly known and popular, but it works decently well for niche dedicated community. Product made some modest buck for devs. If not epic win, not a failure too, considering horrible initial odds.
 
This is example of such thing done right in situation with very low resources. 
 
In can be said, that DU is much larger and complex game. True, it need own repecies. But DU also depends on much more complex systems, where well-organized involvent of community even more essential for any degree of success.
 
 
 
 

Simple solution for this problem is what EVE does with it's low level NPC trade goods.
 
After you have sold 1000 of that item to the NPC the price gets worse and worse and then stays that way for a week of time. You now need to find a new NPC to sell it to in another hub.
 
New players can use it to get a boost, older players ignore it as it is not worth the effort to visit that many hubs that many times.

That's funny I'm the total opposite here.
 
I think DU would be a hit if it had a 'solo, offline,standalone' version with a eventually a local server for small co-op. Integrate with Steam Workshop to allow players to share BP and lua and you have a clear winner that could bring cash to develop the mmo.
 
The MMO choice was (sorry 'is' !) too ambitious and cost too much in term of hosting to allow a free large scale public beta (not sure AWS was a wise choice but I'm biased here). And I'm not sure there are enough potential players for this kind of mmo...
Also technically the game is an mmo but with a too heavy client. Too much is done 'client side' to lower the backend opex but this lead to limitations, cheating issues, and imho very difficult tomorrows. 
For instance, I really really wonder how they will fix the 'alf-f4 , ship completely stopped'. 
 
Well time will tell but I'm very worried. Strike a deal with Stadia may be ?
 
Last point:  NQ should really try to use the community to develop parts of the game: open up the file datamining (at least recipe/talents json files, the current locked .ung files is just ridiculous ), add an API/XHR to the client (within lua as a webrequest method+event or make Dual.Exe as a local REST server) , make the whole game UI modifiable (like WoW) and you will see the community will help you code. This will save you dev resources to focus on backend stuff.
 

hello
the game and its developers are currently doing everything they can to make sure that you don't want to play D.U. anymore!
out of our organisation many have stopped because of many mistakes!
- mining of ore is server day by day depending on whether it works or not (missing parameters!)
- industry has rdm failures after server restarts
- the construction tools are not fully developed
- errors when flying ships ( laggs, bugs, failure of parts )
- Trade ingame not possible as there is no need
- the auction bots senseless!!!!
- pvp is the biggest joke !! ( 1 xs ship can kill L core ships easy but the other way round almost no changse )
- the new function of space ship wrecks what is the 100 max in the whole game LOL
for this you cannot salvage and claim other ships now
 
I have the feeling that NQ is throwing a simple rigged game at us to generate cash with the 3 month subscriptions ?♂️
and NOTHING really does NOT do anything to make the game more stable and better running or to give better content than digging in the dirt for days or piling up voxels on top of each other
 
the worst thing in my eyes is that with every "server maintenance" or "fix patch" the game becomes more and more unplayable more bugs than before etc  
this should actually be different!
i will cancel my subscription like the rest of the orga 
D.U. is as good as death 
I'd rather play Elite Dangerous again ?♂️
 
 
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

The definition of a 'beta' has dramatically shifted over the past 15 years - at least in the gaming world - the definition  remains:
A Beta phase generally begins when the software is feature complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs.  
15 years ago an MMO beta was a largely finished game. Maybe some end game content missing, some placeholder assets, a few quests unfinished, balance issues and so on...
 
But you'd get a full vertical slice of the game. Meaning - every single core feature of the game was functional. For example, Anarchy Online went into beta in 2000 and released in 2001. By the time it was beta, the bulk of the game was done - it was buggy, unbalanced and riddled with exploits - but the content was there. 
 
Now you have DU 'beta' - and core features of the game are actually non existent entirely and those that exist are all dysfunctional in some way. There isn't a single thing in the game right now that I would consider ready for release. 
 
DU is by no means a 'beta' in a traditional definition - there is no justification for calling any product that is missing fundamental core features a 'beta'. By definition beta is feature complete, but buggy. DU is at best Alpha. It doesn't matter what NQ choose to call it - it's Alpha. By definition.
 
So that's why people are complaining. You can't really sell DU as a 'beta' and have so many features not just 'not developed' - but apparently still in the drawing board stages. 
 
All the interviews with JC and the rest of NQ staff have been pretty indicative that they do not have any idea how atmo pvp will actually work, how avatar pvp will work or how territory control pvp will work - I don't mean that they don't have it in game - I mean that they appear to have no idea how it will work at all besides theory crafting how they 'envision' it. It's gotten no further than what JC was talking about during the kickstarter in 2016.
 
Anyone with any history in development looking at just the planned features on https://upvote.dualuniverse.game/ sees a solid 2 years of work. When those are complete, assuming DU doesn't go the way of Worlds Adrift - then the game will be in Beta - meaning another year of polish to iron out the bugs.
 
So players have every right to be upset about how incomplete this beta is. 
 
With that said - the harsh reality of life is that games are not developed for free. Given the staff levels and funding, and expected burn rate, it's extremely likely that the decision to launch Alpha in the current state was to create some kind of cashflow - even if only to further use that cashflow to secure loans and investments for future development. I do not blame NQ for launching the 'beta' as is, or for charging for it, AWS doesn't host their servers out of charity and NQ devs do not pay their rent with their passion for game development.  
 
I do think that the bulk of the community gets that point as well - but are still disappointed by the current state of the game. 
 
That's exactly where I am. I am disappointed by DU.  I kickstarted, and have 2 paid accounts on top of my 2 pre-paid ones, and will keep the subs going because despite the fact that the game isn't in the state where I want it to be - I realize that it will never get to a state that I want it to be in without continued cashflow. On the other hand I can understand why someone may not wish to pay monthly for a game they don't even log into anymore....

About DU for sure, about it's players? Not so much
 
Have a look at how market 15 was handled. Or some of the last posts in ATV forum.
Or the vast majority of posts in the alpha forums where ppl pointed out problems, some NQ acknowledging it and promising it'll get looked at but nothing was done about it. Sometimes up until now, years after the post.
 
Caring indeed 

What, in another of those youtube 'interviews'? I don't remember seeing anything on the forums about that.

Even with the precision move keys?

The upvote page should be part of the website and only be available when the visitor is logged in. If that is not possible then whoever created the website really does not understand webdesign as that is really not hard to accomplish.
 
Here.. I fixed it for you...
 

 
 
BTW; why are the items in the account window (once logged in) a different size and color that the normal menu items?

I should give you a disclaimer: I'm attempting to understand this as a person on my third week at NQ and a non-programmer, so "snap together" is the best verbiage I have at the moment. ?

It's definitely more complicated than that, and I'm currently attempting to get a programmer to explain it to me in a way that programming-savvy players can appreciate.

If the bot buy order 'exploit' described in the below thread is still viable, this is why: 
 
Also, one reason I quit is because NQ didn't seem to care at all about fixing exploits. When it literally took them 2 months to do the simple fix below to stop the linked container exploits, among all the bugs and mismanagement they invoked 'fixing' it, ... ones confidence is lost rapidly.
You only fix it now? *slams forehead into desk*
Why was that not how it worked from beta launch?
  
Same.
 

Even with the precision move keys?

A large rocket connected to a full large tank will fire for 84s with default skills. M rocket with M tank, 65s, and S rocket with S tank, 30s. Rocket engines can be connected to dissimilar tank sizes, too.
 
With even level 3 rocket fuel/booster skills, this changes to 99s for a large rocket + large tank, and with maxed skills (booster fuel tank handling and rocket fuel efficiency), one gets 168s of large rocket burn time.
 
Not sure where you got 15 seconds.

After 24 hours, player constructs at the marketplace should be considered abandoned and subject to salvaging.

Fact 1) We all know there is a content patch soon that will bring new features and re-balancing.
Fact 2) It was proven that a specific alliance was given a preferential treatment during the last event (they have been given a hint when they hit the wall to solve the puzzle)
Fact 3) All "Space core unit L" have been purchased at once from the market and are still being purchased even with high profit margin for the manufacturer. 
 
What is it there in the next patch that you need so much space cores so mysterious someone that has this information already(before all the regular players) buys all space cores?
 
Any org that would have a big project for a space station would manufacture the cores instead of giving 200% margin to the manufacturer so that's not the case.
 
If when the patch arrives, it suddenly turns out that "Space core unit L" is of high value - this means someone had this information before and was again given a preferential treatment and advantage by NQ insider.
 
I would say publicity of this could mean coupe de grace for DU.

Disclaimer: All ideas are based on the publicly available info, not under NDA.

Hello, so one of my biggest concerns with the voxel building tools so far, is the lack of support for curved shapes. I really think it would be sad to see an amazing game like this, filled with only Minecraft Box spaceships. Because curved shapes are so impossible to make. So here are a few basic additions I think could really improve on the current voxel building system. I know, more advanced voxel editing are planned like being able to edit control points, and a Voxel Element Library for more complex shapes. But, there are other, more simple things I think that can be done to get curved shapes into the game sooner rather then later. So, the basic idea is to make curved voxel shapes easily available so players would be encouraged to build none box shaped ships and constructs. I did some artwork to help illustrate my ideas. Please feel free to discuss and give feedback on this thread in the comments. Ok, So lets dive right into it.
 
 
These pictures are examples of designs that can be made with these shapes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
Starting Primitives
So, there are several shapes to begin with when using the voxel deploy tool. Here are some important primitives I suggest should be added as voxel brush shapes. Those shapes are Oblate Sphere, Prolate Sphere, Cone, Torus, Elbow Joint.

Why these shapes?
The reason I chose these shapes is because they are nearly impossible to make with with the current tools. An even with advanced editing options, they would still be difficult to get right. So it seems like a no-brainer to have these shapes as starting primitives for the voxel brush. It would make it much easier to start creating curved shaped constructs, and encourage more creative designs.
 
This picture is of the voxel shapes I think should be added to the voxel brush tool.

 
 
Voxel Shape Options
So the next thing is an a expansion on the voxel shapes, by adding parameters before/after the shapes is deployed. For example, having an option like size, and diameter of the TORUS shape before/after you deploy it, or option to set how extreme the elongation is on the SPHERE or CONE before/after you deploy it, and even maybe set the angle of the Elbow joint. So, the way I imagine it would work is, when you select a starting primitive shape, shortcuts like arrow keys, numbers keys are used to set the value of the shape options, then you can deploy it as normal. Also, having an option box that would stay on screen as long as you're using that shape could work too, so that you can continue to change options and deploy new shapes.

This pictures give an example of what changing the options would look like on each shape.
          
 
 
Bevel, Fillet, sharpen edge tool
So, we currently have a tool that allows builder to smooth edges, but to expand on that idea, I think we should also have the option to Bevel, Fillet, or sharpen edges as needs. The issue is that most times the smooth tool does not give the desired result, or maybe you only want to bevel an edge but not smooth it, or maybe you want some edges with a fillet and some edges sharpen. I imagine it working exactly like the current smooth edge tool, except you would be able to Bevel an edge, Fillet an edge, or Sharpen an edge.
 
 
This pictures below illustrates how the tool would effect the edge. This is the current smooth tool.
           
 
 
Additional Ideas
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Scale Axes
I think this is a simple, but vary important option that needs to be available. Basically we have the option to scale the size of voxel primitives, but we should also have the option to scale voxel primitives on a specific axis (X, Y, Z). This I think would definitely add greater control to create the desired shapes, as well as enhance the freedom of creativity.
 
Hollow Primitives
So, this thought came to me last minute, but I think its something that shouldn't be overlooked. The ability to start with hollow voxel primitives. Either a voxel brush option to deploy hollow voxels, or solid, and set the wall thickness, or have hollow voxel shapes as a standard starting shape to choose from. I know that there is an option to cut out voxels using primitives shapes, but the main issue is that cutting out voxels gives a very ugly looking result, most times the edges don't look right at all, or you need a hard edge but the cut out has a rounded edge with a messy texture. Also, hollow primitive shapes would improve the speed, and ease of use when building constructs. Especially when working with curved shapes. Trying to hollow out a curved shape would be a nightmare, so starting with a hollow shape would be great.
 
Voxel Elements
So my last suggestion is in regard to Voxel Elements. Novaquark mention in this DevBlog that will have a Library of detail, or complex voxel shapes that players could use in their constructs. They mentioned a spiral staircase as an example. Well, here are a few shapes that I think should be included in that database of Voxel Elements.

Pictures of suggested Voxel Elements to add to the Voxel Library.

 

I know that a voxel point cloud editing system is in development, list on trello Here. That will really open up lots of possibilities for builders. But, in addition to that, having a variety of voxel brush shapes to start with is still needed to give builders alternative options, because sometimes doing things one way just may not work out how you need it to, so having other ways to create shapes is a big help.
 
I think that covers the general ideas I had. My overall goal is to see more spaceships and constructs that aren't just limited to boxed shapes, and enable creative builders to really unleash their imagination. An I feel adding additional shapes to the Voxel Brush tool would be a good way to accomplish that goal. Please feel free to give feedback in the comments.

Thanks for reading, see you in the next thread.
 
 

Good games are easy to learn and difficult to master.
DU is the other way around.
 
The is no real progression:
- mining: it doesn't get more complex / difficult, it' just more of the same
- crafting: it doesn't get more complex / difficult, it' just more of the same (requiring more and more sub components or more time to craft isn't complexity)
- piloting: it's harder to fly/leave/enter on the starting planets (Alioth and Sanctuary) than on all of the other planets.
- building: you can just place elements, voxels are a cosmetic option: there is no structural physics for ships and buildings leading to no real challenge in design.
- building: Voxelmancy is a joke': it's like forcing people to draw circles and curves without giving them a compass and then be amazed of what they have achieved with just a pen and a ruler.
- exploration: there is nothing to explore. The playable universe is simply too small.
- character progression: Talents should be a progression/reward of what you do. You should get better at piloting by piloting. That 'passive learning' system is just 'pay2win" disguised. It's not engaging and it will hurt the game in the long term (It separates too much vets from newbies). It rewards a meta (the longer you sub to the game) not something you do in the game. There is no 'joy' and fulfillment to obtain the highest rank of  a talent (other than having to wait 14 days or more ...).
- repeatability and differentiation: a 'Space Engine L' is always exactly the same whoever made it. There is no differentiation between players, between elements, between raw materials. There is no RNG (warning: too much RNG is very bad but a little might help). There only one way to make one thing. Study the Starwars Galaxy crafting system, there is a lot to be inspired by it (variations in ore specs, experimentation in crafting, etc).
 
What can be done:
- Surrogate is a fresh and new concept for MMOs but it is way underused and too limited. You should be able to 'pilot' with a surrogate and do more, may be have different talents for different surrogates. Leveling surrogates could probably be more fun than leveling a single avatar. Selling/trading surrogates could be fun too and a very new concept in MMOs (some players hate leveling , some love it).
It could be a way to engage in PvP (and the only way imho). See Ender's Game book/movie. Add IA/scripting/autonomy to surrogates ?
- more planets, more systems. it's too small for a 'space' MMO.
- not a  fan of the 'tile' system. I don't see why I couldn't mine everywhere I want nor place a static construct everywhere I want. I don't see the gameplay value of tiles. I'd rather have a 'zone of influence' around big structures (like Guild Halls in SWG (again!)) so Orgs can have big cities without grief.
- forced pvp: not a fan at all. You'll never get a general consensus here. You'll have to choose what part of 'potential mmo players' would have to give up on or split your single shard into 2...study more MMO "player profiles" . NQ clearly lacks knowledge of MMOs game theory and demographics. Don't ignore the silent majority to please a vocal minority or early backers (the person who can spent hundreds of dollars on backing a game isn't necessary the good final target audience for a successful long lasting mmo game).  
 

The way NQ handled the M15 situation is what caused me to unsub my paid for alts for sure as I do not feel NQ is in a place development and  engagement wise where they can really expect people to pay for access to the game.
 
Naunet is doing what Naerais did before him/her (we don't know if it's a he or she).. building report with the community. It's all the basic stuff we've seen before, including setting up a survey and a lot of empathic wording. The actions from Naunet's side however are very much NQ and really not much has changed as of yet. To be clear, I respect and like Naerais generally but she has closed herself off quite a bit after coming onto the "scene" in a very open way and I have no idea where Nyzalter is at these days, if he still is with NQ even...
 
NQ will likely start a PR campaign shortly, leading up to a patch in probably 4 weeks and allowing for two weeks of "fixing" time before Xmas break. I honestly do not expect much to substantially change until probably end of February next year at the earliest.
 

DU makes the common mistake of confusing tedious gameplay with challenging.
 
For example, getting T4 ore is simply tedious. It's a time sink. There is no skill involved. It's literally just bite down on something and sink in 10 hours looking for nodes.  It's time consuming and tedious and the only real 'challenge' is forcing yourself to suffer through the waste of RL time that it is. In short - mining is a time sink.
 
Industry isn't much different. Anyone can build a giant factory that will produce everything given that they are willing to sink in enough time to produce 500 transfer units.  There is no real challenge here either - and that's strange given how countless games have managed to lay the foundation for how industry design games can be challenging by  having complex ratios and the like. Factorio,  Satisfactory, X3/4,  Fortresscraft Evolved - I could go on, but all of these have industry design challenges that DU simply does not. Industry in DU is a  time sink - assuming it works right - which it frequently does not with "unknown error" constantly breaking production lines.
 
So the two most fleshed out features of the game are simply time consuming.
 
I would say that currently, the only actually challenging aspect of DU is voxelmancy - and ironically - it's the one that should NOT be challenging at all.  Anyone should be able to sit down and build a passable looking ship without having to resort to watching hours of youtube videos and hunting for voxel libraries...

The game has an extremely high initial bump which, combined with the very rough state of the game's development and rushed move into open and paid "beta" makes it hard to get into. Much of what is missing or what is not working well has been brought up and discussed long before beta started. NQ has never acknowledged any of this and has never shown any indication of being able or willing to adjust their development plans to accommodate this.
 
Most of the game is very much still in Alpha state, if not pre-alpha. When a "major overhaul of the UI" is announced, what basically happens is a reskin of it. The core UI is very basic and not suitable for several of the intended uses cases, most obviously the talent system. It does not appear there is any central management of the project and it appears "coding" devs are tasked with designing the UI and UX which leads to too much information and overly complex actions with too many clicks and important detail 2 or three levels down where they should be at the surface. The general UI design really has not changed at all, except for a different theme, since pre-alpha.
 
It's not helpful when, from the occasional communication, NQ paints a picture which wants to tell a story of "everything is great, we're pretty much on track and where we need to be" when the facts in front of us show that that is not the case.  And now we hear JC pretty much roll back core promises and vision for the game where "unlimited possibilities" have now become "we will limit what you can do to preserve performance". The amount of work NQ has set up for themselves combined wit he mountain of work that needs to be done to clear technical debt and core issues in the game should be a guide in understanding that it is not possible to get to the state NQ claims the game will be in a year when they intend to "release". The stubborn attitude of not wanting to move the roadmap out and by now plain unrealistic expectation being set by NQ is just not good and will make (new) players tag off and disengage.
 
I get that much of this will probably be due to the fact that NQ is not in a very good situation financially and needs to work on a very tight and limited budget, but it's hurting the game's progress quite obviously. The amount of work needed to be done to work around the roadblock of "no wipe until absolutely required" for the sake of keeping people subbed is causing ore pain than NQ is letting on. Th underlying tone of NQ having pretty much beg for players to get back to the game or fill out a survey where NQ should and probably does know very well what the pain points are is rather obviously  a PR stunt more than anything else.
 
From podcasts it seems that NQ in general overthinks what we, as the community brings up in the rarae cases there is a response, which is generally only happening on an ad hoc basis when confronted with a live question, and the "solutions" are often overly complex and in effect miss the mark as far as addressing the intended problem. IN general, NQ seems hellbent on reinventing the wheel over and over while solutions are often readily available.
 
An example is the call for better building tools, NQ will mostly translate this into "we want a vertex editor" and then go into detail on how difficult that is and how much resources it takes. What we actually need is more options to build without resorting to voxelmancy.. More brush options like slopes broken into two voxels, corner pieces and things like that. Making smooth and beautiful ships using voxeltech is great and some designs are amazing but there is no middle ground here between that and basic blocks/boxes. Why can't we have basic shapes like the ones we see in (or instance) Space Engineers? Why is there no single voxel size tetrahedron making it possible to make corners. here's basic block which IMO should be readily available in game (old SE source but valid here)..


 
 
 
The "general" public is not looking for a vertex editor, they just want/need more variation in basic blocks and would be perfectly happy with these. The argument "use a voxel library" pretty much rolls back to my earlier comment about NQ (and a good number of experienced players) not seeing the issue of  this being to complex for an entry level player.
 
What we need is:
In build mode, select voxel placement tool press E to cycle though basic shapes press-hold E to bring up either a radial menu, use scroll wheel to cycle through all available blocks or the option to "click and pick" from a more varied choice of block "brushes"  
Another example is power management. It has been discussed with some good suggestions provided since Alpha but NQ never acknowledged any of it or engaged with us on these ideas.
 
Then, while it's unfortunately a meme by now, the question is a valid one, where is the canopy glass? Why has NQ not ever acknowledged this and why is this element on display in game but not available to players? It is another simple option to make designs easier to make "pretty".
 
 
Lastly, it is _very_ disappointing and a tell tale sign of how NQ thinks that the NDA forum section has been archived and is no longer accessible. It means a wealth of information and content which could be reused in beta is now lost. Arguments to maintain access to these clearly, and frankly expectedly, fell on deaf ears as NQ does what NQ does regardless of what we, as a community think. Why make a post in the tone of an invite to discussion when you really just make an announcement?
 
If you, as NQ, intent to do things your way anyway, why pretend to care enough to ask for our input/feedback. I know this post will no doubt trigger the fanbois in the community once more but he fact I get quite a few messages from community members when I make posts like this saying how they agree tells me I'm not wrong. What we're seeing now is pretty much what happened when Naerais joined and it lasted for maybe a month or two before NQ fell right back to being their usual self. I hope I am wrong and this time NQ will move in a different direction but I reserve the right to expect they won't and it's just a temp  band-aid before it's back to business as usual. I'll be happy to be proven wrong though, we'll see.

The issue is the game is at least 90% tedium no matter what 'path' you pick.
 
Industry?  90% tedium of fighting the lag of the link tool or the random breakdowns where some random element simply stops working. 
 
Mining? - mining is 100% tedious.
 
Pvp? 90% waiting around.
 
Ship Design? Voxelmancy is 100% tedium.
 
Trading? 90% tedium of flying around from A to B.
 
And the lessons haven't been learned.....
 
NQ adds 'wrecks' which are also 90% tedium of flying around looking for them....

Time to learn about the wonders of symbolic / hard folder links.
I just tested this and it works great.
 
What you want to do is move the Dual-Universe-Cache folder to where you want it, let's say from C:\Games\Dual-Universe-Cache to D:\SpaceHog\Dual-Universe-Cache.
 
Then, open command line (win+r, cmd, enter) and type the following (as an example using the above locations)
mklink /J C:\Games\Dual-Universe-Cache D:\SpaceHog\Dual-Universe-Cache
As per the guide linked, paths with spaces will need " around them.
 
This will create a hard directory link in the original cache location pointing to the new location. To Windows / the game, it's as if the folder were still in the install location.

For a number of reasons, RP opportunity for one, it would be really good for DU to have VoIP available. Based on the current state of development it should not take much to implement a 3rd party solution quickly and fairly easily.
 
VoIP should always be optional. While many would like to use it and it will certainly attract players from the RP communities (where many are _really_ looking for a good SciFi themed RP opportunity). Here is how I could see this option implemented:
 
In settings, by default VoIP is inactive, it should be an opt-in feature. The VoIP solution would easily slot into the current way chat is working. players will have local, construct or private channel access, depending on whether they have enable VoIP. Right clicking a player would show a "muted" icon next to the talk option indicating this player has VoIP disabled and will not be able to hear you if you start a conversation so chat needs to be used.  
An obvious option here would be Vivox which is both well known, inexpensive and easy to implement.
 
This would be a very welcome addition to the game, attract new players and generally improve QoL for many players. It  would be good to learn how NQ feels about this without simply referring to the upvote page as this is more about expanding the potential userbase and not cater to existing players (even when many will welcome it).
 
 

There is very minimal NQ presence in the forums - and really minimal activity in general.
 
Things like the "Idea Box" -  may as well be called "The Idea Trashcan" because I'm pretty sure NQ doesn't look at it.
 
I think you as a company need to figure out just want you want this forum to be and frankly if it even makes sense of it to exist. If you are focusing on discord, why invest your time in the forum?
 
If you want the forum to thrive, then you need to actually have a reason to be here - which means NQ presence and to also drive the community to the forums.
 
At this point if you want to hear anything from NQ, Discord, Reddit or even Twitter appear to be quicker to show information about NQ communications.
 
NQ needs to communicate with the community - I don't care if it's via the forum, a reddit AMA or whatever. 
 
Getting on a twitch stream with some streamer is NOT communicating with the community. It's NQ and a Streamer talking about stuff and we get to sit in the back like kids watching adults talk. It's not OK.
 
 
If you just 'clean it up' and add a fresh coat of paint, it won't fix the core issue that this forum is largely pointless. 
 
Until NQ starts being active on the forums and actually interacting with the community here, it's going to remain largely dead.