Emptiness

Camping asteroids was the thing I was most concerned about when I first heard about them. Just look at how things are done here, if that particular asteroid with T3/T4/T5 ore is going to endlessly respawn where it is then the first thing that will happen is orgs walling that rock with L cores and that's it, no more asteroid.

This is exactly the imbalance that exists with PvP. I'm not going to volunteer to put my ship at risk to fight some gunboat just sitting in space waiting for a hapless victim. There is no way I can defend such a ship because the gun boat doesn't have to bother allocating resources to entering the atmo , cargo hauling and just packs it with weapons and armor. Now I will grant you that the warp past PvP mechanic is stupidly carebear and prevents any sort of emergent PvP like me needing to bring combat escorts to prevent my armored hauler from being destroyed before it reaches safe harbor.
 
Right now I hear the "make them come out of warp in unsafe space". Maybe this helps, but what reason do I have to put in that risk? Just to go get some higher tier ore? I dont' 'need' those high tier weapons / engines , they are just a convenience. PvP needs to have a purpose and right now really there is not much is the realm of purpose other then to gank someones ship parts whoopidy do. The flip side is also true that higher tier ores are woefully underutilized in crafting.

Oh, are we doing religious greetings here? Alright.
 
Happy Sol Invictus, everyone.

Let's make all "interesting" honeycomb T1 and the T2+ variants just a black brick but with meaningful stats. Deal ?
T2+ is not a "waste" it's supposed to give you a performance/durability boost, who cares what color it is.

Honestly, I think that all ore tiers should generate in equal quantities. The increased mining time already prevents their acquisition very fast (although I would not be adverse to higher tier ores mining time greatly reduced), and if someone wants to use a massive quantity of t3/t4/t5 for honeycomb for a creative project, the cost is prohibitive. 400kl of a t1 or even t2 for a lot of honeycomb? No problem. 400kl of a t5 for honeycomb? Currently, that's a colossal waste. Builders should not be punished for wanting to use interesting honeycombs.

This is what happens when game dev insta cave when adding elements that provide challenge. They couldn't even get element destruction in for a full week before insta cave to whining.
 
If they allow themselves to get caught in the age old trap of shoveling out "content" to the solo/casual ADHD crowd you can just kiss the game vision goodbye. Next we will be shooting bunnies that have magical $$ or drop super spiffy engine +5. 
 
Keep on caving to those whom came to a unique game only to cry for mainstream 'features'. We will end up with generic sci-fi MMO with an indi short on funds end product.
 
Make the game hard. Take the training wheels off and let those that can't hack it go back to whatever SP game that will spoon feed them do X to get loot Y quests and other nonsense.
 
Frankly same goes for a wipe. If its needed to reset the progression curve after a few major feature let the "omg! I paid money so you can't wipe" crowd go away. Bring it back from such a wipe with hard mode on, no bots , pull the safe zone buffer outside of atmosphere from the outter planets, drop the link range , the whole 9 yards. 
 
People act like $70/year is some sort of blood contract to have the game cater to their every impulse.

well guess what. they rush content now. 
 
no probes to build
no actual search for another system
no actual sending that probe there first
no "build a stargate on this side now"
no "one time jump" to the probe once it arrives there
no "build a second stargate on the side of the probe if you want instant travel"
no defending and selling access to that stargate
no actual fun, engaging and interesting gameplay
 
just instant gratification and a premade stargate because "muh DU needs more content"
 
laughable yet hilarious how they change the vision on the go

You are jumping the gun with your conclusions. Your company craves PVP now and I respect it. After 2-3 months, and after enough losses, one side will seek alliance. After getting enough allies, they might become a threat, and you will counter that diplomacy by making your alliances, its only logical. Result, for a solo bystander is exactly what the man who you replied to said. One big blob to which you are KOS, or other big blob to which you are KOS.
 
EvE was an excellent teacher to human behaviour - in space:)

The following is strictly my opinion. I hold absolutely no weight inside NQ nor do I believe I have any influence over their decision making. I also do not claim to know about what goes on behind the scenes as far as decisions are made. Alpha Team Vanguard is the furthest extent of my knowledge that could be considered outside the public eye.
 
TLDR at the bottom.
 
 
No wipe until after beta and before release or unless there is something seriously holding the game back from further development. Those are the only scenarios where I see it acceptable to perform a full wipe and planet reset.
 
I also maintain my position that a subscription beta was a terrible idea and that whomever put it forward may have put Dual Universe and by extension NovaQuark in jeopardy. I don't say it to be dramatic, but if we were still in an alpha like state where people simply bought into the testing phase and with BIG LETTERS told to expect things like bugs, glitches, incomplete content, and the occasional wipe, I feel it would have better set expectations and people would be way more tempered in their opinions.
 
We should be beta TESTING, a 'soft launch' should have never, ever been in the cards regardless of the financial situation. When I heard NQ stating that we'd be 'soft launching', I immediately questioned what happened to NQ's interoperation of the alpha and beta phases being proper test phases and not things like steam early access where the game was basically 'released' while not actually in its release (v1.0) state.
 
How NQ handles its ATV team is regrettable. I don't feel like an advance tester with an opinion that will be considered along with fellow ATV testers. Suggestions for how these test s should be handled in various instances have gone unanswered for months or are given some half solution that doesn't do much in the way of assisting with the testing process, hence my involvement in said testing is minimal.
 
If I was not leading my own organization.
If I was not a lifetime subscription holder.
If I was not ATV.
If I was not a moderator of the official discord.
 
I don't think I'd be here right now. Yeah, weird flex on basically the entire community I know, don't tell me.
 
All of that (somehow) fell into my lap because I was here for the kickstarter, and every time I log in, I wonder 'why me'? All I saw was a great game that I really wanted to be a part of. You beta testers that just plopped $20 down probably see those four things as a lot to loose and to some, maybe it is. Now flip that view and see things from my perspective, for all you beta testers with only $20 on the line and nothing to loose except enough for dinner for one, a few months time, and even some hopes and dreams, I'm surprised more of you haven't left already. If I was a new tester and was VR'ing around and looking at all the amazing stuff people have already created, forget the economics of it all. If all that was subject to a wipe from players that felt like they were behind the curve, I wouldn't bother subscribing until after release.
 
Ever since beta launched, we've been bumbling and stumbling around like drunks after last call.
 
I am forgiving of all the bugs we're experiencing. Alpha has sharpened me on that. Beta has not turned out how I thought it would. To be fair, alpha didn't either, but we're beyond that now... aren't we?
 
Am I dissapointed, yes. Am I still here though, yeah, I am. Do I have my complaints and grievances, I do. Will I air them, sure, if NovaQuark wants to hear them, most definitely. Do I think they'll listen, to me or anyone else, no.
 
Hope yall enjoyed my word vomit, that's all it probably is anyways. Cheers.
 
 
TLDR:
I think I'm a sepshul person in the community? (atv, discord mod, lifetime sub...... somehow)
Beta is a catastrophe
I'm unhappy with NQ and ATV
Things would be different if we were still testing and not a paid beta
NQ said alpha and beta would be proper testing phases and not early access

May be because you very experienced, early-start, relativly in game wealthy and lot-of-play-time player? 
 
This why you not in demographics that were hurt most by this so called update. 
 
 

From my perspective, you seem to be defending its poor performance. I say, its poor performance is inexcusable.

It erks me to no end that the ATV people outright TOLD NQ the problems of the patch. Said what needed to get addressed and NQ didn't listen, and went ahead with their plans anyway.
 
Then AFTER the community said "Fuck this shit" and started mass exodus the game
NQ back peddled on the stuff ATV said to back down on. Like NQ:
 
WHY THE HELL DIDN'T YOU LISTEN THE FIRST DAMN TIME?!?!?!?
 
Then pushed out a statement saying "We heard you".... no they did not.
NQ only listened when people started to unsubscribe and NQ started to lose money.
 
The sequence of events unfolding couldn't be more "Bass Ackwards"...
 
Like seriously NQ is only listening to the things they want to hear.
Catering to a niche carebear crowds when the larger portion of the community stays silent because they don't feel like writing full length articles on what sucks and why.
Thinking the game needs to be made harder and BARELY HAVE A GRASP ON HOW TO MAKE MONEY BY MAKING A GAME FUN.
If you wanted a true simulator then put that into your description in the game so that you draw in the crowd that buys into a simulator.
 
The PvPers... the THOUSANDS OF PVPers who want to spend money on a game that offers fun and challenge (NOT TEDIOUSNESS) will go to games that are WORTH spending their money on.
 
OTHERWISE, save your game by adding shit that will draw in the crowd and make them want to play the game.
T4 - T5 mega nodes in Asteroid belts PVP space only AVA - STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM LOCK AND FIRE, you will lose sooooo much interest if you do it that way There's barely much PVP going on now, applying AVA by way of lock and fire when the server is barely getting stressed out from ANY PVP in space today is just a cop out. Quit trying to take the most challenging path for NQ to develop for AVA and do it the same way it's always been done. A physical projectile being shot from one location and landing at another with AvA. All this calculation based AvA may seem nice on the beginning but by making the game less enjoyable/fun there will be less and less of it happening over all.
Or
If this is TOO much of a complication then PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE find a better alternative to lock-n-fire shit. As it stands so many people are turned off by the way PVP is now. Having lock-n-fire first person shooter is just only going to add to one more reason to NOT play this game. Tractor beams and Harpoons and Interdiction for Warping ships Space anomalies to encourage exploration More wrecks rather than the crumbs we have today Ability for people to develop their own schematics to sell on the markets ( A FUN WAY TO MAKE THEM, instead of some overwhelmingly complex implementation that is AIDS to even bother getting into) 2 - 3 NEW SOLAR SYSTEMS If NQ does this, then it will be the defibrillator NQ needs to bring the crowd back to the game and more money to be generated. HANDS DOWN.
Because there's nothing to do, people see no need to subscribe. It's causing less cashflow to get into the game and more people to walk away because they're pushing shit that makes the game worse and less fun.
 
Instead make shit that energizes people to play the game not want to gag on a baseball bat at the thought of having to mine to craft to indi to build to fly to .... ugh... fuckin hell ... to just do anything at all.
 
If there was 2 or 3 new solar systems in the game with exotic planets to check out, I'd happily command my people to gather the fleet for a "Great migration" to the new system. Fight anyone for the new elements and happily mine and craft and all the crap just because Flying for days and weeks just to explore somethign new is a LEGIT reason to stay in DU.
 
With PvP? I'd love to board someone else's ship at 5-10,000km/hr with harpoons and tractor beams. Pulling someone out of warp to kill the crew and take their stuff.
 
With exploration? IF WE HAD deep space probing abilities and better notifications about random celestial events to give us a better heading of where shit is so we can explore it then yeah. I'd gather a crew to go explore the new thing.
 
With T4-T5 mega nodes on Asteroids? OMG would you see some heavy activity in the community.
but with what they've done? there's literally ZERO reason to play... ZERO reason to fight... ZERO reason to even bother doing anything in the game.
 
Those 7 points above = CONTENT that the community is unable to and unwilling to try and create themselves. NQ needs to do it or people will trickle out the door more and more.

0.23 was the feature that made the game excessively difficult for many but not all. My personal view is that NQ needs to be focusing on adding features to the game that make it fun and enjoyable for the community to even have the energy to get involved in.
"There's no where to go but up from here"

I'm going to make this claim:
If NQ doesn't push to make this game fun, to offset the difficulties they've created it will not survive long after launch.
Many people don't like coming home from work to do more work. It's what won't make money for NQ's DU to survive as a game. The only thing left to do would be to sell the technology and close up shop and move on to the next project.

From my perspective, you seem to be defending its poor performance. I say, its poor performance is inexcusable.

From my perspective, you seem to be defending its poor performance. I say, its poor performance is inexcusable.

At this point the NDA is a mood point as we are already talking about it, so here it is.
NQ didn’t listen when people told them to remove the bot orders from the get go, they left them on soft beta release. This in conjunction with leaked information on the location of wrecks (very unbalanced and unfair) and leaked information to a selected few on other matters, including but not limited to ore locations and prices, lead to an unprecedented rush that made a few people extremely wealthy by day 2 of soft release. Now, NQ claimed that some of us where exaggerating the amount of wealth and made a vague statement claiming it wasn’t much and everyone was going to be reset to 50 million. What NQ didn’t say was that they only accounted for the Quantas and not the assets (and that I can prove, as my assets weren’t touch), couple with, yet again, more leaked information to a selected few, made some stack up on billions of hard assets by day 4-5. So they took the money sure.....they didn’t touch the assets, meaning some had enough factories, equipment and everything you can think off to play the rest of their lives without a care. Add that money was also moved prior to the cap to alts and players (50 million a piece), and some people having 6-10 alts, well, you do the math.
 
Now, with that say, I could care less about the above statement and if I can say it or not, at this point it doesn’t matter cause NQ can’t penalized me for breaking anything when they are completely back peddling themselves. So, consider this my last meal before I jump ship for better seas.

There are at least two types of players.

Those who like pvp and will engage in different stages of pvp and write stories.
Those who dont like pvp and want to build and create cities and read stories about those who are living outside safe zone.

We need them both for the game to be complete And bubble is needed. This wont be Rust or Ark 2 with no safe zones, etc.

I'm pretty sure 0.23 was a mortal blow for the game.  I worked hard (12+ hours a day for 3+ months) to get to the point of being able to build a Warp Beacon.  Towards the end, it was a real drag - basically spending the entire day doing 15 minute scans in hopes of finding a single vein of T5  Niobium ore, knowing it takes several veins to make the alloys required (plus all the T1->T4 ores).  Still, I did it, since my goal was in sight.  I've gone from the 4 yard line to the 99.5 yard line now - the game didn't nudge me to something a bit harder, it tackled and plowed my head into the ground and claimed "Gee that was fun, get up and lets do it again, and again, and again".
 
I can't understand the lore (and yeah, lore is important) behind not being able to duplicate schematics some 10,000 years into our future.  In fact, with industries so relatively cheap, not sure why each has a schematic box.  Each industry can only run one thing at a time.  There is no LUA code that would allow cycling between them, and even if there were, the 10 input links would severely limit that usefulness.
 
Suspect I'm going to have to hear something like 0.25 will be both a wipe and bot free to bother to come back.  I've been logging in daily for the bonus, but the impulse to do that is fading quickly as well.
 
Have we seen any of the rollbacks promised yet, beyond the income change and schematic price change?  If so, I missed the announcement of the damage change rollback and the like, much less any compensation for cores blown post 0.23.

This is all good, but if I just started? You have a SPACE STATION (or several), a SHIPS, a QUANTAS! And I have a pair of small buildings on Sanctuary, a free Speeder and a small ship, which I built myself and planned to expand it to travel to space. Just before 0.23... Well, now I'm planning nothing. Acually, I unsubscribed from DU and unlikely will subscribe back. Only if NQ change things.
 
Listen to people here. Who will you sell your schematics? Who will transport you? The only answer (not good for me) - DU will be populated by people with mentality of EVE players. I afraid of it, and if that happens... It's total disaster.
 
And, by the way, what are communication means? How can I receive an order from a person, who need a lift for example?

Also NQ's policy on communication and "transparency" (lel) is stuck in JC's generation (and mine) / last century corporate style. They never caught up to the current hipster communal style of doing things (to give it a name), which evolved out of a disgust and distrust of the old ways. Even though NQ was only founded in 2014.
 
@NQ-Naunet is the first to actually engage with the community in present-day fashion, and as a two-way street, with some success. From all appearances, she is the only one at NQ who knows how to speak to the current generation, probably because it's her own generation.
 
But all it really boils down to is to actually just talk to people like normal people. You at NQ, normal people. Us community, normal people. Just talk with us like we're all normal people here. That's all we ever asked for, and never happened until now.
 
Old style is more of a brick wall style that just doesn't fly anymore, and rightly so.

Find another game(s) to play for a few months and check back on DU in half a year. It's what I've decided to do. The current game just isn't worth wasting my time on.

Oh look... Warp drives are back down to 1.5M on a number of markets after hitting a high of about 8M a few days ago.... That didn't take long. LOL.
 
JC, was that too quick for you? Are you going nerf tf out of everything again?

I should start off by saying, this is specifically for the devs & NQ. I'm not trolling anyone on the thread, nor demeaning anyone else.
 
I have tried defending most of the updates, even ones I didn't personally like, because the game is in beta, and there is still soooo much to do before it's released. But the schematic thing is complete bullshit. "That's not how the game is suppose to be played" is a cop-out answer. At least have the common decency to tell the truth and say "we don't care what ppl want, we already got your money, we want this so this is what we're doing...deal with it or f*ck off. We don't care either way."
 
The biggest draw to this game was I could build anything I wanted. I could do anything I wanted. As long as I could imagine it, and I put in the work to get it, I could accomplish it. With or without a group to play with. There were obvious, and large, advantages to playing with a group, but it wasn't necessary to enjoy the game, or to accomplish things. But this latest change, this is the last kick in the juju bees I'm willing to take without voicing my displeasure. And there is no defense for this. There was nothing in the fund raising that said anything about this game being another version of Eve. If I wanted to play Eve, I'd renew my sub and go play. This had sooo much more potential. Me and my group of friends played for 2 yrs, and we still hadn't got a lot of things that we wanted, and hadn't done a lot of things we wanted to do simply because of the time involved in going out to get the materials, refining, skills, etc.....,we do after all have some semblance of a life. But we were still having fun. We were a small group, less than 1/2 a dozen, that played well together, were able to coordinate and accomplish a lot. We could keep relative pace even with the larger orgs. But with this, there's absolutely no point in even logging on. We can't do anything. Go mine, sell it to bots to purchase schems so we can go mine so we can refine so we can sell, so we can mine, so we can refine, then build. Gee...that sounds like FUN! The point is to get together, work for a common goal, ie build a specific ship, building, etc..., and enjoy doing it because we could see progress and the results of our time and effort. Now it's just a grind fest.
 
I understand wanting people to work together. i get it...MMorpg does start with multi-player. However, there are much better ways to encourage it than this abomination. The players seemed to be pretty involved and working together well before this non-sense. The dev's want to slow things down? News flash, it taking months upon months of mining, crafting, planning, and working to complete ONE build is plenty 'long' enough. I even encourage the intricate crafting system. I love that part. The better you are, the more resilient, the more of a product, the less materials consumed or the better a product should turn out. So I don't even have issues with that. But again, making me buy a schem to be able to make it is inane.
 
You don't like the pace at which large orgs were progressing, then do something that would limit them. Not the community as a whole. People will always figure out a way around your idiotic, artificial time sinks. They have hundreds of players to harvest $ from so they can purchase w/e you have set up to try and 'slow' down progress. You still haven't slowed down anything, all you've done is make it impossible for smaller orgs, or small groups of players playing together to be able to do anything except mine. So effectively you've turned all of us into mining slaves for the large orgs. Nice job.
 
If you had put this crap in your fund-raising efforts, instead of the promise to be able to build anything we can imagine, I would never have put out the money to support the game. But since I did, I get to bitch about it on the forums. For all the good it will do.

I'll never understand why some people are so intent on prescribing how other peoples playstyles should be. It just so happens some people enjoy the challenge of trying to do it all. You want to limit yourself to the boring task of producing one item be my guest. I buy multiple accounts just so I can "do it all" ...now it seems that playstyle is not in the vision so my multiple accounts have been unsubbed. What folks don't realize is that solo players are actually the majority of paying customers is these games, not because of the number of individual solo players but because we usually have multiple accounts. (it's hard to be self sufficient with one character)
 
What should have been done would have been to offer the basic schems needed to get a start in the game for free. Then as items produced get more complex they could start charging for them, with the more common ones being dirt cheap and the most rare being the most expensive and difficult to acquire.
 
We also should not need a schematic for each machine. This could have been handled by uploading them to database's of varying sizes that could then be linked to a series of industries. Small factories would only need the smaller, relatively inexpensive db's, while the mega-factories would need many much larger, much more expensive db's to operate. 
 
I understand why they did it this way ...IMO they tripped over themselves in the process. The upcoming need for power generation will accomplish their goal. The current implementation of schematics has come in as more of a wall than the curb they intended.
 
Schematics are good and should stay as they add a level of complexity. But implement them so as to add to the fun, not impede it.

Illusion of content.
 
Before many felt like they had nothing to do  - they had a factory that could produce everything and they just needed to sink in hours mining to throw in the ore to get the stuff out on the other end.
 
Now - they need to sink in months of mining to get the same factory running again. They have a 'goal' now - to get back to where they were a week ago - or they can quit.