HangerHangar
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Posts posted by HangerHangar
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In the 90s/00s when forums mattered the ideas forums was a great place to see what a game was missing before spending several days to attempt the download. Essentially was the quickest place to know status of PvP based on who was crying, the type of endgame based on who was crying, and similar. So IMO idea forums never existed for the devs, and instead existed as a barometer to judge the game.
though they’re extra cursed for this game since. Considering they made the “idea reddit” for upvoting/downvoting ideas, just to implement their least popular first wave idea of schematics. Likewise the devs have spent massive amount of time cozying up to streamers with their early promotion attempts, so their bandwidth for feedback was massively taken up there. Not to mention they’re stuck spending all their time on base infrastructure/bug management, to make the topic matter even less.
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I don’t think the economics are there for PvP.
You can log into EvE and find fun builds that take an hour or two of play time to set up (hell frigate fights are probably the most fun and diverse PvP meta and those can be 5-20 mins of game time to build). then if you need to go higher the civilization side of the game has ship replacement programs, along with “income multipliers” for participants of the defense outside of PvP (ranging from intel watch channels, to PvP areas more “secure” than high Sec, and defense response fleets).
something like Mortal Online or Albion Online have gear set up so “fun” gear can be made in under an hour, along with the skill system set up so people “spam” gear for leveling/training. This means that often times gear is “cheaper” to buy, than the time value is to make.
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Frankly this game utterly fails on making gear cheap, and only somewhat grasps the concept of “civilization multipliers”.
even if PvP gets rammed in most of the community will just sad out from PvP pregrind, and the rest of the community is likely to follow. PvP is also lame as all hell in this game you have EvE style targeting, with fewer guns/utility modules, and don’t get the ability to move yourself. Or you get to move yourself but get maybe a single module to play with. (Lame to play, lame to stream, but great for getting drunk with some buds I guess).
The worst part is that the devs are literally fighting in the wrong direction for fixing the game, by increasing grinds and similar.
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If the original devs can’t prevent community visible item duplication bugs, inventory teleportation, and similar. A third party will be against a hopeless cause to prevent them in their own game.
likewise with how abysmal the devs have been at tracking down the bugs and fixing financial damage, means they’re missing a major selling point in tracking/reporting.
there’s also the fact that “empty” areas can suck bandwidth at 5mbps usage averages. Most developers will face financial pressure to have rates in the low kbps ranges.
basically the tech is useless to a third party.
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Well we knew it was happening looking at Jita IV in EVE. That thing sticks around even after removing the mission agents that originally made it valuable, and while being the least safe High-SEC area in the game (and less safe than most PvP areas).
- Cheith and JohnnyTazer
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Then it would be an empty parking lot simulator.
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Hopefully the devs already learn from the last event how crap they are.
- CoyoteNZ and le_souriceau
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43 minutes ago, ShippyLongstalking said:
I understand your point, but the reality is that MC has proven that it can retain and grow a massive, massive audience of players.
You're saying you spent years in MC...that's really good retention and lends evidence to the idea that building is a viable niche.
Everything about MC's demographics suggests that builders can carry a game financially. I mean...MC is among the most successful games in history. Yes, people get bored eventually, but that's true of every game ever, sub or MMO or otherwise.
Nearly 30 million people bought Minecraft last year alone (2020)...DU won't get 30 million sales for its entire life.
I'm not understanding the idea that builders can't carry a game financially because there's ample evidence in the industry to suggest otherwise.
Minecraft lets you build whatever you want even if it’s as silly as a windmill punk server.
this being an MMO it will just be DU. There are some advantages there, but some major letdowns like getting your starwars theme shoot out interrupted by the DU optimal cube ships.
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4 hours ago, joaocordeiro said:
What exploit was this? Did you report it?
Two non
PvP grade ores being in PvE areas (expected)
Market prices were terribly balanced in the week of early access for kickstarter players.
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two allowed.
alt-f4 stopping ships mid air before crash. This provides great support to allow faster gains than future/current players will have since people got to ignore landing physics.
using the maneuvering tool to raise ships as high as needed (antigravity levels). This time allowing players to ignore take off physics.
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several reset worthy
multiple item duplication bugs tied to industry.
several ways to maintain a container link beyond max range. Most notable being linked to a container that’s anywhere in the universe, while market terminals would dump into them.
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It’s an MMO, chat being hidden by default is ridiculous.
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Subscription model isn’t too bad considering how expensive of a PC you need to even bother to play the game.
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On the other hand the devs really don’t release “net positive” updates for players of the game. A subscription based game can’t go for several months with the only major content update being a kick to the groin with schematics.
The devs kind of screwed themselves to be honest, since the game is “content light” (IE: no quests, raids, or similar), every update they’re going to be just be fully unique updates. There won’t be WoW, RuneScape, FFXIV style updates where you can release content that rhymes with old content. Instead it’s all going to be unique content, requiring actual infrastructure development (rather than mostly softer design development), all being completely different in implementation, and requiring unique test methods (IE: you can look at how tuning has changed on raids in classic MMOs, there is a solid and retreadable path for design/development/testing there).
Schematic implementations also removes half the content of the game from most of the player base. And industry is one of those systems you can keep stacking grind and stat improvement updates on, without being called out as quickly as you would for combat tier-ify-cation.
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Game was kind of a success. Players generally got their monies worth if they were a subscriber. They probably won’t have a continued reason to resubscribe, even if they’re going to get bonus rounds watching the game crash like Worlds Adrift. (Game does not seem economical IMO, it literally sits there in empty areas using 5mbs for hours at a time. That’s a big cost to recoup, and massively devalues to resale price of the tech).
I don’t think the publisher side of the business is all that great as well. Schematics are the biggest nerf I have ever seen in MMO history, and that update was released weeks before all the 6 month subs were due to repay. (Schematics literally affected 100% of the player base, increases grind by at least a magnitude to do what players were previously doing, completely destroyed play loops to the point where what players were doing everyday changed to “what I used to do", and releasing just before resubs were due was perfect timing to let players show off their discontent with cancellations).
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58 minutes ago, ShippyLongstalking said:
I see the game as having just as good a chance to survive as with JC at the helm. It was long overdue.
Everything we've seen and heard suggested he wasn't just a bad leader because he lacked experience in the game industry...but because he wasn't open-minded and didn't want anyone else's ideas. That's reflected in how NQ interacted with the community and (from all the evidence we have) based on how he treated his own employees. It was always his project, his vision, his castle, his "ready player one" roleplaying game.
When the community complained, he told them why they were wrong. I expect he did something similar with his own employees, hence the very high employee turnover and slow, slow progress.
If investors want to salvage this game, they can't just "sell off" tech because there's nothing to sell.
Everything they've made is very buggy and vendor-locked on AWS or Unigen2 (which no one in the industry uses) -- never worth it to buy buggy code that hasn't been proven to scale! It's far, far cheaper to develop it yourself long-term...any studio with the cash to buy tech like this would have wisdom enough to avoid it. "Wanna buy tech for this game that's been mired in bugs and hasn't shown it can scale even with low population?" No, hard pass, maybe worth $50,000 but not anything substantial enough for investors.
i expect the investors will make up their mind shortly -- but my guess?
They wouldn't start taking things over unless they had some runway left to try to salvage the project. Otherwise they'd have laid everyone off and shut it all down already, because every day it is online is money spent. I'm not holding my breath, but getting JC out of there might be the change NQ needs.
If the original engine builder can’t avoid item duplication bugs, item teleportation bugs, and keep client/server terrain state synced...
A third party picking the engine up has a snowball in hell chance of doing better.
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4 hours ago, Honvik said:
To be honest they could have raised extra funds through skins/cosmetics to boost their overall funding. Anyway where does it say their financial's are bleak? Just want to look it up for reference. DU overall has so much scope and we all wonder what would have happened if they had even double the funding!
Honvik
Premier of the Empire
That was the plan. At JC listed different color lights as a future cosmetic.
considering how many cosmetic packs Space Engineers has released. It’s pretty safe to assume that cosmetic packages do quite well in space building games.
the only thing is that selling cosmetics in an “released but declared unreleased by the devs” game is trashy, and will get called out on social media.
Likewise cosmetic items are probably less valuable in Dual Universe than SE, since to actually ducking build them you’re going to need an industrial infrastructure that less than some single digit percentage of the community has access to (IE: if you even want different colored blocks it’s a different schematic, and still need to grind up all the precursor/input items which need even more grinding).
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There have been way too many exploits to seriously consider this a market SIM.
IE: the item teleportation bug was literally just based on your linked containers just disabling GUI options. So you you could purposefully kill your cockpit While making sure your linked container survived, then spawn at Alioth markets and have markets deposit into your distant container on a different planet.
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Has NQ even done basic MMO communication yet? IE: pressing enter should set focus to chat, displaying the chat window should keep it up in (instead of it deciding to disappear), there should be some form of indication that someone next to you typed (keyboard typing emote or chat bubbles), and similar MMO standards. The game is so antisocial that there has never been the guild recruitment spam chat that is endemic to the MMO genre.
not even following basic social GUI design language sets DU to be explicitly non-social when it comes to ingame communication. Likewise by ingame tools being so terrible that leaves pretty much Discord and these forums for everything, which means that you’re shoving people not even playing and playing together (Which will help population death spirals a bit with “bad reviews” in the “actual” game chat).
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Lol the last thing you want is for NQ to be unhappy with the mechanics you’re playing with. Just look at what they did to industry after they were unhappy with it.
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I figured I already got my monies worth before .23, but the forum drama is indeed paying extra dividends. Though tbh I knew I was going to be quitting after PvP went in, to eventually come back after the devs released a EVE style Wormhole update (ship/group/scale limited PvP, along with massively increasing permeability of PvE/PvP boarders).
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On 3/11/2021 at 2:41 PM, LouHodo said:
Fight back how?
How about you have vehicles to defend with. Because what is a person on foot going to do to a tank, a fighter or any ship attacking them? Even if they had a gun.
It is something that can come later and not change a whole lot of things.
With the inventory/hammer space that characters have in this game, the level of manufacturing an individual has, and the grade of weapons we already have access to...
you would need need to be incompetent to be unable to take down an unprepared tank on foot.
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Boundless originally had this. One of the first major things they added after release was storage for claims dropping/going Unfueled. Game is pretty much never return status for me, and it’s one that just has a box price (quit before that update).
I can’t really imagine what economics NQ is expecting for this game since returners will have to consider a 3-6 month sub on top of all their stuff being gone.
NQ quite simply put will be forced to implement quitters storage if they survive long enough to see returners log in once and quit after not finding their old stuff. The same way that Boundless did as one of their first "respond to play stats " updates.
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Playing Space Engineers, wanted something multiplayer first.
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I would say you've never played the game Children of a Dead Earth. You've got: orbital dynamics, battle strategy, nuclear science, rocketry, material science, weapons science, thermodynamics, and probably a few other things I'm missing.
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9 hours ago, blazemonger said:
Most of the relevant things you mention are in SB's direct "competition" Space Engineers and Empyrion.. I do not really see SB on the same scale and level as DU at all. If and when SB has several hundred players in game and will handle several hundred constructs and player in one place such as we see during expo events in DU I could see them compare.
The whole distributed server tech SB uses for me is a bit question mark in how well it wil work and scale. Also, effectively, from your remarks the answer to "is there building on planets" is no.A big blocker for me is that I find the in game element style of massive buttons and sliders to be absolutely obnoxious and de detraction from the game. From what I have seen, while electrical wiring is a great idea, it looks very rough and unfinished still. Also, having friction in space to make (dog)fighting "more accessible" is a major detractor for me. If you want to have dogfighting in game, don't design the game in a space themed format..
So far the stories coming out of the SB camp are such that I do not see myself getting into that game. Nothing wrong with a PVP centric game where all roads seem to lead to combat, but that is not a game I expect to enjoy. But we'll see once the game actually goes public which as far as I know should not be too much longer now.
Scriptable turrets has me in. on release at least, though I feel no need to bother to try to get into any of the closed testing.
Building system is about "bolting" stuff together. Whether structural things like plates/beams or DU element style things.
Also has actual minigames for generating credits on starter stations. IE: tutorial systems are a way to earn some income, with some things being pretty repeatable like a Hardspace "lite" style minigame.
Weaker/Less MMO-y server system. Closer to a peer to peer system, with the server just being something closer to a cheat detection peer. Personally I'm questioning it as well but more worried about things like cheat detection effectiveness and similar (Though considering even DU is pretty laughable about that as a "true client server" while still but having bugged/non-loading cache/buildings crashing/not-crashing probably leaves the SB devs with a smug face "tell me about how your client server model is decreasing cheating").
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Honestly I feel like a lot of the smaller orgs would probably be way happier in Valheim than in DU. An actually climbable tech tree that feels like progress, when stuff starts to slow down it's like you suddenly unlock new stuff you can do, and something that just has a whole lot of soul put into all of the design. It also doesn't punish you for mistakes nearly as badly as DU does so you won't see things like your friends burning ship just sitting somewhere for a few days, until you realize "yep they're gone now". But still leaves you with some annoyance for trying to game the game to do silly suicidal things.
Also really good about the bigger aspects of DU of "Look what I made" and "look how I play differently", without locking people just completely out of some aspects of the game (DU style, "no we don't want everyone crafting, and the people who care about crafting being too good at it").
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Warp works fine if the main goal of the game is to have PvP be objective based. IE: PvP targets mostly pick engagements on an objective to get a response, or defenders choose to stay behind and fight for an objective.
IE: things like attack/defense timers on territory, whatever mechanic stations will have, and deciding whether/not to give up a supernode.
BEST MINING SIM EVER! thanks NQ for SPACE MINECRAFT
in General Discussions
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Starbase is releasing on the 17th. So you can relive your experience there.