Collider

I have been playing DU for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
Why?
Mostly because of the people I played it with.
 
DU itself does not give me a big enough reason to play it.
 
I have one suggestion to the Developers ... before they try to implement more player based content that uses the exact same boring mechanics that already make the game an insane grind without actual reward. Don‘t implement more of that.
 
There is currently one very simple yet really successful game ... Valheim ... it does not have the insane scale of DU. It does not have great graphics. It does not have any kind of in game economy.
But there is one thing it has ... progression in PvE and a feeling of accomplishment.
 
Yes, PvE. And an environment that gets more challenging the further you venture away from your starting point (to put it in simple terms).
 
DU is boring, because it is not challenging. There is nothing dangerous out there except Borg Cube PvP gankers and your own stupidity when flying.
 
Everything else is grinding. Get more ressources, sell more stuff on the market, to be able to buy more stuff that helps you to grind even more.
 
Valheim has different biomes.
 
DU has different planets and moons.
 
Why is the DU universe dead? Introduce PvE combat, both in space as well as ON planets, against hostile fauna and NPC pirates, maurauders, NPC industry conglomerates, etc.
 
Have Sanctuary as a sanctuary. Dead moon, no PvE or PvP.
 
Make Alioth an easy PvE area near the districts. Make it more difficult in the further away areas.
 
Make planets more dangerous PvE areas the further they are away from Alioth. Also the space ... you venture away from Alioth ... you will be attacked by NPCs eventually.
 
Go even further away from Alioth and you can even be attacked by players (in addition to the even stronger NPCs).
 
Give us a feeling of accomplishment ... because building the 50th spaceship and the 100th base will get old very fast.

I have been playing DU for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
Why?
Mostly because of the people I played it with.
 
DU itself does not give me a big enough reason to play it.
 
I have one suggestion to the Developers ... before they try to implement more player based content that uses the exact same boring mechanics that already make the game an insane grind without actual reward. Don‘t implement more of that.
 
There is currently one very simple yet really successful game ... Valheim ... it does not have the insane scale of DU. It does not have great graphics. It does not have any kind of in game economy.
But there is one thing it has ... progression in PvE and a feeling of accomplishment.
 
Yes, PvE. And an environment that gets more challenging the further you venture away from your starting point (to put it in simple terms).
 
DU is boring, because it is not challenging. There is nothing dangerous out there except Borg Cube PvP gankers and your own stupidity when flying.
 
Everything else is grinding. Get more ressources, sell more stuff on the market, to be able to buy more stuff that helps you to grind even more.
 
Valheim has different biomes.
 
DU has different planets and moons.
 
Why is the DU universe dead? Introduce PvE combat, both in space as well as ON planets, against hostile fauna and NPC pirates, maurauders, NPC industry conglomerates, etc.
 
Have Sanctuary as a sanctuary. Dead moon, no PvE or PvP.
 
Make Alioth an easy PvE area near the districts. Make it more difficult in the further away areas.
 
Make planets more dangerous PvE areas the further they are away from Alioth. Also the space ... you venture away from Alioth ... you will be attacked by NPCs eventually.
 
Go even further away from Alioth and you can even be attacked by players (in addition to the even stronger NPCs).
 
Give us a feeling of accomplishment ... because building the 50th spaceship and the 100th base will get old very fast.

The sell of bugged schematics has begun...

@NQ How it is supposed to balance that in the future? that is not the only bugged price schematic out there. as seen on another screenshot he holds over 100 of warp beacon xl schematics........

NQ. Just want to say an insincere thank you from the bottom of my heart for making all my small personal shuttles useless... I specialise in and have build dozens of one man dockable shuttles and recreational vehicles since starting DU. My ships are known for being ridiculously compact... And I have NEVER used the glitch exploit to achieve any of my designs by placing elements through each other...

But now that you've gone and completely fudged up docking, not a single one of my ships can actually dock with any of my host vessels any more.....  Even in the earliest alphas, docking was basically a lottery but now NOTHING works.

I knew that the manoeuvre tool was now no longer able to do it, so I decided to try fly some of my smaller ships onto the landing pads. Biiig mistake...

This is REALLY annoying with your game since your code seems to be incapable of even calculating the hit boxes of the elements and voxels with anything approaching finesse or accuracy. So it's a complete crapshoot trying to actually fly using VTOL in proximity to the host vessels because something with an invisible hit box will invariably collied with something else and leave the vehicle floating in mid air.


Worse, once I get out, they all continue to bump and jiggle around on top of the parent vessel as if possessed by the souls of disaffected DU players and invariably end up sliding off the side and dropping to the ground.

So a big thank you for yet again using a sledgehammer to crush an entire, useful and unique function in your game.

I can't help feeling that the programmers got pissed off by people abusing the bugs they left unfixed in their code and exploited with impunity knowing no punishment was going to be made, so they just removed the whole function as a middle finger to the players; cutting off the nose to spite the face, at it were.

I'm now going to consider a new career that doesn't include building  micro, slot-dockable, ships since no body will use them now docking is such a massive pain in the rear.

OK. Rant over...  I feel much better now ?

So the below obviously all my opinion/thoughts only.. even when the writing is on the wall in a pretty bold typeface 
 
 
Monday came and went. NQ does not care and have closed this issue internally. They think and hope that by ignoring it, it will just go away and the comments will end. They expect us to be good kids and let them off the hook once again. The level of ignorance and disrespect is astounding. But I expect they stopped reading these threads (if they ever did) as .. they could not care less and will just ride it out until if blows over again. The few that can and likely would want to engage are probably told to step back and stay out of the discussion.
 
 
Today is the day that the additional month subscription runs out for the ones that were eligible. It would be interesting to see what happens next. I'm guessing NQ may actually silently allow subs to continue for a bit in the hopes some will (eventually) resub. They're down to tricks to try and keep the player count up. Meanwhile, going into month 6 of "beta", claimed tiles count on Sanctuary is pretty much stuck around 35K (Alioth is well behind at below 30K) and with 20K+ backers and their 40-60K beta keys, 60-80K potential player accounts that all play free through beta, it is fair to question the viability of the game as far as revenue. NQ won't say obviously, but the numbers we have and see speak volumes. Two offices in very expensive locations, around 100 staff, external partners and massive server infrastructure cost will roll around what I'd expect to be substantial 6 figure monthly operating cost at least.
 
 
As I see it, DU will be the next Landmark, it will continue to run for a bit longer and then the announcement comes that he servers wil be shut down and the company dissolved. NQ will be the next in line of indie devs with a dream but lacking the ability to actually make it work, killing their own game by stacking one mistake onto the next without ever really taking ownership and ignoring their player base. At this point, I have my doubts whether they can make it to the end of the year, I see nothing that makes my think they might at this point.
 
Frankly, when the end comes, they only have themselves to blame. Their lack of engagement, responsiveness and support as well as their indecisiveness and failure to utilize and understand their userbase (and take them serious) is what will have done them in.
 
And yes, I hope I am wrong in having this rather bleak outlook here and NQ has a trick up their sleeve we don't know about to pull through and deliver the game they say they will. But the numbers just do not add up. DU deserves and has the potential to be better but I just fear NQ is not the company capable to deliver.
 

A warp beacon costs 20-30M to make, it is sold for much more because it takes so long to make and because people want to make back the money they paid for the schematics. The same can be said for any t3+ item, the price is not dictated so much by the raw materials but the build time and schematic price. 

Now that plenty of people practically got the schematics for free, there is no way anybody who paid the normal price for it will ever make his money back. The issue may not hurt you, because you don’t do industry, but it does hurt a lot of other players.

The game right now has several issues that need to be adressed before the Alt+F4 and element destruction changes.
 
Several players have login timeout / disconnect issues. Those issues seem to happen only to certain players connecting via a few internet hubs. (Seems at peak times the Amazon servers do not work very well with certain internet hubs ... as the game runs better, faster, and with less lag when those players use a VPN ... which is paradox). DU does not use the processing power of your graphics card. It‘s main source of processing power are the CPU cores. Additionaly my system is capable of running 24 threads ... but DU only uses 12 threads ... as it only uses one thread per core ... even if your system could use two threads per core. My CPU is screaming, while my GPU isn‘t even bothered to turn on its fans. That‘s a huge waste of processing power. Repair unit does not work. Needs to be fixed before the changes happen. When you buy a tokenized ship from someone, the elements get the „when put down“ boosts of the creator. If I have to replace broken elements, those boosts will be lost. They need to have a possibility to keep those boosts upon repair/replacement of the elements. Otherwise most of the tokenized bought ships will be fubar once they have been repaired. With limited ressources in the system it is not smart to have element destruction in the game as this will drain ressources from the game faster than NQ can imagine. Higher tier ressources are already hard to find ... these changes will make things worse ... prices will skyrocket ... and new players will be forced to fly around in crappy ships ... which will make new players leave the game before they reach a point where they can afford the better equipment. Stuck adjustors will be stuck forever, when the Alt F4 changes are implemented. This needs to be adressed beforehand or we have a lot of „adjuster shipwrecks“ AGG towers on low surface altitude planets are littering the atmosphere. Many of those towers are sitting on 1 voxel wide „poles“ that support them. Those structures are invisible during flight, spawn very late ... too late to break. I have crashed into them more than just once. With Alt F4 gone ... you can‘t even do an emergency break to avoid the destruction of your ship. AGG towers must be banned from the game ... easiest way to fix this ... make AGGs work from any altitude ... and make them work faster in vanilla settings. The way AGGs work now is just forcing players to litter the game with trash towers everywhere.

The game right now has several issues that need to be adressed before the Alt+F4 and element destruction changes.
 
Several players have login timeout / disconnect issues. Those issues seem to happen only to certain players connecting via a few internet hubs. (Seems at peak times the Amazon servers do not work very well with certain internet hubs ... as the game runs better, faster, and with less lag when those players use a VPN ... which is paradox). DU does not use the processing power of your graphics card. It‘s main source of processing power are the CPU cores. Additionaly my system is capable of running 24 threads ... but DU only uses 12 threads ... as it only uses one thread per core ... even if your system could use two threads per core. My CPU is screaming, while my GPU isn‘t even bothered to turn on its fans. That‘s a huge waste of processing power. Repair unit does not work. Needs to be fixed before the changes happen. When you buy a tokenized ship from someone, the elements get the „when put down“ boosts of the creator. If I have to replace broken elements, those boosts will be lost. They need to have a possibility to keep those boosts upon repair/replacement of the elements. Otherwise most of the tokenized bought ships will be fubar once they have been repaired. With limited ressources in the system it is not smart to have element destruction in the game as this will drain ressources from the game faster than NQ can imagine. Higher tier ressources are already hard to find ... these changes will make things worse ... prices will skyrocket ... and new players will be forced to fly around in crappy ships ... which will make new players leave the game before they reach a point where they can afford the better equipment. Stuck adjustors will be stuck forever, when the Alt F4 changes are implemented. This needs to be adressed beforehand or we have a lot of „adjuster shipwrecks“ AGG towers on low surface altitude planets are littering the atmosphere. Many of those towers are sitting on 1 voxel wide „poles“ that support them. Those structures are invisible during flight, spawn very late ... too late to break. I have crashed into them more than just once. With Alt F4 gone ... you can‘t even do an emergency break to avoid the destruction of your ship. AGG towers must be banned from the game ... easiest way to fix this ... make AGGs work from any altitude ... and make them work faster in vanilla settings. The way AGGs work now is just forcing players to litter the game with trash towers everywhere.

In our organization's Teamspeak we have often discussed possibilities to remove "clutter" on and near the District landing pads.

Here a suggestion how this could work:
 
When a dynamic core is "parked" near the district for too long (more than 24 hours) it should be "towed" to a virtual compound The player receives a "parking ticket" and needs to pay a fine depending on how often the player's constructs have already been towed. Contructs will NOT be sent to player inventory ... however the "parking ticket" can be traded in at a vending machine at the landing pad and the construct will be spawned immediately (so people can not use this mechanic to get an easy "no weight blueprint" of their ships) First time offenders ... reclaiming the towed vehicle is free. Warning is issued that it will cost from now on. Second time offender ... reclaiming the vehicle costs 50.000 h Repeated offenders ... reclaiming costs double every time a construct gets towed.