Anonymous

Don't be so quick to write the idea off - what is DAC if not a type of digital currency, (which is how Entropa Universe operates), and that's not to be confused with crypto-currency. While I believe they (EU) have toyed with the idea of using blockchain to secure and verify transactions - this is mostly because they deal with real wold money in their economy. I for one vomit into my mouth a little at the thought of that kind of game, and I don't believe DU or NQ want to take that path.
 
However, taking the "bitcoin / make real money" bit out of the equation - blockchain driven markets using normal fake in game DU currency (not DAC's which are just another trade commodity in that sense - i.e. - you DON'T want to make a situation where the game is people mining DU "Bitcoin" rather than having fun playing) would be both doable and cool.

There are good reasons why free currency trading is restricted in games. It created a near perfect money laundering technology for terrorists and criminals. Some have even been busted in Second Life. So avoiding a player withdrawal of trade-able currency is now normal. Novaquark is following that line. 
 
There is more to Bitcoin than bitcoin the currency; the blockchain technology as many useful game functions including server-less peer to peer account archiving, anti-hacking measures that enable client side archiving, automatic player adjudication of transaction disputes. etc. 

Well you will already be able to buy DAC for real money and sell it for ingame money(pssst, i think its a bad idea.)
but we could solve this by you can only buy and you cant sell

This is a "General Knowledge" thread to help provide newcomers with a list of hot topics, answers, FAQs, videos, and other miscellaneous information that pertains to Dual Universe. This thread will not contain everything about DU, but merely help to point you in the right direction. I have done my best over the years to keep this thread up to date for newcomers, so if there is something you think is missing and should be added, just private message me with the information and sourcing.
 
You are also encouraged to join the Official Community Discord for Dual Universe if you have questions, or just want to be involved in the community. 
 
PSA: Use the SEARCH FUNCTION in the forums before making a thread if you are new. Chances are, it has already been discussed and beaten to death.  
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
 
-> Release Roadmap & Alpha Announcement <-
 
Official Links:
 
• FAQ from the Main Website
 
• Trello Community Suggestions
 
• DU Gamepedia (wiki)
 
• Developer Blog
 
• Kickstarter Page
 
• Youtube Page
 
          • DU Community Discord
                • Official Discord FAQ (Forum Link)
 
          • Soundcloud/Soundtracks
 
          • DU Reddit
 
 
Forum Links:
 
• "Ask Us Anything" Thread by NQ-Nyzaltar
 
• Forum Rules thread by NQ-Nyzaltar
 
• Pre-Alpha FAQ and Rules by NQ-Nyzaltar
 
• DU DevDiary Video Guide by Shockeray
 
 
Other (Non-Official) Media:
 
• Dual Universe Explorers (Podcast)
 
• Ark Central (Community News)
 
• Dual Insider (Community News)
 
• Dual Universe Sleepers (Fansite/Blog)
 
• Outpost Zebra (Blog)
 
• Community Org/Player Map (Community Tool)
 
 
Common Topics: (NOTE: All information below is subject to change at any time. Official responses from the developers, and sources, have been linked to each subject.)
 
• Price Model will be Pay To Play
 
 
 
• "Virtual Simulator" for builders to build in peace
 
 
• "The Economy"
 
 
• "Scripting" Dual Universe will utilize LUA Scripting and Distributed Processing Units  
 
• "FTL Travel" answered by NQ-Nyzaltar in the Ask Us Anything thread
 
  • "Unigine 2" Dual Universe will be running off of the Unigine 2 Game Engine
 
 
• "Single Shard Server" In Dual Universe, all players will be playing in the same server
• (Video) Server Technology review by JC Baillie
 
 
• "Active Lock On Targeting" In Dual Universe, combat will not be twitched base
 
 
• "Character Progression" There will be no character levels in Dual Universe
 
 
• "Survival Gameplay" Currently NovaQuark are still considering adding survival elements
 
 
• "Territory Control" In Dual Universe, you will be able to own pieces of land
 
 
• "Rights And Duties Management System" Sophisticated system for managed roles in your organization
 
 
• "Stealth Technology" Stealth tech is currently being considered by NovaQuark
 

i would even extend that
 
i would even extend that, saying you have to manage inertia as gravity, so we can create artificial ring gravity (with rotation), just align the player with the force vector when in collision with a structure or vessel.

I want to build a frontier trade outpost and saloon.  It would be cool to bring people together in game and start a township on the edge of explored territories and watch it grown and progress overtime, fighting off bandits and eventually developing our own customs and politics.
 
The way I see it, without NPCs or fast travel the only place to get equipment will be the ark and the only place to get resources will be the frontier, people will be forced to work together or spend hours and hour hauling inventories of unrefined ore back to the auction houses at the ARK.

He means the territory claims.
 
Devs stated there would be a Territory Unit that would have to be protected, so if a territory had been abandoned eventually the shield/energy would run out so it would be vulnerable and someone could break in an destroy the TU.
 
We dont't know how expensive TU are going to be but I suspect that most territories would be controlled by medium to large organisations due to the cost, maintenece and defense required to keep them going. I suspect individuals will either build bases in the wild and try and keep them hidden or rent space in an organisations territory.

Reality check.
 
Using our one REAL measure (Earth):
 
Surface area: 501,000,000 km2
 
Dry bits (usuable "territory"): 139,870,000 km2 or about 29.2% of the total surface area.
 
Arable land - example only - obviously mining is different): About 55,948,000 km2 or about 10 of the total surface area...
 
And then to refine it further (for instance) when it comes to human settlement, historically something like 80% of all human settlement was within walking distance of salt.
 
Key takeaway - there is a crap ton of "territory" to be had in a setting like DU - you may consider this "infinite". But only (if modelled right) a very small percentage of that territory will be usable in some way and thus matters - Sovereign Territory therefore is really actually "finite" and always will be.
 
Sovereign Territory isn't about how much km2 you control - it's about WHAT is in the territory you control, or what controlling that territory strategically gives you access to or control over.

Reality check.
 
Using our one REAL measure (Earth):
 
Surface area: 501,000,000 km2
 
Dry bits (usuable "territory"): 139,870,000 km2 or about 29.2% of the total surface area.
 
Arable land - example only - obviously mining is different): About 55,948,000 km2 or about 10 of the total surface area...
 
And then to refine it further (for instance) when it comes to human settlement, historically something like 80% of all human settlement was within walking distance of salt.
 
Key takeaway - there is a crap ton of "territory" to be had in a setting like DU - you may consider this "infinite". But only (if modelled right) a very small percentage of that territory will be usable in some way and thus matters - Sovereign Territory therefore is really actually "finite" and always will be.
 
Sovereign Territory isn't about how much km2 you control - it's about WHAT is in the territory you control, or what controlling that territory strategically gives you access to or control over.

Great idea having this. I'll jump on in the AM and lurk on my phone - 1:30 am here on the dark side of the moon.

Hi everyone, so much has happened in just a few days!
 
The community has an up and running Discord server and we would love for you to join!
 
 > https://discord.gg/hkxNNvd < or >https://discord.gg/FRDShpt<
 
Come join us and talk about DU!
 
Chat and play games or find other media to entertain yourself on the long wait for the launch train to arrive.

This game is worth it ... that's why

Here is an email from Novaquark about the topic of subscription. Hopefully this can elevate the beat to death debate of sub and pricing.
 
Posted by Novaquark (Creator) Hi guys! Already 135,354€ and 27% covered! This is amazing! We can’t thank you enough guys, thank you for your support!
So, this is the first update, and we wanted to bring some light on one important point. There has been a lot of discussion recently about the monetization of Dual Universe, and the question of the subscription model. Let us clarify here what we have in mind, so that you can see all the options we will offer:
Free to Try “trial” access: there will be a free to try access to Dual Universe, with limitations on things like how much skill, money and/or space you can access to. The details of the limitations are not yet defined precisely, but it will be made such that you can enjoy the game and have a taste of its large scale potential. Pay to Play “premium” access at a price at launch that we will keep in the range of comparable products on the market (typically around $10-$13/month or 10€-13€/month depending on the country), decreasing when bought in large bundles: this is the full scale game, with no limitation. DAC access: Dual Access Coupons are items that you can buy on the in-game markets with the in-game money you make while playing, and that you can turn into one month of Premium play time. You can also buy a DAC from Novaquark to sell it on the in-game market in exchange of in-game currency. DACs will have a price of $18/€18 at official release (for reference, items similar to DACs used in other MMORPGs are priced around $20/€20). Alpha/Beta access: no subscription involved. As you can notice, the real money price of a DAC will be higher than the normal price of one month of subscription, which may have caused confusion as some people, quite understandingly, assumed that the monthly premium sub would cost as much as a DAC. This is not the case.
We hope this helps clarify our future business model. The reasoning behind the choice of a Pay to Play premium access has been discussed in detail in a devblog post about monetization that we made in April. We believe this model is the best to ensure both a high quality of playing experience and the best possible support for our customers. Remember also that Dual Universe is meant to become a massive MMO experience: if we are successful we will have to run a large and costly cluster of servers, especially since we have this unique continuous single-shard approach.
Again, the team at Novaquark wants to thank warmly all the 1700 backers that have supported us so far! Don't hesitate to spread the word and get everyone on board!

Yes, scamming should not happen because of bad UI or poor game mechanics. If something is worded confusingly in the UI, or a mechanic is too confusing that it would be trivial to scam someone with it, then perhaps the UI or the mechanic should be revamped.
 
One might argue that Eve has this issue (or had, I haven't played it in over a year), in contract scams. 
 
They did eventually end up fixing part of the UI issue that was allowing me to run courier scams in Eve, but that was more of a change to make it more obvious to people that they were about to do something dangerous. The only thing the "fix" did was to try and stop people from being scammed that way, but CCP billed it as something that would add clarity to the details behind a courier contract. 
 
-shrug- 

Exactly. Emergent and organic. You scam someone? That someone might want revenge. Might send people after you. Might even have your account ID to tell when you are online on alt characters. Boom, faction wide K.O.S. on bounties and banned from being traded. Perhps a faction could "paint" an individual to be seen by its members with a red name to signify a hostile target towards them. Who knows.

Certainly. With all the freedom the devs are planning to give to us, and all the aspects of the world that are supposed to arise organically, Dual Universe is effectively one giant social experiment. A MMOSE you could say. I am really interested to see how people behave, and how much the subscription (A PLEX system actually) changes the peoples normal online behavior.

you have to understand, that the videos are pre alpha gameplay, if you are active in the forum you will encounter something called "nanoformer", which will be our tool for crafting etc. but just isn't implemented yet. It was never planned to do it with an empty hand.

No, let's add an actually huge map in the game. Make it like, a giraffe's print in the captin's cabin and make it like, glowing and stuff, and make it like, have those little soldiers, that you move with a stick to where you are going to attack and stuff abnd then add colors to them to punk your opposition's team's colors and stuff.

Things. They know things. They went on strike briefly in 1974, unfortunately during the critical filming stages of Zardoz.
 
As a result... this.
 

Sometimes more than a month goes by before I play ps4 again, so I end up just paying for what I use

Reading this I noticed the psn thing and it made me think of how if you pay for more than one month you save. I pay for 3 montsh at a time

I think the problem can be negated with a subscription fee that is cost effective. 
 
$20 a month is going to be a harder sell than, let's say, $15 or $10 a month. A lot of that has to do with psychology, and what people can compare the prices to. At $15 a month, that's a little more than a monthly Netflix subscription (which just went to $9.99 for the only-only streaming option). With Netflix, nobody is ever watching 24/7, but they see it as a reasonable fee to pay for the hours they do find every week to watch some shows or movies on it. I pay $9.99 a month for my PSN subscription so that I can play PS4 games with my friends online, and although you do get 2 free games a month they haven't been very good in recent memory. 
 
I also think it's worthing taking the emergent entertainment value into consideration when thinking about paying for a subscription. You're paying to not only be part of a story, but to have a hand in creating one yourself. Which is something I don't get from many games, other than maybe Eve Online.
 
 
 
I mentioned in another thread about the subscription models that I think there needs to be an ability to gift subscriptions in the form of time codes to people, not only just the ingame subscription "tokens". There are many of us who would be happy to pay for a friend or two to play with us, who otherwise can't afford to play for one reason or another. I'd also like to be able to give away game time codes to people on Twitch, or coworkers or whoever.
 
Sometimes all it takes to get someone to subscribe and play with you is to give them a month for free. I always tell people that if you can stick with Eve Online for at least 1-2 months, you'll be hooked, and I'm sure a similar thing will be said about this game. 

Something that might also be worth looking at is a community cash shop, similar to DOTA2's workshop on steam. People of the community can submit models/designs for implementation into the cash shop - based on vote by the community (coz then you know people are gonna buy the stuff), and DUAL takes a percentage of the share. 
 
These can be things like a variable line of ship designs, or personal items, skins etc. It would be upto to DUAL to set the cash shop categories for such items - and then review popular items that are voted by the community for implementation. I guess it all depends on what you can have on the cash shop. 
 
This is a good way to keep the community active to designing and creating content that DUAL can use for their cash shop. Especially if it's like .... dang.. what's word. stuff that looks good. vanity items? 
 
things like model pieces for your character... bionic arms, robotic legs, etc. 
 
it's just a loose idea. 

(Posted Friday 8th of April 2016 on the DevBlog)        Today, we want to share with you our view on a delicate topic: how we plan to monetize our game. Monetizing an online game is a difficult exercise: if it's not profitable, it dies quickly. If it's overpriced, it turns off players and the game dies as well. Adding the fact that there is no monetization model fitting perfectly for every type of game and this can give a quite serious headache to make it right, even when the guys in charge have experience in the field. Finding the adequate equilibrium is never easy. We have given a lot of thoughts on the topic, collected feedback from the community and listed a number of related critical points and checked how each model is adapted for each of them. We wanted to share our conclusion with you.   Being able to play the game without spending money   Nowadays, this is an unavoidable topic when it comes to start playing a new game. This is something everybody would appreciate. It's possible in some context, but there is always some inconveniences to balance it. But let's see how each model can answer to this point:   Free to Play (F2P)

This model has been created around this very idea. It gives the opportunity to gather a bigger community and it becomes easier for players to find people to play with. However, it is very difficult to apply it flawlessly, and it's not always a fitting model for a game for many reasons, as you will see below. Buy to Play (B2P)

This model is completely the opposite. Even if sometimes you can test for a very short amount of time the game (limited in game time and/or gameplay), a player will have to pay the whole game at some point, and it might be a paywall that turns off players with a low budget.
  Pay to Play (P2P)

This model has evolved through the last decade and yes, it has become possible to play a game for free with a P2P model in its latest form, where the subscription fee can be optional. This evolution have already been successfully implemented by major MMO games, in particular Eve Online (the PLEX system) and it's the one we are interested in. How is this possible? In any MMO community, there are generally two player categories: those with a small/tight budget for games but a lot of free time and those who have a limited time to play games but a significant budget for them. Many activities in a MMO require a significant amount of in-game money. Acquiring a large sum of in-game money takes time. Players with a limited game time generally want to skip that step if they can. The system offers them to buy a token worth a monthly sub and trade it with  another player for in-game money. Players with a low budget for games can play for free if they invest enough time in the game and gather a large amount of in-game money to buy a token from a player selling one. As there is also a free trial period, a player who is really active may gather enough in-game money before the end, and continue to play without having to spend a cent. Basically, this is the reward for contributing to the in-game Economy. Everybody wins.     Responsibilizing players for their actions   Most of the players interact nicely between them without feeling obligated to do so but a small part always like to cause trouble (especially harassment or cheating), just to annoy other people or to gain an unfair advantage. In general, the Terms of Service (ToS) and more specifically End User Licence Agreements (EULA)  exist for the troublemakers. To discourage them to generate chaos in a community, the rules put in place need to be efficient, and all models are not equal in this regard.  
Free to Play 

This is one of the biggest weakness of the F2P model: Most of the troublemakers are players who do not spend money in the game. As they haven't spent any money, they generally don't care if their account(s) are banned. They just have to recreate new ones and can continue with the same behavior.
  Buy to Play 

In a B2P structure, a player wanting to make trouble will think twice before creating disorder in the community, if their account can be banned and they lose the money they invested to  buy the game. Of course, this won't make such behavior disappear completely. There are still a few people who will behave badly no matter what, but most troublemakers will refrain themselves if they have something to lose.
  Pay to Play 

On recent P2P games some features are locked on trial accounts (especially features that could be abused to gain advantages with an unlimited number of accounts or harass other players). Once the player has invested a significant amount of time in the game or paid for it, they are no longer in trial mode. Hence if the player start a ruckus, they have something to lose.     Getting a high-quality Customer Support   For a MMO game, Customer support is an important aspect that can make the difference between a player who stays and a player who leaves. Customer support is there to help players to solve any problems they have, be it a bug (in which case CS transmit it to the devs), a question, or a conflict with another player. Again, all monetization models are not equally designed to handle the task.   Free to Play 

F2P games usually have a number of players far more important than the size of the customer support team can handle. The size of the customer support team is dictated by the global income of the company, where the size of the community is not. This tends to degrade the quality of the support, as trade-offs have to be made to handle the increasing number of requests.
  Buy to Play 

Due to the fact that each player must pay for the game, the customer support team will be able to better manage the number of requests they have from the community as a part of the money coming from each sale can be allocated to financially support the customer support team. However, for an MMO (for which we can hope a very long life, like a decade or even more) this might cover the first years but after that, the situation will be the same as the F2P game, where the sustainability of the game will rely only on the players spending in a possible Cash Shop, unless a paid DLC or expansion system is put in place to generate revenue.
  Pay to Play 

This is the only long-term, healthy way to support financially high quality Customer Support. If budgeted well, the Customer Support team should be proportional to the size of the community and should be able to handle all players without prioritizing or favoring some players before others. Having a regular income is justified for permanent Customer Support. It's also true for other production costs like, for example, server maintenance (some MMO games have cheap server maintenance costs while other have expensive ones. It all depends on the amount of computation power needed on the server side. And on a game like Dual Universe, it will be far from trivial. This is the drawback for handling technological challenges).   So what's the conclusion?   We have synthesized a bit all the things that were taken into account, but you have here all the main reasons why we are aiming toward a Pay to Play model. In a nutshell, here's what we have planned: Free Trial period: between 2 and 4 weeks. Monthly subscription (optional with a PLEX-like system) Possible (cosmetic only) Cash Shop. If deployed, we will make it in order that every month, players who have paid a subscription will be able to get some cash shop items for free.   Of course, we will remain open to discussion on this topic like any other: don't hesitate to give us your feedback on the Social Media and/or on the forum!   The Novaquark Team.

If they take the lazy way out after the for the beta, I will be severely disappointed. I want planetary timezones! Just to confuse people more, it would be worth it.