NQ-Naunet

I've been speaking with a few players and one of our Marketing gurus (who is an avid DU player) about the various ways in which people can enjoy DU without having to dig, dig, dig for eternity. We're collaborating on a kind of guide that will (hopefully) open up some new possibilities for people. We're all getting ready to have a holiday, but when we return in the New Year I expect to put our noses to the grindstone to churn this side project out. Actually, to that end... I'm curious: Have any of you witnessed a really unique play style that you want us to promote? I'd happily give you credit on the final guides if you want to share a story. ❤️

I would loooove a virtual tour of Eikona!!!! (I'm obsessed with art galleries.)

Hey Teso! Thanks for the suggestion. (Note: I moved the post into the Idea Box.)

Niiiiiiiice! Do the 'other things with friends' include drinking and being merry?

Heyyy Aerial!! ❤️ You know what? I think there just might be some free fireworks. Don't quote me on it just yet, but I have heard talks!!! I also know we're trying to organize a fun stream-a-thon... more on that to come! I SO FEEL YOU ON THE GIFTS FRONT. I was kind of relieved to not have to go shopping this year! I don't mind staying indoors with just one person. That's when I'm the happiest.

I'm really curious to see how the wipe vs no wipe debate continues to unfold! This has been a really fascinating thread - I'll be keeping my eye on it. As it stands now, we're not planning on a major wipe.

That's all it is, Bobbie! You nailed it. Our 'style' is just... normal, empathetic conversation. (Unless we're dishing out super formal information, like a warning or big announcement.) That's certainly not how we view it, I can guarantee you that. The fans who post here on the forums are incredibly insightful. Each of DUs social (community) spaces has their own little ecosystem. There's something for every player personality, and that's valuable to us: Forum posters tend to be more technically minded and informed about industry practices, enjoy writing long-form/thoughtful feedback pieces and more often than not have been around since the beginning of the project. The overall vibe I get is similar to walking into a library - it's a quieter, more studious atmosphere. Forums are an amazing place to house information long-term, and I personally really enjoy them. (A large part of my personal enjoyment comes from how well forums showcase people's personalities! I think it's one of the better places to bond and have meaningful conversations.) Discord is excellent for allowing NQ to take a quick community "temperature" check! If we want to see how any one thing is affecting fans in-the-moment, Discord is a great place to look to make a fast assessment. (The next step after that is to come here and see that "temperature" elaborated upon.) Discord is also great for general fun/joking around, and for spreading key information rapidly. Reddit falls somewhere in between the forums and Discord. It's a widely popular, easily accessible platform that tends to attract newer players, which provides NQ with the opportunity to better understand the new player journey. It has its own chat feature and also allows for long and thoughtful posts, though it seems to be used mostly to showcase builds/ask general questions. The demographic that posts to Reddit skews a bit younger and tends to have their fingers in more than one gaming pie, which enables us to keep tabs on what else might be grabbing fans' attention in the gaming world. I personally view platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter & Youtube as belonging to Marketing first and foremost. Those are spaces where NQ can promote DU, not necessarily where we as a community team might go to source important feedback. (Occasionally we'll get the odd constructive Youtube comment, but that's fairly rare.) So as you can see, every space provides NQ with something meaningful. We pull insights from each space to compare, contrast and ultimately develop a well rounded picture of how our players think and feel. They're all important to us for different reasons. No one space is better than another - just different! Now to address the title of this thread: "Will this be another Cyberpunk 2077 disaster?" The short answer is "in all likelihood, no. Thank goodness." You can make some loose comparisons I'm sure, but DU and Cyberpunk (and the companies that created them) are very different beasts. If you're interested, I encourage you guys to check out an in-depth article I read earlier about the Cyberpunk situation: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/style/cyberpunk-2077-video-game-disaster.html NQ has certainly encountered some growing pains (that's no secret!), but we're working through them. Even in the short time I've been here, I have seen growth! ❤️ Take for instance the following is official communication from us: This is in direct response to a large majority who felt we did "too much too soon" with 0.23. We agree! We hear you, we see you, we are going to try something different next time. This is JC saying that, while we tried our very best, in terms of testing new features we fell short this time. We will and are making improvements on this front, which hopefully means 0.24 will be a vastly improved experience for all. (Those quotes were taken directly from this post, for those who are curious to read more.)

So we've had a big ol' chat about this idea, and we've arrived at: We don't have the time/resources budgeted in our current feature development sprint to program an elegant solution for this immediately. Having said that, the idea has been saved! I look forward to seeing how we solve this problem once we have the time and resources to tackle it properly. We could enforce some rules 'manually' (GMs and CMs leading the charge by playing interplanetary 'meter maid') but we feel it wouldn't be a very 'clean' process, which we fear would only serve to frustrate players more. In conclusion, if you don't mind waiting we will save the execution of this idea for a time when we can pay adequate attention to its development.

Hi everyone, What are you all doing for the holidays? ? Whether or not you celebrate anything in December, I'm curious to know what you've got on the go! We're set to enter another round of lockdown where I'm from (t-5 days), so I plan to do a whole lot of nothing. I might do some extra baking (because why not eat like a bear in hibernation?) and play Earthbound for the first time. That's a game that always managed to elude me, so I feel like it's finally time to see why it's such a classic. Can't wait to hear from all of you!

I really like your proposed solutions - these seem viable! I'll share it with the team and let you know what they think.

Hello Noveans, With release 0.23, we have introduced a long-due system to protect and manage the intellectual property rights of construct creators. This is not just a variant of the existing . Rights and Duties Management System (RDMS), which is mainly in the hands of the owner of a construct. Instead, the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system is in the hands of the creator of a construct, who might be another entity than the current owner. Let’s have a look at how it works. Creators and DRM flags When a construct is created from scratch, that is, when someone deploys a core unit, whoever deploys this core unit becomes the construct creator. This can be an organization, if the deployment is done in the name of the organization. This notion is crucial because when interacting with a construct being the creator will give you certain privileges. Note that if the creator is an organization, any legate of this organization will be considered as the creator. It’s a great way to share “creatorship” between several players and be more resilient about people not being in the game for whatever reason. There are four things you might want to protect as a creator when somebody else is going to buy/use one of your constructs (with the caveat that we may add more things in the future if needed): The creation of blueprints The copying of voxel structures out of the construct The edition of Lua code in Control Units The edition of HTML content in Screen Units However, we wanted the creator to be able to select which protection to activate or not, to give them more control, and also to allow to make a distinction between Control Units/Screen Units that might have been added after the purchase of the original construct (and which should, obviously, not be subject to any protection). So, we needed flags on elements to be able to say yes/no regarding each of the above protection abilities. That’s the purpose of the DRM (which is a commonly used acronym for copyright protection of digital assets in the real world). The DRM flag for blueprint and voxel copy protection is held by the Core Unit. Otherwise, each Control Unit and Screen Unit has its own flag. From there, the rule for accessibility of any of the above four actions is defined by: 1. Is the player performing the action the creator? If yes, authorization is granted, if no: 2. Is the DRM flag of the corresponding element activated? If yes, authorization is NOT granted, otherwise it is. Note: Historical constructs, created before the introduction of the notion of creator signature in construct (roughly around April 2020), do not have a creator. In this case, we chose to disable DRM entirely. Since there is no easy way to guess who was the creator (we can’t easily trace back the history of a construct, originating from several blueprints, etc.), we will leave it at that. Blueprint creation and DRM management How do you set the DRM flags? It is done automatically for you when you create a blueprint of the construct. By default, all DRM flags are set to “activated” on the Core Unit, all Screen Units, and all Control Units; however, you have a relatively hidden (because relatively dangerous) right-click menu option in “Construct/Advanced/Create Core Blueprint without right protection” that allows you to create a Core Blueprint that has no DRM flag activated, which means no protection at all. We will see below in the “use cases” section that this is not quite as useless as it sounds. It is important to understand that the flag configuration is held by the Core Blueprint. Any construct that will be spawned from blueprints originating from the Core Blueprint will inherit the flag configuration: either all activated or all deactivated. Once a construct has been created with such a blueprint (or even on the original construct if need be), the creator can still individually unflag any of the flagged elements (with the right-click menu “Advanced/Release DRM Protection”). Unflagging the Core Unit will release the DRM protection for blueprinting and voxel copying. It does not mean that anyone can now blueprint the construct, since now the owner (who is not necessarily the creator here) can use the usual RDMS restrictions on blueprint creation to define who can use this ability. In the same way, a DRM-free Control Unit is still subject to the RDMS as for who is allowed to edit the Lua inside it. But again, this is now a consideration for the owner, who is managing the RDMS, rather than the creator. Once unflagged, a Core/Control/Screen Unit cannot be re-flagged by the creator. So, be careful when using this, it cannot be reversed. Now, if the owner of a DRM protected construct decides to customize the construct and add some Control Units or Screen Units, these elements will be deployed without the DRM flag activated. In effect, it means that the owner will be free to edit them, as expected. There will be two types of Control/Screen Units in this construct then: those coming from the original DRM-protected blueprint, with their flag activated and therefore not editable, and those coming from the owner’s personal additions with no flag activated and full edition rights. Use cases Let’s be practical here and see some patterns of usage that we believe will be quite frequent. 1) The ship designer: This player/org typically intends for their constructs to be sold and fully protected. A Core Blueprint will be created with full DRM activation, and constructs made from the Blueprint originating from this Core Blueprint will be ready for sale and fully DRM-protected. 2) The org internal ships: Those ships are meant to be used by org members and should be created in the name of the org. A special blueprint without DRM would be issued to create ships for the org’s internal use. RDMS would play its role in managing internal org rights as usual. 3) Voxel library designer: By definition, selling or simply sharing a voxel library construct would imply the creation of a blueprint without DRM, otherwise the voxel copying will not be possible. 4) Special customer deal for a ship designer: It could be that the designer of a ship accepts to unlock some aspect of the DRM for a given customer. In this case, the creator will have to access the sold construct and operate on it to deactivate the flags wherever needed. Still to Come We are still missing some important features to fully cover the DRM mechanism. In particular: We need to improve the way to find out who is the creator of a construct and provide an easy way to contact them. (You can currently find this info in the “Construct Information” tab of the Build Helper, but it should be easier to find.) We need a way for a creator to be able to transfer their “creatorship” to another player/org. We may need a way to separate DRM protection for blueprint and for voxel copy. We may need a way to allow the creator to activate the DRM flag, not only to deactivate it. (This means the construct should remember what was an original Control/Screen Units in the list of elements of the construct.) This will come in future updates. Until then, we hope you will enjoy this new addition to the game mechanics related to constructs and that, in particular, ship sellers will now be able to mass-produce and sell their creations without fear! Want to discuss this? Visit the thread linked below! ?

@Chalana I love the colour of your ship!! ? @Krapylius Your mansion is wonderful!!! Can we have an interior tour sometime?

Thank you for chiming in, Tordan. I've shared this with the team.

Self destruct is an interesting concept, to be sure! I'll share this idea.

Hey AGramzylife, We did have some brief, scheduled downtime at 10:00 UTC on Wednesday (the day you made this post). Have you been having any further issues logging in?

The points will be applied after a brief downtime starting at 9 am UTC | 4 am EST on December 17th. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hello Noveans, December is halfway over, meaning the arrival of the new year is tantalizingly close! 2021 is sure to usher in some big changes, and we couldn’t be more excited to experience those with you. ? While we were rolling out 0.23.1, we noticed that players who had talents in training lost what was accumulated during our downtime. So, in the spirit of bringing out the old and ringing in the new we would like to offer everyone 1 million talent points (~1 week’s worth) to not only replace lost points, but also as a bit of a holiday gift! Build, explore and be merry! Thank you for your continued support. We sincerely hope that you and yours enjoy a restful holiday season! Sincerely, The Novaquark Team

Hi guys, Just popping in to say thank you to everybody who took time out of their days over the past couple of weeks to write extensive feedback here on the forums. The community team was able to collect and present your thoughts to the rest of the NQ which ultimately led to this evening's write-up from JC. Even if you're not 100% satisfied with the changes we're making to 0.23, I hope that this at least demonstrates that we do indeed read, digest and execute on your valuable questions, concerns and suggestions.

Let's have it, DU! Let's talk about NQ's 0.23 learnings.

0.23 and What We Learned In reading through the reactions from our community regarding the recent 0.23 update, we’ve gained some valuable insights. Before we talk about the changes we’ll make in our processes going forward, let’s get back to the fundamental reason behind the update itself. What we did in 0.23 is at the heart of the vision for a game where a society of players is interacting directly or indirectly with each other through an elaborate network of exchanges, cooperation, competition and markets. As it was, the current state of the game consisted mostly of isolated islands of players playing in almost full autonomy. A single-player game where players happened to share the same game world but with little interactions. It’s hard to imagine how the appeal could last for more than several months for most players once they feel they have “finished” the game. It is also a missed opportunity to try something of larger proportion, a society of players growing in a fully persistent virtual world. For this to work, you need more than isolated gameplay. Players need to have viable reasons to interact and need each other. In many single-player space games, you have ways to make money, and the game then offers you ways to convert this money into whatever you need in the game to progress, mostly via markets. This is the state in which we should end up for Dual Universe once all the necessary ingredients are in place, You get into the game, you farm a bit of money in fun ways, and you buy more and more powerful ships, equipment, weapons, etc., to help your character grow. The difference is that here, the ships or equipment you buy have been made by other players, instead of the game company. On the surface and during the first hours of gameplay, to a new player it would look similar to any of those other space games, but it would in fact reveal itself to be much deeper once you spend a bit of time in the game. Everything you would do would be part of another player’s or organization’s plan, everything would have a meaning. And soon you would realize that you too could be part of the content creation and, somehow, drive the game in the direction you want. In its current beta stage, DU doesn’t have enough ways for people to make money because we haven’t yet had the opportunity to implement all of the necessary features. There’s mining, of course. Trading is not as good as it will eventually be because markets are not really used to their full potential. As a consequence, players rightfully turned to a solo or small org autonomous game mode. We tried to nudge people out of this with the changes introduced in 0.23. While necessary, many players expressed that the changes of 0.23 came too soon because it lacked a variety of lucrative ways for people to make money outside of mining. What We’ll Do Now The vision expressed above still holds. We want people to consider going through the industry specialization only if they intend to become industrialists and not necessarily to sustain their individual needs; however, we understand that it’s too soon to press for intense specialized gameplay considering the lack of sources to earn money. Here’s our plan for now. We will modify the formula of the schematic prices to make it considerably more affordable for Tier 1 and still challenging and worth a commitment but less intense for anything Tier 2 or above. This will allow most factories focused on T1 to resume their activities rapidly while keeping an interesting challenge for higher tiers, spawning dedicated industrial facilities aiming at producing to sell on the markets. We will also reimburse players who have bought high-priced schematics since the launch of 0.23 (please give us some time since it may take a few days as we go through the logs). We will keep monitoring the price of schematics to see if it makes sense to increase or decrease the costs. The right approach to set such a price would be to evaluate how much time it takes to recoup your investment by selling the products that the schematics allow to produce. It should be a few months so that the investment is a real commitment and it makes sense to plan for it. We currently lack the metrics to properly assess this return on investment time. We need a player-driven market price for the components and a market price for the products to assess the profit made by each run of a schematic. This will come when the markets start to work as intended, and we can gather more data about them. Feedback and Testing The release of 0.23 also taught us that we need improved ways to test new features, both internally and with community participation. The Upvote feature on the website was a good start, but it’s not enough. To address this, we have two courses of action that will be taken. The first will be to set up an open public test server, hopefully with shorter release cycles, for players to try out new features. This will also allow us to explore ideas and be more iterative. If all goes according to plan, this test server should be introduced for 0.24, the next release. It will mirror the content of the production server with regular updates to sync it. The second important initiative is to revise the role of the Alpha Team Vanguard (ATV), getting them more involved in early discussions about new features and the evolution of the game. We are still defining the framework, so more information will be released as available. What is to Come In the short term, we will push a few corrections to improve 0.23, which include: Ships will now stop (be frozen) when their core is destroyed in PvP, making them easier to catch. Element destruction will impact the restoration count only when it occurs through PvP, at least for now (not when the ship is colliding/falling as we want to avoid having players penalized simply for crashing their ships because they’re learning how to maneuver them, for example). Recycling of un-restorable elements through a recycler that will take an element as input and grant a small amount of the schematics required components as output. The next major release is already in the making and will be about the mission system, a first step toward giving players more fun ways to earn quantas. We will reveal about it shortly so that we can get as much feedback as possible. We also want to reassure you that the mission system is not the only answer to offering more varied ways to earn revenue in Dual Universe. Things like asteroid mining and mining units will be introduced in the next few months. This list is by no means complete, but should be a good jumping off point that gives players reasons to fight and to explore, opportunities for pirates, new ways of making money, and a plethora of other activities our creative community will think of even if we didn’t. That’s it for now! We want to thank you again for your support and patience as we progress along this beta road! See you soon in Dual Universe! Want to discuss this announcement? Visit the thread linked below:

Hahaha I realized that I 'liked' your post out of habit upon reading - oh, the irony! ? This is good to ponder! A post with a high number of 'likes' may discourage people from voicing opposing opinions lest they earn the ire of the 'popular' group. I haven't seen anything like that take place here (that I know of), but I'm definitely going to keep it in mind.

I love this so much! You've done a fantastic job.

Thank you for your suggestion.

?

I can see why one might feel this way, but I can promise you that all moderation cases are documented and saved in a space where all staff are able to review them. Nothing is enforced in a vacuum, and there's no short supply of objective perspectives. I hope that's reassuring.

Glad to see this was resolved, Kirth.