NQ-Naunet

With the preparation for and release of 0.23, the task of finding out if we can raise the reaction limit on the forums has creeped down my personal priority list. We are still planning to update the overall look of the forums, and I suspect once we get our designer on that job we'll revisit the matter of reacts. I will say that, upon pondering it further, I do wonder if giving people the option of a "dislike" will be detrimental to the overall quality of discussion. I see it frequently on places like Reddit, where the 'downvote' button is supposed to be used to dampen irrelevant content but is, unfortunately, frequently used to 'brigade' people or express discontent/anger instead. (@vertex makes this point very well in their post further up this topic.)

That figures. He was teasing. He's not actually going to show up to a player PvP event purposely overpowered.

You're welcome! I like having things on the forums, too. Thank you for the feedback on our general messaging. I understand that "soon" and "it takes time" are a bit of a meme these days! In a perfect world, how would you like to be communicated with when we aren't able to share a definitive date but still want you to know that certain things are looming on the horizon?

Aw, that's certainly not the case. I was on voice while he answered each question - there was no anger present at all. We were all a bit anxious given the new Discord AMA format we were trying out, so perhaps that's what you're picking up on. Otherwise, please be mindful that JC's first language is not English. Some things may sound more 'blunt' as a result, but he appreciates players more than anything. Never hesitate to ask for clarification if you're unsure!

0.24 (the next update) isn't set for release for some time - we've got to get beyond the holidays, first! We have been carefully considering everyone's feedback about 0.23, and have used it to make the following adjustments: A full talent refund. All of your talent points will be refunded and your current talent training queue will be cleared! A temporary Holiday Bonus Daily Reward increase to 150.000 quantas! Fixing honeycomb schematic prices. For reference, here is the exact formula used for schematic price calculation: Price = 500 * 1.5^Tier * max(100, schematicRunTime) Market bots will now temporarily buy your T1 ore for double the usual price. (They will also purchase T2 ore.) This is to compensate for the absence of other income-providing methods that will be introduced early next year. Please keep your eyes peeled in case we announce additional changes/updates.

Hello. For those that were unable to attend (or simply prefer the forums over Discord), here is a transcript of the AMA JC held on Thursday, December 10th to field questions about the 0.23 patch release. I would like to issue a very big and special thank-you to a player by the name of The Chargent on Discord for compiling this information! If you see him around, please let him know he's an asset to the DU community. ❤️ (Note that the entire AMA is available to read on Discord as well for posterity.) Here we go! Blue responses are from JC, default text colour are the questions: **Asteroid mining before or after territory warfare?** NQ-Sophon: before! **VarietyMMOs: Jc. The element destruction and core replacement in the latest patch has made pvp and Lose-lose situation. Even if you win a fight you still lose in overall resoureces. How will this be addressed? is asteroids nq response to this? if so when will they be implemented** NQ-Sophon: The key idea in the evolution of PvP that we have in mind is to allow you to better target parts of the ships you want to target, and also have different types of damage for different types of elements/voxels in the ship, so the current situation where you have to obliterate a ship to "win" should go. But this is not for "right now". **Akthurya: Could you say more about other income-providing methods and what are the NQ plan to incent players to explore multiple carrier and path to generate quanta? (Not having every player as an industrial man/woman)** NQ-Sophon: It's indeed at the heart of what we have tried to do with 0.23 to make it more like the game is a "society of players" rather than solo/small group self sufficients entities. That does not mean you cannot play solo, but you will use the markets to interact (anonymously) with thousands of others. Now, the key to this is to be able to make money and it's true that right now, it's mostly mining. In fact, there is also trading, but for various reasons this has not been used so far (mostly because the economy was not igniting as everybody almost was playing in isolation). The next step is for us to introduce a mission system where you will be able to make money, and (this is still in discussion) possible competitive arenas (for PvP) where players can face each other (without risks for their real ships). This would be an extension of the current tutorial "instance" mechanisms, but you will be able to bring a ship along with you. These are just example, we are working hard on the pb of "how to make money without mining all the time" **NQ-Sophon: Why was the update brought now and not next year? => ** the reasoning is that the game is currently getting people to reach end game way too fast. Once you have been to endgame, it's hard to go back. So, it's better to fix this asap so that new players to not be impacted and have the proper experience. It's not cool, we get it, but this is the way the game should have been from the start. Now on the bright side: think of all the business opportunities in the game right now. Lots of people with lots of needs, and lots of trade/cooperation/exchange possible. This is a new challenge, and we believe it is surmountable. We might have to do some minor adjustment over the coming weeks, so we stay listening to you guys, but the core idea will remain. **CDEEKS: So, what are NQ doing to improve the solo player experiance and small group as often many mmo games cater too much to the larger groups and oprgs and the little guy is left behijnd.** NQ-Sophon: Extension of the above answer, to clarify: 1. mission system (more about that soon, in the next release), 2. more events, 3. arenas/sandboxes based on the tutorial system but more "open", 4. asteroids yes!. A bit later we will have a revamp of the PvP and territory warfare. **InfoDeath: Question: How are you going to address the fact that some organizations that had members in the Test Server, and were aware of the latest changes ahead of time, Used that insider information to stockpile various endgame items before the patch was announced?** NQ-Sophon: We are going to introduce a much larger public test server soon. And we will keep working with ATV with a different approach that will be more about discussing future evolution ahead of the push in the test server. We want to avoid pushing completely new stuff in production as we have done so far. **Virtual: Question: Will the ability to blueprint anyone's ship you have build mode on from before the update be fixed?** NQ-Sophon: Yes, this is a problem that will be fixed at the latests by next week. The fix is in QA. **WhiteMeat: Hi JC, I really don't have any issues with this update at all honestly, and a lot of unnecessary complaints. However what I love about this game is that you can be creative. What I don't like is that it takes quite a bit of work for you to excersize any type of creativity. Are there plans to give us a bit more freedom for this, rather than spending months to get the right color of honeycomb trained for your building, etc. ?** NQ-Sophon: We are really considering the possibility to introduce a form of sandbox mode: like a tutorial, but with infinite stuff in it and persistence. It would not be in the real world (so all you can bring along from there is a blueprint), but it would allow you to build, test ships, etc, with no strings attached. **NoRezervationz: Hi JC! I have a background in real life manufacturing. I know for a fact that manufacturers use their own R&D to make their designs (you call them schematics) and use that single design/schematic across all their machines. Why did NQ decide that the same schematic needed to be bought multiple times for multiple machines? Related, why wasn't there a system in place for players to do their own "R&D" on schematics instead of buying them bots? I ask this, because you made many references to real life comparisons in your last Q&A** NQ-Sophon: The proper way to look at a schematics (the name is perhaps misleading) is that it's a whole factory in fact. It's a thing that allows you to produce complicated products in mass volume, from components. A factory is usually worth millions or billions $ in real world, to produce goods that are way cheaper that the cost of the factory. This analogy can help to understand the prices here and the metaphor. And R&D on schematics: yes this is planned, I don't know when we will have time to implement it, but it's a good idea. And perhaps we will introduce also way to earn schematics without necessarily buying them on the markets, but for now this is the first step we had to take. **Odendis: Will NQ consider a more agile process of development where patches are generally smaller but more frequent. Can we also have Dev Dairies return so we know what is being worked on and can weigh in on it.** NQ-Sophon: yes, we plan to be more agile in the future: sharing our design plans with the community more in advance and engage in discussion ahead, plus using the future public test server to push smaller iterations more often. **MalphasWats: @NQ-Sophon Hi, What roles do you see more casual players filling in the next 6 months or so? What content will there be aimed at 'shorter' play sessions?** NQ-Sophon: As I said in a previous question, there are a lot of things cooking that will address precisely that. One example is the mission system. You'll be able to fulfill small missions (issued by other players, or by Aphelia) with a clearly stated difficulty (mass to transport, distance, etc). This is a cool way to go around in the game world, to make a bit of money and to build relations with other players (the mission issuers). Always this idea of a society of players. **XKent: Why you advertise game as PVP and don't care about PVP ? You do advertise NOW as PVP, not in 2 patches. You nerf it over and over to the point that it's impossible to PVP. DU is fake news ?** NQ-Sophon: PvP is probably going to be the biggest overhaul of next year and it will change it deeply in a super cool way, introducing a lot of tactical elements, and more roles, more options. I'm really excited to talk about it with you and we should probably to a dedicated live session on that. Rest assured that we care a LOT about PvP. Things take time however. **Alias: 2. please bear in mind that not all noveans read patch notes. So my suggestion is to implement more popups for every player to highlight the biggest changes (like alt+f4, industry changes..) and make patch notes readable ingame :slight_smile: ** NQ-Sophon: 2 => We are actually putting the finishing touches to a new launcher, which will allow us to push news about the game directly to the players, and also will have a dedicated section for patch notes. It should come for 0.24 or before early in the year. **McSoon: Mining unit soon ?** NQ-Sophon: mining units are tied to Territory Warfare, because TW is also about giving more value to territory tiles, some of which will be related to their capacity to be mined with those mining units. **_Kiwi_: When are we going to get a second solar system?** NQ-Sophon: the plan is to have that somewhere in the second part of 2021, definitely for release **copperlein: Will it be possible to use the recycler in the future to recycle elements?** NQ-Sophon: The recycler is in discussion yes, no shipping date yet, but it will come **smurfenq: How are we as pirates supposed to earn anything when we have put all our efforts into one specific area of the game that now can't earn you anything as the stuff we shoot will be deleted? There is currently no way for us to communicate/surgically destroy enemy ships, so isnt the consequence for bad decision making rushed as there is no decision for us to make, i.e. AVA or specific elelemt targeting.'** NQ-Sophon: First, there is the points I mentioned about the future of PvP where you will be able to be more surgical in attacks. Also, the idea here is that a ship can be partially destroyed (with restoration points remaining), so it's not clear that you will necessarily run it down entierely each time. But the recycler would help to make sense of that, I agree **3ApNTerra: What lead you to the decision to increase bot ore prices. This is just removing more resources from the game rather than encouraging those resources to be used.** NQ-Sophon: It is meant to be temporary until we introduce more ways to make money (next release with mission system). We will see how that flies and we might revert anything related to bots at any given time. **Alias: 3. ammunition schematics are all at 168.750Q ?! why all same price? and why so cheap? compared with other things its just a drop onto an hot stone ? - must be changed - ammo shouldnt be that easy to have/get in mass!** NQ-Sophon: 3 => the schematics price formula is P = 500 * 1.5^Tier * max(100, SchematicsRunTime) **Catavarie: Are there any plans for providing analytical market data such as price history and volume moved of each individual item so that players can better determine what to specialize their production towards and an API with which market data can be analyzed outside of the game? And any timeline on when these market features can be expected?** NQ-Sophon: Definitely, as we know this is crucial for traders to do their (very important) job. However, this is also a lot of work for the team. Right now, we are discussing the much easier option to introduce a market API so that you guys are not stuck for too long times. **Dr. Dehydration: Hello JC, I see many players calling for a wipe. Instead of a wipe what if a element decay system was implimented? This could clear up a lot of abandoned ships and other various buildings and elements from the servers, as well as open up territories which were claimed.** NQ-Sophon: there is a detailed plan we have to introduce "garbage collecting" of abandoned constructs but this is not a priority. Element decay sounds like something that could be seen as too harsh if it's generalized. **Dropdeadfred: Could you please consider adding all of the T1 schematics, and Kergon, to every planet? There are a ton of players in the outlying planets that were unaware that a change like this was coming. Some of us are looking at a 10-12 hour round trip, plus fuel expenses, simply to have refiners making iron again. We can't even make the fuel needed to make the trip.** NQ-Sophon: We will see. But what you just said sounds like a fantastic business opportunity for "entrepreneurs" in the game to provide you with a market-efficient solution ? People say there is not much to do, but each of these design choice are made to trigger indirect opportunities for some players to address needs of other players and make a business out of it. Let's see how it evolves. **TacticalDonut: Has these last 24 hours given you any insight into your industry changes, for instance schematic prices? Will we be compensated for any changes in prices if we already bought in(with every quanta we have)?** NQ-Sophon: We are aware of that and honestly we don't have an answer right now. We need to look into what's possible to do and if we can compensate players without leading to abuses. We have a meeting planned to discuss it but I don't have an answer right away, I'm sorry. **Regarding Meganodes** (This issue has since been fixed.) NQ-Sophon: Yes, we know. This is a tricky problem. We tried to fix a bug around territory scanner results and it introduced this issue on mega nodes. The plan is now to fix the fix, but it will reshuffle the ore distribution in any "cell" not yet mined. That means: more mining opportunities (good), but also all scanner results on untouched territory tiles will become invalid. We tend to think it's better to regen the ore and invalidate the scanner results, but we know some players made a business out of those scanner results, so... **ChaoticOne: You say people are reaching "end game" too fast. What is even end game in a building game? As long as I have ideas, there is NO end game. So how do you get to determine that for us? Can we just admit that this was a back end way to save the servers from not being able to handle what you thought it could? I don't play games to spend years trying to just build a box. Sorry this was alot, but all questions are of same caliber.** NQ-Sophon: The changes made in 0.23 have nothing to do with server limitations. When I talk about end game here, I was mostly talking about the industry gameplay. And, as a consequence, the isolationism that impaired the economy. **BonemanJones: Will we ever be able to create mining ships with drills on them to allow us to mine more efficiently?** NQ-Sophon: Not in the short term, but it's not out of the question in particular for asteroid mining. Note that we can't also have mega chunks of stuff mined in one shot, because of server calculation costs involved. **CedriVastal: A pressing question among many builders and architects is would it be feasible under the current engine to implement finer controls or more sensitive incremental rotations for precision placement in build mode as well as core placement/blueprint placement?** NQ-Sophon: Definitely, and it does not seem like a huge addition to put on our side. Like everything else, we need to balance priorities here. **McSoon: Mining unit soon ?** NQ-Sophon: mining units are tied to Territory Warfare, because TW is also about giving more value to territory tiles, some of which will be related to their capacity to be mined with those mining units. **Forodrim: 1. I see that on the Start Screen there is the exploration and shipwreck now ticked as finished. Does that mean the current version of it is the final version? Because I think it is rather underwhelming as it involves no real game mechanic, like scanning or similar. ** NQ-Sophon: 1. => most feature like that is never really finished, so we could invest more and more time in it forever. We will continue to make small adjustment and iterate on it, but we can't invest vast amount of time in it anymore (hence the ticked box), at least for now (until release is done) **Noddles: Why not introduce power mechanics first and see how the effect industry before these changes?** NQ-Sophon: power (or, "energy management" as we call it) is tied to territory tiles, hence it is also tied to the big "territory warfare" update, which include a lot of work on making each tile more valuable, including related to their energy production capacity. We could decouple it, but this is not the current plan. **EveManny: Can JC meet us out in the PVP zone after this AMA so we can uh "speak"** NQ-Sophon: Sure. I'll bring my "godmode" powers and we'll have a friendly chat :slight_smile: **Kurock: With players mining big holes in the planets, is there a plan to do anything with the tunnels and new cavities formed?** NQ-Sophon: Not at the moment, but there is a possibility one day that we regen underground areas that are not under claimed territories, to save on resources on our side. **GraySeeker: ‘ think of all the business opportunities in the game right now. Lots of people with lots of needs, and lots of trade/cooperation/exchange possible.’ All NQ talk seems to be centred around this business premise. It seems that you are overlooking one important factor: People like to build stuff themselves.Creative people aren’t driven by economics, power etc. The driving force is to create, to build. And DU is awesome for this. A primary reason the market hasn’t been used as you would like could be because people love to make the stuff themselves. Are you concerned that people will sink all their money into schematics to carry on building as they have been, buying little else from the market which could end a potentially worse situation? If you think mining to buy a mass produced component is more interesting than making it yourself then you are in danger of purposefully killing the fun of the game** NQ-Sophon: We don't expect all player to "sink all their money into schematics" in fact. We expect a minority (10%?) to go into the industry gameplay, and compete on the market to provide low cost "products" to all the other players. It will be vastly cheaper to go buy on the market, than trying to produce yourself (like in the real world). We will how that works, but this answer is a call to arms for industrialists: you have a lot of customers out there waiting for you! Also, about the more creative side: as I said above, we are really thinking about creative sandboxes. More to come soon. **Nemaca: Hello, as a new player, how can I learn the new ways? Are the Turtorials updated? Thanks!** NQ-Sophon: I know we have spent a lot of time updating the tutorials but I'm not sure it's completely done (and, in general, we would like to add way more tutorials). I need to check that with the team. Hopefully also we will see some videos coming out with more details. About the new industry, I would recommend: if you want to become industrialist, start small, pick a slice in the production chain, buy the components, sell the products, and iterate. Soon enough you will have a pretty large factory, especially if you start with T1 **Regarding Support** NQ-Sophon: We tried to explain the situation in the AMA on Monday. The truth is that we got absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of tickets we received at the launch of the beta, despite the fact that we had ramped up our support team in preparation. We had a exponential effect between the number of new players and the number of bugs and issues, which flooded our support channels. So what we did is we prioritized the tickets, first with the ones that were preventing players from playing the game. For the past few weeks we've been going back to the backlog, with most tickets now honestly obsolete. It's really not ideal, and a lot of tickets got answered very late, admittedly. I can ensure you though that we've ramped up our team even more (but it takes time to train the teams on a game like DU), we are building more tools to help the team, and we're almost done with the backlog of tickets at this point.

Hey Kirth, If you disagree with moderation you received, please contact the moderator that issued the warning/ban/mute to discuss your situation further. Also note that while we try to be as consistent as possible, there will be times when both NQ staff and the volunteer mod team misses incidents due to the speed of chat on Discord. (We strongly encourage everyone to report any rule breaking behaviour to ensure nothing slips between the cracks.)

Ha. Yesterday was certainly an adventure in fire-fighting. From my perspective regarding the direction of the game, I can see what the long-term vision is. I intellectually understand the choices made, as do many players. I can also understand how many players seem to be left wishing the changes were introduced more gradually and announced earlier. I think the entire team learned a lot from the happenings of 0.23, and I feel we will do better in both areas with the next update.

Hello everyone, We are preparing an update for next week (Monday, December 14th is our aim) that will enforce DRM protection for constructs in Dual Universe with the ultimate goal of facilitating construct trading in the game. There are several possible cases though that we would like players to be aware of. We have currently have three types of constructs in the game: Constructs made before the introduction of creatorID earlier this year, which therefore have no creatorID on them because the feature did not yet exist. Constructs made from a blueprint created after the introduction of creatorID but before 0.23. These have a creatorID, but DRM were not activated on them. Constructs made from a blueprint created post-0.23 have both a creatorID and DRM protection by default (unless the creator decides to make a DRM-free blueprint). Type A constructs will unfortunately forever be unprotected as they do not include a trace of their original creator. Players who wish to trade them or make blueprints out of them should be aware that no DRM will be enforceable on them. For Type B constructs, we will forcefully activate the DRM for you with this update. This means that in certain rare cases, if you have added yourself a Control Unit or a Screen (not part of the original blueprint) to this construct, it will get DRM protected as well in the update. You will not be able to access the content of those Control Units or Screen Units after the DRM activation patch. Instead, you can either: Remove them and redeploy them. (You will need a copy of the content somewhere in a file elsewhere on your computer because you won’t be able to save it in-game). Contact the construct creator to ask him to unlock DRM on these specific elements. Type C constructs behave as expected and already benefit from DRM protection for all elements that are part of the original blueprint. New elements added to them by the owner are not DRM protected, so the owner can freely edit them; however, the update made on a Type B construct will unfortunately impact them as well, and the DRM protection will be forced upon all elements, new or old. You may have to resort to the two possible solutions explained above for Type B. We hope this information was useful! Thank you for reading! ?

Hey guys, I appreciate the thoughts about the talent reset. I will definitely be sharing this with the team!

Hi everyone! ❤️ I promised I'd be in here to answer questions, but the list grew A LOT! I'm having the entire team pick at the questions to ensure I'm delivering the best answers. (Just so you know why I'm delayed.) NQ-Pann is in the process of writing a stream recap as well, so please be on the lookout for that in the coming days.

Hello Noveans, With the latest release (0.23), we are introducing some pretty radical changes to the industry gameplay. We would like to take the time here to explain the rationale behind those decisions. First, let us start by reminding everyone that we are still in Beta, which is a place where core balancing is supposed to happen in order to prepare a game that will stand the test of time at release. We understand that some changes will impact the current game style of many players, but keep in mind that everything is done for a good reason, which we will try to explain below. Industry Recipes as Items The central idea behind the industrial gameplay is that an Industry Unit (Assembly, Chemical Reactor or others) is a sort of mini factory. It should come with an initial and substantial cost you have to invest before starting to commit yourself to mass producing the goods that this unit allows to produce. Mass production is a key element here. If you need just one or two items it should not make sense to build a factory to produce such small quantities. You should instead go on the markets and buy it from a specialized producer. This is the basis on which we can hope to see a healthy economy strive in the game. It follows then that the initial cost to build a factory must be much higher than the cost of production of one unit, and by a very large margin. This has not been the case so far. The price of an industry unit was often on par (or even far below) the unit cost of products it could output. As a result, buying on markets made little sense. Markets overall were not being used as much as they were intended to, and players built omni-factories to produce anything they needed even if they only needed it in small quantities. This would be a great design for a single player game or a hosted-server game but not for a civilization-building game with a single-shard approach where player specialization is central and paramount. This is what the “Schematics as Items'' modification is intended to fix. (We renamed “recipes” to “schematics” because even if we are a French company, we don’t want to bring cooking too much into the factory!) We don’t intend to touch the price of existing Industry Units, but instead we have added a schematic item that you must load individually into a single Industry Unit (there is now a small schematic bank container integrated). Having the schematic item in the Industry Unit schematic bank is needed to run a particular schematic, so you will need several instances of the same schematic item if you want to produce the same item on several Industry Units at the same time. Those schematic items are sold by bots on markets, and they are much more expensive than the Industry Unit they run on. Each factory needs a schematic associated with it. This is why you need to buy several of them if you want to run production on several lines simultaneously. Adding a line of production for a new item will come with a steep initial cost investment. This makes total sense if you plan to mass produce the item, but is suboptimal if you just need a small quantity of this item. You would be better off going to the market to buy at minimal cost from specialized producers competing against each other. If you're only planning to produce a couple of decorative plants to customize your underground lair, it’s probably going to be more cost-effective for you to buy them from a market than buying a schematic for it or else the cost of this couple of plants would be excessive. What does this mean for industrial players? If you already have a giga factory, you will still have it, but it will now need a significant starting investment to buy the schematics needed for production and a commitment to mass produce and sell in order to make economic sense. You could specialize it to improve its returns or you could even consider reselling part of it on the markets to revert to another strategy. You could perhaps take it as a new challenge, a reboot of the game goal where the balancing between initial setup cost and cost of a single item will be central to your success. Something else to note is the fact that the introduction of items for schematics means that we may later be able to introduce a Research gameplay feature where players can improve schematics to get an edge not only in productivity but also in the quality of the product they create. This could additionally open the possibility of selling schematics, an option we may consider for the future (though it will not be anytime soon). New Talents Before the 0.23 update, there was no barrier to use any advanced Industry Unit or advanced weapon. If you had it, you knew how to use it. This was both counter-intuitive in general (before you buy new gear, it’s normal that you learn how to use them) and went against the idea of character progression as intended in the game. We have now introduced new talents to unlock access to basic industry (very easy) and also the more advanced versions or the larger versions, which are more advanced talents. This will contribute to player specialization, which is a central idea in the design of Dual Universe. That’s it for now. Thank you again for your support and your constant help along the path. See you soon in Dual Universe! JOIN THE DISCUSSION!

I'm loving this discussion.

This looks epic ?

You should set up a betting pool, @blazemonger ?

Alrighty, here we are! The official discussion thread is open for business. If you haven't read it, check out the announcement post here! Please place all of your burning questions and comments for JC in the comments below. ?

Thank you both for weighing in, by the way.

You're so right - how rude of me!! I went back and gave him a like.

I spoke out of turn, folks! JC bot remains. I will proudly wear the egg that's now on my face - yes we're doing an audit of our Discord server, and yes bots are part of that, but I misunderstood which bot was being looked at!! Forgive me - in my rush to be responsive, I was too hasty.

I'd love to attempt to reverse the punched feeling, if I can! What would make wrecks feel the most satisfying for you? What *should* this event look like, in your opinion? I posted elsewhere about this (I believe it's in the feedback thread re: GO_D ST__), but the current version of any event we run is in no way indicative of what'll happen in the future. Right now we're trying to figure out what works and... well, what doesn't. And you've all been great about helping us understand what doesn't work. ?

...I was really invested in your story telling style, @Umibozu! ? I wish all feedback was delivered this way!

JC will be doing a Q&A session, hopefully next week, that will touch on update information!

I'm obsessed with that, @Bobbie!!!! Looking great!

Hm, I just drafted a post for the Refer-a-Friend program's return, so news about that will be coming out in the next couple of weeks. I personally don't know anything about the status of backer packs/pricing, but I'll inquire.

Excellent questions, @le_souriceau ❤️ I passed this feedback along to the team this morning, and have returned with some answers. 1) You're right, and this is a goal we're actively striving to meet. (As the NQ team and game grow, so to does our ability to develop better processes/alignment between Community, Marketing and Game Design; the trifecta of event-related departments.) Put plainly, we're getting organized and finding our rhythm. The earlier events are announced, the better. (Unless of course we purposely want to sew the seeds of mystery & surprise.) 2) This one is tougher to do at present, but it's not out of the question in the future! Running events in/for DU is obviously a newer experience for us, so the first handful we run are not indicative of what will happen down the road. We'd love to try some weekend events eventually, we just have to do some serious finessing on our current iteration of events. Once we've hit an events 'sweet spot' as it were, we can staff for weekend coverage and go to town. Right now however, we want to stick to weekdays so everyone at NQ is at their desk and ready to jump in should anything happen. 3) We're heading in this direction! It's always been our desire to hold events that last for long stretches of time. This particular event was obviously limited in some ways, but again - that's not indicative of what you can expect for every future event. We're just getting started. (If I may add a little comparison for point 3: we've seen the community ask us to please prioritize the fixing of bugs before the implementation of feature changes. This is the philosophy we're applying to events, essentially. Fix any issues with events first, THEN upgrade to weekend event 'features'.) 4) Noted!! One team member raised a good point that I'd like to volley back to all of you: "right now, it's tough to design an event that works for solo/new players that also can't be overwhelmed/overrun with more experienced folks". What say all of you? What kinds of solo events would you like to see during Beta that can't be taken over by groups/experienced players?