Deintus

Contact Xsolla directly and tell them you need to cancel and will contest/chargeback any future charge. 
 
If they still don't cancel the sub, do exactly that -- contest the charge with your CC or bank explaining that their ability to stop a sub was confusing or not functional. 
 
 

Agreed. As I have seen for myself, as well as many others here have stated. Touching a production model is verboten except by a specific person. The only time I have ever seen servers touched like that is just when they're in alpha state.
 

This is just yet another avoidable repeat of what happens when a company is incapable of acting professionally towards it's customer base. Anyone thats been around the game world awhile has seen this scenario play itself out in EA games before. I would be surprised if they didn't have enough funding to carry them through this year, otherwise they probably would care more about what I would guess is the majority of players being free accounts.
 
I like this game a lot. It highly disappoints me to see a game developer make such a glaring mistake in how it handles what should be a common sense response to a problem they created. This was not some unpopular game design thing that can be argued to be better for the game as a whole. This was a patch to their reputation , and it got nerfed.  
 

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.
 

Frankly, when they promoted the game with Build large, Spacestations as large as the moon, play alone or with others, Freedom rich PvP Player driven Market, build civilization!
I did not think it would turn up like this.
What we got was something totally different:
Build on large cores what is  very small, spacestations very small and large is possible by placing more cores that you cannot link or merge with eachother so you have a borgcluster and not a station, Do not play alone or we will Find you and limit you and also we give out gifts to large organizations but dont tell, Freedom within limitations and boundaries, Plaer driven to NPC markets, rich through exploids not PvP, build puzzles not civilazation.
 
@NQ-AdminI (probably we, if i know the others who are critical as well as i think)  still love the original concept and do think NQ has some really great developers but the strategical desicions made do the project more harm then good and when you look at what it Can be verses what it is going to be, the road we are walking now leads to a limited vanila modless SE server with Clanginized PvP and defect B&R and only lvl1 handdrilling allowed with extra restrictions on production blocks and progression steps cost an exponential factor per level.
 
I already have SE with less restrictions, why would i need one with more?
 
Please live up to your potential!  Do not linger in satisfaction for dreams half progressed, Be what you Can be, Live Life Die another day, Roll Back instead of growing molds, Be Brave and go there where No Company has gone before! Reach out to the community because We did hear you, we did read your posts and we do see the strugle that is there. We Do want to support, But Damn you make it so hard for us to actually do so.
 
Critizism and comments are easier given to those/things you carry close to the heart as you want them/it to flourish. You do not punish your kids because you hate them, you try to teach them ways to be glorious adults.
 
Dont see our comments and critizism in any other way, We love your game, we love your work. But the direction this leads to we have seen fail before and we want to keep this glorious project from going into That route.

I'm here because I'm a stubborn, stupid optimist... Just like I am with Star Citizen, which is finally (finally, thank the gods) starting to shape up into something epic with -and this is key- *visibly accelerating* momentum... At the beginning of Star Citizen's development in 2012, the scope was small and tame, but in 2014 (IIRC) with $25m or 10x the original planned budget of $2.5m already in the bag, Chris Roberts sent out a request to vote on the forums for the following:  

1) Continue and complete Star Citizen  as originally planned and start work on SC 2 or...
2) Reconsider the game from the ground up with a much expanded scope commensurate with the new income..
 
WELL over 80% chose option 2...  So SC was basically scrapped and restarted... The progress was so painfully slow, building up a proper studio, working with subcontractors who were basically pants and having to redo entire swathes of the game *again*  Many started to call it Scam Citizen,  Star Shitizen, Stop Citizen, Star Cynical and other names...  Yet it's now a very enjoyable if buggy Alpha with epic graphics and some cool game play loops. Yet it causes almost as much constant hate as the US  Dems vs Republicans shitshow that is the US political scene...
 
I was like this, positive beyond reason, with No Man's Sky, which I have played hundreds of hours and has basically become a verb: "To Pull a NMS" means to drag yourself kicking and screaming from the ashes and rise as a phoenix...
 
Another game that is controversial that I yet have hope for is Cyberpunk 2077... I am currently playing it through on the PC and though it was not as revolutionary as originally promised, the somewhat gelded game that the PC version became is nevertheless eminently playable  (I have >100 hrs so far).. If CDPR do add the patches promised, they may even have a Skyrim on their hands since the world of Night City and the badlands is just that good.
  
So I'm here watching the growth of Dual Universe in the hopes that the devs somehow manage to pull this game off... It's got so much promise and potential that it would be a hideous shame for it to crash and burn... and the years are dragging by and funding has all but dried up, so I'm only borderline positive right now...  

However... I am still here *Because* I hope DU will fulfil its potential

(Just don't ask me about how I feel about Hellion)

While razor thin at this point, yes I do. Frankly I have taken precautions in game to be able to step away any moment. I'm at the point where unless NQ shapes up and finally starts showing they are actually serious about their community and their game I may move away.. And some will rejoice no doubt if that happens
 
I think a big difference is that I have always realized that what NQ was promising and saying they wanted to achieve would not be possible for them and so my expectations, while still feeling good about the game, were lower and I guess more realistic than a lot of other players. To see them even manage to not meet my expectations  I guess is a disappointment in itself.
 
I want to be clear here, I actually think there is a some pretty smart and passionate people working at NQ and there is a lot of them with a fair amount of understanding of the business and what should happen. It is IMO those in middle and upper management positions that are pretty much clueless about what needs to happen and what needs to change. And that is where the "we heard you but we're not listening" comes from. Unless these people come to their senses and start changing or step aside for those that can accomplish change to take over, NQ will not be abel to pulll this one out of the fire. 
 
Frankly, I think NQ should drop the Paris office and focus on/relocate to Montreal entirely. It may hurt in the short term but it will give the company and the game a chance going forward. As I expect they are pretty strapped for cash by now, something will need to give and completely moving to one location, which then logically would be Montreal, makes actual sense..
 
 
Honestly? not much. Everything here once more points at an idea from one person thinking this is the one mechanic that will save the game. And it won't as there is no framework to support the feature which in itself could be great just like the schematics system is fine but without the mechanics to feed into such a system (and yes, as is the case in EVE where they got the idea from). What NQ seems to want to do is very much like the jobs board in Eco, it works really well there because the game actually drives and promotes player interaction and co-operation at every level, not shove "you _will_ work in/as a group/org, we will nerf your options and buff org options until you do" down the players throats the way NQ is currently doing in DU.
 
NQ will once again rush this, release a badly tested patch with a broken/half done feature which needs a lot of work and in the process they wil break more stuff as well since there is a lot of stuff that is broken in game and just covered up by band aids.

Not true. 
 
1) Starting conditions of new world at Beta release were leaked. Not a big deal (on surface), but was used to some extent to grab best spots faster/figure out optimal rush strategy. I knew some details in advance.
2) 1st attempt to intdocude wrecks was (most likely) leaked, this why many most valuable things were found almost instantly. Yet, I have no solid proof on this one.
3) 2nd attempt to introduce wrecks (locations) was 100% leaked, this why NQ introduced silly "loot limit" to do at least some damage control without aborting whole event. I had leak about this in advance.
4) 0.23 patch principal info (90% accurate) was at least 10 days before in hands of many interested parties, who without delay started to use it for profit, bying things to sell after (I had this info too, via my "press channels", as all other). For some people such inside produced hundreds of millions of speculative money. 
 
This is only what humble me knows, likely its much more to this.
 
 

That makes absolutely no sense... 

I don't care if you feel they deserve it or not, but let's for argument say you wanted to punish them, then how, pray tell, would you go about punishing an anonymous person who purchased billions worth of 99% discount schematics?

I'll wait here...
 

A lot of these comments ar coming from players who have been in the game for some time and who understand what it takes to build such a ship. They forget that for anew player who knows nothing this is absolutely not something they are ready for. The experience we have built in game as early backers or even those who got in at beta is so valuable going forward an dit's for a bit part that experience that makes me feel that if NQ were to wipe it would not actually be much of an issue for many of us and we'd be up and running very quickly, especially with the blueprints and talent points retained.
 
Those of us who were here September 2017, we remember the trouble of getting to space and the way the flight system worked back then. While there is a lot of things we can complain about and frankly rightfully so, a much has also gotten a lot better over time. The flight mechanics are still not _really_ good but compared to the first iteration it is pretty solid and easy to get to grips with.
 
So no, for a new player it's not easy. DU has a massive initial hump because it's mostly designed by nerds who forgot that their player base is mostly people who need to be guided beyond a 2 hour introduction.. The tutorials take a lot of knowledge for granted as well and really could be more basic and explain better why things work and how. But that is an entire topic by itself

I love the fact that constructs in Starbase Alpha suffer stress-load from gravity and acceleration (yeah, I know, gravity IS acceleration) and you have to build your constructs to be able to absorb the stresses due to mass and thrust.
Very cool! Would put an end to those 1km tall single voxel towers on Alioth

True, it is one of those things that really shows that NQ does not understand the impact  their ideas or comments have.
 
 
While the schematics thing is not really an exploit, I do agree that NQ can't treat this as if it's a trivial event that has no impact on the game, especially when they are trying to prevent a wipe at all cost. If you do not wipe you need to be able and willing to repair any damage that can have a lasting effect on the game. It's a simple matter of either/or.

Of course, the resources you need to build grow on trees. Or do you buy them on the market from the pittance you get from the daily login?
 
I call the game Landmark in space. And your visions that you mention are not what people gave money for back then and made this project possible in the first place to be where it is now. And the various changes of course have managed to make the game dependent on a pillar on which everything rests. 

You know, this is actually plausible given past experiences...
 
I mean... I don't THINK so... but the seed of doubt is now in my mind... ?
 
@Aaron Cain
Yes, again based on past experiences, I personally would never post another ingame screen shot publicly even if it is legit within the guidelines.

Something tells me Elitez got herself a bunch of schematics on Friday... ?
 
/troll

If NQ are making the programmers do 3D modelling, it explains a lot. Not only why even simple design changes seem to take so much time (people having to switch tasks), but also the gigantic and clunky looking furniture and overall boring/simplistic design of elements.
 
It is very telling when players can make better looking furniture using voxelmancy and all it's inherent limitations, then NQ can do with total freedom and proper 3D mesh modelling tools. And the sad thing is, if NQ truly was the progressive community driven company they tried to portrait in the beginning. They would have turned element/furniture design into a community competition. I bet lots of players would have put their heart and soul (and countless hours) into making elements for free, just for the bragging rights of having them become an official part of the game.

I've always said that any bug a company is not willing to rollback or mitigate in an entirely fair way should be announced to the whole player base so that everyone has a reasonable chance of benefitting from it...

This is standard business practice 101: "More than actual, absolute compensation, worker parity -or indeed the perceived disparity thereof- is an important driver of workplace conflict and general employee disaffection."

Yeah, I know this is a game and not a job (though someimtes it feels like one) but this well established concept of hygiene factors extends far, far beyond the workplace and to membership of organisations and society in general. Anyone who runs a company should be well aware of this... JC!!!!

The FOMO is real and I'm kicking myself now that I didn't take advantage of that and leverage my 20m of liquid assets into 2,000,000,000 ℏ worth of schematics.

Damn, did I miss yet another exploit?
what happened this time? 1 ℏ schematics?
 
 
---edit: I see I was nearly on the mark... not a bad guess, if I do say so myself.
 
 

Even if it there was some specific way (please show me) for new players to 'easily' get decent progress without running the mining gantlet, after 0.23 the entire premise of the game is broken.
 
Remember, the initial promise was:
And 0.23 is the complete antithesis of this.

Not for a second to I believe the CM team are at fault, they are a great bunch of peeps and if anything i say appears to be critical of the CM team (unless of course i do it explicitly) then I can assure you I don't believe they are at fault, actually I believe the CM team are a saving grace for NQ.
 
If anything goes wrong within my team that I am responsible for then simply put the fault is my own, it doesn't matter if a junior member made the mistake or I made it, if I am responsible then I am responsible, that is why I hold the upper management of NQ responsible for these blunders; the mistake should not have happened in the first place.
 
I think that argument being used means something, it means that NQ are trying to take cues from a company with a hell of a lot more experience with an MMO in production, this means they need to temper their expectations of what they can achieve.
More to the point my understanding is some of the upper management including JC aren't seasoned game designers, my understanding is they are scientists who decided to build a civ sim, that makes sense and it shows; a grand vision, promises of features and building of hype are all well and good but it is the execution of it all that matters, all this is to say that they really should look at how they are making decisions and be honest with themselves; from my point of view some of these decisions are really harming the reputation of the company never-mind the game.
 
Absolutely it should, if they aren't able to do this then it highlights either a gross inexperience in design or that they are so up against it that they have had to put off implementing such systems, neither of which bode well for a release.
 
This was due to them giving out BPOS's instead of BPC's for some kind of competition?

If that is the case then i'd point out that this was a different scenario from what NQ did, giving items to players for a competition is probably a case of inputting a item id, account ids and then executing but what happened to DU was a change in the pricing for every single item sold by bots, where are the tests?

even something mundane such as:
 
// Given 
item_id = someItemWorthFiveThousand
// When
const result = getBotSellPriceForItem(item_id);
// Then
assert(result).is(5000)
 
Would at least act as a really simple guard against these mistakes; their code is probably heaps more complicated and in no way can i expect them to have such a method but I would expect them to have something LIKE this to be run when they make a change to config.
I can only assume they don't - being that this happened - or that the tests were never run in which case big yikes.

That would be true if NQ actually keeps these records as they should which frankly I fear they don't as they never considered that requirement due to a lack of understanding what it takes to build a game like DU and they make stuff up along the way without having a solid and well thought through ground level framework.
 
Besides that, undoing these transactions should be a trivial matter. Not to long ago CCP had a somewhat similar issue in EVE and dealt with it swiftly and decisively by rolling back the error and it's fallout without needing to touch anything else. They first communicated that the mistake happend, that it was corrected and that player were not to sell the incorrect blueprints, not make copies and not manufacture from them and that the incorrect blueprint would be replaced in inventory by the correct one and any blueprints or transactions based on the incorrect ones would be undone. Simple, to the point and clear. Next day at daily downtime the changes were executed like announced.. problem solved. THAT is how you deal with these mistakes and it sets the expectation that trying to take advantage is pointless as you will lose your advantage the next day.
 
NQ however continues to send out the expectation that it's fine to take advantage and you wil get away with it as they will not act in any way on it beyond correcting the mistake itself. And that is the big problem, they continue to be terrible communicators and show a chronic lack of ownership of the mistakes the make, refusing to correct the fallout of the mistake.
 
The argument some have that "CCP has had 15 years of experience" means nothing here as NQ clearly is taking many cues from EVE and they have the examples of how CCP deals with these things so they do not NEED to make these mistakes themselves. But something (or someone) in their company culture seems to say/think that they know better and will reinvent the wheel once more anyway. Also 18 years ago, CCP could make these mistakes as the world of online games was very different then, it was itself pretty much in its infancy and many online players were actually still on dial-up connections which is something a lot of the members of this community probably never actively used or are familiar with.
 
 
I agree with his and that makes this all the more worrisome. Everything we see points at both inexperience, lack of comprehension of what goes into dealing with these things and a severe lack of understanding that communication and setting the correct expectations is is key. And I would not blame the CM team here as they are just the messengers, it is the internal decision making that is the problem here. I do not believe they have the ability to actually trigger change in this internally and that is unfortunate.
 
 
 
 
In the end, mistakes happen and they will again. That is OK though as long as the way you deal with them in cleaning up and showing you take learning from them is visible. With NQ neither is the case.

If they have the necessary metadata, part of my little essay questioned whether they have. This is why this is so disturbing, it transcends the event itself and gives us an unsettling insight into what is and is not possible, obviously the decision making speaks for itself but that is damned disturbing too.

This isn't a game issue, this is a company issue and that is worse in my opinion.

What follows is perhaps the most critical thing I have said regarding NQ, I don't think it is unfair though.
 
Ok so my understanding is this: In an effort to fix a issue with pricing on a particular schematic someone managed to somehow set every bot order to about 1/100 of the price it should be selling at. Please let me know if I have missed something.
 
Now, full disclosure, I wasn't able to gain from this, I wasn't online, I am telling you now I would have taken full advantage of it and anyone who is honest knows they would too.
 
It might be fair for you to ask me something like "Why are you putting a post up of something you aren't even sure of?".
 
That question would be fair only up until you realise that nothing is being done about it, with NQ stating they were "to err on the side of caution" whatever that means.
 
Caution? It's a bit late for that now isn't it? Where was this caution when someone decided to make changes to live servers. I bet there are a ton of engineers and developers playing this game and almost all of them know the cardinal rule: You never, ever, ever mess with production code or data before fully testing it on a representative environment or as close to one as you can get!
 
By now I suspect many reading this have seen the screenshot of someone holding 112 warp beacon xl schematics, not 1 or 2 but 112, if they also bought the necessary sub components then you are looking at production of an end game item at a scale that just should not be.
 
NQ, where is the philosophy you so passionately and vocally used to defend the changes made in 0.23? Your insistance that having players being able to run up mega factories is a bad idea? Everything you as a company put out at that time is contradictory to the inaction on this issue.
 
NQ, how are you meeting the statement you made after 0.23, you remember don't you? The one that stated you would be more communicative, you would test things out more before you rolled them out, what about internally? Did you not learn from the knee jerk reaction that was the talent reset?
 
NQ, it boggles my mind that you don't see this as a serious problem, it isn't just about those 30 minutes and the minority of players getting a leg up it is about what comes after.
Looking at this selfishly as an example, i mine like a madman for weeks and I finally buy schematics and a warp beacon, i mine more to build the beginnings of a space station, i keep on mining to buy more schematics and before Thursday I at least figured I had made an honest dent into building a foundation in this game; those 30 minutes demolished all that work.
 
These points don't just apply to me, they apply to any player who wasn't lucky enough to get in on the schematic grab.
 
Ok ramble over, NQ it is time to point out why this is all quite disturbing to me as a player (i would hope others too):
 
1. This has demonstrated a severe lack in your processes, you've lost customer confidence
2. Your decision making in the aftermath is abyssmal; your going to do nothing? 
3. The reasoning for your inaction is.....well it isn't reasoning; 'err on the side of caution'.
4. Your inaction points to (from more likely to tinfoil hat):
  a. You truly don't see this as a problem and are content to carry on (your wrong, it's more than just the schematics, it is the message you are sending)
  b. You now see it as a problem but you can't rollback
  c. You always saw it as a problem but you are unable to perform a rollback and you don't want to admit that
  d. You intend to wipe
  e. This was intentional for the benefit of a group of players (tinfoil yes but it's not the first time a mmo has done this).
5. You either can't trace player transactions or don't have the time to rectify your mistake meaning this is an intensive process.
6. Your communication on this matter has been more pointed to 'stay silent and it will blow over' rather than addressing concerns.
7. Your indiffference to this matter
 
I like DU, I see the potential, but potential isn't enough, at this point features won't be enough, your team appears to be lacking process, experience or maybe just passion, that or someone is calling the shots and  overriding the devs decisions, this isn't the first simple mistake as a result of quick decision making or poor thought, something needs to change and it needed to change 4 days ago
 
 

DU is a game that just keeps on giving, even when you don't play anymore. I love it. *popcorn sounds*

Why is this such a hard thing to fix?  Just find those purchases in the database, refund the money to the player, and remove the schematics.  It might be too late by now, players may have already made millions selling them off.  But if they REALLY cared about the economy as much as they say they do, they could find out who bought one and reverse that purchase as well.
 
IDK, probably too late.  What a cluster****.