When making their plane design decisions during WW2, the US-army once concluded that the most-hit areas of planes should be the parts which must be improved by more armor. This seemingly common-sensical conclusion was proven to be false by the statistician Abraham Wald. The issue was that, the Army's conclusions were drawn from planes actually made home after sustaining damage. One would notice a way different damage distribution and draw very different conclusions, if one actually looked at planes that fell down in combat and didn't survive.
I suggest that a similar error might be beginning to haunt DU's developmental prioritization. NQ is beginning to take the feedback of the currently surviving DU community very deeply to decide which areas of the game they should improve immediately. While this might seem common sensical, it might also be creating a bias similar to the above example.
My (very anecdotal) experience of reading DU community gives me the impression that we have a lot of people here who enjoy making ships and constructs. I know this would be an oversimplication, but let's for the sake of argument categorize these players with othergames they might enjoy. Let's say current DU playerbase has a lot of Minecraft, Satisfactory, Factorio people. This would check out, because voxel building has been one of the most advanced and interesting aspects of DU since early alpha. So people who would enjoy this kind of gameplay came into DU and "survived". The game ended up being interesting to them at the current state.
Meanwhile people who would enjoy PvP, dogfights, exploration, empire building, creating huge organizational (managing real people, not factories) tycoons etc. either didn't come into the game yet, or didn't "survive". Eve, Star Citizen, No Man's Sky kind of players didn't fill DU's current playerbase. And I know many of them dropped out after the weak experience in their areas of interest after beta launch. Ofc, there is greater diversity in player mentality compared to alpha, but still insufficient.
I would argue in its full potential, DU should appeal to all these types for different reasons. But since the game is still in a very early stage, the population of DU is less diverse across these player mentalities and the effects of this bias are greater. Meanwhile, some developmental prioritization decisions are being made by the influence of the existing playerbase, rather than the playerbase DU should be appealing to. Here are some examples how this happens.
1) A feature upvote page was created with no regard to principles like "nobody reads the second page of search results". Then features were upvoted by mostly pre-beta players, cemented on top by the web page's design, and those began taking significant NQ attention.
2) Due to surviving players, ideas like "voxel vertices editor" or "mining bots" are heavily upvoted. These are features which the Satisfactory and Minecraft kind of players would enjoy. They wouldn't enjoy mining so they'd seek ways to build without mining. But DU should be a game which should also appeal to people who like to mine. Bots would devalue their work. Instead of working on an improved mining experience, prioritizing bots is a clear example of survivor bias in development.
3) Similarly, voxel builders are already achieving greatness in DU. Instead of elevating their gameplay further, NQ's developmental prioritization should be getting other gameplays to that level of interestingness and fun.
4) The incoming PvP patch is grounded on solving shipbuilding problems. But meaningful choices in ship design isn't the only balance domain for a fun PvP experience. In a balanced single-shard sandbox sci-fi MMO there needs to be PvP commitment, non-consensual PvP, and a meaningful risk/reward spread. I would argue the lack of warp disruptors, warp bubbles, webs; the ability of PvP'ers to bail out of any fight even after engaging in it, are more important issues than borg cubes. I'm sure it'd be better for more people if NQ solved the core gameplay experience of looking for meaningful PvP for hours and not finding anything, or the ability to bail your ship out of engagements (thus economics, chance of death, consequences not mattering), rather than fixing the shape of my ship.
Of course, in an ideal world, NQ should keep improving all aspects of the game. I am not arguing at all that the game does not need a vertices editor, nor that borg cubes aren't a big issue. I am just saying that NQ should be wary about de-prioritizing important developmental areas which also happen to have no voice in the community since people who would care about these issues aren't even playing yet.
The game is very early and I'm eager to see how things will develop. This post is meant to be more of an early warning to NQ and a conversation initiation. I hope they keep the great work up.
