Rimezx

I wasn't going to write this post. It was also a post I never actually thought I would have to write, but events since release two months ago led me to this point. 
 
I don't post a great deal on these forums, but I'm an avid reader and professional lurker since joining at the Alpha stage. I try to keep my finger on the community pulse and to keep up to date on updates and the general buzz. I've played since Alpha and mostly enjoyed all the time I've spent. There has been many times when DU has fought against me and attempted to break me down. However I was always sold, like many others, on that potential carrot on a stick of "What if?".
 
Over the DU development since 0.23 and beyond, the community was gutted due to the introduction of schematics. As updates and patches were introduced to the game, I've watched with dismay the amount of players with high standing in the community, slowly turn on NQ and Dual Universe when they get that stark realisation that this game is never going to live up to that perceived potential. Some go quietly into the night, others announce their vitriol for a few weeks before quitting with much fanfare. 

Being a player since Alpha affords me an ability to see the bigger picture of what I perceive has been going on:
 
If you look at all the updates since Beta started and outside of some balancing updates to PVP and visual upgrades, everything else has been implemented to cut costs due to what I believe as woeful inadequacies at the design and concept level. The vision of this game and what was perceived could be done, didn't match the budget available and the technology. In short, the game that NQ wanted to make didn't match what they could afford to do. Hence, I believe, this is why JC was ousted and the company is now ran by the main investment company (who I feel wants their investment back). The game has had its life and soul gutted out of it, and with every "improvement" it takes another little piece of itself away.
 
When the announcement came that this game was going to be released, I'm pretty sure we as the community, were in the unanimous agreement that it was way too soon. The game was undercooked and needed a lot more time before it was ready. Any development company who wanted their undercooked product to survive would of released it as an early access product. However, Novaquark is a business ran by an investment company who wants to recoup. Keeping the game in another few years of beta or early access wasn't going to make them anywhere near the money needed to recoup. With no new investment, there was only one possible course of action, throw it out the door and see if it sinks or swims. Unfortunately they forgot to teach it how to swim or provide any floatation aids.
 
I don't want to be one of those doomsayers who, when they're not happy with the state of the game will immediately declare "zomg, this game is dead!" But It saddens me to say that, that is what I now believe. It died sometime ago when Novaquark realised that under the budget they currently have that there was no way they could afford the server costs to make it work as intended. It just took some of us longer than it should to see it for what it is.
 
So what is the immediate future? If you look at the current lack of content and updates, all that we're really getting is the completion of the supporter goals that should of been ready on release. Beyond that, as of writing this, nothing, no road map, nothing. No enthusiasm from Novaquark, no excitement, nothing. 
 
Can the game be saved? In short, no. To do this, the game would need a large, fresh influx of money, coupled with a long protracted development time to essentially re-release and reinvent itself. We are at the point of no return though. NQ, I think are running on fumes and they know it. Releasing the game, wiping and increasing the subscription prices and then going essentially dark speaks volumes to their future plans. 
 
I do wish it wasn't this way, and I am kicking myself a little for having to write one of these posts, but I felt it needed to be said. I know this game will still have its staunch defenders (I was one of them) who will go down fighting to the very last day. But this week the game broke me. As I logged in and did my busywork and realised I was barely able to cover my costs to keep the lights on with no real goal of progression any more, my love, passion and perceived potential for the game melted away. 
 
I appreciate my rantings here are purely opinion and conjecture, but if you take the time to take a long hard look at the past few years of this games development, the clues are there. Many of us already know it and made their comments known on the various channels. The tone and overall feelings of the community are at an all time low right now and that should tell you everything as to what the community is currently feeling. 
 
I'd love to be proved wrong, I still want the game to succeed, but my joy and passion, like many others past and present in this community, is gone and it would take a truly Herculean effort on the part of NQ to get it back again. However, judging by recent efforts I won't be holding my breath.

I think the game version on beta release was superior to current version overall. Even with all it's bugs and issues it felt more fun. 

I think the game version on beta release was superior to current version overall. Even with all it's bugs and issues it felt more fun. 

We should scrap mining units a good system would be if you could explore new planets  for higher tier mine in the ground  with both ships and by hand  😀 lol  and the planets would regenerate over time so you don’t have everlasting holes and tunnels 

Thanks NQ! You helped me make my choice.
Subscription ends on the 27th. And now there is no doubt about the choice at all.
😉

So if u find a t4 tile u can calibrate all ur charges on it with multiple accounts and dump the ore into the market. Does that seem fine to you?

Currently NQ are trying to reduce server load.
Their #1 method to do so is to dissuade new players from signing up and clogging the servers with their noob activities.
Their #2 method is apparently to do everything in their power to reduce the number of current players renewing 
 
Basically there is so little fun left in this game that NQ are on course to achieve their ultimate dream of zero server load within a year of release.

I think NQ especially underestimates this as a problem...yes, you can tell people to stash stuff at a safe moon, but that again puts the work and effort on the player's side. 
 
A player that's about to churn isn't going to take the time to pack up their stuff and move it to a safe moon expecting to come back someday. No, they're just going to churn. 
 
The best MMOs (and subs in general) understand that every customer eventually churns...but they also frequently re-engage. 
 
NQ can scold players to move stuff to Haven, but that misunderstands completely the mindset of a customer that's about to churn...and it's NQ that will suffer from this shortsighted concept, because clearly their churn rates are very bad among new players (as you can see from Steam's rapidly dwindling active player count). 
 
With no (apparent) strategy on how to grow the game, re-engaging lapsed customers is critical.
 
Telling the few customers that want to re-sub "welp, you should've moved stuff to Haven" is naive and self-defeating.
 
Also...if the OP wasn't aware of how this works, many others will be in the same boat...it isn't like NQ does a good job explaining all these rules.
 
They expect players to seek out this information, to do the work to prepare for their own churning sub, and don't see any issue with this at all.
 
 
Couldn't help but comment.
 
Their CTO's last job before NQ was an internship. Their head of tech's only other job was as an intern, so saying their work is "intern-level" isn't even a stretch, it's literally true. 

So the problem is about the abandonment and decay system after subscription ends. As the system stands now when a player's subscription ends a 90 day timer starts and after this timer ends this player loses ownership over any construct they own, making that construct available for claiming by others and if not claimed it just dissapears from the game after one more month. This applies for every place and tile in the universe including haven. 
 
I don't know which monkey thought that this is a good idea. I understand that leaving constructs on alioth forever can cause stability issues and lag and they need to be recycled somehow, also the planet will be filled with inactive tiles from inactive players that could be reused by new players. All that is understandable BUT a player should be able to keep their stuff if they want to take a break from the game.
 
As this system stands now whats gonna happen is players will eventually stop playing for a while, because thats what people do they don't play games forever, they quit they come back, they have lives and work. They are going to figure out they lost of their constructs and effort and what are they gonna do then? You guessed it right, leave the game and never look back. Dual universe is a big time investment. It is not a game like rust where you play for a week build stuff and then hop on a new server. This effort cannot just be deleted like this because of optimization issues. If i know that all of my effort is going to be deleted eventually then i should just quit outright, is the though proccess most people are gonna have when they figure this out. Have you seen another online game of the mmo genre do this? This seems like an intentional extortion of a sort .. "buy game time or you lose your constructs". I know that this is most likely not intented (really hope not).
 
Since i don't like talking out of my a@@ and i like providing suggestions rather that randomly criticizing someone, i am going to propose all of the solutions i can think of for this issue with prio from top to bottom in which i think would be the best.
Possible solutions:
 
1. Make game simply not load costructs of accounts with inactive game time. The tile will be taken but people will not load or see anything on it until the player buys game time again. 
2. Create an istance somewhere in the persistent universe where a player can go and store everything they own when they quit. Only visible to said player and anyone they have given rights to and not loadable by the rest, so its just data and doesnt impact the game stability. 
3. Reduce number of HQ tiles to one per player but make this one tile be untoutched forever. Or give a main HQ or something for this reason. 
4. Create a new dump planet/moon where players dump their stuff when they quit. 
5. This one is the worst idea but is acceptable. Increase inactive time from 3 months to 2 years and not less. And no 6 months is not enough. People quit for 6 months and come back. 
 
My conclusion is that this change cannot wait. People are going to quit over this and never come back. if u wait for 3 months before implementing this and ppl lose their constructs they are gone. After one year at most the game will be dead. I was one of the first people to warn you about patch 0.23 back in the beta and guess what exactly what i said happened. This time around there won't be a "release" to save your asses if you botch this again. Consider yourselves warned. 
 

So the problem is about the abandonment and decay system after subscription ends. As the system stands now when a player's subscription ends a 90 day timer starts and after this timer ends this player loses ownership over any construct they own, making that construct available for claiming by others and if not claimed it just dissapears from the game after one more month. This applies for every place and tile in the universe including haven. 
 
I don't know which monkey thought that this is a good idea. I understand that leaving constructs on alioth forever can cause stability issues and lag and they need to be recycled somehow, also the planet will be filled with inactive tiles from inactive players that could be reused by new players. All that is understandable BUT a player should be able to keep their stuff if they want to take a break from the game.
 
As this system stands now whats gonna happen is players will eventually stop playing for a while, because thats what people do they don't play games forever, they quit they come back, they have lives and work. They are going to figure out they lost of their constructs and effort and what are they gonna do then? You guessed it right, leave the game and never look back. Dual universe is a big time investment. It is not a game like rust where you play for a week build stuff and then hop on a new server. This effort cannot just be deleted like this because of optimization issues. If i know that all of my effort is going to be deleted eventually then i should just quit outright, is the though proccess most people are gonna have when they figure this out. Have you seen another online game of the mmo genre do this? This seems like an intentional extortion of a sort .. "buy game time or you lose your constructs". I know that this is most likely not intented (really hope not).
 
Since i don't like talking out of my a@@ and i like providing suggestions rather that randomly criticizing someone, i am going to propose all of the solutions i can think of for this issue with prio from top to bottom in which i think would be the best.
Possible solutions:
 
1. Make game simply not load costructs of accounts with inactive game time. The tile will be taken but people will not load or see anything on it until the player buys game time again. 
2. Create an istance somewhere in the persistent universe where a player can go and store everything they own when they quit. Only visible to said player and anyone they have given rights to and not loadable by the rest, so its just data and doesnt impact the game stability. 
3. Reduce number of HQ tiles to one per player but make this one tile be untoutched forever. Or give a main HQ or something for this reason. 
4. Create a new dump planet/moon where players dump their stuff when they quit. 
5. This one is the worst idea but is acceptable. Increase inactive time from 3 months to 2 years and not less. And no 6 months is not enough. People quit for 6 months and come back. 
 
My conclusion is that this change cannot wait. People are going to quit over this and never come back. if u wait for 3 months before implementing this and ppl lose their constructs they are gone. After one year at most the game will be dead. I was one of the first people to warn you about patch 0.23 back in the beta and guess what exactly what i said happened. This time around there won't be a "release" to save your asses if you botch this again. Consider yourselves warned. 
 

Hey there Rimezx. I just wanted to point out that a player's safe moon territories (ie: Haven and Sanctuary) are currently exempt from said abandonment system. These locations can thus be used for longterm storage in the event anyone wants to take a 3+ month vacation. Just keep in mind that only constructs belonging to the owner of the territory are exempt, so if assets are tied to an organization said player will need to transfer ownership to themselves for this to work. With that said, organization owned constructs will only become abandoned if said organization lacks construct slots or does not have at least one active legate (ie: with active subscription).
 
Hope that helps.

It would be cool if we had some form of long range communications between constructs.
 
When i first saw emitters and receivers i though of coding an IFF system for space. It could be installed on all ships of an org to identity when meeting in space.
Could be used as a form of communication between pirate and foe at some set universal frequency. Could also be used to create a commander screen that 
shows every ship in receiver range of the flagship so that a commander could have a visual of the fleet they are controlling. Could work in atmosphere too but
for shorter ranges. 
 
Could also use encryption algorithms in lua and add security to comms. Imagine an in game SSL-like handshake

The idea is adding radar jamming elements for ships to use. 
 
How it would work: 
A ship fires its radar jammer and it stops all ship radars with in range from functioning of a limited time.
The radar jammer should have a limited range less than maximum radar range and also a cooldown.
The ship that had its radar jammed cannot get jammed again for an X amount of time. (this is to prevent having multiple jammers/ships and using jamming in rotation to get away).
 
This would make pvp much more interesting and less decided from the start. It would give the player a mechanic to outplay the opponent after the engagement. You could
change course rapidly, brake, accelerate within jam time to change the course of the fight. 
 

The biggest issue is not the subscription cost. It was said there will not be a wipe in this beta so people invested time and effort in the game, treating it as a release. The amount of effort many people put into this game far outweights the subscription cost. People felt like all of their effort had been wasted. This is why the backlash is so intense.

The biggest issue is not the subscription cost. It was said there will not be a wipe in this beta so people invested time and effort in the game, treating it as a release. The amount of effort many people put into this game far outweights the subscription cost. People felt like all of their effort had been wasted. This is why the backlash is so intense.

The biggest issue is not the subscription cost. It was said there will not be a wipe in this beta so people invested time and effort in the game, treating it as a release. The amount of effort many people put into this game far outweights the subscription cost. People felt like all of their effort had been wasted. This is why the backlash is so intense.

Do you think that be a slave of the market for everything you need is funny mechanics?  
 
If players are complaining about the few things to do, would not be better to add new things to build instead of making existing harder?
 
If you wish players to collaborate, why then not introducing some community goals like building or defending something?

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:
 
 

It has been like this from the start. That is how they injected quantas into the economy in the first days of the beta. With their new schematics prices this is required if enough money is to somehow get generated in order to buy expensive schematics (which are sold by bots meaning the quantas disappear from the economy). It could work without bot orders if they only relied on the daily 100/150k from the start and let the players trade with those. Market prices would be according to that, money would have different value and problem solved. But now that people already posses large capitals there is nothing to be done. 
 
The problem with this approach is that mining (world resources) vanish from the universe and they do not respawn. At start they had bots buying all elements which is like a country printing money out of thin air and paying everyone. If they add those again money value slowly changes and money becomes worthless. That is why everyone was keeping ore instead of money.
 
What can be done is to remove those orders from the player market and add them to a separate npc market. Doesn't really make any difference. These are equivalent to vendors in other games. They just dictate the value of the currency. Although changing their price immediately alters the value of held capitals from all players, that is why they need to be careful.
 
As i said in another post they need to hire a real economist. Seriously. This game's economy is obviously too complex for the devs to handle correctly. The economy is totally unstable. Worst kind of conditions for someone to make an investment.

It has been like this from the start. That is how they injected quantas into the economy in the first days of the beta. With their new schematics prices this is required if enough money is to somehow get generated in order to buy expensive schematics (which are sold by bots meaning the quantas disappear from the economy). It could work without bot orders if they only relied on the daily 100/150k from the start and let the players trade with those. Market prices would be according to that, money would have different value and problem solved. But now that people already posses large capitals there is nothing to be done. 
 
The problem with this approach is that mining (world resources) vanish from the universe and they do not respawn. At start they had bots buying all elements which is like a country printing money out of thin air and paying everyone. If they add those again money value slowly changes and money becomes worthless. That is why everyone was keeping ore instead of money.
 
What can be done is to remove those orders from the player market and add them to a separate npc market. Doesn't really make any difference. These are equivalent to vendors in other games. They just dictate the value of the currency. Although changing their price immediately alters the value of held capitals from all players, that is why they need to be careful.
 
As i said in another post they need to hire a real economist. Seriously. This game's economy is obviously too complex for the devs to handle correctly. The economy is totally unstable. Worst kind of conditions for someone to make an investment.

.

Did you even do the math? where did you get the 10 mil from the previous post?  12 mil is only the exceptional parts and 5 mil the warp cell. It should be around 20 mil for 1 cell every 50 mins if not more.  Very few people are gonna bother doing this for months just to START making profit. Not to mention that you have to pay a sub to do so. This is ridiculous. The price of 1 cell will get to levels like 50k per cell for a while. Gl bringing loads from the pvp zone with warp. Anyway if you guys think this is okay just wait for the game to die. Then you will realize just how okay this is at this point.
 
Gl finding people in the pvp zone risking their now irreplaceable ships. No entering the pvp zone because of the risk + no warp because of cost = dead game.

The game was not ready for this indeed. 
 
An endgame and side activities are currently missing from them game. Right now the game is a space
minecraft basically. You have 3 activities: Mining, Crafting, Building. PvP right now is nonexistent as an
activity and there is no pve content either. If you take away crafting then what does a new player do?
Answer is mine all day everyday until they can afford to build stuff by buying everything from the market.
 
This will not be enjoyable by the average player. If you consider these changes not from the perspective
of the average player but a hardcore player that does nothing else but play du then yes it might work for you.
I'm saying this as a player that has been playing du all day for 2 months now. Problem is if all the average
players leave you will be left alone in a dead game. Starters and casuals are crucial to keep the game alive.
 
All changes besides schematics were correct and needed. Element destruction alone was enough to jumpstart
and sustain the economy. Fix pvp on top of that and the market would work just fine. Mass production factories 
could be left to organizations. If these orgs had talents/buffs to mass produce stuff then small factories would 
not be able to match them in prices. As i mentioned in another post a quality factor for an item that was produced
from an org factory would make mass production all the more important, but people would still have their small 
factories being able to craft whatever they needed in small quantities even if they didnt have economic profit from
doing so. That is how it works on any mmo game why reinvent the wheel with this one?
 
My suggestion: Remove schematics for now and refund everyone who bought them since the prices are constant
and do it soon before the game dies. There is great potential at this game do not kill it like this.

The game was not ready for this indeed. 
 
An endgame and side activities are currently missing from them game. Right now the game is a space
minecraft basically. You have 3 activities: Mining, Crafting, Building. PvP right now is nonexistent as an
activity and there is no pve content either. If you take away crafting then what does a new player do?
Answer is mine all day everyday until they can afford to build stuff by buying everything from the market.
 
This will not be enjoyable by the average player. If you consider these changes not from the perspective
of the average player but a hardcore player that does nothing else but play du then yes it might work for you.
I'm saying this as a player that has been playing du all day for 2 months now. Problem is if all the average
players leave you will be left alone in a dead game. Starters and casuals are crucial to keep the game alive.
 
All changes besides schematics were correct and needed. Element destruction alone was enough to jumpstart
and sustain the economy. Fix pvp on top of that and the market would work just fine. Mass production factories 
could be left to organizations. If these orgs had talents/buffs to mass produce stuff then small factories would 
not be able to match them in prices. As i mentioned in another post a quality factor for an item that was produced
from an org factory would make mass production all the more important, but people would still have their small 
factories being able to craft whatever they needed in small quantities even if they didnt have economic profit from
doing so. That is how it works on any mmo game why reinvent the wheel with this one?
 
My suggestion: Remove schematics for now and refund everyone who bought them since the prices are constant
and do it soon before the game dies. There is great potential at this game do not kill it like this.

They will propably have to reduce schematic prices greatly or watch their subs disappear. They will be forced to sooner or later. The longer they take the higher the chances people are gonna get fed up and start searching for other games. And they call this a beta test. Please. This is pre alpha paid with a sub and a 3 month one at that haha. Half of the freaking game is missing. Back to waiting for ashes of creation i guess.
 
66% of forum users want to quit xd. Percentage will be higher out there from people that do not bother reading forums. GG.
 
Definition of game beta test:
Beta testing usually depends on volunteers rather than on paid play testers. By the beta-testing stage, all major bugs should have been worked out in earlier, in-house testing. By the time the beta-testing stage is reached, it is usually too late to make any major changes to the game mechanics, level designs and so on, so any fixes usually take the form of a patch.
This definition was written in the context of Gaming