Alpinesun

Hey NQ! Read this! It's spot on ?

Hey NQ! Read this! It's spot on ?

Hey NQ! Read this! It's spot on ?

A welcome start but actually not the root of the industry issues.
 
The reason why people are being seen to 'solo' or 'self sufficient' is that the fundamental backbone of the markets is broken, absolutely broken and removing the desire to collaborate. The reason? Bots.
 
Bots are placing buy items in the market place and poisonings the market flow down. To make it worse, its being done at the source with ore which is amazingly overvalued. Ore is key as its the starting block of the supply chain and an artificial high in value then creates no desire for anyone to refine, create and then sell their items into the supply chain. Generating a real supply and demand equilibrium will never take hold, and the desire to build industry and actually sell items to other players, or build consortiums to provide goods and services will never materialise. Right now the ore is at a price that's too good to miss and selling it back into the system is the easiest and quickest way to break the recession that 0.23 placed on the community.
 
Remove the bots, let the true supply and demand take a hold, watch the markets grow and stabilise and watch industry grow in the way it was intended, to sustain the wider community and provide a genuine game mechanic.
 
"The great virtue of a free market system is that...it is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another" - Milton Friedman
 
 

100% This. It is ruined. I've posted several times on the forums this week that it's price fixing and that's illegal in the real world for a reason. There's no need for bots in the market place and they need to be removed for the market to find its true equilibrium, supply and demand profile. Bots and price fixing are not allowing industry to breathe in the way that it was intended.

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:
 
 

100% This. It is ruined. I've posted several times on the forums this week that it's price fixing and that's illegal in the real world for a reason. There's no need for bots in the market place and they need to be removed for the market to find its true equilibrium, supply and demand profile. Bots and price fixing are not allowing industry to breathe in the way that it was intended.

A welcome start but actually not the root of the industry issues.
 
The reason why people are being seen to 'solo' or 'self sufficient' is that the fundamental backbone of the markets is broken, absolutely broken and removing the desire to collaborate. The reason? Bots.
 
Bots are placing buy items in the market place and poisonings the market flow down. To make it worse, its being done at the source with ore which is amazingly overvalued. Ore is key as its the starting block of the supply chain and an artificial high in value then creates no desire for anyone to refine, create and then sell their items into the supply chain. Generating a real supply and demand equilibrium will never take hold, and the desire to build industry and actually sell items to other players, or build consortiums to provide goods and services will never materialise. Right now the ore is at a price that's too good to miss and selling it back into the system is the easiest and quickest way to break the recession that 0.23 placed on the community.
 
Remove the bots, let the true supply and demand take a hold, watch the markets grow and stabilise and watch industry grow in the way it was intended, to sustain the wider community and provide a genuine game mechanic.
 
"The great virtue of a free market system is that...it is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another" - Milton Friedman
 
 

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

This all goes back to the fundamentally flawed idea of having bots in the market at all. If ore prices were allowed to nose dive, producers would find more value in producing etc etc etc. They insist bots are needed when all their presence does is cripple the ability for an actual market to develop. Their constant tampering with bots in the market is what has lead to the 'problems' they are trying to correct while still insisting on keeping the problem alive on their end.

Wow. Difficult to leave a planet without a ship. Not sure the noobie speeder is going to cut it. Older, richer players roll on, new players die quickly. Game over man. Game over. 

Natural order was not allowing virtually anyone to buy schematics, like at all.  The economy didnt just crash, it evaporated within hours.
 
Their fix was doubling the T1-2 bot orders.  But meganodes were gone.  They fixed that finally and now people are slowly making a bit of money to buy schematics.....very slowly.
 
We just now got a fourth warp cell line running, and we are probably the largest guild on Madis.  We may be able to get some T4 factories going tonight for replacement engines and cores.  Maybe.
 
As I said before in places.  This patch really hurt us, as a huge guild.  But it destroyed a lot of players smaller than us.  People are actually trying to sell things other than ore but nobody has any money right now, at least not any they want to spend on anything besides schematics.  Give it a few weeks and the ore selling/buying might go back to something closer to than what it was.

Tell that to the diamond cartels.

Wow. Difficult to leave a planet without a ship. Not sure the noobie speeder is going to cut it. Older, richer players roll on, new players die quickly. Game over man. Game over. 

I've been monitoring ore prices this morning. Hematite on Alioth went from on average 24q per unit to just under 19q in four hours. The market is flooding as everyone is underground grinding to have any hope of pulling themselves out of the industry hole they find themselves in. I expect that price to plummet even further by this evening as more and more ore floods in. Its a basic economic concept based on the Wyckoff methodology that the rich will get richer and the poorer work hard to maintain a basic standard of living. As a poor noobie it's really not fun.

That would be the best situation. Level the field and make people truly collaborate at the same level. The economy gulf between the rich (older players) and the poor (new players) is too wide for the economy to work. 

That would be the best situation. Level the field and make people truly collaborate at the same level. The economy gulf between the rich (older players) and the poor (new players) is too wide for the economy to work. 

That would be the best situation. Level the field and make people truly collaborate at the same level. The economy gulf between the rich (older players) and the poor (new players) is too wide for the economy to work. 

I've been monitoring ore prices this morning. Hematite on Alioth went from on average 24q per unit to just under 19q in four hours. The market is flooding as everyone is underground grinding to have any hope of pulling themselves out of the industry hole they find themselves in. I expect that price to plummet even further by this evening as more and more ore floods in. Its a basic economic concept based on the Wyckoff methodology that the rich will get richer and the poorer work hard to maintain a basic standard of living. As a poor noobie it's really not fun.

Well what can I say that others have not.
 
 
I'm not rich, like to solo so I guess Nova don't want folks like me about any more so I'll take the hint.
 
Un-Subbed and Un-Installed.
 
Good luck with the direction you are going in but really not for me.

I completely agree. Why he has at all cost force players to make part of the market and capitalist mechanisms? That, by the way, to works needs to create unbalance between players: we cannot be all wealthy otherwise none is. So actually how he thinks that this could make the most of us happy?
 
I already live in a world that work in this way, and I do not like. I play a game, this game to experience different experiences: able to build thing and be creative.
 
Now what I got is grind for money in order to be able to buy things... What an original idea!
 
If JC wants us to collaborate, why he do not simple introduce a goal that does that: a PVE threat (alien species?) Or build a star gate to other systems or whatever? Be creative and introduce a community goal! 
 
An advice for NQ (if any even read forums): if players complain about the fact there are few things to do, you just introduce new things to do and build, you do not just make existing things harder and tedious.
 
Thank you for all, but my experience with the game ends here.

I’m a new player, I started about 2 months ago as a way to escape the drudgery of the current endless Covid lockdowns.
When I signed up for Dual Universe, I was inspired by the idea that I could take the game at my own pace and build a world for me, in the way that I wanted, that I could explore space and build amazing things.  I don’t class myself as a gamer, I’m not interested in PvP or combat, but I I love sci-fi, enjoy escapism and being able to create.
Your game seemed to have everything I wanted, and although some elements were a bit tedious – mining, unrelenting crashes whilst learning to fly and the subsequent repairs to name a couple, I persevered because I was progressing. It felt that possibility was always within my reach, I just needed to do a little bit more, work a little harder, and that’s what kept me reaching and growing.
This new patch has, in one stroke, removed all the joy, possibility, fun and scope for new players like me.  I don’t want to be part of an Organisation – I was sold the idea that ‘I could be anything I wanted to be’.  But that’s simply not true anymore.
I implore you NQ – PLEASE think about the experience for new players, this game had such possibily and was truly inspiring. I have absolutely loved playing it and even though I couldn’t compete, or wanted to, with the big orgs it was truly great to immerse myself in this world.
You’ve created a perfect storm for new players:
Building your first ship is now out of reach. Even if you manage to build one, core & component damage now means learning to fly a ship will be impossible. Travelling to and from markets is long and dull with your free speeder as there are no territories near any markets on Sanctuary with a shuttle. Even if you do want to spend ages trailing backwards and forwards, you cant carry much. Blueprints are ridiculously expensive, so now you cannot invest your money in industry to convert your ore into usable money, as all the lower price blueprints will produce products that will no doubt flood the market, have little value, and therefore have no profit. Assuming you can get off planet, you have hours of flying to reach anywhere with ore of any significance, assuming you make it there and back in one piece now warp drives are so utterly unreachable. I didn’t sign up to a space-mining, economics simulator game -  I wanted to engage with what was sold to me through all the marketing; and that’s certainly not hours of doing nothing interesting to get nowhere.
Unfortunately, you’ve made it utterly dull, with the potential for fun so far out of reach that its honestly not worth the time or money for me.
I really hope you fix this – it had huge potential, and I honestly cant remember a game I enjoyed as much as this, but I think you’ve just shut the doors on new players and shot yourselves in the foot.
I genuinely, genuinely hope you listen to everyone and you make a success of Dual Universe, it is (was) special, I’m just gutted its been ruined for me.
 

Sorry to go, but patch was the last straw.  I will miss seeing all the crazy designs and the space elevator (which I did not hit!).
 
Good Luck to All!
 

This is just some kind of madness. I really can't believe this is really happening. There is no PvE in the game, there is no way to earn a quantum other than mining, damn it. Mining, mining, mining. I hate mining. I just want to build factories and make stuff for myself. Not for sale, for my own use. As I said, I hate mining, but I'm ready to do it for myself needs. But in order to make money, to buy recipes? LOL never. I am leaving the game until this patch is removed from the server. The game is not playable for me now.

We now need money to produce  anything.... but we need to mass produce to have money ...  and there is no other way to make money. Oh yes ... I  could wait 30 days, connecting everydayt, to have 3M... and be able to produce.... mass basic connectors !!!!  Awsome ...