merihimRefin

You mean magic blueprints which is the one thing NQ promised we would get no matter what, if there ever was a wipe after the soft-release in beta... .. .

I would like to thank NQ for being reverse-toxic enough to finally break through my DU addiction and make me quit! I can't thank you enough, another game/publisher will also really appreciate the €500/year that will go to them instead of NQ...
 
I've been unhappy with DU (and specifically NQ) for a while now. The 180 degree turnarounds on things they announce/say in an official capacity, the wipe... My gawd the wipe! The wipe announcement! The 5+ months of 0 motivation due to the wipe announcement... The talent points after wipe. The 2.5 years of downgrading DU instead of introducing new interesting stuff... But even with the lack of actual enjoyment and the constant feeling that all I've build in DU will be taken away again, I was still here, probably because I was addicted enough to DU to keep coming back. I've done the asteroid mining thing again and that was kinda disappointing with the 5000L-6000L nodes, but maybe if I gitgut the experience might be more enjoyable (like in the old days)... Every time I need to extend my subscription I think more and more about the option of quitting, but I can't do that because reasons... (addict reasoning)
 
But this morning I got a ticket from NQ support... But I didn't submit a ticket and the email I initially got wasn't clear about it either (system not designed for reverse tickets). So I log in and I see the claim that my Airdock at Alioth Market 6 is above the 1000m limit. And I get a REALLY negative feeling, not specifically because I need to move my airdock to a lower altitude, the person at NQ that submitted the ticket to me could probably do that for me (and they can, I just need to move the dynamic cores)... But because of, why the heck could I deploy that there in the first place? That 1000m height limit didn't feel correct, I thought it was 1000m above ground level (but that was wrong as well). Why didn't that 'feel' correct? Because we get blasted with a TON of conflicting information all over the place and I loose track of what the 'current' rules are... So I went digging, this is what I found:
 
 
The 1000m height limit was posted during an Ask Aphelia sessions (by NQ-Deckard) and it was 1000m above sea level (5th of August):
 
Then we have NQ-Deckard's announcement (23rd of November):
"We will allow these constructs to remain for two weeks beyond the implementation of the new height restriction system."
 
Patch notes (24th of November) state:
https://www.dualuniverse.game/launcher/patch/release-1014
"Alioth: 1300m"
 
The 'new height restriction system' hasn't been implemented yet, so structures placed should be OK (according to NQ-Deckard) two weeks after the 'new height restriction system' has been implemented, which again, it isn't.
 
Even IF that did happen in the last two weeks, that was never mentioned in the patch notes, heck the whole issue was not mentioned in patch notes known issues section. The patch notes actually say that the limit is 1300m (which I'm still above) and not a 1000m as the support person mentions and wasn't changed in later patch notes, it's also the most recent height limit that NQ mentions and I could find.
 
The issue for me is not the having to move the dynamic constructs so the support person can move it to the proper height. But that this isn't the issue, it's the issue that I have to dig through all kinds of NQ publiced information and even the lastest info there (1300m) doesn't conform with what the support person is saying (1000m). That says a couple of things to me: It's a mess internally at NQ as they can't even coordinate among themselves the proper values that things should be and they can't communicate with us correctly either (known issues), as I was under the assumption this issue was fixed a while back. So that was pretty much the straw that was breaking the camels back for me. But maybe I'll calm down before tonight, the deadline to extend the subscriptions for two of my accounts....
 
Then I get the support ticket back... Which it short, doesn't address my issues and pretty much states "Thank you for you detailed response, it's appreciated. Now you have 24 hours to move those dynamic constructs away or we have to delete (the static constructs?) as they violate the rules. Thank you."... Yeah, I'm out, no waiting for this evening.
 
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Well, its somewhat larger issue, that game (as it is) gravitates toward disign, that presumes "ideal" player has unlimited time. Like, unempoyed, retired, who knows what. Its not unique for more hardcore MMOs, but DU kinda pushes it hard.
 
This why I argued back then with some retired boomers, who argued no one understands game economy, because its just takes 10 hours of flipping on markets a day to be rich.
 
So, not suprising, that casual retention is so deadly low. 

Why on earth would NQ set an exact 24 HOUR TIMER for recalibrations and not allow skills to reduce the time other than to hurt the players of their game?
 
EVERY SINGLE DAY I'M HAVING TO STAY UP LATER AND LATER TO CALIBRATE MY MEAGRE T2 MINING UNITS....
 
Because on day 1 I set my mining units at 9:20pm after i finished work IRL and the next day, I wasn't able to set them until AFTER 9:20.
As it happened, it was about 9:30 by the time I finished calibrating them.
 
The next day, a client phoned me just before I could calibrate them and ended up calibrating them at 10:15...

Now the next day, I was unable to calibrate them until 10:15 finishing at about 10:30
 
The day before yesterday, I went out for a drink and got back at gone 11pm. Now last night I was unable to calibrate them before midnight. So I had to skip calibration until Saturday afternoon at 12;30pm...
 
I've used Hanlon's razor so much this last two years that the blade is duller than a taxman's suit. To the point where I could easily believe NQ chose 24 hour cooldown SPECIFICALLY TO IMPEDE their PLAYERS and INTERFERE with their PLAYSTYLE. There is no other reason why a GAME DESIGNER would PURPOSEFULLY choose such a PLAYER HOSTILE cooldown.
 
This means that once a week I am effectively either losing sleep or losing a day of calibrations.
 
Thanks for willfully and purposefully making your game a POORER EXPERIENCE at EVERY OPORTUNITY you get.
 
Wearily yours,
   Jinx.

Because they don't have the expertise for it... If their current payment solution and subscription system is any indication... And if the cosmetics that have shown up to date are any indication, quality isn't really all that high and only the most dedicated would buy those anyway... Hell, they've not even gotten their DAC in order!

One of the reasons we wiped your progress, because you were progressing, and it was bad.

 
Shame on you for using the Mining Units to generate the income you need to play, we should have been taxing you MORE!

 
Just go buy resources with your 100k allowance, until we decide to take that away, or learn how to purchase ore when you don't have any money. Cause we allow people with alts to mission run billions of quanta a month.

 
How dare new players have a way to make income without any barriers! Especially to get started in only a few days!

 

Not our fault you can accidentally sell to people that buy ore for zero quanta, and we refuse to fix this for you.

NQ is punishing and placing the burden on players playing the game as it was intended!

Yet they fail to deal with the quanta faucet of alt-mission running, that concentrates BILLIONS OF QUANTA into a small number of people's hands. Besides can't remove that, or else who would have the money to buy your ore? 
 
So ALT UP if you want to play DU and have money to enjoy it or Leave!


 

.

We have an edgelord among us... Where do you want your medal sent? Some of us play games to have fun and relax, not fk around with taxes.
 
 
Dude, this is NQ we're talking about... That's like saying NQ has the tools to spot exploited bugs and roll back the server then ban the miscreants and regulate what players do in real time or at least within 24 hours of them exploiting a bug.
 
 

We need to balance the income with the amount of money flowing out of the economy weekly due to taxes and schematics. 
 
If NQ fail to do this one single thing, the entire  in game economy collapses. Repeating the same mission to Aphelia twice a day is obviously not a tenable situation and is boring as sin. 

Presumably the 100k daily stipend is permanent? 
 
if every player has one tile like a good communist should, then they will have 200k ℏ per week to spend after taxes and like a peasant they can barter their ores for other wares and trinkets.
 
also, a proper communist org with 1000 robots, I mean players, will have 200m ℏ per week at its disposal and also receive an amount of ores as protection money from their members. 
 
Ah, the smell of communism in the morning.
 
Typically, still no answer from NQ regarding such an absolutely fundamental inquiry. This shows a level of disrespect towards their customers of almost Apple like proportions, IMHO. 
 

I hate having to inspect each machine to figure out WTF is going on.
I wish they would update the status lights from just crappy Green / Red...
They could easily make it:

Red: out of material.
      Flashing: 1 hour has elapsed in this state.
Orange: output container full...
      Flashing: 1 hour has elapsed in this state.
Yellow: idling (maintain level reached)...
Green: Operating normally
      Flashing: All done.
Blue: Schematics Lacking.
     Flashing: 1 hour has elapsed in this state.N
Off: new machine or no task assigned. 
 
But this detail of development would likely require NQ to dedicate an entire team several weeks to achieving.
 
They could just leave it to us and make the damned light LUA controllable.

Damn. I've gone and added to the endless wishlists that fruitlessly populate this forum.
 
 
 
--edit... holy shitballs, I just looked carefully now and realised the machine's lights are THREE colours, not two....   An ever so slightly ruby shade of red means purposefully paused due to maintain limit reached and an ever so slightly orange shade of red means there's an error.
 
Never even noticed until now. LOL.

Which is clearly a nonsense and broken system. That an org only needs a single tile with 1L of each of the four T1 ores to survive is clearly not what the developers intended. Sure they don’t count it as an exploit (calibration charges Yada Yada) but it is pretty much game breaking. 
 
TLDR:
That 10 players can somehow get 200kL of ore per day from a 1L per hour tile even using a single size S mining unit is a stupid game mechanic. 

This is the sort of “Hollywood movie economics” I see everywhere these days. It’s shown to be so laughably wrong in the modern day that even applying it to a game is kind of ridiculous. 
 
It used to work it the fifties and sixties when there were dozens of innovative companies in each region fighting for your attention. 
 
but there is no reason for this to function in an economy where consolidating at scale always wins and mergers and the subsequent monopolies in each field are de rigueur; because the market is no longer free but instead directed and controlled by a tiny cartel. 
 
Just look at the “Right to Repair” movement for an example of a market moving AWAY from what a truly competitive market with a hundred competitors would achieve. 
 
if players were the only source of schematics and aphelia schematics did not exist, things might work a little better but currently, schematics combined with taxes constantly remove so much money out of the economy that the economy would enter a deflationary death spiral in no time. 
 
10,000 players add 7B ℏ per week in stipend but the 13,000 tiles on Alioth (assuming they are productive) drain 6,5B ℏ per week already leaving almost nothing if we remove ores. 
 
if ores disappear the the game’s expansion will all but stop. 
 
“but ore price will rise if supply drops”
— and there is the cusp of your misunderstanding. 
 
there will be no money to purchase the ore. 
 
 

If this is true, then the game cannot survive in its current form.
 
Within a month or two the bot sales will be gone and whole game will be reduced to a total influx of 1 Bℏ per day (assuming a generous 10k daily entities -players and their alts- with alts @ 100k ℏ each) plus a few NPC missions for those desperate enough.
 
That's not going to go far... think about it tax for the 13,000 tiles on Alioth alone assuming they have industry or mining will account for 6.5Bℏ per week consumption, leaving only 500Mℏ per week of ℏ influx or thereabouts between all entities... so if we say 10k entities, that's about 50k ℏ per week per player...  Enough for ONE 750kℏ L core schematic about once every 15 weeks.
 
Even modest schematics costs outweigh the influx of ℏ by such a ridiculous margin that development will likely all but cease once the 30 Bℏ (30 markets, 1B ℏ of T1 ore per market) of initial ore bot gained ℏ is consumed which it likely already mostly has been.

I just don't see how this "economy" can survive that kind of ℏ starvation...

In the original anouncment of the new schematics system it reads "Copying schematic batches will cost time and a small amount of quanta." I wonder if they just failed at balacing or if the "small amount" was a downright lie from the beginning.

Let's set aside for a moment that wiping beta player constructs at launch was always unfair, given past commitments. NQ have now heaped insult on injury with a number of stealth nerfs at launch:
 
Alioth T2 Distribution: 
I did 80 territory scans on Alioth at a ~3 tile spacing and found zero T2. None at all. Zip. Nada. No T2 - after spending 3 days building the XL assembler and scanner. This is a broken gameplay loop. Combined with the removal of Malachite from Alioth, the stealth nerf of ore distribution on Alioth resulted in a week of wasted effort. Forcing effort with no payoff is not gameplay. 
 
If NQ had been transparent with us before launch, said they were going to nerf T2 on Alioth, I wouldn't have wasted that critical week. I would also have rebuilt my base before launch so the BP wasn't made of 500,000M3 of Copper. Now, to deploy my BP I have to swap copper for another honeycomb, and then go back and untangle where the new material has blended with the same material already in the BP. More rework, on top of the wasted time.
 
1000m Build Height: 
This was self-evidently dumb. By choosing a 1000m cap instead of 1128m, it's impossible to build a 1000m AGG pad without placing your foundation core at an exactly multiple of 128m (since you won't be able to place the top core if there is less than a 128m gap.) Even then, you can put nothing on your 1000m pad, no elements, no structure. And you have to either use smaller cores for your top layer (increasing server load) or build your base from the top core, down - which means tall temporary scaffold structures first to place top cores and work back down - while others complain about griefing the entire time. 
 
A large number of pre-launch bases had AGG pads at or slightly above 1000m. All these pre-launch base BPs are now bricked.
 
This misstep demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of their game's own mechanics by devs, and poor understandng of players. To make matters worse, the change wasn't even included in patch notes. The only place it was mentioned - just wks before launch - was in 'Ask Aphelia #12. Few players had any opportunity to fix their builds before launch. This mistake (1000m vs 1128m) would easily have been picked up if players had been warned.
 
In summary, not only did NQ reneg on prior commitments to honour our builds in their 'persistent' universe - the only compensation being retained blueprints - they went on to stealth nerf the BPs we kept. 
 
[EDIT: Because this rule is not yet being enforced, and it is still possible to place a core above 1000m, this will create even more pain for players uncertain or unaware of the rule - should NQ decide to delete structures after they are built. And for as long as the rule is unclear, it is impossible to safely place the foundations of a tall structure.]
 

 
Missing STUs for 'Contributors' (and Surface Natron):
By making Sanctuary the only place with surface natron near Alioth, Alpha contributors already had a significant advantage at launch - since natron is needed to make many popular elements: screens, lights etc.. NQ then messed up further, by jacking up the distribution of STUs meaning only some Contributors received them. ~10 days later, this still has not been fixed. This means a small number of players, purely by chance, have the only access to surface natron near Alioth.
 
HTML/SVG nerf and Indiscriminate LUA Changes: 
The disabling of HTML screens was long rumoured, but took so long to be done it appeared to have been abandoned. Waiting till launch to tell players all SVGs and HTML are also now bricked is also poor form and counter-productive. Because a large number of ship BPs from pre-launch contain screens using HTML, and virtually every factory monitoring set-up, any player flying these ships or running these factories, will now simply go to settings and re-enable HTML, to be able to play the game - undermining the point of the exercise to phase out HTML, and prolonging the inevitable pain and frustration when it is finally done. This pain is now unavoidable given the original misstep of building a new API with zero compatibility with HTML/SVG. (The new API should always have been implemented in a way to minimise the effort of reworking existing content for players - rather than forcing ground up rebuilds of all screens. Better still, existing content should ideally have been ported on behalf of players.)
 
Combine this with the frivolous renaming of a number of LUA cmds, additional rework has also been created for players to reimplement scripts written before launch - for no apparent reason. 
 
STILL No Static BP Placement Snapping!: 
We asked for this in the Alpha Trello 3 yrs ago. It was poorly implemented on day one - snapping new cores only. Hundreds of players have asked for it to be fixed for static BPs over the years. It never made sense that new cores snap into place, but static BPs work of a bizarre raycast that doesn't even align with the player camera and - annoyingly - nudges by 2 voxels instead of 1. This feature was already long overdue, but now made more critical since it is essential to redeploying any mult-core construct after the wipe. Finally... finally, it was coming! In the launch livestream it was promised for launch here, at timecode 35:38:
 
Instead, we now learn this was skipped, rendering all multi-core static construct blueprints useless. 
 
Summary:
 
- Forcing players to constantly rework their builds is not gameplay.
- Reworking existing content is a poor proxy for new gameplay loops.
- Player input is invaluable. 
- Last minute, uncommunicated changes rarely if ever have a positive outcome.  
 
The culture at NQ of disregarding the time and effort of players, and lack of consideration of impacts on our gameplay, is worrisome. More worrisome, is the tendency to continuously rework existing content - mechanics, terrain, boolean noise - rather than develop significant new features, many of these features requested years ago. NQ are still missing the winning strategy of successful 'player generated content' franchises like Minecraft, where the focus of the first several years was on adding new gameplay loops - as opposed to continuously reworking existing ones. Reworking existing content decays player satisfaction by forcing the constant rework of our own builds. And making changes by stealth only magnifies the problem.
 
Until this is understood, the future of this franchise is fraught. 

I still find it unbelievable that NQ wiped all our stuff without even having the decency of giving us a method to reassemble all of our hard work properly.
This kind of behaviour smacks of lack of respect towards the paying customer, in my opinion.
 
We have some multi core Bloops that we will need to place in the near future, but having a 2px gap around the outside of each core will not do!

I played with a large group of friends (1000000+ people) and we only come back if there is no wipe. Lmao. 

Main Pillars of DU:

Exploration: the game is "ready for release" yet its first of the main pillars is COMPLETELY MISSING. There is nothing to explore, because there is nothing to see worth your time or effort. Barren wasteland, nothing to find, no aliens, no ancient civilizations, no real artifact, no unique planetary features worth exploring. Move along.

Building: so-so ... the question is why though? There is no purpose behind building anything really (besides maybe ships) because there is no system dependency. You can build a fake garden out of plastics but you don't NEED to build it, because there are no dependent game mechanics tied to it. So you are wasting time and energy for something that is completely pointless and nothing will change whether you build it or not, nothing will be risked, nothing will be gained. Also, it's fake so nothing will grow in it. Move along.

Economy: lol

RPG: wait, what? Ooohhh so that's what the end of this acronym ("MMORPG") stands for .... I see. Well, nothing to see here, move along.

PvP: another lol ... or wait! Maybe, you know, if you had built a garden which happens to be in that specific spot of land with its unique features, and the only place known where the produce is 900% higher than anywhere else, thus making that garden extremely sought after, so you have to defend it with everything you got, because some players might try to attack you and occupy your land where this garden is ...... oh, I forgot again, there is nothing of the sort here. Move along.

Social: Ha!
 
 
 

After 8 years, the game is now ready for release.

See this is what some people here do not understand.
 
A pve player calculates risk and reward before venturing in a non-safe zone, DU makes ships and property to valuable so the risk will always be to high. Add easier mining and industry and pve players will in the end go to pvp space. 
But there must be a reward, artifacts, unique gear, just remember to any PvE player Glamour is the real endgame
 
Add unique skins and unique building blocks in PvP and they will go. 
 
Lets say there is this ultimate flightsuit that can be found on crates on moons in pvp space, they will go. But only if the ship they can use to get there is expandable
 

This. Every single game where pvp is an option, for whatever reason pvpers always think removing pve will somehow make pvp perfect. It doesn't.
 
All you are getting by making this change is giving free targets to pvpers. Ganking is not pvp, might as well add npcs to be killed, it would fulfill the exact same outcome, and wouldn't make gameplay for pvers worse...
 
If pvers want to pvp, they will go to the areas that can pvp. If they don't want to pvp and are forced to do it, they will stop playing eventually.
 
People have lives and DU already takes too damn much time to do anything. If I built an entire factory and ship to just be killed by some [filtered] that plays 24/7 I wouldn't be playing this. 

Yeah, I think most people get that it was never a real promise or 100% commitment -- certainly not in any legal sense. Yet many people bought into the beta with the expectation that progress would roll over into the live game. 
 
Right or wrong, that expectation was set by NQ in the way that they presented the beta and reinforced by the fact that they were charging a live sub. It's on NQ to present the offer clearly and it wasn't clear to everyone. (It probably still isn't clear to everyone)
 
I think you're right that NQ always had this option in their mind, but...it is up to them to communicate clearly, not up to players to try to divine their half-spoken intent -- especially in the context of marketing a paid product. 
 
If it were so obvious that they were going to wipe, this discussion (and the 300 billion other threads about it going on for years) wouldn't be a thing. 
 
Back in the old days, MMOs would often give credits for issues with stability -- a month of credit for all active subs might be a good compromise between "pause/refund subs now" and "no, you get what you pay for". I don't really especially care, but it might earn a bit of good will with the existing players, which is in short supply right now. 

What I would be more interested in, what assurances do players get, provided the game has been released, that the things earned in the game will not be deleted every year? Currently you can see how persistent this game really is. Likewise, you can also see what rights and obligations are in the agreements. So really as persistent for players it is not currently, no subscription changes that either, whether 1 year or just 3 months.
So will there be adjustments in that regard to give players a little more protection in this "Persistent Universe"?
 

If I could build any ship remotely close to the ones ive spent countless millions on... I would have saved the millions.  I have 50+ ships all by some of the best designers in the game.  I can make a flying L container... and it flys horrible.  The reason everyone has different roles in the game.

So I felt NQ had this during the Golden Era between Beta launch and .23 update. It was so amazing even when things were problematic. You had a community of players like a bunch of crack addicts during downtime waiting to rush the server gates. 

The main reason I feel we lost it is that we are all building sand castles on a beach (Dual Universe - beach), and then each wave (update) from NQ is like a wave from the ocean and starts eroding/erasing both individual player projects and community projects that were developed.

The big one for me was the tile taxes, to "open up more territory" for all the players, that was paired with the removal of mining/megas. They should have never been done at the same time. The worst thing about this situation is you had dozens and dozens of players warning NQ about the devastating impact this would have, and it is exactly what happened, and NQ pretty much dismissed us and decided to do it anyway. The economy and value of all things was destroyed within just a week, while a burden was placed on the player with weekly taxes. Also the value, purpose of so many ship designs became pretty much obsolete.

This removed incentive to play, and forced players to abandon thousands of tiles to make room for others, when the community suffered a population loss not boom.
Players don't want to spend 100's of hours playing only to have their projects removed/wiped/destroyed/broken,obsolete.

This instability, and Alpha approach to development choices in DU is stifling to motivation and creativity.

I played with a large group of friends (1000000+ people) and we only come back if there is no wipe. Lmao.