BlindingBright

I shall revel in this succulent win, for I- have bested you NQ... I have destroyed your Fools Defense. Also have video if this win is challenged I stayed up all night for this, having planned to load my ship up at 2am locally when the PTS was supposed to go live.. had planned to go to bed... to login 4 hours later for the event... but due to server troubles... didn't happen... and... well, no sleep confirmed. So I'm hibernating after this post, can't get me on April fools day if I sleep through it! TIL: Naming my ship "Not JC Ballie" and "Not NQ Pann" in honor of leadership past.... lead to fleets attacking me... I had thought this designator of "Not" would suffice in letting people know I am NOT JC Ballie and NOT NQ Pann.... but alas, for I was attacked mercilessly by those I was trying to help in battle! Upon changing my ships name, and getting back in to the field after a shield recharge I was able to land the killing blows against NQ's citadel station while Empire's Lovoda carried out his vendetta against the leadership of Serenity in their new... war or whatever it is.... Lovoda proceeded to take a proud selfie with Serenity's partially blown up ship to celebrate the cementing of their new relationship. I approve; you two are adorable together ❤️ Shout out to Legion: zergs gonna zerg. Also shout out to Habitant, we both got the final blow... we both?! won!?!!! but imma highlander you when they add AVA, so I can and absorb your kill sharing powers. I'd like to also thank the academy, and apologize to Chris Tucker for the slap he never endured at the 1997 Emmy's when Jackie Chan couldn't understand the words coming out of his mouth. Oh and thank you J.C. Ballie for that one time he liked a tweet of my ship..... *hey why is the mic getting softer and music playing?!* Happy April Fools #stilltruetho

HQ tiles are "Safe" from going unclaimed after 3 months of no active sub, least "for now" till NQ changes it as they've left that door open in past communications. Cores though are a separate system that is not dictated by tile ownership, and as it's currently coded they go unclaimed after 90 days of no active subscription.... I don't see why it being on a HQ tile would change that. To my knowledge there is nothing stopping cores on HQ tiles from going unclaimed in the current system(though we haven't even seen the full effects of that update as cores are still in the 3 month limbo for many) Your tiles will not go unclaimed, but to my understanding after 3 months the cores will as these systems operate independently.... Compare all of that... to how you could mindlessly leave the game a year ago and come back after 6 months and not loose anything... it's a huge change. But as it currently is @PotatoMart unless your cores are personal and on your sanctuary claim, you can't take a break/unsub for more than 3 months without loosing the majority of your stuff... unless you just live off a single tile on sanctuary with minimal personal constructs. I am not saying that people should be able to hodl indefinitely without sub, while taking up active server resources... I am saying is that NQ implemented these features without offering up the ability to easily pack up your constructs and take a break from the game.... Most MMO players take breaks from playing... and this game now punishes you for it. So for me personally, having paid for an active subscription for over a year of beta... I feel like NQ is now holding my constructs and game progress hostage.

Yes, yes you can wait. Nothing we say matters, we're gonna get this shoved down our collective throats either way so why spend time reading our responses? 'Doesn't meet our vision of Dual Universe' I'd really appreciate anyone within NQ taking 30 minutes to an hour to film a video or write a blog about the vision for Dual Universe going into and after launch... With launch coming up and little to scant details on over-reaching game design implementations of features promised that won't make it to release. Pair that with features in Athena that were never promised... and it makes sense that the DU Community is at least owed a video explaining the vision of the game going forward... as it's clearly not the one people bought into. Stop dancing around the elephants in the room NQ brought to the party, you're only harming your own product by staying silent. Customers are owed an explanation. Rip the bandaid off, clean the wound, and let stuff heal. This festering infection that NQ created isn't gonna heal on its own.

To my knowledge, cores on HQ tiles will still go unclaimed after 3 months- they are not 100% safe. Sanctuary I've heard is the exception. I cannot easily pack up my base and go to sanctuary... that's part of my complaint.

I hope you read this @NQ-Nyzaltar and NQ team. I am not going to post 1000 times on the forums about this subject, and as requested in the other thread regarding wipe news... posting here for visibility as requested. Have taken the last few days to gather my thoughts. I've already had a wipe of 5000 or so scan results I personally obtained, hundreds of hours of scanning... though with that wipe, I was largely okay with it as I had already mined out those meganodes and made use of them. And with Demeter it largely opened up scanning again for new gameplay opportunities, and I quite enjoyed scanning to find some fields. If NQ wipes industry/quanta/schematics... then all that time I spent setting up for the future would be largely for nothing, as that was all built with the purpose of supporting ship sales for the future. If NQ deleted all of that, and left me with BP's... it'd be a bit heart-breaking, as I did not spend 100% of my time just building things... and had/have done almost every aspect of DU's gameplay spreading my time out more. I probably have over a 1000+ hours of grinding/work on that single factory core. It's been a fun hobby haha. So even a partial reset would feel like a slap in the face at this point, and if NQ deletes my factory... I will never give NQ another dime and urge others not to as well. It's bad enough that core slot changes & tile taxation makes players slaves to our own constructs(Keep paying... or loose progress.. which almost no other monthly sub MMO does besides EVE.... and it's dying), but if NQ goes forth with severing that tie and wiping... than I and many others will not be coming back. This is actually my biggest fear with DU, that right before launch being able to easily pickup/put down the game has become an issue.... for the longest time you could take several months off from playing and come back, now- you can't really... pair that with a forced subscription. ooof. This would be less of an issue if we had an easier way of storing in game assets long term(past the 3 month no sub delete mark). A feature to at least easily de-construct a construct was briefly mentioned by the dev team but never followed up with? Why does this matter? DU's playerbase will probably always stay niche... meaning you'll only ever have so many people that will be interested/play DU. If I pickup the game at launch, play it- then go play something else.... I can't come back to it nearly as easy as as most games. 95% of MMO's where I can get board of the game, and come back to it later and pickup where I left off as most do when there is a major patch. The recent game mechanic changes will dissuade players from wanting to come back after they drift away from playing actively their first time. Plus this past week or so NQ has had 3-4? complete server outages paired with poor performance the last couple weeks.... The writing is on the wall, and it's disheartening because DU has the chance to be the most unique MMO in the world if handled correctly. I just worry board of directors marching orders and dev-resources/time are not lining up and it's going to be a messy launch because of it. TL;DR I'm going to keep cheerleading through launch, though the dark cloud of a wipe looming over our heads and the uncertain future (lack of roadmap, launch details, and features most see the game needing by launch) has many of us concerned. So till those things are addressed further, myself and many I know are cooling off from the game.

He makes a salient point.

Am debating not playing till this is answered fully. Even a partial wipe will be problematic and won't really solve any real issues... The community/game hasn't even fully settled from the construct slot changes yet. This last post from NQ was poorly communicated: "This includes long time topics such as will there be a wipe at launch, Avatar vs. Avatar and DAC implementation. We appreciate your patience and we will have the answers for you as soon as we can." Pretty boldly implies they don't have the answers to those questions, which are things they should know if they're planning to release after their next major update.... Which is worrying, and I hope is addressed ASAP. This smells of the board of directors at NQ forcing release to happen, this year. They hired Nouredine Abboud to push this game to release in 2022, and by doing it mid year (6 or so months after they brought him on as CEO) they can watch the release numbers and decide how to proceed by the end of Q4 2022. From a investor stand point it makes complete sense, and either way will produce a result finally. The issue is now this places the pressure on the development team to tie up the loose ends started years ago. I feel for the devs right now... they're stuck between a rock(investors), a hard place(development hell) on top of their customers with pitch-forks at the ready. Now is the time to be brutally honest, upfront- and fully transparent... not just about a wipe, but the state of the game and the plans going forward into launch and after. You only get one chance to announce the full launch of your game, a footnote in a PTS update post that raises questions about the sate of the game and creating FUD is not it.

I give it out freely as a trinket in the Bright Foundry. So every novean can dream the dream!

You used to be able to easily do this, all the 3D models were accessible via URL- could easily download them and convert/prep easily. It was shut down. IIRC the models didn't have any of the elements, and were bare voxels/mesh only.

This is part of the issue with the new talent tree.... on first glance you'd think THESE are the skills you need. The wording is horrible "+75 Maximum Organization Constructs per level" you're one of a handful of people I know that has trained these skills expecting they'd get to "use" those cores. NQ should have just had a single skill tree with orgs having a max of 1625 without a special confusing skill tree for it. Likewise, separating personal cores and org skill trees. The level of un-needed complexity is silly and simply bad game design. One skill tree, cores go into "personal" until assigned to an org- easy peasy and makes too much sense to be implemented. Instead we got multiple skills trees, with sub-skill trees..... and no in game information about how they interact and work together in any meaningful way.

Simple solve, if a beta account isn't converted into a paying sub on release, delete their cores/unclaim the land after 3 months like any other non paying sub. Game cleans itself, no wipe required.

With the advent of mission money most of the early exploits where a few people got cheap schematics/resources are not even ripples in the water anymore.. Sure it's lame it happened & NQ didn't do much/anything about it at the time, but overall the economy and state of the game isn't heavily affected by them at this point in time(in my humble opinion) 100 bucks a month in subs and a whale can churn 200-400mil a day easy. A month and these players are starting to eclipse the blip on the radar that was cheap schematics and money people made from selling honeycomb to bots lol. Simply by NQ changing the gameplay/state of play by introducing new mechanics they've "wiped"- it was just on a live service. If/when they go out of Beta they need to be able to show they can manage a persistent game world that can be managed over years of gameplay, even when things go wrong/become unbalanced from new changes. We've already experienced several soft-wipes in beta, initially with schematics, territory upkeep, and core slot changes. So the question I ask, what really does a full wipe accomplish besides deleting the game world players are building for release and "leveling" the playing field for those that see players progress in beta is not valid, because "beta". I argue the majority calling for a wipe do not play much, and or, just want to watch the world burn... and unlike most games, players are creating the content for... the game. Seams silly to wipe that out.

Hopefully this goes with "PVP Balancing" part of the patch. Pair decoupling ship performance from FPS and potential voxel-damage fixes in athena... some actual content to fight over... paired with I hope a proper rebalance to make PVP more dynamic/interesting.... Huge hype. Just hope they get it right... the last rebalances were sorta lackluster.

This may be some proper new content. Good thing I've been preparing for WAAARRRRR!!! Let's gooooo! Curious, introducing Alien Cores feels like a huuuuge departure from the original game... you can't just drop "Aliens" on us and not expect the obvious question.... when do we get some Alien NPC's to shoot at? hyyyyype!

Are people seriously complaining about this in any meaningful way still? I have more ore income now than I had pre-demeter, sure it took a bit of setup having to hunt a mining field down, setup the outposts- and manage them.... but now I get gobs of ore for a weekly session or two of play... I spent 2 hours yesterday picking up 4 megaliters of T2+ ore, after 7 days and 10 hours since my last calibration. Was able to get machines back up to 94% efficiency. while picking it up. If mined by hand, it'd would taken me easily north of 30+ hours considering the tier of it. Nearly 300mil in ore at current market value. As a noobie though, without resources to invest into scanning and setting up a field- yeah, gameplay is a bit slower than pre-demeter as you can't just go out and mine almost any tile and make millions when T1 was 150L (6x price difference)... but arguably, this was "too easy" to me... though for some was the goldilocks zone for accessibility to the game... but it still meant hours upon hours of mindless clicking.... now making quanta means noobies need to be /smart/ with how they approach things and it's arguably still easy to acquire but takes a bit of knowledge, planning, and a bit of critical thinking to achieve vs just digging a random hole(peeps didn't even need to hunt meganodes pre-demeter to make cash) For example, I could make money all day long flipping ore- it may not be a lot to start if I'm new, but as you do it- your returns should snowball and you can "reinvest" profits into larger ore buys/sells. Flip elements on the market is riskier, but still doable. Peeps can go roid mining, T5 is still high value and on advanced roids. I can make/sell items in game to players. Salvaging is... sorta a thing now, peeps have flown across planets to find abandoned mining fields, ships, and bases. Spend a week on skills to get fuel production and ore refining to level 3/4 and make a profit selling fuel. Calibrate other peoples mining fields for 100-250k per charge used, and with 40+ charges easily trained that's a solid chunk of money for a few minutes of effort to a noobie, and arguably faster than manual mining to achieve. Hauling missions are a thing, still- just sorta nerfed for orgs. and pre-demeter it was trickledownmissionomnics, the ore prices and "easy access to cash" was due to all the mission money floating around. People blame mining units for the economy crash, but they need to look at the faucet that was removed with VR mission running paired WITH a finite resource becoming "infinite". This combo together is what lead to this situation, but IMHO the core of it is the mission nerf closing off a faucet, not mining units. TL:DR "No, you're a towel!"

Just don't make NPC ships physically enabled, they really can't anyways due to physics being handled client side anyways. Keep them in space, traveling between planets/points. Could even make them player controlled, could tell my NPC pilot to run to a planet to pickup an item from a parcel container, but- they can't warp, just slow boat back.. maybe even let them go down the pipes, it'd be apart of the risk of running NPC's out in PVP space. Tell an NPC to scout an asteroid for ya, let the AI spend 2 hours scouting, let me risk the ship and fuel. Adding AI and NPC's to the game doesn't mean it needs to detract from the vision of the original game, a player built & controlled universe, this just gives the players more tools- and at the same time, gives the game more life without having random NPC's that are there just to fill the void and create "content" The most ironic thing is, the games founder is known for... AI. Go figure. Plus, as it is, we were promised Pets/AI in the kickstarter, where is my repair droid?!

You're a towel.

I let this one sit for a day before making this video so I could gather more of my thoughts on this issue. IMHO if this goes through as intended, even with the revisions- I'll still have to tear stuff down unless I beg people for construct slots for my personal project/s if I had all 200 avalible to me when this launches, great- may be able to make it work... but as it is we're still going from 275 to 125(if you're lucky and have stuff already maxed out) AFTER having the skill that is nerfed refunded, and training for a full month on top of that to not even get half way to where we are now. Really? just.... really? make people tear stuff down just so they can spend months training skills to rebuild later, this was the solution? This is not a working solution. Though I do appreciate the attempt to fix things and a response within 24 hours, while leaving the door open to future changes if needed. Well, I and others are telling you changes are still needed. Please DO NOT make us play a game of chicken with our constructs being removed.

Can I get the details on that server?

They had that with their alpha testing team. Though we had a CM that literally laughed at and silenced the community, and devs that didn't care to listen to their feedback... They stopped the program altogether. What's the point in having one if only to save face and not actually use any of their feedback?

Here's my feedback in video form, I tried to keep it short. This effectively kills my ship shop going forward, had just spent months building it up with Skyexplorer and a couple friends in preperation for new sexy voxel tools to make a new, exciting ships- and have a place to display them. Even if we all committed ALL of our accounts and alts, it'd not be enough. and none of us would have any personal cores to use. I'm officially in protest of these changes and won't be playing much until this is sorted/finalized. This is the only change since playin at beta start that has elicited this strong of a reaction.

My body is ready.

My friend Aphelia has some schematics to sell you

Actually, can do more than 27- past 30 and it feels like you're wasting time/resources to pickup and deploy them. A tomahawk with 33 scanners is a hefty ship haha. I still recall having 120+ scanners active on lacobus doing a scan op with friends, good times.... I miss the scanner gameplay. I feel it's dead now, except for a few that like to scan/sell tiles. Was actually stoked NQ deleted all my scans, gave me a reason to scan again! though once I found all the ore I wanted; ran out of a reason to keep scanning... so now I alone own 2 scan ships with 50+ scanners, and the org has 2 with 50+ laying around just collecting dust. I stare at them every once in a while to remember the good times. with Demeter giving us "salvaging" and "unlimited ore" they also largely removed emergent gameplay of Removal/Nerf of hauling packages for other people with VR Mission Nerf(still a thing, but waaaaay less so) Removal of In Ground Mining - Replaced with taxes & required mini games, somehow worse than manually mining.... Removal/Nerf of scanning gameplay - Once you have your field/s... no reason keep scanning? Removal/Nerf of vanity projects. I saw several artwork/installations go unclaimed due to taxes. I love DU- though I'm even finding myself taking a step back from it a bit lately. I wait to see how they implement the vertex editor for voxels, and how they handle the next update in general. Haven't wanted to work on a new ship with so many changes looming (weird stacked element issues, airbrake changes confirmed yet? Voxel complexity may nerf/break ships?!?, no vertex tool yet) Those are huge unknowns, and due to that- haven't wanted to invest in creating content for the game when it'll most likely need to be reworked due to this update coming- and because NQ doesn't communicate their intentions more clearly, makes it very hard to maneuver around. What do you do when you have a factory that makes everything, enough resources to do anything, and a game world that leaves nothing to be desired?

Site is nearly unusable on mobile, got hit with multiple pop up/out ads before I could even get to read the main page(edit to add, I clicked on the contributing members page first), clicking out of one refreshed the page and gave me another ad! DU really needs to host its own wiki without ads, this is a subscription based game not a fan made Naruto game made with RPG Maker by that one kid in class that smells weird. Seriously, I just consumed ads for a game I already pay a premium for and could not use the site on mobile effectively due to bad advertising....