blundertwink

I think NQ has a weird obsession with the economy -- what matters most is creating engaging gameplay that will retain new players. That's always the first goal for an MMO that's struggling to grow and retain players. The economy is meant to be a tool to help drive engagement..."balancing" the economy or trying to prevent some people from getting too rich isn't meant to be the main goal for any design. The game doesn't magically become engaging just because the economy is "balanced"... Video game economies aren't real economies and they never will act like them...people talk about sinks and faucets a lot in terms of gameplay, but the biggest sink in any MMO is churn rate. What percent of items or currency in any given MMO get hoarded into people's inventories or banks never to be touched again because the player unsubs...? I'd wager a huge majority. In real life, people's participation in the economy isn't exactly optional short of fleeing into the woods with a hatchet. If NQ is really worried that refreshing bots will print too much money, they should check their churn rates... And really who even cares...? At this point, having a "balanced" economy shouldn't be their main goal, attracting and retaining new players should be their only concern.

That's really a great example... FF14 was at a time Square-Enix's biggest and mostly costly disaster. It's now the most profitable final fantasy game of all time. Not only did they have to rebuild the game from scratch, they did it as they were maintaining the older version. In less than 3 years. From the game's wikipedia: NQ clearly doesn't have an issue with the first point...but the others fit NQ like a glove. Unfortunately...I'm not convinced that NQ's leadership has the same level of humility and self-reflection that Hello Games (or even SquareEnix) has...and certainly doesn't have nearly the same level of hype or publicity, which makes "coming back" a lot more difficult even if they were able to revamp or rebuild the game.

Yes. Maybe I'm being a bit unfair. To be clear...this is someone who has spent many years at NQ. It isn't like they are fresh from an internship and immediately became NQ's CTO. That said, we're talking about a highly complex stack in a company where this is their only product. Experience is very important, far more important than domain knowledge alone IMO...you'd want someone who has released, scaled, and maintained products before.

The company providing the servers is Amazon...I wouldn't be shocked if an increase is imminent with them doing layoffs and adjusting for inflation, but I'd expect it to be small. Keep in mind that auto-scaling servers are vastly more expensive than reserved instances...so the more that people actually engage in random events like battles or races that mandate auto-scaling, the more expensive it is...and this is rather unpredictable. Regardless of the cost issues specific to DU, the only way any sub-based MMO can survive is through subscription scale. Subs have crap revenue no matter how you slice the server costs unless you have a critical mass of players...which NQ doesn't yet have. Nor are they close. I am unsure how NQ intends to get this market share they hope for....they haven't bothered cultivating a social presence after this many years, nor do they care to do so today. No one on their team can be bothered to post to insta or Twitter -- they just don't seem to care. For how much they insist that they are "indie", they don't care to engage on any channel that indies typically utilize. There are countless small indie studios that spend hundreds of times more effort in promoting their game organically than NQ does. With far fewer resources and staff. They have little hope of a positive-ROI paid campaign with churn rates being high and having to compete with AAA games that have far more budget (and often have an initial purchase price, so they can afford an extra $10-20 per conversion hat NQ never can). It's like they expected Steam to do all the work and bring them scale in buckets, but that is obviously fantasy. All I can imagine is that NQ literally doesn't care how well DU does for some reason, because otherwise I don't understand the general lack of effort in trying to promote the product even in free channels like social media.

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.

DU is still merely "potential" after this many years of development...IMO, "potential" isn't enough at this stage in the game's final months before release. I do see how this change improves early gameplay -- it isn't all bad. But...when viewed holistically alongside the last several changes, the game overall has become less engaging, less scaled, and less fun. After the early game, players have little to do other than reflect about how much "potential" the game has as they monitor auto miners, shovel paper into machines (up to the limit of their patience), and build mostly for the sake of it, since there's so little functional mechanics after these 6-8 years of development. You don't judge changes based on potential alone...especially in the final months before release where they don't have time to fully exploit that "potential". So to me, especially with the game nearing release, potential is another way to say "not good enough" or "not there yet".

Agreed...it's kind of puzzling how there's some that have said really horrific, personal, childish things with impunity while others get the ban hammer. Other than an incident involving LinkedIn, Blaze hadn't done anything especially grievous... And what did it even get them? A more positive and constructive tone? A lot of people suddenly seeing how brilliant they are and how their game is so great...? You can't ban reality. I mean, I guess they can run it like a playground if they want. That would explain a thing or two about why they don't seem able to run it like a business...

Yes...and no. Over $20 million in funding is way out of reach for a typical indie studio...NQ would be more like a "III" studio -- indie relative to big and established studios, but hardly a small shop. However, MMOs are a different beast. Commercial MMOs often involve 10x NQ's funding -- $200 million or more. A big part of that is marketing, sure, but the point is that NQ never really had the budget to make something as ambitious as DU...especially when they didn't roll their own servers or engine (throwing it all on AWS is vastly expensive as NQ eventually learned). We don't know how many employees NQ actually has or had, but even at 150...that still isn't a AAA level of development scale for an MMO, especially if there isn't a lot of experienced people. Their CTO hasn't had a job other than NQ (and a 4-month internship), so it isn't like they are overflowing with experienced technical minds. A team of mostly mid and junior devs isn't going to make quick progress...and when the most senior technical person at the company has only worked at NQ before, that's not a healthy sign. Their CTO hasn't likely released software before, and certainly hasn't released a game. Think about that for a moment. How is NQ planning for release when their technical leader has no experience about what's involved? This isn't a conspiracy; why do people think this is some secret...? NQ is very, abundantly clear that they are working on multiple projects. Their CEO has stated this more than once. Yes, NQ is working on more projects than DU. Yes, that does likely mean that DU is not getting 100% of NQ's development resources...although even when DU was their only known project dev was very slow.

Yes, I know. It's the only form of emergent gameplay that DU has.

You ruined it! Not a great sign when this game's only PR efforts gets a few hundred views -- the last few videos haven't even crossed 700 views 😕 It's almost like people have given up on watching these videos because they know it won't be especially relevant or answer any real questions. Wouldn't be a huge deal if NQ engaged in other ways, but they don't. Their weekly "video" is really the only effort they make in talking at their customers.

Still listed as: Founder Novaquark Jan 2014 - Present · 8 yrs 8 mos His hobbies include liking content posted by NovaQuark or its CEO. Otherwise, we'll likely never know how involved he is day-to-day...but I'd guess not very. And to be fair, JC's first job in game dev was also NovaQuark, so I wouldn't say he is more qualified.

"Well...it's been 113 days since they started their internal discussion." ----- "That's only 30% of the year, it's fine." "That's only like 81 weekdays, don't be dramatic." (whispers) "...that's only 8 paychecks..."

"only if humanity has solved other more pressing problems by then" is a really important point. The word "metaverse" was coined in the work "Snow Crash", a book by Neal Stephenson written in 1992. Some nerds like JC obsess over the metaverse itself and ignore the themes of the book, which explores in part how the digital landscape is merely a sour reflection of real life inequality and racism. It really isn't meant to be inspirational (which is sometimes a criticism of the work). Many of the same people obsessed with the metaverse embrace the scammy world of NFTs, where they don't see an issue with $200 digital sneakers. Indeed, that's a fundamental part of their dream. Digital worlds won't be paradises, they will reflect the ambition and inequity of their capitalist builders. Until we can learn to value people in real life, a metaverse will hardly be an improvement to society...or does someone out there honestly believe organization like Meta are the best people to create (and monetize) a digital world and its denizens? With how social media has impacted society, I would hope that people are more wary of how technological can shape society in negative ways...but sadly, I do see this concept continuing to move forward in the next few decades and expect it to be as greedy and evil as scifi authors imagine. I do think it's hilarious how web3/metaverse fanatics invariably seem to be nontechnical people that have a limited understanding of how technology actually works, yet have no issue claiming that blockchain or web3 is the inevitable future.

I don't know why NQ has no sense of urgency. They keep changing things, but don't bother to engage their beta testers and give them a reason to play. By the time release comes around, there will be a ton of changes untested at any sort of scale or with any real context. As anyone with experience will know, release greatly magnifies the number of bugs and issues you'll find. Even a great beta test doesn't find everything, but it helps. This isn't a good beta test...it's probably one of the worst in the history of gaming between having to pay for a sub, NQ sabotaging the will to test by refusing to discuss persistence, lack of customer engagement, and saving the worst phase of beta testing until the most critical time that testing is needed. Of course, this is likely the CTO's first release of any software (NQ is their first engineering job other than a 4 month internship)...so it's possible that they literally don't understand how release will work.

Funny how this comment came just before the honeycomb changes were announced 👀 How prophetic!

Why has NQ's technical leadership apparently failed to push back against designs that were never, ever scalable...? Or have they done so, but NQ's pie-in-the-sky CEOs refused to listen...? Their CTO was (for a short period) Högni Gylfason, an ex-CCP vet that has had a ton of experience going back into the late 90s. They lasted less than a year (11 months) and left in 2019. Now, it's someone whose only previous job was as a 4 month engineering intern. Please let that sink in for a bit... NQ's CTO is someone whose only real experience in engineering is with NQ itself. Their specialty is graphics rendering...hardly a simple field, but not someone that has experience building or scaling an MMO (or any online software for that matter - they've only had the 1 job at NQ and a 4 month internship lol). When it comes to scale, practical experience matters a lot. Someone with experience knows how even one tiny change can crash servers at scale...and knows why and where things break down at scale. Techniques that work with low pops or traffic simply won't work at scale. So when NQ talks about how much server costs they have, keep in mind that their technical leadership really doesn't have experience in this domain. Ultimately, this is the person responsible for making technical choices and no matter how bright, they will be severely limited by experience.

It wouldn't be so bad if the premise of the rest of the lore was believable. A rogue neutron star hits earth, eh...? Forcing everyone to pack up and give their lives to an AI, which then unpacks the remnants of humanity into a lawless land with no government...but consistent taxes...? After it constructs a bunch of clone markets, of course. Why pick a neutron star? A rogue planet or brown dwarf is far more believable and likely...an asteroid or comet would work even better. The nearest neutron stars are somewhere between 200 and 400 light years away from us. The chances of a neutron star getting closer than Neptune (which by itself would probably be catastrophic) in the next million years are something like 1 in 48 million or less. The chance that a neutron star actually hits the Earth? So small it's essentially impossible (1 in 1.4 quintillion -- that's 1 in 1.4 million trillion). I know these things are unimportant...but if you're going to make sci-fi lore, it doesn't cost you anything to make it within the realm of plausibility. One of my pet peeves is sci fi lore that doesn't even try.

There is one "Ask Aphelia" episode with less than 300 views. All the recent videos have less than 1,000 views. If you sum up all the views from all these stupid videos, it's like ~4000 views. Meanwhile, the wipe thread has 10x more views, but no replies for months. These videos are objectively a waste of time. No one is watching them -- more people watch videos like "Dual Universe: what the heck happened" than the official Q&A "podcasts" that cherry-pick questions submitted via a freakin' Google Form... Like...I know NQ craves "balanced" feedback to mollify their ego, but they can't even do Q&A right 🤷‍♂️

I do love how the posts of arrogant people age so well... Ah, the guy with no literally no experience in this field has "incomparable knowledge" 😅 Funny stuff.

It wasn't designed to scale, and that's evidenced by endless refactors since 0.23 or before. From mining to PvP to building to LUA to schematics...everything has been tweaked because the original design wasn't scalable. They've said as much...that their changes are driven almost completely by cost. If you're doing refactors to scale the game in the months before release, that's not a working design. That's not scalable. I do know very well what working at scale means...if you're sure that I'm misunderstanding the definition of scale, please do define it rather than just implying that no one else knows what they're talking about. Scale is a lot more involved than just "server resources" being limited due to cost...that's only the hardware aspect, which matters very little if the software isn't designed to scale, which clearly it hasn't been (by their own repeated admissions and refactors). If you're suggesting they merely need to throw more hardware at the problem, I think you might be misunderstanding what "designing for scale" actually means. It certainly isn't just limited to the raw amount of hardware resources...that's only one facet of designing for scale, and arguably the least important facet.

True, but they'll market it as if it isn't niche and few people bother to research before they buy. They'll believe the misleading flashy videos and not hesitate to plop down $10 to give it a try. It might seem like everyone that's interested in DU has already heard about it...but therein lies the magic of paid advertising. Just in the USA, about 2/3rds of the population play games (over 200 million people)...between the US and EU, there's certainly millions of gamers that might be interested in the game (as presented in advertisements, not as it exists). The key is that with them reducing costs, it might be possible to turn a profit off a $10, 1-month conversion. Then they can scale their paid adverts almost indefinitely and continually pull in new players. IMO, it's almost impossible to "run out" of customers. It's just a matter of how much you're willing to pay to advertise. Way too many people play games for them to all have heard about DU. So even though it may never be successful "as a game", there is a path forward for NQ to monetize this beast, at least for a while. Plenty of crappy media has been wildly successful financially due to marketing efforts alone. TLDR: there is an almost limitless well of people to throw advertisements at that haven't heard of DU, it's just a matter of ROI and scale -- for a game like DU, it might work better than we think

This is what we mean when we say that NQ hasn't designed for scale with any of its core mechanics...they're still changing how linking works this late into development? It goes far beyond industry being "impossible" to scale and therefore the game needing limits that they know aren't fun...basic concepts in the game weren't designed to be scalable and still aren't release-ready. Everything in DU has been (or will be) developed multiple times at this point because their first iterations aren't tested or scalable and linking is just another example. There's a reason that games still "go gold" even without having to burn CDs...even a tiny change can destroy servers at scale. The more tiny changes they try to push in before release, the less stable the game will be...especially with so few people testing it today.

People keep using this line of logic, but it assumes that NQ's goal is "actual" fairness. It isn't. Their goals are driven by cost and marketing -- because there is a very strong draw in MMO players to "get in early". Most MMO gamers know that it gives you advantages. It's one big reason people signed up for the beta knowing they'd need to pay for it...because NQ suggested it would have persistence and therefore give a big advantage to those that join early. I know that not everyone thinks like this, but for a lot of MMO players, joining an MMO at launch is a big draw...if it's a fresh world where they can feel like they are getting an advantage just by playing at launch. Conversely, these sort of players really loathe the idea of being "behind". Of course, these sort of players won't stick around for very long because DU doesn't offer them the progress/milestones they want. In many ways, there's not really any way to "advance" in DU by playing. You "advance" in this game by waiting, and that won't connect well with the sort of gamer that cares enough about joining a "new" MMO to be attracted by the reset (or deterred by being "behind"). Edit: also no one believes the game will last 2 years post-launch...

This is something people have been bringing up for like 2 years now, haha. I thought that this was something NQ had planned initially as well, but obviously never implemented. It's sad to see how NQ failed to design for scale with every core pillar of the game from mining to PvP to industry. They insist that it's impossible to let players run 1000s of factory units, but...really, like all things, it depends on the implementation. They didn't want to fix the implementation (just like with mining), so they decided to fix bad technical choices with worse mechanics. I could write a long, detailed rant about specific ways they could have designed this for scale (e.g. the simplest is much longer production loops), but NQ wouldn't read it and even if they did, this ship has sailed years ago. The issue isn't that there's no better ideas than what NQ has implemented, it's that they made their technical choices 6+ years ago -- and failed to design for scale through the history of this whole project, so now the design itself has to be altered to fit into a bad technical foundation. So much for "cutting edge" tech that can support "millions" of players.

The very fact that this thread exists goes to show how bad NQ is at communicating major changes. If they lock this thread asking to put all feedback about the wipe in one of the existing threads so that players can try to dig through 40+ pages of unanswered complaints and feedback, I will laugh heartily at their "moderation". I wouldn't classify this as a "recent" letter seeing as how it's August 1st and this was posted on June 6th. 🤷‍♂️ Honestly, it's kind of a stretch to call this "information" either, as it's really impossible to believe that any company could actually spend 3+ months "discussing" the reset. Either they are vastly, incredibly incompetent for needing a quarter of a year (going on 1/3rd) to make a simple choice, or as most people expect, they made a choice a long time ago and just don't want to announce it yet.