blundertwink

They pushed this idea that they developed "cutting edge" technology that would magically allow them to maintain vast amounts of data and scale to "millions" of players. I wondered how this would work, but I generally believed them. Then I played the game on beta launch and realized they were in way, way, way over their heads. Learning more about their tech, it became clear that they hadn't really "innovated" anything to make their claims about scale even a little bit realistic. As we see now, they didn't even do basic due diligence in testing the crappy tech they did make with any sort of real load or even basic, basic common sense. Yet they love to complain about their bad choices, too...like telling us that "scaling to infinity" is so obviously not a path forward with industry as if they weren't the ones that designed it like that to begin with years and years and years ago. If they owned their mistakes, I think everyone would give NQ a lot more sympathy and patience. But they don't do the whole "humble" thing...instead, they want us to adjust our tone and be more positive in feedback. They want us to understand why changes are "required" while in the same breath admitting that it's probably not fun. The hubris is just outstanding...and I admit, their whole attitude makes me eager to see the next few months play out as we all know they will.

I'm not sure NQ really has "intent" in their designs, but if they did....I think their intent with this last change was to reduce server loads, which was successful. In a way, this makes sense. We all see that release isn't going to go great...we knew this months ago when it was first announced. NQ knows this, too. They will market the hell out of this game to people that have never heard of it, make trailers look just as promising and misleading as beta, and collect as much as they can from this one wave of new players post release. They know they'll only have those few months before the player population crashes, just as it did with beta. If this is their one chance to monetize and they know they can't make the game sustainable, why not reduce costs across the board...? Every cost that's cut means more profit during the one opportunity they have to make it. It isn't like spending the last few months trying to make this game sustainable and scalable would have worked anyway...there's just way too much technical and design debt. Changes like this are sadly logical. NQ's leadership has made clear that they're working on other projects...IMO, they're preparing DU for release knowing it won't scale or stabilize because they believe they can still make them some money before it goes offline, hopefully enough to fund one of these "other projects" (read: scammy NFT BS) to completion. They're probably right, too...with some good marketing, plenty of gamers would plop down $10 to give this concept a try. I wonder if they'll change back to a minimum of 3 months for a sub...that would really make this "strategy" work.

Right, because you can always train skills. Or do mining. Or run missions. Ah, right...those also involve waiting around or being AFK. So let's be clear: DU is the best game on the market for being afk. I can't think of a better place than DU (also the fact that industry was marketed as a core thing to do and it isn't like the game is overflowing with activities)

I was actually expecting a wipe announcement soon -- figuring schematics was the last thing they wanted to touch before pulling the trigger. It will be going into month 4 after all...i.e. an entire quarter consumed by this. So much light has been shed on their internal decision making, it's like everyone is blind and unable to see what's next.

This reply got lost in translation I think. I'm not understanding what you are trying to say here, but again...you're making assumptions that I feel a certain way when I don't. Nothing "triggered my discontent" and seeing as how you don't know me at all, it's weird to make any assumptions about how I feel. I've explained what I think about these changes. Any other presumptions about my state of mind are irrelevant, baseless, and live only in your imagination. If you have something to say about the reasoning I've presented, great. Otherwise, the way I feel is both none of your business and entirely outside your ability to know or speculate about. If I feel a certain way, I will let you know. Otherwise, don't make assumptions for me or for other players. Not saying this is the case, but these sort of assumptions undermine any argument you make because it makes it seem like you can't articulate a reply based on reason and are instead trying to frame my stance as being unreasonable or emotional.

I agree 100%. People do realize that they labelled alien cores as "Space Territory Warfare", right? That's the only version of "territory war" there is. They spawn these as they do for a reason....they don't want people PvPing all the time any place they want...they effectively want to instance that traffic by separating it. In other words, their single shard implementation doesn't scale as they'd like, which we all know is the case because they've been very clear that the last few updates are cost-driven. Like....the game can't even scale with the number of players and limited features it has now, this idea that atmo PvP, AvA, etc. will ever arrive is just....well, I wish I had that sort of optimism, I guess?

No, I took a lot of time to outline my reasoning, which you didn't address. You don't get to tell me what my motivation is. If you have an opinion, you're free to articulate it and I welcome it. I have nothing but respect for other opinions. However, you don't get to tell me what my opinion or motivation is just because it's something you believe. So by all means you can disagree with me, but do so with reasoning and not by telling me what I "really" think.

I can't even tell when people are trolling anymore, lol

Maybe speak for yourself instead of explaining other people's thoughts and motivations. There's a lot more opinions than the simple dichotomy you're presenting. I do see how this change makes it easier on new players...but also see how this changes the nature of industry at scale, which removes yet another core pillar of the game, reducing overall engagement. Exploration isn't a thing, anymore, because mining is gone. Wrecks obviously don't count as a real exploration mechanic to anyone that's tried. Mining isn't a thing anymore, it's a timer. Missions are mostly NPC missions slowboating, that's not fun to me or to most people. Now industry...it's still a feature, but with these changes, it limits how much time you can really spend on it. To be clear, this change wouldn't be a problem if DU was like other MMOs, overflowing with other things to do. If that were the case, I'd be far more open to this change, because I understand (very well with a lot of real experience) why scaling factories is difficult. But...DU isn't that game. It's a game that's always suffered from a lack of feature depth, which NQ's recent crop of changes have made far worse. So we can't scale factories anymore...okay, that wouldn't be a huge deal on its own...but then, what can we do? Build bases that don't do anything? Fly ships that don't need to go anywhere? They keep talking about cost and making changes to reduce cost....but where are these resources going? There needs to be something to do at scale -- it isn't industry, it isn't mining, it isn't missions, it sure as hell isn't PvP. Looking back on when this beta launched and thinking "hey, there was actually more stuff to do then than there is now" isn't a great sign that this is an MMO that can grow and expand. That's the fundamental issue I have with these changes...it takes a game with little feature depth and makes it even more shallow. At this stage, things should be progressing the other direction. Instead, development is going backwards...making the game less and less feature-rich and engaging with every patch in the name of cost. It was NQ's job to design and develop a working game knowing the limits of infrastructure, as every professional engineer in the world does. This is one of the most basic and obvious facets of developing an MMO and isn't something you think about only in the months before release.

Aphelia also seems to control when and where asteroids spawn, and when and where you're allowed to engage in "space territory war" via alien cores. Aphelia also controls the Exchange, the closest thing to a "player run market" there is. It's powered by NQ reviewing Google Forms, lol. Aphelia controls NPC missions, while player missions seem to be rare. Aphelia is also the only entity that can print money...in other games currency is 'printed' by NPC drops, but DU doesn't believe in NPCs as a plural, it only believes in one all-powerful NPC that we can't ever directly interact with.

Pretending that NQ will finish features that are far beyond their reach as of today is equally constructive... 🤷‍♂️ Maybe I'm misunderstanding your post about piracy, that's definitely very possible...but it sounded to me like you were explaining a state of balance that exists only in the future and depends on features that aren't even planned. I don't view that as constructive because release is coming up soon...and players will judge the state of balance as it exists today, not based on x, y, and z feature that may never materialize. Experience does matter when trying to speculate about the state of the game and its abilities, especially when there's so little information from the studio itself.

NQ needs to grow up if they want to be treated like professionals. 🤷‍♂️ Are they really this unprofessional and insecure? This whole "you need to provide 'balanced' feedback" demand is something I've never heard from a business before, but NQ isn't shy about saying it (more than once). NQ wants to make their own customers the problem -- we're the ones at fault for not praising their efforts enough. We're "toxic" for complaining. For "not telling them what we like" about their recent choices, implying there's got to be something they are doing right and we're the ones that can't acknowledge their great work. It's because of their own actions and utter lack of engagement that people don't care to indulge their egos and flatter them with misplaced praise...but yet again, NQ is complaining about a situation they created with years and years of incompetence and neglect. We'd be a lot more keen on actually being 'balanced' if they cared to spend even a few minutes answering basic questions like how long their paid beta will have persistence before being wiped. No worries, though...NQ doesn't like hearing from paying customers, that's fine! That's a problem that will solve itself in a few months.

Cyrille Fontaine...their lead designer. To copy from another thread, his credits include: 1993's "Pac in Time" by Kalisto 1993's "Fury of the Furries" by Mindscape 1997's "Nightmare creatures" by Activision 2015's "Trivial Pursuit" by Gameloft S.E. (yes the board game) The will might be there, but he isn't an experienced designer for big or complex games...never mind MMOs. I think the will might be greater than the ability. I don't intend that to be harsh...arcade/simple games are not easy to design for. When mechanics are simple, there's nowhere to hide. But clearly these types of games are radically different than big, complex games or MMOs. So...I wouldn't hold my breath that these concepts ever come, especially since these features would have to arrive post-release, and I don't expect the player counts to be high enough to support the game's ongoing dev.

Why would you think that this is going to happen? There's no indications at all that atmospheric combat nor territory war in any form are coming...or even planned. I get that this is what the KS "promised", but Kickstarter funded less than 5% of the game, so I don't think NQ particularly cares about what was said there, as many recent patches have shown.

For a moment let's reflect on the fact that the forum even allows text colors to change...and it's a paid, hosted forum. Not 100% cheap, either! I can't think of any good reason for people to change text colors other than being obnoxious. No offense @Zarcata, lol, but this does matter for accessibility...and that's Invision's fault, not NQs. I know most people don't think about accessibility online a lot, but it matters -- if you are colorblind or have trouble seeing, allowing people to post in any text color can be an issue...a very unnecessary issue.

Devs never have an objective view of their product. Never. Fresh perspectives from actual gamers is extremely valuable, and the community has poured their time and effort into articulating those perspectives. Unfortunately, sometimes ego or arrogance gets in the way. They really don't have an interest in processing feedback because they believe it is all unfair, toxic, or that the community will never have anything positive to say...so why bother? That's taking things personally instead of being professional and objective. They've struggled with this for years with no improvement. They've only grown more disdainful of criticism, when it's 100% for their benefit...that's not a sign of a mature, experienced studio staffed by professionals. That's a sign of hubris. They don't get that we want NQ to succeed...and part of that is telling them when their "vision" is not working. Ego is seeing almost every player reacting negatively to changes, but insisting "it is for the best, and players just don't understand why we need to do it". Ego is knowing that the change "probably isn't fun" but insisting that it's needed, regardless. They're making a "game", we're telling them it isn't fun, and they reject that opinion because they know better. After years of this, only an idiot would be surprised at a lack of enthusiasm or positivity from the community. This is yet another facet of the business that NQ has designed for years, then complains about not working the way they want.

lol, now we are really getting into the nitty gritty, eh? iirc, @Zarcata does so purely for style points and to make life slightly harder for those that are colorblind 😅

No, they rolled out schematics 1.5 years ago. This idea that they "don't have the time" to fix a core mechanic that they've apparently known was broken for over a year and a half is just silly. This argument that NQ is constantly out of time is completely nonsense...compared to any other studio of similar size, a year and a half to make a rudimentary, simple change like this would be unthinkable. They're out of time either because the game doesn't have solid engineering and every tiny little change therefore takes an eternity, or because they have so few people working on DU (NQ is very clear that DU isn't their only project) it only has the bare minimum of development resources. They really didn't "spend a lot of dev time" on this. They refactored it away without any intermediate changes. No one forced them to bury ore so deep, and they never tried less performance-demanding techniques (of which there are many). Again, this plays into their love of false dichotomy: "we had to remove ore because it required too much infra" as if the only two options are "unsustainable" or "auto-miner" -- and that's not the case. Besides, the way professionals make software is to design and test for scale before you're months away from release...especially as an MMO, it's really puzzling that NQ keeps saying they are out of time as if they had no opportunity in the last 6+ years to understand how their design would scale.

I have to point out how this is classic, frustratingly common example of a false dichotomy. They are making it sound like the only alternative is building without limits...like we're the ones that don't understand how scaling works when NQ has had so many troubles with it... That's really unfair, when so many ideas for gating have been discussed...a creative designer could certainly find many worlds of possibility between unlimited production and shoveling paper into burners. That's their job. This is a very common thing that people do, presenting it like you are unreasonable because the only two choices are this change or the old way.

I like how they say "infinity is not a scalable solution" as if that's so obvious when they were the ones that designed it like that to begin with...and left it that way for years. Why design it in such an obviously flawed way to begin with? Making a scalable design is supposed to come at the start of the project, not at the very end right before release! That's really, really fundamental for a company that's making an MMO. We know plenty well that server operations have a cost...so why didn't NQ when they first designed the game...? They're supposed to be the professionals, but this sort of comment comes off like they had no choice, they know this isn't fun, but they're doing it anyway because "stuff is expensive". They're making mechanics more important than engaging gameplay, which is not how game design is supposed to work. That's just throwing the cart miles ahead of the horse. It's puzzling that they admit that this "might not be fun" and push it forward anyway because they don't know what else to do. There have been plenty of suggestions on how to gate production without this silliness, but these all require actual work and would have worked a lot better if they were implemented from the start (as people suggested back before 0.23). You know, how professionals make games: design for scale before you're 6+ years down the line months before release. TLDR: NQ made this bed, now they are whining about sleeping in it.

Yep. There's not much reason to play until then. Which means NQ gets little testing, even as they make fairly sweeping changes. I would think that this was the last major change before they finally wipe, so maybe it will come this week. Thursdays are popular patch days... More delay won't help them, it'll only give them less time to actually find bugs and make balance "fixes" for release, since so few people are playing in the meantime (and those that are still playing won't value things the same way, since they suspect that their stuff isn't permanent)

Eh, because it's a video game? Mechanics are supposed to be fun...or at least engaging. Personally I find Satisfactory/Factorio to be immensely fun as games. Their current CEO was a producer at Ubisoft for over 15 years...I guess Ubisoft counts as "bigsuit corporate" as they have like 20,000 employees.

Unluckily, chances are good that they'll finally make the call on the wipe soon after this change deploys... They mentioned months ago about changing schematics as a part of the wipe, and here we finally are. It would make sense, as they probably want to actually test to make sure the new FTUE and new industry work as expected before they push this mess to release. So, erm...better get to warping while you can.

Markeedragon is more legit and trustworthy than Xsolla ever will be... Not following the letter of the law in every situation doesn't make you wrong, mean you're doing wrong, or mean you can't be trusted. There are mountains of companies that do business in the EU that don't post this information...often because they aren't familiar with the requirements, not because they are trying to scam you. That doesn't mean they aren't trustworthy...nor does having this legal compliance mean you can be trusted. I mean, anyone can post this information on their website...are you then going to check to make sure it's accurate before you ring you card? It seems like this sort of regulation doesn't really do anything of substance to mitigate scams or foster trust. I know it's a total tangent but just saying...following every law or regulation doesn't always make you the more trustworthy party.

There's no other place to go to read statement's from NQ's leadership or learn about the company's objectives... As for it all being fabricated for marketing hype...well, name one concept in DU that isn't stretched to the point of dishonesty for marketing hype Besides, the way that NQ's leadership is presenting the company is very relevant -- it shows that their focus isn't really in finishing this game to the best of their ability...it's in trying to lob a bunch of buzzwords at the ether in desperate hopes of an acquisition or investor. In other words, they can't stand on their own and they know DU isn't going to make the company solvent. That matters...it means they are likely all-in on these "other projects" and only giving DU the bare minimum to push it to release. Finally...there's reasons to believe the CEO when they post about how great web3/crypto/metaverse is -- there's every indication that they were all aboard that bandwagon well before they started at NQ. Their efforts here go beyond just some lazy hype/buzzwords. They've presented at conferences, are lobbying the french government about crypto and blockchain, and they were executive producer for Ghost Recon's infamous "Breakpoint" title, which included NFTs (recently it was announced that Ghost Recon would phase out these NFTs because no one used them, lol).