blundertwink

So on one hand, you want a full wipe so everyone starts "the same" -- okay, whatever. I'm open to that perspective I guess. But saying it should be a one-time charge with no microtransactions...that just makes zero sense at all and you surely know it. That's just fundamentally not how MMOs work... The only model close to that is GW, which obviously doesn't have same infra demands as DU and drops so many expansion packs, it's close to a microtransaction model anyway. Then saying everyone else is pathetic...? When you're the one coming back here with the genius idea that "steam" will "finance" the game...? Hmm, that's bold.

Note to NQ: posting a short weekly video then opening a thread is not community engagement or management. It's a one-sided video (not a discussion) where you don't even bother to read the forum to answer questions! You require people to use form to submit them, then cherry-pick the ones you want. That just underscores the fact that you don't read the forum. Even worse, there's zero engagement on these "discussion" threads...questions about your videos go unanswered, obvious criticism or feedback goes unaddressed, and it's been months since you've even acknowledged that you have mentioned a wipe. Months. It feels like there's maybe 3-4 hours of community management work done every week... For a company that's always "out of time" across every team, I just don't understand how they utilize it so poorly. If the CMs are "out of time" with this level of engagement, I just don't understand where that time is going...unless the CM work is 5-6 hours a week part time I just don't get what is going on every day. And that's the general feeling with NQ: no one understands why simple things take forever, and why everyone is always out of time when so little seems to be going on.

No, this isn't a "secret". Their CEO has posted on LinkedIn about how their focus is new projects. This is the quote from their LinkedIn bio: It isn't a secret that NQ is working on new projects at all...just as it isn't a secret that Nouredine's posts are all about how great cyrpto, blockchain, web3, and the metaverse are. Like many non-technical people that head technical companies, he has no clue why blockchain is so "great", he's just riding the bandwagon of hype or is mislead by a lack of real technical understanding. Someone like that helming NQ is a problem...just like JC, he's focused on ideas that don't have a basis in reality instead of focusing on the day-to-day grind of finishing their game. So many "great" facets of blockchain or web3 are silly because a centralized model is far more efficient and effective and far less wasteful...the only benefit offered by these technologies is some vague ramblings about "trust". This whole metaverse fixation is highly relevant because NQ's leadership is the heart of all their issues...and the leadership seems want to double down on the scammy buzzwords of the day (even as this sector collapses) instead of staying focused on the one product they have. Any new project they're working on will fail because the leadership is obsessed with concepts that don't work in gaming and are so utterly confident that blockchain is the future without even understanding what problems blockchain actually solves technically.

Which is astounding -- this thread was started on April 14th! Whenever people ask them to address this, they simply ignore it. Over and over and over. After every one of their useless weekly videos that they seem to think counts as "engagement". It's been about 2 months since they commented on this "ongoing discussion". People make decisions about who to elect as their nation's leader faster than NQ can make a simple choice about their own product. Well...okay, maybe that's a bad example. This isn't wise decision-making or some grand strategy...it's poor business in every dimension: It's bad PR on top of bad PR, right before release...how do they think the reviews will read? It's very bad game development...this is the time when the beta is supposed to be its most scaled-out, not the least popular as it is now. Few players means few bug reports means a guaranteed crap release. It's bad game development (x2) because they keep changing things as they push forward to release. Even a small, small change can destabilize the product at scale. Multiple changes combined with low pops means bad times at scale. It's bad business strategy...whatever widgets they think they "lose" if people have an early start, it'll be far, far worse with all the above. It serves no purpose other than making people not want to play -- I've yet to hear any cogent business reason to delay even the obligatory "we're still thinking about it" lines of communication, never mind dragging their feet on this in general. Having learned about their CEO's ongoing obsessions with web3 and the metaverse, it's not really a shock that they are more interested in lofty ideas that have nothing to do with DU (or even reality) vs. actually rolling up their sleeves and doing work. Prepare for NQ's next project announcement...it'll probably have NFTs and be an even bigger disaster than this mess, because NQ's leadership is just not capable of self-reflection, self-improvement, or self-awareness.

Yes, this is a known bug. No, it's not a critical priority for NQ and there's no ETA for a fix, but it probably won't be patched until the next update cycle.

Just to put this out there....DU has a 3-person design team as of now per a video put out by their design lead. The design lead's design 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 mining mini game starts to make sense, doesn't it...? This is a designer with more experience in simple/arcade style games...so simple timers and mini-games probably feel very comfortable. I don't want to be too harsh...but is this really the right experience for designing an MMO? Compared to the former Eve online designer who quit after <1 year...which, we still don't really know the story of why they left.

Is that why it doesn't work as a "game"? Or were they always developing it as an MMO / game, and now they're just trying to cash in on using the "metaverse" buzzword before it was popular? (Edit: i know i've posted about similar stuff before, sry I'm just bored and there's no new information from NQ, so why not dig up some stupid quotes from their founder...?) From one of NQ's employees (reposted by JC): Some interesting quotes from this article [link] (from JC): Ah, but DU is a game...? Hmmm. Now I'm confused, because he also talks about how NQ was "founded on the idea of making the metaverse happen". So is DU supposed to be a game? Or is it supposed to be a metaverse? Second Life "isn't fun" but slowly crawling across space for hours is...? This article was published in 2020 and it wasn't a realistic concept then, it's even less realistic now...whatever content he's imagining that players will make, the tools don't exist. Wtf is he even talking about with building nations -- the only nation that exists is Aphelia and it has no military, controls every market, and levies taxes. Only once has Aphelia been "attacked" and it resulted in bans -- little did we know those early players were fighting back against what would become a hostile, overbearing AI!

Your reward for playing while so many others aren't: bugs that NQ doesn't really care to fix urgently, even though the game has live, paid subscriptions. 😵 For any other game, this sort of UX issue would be a critical priority to fix for paying customers. They don't often do hotfixes to deal with bugs -- they like to wait until there's a bigger patch and push it all out at once, probably because their release process has a lot of manual steps and they don't feel like doing a release for one "small" thing. They really have no idea how people will react to their "support" when the games get shoved to release...🤷‍♂️

First, balancing economics isn't nearly as important as creating engaging gameplay -- the economy exists in video games to stimulate engagement, not for its own sake. In this, NQ has started to put the cart before the horse. Fuel/energy does gate production just like schematics. Your factory produces limited energy (which requires fuel to keep running) -- more production means needing more power plants, not just more fuel. That's a gate, and a big one depending on how it is balanced. Fuel/energy could offer more logistical complexity than shoveling paper into machines from your backpack. That's the thing about every good factory game -- production itself usually isn't as challenging as logistics. There's a reason logistics should be a focus -- it means more people having a reason to fly or haul, it could make the location of your factory more relevant, and it creates more engaging loops in managing potentially different types of power generation. If you could sell power? Well, that's more reasons to cooperate. Logistical complexity would encourage a lot of the gameplay people are missing now. Logistics will never be a real thing in DU, though, because DU insists on every action being done by human beings (and there's no player-built markets). So without better tools, logistics comes down to needing human haulers, which is severely limiting and boring. That means less targets for PvP, less interesting industry/factory gameplay, and few reasons to even leave your hexes. TLDR: fuel / energy is a solid idea IMO, but NQ doesn't have the time and really making it work well would require too many other changes they don't want to do

You'll find out soon enough when they push it live...😕

In this case, no news is not good news. They'll push the schematics change and try to do the wipe just before release. Then they'll find an explosion of bugs from everything they've touched in the 3 months since this dumb wipe "announcement", which they won't be able to fix in time. That's on top of the bugs that always come with release. Hard to have any sympathy for this style of software development. Let's make an announcement that ensures no one wants to beta test and drastically alters the economy since no one believes quanta will persist...then proceed to keep changing things up until the moment of release without a drop of feedback considered (including some updates getting pushed straight to live and skipping the PTS). That's a professional software development lifecycle...right? Good thing they learned from how bad public beta's launch went and are taking steps to make this an even more "dramatic" release, eh?

I don't blame anyone for being skeptical, I was too -- but I'm glad everything seems to have worked beyond expectations. Who knows how bad the micrometeoroids will really be, but barring some additional bad luck, it could survive another 20 years. Overall, Webb has been a great success for science in a time where celebrating science is especially important.

You're probably right. The worst part is that there's actually no way for NQ to test this change, even on live. There's no way to balance an economy when pops are low and many players expect a wipe coming. That alone changes the value of quanta and how people play -- a lot of people are only logging in to train skills or check their ever-increasing list of timers. If they really want to test the economy after this change, they need to sort this wipe BS...otherwise there's the grim prospect that the first time this change is actually exercised at scale is on release. You can't test an economy 3+ months after you announce that it'll likely be wiped, but don't explain to what extent or when or give any real updates in the months to follow. Yeah, that's a great basis for beta testing the most critical changes before the game goes into feature lock, haha!

Well...I agree with all of this. Hindsight is always flawless, but having shared community servers would solve soooo many problems. Scaling for an MMO isn't easy at all...like it wouldn't be a stretch to say that every feature in DU becomes triple the complexity just because of the scale required to make it work in an online persistent setting. It isn't unrealistic to suggest that 75% of the struggles NQ has faced technically are simply due to the demands of an MMO setting. It's easy to imagine how much "more" the game would be if all that time went into feature depth and gameplay instead of struggling with scale -- not that all this complexity goes away on community servers, but it is orders of magnitude easier (and cheaper)...and obviously all this chatter about PvP or not PvP would go away with a few server settings.

Eesh, they'll never be able to reduce server costs enough at those sort of subscriber numbers! They'd need their servers running soooo efficiently that Amazon would be paying them for this game to be viable at 20,000 subs. 😁 Also, they don't actually have to pay back the $25 million...it'd be generous if that was how VCs worked, but they invest money in exchange for ownership shares. It isn't a "loan" they expect to be paid back, although that's kind of how I assumed it worked before I had to research VCs for my dayjob. NQ is on the hook with them forever. If that ownership share leads to $500 million of profit for the VC, well...that's why they do it. Huge risk for the potential of huge rewards. That's also why most VCs would never invest money in a new studio with zero revenue led by someone with no experience in the field...they know that most new ventures fail in general. Nowadays, they want to see at least some revenue first...which I suppose NQ has, but they sure didn't when the investments came in around 2016! A very high percent of all VC ventures fail -- they still do it because the potential returns are so astronomical when ventures do have success.

People can only judge based on the limited information that NQ releases, which isn't helped by them not answering simple questions about how things will work or refusing to deploy changes to the PTS so we can actually see things in action. And really...are we supposed to give NQ the benefit of the doubt when it comes to design choices...? I do think they'll tweak the numbers for schematics to be more generous before pushing this out, but I don't blame people for a lack of trust. If NQ actually wanted to discuss things and give us the information we lack, maybe we'd be able to judge things more fairly. And speaking of being fair...the community said that AMs would be bad, and they are bad. I've yet to see anyone claim that this timer-based minigame gameplay is at all engaging. It's also impossible to say that the community was "wrong", really, because player pops are cosmically low and many of the people that do log in don't spend time to build, they're just checking their timers. The "economy" that exists today isn't even close to a valid test of a live system. So when these changes hit live, we actually have no idea how they will work on release -- because there's zero way to test anything related to economic balance until the wipe happens or NQ decides not to do it. Quanta simply doesn't have the same value when players know it is likely going to get erased. Until the 3-month-plus "decision" of the wipe is made all we can do is speculate, even after this mess is deployed.

Huh? This math makes zero sense to me. You're saying 300,000 users pay a 50 euro annual sub. So that's 15mm euros per year in revenue. Divided by 400 employees, that's an average wage of 37k euros assuming the studio has zero other costs. Yet somehow they are able to pay costs, pay 400 employees a living wage, and manage a net revenue of 2 million annually...? There's clearly something missing in these calculations... What is your source? Does this studio also do microtransactions? Either they have a huge source of revenue other than subs or this information isn't right. There's no way this math adds up otherwise. DU with 20,000 accounts: paying infra costs and 50+ employees off ~200k a month or less simply isn't possible...the average employee wage would need to be well under 48k euros per year assuming 100% of their revenue went to payroll. Just doesn't add up.

Everything makes it sound like DU is running off a skeleton crew now. They don't have time, they don't have time, they don't have time. That's all they can say. Yet...what's changed in the last 3 months, exactly? They opened the exchange, they added DACs, tweaks graphics slightly, and they refactored the LUA API...? It isn't like it takes them time to ignore posts asking about the wipe...so where is this time going...? NQ's CEO has been very clear that they are working on new projects other than DU. It's hard to imagine that DU is receiving 100% of NQ's resources with the state of the game and its progress. For all we know, DU is being desperately maintained by a team of a few people as NQ throws money into an NFT pit with their next project. Of course, DU development has been slow for a long, long time now, so...who really knows 🤷‍♂️ And that's why this change will go live -- because they "don't have time" to make something that would actually work. I mean, if it takes 3 months to not even decide about a wipe...it'd probably take 3 years to actually fix industry in a way that doesn't ruin what limited engagement there is. Be ready for their explanation of why this was the right call and why we're all wrong, hah!

Should have clarified...I'd be looking for other options if I were an employee at NQ. It's maybe a mean thing to say, but that's just how I see things. 🤷‍♂️ Especially with leadership so focused on other projects (likely web3/NFT in nature based on the CEO's recent posts), I wouldn't feel optimistic about NQ's long-term prospects.

Only some employees are in Europe, the rest are in Canada. $350,000/month is workable, but it isn't so much wiggle room, really. They'd spend over $17,000 just for Xsolla's fee...and infra could easily be $50,000+ at that scale. And I think $10k/month is probably a reasonable starting point for payroll -- plenty might make less, but $120k/year isn't a lot for a Sr-level dev or upper-management. Plus there's benefits. Finally, you'd need a sizable marketing budget to stay at 1,000,000 subs...with retention for some of the best subscriptions being about 80%, that means enough marketing budget to bring in ~200,000 new (or returning) players every single month. That could easily cost $100,000+ on its own, even with decent organic growth. So yeah, 100k subs would work for NQ...50k subs? Not so sure. With it being unlikely they even get to 50k subs...? I'd be looking for other options, personally.

Phone or email only. They don't have automated sub cancelation, you have to contact their support. Edit: to be clear, there is an online cancel link that is sent when you first sub to DU, but that's the only link afaik to cancel online and plenty of people lose it or don't realize that link exists I should note that this likely violate's new rules put in place by Visa/Mastercard that require simple cancellations. These rules were supposed to go into effect in 2020 or before, but got delayed due to Covid...Xsolla would probably argue that having to email their support counts as "online cancellation" because that's exactly the sort of company they are.

My question would be how could they survive without this scale of subs...? 😵 100,000 subs means (at most) $1,000,000 in revenue per month. That's not a huge amount...Not for a company of NQ's size! IMO, 50,000 subs is far too low to keep a company of NQ's size going. That's only $6mm a year at most -- that wouldn't even be enough to cover payroll for ~50 people, especially for devs...never mind marketing, taxes, rent, or infrastructure! They'd have to do severe layoffs, which would only hamstring their progress more. Somehow, NQ must think they have the ability to scale this game to a level high enough to support themselves...I don't think it's likely either, but with no other source or revenue (as of now), I don't see a way for them to be sustainable without hitting this sort of sub scale, at least ballpark.

I don't agree. I think the only technology worth anything is the voxel tech -- the voxel to mesh algorithms and the voxel editors. As far as I know, NQ didn't develop technology to make single-shard a possibility. This technology was already viable because of how cloud-based infra works, and NQ has famously leveraged AWS to do this (vs. trying to build their own stack as some other companies do). This idea that it's one server isn't true -- it's still many servers working in a cluster, with instances going in and out of the cluster as needed. Power consumption isn't the issue, because that's not how AWS charges. CPU, memory, and read/write ops on a database like Dynamo is where things get really expensive. AFAIK AWS hasn't drastically raised prices recently (if that's not true please LMK, it'll affect my day job lol). They over-leveraged these easy-to-use services early on, then realized it was too expensive...because NQ is the exact opposite of an "expert" in server tech. They made really obvious mistakes that many first-time devs do: not designing for scale, then had to cut back. Even with them utilizing these services at their highest, it probably wouldn't be too expensive if they had ~100,000 subs or so. The issue isn't just cost, it's that their sub base is so low -- in a scaled-out subscription model, there's always a ton of players under-utilizing the infra that more than make up the hardcores playing all day. I do agree that there's tech worth something, although it's hard to say if others will really see the value and I don't believe NQ has had much luck in developing useful server tech other than their core voxel systems.

Says the person whining about cancel culture... As stated, their fees are very high relative to the industry. That doesn't mean Paypal's fees are cheap...there's a lot more payment gateways out there than PayPal or Xsolla lol. Security is irrelevant -- competitor services like Stripe are also PCI level 1 gateways and also offer hosted checkouts (which are designed to eliminate the PCI burden on the merchant, NQ)...and as I said, Stripe is among the most expensive gateways at ~2.9% + $0.30. I don't know why you brought up paypal as the only other comparison when there are so many better services. How they treat their employees is completely relevant to my decision-making as a customer. Few companies that treat their employees like crap also treat their customers well. Xsolla is one of the only sub services that doesn't offer the ability to cancel a sub online. That's not for a customer's benefit. So...I dislike Xsolla because there's obviously better options with lower rates, which saves money for NQ, and offers a far, far superior customer UX. It's certain that some players from open beta that went through Xsolla scammy cancellation process will never return because of that poor UX. That's just basic business sense. You're the one whining about cancel culture when there's many objective reasons to avoid this company...if you don't agree with those reasons, fine...but don't make faulty assumptions about my motivation or reasoning.

As usual, a polite response to a rude statement. I don't know that we agree about the state of DU or its development team, but @Msoul is always respectful...and it isn't hard to see they've been around since this forum started. No reason to be rude. 🤷‍♂️