blundertwink

This is true. AFK mechanics aren't gameplay, they are "go clean the house while the game sucks up electricity for no reason". Never understood how DU expected to be an actual MMO with this as one of the main ways new players make money. How many players do they think will pay money every month for this oh-so-engaging mechanic...? I've yet to hear any real game design rationale for why these missions exist...other than people that say that Eve takes a long time to travel too, which betrays a lack of understanding about game design fundamentals.

They're totally ready to run this game for release 👀

Honestly...why do they continue to do these...? They rarely answer questions in enough depth, aren't precise in their communication, and as I've said before, it's really lame that the only communication they care to do is these weekly one-directional non-conversations. Then they rarely clarify or reply to anything in these "discussion" threads...the community keeps asking for clarity on the wipe and NQ keeps ignoring it. I wouldn't take this idea too seriously... NQ has no clue if assets will be really permanent on starter moons or not because they don't know what will happen on release. It's silly to think that they'd maintain 30,000 abandoned starter outposts forever, for example. They might believe that assets there will be permanent as of today, but I wouldn't trust this long-term...they've failed to consider such issues with their design before. NQ has showed multiple, multiple times that they aren't very good at designing for scale (schematics, mining changes, alien space cores instead of TW, etc.) -- don't trust that they've considered every facet of how this will scale. Promises of permanence can't be trusted until NQ has proven that they can design at least one feature at-scale...and so far they've yet to do so.

I'm still a bit...shocked that they would talk about how feedback is "unbalanced" considering they have for years refused to use their CMs to actually interact with the community, have refused to address this ongoing 3-month discussion about a wipe, then seem to blame us players for "not liking" something as if they have no responsibility or skills in game design. Without any specifics about exactly what it was we "demanded" be deleted then wanted back...so it's just a vague complaint about their paying customers. I hope this week's episode will be better, but my guess is they ignore everything in this thread like they always do. They'd be better off ending this charade of a "podcast" (it isn't a podcast lol) because the only PR they know how to do is negative PR that hurts their brand and reputation.

Who freakin' knows...? They have been having "ongoing discussions" about the wipe for like 3 months now. The only communication they want to do is via a podcast where they don't address this topic, but do whine about how "unbalanced" feedback is. They're 100% right, feedback is completely unbalanced, because it's only us players talking into the void and zero communication or reply from NQ even after months of "we'll get back to you" about this stupid wipe.

I think there's a misunderstanding of what @Atmosph3rik is trying to say...WoW and other traditional MMOs aren't web3 / NFT projects. They have lots of content because they were developed as traditional games, not scammy NFT crypto nightmares. There's a mess of such projects branding themsleves as a "metaverse", so many that the term has been polluted by blockchain enthusiasts that still believe that crypto is the answer to everything. NQ's new CEO is very much adjacent to these projects -- he was executive producer over Ghost Recon Breakpoint, which (in)famously sold like 18 NFTs in the month after their launch...a game that will no longer receive updates (even if Abboud's LinkedIn calls it "the biggest comeback ever" lol). Granted Abboud left a month before those NFTs dropped, but there's zero doubt he influenced this direction as executive producer prior to his departure. He was at Ubisoft for 15 years and the timing of this departure makes me wonder if the higher-ups knew this latest Ghost Recon was going to flop and wanted a "change" in leadership. The point is that NQ wants to be like these scammy projects that don't view themselves as games. They want to be a "content platform" not a "content maker"...and that's a reason why DU feels so empty. Not just because DU is "missing" key features / content that other games have, but because they don't even believe in making such features! IMO, they should have ditched this silly metaverse obsession a long time ago and actually develop DU as a "good 'ole fashioned game". This is why DU has no content: because NQ's leadership literally doesn't believe in making content thanks to this metaverse obsession.

Personally......I don't think there should be events until the game is live. Anything you earn from an event will probably be lost, anyway. Many of these event ideas are great, but would require development to work, which is a non-starter because they are supposed to be 100% focused on performance and bugs prior to release. I agree that NQ should work with players where possible -- players have made race tracks and puzzles, an event that features these actual examples of emergent gameplay would make a lot of sense.

I get your overall point and don't necessarily disagree with the idea that the CEO's job is to do whatever it takes to preserve the company... However, this means that NQ's leadership knows that DU won't work as a product. They know they won't get enough sales to keep NQ solvent, which means their focus isn't really on improving or fixing DU. They know they can't. Abboud has explicitly stated that they are working on more than one project -- in this context, that means to me that DU isn't moving forward because they don't have hope that it'll scale. As you've reminded us, it took NQ 8 years to get to this point...you'd think they wouldn't be eager to take on more projects considering their dev pace unless they were utterly confident that DU was going to fail. So bringing this back to the original topic, this has never been about NQ's leadership "discussing" what to do with the game and the wipe...because it seems to me like their leadership has already given up on DU and are focused on last-ditch efforts to reposition the company in general. That's not a great thing for DU, even if it is a possible strategy for NQ. With how they are trying to position NQ, there's little chance (IMO) that someone will buy the company and keep on with DU (vs. taking NQ's patents and doing their own thing). I'm equally skeptical that any reasonable investor would throw money at them to extend an 8-year-long runway to "finish" DU, either. So maybe the CEO is doing what they believe will save the company, but this doesn't mean good things for DU.

As I've pointed out before, NQ's new CEO (Nouredine Abboud) is huge on the metaverse concept. If you look at Abboud's LinkedIn, they dedicate their posts to discussing the metaverse and user generated content. They even call it a "user generated content game". Here's some very revealing bits from their posts: "We don’t deliver content, we deliver game mechanics" "We are nurturing a number of new projects in other new crowd-pleasing settings" "We don’t dream about the metaverse, we build it" "As the Metaverse is eating the world, Massively Multiplayer Online Game economy building, Play2Earn controversy and NFT versus real life debates are all over the place. 🚀 One game has pioneered those topics since 2014, Dual Universe..." From this, I think we can learn a few things about why Dual Universe has seemed to have no direction or leadership: As people have mentioned before, NQ is moving on to other projects. That's a big deal...resources are likely not entirely focused on DU. Abboud doesn't believe in creating content, he believes in creating a "user generated content platform". When you ask "where's the content in DU?" the answer is that NQ's leadership actually doesn't believe in content. NQ's apparent arrogance problem is showing with these posts...or at the very least, upper management's complete disconnect from the reality of their product. DU has nothing to do with some of these topics, never mind "pioneering" them. NQ's leadership seems more interested in making them look like a "metaverse company" vs making DU the best game it can be -- as many have speculated, they're likely trying to make themselves appealing for a buyout or for more investment. Like many NFT/web3/metaverse people, he's all about huge ideas that lack specifics, follow-through, or an explanation of how these disparate concepts translate into a solid game design. No wonder there's been no decision-making for months, here...their new CEO is just as "head in the clouds" as JC! Do you think NQ should abandon their obsession with the metaverse? Or are they actually right to let DU fail and pretend like it was never supposed to be a game, just a platform for user content...? Is this all coming back to claims that DU is "little more than a tech demo"...?

Feedback is mostly negative for a reason Feedback would be more balanced if NQ interacted with the community more than once a week via a video -- the best feedback comes when communication is two-sided. When people feel like nothing they say matters anyway, they tend to be more harsh. It'd help to have specific examples of criticisms that led to NQ removing something that people then disliked...People complained about "mole sim" for along time, but auto-miners aren't popular, either. That's because complaining about something doesn't always mean you want it to be deleted. I'm all for providing more "balanced" feedback, 100%! But...that means NQ has to spend more time actually interacting with the community, because absent that of course feedback will skew towards complaints. Part of this would be actually addressing obvious topics that need attention like the "ongoing" wipe discussions. If you actually read this forum, you'd know very clearly how much annoyance this topic has caused. That this still isn't even acknowledged doesn't inspire people to provide more positive feedback...it inspires the exact opposite.

Agreed -- more power to those that find it fun, but everyone knows it's not very engaging. I agree with this too, MMOs are fun and all....but with today's technology, they don't work well as builders because any sandbox will always be constrained by technical limitations around scale (e.g. infra cost). It took NQ way too long to realize this when it should have been obvious from the start. Hence the schematics and mining refactors. It's far easier to develop a small-scale MP game and there'd be few ongoing costs...Plus, everyone knew that people would freak out the instance PvP was announced for DU -- this goes back for so many years it's hilarious. To be fair, I highly doubt that VCs would have put up $20 million+ to back a non-subscription game. That MMO greed was a big motivator...as was JC's obsessions with the metaverse and "Ready Player One", so they were locked into this path...

I get what you mean, but my point is that it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison because there's always more than one design element at play. Eve has NPC police and highsec...so yes it's "full open world PvP", but not remotely in the same context as DU. It also has ship insurance. Which again emphasizes the point that you can't compare just one concept in isolation because every design element works together -- Eve's version of PvP works because of these other concepts.

Stop it with the Eve BS. This isn't Eve; it's nothing like Eve. You're drawing one point of comparison like that is the only difference. Eve also has actual PvE, insurance, and no ship building or atmospheric entry. I don't find pointing at differences between Eve and DU to be at all convincing, because they're very different products and one mechanical difference in isolation means very, very little. Further, that Eve is still alive after this long doesn't mean that a product that clones Eve's features in part or whole will be equally successful.

NQ's CEO went to a "metaverse conference" 8 months ago where they were a speaker. It's just comical to think that NQ believes they were "doing metaverse first" and Facebook merely made it mainstream. The level of arrogance and disconnect is just wild. Another quote from this event that indicates that Nouredine actually doesn't care about Dual Universe as a game... If it feels like DU has no direction or leadership, maybe it is because the company's CEO is busy with that "array of projects"...e.g. trying to figure out how to jam NFTs or other nonsense into this wild ride, since that obviously worked out great for Ghost Recon 😏

You're obviously a bit new around here....this idea that the devs will read feedback and then act on it is certainly well-intentioned, but this simply isn't something that NQ does. There's 6 years of history, here, where NQ rarely interacts with feedback (never mind acting on it). This isn't a complaint about them not "doing what players say", it's just a statement of fact that almost all communication is one-way...so the chance that they'll read this idea and consider implementing it is basically zero. IMO, the UI/UX in this game needs some major overhauls in general. It still looks like the UI was improvised by the dev team -- UI/UX is important because it helps players learn the game and presents the game as being professional instead of looking like it was thrown together in a basement.

Their linkedIn post seemed very out of touch...first with the state of DU (really, talking about RDMS like it's either new or wonderful?) then with the random blockchain reference. It's like they want NQ to seem like a hip web3 company (even as this wave of NFT grifts implodes). They want to talk about DU like it's a metaverse and not like it's a game. His latest comment is even better We all know there's some leadership issues at NQ, but this obsession about branding it as a "metaverse" has become wildly silly and more than a little arrogant in the tone. If DU is a playbook for anything...it's a playbook of things to avoid. I wish the CEO would focus on the here and now and not this absurd idea that DU has anything whatsoever to do with a metaverse. Edit: I realize now that Abboud was an executive producer for Ghost Recon: Breakpoint which explains a lot.... 👀

As if anyone is even around to care anymore, it's been 75 days+ since this was first posted. Since then, I think NQ has chimed in about the wipe 2 or 3 times. I'm not surprised that Nouredine Abboud (NQ's new CEO) is doing....basically nothing. His recent linkedIn post from today is about...RDMS and how brilliant it is: Yeah, throw that bitcoin into your post -- real timely with that. DU has jack to do with blockchain or web3, but sure, try to convince people that DU is a "metaverse". Yep, no chaos here! The vision is so clear it's basically transparent. Nothing to see here, folks! 😭

What's especially "unconventional" in my opinion is the drive to both work on performance fixes and bugs and continue to push new features in advance of release. As anyone that's worked on software at scale knows, these two concepts work against each other... Every feature change can have vast, unintended consequences on performance and will spawn numerous new bugs. Bugs tend to be magnified on release when more players storm the game...minor flaws become major ones if the game scales. I'd argue that beta pops are so low right now, they have no meaningful data on how the game will perform once live. This speaks to "unprofessional" because this is basic software engineering standards. Granted, I don't know their release timetable; maybe they have plenty of time before release and don't need a feature lock yet... But I highly doubt they do real load tests, and without a beta system with meaningful scale, a lot of issues will fly under their radar and ambush them on release. More so if they believe they have enough performance and stability to keep pushing feature changes! It's almost like this marathon feet-dragging about the wipe has sabotaged their ability to test at the most critical time in their history... 👀

Hah, this whole diatribe is rather hilarious. You actually used the phrase "It's PvE that is massively racist towards PvP." That's really all that anyone needs to read to understand the quality of your..."philosophy" Comparing something as inane as PvP / PvE to racism is a clearly articulated, evolved perspective. Riiiight.... And FWIW, this whole blaming other players for playing the product they paid for as they want is childish and boring. It's NQs job to design the game and they decided on this crude melding between PvE sandbox builder and full open world PvP (with niche, UI-driven combat). It was NQ that pitched being able to do whatever you want and fill any role you want. If combat and PvP were really so utterly fun and interesting, more people would do it and NQ would therefore prioritize it higher. It's not complicated.

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.

I don't understand your bad attitude, here. You're saying you'd gladly live in a PvP zone full time, but only if the game is different than what it is today...? Okay...but @RugesV wasn't talking about some theoretical version of PvP that doesn't exist. I think the war declaration system is a nice compromise that could bring more life to the org system and bring some level of conflict into the safe zones. It wouldn't matter if you were more polite about it...but then you say these arguments are "the dumbest of the dumb"... "I'd gladly live in the PvP zone...if only PvP had more benefits and also worked totally different than it does today" Basically you talked about how Eve works then called someone dumb...? Not especially productive, polite, or convincing.

Okay, but TW may never be rolled out universally because the game can't physically handle it at scale and possibly never will. There's a reason NQ spawns asteroids and alien cores as they do. I don't understand why you think more PvP will give the game a "boost" in any media channel. I've seen plenty of videos posted to YouTube etc. with very few views...and that's understandable because watching combat in DU is absurdly boring. It's not very watchable or interesting...especially compared to other PvP games. If watching combat is so engaging, why isn't it more popular on media today? Only because TW is missing...? I'm not convinced. Again, this idea that the game will fail without your specific vision for PvP is a false dichotomy -- there's more choices than just your way or nothingness...there's an infinite spectrum of possibilities between. "Selfish" players are those that insist again and again that theirs is the only vision that will work. I don't disagree that the game will end before 2023...but it isn't as simple as merely turning on TW and removing safe zones -- it'll need a lot more than just that.

It's easy to say that you simply shouldn't pay if you don't want to, but some people committed to longer-term subscriptions. If I decided to start a 6 month sub right before they announced that they might wipe, I'd feel a bit ripped off at this point...especially since a big part of the pitch to join early access was persistence. Yeah, in that case I think a refund isn't so utterly absurd. Forums in general are not a place for pure fact and objectivity -- even if they were, it isn't like we have the capacity to know facts beyond what NQ shares with us. Speculation and emotion is a part of every community. Anyone that's ever engaged in online discussion should temper what they read with this understanding. People have a right to be emotional and to speculate -- speculation and emotion is just one element of discussion. Speculation is a useful facet of conversation -- people speculate about history and politics because it leads to interesting thought experiments and "what ifs" that allow us to wonder about an ocean of possibilities. I do agree that there's an important distinction between complaints, emotions, and speculation and outright hostility, lies, and irrationality. An obligatory reminder: this is just a game for us...for those people working at NQ, it's their livelihood and for some, the last 5-6 years of their career. As emotional as players are, those that have spent a lot of time and energy working on the game are even more emotionally invested and likely even more acutely aware of the uphill battle NQ has in stabilizing and scaling their company. So...say what you want, but it's worth remembering that behind this game are a lot of likely overworked and underpaid human beings that have a lot more at stake than any player.

The exhibition hall likely required very little actual dev. Especially with manual moderation, they probably had to write little to no code. I agree 100% that there's better ideas, but as we're all aware, NQ is focusing mostly on optimization and performance prior to release (they have a lot of work to do there). They probably believed this was a good way to feature player content without any strain on limited dev resources. Integrating DU-creators sounds like an awesome idea, but there's logistical complexity and developer cost to that. Do they have an API already? How robust and scalable is it? Who pays for it / owns it? What if it goes offline? What if DU explodes in popularity and they demand more money or they'll take the service offline? Or their site gets hacked? Or they simply get bored and don't want to maintain it? Granted this isn't an overly complex site and NQ could develop it themselves, but that goes back to developer resources (and game devs often don't know web development). I personally wouldn't be eager to integrate any third party system into a commercial product -- there's a lot of business and technical caveats that would create a lot of headaches.

And let's be real...sniping mission runners is PvP only in the lamest sense. It's puzzling how some PvP players complain about players "not wanting to take risks" when many pirates operate the exact same way... I agree that risk vs. reward is way out of balance with DU. The best PvP games embrace loss -- especially in a context where there's zero way to practice combat other than PvP, loss needs to be less of a grind and annoyance. Reality is that it's not 1999 anymore...if you want to be a massively multiplayer game, you need to design for the gaming mentalities that exist today. A boring grind to replace a ship after being ganked (or simply losing a battle) has little actual game design justification -- how does that improve engagement when the 'grind' is mostly just waiting for AMs to churn out ore, anyway? If DU really wants to be so niche, that's fine...but then it should have never been an MMO to begin with.