blundertwink

I think this whole podcast concept is hilarious. If only there was some place people could go to ask NQ questions and they could answer in detail with text...it would be like a public forum of opinion. Too bad such a thing doesn't exist and answering select questions from a google form is the only way. Maybe someday this "forum" technology will exist, but until then we'll wait until next week's Youtube not-video for more deep answers to deep questions! 😁

Yeah, definitely helps to have text transcripts for that reason, but also because it takes like 1 minute to read the answers to the 5 questions...but 6 minutes to listen. It's nice to know if a relevant question was asked without having to listen to the whole thing. At the very least, it wouldn't be hard to list the questions being discussed in the post description instead of just "here go listen to this". Just my opinion, but doesn't seem like it would take much time to do that.

Putting a basic transcript in place so that people don't need to listen to the whole thing to see if a relevant question was asked. Hint: probably not. #1 - "Will LUA API change?" Yeah LUA will change and break stuff, but we don't have details. #2 - "What is griefing?" Who asked this...lol #3 - "Are we getting different colored lumi voxels?" Don't know (e.g. probably not), but you can use screens... #4 - "If new FTUE is meant to improve starting zones, why shuttles to Alioth?" So people don't have to build ships if they don't want to (lol) #5 - "Is T5 output on alien cores too high?" Maybe. It's 'first iteration' which means trial and error. #6 -- oh there's no number 6. That's actually it. This time not even acknowledging the "discussion" they are having about a wipe. Hmmm.

You probably aren't wrong, but IMO $20/month is way too high. That said....I kind of doubt NQ could keep that many players subscribed even for free 😬 IMO, the majority would churn after <90 days even without a charge. Subscription MMOs are all about being a time sink, and while some people could spend forever crafting ships and constructs, most get bored without more structure and content depth...which DU lacks (to an extreme) compared to other MMOs. So...doubling the sub price kind of makes sense because they aren't going to win retention with gameplay or updates at their usual cadence. If the vast majority are going to churn anyway, I suppose it's best to collect as much as possible.

I'm not saying you're wrong Blaze, but they'd be..."bold" for releasing it that quick. It isn't even clear if they've feature-locked the game at this point (still considering removing schematics...?)...and clearly they haven't tested it enough to optimize and fix bugs. I don't know what sort of traffic they'll get for release...but if they try to push it that quickly, I'd wager that new players will be greeted with the familiar "pending operation" just like beta. Did they even load test the new FTUE...? I wonder how robust the server will be spawning 10,000 outposts a day...I actually expected the wipe in part to test this, but they clearly don't feel the need to rush. Beta saw an ocean of abandoned speeders. I wonder how they'll handle the sea of supposedly permanent abandoned outposts... 🤔 🤷‍♂️

That's the thing about fun, it's very arbitrary. Everyone has different ideas about what's fun...there's nothing wrong with that. IMO...combat in this form is very niche both in its mechanics and its its "only open-world PvP" concept. It's also very, very boring to watch -- which matters for a small MMO that needs every ounce of advertising via streamers. A typical modern MMO has a budget 5 times (or more) more than DU's ~$22 million -- in large part to pay for marketing. They need those streamers. Showing an average gamer real combat in this game will actively deter them -- it's just too niche for an MMO today in 2022. Plus...without actual Territory War, it feels disjointed from the rest of the game -- their desire to encourage combat by spawning stuff in deep space only makes it more disconnected from the rest of the game. Their inability to balance combat also spells troubles for release -- any change that breaks constructs and requires refactoring a build will annoy people. I'm not convinced they've settled into a real balance here, nor am I convinced that they'll operate any differently after release...and as we've seen, decision-making isn't really their strongest ability.

And that's on top of the 3,000,000 other threads with discussion about a wipe going back years. I agree that most people have stopped caring. In a way it's brilliant. By wiping the players, they've ensured that they can delete the whole game with no one blinking. Here we thought they'd wipe constructs or worried about keeping blueprints...it's us they've been wiping this whole time. 🤯

Also aimed at reducing cost...to be fair, the idea of multi-crew ships was never going to work great with a single shard system. This should have been obvious to NQ during the design phase, but yet again their ideas were implemented far ahead of actually thinking about the system at scale. Network performance requires more resources (often exponentially so) as there's more clients. Relatively small battles between multi-crew ships might involve 10+ clients...if battles were instanced, maybe this wouldn't be as big a deal, but otherwise it yields much better "bang for buck" for network performance without multi-crew ships. Even if it means more ships, fewer clients will likely be more efficient. That said, PvP performance will probably never be great and I don't think DU will ever see "massive" battles.

They would rather talk on a podcast because a podcast is one-way communication where they can pick and choose a few questions without any back and forth or actual community engagement. A month of discussion and decision making on one simple choice that's been talked about for years is absurd, especially considering the urgency. I don't know what the new CEO is doing...but leadership at NQ hasn't improved. It might be worse than ever, frankly. NQ is probably facing burnout and morale loss, just like us players. If the issues are obvious to us, I'm sure they are obvious to employees that stare at the game 8 hours a day. I really can't agree -- the profitable thing is to actually test the game with as many players as possible so you can find the bugs and release the game without it instantly imploding. The very few beta players still subbed aren't generating an ounce of profit for NQ. Only release-scale subs will give them any sort of profit, and release will fail if they don't test it with as much scale as they can. Even 10,000 subs wouldn't be profitable for a company of NQ's size (nor even close), and I think we can agree they don't likely have even that amount...so stringing us along is self-defeating.

The risk I see with this is that it's too quick to leave you on your own...which could mean a bunch of people joining, getting their outpost, and quitting. When public "beta" launched, at least then a lot of people that were turned off quit before they claimed a hex or built stuff. With this, it'll be a lot of abandoned outposts permanently using up tiles and cluttering the server...which means NQ will have to again change the rules on what's "permanent" on the safe moons.

Tested at minuscule scale is not good enough, IMO -- even if they went back in time and didn't bungle this wipe announcement, the beta population then still wouldn't be enough to test the game at scale for release....but it would have been a lot better. I expect NQ is thinking along the lines of "who care if most people stopped playing, we are still getting test data and bug reports?" -- but that's just not going to work. They learned (hah, they didn't) from public beta's launch that things working at a small scale doesn't mean they'll work at a release scale -- anyone that's seen software break at scale knows it is a lot more involved than tripling the hardware to triple the traffic. A single tiny flaw that isn't noticed when there's only a few hundred people beta testing will explode the servers if thousands join on release day...and with the amount of tech debt NQ has accumulated, they will need many months to optimize and fix things. I do think they'll announce this before release and will try to release during winter, but every day with low populations is wasted time in gathering the data they need to scale this bastard.

I don't really get it from a business perspective. The longer you play the game, the more it costs NQ. Why would they then reward players with free time? That's combining higher cost with no revenue. The only way DAC works is if there's enough active subs to support those that don't pay -- then it becomes a money sink and a lure to encourage people to get hooked thinking "hey I can earn my sub by grinding" when most likely they can't. If DU doesn't first have enough subs to be stable, then people trading quanta for DAC doesn't make as much sense. If they allow it...it will be absurdly expensive. I mean, it seems obvious...NQ only makes less money the more people actually play and I'm skeptical that they'll be so overflowing with subs that they will be willing to exchange free play time for quanta for any reason.

Plus...release will certainly crash and burn if it isn't tested...and right now it isn't being tested. If you don't test the latest changes before release, there's no point to having a beta program at all -- it renders the last year of testing basically worthless. I wonder if there's anyone in charge over there or if it's just people collecting their checks until it implodes. I know that is probably too harsh, but I don't really get how the project could get this far off the rails unless morale there is utterly depleted, even at the leadership level.

Plus it was developed by a team of <20 people over only 3 years...NQ's team is over twice the size and has taken 2-3 times as long. For NMS, they had to create their own engine -- that alone is no small feat. The procgen algorithms in NMS are just as complex as any of the mechanics in DU if not more so. Although NMS isn't an MMO, it's not that hard to run into a dozen or so players in any hub. I think DU would have been better off as an asynchronous multiplayer game similar to NMS. That would align with their budget more closely and allow them the time and resources needed to make NPCs to fill out their world, add feature depth, and let players have more agency in the game experience. A lot (arguably most) of the complexity with DU comes from the scale and optimizations needed to work as an MMO. Player interaction isn't really much of a thing anyway, so asynchronous multiplayer in a similar style to NMS would work fairly well. You'd still be able to showcase your creations and meet players in key hubs/markets -- but the game would be vastly easier to develop, which means by now it'd have a lot more depth. Of course...they wouldn't be able to charge a subscription, which means they likely wouldn't have received all that VC money to begin with. This is a big tangent to the topic but there's already like 1000 replies talking about a wipe beyond the 3 billion threads that have discussed it in the past, so not really too concerned...

It was a lame way to implement space-only territory war in a way that's purposefully disconnected from the rest of the game. In their patch notes, they even call it "territory warfare"...I guess that checks the box, just like how missions are 100% done. I think they are scared to roll out actual territory war in part because of performance. There's a reason alien cores are out of the way (beyond general PvP-angst) -- alien cores are a mechanism NQ can carefully control, but actual TW they can't. NQ now has to fight against its own single-shard design and invent absurdities to isolate players so that performance doesn't crash and burn, especially with release "coming up". It's the most fundamental issue with single-shard: more players in one area means more resources needed, and actual TW would encourage too much costly interaction. I don't think we'll ever see actual TW -- even in space, never mind on the ground.

But NQ isn't an indie developer...why do people think they are? They are certainly indie compared to the big giants of the industry like Activision or EA, but over $20 million in funding and ~30-50 employees across two offices means you aren't indie. They are probably not even triple-I with the size of their studio...and more neatly fit into the double-A category. So...might be quirky but certainly not fair to classify them as indie.

Plus, this personal data just isn't worth very much. It's only worthwhile in bulk and DU doesn't have enough scale to be worth anything. For reference, a lead list of ~10k emails sells for <$1,000 ($2k tops if they are highly qualified and highly accurate) and I'm not sure NQ has even that amount. Certainly not worth enough to risk GDPR fines

This whole thing goes to show how unprepared they are for release. It's been nearly a month of "internal debate" -- and in the meantime, no information (to my knowledge) about any other updates planned. They have no interest in keeping their players engaged and looking forward to the next drop. Even if the release date isn't set in stone, the content should be planned out well in advance. NQ isn't ready for release because they don't understand this urgency. This isn't rocket science. They've had plenty of time to practice...of course, if it actually takes them a month to make a simple choice (that's been years in the making), I guess planning out updates is too much to ask? Our complaining about poor customer engagement is for their benefit, but they seem to take it personally or just don't believe it's a big deal. The run the game like it is single player, not like a subscription-based product. Why would anyone keep paying NQ month after month when it takes them so long to do anything...? It's just another big issue that will encourage players to churn. Either they are absurdly stubborn, or morale over there is completely depleted.

Instead of actual TW after years and years (and years) of people waiting for it, they gave us random alien crap... I always thought Territory War would start in space and not have a ground-based implementation for a very long time, but never expected it to be this disconnected from the rest of the game. I doubt they have the bandwidth to make any changes here before release, though -- I expect the next updates to be small and focused only on bugs and optimizations (assuming they ever decide about a wipe). I don't envy the catch-22 they are in. Leave it the same and the game isn't very well designed...try to squeeze in more updates and the game isn't tested enough and burns on release...it's possibly too late to fix things, sadly.

Fair enough, though it probably took a lot more total work-hours than you might expect. I can't really blame them for wanting to have some fun -- I imagine working at NQ is rather stressful especially now. I do apologize for being a bit of a jerk about their egg hunt.

Eh, who cares...? "Not Apheilia" is having fun (well, no, they don't understand the human notion of "fun"). There's no harm being done -- even if it were against the rules (or the "spirit" of the rules), I'm not a fan of blindly following every rule just because "rules are rules". If there's no harm, there's no issue. By the way, this forum software wasn't written by NQ, it's written by Invision Community -- not a great look for a vendor that charges up to $500/month (or more) for a freakin' forum. This means NQ has spent: $6,408, $10,728, or $39,528 on forum software since this forum started depending on their plan. To be fair, I expect they are on the lowest-tier plan. Hopefully all those Aphelia taxes helps cover the cost...but to me, I wonder if NQ will keep paying for the forum when they clearly don't like engaging on here, anyway. Honestly...if I were them I'd have spun this forum down so their CMs can focus on fewer channels and hopefully provide better engagement.

Everyone calm down. We got the results of the egg hunt yesterday, so everything is fine...hiding 400+ eggs manually for an event that didn't mean anything at all is a much better use of time than all this game development crap.

Well...Athena is the last major update and they don't have time to make deep changes before release...even if release is 6-7 months away, they unfortunately don't have time to squeeze in major changes along with the (sorely needed) optimizations and bug fixes. If advancement is even slower...what we'd have is a game where people stand around waiting for AMs, and I think that would reduce engagement especially for new players. IMO The game is shallow enough without having to wait for people to grind research. There's so little progression overall that "gating" the limited content wouldn't make sense to me. The game needs more feature depth overall -- new mechanics and not just changing how existing mechanics work.

This is the sort of basic business logic that seems to elude NQ when it's obvious for everyone else. If you don't charge an initial purchase price, you can't afford to churn people like this -- the cost of acquisition may very well exceed the $9.99 they pay for 1 month's sub...and creating an unrealistic expectation makes churn rates far worse. It's frustrating because it's easy to imagine someone in marketing insisting that the adverts are fantastic because "conversion rates are good" -- when as a subscription-based game its retention rate that matters. It's like they've made an effort to learn as little as possible from the public beta rollout and are trying to repeat that failure in every way. NQ has had 3 difference CEOs before the game has even launched...so even if we put all their game design and development woes to the side, there's fundamental issues with their leadership that are hard to explain.

They are having internal discussions to determine this -- every NQ decision requires at least 2 announcements stating that an announcement will come...including the results of an easter egg hunt, apparently. It's business as usual.