blundertwink

Exactly my point, though....if Eve Online of all the MMOs in the wild is more accessible than DU, that spells serious trouble for NQ. A wide variety of people can join Eve and have fun (even if it is only for a few months)...DU doesn't even have NPCs to shoot at. That alone makes it less mainstream and accessible than Eve, never mind the horrid UX and bad tutorials. I don't necessarily disagree, but that time has come and gone. Athena is their last major update after over 8 years of development. This idea that DU will be fine if only NQ has a bit more time to "add content" is puzzling to me. They've had the time. It's come and gone. People have been waiting for that magical content for years and years and years now. There's nothing in NQ's years of development that convinces me that they can speed things up and improve the game enough to scale it...not in the limited time they have before release. IMO post release updates don't matter if release goes poorly, because at that point they just won't have enough money or time to make the game commercially viable.

I get what you're saying, but Eve is still around despite some of its older mechanics, not because of them. Copying features from a 19 year old game (as DU has done in multiple places) isn't generally wise. Slow boating as a concept hasn't aged well...especially when there's not much to do otherwise as you say. The existence of NPCs in Eve makes a huge difference for its mainstream appeal...and even then most players don't make it past 90 days of play time. I personally dislike comparing DU to Eve because overall Eve is a much more mainstream game. It's hard to compare with DU, which is lacking a lot of the core elements that make Eve more accessible to mainstream players.

That's what I mean -- they need to do this and move on so that they can actually stabilize the game and get back to beta testing. Toying with the ideas of removing schematics or not before they do the wipe is immensely counter-productive and should be out of scope considering that they don't have unlimited time until release. All this should have been sorted weeks ago.

No one thinks this is fun...it's a huge waste of time and electricity. If I wanted a screen saver, I'd put on a screen saver. There's a not-so-fine line between "hardcore" gameplay and "boring as all F" gameplay. If the most attractive thing about slowboating is that it gives you time to do chores IRL...well, that's literally the opposite of engaging gameplay because it's forcing you to do anything else while the game plays itself. There's no rationale at all behind this game design choice. They could have hired some random person from one of those slightly scammy "game design" colleges and been better off than whoever is making these decisions.

I almost forgot that they were actually thinking about that...I really don't get how they think they have time for this. They should be in a soft "feature freeze" where the next few months are 100% focused on bugs and performance. UI/UX would be welcomed too. Making more changes like taking out schematics will make performance an unknown again. Maybe that's fine, but the risk is that they inadvertently eradicate all the gains they've made by removing mining and new players will enjoy another ocean of "pending operations". With lower player counts....they might not see this as an issue until it is too late. I keep beating this same drum...because I don't want release to repeat the same mistakes as public beta's launch. It's their last chance to scale this game. If they think otherwise that's just pure hubris. It's like NQ really doesn't get the idea of beta at all. When they finally need it the most, they sabotage it by dragging their feet on this wipe nonsense while simultaneously toying with changes that can easily destabilize the game at scale. They'd be so much better off just ripping the bandaid off if that's what they are going to do.

Fair. It's also amazingly counter-productive. If they're using the same advert as when public beta dropped, it's probably because they hired a third party firm to develop it...and contracted firms only care about conversion rate, not retention. They probably don't want to spend more money when that ad already "works". A great advert with high conversion can lead to higher churn rates than if they presented an honest advert. It's more economical to get fewer people into the game for longer than attracting a flood of new players that churn right away. Ads like these work fine for non-subscription products or subs with a high enough initial buy-in...but a $9.99 entry point that has to be re-earned monthly? Not so much. They should have learned all this with public beta's roll out...hopefully they go a different direction for release, but I won't hold my breath.

Bigger elephant in the room: combat sucks in DU in general...who even cares if it is P2W, it isn't very fun even if it were fair (it can't be fair no matter how they tweak the stats or control alts, that's an inherent part of asymmetrical open world combat). Regardless of balance or the frustrations of an "unfair" loss, you could give every new player an infinitely respawning combat ship and still most people wouldn't find combat interesting enough to PvP often...because even on a basic mechanical level, it just isn't very interesting.

Their reasoning was flawed to begin with, though. "Let's remove the idea of exploration and movement because digging is too expensive." They could have removed digging instead of turning the game into an exercise in waiting between repetitive back-and-forth hauling. Further, I don't think it was "too expensive", I think it was poorly implemented. Digging was too deep, the technical implementation was far too inefficient (especially with players in the same areas), and NQ realized that they need to maximize their margins because churn is too damn high. The lack of engaging content only makes churn worse, though...yay new players can exist in the game without "pending operation"...but they also have nothing to do.

Mmm, no, blockchains don't magically solve anything. Centralized systems are far superior in the context of MMO development (and most everything to be honest). Smart contracts are a huge mess and the blockchain is massive waste of electricity in general. Even the latest NFT-crazed MMO (i.e. BigTime) runs on traditional architecture...for a very good reason.

I gotta keep saying it -- big updates in advance of an incoming release combined with very low player counts because of wipe angst (or constructs being ruined) is a potentially lethal cocktail. This is the time NQ needs to actually beta test and find bugs and flaws in their ability to scale. This being the "dead-phase" of DU is not good...this is the time it should be the busiest if NQ hopes to have the feedback it needs to do a clean release. This wipe BS has gone on for too long. If they wait until right before release, that means Athena will be practically untested at anything close to load. That's a huge gamble and makes this entire beta program rather pointless...you don't make last minute changes to a rocket 30 seconds before launch and hope for the best. This is the time DU actually needs a real beta program, but NQ has greatly reduced its effectiveness by delaying this simple decision. Yet again, players are warning them about what will happen, and yet again NQ thinks we are know-it-alls that don't understand the process (as if none of us have released software before lol). Good luck with release, but we already know how this will play out.

No one said they needed tunnels to mine, either....the most important aspect of mining (to me) is that it gets players moving across the system searching for ore. Exploration is a good thing. The actual process of digging through the planet...I could take it or leave it. They could have a mining mechanic that doesn't involve actual digging -- like maybe you fire some sort of sensor probe and the goal is to pinpoint the node. Then your ship automatically extracts the ore once located. Then having a mining-specialized ship would be a thing (e.g. more or better probes or faster extraction) -- without the cost of terrain deformation. Not saying it's the best idea, but my point is that there's a lot of room between pulling ore out of the earth and eliminating a huge pillar of active gameplay with timers and a silly mini-game.

Riiight? I think this will hurt them more than is obvious right now. It makes building more convenient in a lot of ways, but overall it reduces the engagement of the game. Once you have some AMs set up, mining is basically a "watch the paint dry" feature. Just like slowboating. Just like training talents. Just like waiting for asteroids to spawn. When so many features in your game rely on waiting around doing nothing, that's just not a good design.

I'm eager to see how NQ manages this at release. "Sorry, your constructs are borked because we did a balance change" isn't going to fly (no pun intended) post-release...and if they are trying to rush in all these balance tweaks before release, there will certainly be changes later (if the game makes it to post-release).

That's really not how it works, though....you can't just copy/paste the code that creates items and "invert" it. You need new server-side endpoints, new UI/UX to facilitate it, new models, new animations...plus it needs to be tested. Just because it is "similar" to an existing function doesn't mean you'll actually have a lot of code reuse, especially if it was never planned for that logic to be invertible. Even if there is decent code reuse, there's a lot of other work that would be required...in general, anything in development that you can imagine as being easy is many times harder in reality.

I don't think they like player feedback, honestly. Some comments in the past have soured me on their ability to process feedback in a professional, objective way...like calling some posters "know-it-alls" and constantly trying to remind players that only they know how hard game development is (which is very false). I don't view this as just a wipe for balance or changes or whatever...it's also a wipe of players they don't really like hearing from...I get that constant negativity is a huge morale-suck, but it's also a "canary in the coal auto-miner" sort of thing that they've generally ignored. IMO they do the wipe, then they shut down the forum after letting people vent...then they proceed with release without the pesky burden of player feedback. Then they crash and burn because they forgot to test the game at scale...again. 😅

I mean...for the record, It was @blazemonger that actually did the "doxxing" and you can't really blame someone just for starting the thread (which wasn't at all calling for that) 😅 Not that this has anything to do with the topic, just saying...

This thread has already become so long that NQ won't read it...and if they do, the takeaway will probably be that it doesn't much matter because "some love the idea, some hate it". They'll see whatever they want to see in this thread if/when they skim through it. They should rip this bandaid off one way or the other and move on, because there's many more important things. I don't get why NQ thinks they have unlimited time to make these sort of simple choices -- it's like they think that release is so far away that they have plenty of time to [filtered] around with making more changes...when in any sane studio they'd be in "feature lock" and focusing on UI/UX, improving FTUE, fixing bugs, and making sure everything is scalable/performant. NQ has learned next to nothing from this whole beta experience and it shows.

There's no plausible way to do that. What "proof" could you possibly present...and who is checking this proof? Anyone on a dynamic IP is just SOL? And if you move and switch IPs or switch computers, I guess you have to resubmit proof to NQ's massive team of reviewers? It's just not technically feasible to ban mutli-boxers without immense collateral damage -- it's one of those things that can't be solved through technology and the effort required to do so would make it unplayable for too many to be worthwhile. The only way to mitigate bad exploitive behaviors that come from alt hordes is to design the game to minimize the scale/imapct of such exploits.

Not everyone has a static IP and people often play together on a LAN. You can't rely on hardware-level fingerprints because that doesn't stop multi-boxing and every GFN instance would likely have the same fingerprint. Hardware fingerprints suck anyway -- people are allowed to play on multiple computers or purchase new computers. Payment info is easy to get around by buying game codes...and unless Xsolla offers a way to detect/enforce distinct payment methods (I doubt they do) NQ would have no way to do this without implementing a new gateway themselves. If they were going to do this, they would have already to get away from Xsolla's absurdly high rates (they are almost twice industry standard). As has been discussed before, there's no technical way to identify someone multi-boxing vs. playing over LAN together...and some manual review of people on shared IPs wouldn't work because there's no "proof" you could present or refute (setting aside that this just isn't a scalable/reasonable thing to do). The issue isn't with the tech, it's with the design...

I hate to be mean, but there's no point in making suggestions at this point -- especially those that require considerable changes like recycling, energy, etc. These are all far, far more involved to develop than NQ has the time for. The game is baked. It's done. It's past the point where they can throw in new features at the last minute. They might be able to tweak balance by adjusting stats, but they can't add more depth to the gameplay...if they haven't gotten around to it in the last 8 years they surely won't in the next few months.

I don't think you even took the time to understand the OP's suggestion (not about a wipe)...and either way, this sort of insult makes you sound like a whining teenager. For someone so concerned about "care bears" complaining...you seem to complain so readily and are eager to throw around personal insults despite not knowing the OP at all. If you're worried about people throwing a tantrum and ruining the game's fun, try looking inward.

I agree that the game isn't ready for release, but that ship has sailed. It's been 8 years in the making...it's done. Athena was the last major update. People have been waiting around for a "big update" that brings actual gameplay depth for years. It isn't going to happen. They don't know how to make it happen, and if they did...they couldn't do it in the time they have left. Even if they don't actually release for another year, they don't have time. They have a bottomless pit of tech debt to settle in terms of polish, bugs, and stability to be ready for a real release...things that will make a much bigger dent to new player retention than fresh servers. They should have settled this months ago...their inability to make a simple decision is "shedding light" on NQ's management and maybe explains why nothing has fundamentally changed with this game for years.

If they wipe, they should also give credits to people that have paid subs up till this point. I get why they want to wipe, but it's a bit scammy to say that you'll get to keep things you build during beta then change your mind later. This speaks to why they want to wipe, though -- because there's a strong psychological pull for players to join an MMO as early as possible and advance as quickly as possible. I don't get it, but it's a very real thing in this genre. Plenty of people paid for that already with beta...and wouldn't have paid if they knew progress would be lost. Either way, it's been way too long without a decision. Make your choice and do it quickly -- that there's "debate internally" only makes me think there isn't strong leadership.

There's a lot of psychology around joining an MMO at launch and wanting to advance quickly, rise to the top before the game becomes mature...I don't get it personally, but it's very obviously a real motivation. Yes, the game will end up in a similar place in X years or months...but that really isn't the point. It isn't time for NQ to answer the question about wipes...it's long past time. It shouldn't take them weeks and weeks just to make a decision, never mind implement it. No wonder dev is so glacial...no one wants to make a call? Why do they believe they have this sort of time to squander...? I think they greatly underestimate the amount of time they need to spend 100% focused on scalability, bugs, and polish. They have months (if not years) of debt piled up, here...and refusing to make a professional UI/UX will do a lot more to churn players than the lack of a clean slate. It'll fail just as hard if those thousands of new outposts (or massively upscaled industry thanks to schematic removal) crashes the servers under the weight of untested scale.

NQ needs to focus on scale, bugs, and polish. Settle this BS about a wipe quickly, move on, and make sure DU can actually support a release at scale. I'm skeptical it can...and more skeptical the more stuff they change before release. Rip out schematics? Okay, but then you need to replace them or understand the performance implications. Have they even tested the latest version at scale? They obviously didn't went they rolled out public beta -- will they actually learn anything from the past, or repeat the same mistakes? The more time they invest in changes, the less time they have to test and fix the game's performance and scalability, improve polish, and fix bugs. I don't think they should wipe for that reason alone -- they don't have time. Even if only focusing on scale/bugs/polish...that'll take them months and months because they have a lot of debt built up in those departments.