blundertwink

Please stop necro-ing posts from a year or more... There's plenty of more recent posts endlessly discussing "wipe theory" (which sounds...not great). Who even cares what JC said...? He said a lot of things that didn't make sense and he isn't in charge anymore. He's not "the man" anymore.

So many promises will never materialize. The idea that the game will support big battles is one. I mean, it can barely support small battles. It was never going to support battles as large as Eve's -- that's a fundamental part of how they designed the game with multi-crew ships, huge raycasting distances, high speeds, and voxel damage. I don't see the point in a wipe...but I don't agree that wiping will "make the servers dead", either. There's simply not enough beta players to matter -- obviously NQ doesn't want to just drop the few thousand subs they have...but if they all went away, it wouldn't be material. They need to 10x or 20x their subs and if they believe a wipe would help them bring new people in, they will gladly sacrifice the tiny beta population. I doubt new players would care much either way -- we'll see how NQ revamps FTUE, but new players have plenty of hurdles beyond "the world is empty" -- if anything, that would be a bonus by making more hexes closer to markets available. It is really puzzling that they would be running ads already...the FTUE is really horrid right now, regardless of wipe. I don't know how they expect first time players to stay interested. Have they bothered watching a new player try the game...? It isn't pretty. It's like they want people to churn, if they really are pushing ads. I'd love to see the ad itself...curious if they are just recycling ads from beta or made something new.

Also shocking when people RP as a deeply narcissistic genius obsessed about 80s references. Halliday's metaverse was a nightmare realm of inequality. Unlike many of the superwealthy in history who become charitable when they become old...his choice was to say "meh, whatever" and not use his wealth for good...but to satisfy his ego one last time with a silly contest -- because that is a great way to decide the fate of trillions of dollars. I see a lot of parallels with Halliday and people trying to develop a metaverse / web3 -- the read books like this as an inspiration when they were intended to be a cautionary tale.

This thread is begging to be locked...if grown adults can't handle being reasonably polite, I think NQ should change the forum rules. Every thread of any length becomes some argument about PvP or a wipe, anyway...with predictable (and endlessly repeated) outcomes. Allow replies to developer posts, but eliminate the ability to make new topics...at least in this "general discussion" area. 🤷‍♂️ No one has anything new to say about PvP that hasn't been said in the last 6 years of history here. People have been arguing since the day PvP was announced as a concept. All that's left is complaints and insults. I'm surprised NQ has let this forum continue for as long as it has. It's an extra burden of moderation they don't really need.

Black text on a black background is a great evil to me... (edit: thanks for fixing) I don't know about this specific drama, but I do find it sad that there are issues with the community not being polite...for a "mature" community of mostly older gamers, there's a lot of childish behavior.

There's plenty of websites that will help in picking compatible parts. I'd strongly suggest using a comprehensive system like pcpartpicker vs. offhand knowledge from around here which will never be complete. They also have plenty of prebuilt configurations that will give you a rough price range and list of compatible components. Personally, I stopped seeing the point of building my own computer...the price difference of a high end prebuilt vs. all the constituent components (at retail prices) seemed too small for the effort...but of course "too small for the effort" is highly relative.

NMS also has what DU lacks in core technicality -- they knew that what they wanted to achieve wouldn't be realistic with an off-the-shelf engine so they rolled their own. The game might seem simple, but their procgen is extremely advanced and merely looks effortless. The details involved rival anything DU has achieved in complexity (e.g. voxel-to-mesh tech which uses a public / academic algorithm). Frankly, it's probably easier to run into people in NMS than in DU... NMS also has a very strong design / style and streamlined UX -- it often feels like NQ doesn't have even a single person focused on UI/UX on staff. Still a lot to learn from NMS -- don't compromise, just keep improving, don't lose hope, don't lose sight of the core premise of the game...and don't make promises based on lies (very relevant for their marketing team come release)!

The rumors say it is because an investor "forced" them to, but I've yet to see any actual evidence of this beyond rumor. Xsolla isn't just shady, they have absurdly high rates (almost twice Stripe's rate, which is considered very high in the industry). How shady are they? They fired 150 employees based on a big data analysis of performance which tagged some employees as "unproductive" based on their activities in Jira, confluence, gmail, etc. For anyone that's actually used those tools...it isn't just mean, it's a stupid idea. CEO Aleksandr Agapitov's classy response to this controversy...? I don't think anyone on the planet should use Xsolla as a payment service. It's objectively crap, there's much better and cheaper services that are extremely easy to implement technically, and the owner is an irredeemable [filtered] that's made most his money by making subs difficult to cancel. Xsolla still maintains offices in Russia (but is a California company), so some percent of your sub might go to paying Russian employees and enriching the Russian government via taxes...maybe not with sanctions making it all but impossible for them to actually pay those employees, but Agapitov is enough of an ass that he probably has a work-around. It wouldn't be hard to switch payment providers -- and unless someone can produce some real evidence that NQ is "forced" to use Xsolla, I think they should switch providers.

This article was written in the wake of No Man's Sky's disastrous release...it's humorous reading it now, because JC is specifically talking about overambitious kickstarters promising too much...but how NQ is going to be different and "totally transparent": https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-10-07-building-a-space-sim-in-a-post-no-mans-sky-world I know this ship has sailed a long time ago, but it's a reminder of how much better off NQ is without JC at the helm...and how misleading he was with almost everything he said. I think articles from the past like this are helpful to understand why so many alpha backers left and won't be coming back -- his "facts" never seemed to be based in reality. It isn't just that NQ missed the mark vs. Kickstarter goals that were never realistic...that's understandable (and typical)...it's that JC talked about how they were different, they would be transparent, and they "had the technology". He talked it up for the sake of funding...and he was successful. NQ of today isn't perfect, but it's SUs ahead of the exaggerations and obvious lies of 2016...and really interesting that in the years since, DU is still an alpha while Hello Games has (IMO) completely regained the trust of their customers and then some.

Hate to be the bubble burster, but AvA won't be coming anytime soon if ever -- they've confirmed it won't roll out until "at least" post-release. You mention PS2, but if AvA drops it won't be an FPS -- it will be tab targeted. That we have no idea how major aspects of PvP will work after this long is not promising for how PvP will work when everything is "done".

Laziness and not caring -- they probably figure since logs are stored client side "why not" log as much as possible. There's two records with exactly the same time stamp in the original post (granted it is old) -- down to the milliseconds. Either timestamps are wrong or it is logging the same thing more than once per frame. It's rare for logging systems to care about logging duplicate data but logging the same thing more than once per frame is odd. The log level is set to "debug" -- that is typically the "lowest" log level that logs in the most excruciating detail. It isn't typically intended for production/clients. It's intended to have so much detail that you can...debug. This goes back to "lazy and not caring" because it's plausible that they could simply change it to log level "error" for production (so they only log actual errors) and only use "debug" as developers... Hopefully someone will make that switch if they haven't already (i haven't paid attention to my logs but probably should ?)

I don't understand the concept of crowdfunding a published game that is already charging a subscription...and already raised their sub price once...and already raised over $20 million in VC funds. If they haven't used that money well in the last 8+ years, that's not our fault. They have the funds to get this to release. They've stated there's no dire financial emergency. There's no evidence that throwing more money at NQ will improve anything, not at this point in the dev process. It isn't like you can merely hire 20 devs and increase your dev velocity overnight. IMO giving NQ more crowdfunding money would be like a donation to them, which I don't understand at all. Plenty of people that actually need that money compared to a for-profit enterprise. NQ hasn't hesitated to make sweeping game changes to reduce costs so that they will make more money come release...in other words, NQ knows this is meant to be a cash register and isn't going to sacrifice profits for the sake of the game or gameplay or players...so I don't see why anyone should "support" NQ with extra money beyond the price they already charge.

Being respectful isn't optional. Antagonizing someone isn't allowed. The first two rules of this forum are: Be respectful and courteous Communicate constructively If you can't do that, you shouldn't be posting here.

Contact Xsolla (support@xsolla.com) and ask them to cancel. Unfortunately, contacting them manually via email seems to be the only way. Some credit card portals now have an option to cancel a recurring charge right from your online statement, too. If all else fails, file a complaint with the credit card company (dispute the charge) saying that you already cancelled the subscription. When companies chose to make the process to cancel opaque and difficult as NQ has, sometimes that's the only way. People say Xsolla wasn't NQ's choice and it was forced on them by an investor, but I've yet to see any evidence of that claim.

This community has become so much meaner...it's pointless and petty. Someone stating that they'd rather not return unless there's a wipe isn't "demanding" anything. It's stating their opinion, which they have every right to. This sort of rhetoric is really not helpful -- twisting a simple and commonly expressed opinion into a "demand" so that you can frame someone you don't know as "selfish" is not productive communication.

No, the game is still in alpha (not feature complete), but is expected to go to release late this year or early next. No, no talk of a wipe except on the forum every third post -- no confirmation one way or another about this as we all expect. This is the latest update to the roadmap -- it isn't really a roadmap so much as a history of past changes (you may find very useful) and their current "in progress" feature. I'm not sure why they bumped new player experience from being next, because new player experience is broken right now with the last updates to mining -- but my guess is they don't care about new players and just want to get the game release ready, so will wait until as much feature dev is done before coming back to FTUE.

Also, this isn't a simulation game, it's an MMORPG. If you want realistic flight mechanics, you should play a game in a genre that actually aims to deliver realism, like Microsoft Flight Simulator. Realism isn't the goal, here, and I wouldn't be that surprised if NQ simplifies the flight mechanics even more. The first "M" stands for "massively", after all, and the masses don't have Jinxed's patience where they can spend months learning the game with friends and YouTube. It sucks that people don't have more patience today, but that's the economic reality of game development in 2022 (and less patience / more instant gratification been a trend in society in general for over 100 years...)

Griefers isn't a homophobic slur for one...but my point was that insults are childish and stupid no matter who is using them. Which I said rather clearly. "But they did it too" is about as childish and useless a defense as you can muster.

Completely irrelevant to my point. All name calling makes you sound like a child, but especially mildly homophobic slurs like "butthurt". I don't care if you enjoy PvP or not (personally I do enjoy it)...if you resort to boring, repetitive, childish insults, your opinion should be thrown in the dumpster as irrelevant garbage. It doesn't matter "who starts it" -- this isn't 2nd grade and the topic is a video game. If you must use insults, at least save it for a topic worth getting riled over.

I don't get how a game of mostly adults...mostly 30+ year old adults...so often devolves into pointless name-calling. If you feel the need to use the term "carebear" or "butthurt", you don't have anything worth saying. It's a deep irony that people who accuse others of having thin skin or being too "weak" for PvP so often have their feathers ruffled with the drop of a pin.

Honestly? None of your business. People have real life. You can't expect people to keep common spaces clean for the sake of other players -- not with an MMO. Ever used a public bathroom? It's called "the tragedy of the commons" and most MMO developers know this (very) basic aspect of social dynamics and design accordingly. You don't even need to know the term to know intuitively that the "honor system" and "being courteous" doesn't work at scale...especially in a digital realm for a paid entertainment product...especially when scarcity of parking spots is an NQ-designed issue, not an inevitable facet of the game. It isn't like scarcity of space is a real thing in a digital world -- a billion ships could share the same space so long as they only render locally. People have discussed better options for years vs. abandonment. Years and years and years. Basic human nature is that when you are done with a game, you log off. Not all of us have the time to relocate our ship first. Things come up. Real life happens. The schedules people have for playing are no one's business -- they pay for their time just the same and can use it as they want. This idea that all players must do the chore of moving their ships before they log off just isn't scalable or realistic for any population at scale. TLDR: This is NQ's fault, not players'. They literally designed this problem, they should solve it in a way that doesn't encourage people to churn simply because they didn't log in for a week.

NQ has stated several times that there's no dire issue with their finances. They have a large team of devs and non-devs across two offices and they've been paying those bills for almost a decade now, so it isn't like they have mountains of money....but the issues with cost are not "draining" them of money in beta. They are issues because it prevents them from scaling the game. So there wasn't some dire, urgent need to slap down this 7 day timer or face the lights shutting off. They should have thought about this a bit more carefully -- not because we betas are so important but (again) because they need to practice running the game at scale and not like it is still a closed alpha. I don't think they realize how players will react to changes like this at scale...if they think we are complainers, they don't understand how MMOs work at release. Nothing wrong with the change itself, only with the duration of the timer and the lack of purely in-game feedback vs. a reliance on other mediums that players won't engage with at scale.

Maybe that's true, but he isn't the first and won't be the last player to have this issue. There's already a lot going on in DU that doesn't have clear enough in-game feedback. Punishing a player because they "don't care enough to stay informed" is really not a great strategy for an MMO. If a player doesn't understand a rule in your game, it's always your fault as the game designer. Always. It isn't our job to go digging for the rules of the game in emails, blogs or the forum; it is NQ's job to present them in a foolproof way. Among the most basic things every game designer learns is how to use feedback to make your game rules clear. The way to roll this out correctly is to make sure feedback is surfaced in game (the only medium that you can rely on to communicate critical changes!) and that no action is taken until the user has a chance to login, see it, and react (within reason, e.g. up to 30 days). Like you said, NQ decided to implement this in a lazy way, as they usually do. My issue is that they aren't using beta as practice for release at all...and that will kill them long-term! If a change like this rolled out at scale, NQ would certainly feel how many players don't read their email or check this forum. So this isn't a big deal in beta...but IMO a paid beta at this stage should be run exactly like a released product, and NQ isn't doing that. Even if they grow the game, their "run-the-game-like-a-closed-alpha" approach won't be good for retention.

I think mining units are "not great"....but it isn't because of the utility to me. I'm someone that works a lot -- it's great to come back to containers full of ore vs. spending so much time as a mole. That said...it isn't just about the personal utility for me or about how easy or hard it is to make money or find ore. To me, the dangerous part of MUs is that it makes obtaining ore a passive gameplay feature -- whereas before there was a sense of exploration and adventure. It wasn't sustainable long-term and ore was buried far too deep. The implementation wasn't perfect, don't get me wrong...there was definitely an element of tedium, but the concept was better (IMO) than MUs. It needed many tweaks, but removing it in favor of MUs takes a huge chunk of active gameplay (and virtually all the exploration gameplay) and sets it aside for a passive well of infinite resources. It removes mining as a specialization -- the idea that some players will specialize while others will just buy the ore they need is now a silly concept. There is no drama, not much strategy, zero exploration, and few reasons to even fly around except between my tiles and the markets! MUs have made the game more isolating, less engaging, and certainly less specialized. Yes, it makes getting resources far more convenient. But...that convenience comes at a price of engagement. In a game like this, the core game loop is usually "explore, acquire, build" -- now it's just "acquire and build"...and "acquire" isn't even a loop. You are simply handed resources every interval. MUs took DU's core issue..."there's not enough to do"...and made it worse (IMO). It's great for sandbox builders that would be happy if all resources were infinite, but it's bad for making a robust game with real gameplay depth.

In other words, NQ made another fundamental design mistake as they did when deciding to bury ore so deep underground. It took them 8 years to realize it was that expensive when anyone with any experience even playing an MMO could have told them that a long, long time ago. Battles at insane speeds is not a good idea for so many reasons...It has no design purpose at all. Making people experience a screen saver type gameplay to slow-boat is also objectively bad design with literally no engagement. That said, this is probably JC's fault. It feels like a design made by a novice because that's what it is. I know blaming him gets old, but just saying....these are issues because early on, NQ simply did not have a professional with experience in charge of design. He had 3 job titles but zero clue! So now they have to go back and fix every facet of the game instead of moving forward and adding depth, which is what they need to make this game work. All of this is why game design is the most important discipline in any game studio...something NQ has learned in the hardest possible way.