blundertwink

He does have serious credentials. I'm sure he's very qualified and extremely bright....in his field of Robotics/AI. Tech isn't interchangeable -- knowing a lot about robotics (or even AI) does not equip you to be successful as a game developer. The most important concept as a game developer isn't even technical...it's almost easy to develop a game feature technically compared to making a practical, simple, and engaging design. I'm not saying code is easy (trust me I know), but technicality is only one part of gamedev. Even if JC wrote all the code and it worked flawlessly, that wouldn't make a great game by itself...and certainly wouldn't make him a good CEO for the studio. Good CEOs don't do the coding or design themselves (not for a studio of NQ's size), but they know how to build their vision around experts that do. JC is no doubt a smart person, but he was never a good game studio CEO...or even a good CEO in general, which isn't really a dig against him...since he didn't have much experience as a CEO and had zero experience in the field of game development.

The crypro "metaverses" are scammy to an extreme. I'm interviewing with a new gaming NFT that raised over $70 million with pre-sales alone. That's like 3 times what DU has ever raised in the blink of an eye. People are buying this up as an "investment"...for a game that hasn't yet been published. It's not that different from a pyramid scheme. "Better get your WHATEVER coins now! They'll be worth so much if the game is a success!" There's a fine line between a visionary and a con artist..."not bound by what's currently possible" can describe a lot of actual nonsense. I prefer to think about concepts as "even if it were possible, what would change"...? It's like talking about colonizing Mars. Even if it is possible....how would living on a lifeless radioactive rock actually improve humanity? The whole point of books like Snow Crash or even RPO is that digital worlds can amplify inequality -- we've seen how this works already with play to win games. My former boss worked at a big mobile game company and described how their top customer had a servant whose job was to buy microtransactions all day. Seriously. The person couldn't be bothered to spam the button. That is the future the metaverse wants to create, not some equal platform for humanity's benefit. If JC is a "visionary" I'd rather be blind.

Beyond the marketing efforts, it's weird to me that people read novels like Snow Crash or Ready Player One...and somehow get the idea that the metaverse is a good thing... That's like reading Fahrenheit 451 and agreeing that books are too "confusing" and ought to be burned. If NQ wants to be a "metaverse company" and not a game studio, it does explain a lot about their abilities as game developers. If DU is a "demo" of their "metaverse technology" it is likely one of the longest development periods for a "proof of concept" in software history -- and is a really counter-productive way to show that your tech performs at scale.

They are certainly milking it now! It's the main subtitle now across all their social channels, LinkedIn, their new website, etc. They're making a very conscious effort to brand themselves more strongly as "The Metaverse Company". I expect they want to ride the wave of the Metaverse buzzword...it isn't like this sort of branding is hard, but it does take effort. They're doing it for a reason. We all know that business as usual isn't working...it shouldn't be a big shock that they might consider some major pivots, including the monetization model. It's extremely obvious that a subscription model won't work for DU long-term. When NFT games are making such absurd amounts of money, I wouldn't be shocked if they went down that scammy road. I'm not saying they will...but they didn't update all their branding and restart the NQ Twitter just for fun.

I'm not sure what you mean. It's clear they pivoted to using the metaverse buzzword -- I linked to their new Twitter and Website design that show just that...and their Twitter is posting stuff about the Metaverse after like a year of silence. It isn't me that's making any of this up because "it sounds good", which if you read my post I'm obviously not a fan of this concept.

You'll notice on their Twitter and the DU website that NQ has a new design and focus around the metaverse. For those of you that don't know, the "metaverse" is a buzzword that describes a vague second version of the Internet with features essentially identical to the first version of the Internet...except with more microtransactions and an occasional focus on VR/AR. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the concept -- like many buzzwords, what it actually describes is vague and driven by a desire to aggressively monetize. Crappy NFT games where you too can have the honor of spending hundreds of dollars on virtual shoes are often touted as a "metaverse"...and obviously that's the aspect FB wants to cultivate with "Meta" -- they've made it clear that a big goal is selling virtual clothes. What do you think about Novaquark being "The Metaverse Company"...? Is this marketing fluff, a pivot in design direction, a way to frame NQ so it looks attractive to potential buyers....all of the above...? Is NQ becoming the "metaverse company" a prelude to NFTs or other aggressive micro-transactions in DU...? Or an indication that they want to support VR in the future (hah...)? Or does NQ's update have little to do with DU...maybe they are starting another project...?

Just because some players (supposedly) have lines of communication with someone at NQ doesn't make it a "fact" that they have sway. Exactly who do they know at NQ? Exactly how much decision-making power does that person have? Being buddies with some dev at NQ doesn't mean much -- you might get some leaked info, sure...but there's relatively few people over there with real decision-making power. And as you say, there's no way to know the extent of someone's influence. All you can do is hold people responsible for the choices they make -- it doesn't really matter even if people "have the ear" of some NQ employee, that doesn't somehow make that person's choices "not their own"...and again that's assuming this unknown contact even has the power to make real choices, which is unlikely. I think there's a weird tendency to blame other players for the direction of the game, like some conspiracy that doesn't add up. Even if there was a shadowy cabal of players with a direct line to the CEO...the CEO would still be 100% responsible for any choices they make. For example, the OP is assuming that "bad advice" is being listened to based on the outcome of Demeter. That's not reasonable -- to use a bad choice as "proof" that they are being "misled". No, they just make bad choices. When someone makes a bad choice, that's on them....you don't blame it on "bad advice" as if they are some ancient king being poisoned by a corrupt cardinal.

A good gameplay loop creates a state of "flow" -- one of those game design buzzwords that's difficult to define precisely. Most gamers know what "flow" is because they've played games that drive it well, but it isn't easy to describe. Flow is when the gamer is fully "engaged" and focused on the game and has the exact right balance of challenge and reward. A loop is those actions that work together to create this state. An example of a loop is mining pre-Demeter. You have to find a node, dig to find the resource itself, extract it, then transport it back. That's a loop, but a weak one -- it struggled to create a state of flow because the 'challenge' of mole mode was more frustrating than engaging...but it had some level of depth because it interacted with the "build" loop -- want to carry more ore? You need a ship capable of lifting more. That's how games become more complex and engaging -- when loops interact with each other and become more intricate and interconnected as you play. We've seen negative progress with this loop being replaced by a calibration mini-game. Yes, mole sim wasn't great....but it could have been tweaked instead of being destroyed. I don't think NQ really thought about how big a part of their core loop mining really was. DU's loops are shallow and lopsided -- reward and challenge don't align, so gamers never experience enough engagement to reach that coveted state of "flow". The game is either impossibly easy in the ability to avoid all danger or impossibly hard in the asymmetrical and specialized nature of PvP. Many of the game's core loops now involve "wait" as an action -- the "collect materials" loop touches just about every part of the game, and now that it is mostly replaced by a mini-game....well, people will need to find depth in other loops to make up for it, but those loops don't exist. In those times where DU manages to capture that state of flow...tbh, I feel it's more of an accident that an intent of the design.

I really dislike the line of reasoning that says that NQ is listening to the "wrong group" -- I see no evidence that NQ really engages with player feedback in general...that's one of the main complaints about this studio. Beyond that...it's weird that people think they are being "influenced" by some cabal of players as if they are children incapable of making their own choices. There's plenty to debate with NQ's choices, but at least give them credit for making the choices they have. Right or wrong, these are NQ's decisions and they alone have the power to make them. I'd love to see evidence that there's any group of players that NQ actually listens to or engages with, because I don't see that here in the forums.

Oh they redid their website....apparently to see how much they can use the word "metaverse". NQ's arrogance is spectacular. To them, DU isn't just a game, it's a metaverse. Meanwhile, people that have actually played it...don't even think it's a game. Next they'll announce that DU will be implementing NFTs and you'll need DU coins to buy land. I feel like their website makes NQ less about DU and more about spamming the stupid 'metaverse' buzz word in the hopes that some idiot will be tempted to acquire them. The very idea that NQ is "building the metaverse" is hilariously sad and about what can be expected from the sort of people that buy into the "metaverse" concept blindly. Almost as sad as this gem:

So true. I feel bad for NQ's devs -- if you think the game plays bad from our perspective....trust me, the devs doing the real work know just how bad things are. If you think it's annoying that NQ doesn't engage with players...? Try being an employee...it sucks when upper management doesn't listen and has no interest in bringing the dev team into the game design process. I would really struggle to believe that NQ is an open workplace where everyone's opinion is considered...they don't run their public-facing side like that, so I doubt they are open-minded with employee feedback, either. Sprinkle some crunch time and a sloppy 7-year-old codebase and your dev morale isn't exactly in a winning place. There's a reason why NQ's velocity is so glacial...

It didn't start as a "software test". I really don't get why people insist DU is nothing more than a "tech demo". If that were true they'd have stopped years and years ago. Calling it a "software test" or "tech demo" is both giving NQ too much and too little credit.... It's giving them too little credit because it makes it sound like NQ never wanted to make a game...which doesn't align with all the evidence we have. They've spent a lot of money working on DU across two offices and a ton of employees. They've hired game design/development experts....sure, many of those experts haven't stuck around, but all the evidence we have suggests that yes, NQ has tried their best to make a game. For over 7 years. With over $20 million in investment. Just because DU plays like a very unfinished prototype doesn't mean they haven't tried -- it's a classic case of Hanlon's Razor ("never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence"). There'd be no reason at all to "disguise" DU as a game, that makes no sense. It gives them too much credit because it makes it seem like NQ is working on some cutting-edge technology that's worth more than the game...which isn't remotely plausible. It makes it seem like this is all part of some grand plan to sell tech that doesn't work. I don't understand why people would believe this. It doesn't align with their history, with the product they have, or with the reality of the software industry. I think NQ deserves a lot of the criticism they get, but we can at least accept that they've tried to make a game without some conspiracy theory that DU was never supposed to be a game...because clearly they haven't spent 7+ years working on the underlying tech. DU is actually their honest, best attempt at making a game.

Gaming has nothing to do with the real world. You build a game based on solid design, not how closely it matches the real world. The best games ever made are not great because of their fidelity to reality. Forced specialization won't magically "fix" the economy and even if it did....so what? DU's biggest issue isn't an unbalanced economy. If the economy were perfectly balanced tomorrow, how would the game change, exactly...? There might be more engagement around the markets, but mostly you'd be stuck with all the same problems. NQ deserves a lot of crap for some of their design choices....but game design isn't easy even for simple concepts. DU's "biggest problem" is not the economy, specialization/balance, or even its lack of content....DU's "biggest problem" is the concept itself. Full open world PvP combined with voxel builder was always a tough concept for most people -- 3,000 pages of forum discussion are proof enough of this. Single shard was never going to work at scale with open world PvP, no matter what claims of "magic cutting edge" technology. Player-run 'everything' with "no NPCs" was always going to require an intense depth of features to make up for the lack of NPCs and enable players to "do everything". The bold premise is probably what lured everyone here, but it wasn't realistic for a first-time studio to make a game like this -- especially when the few well-known vets they had left the company so quickly.

I think this is great feedback, but at this point....I think the ship has sailed. I think NQ is on an irreversible path: 1. NQ will revamp the new player experience, probably in a lazy way that just jumpstarts them with a few auto-miners and reworks those tutorials 2. NQ will implement "territory war" in space only -- ground-based TW will be "some future thing" 3. NQ will push the game to early access release -- maybe even before #2. 4. At some point between now and then, I think NQ will close these forums. It's just bad PR at this point and they are sick of us. 5. Churn rates won't really improve compared to the initial "beta" launch -- it's conceivable they are just as bad or worse. 6. IMO, the game will never see full "release" where all its core features are done -- it will get incrementally closer with features being half-implemented as it crawls ahead...but I don't see it ever escaping "alpha" status. There's just too many major features that have yet to be designed never mind implemented...and NQ's history says a lot about its future.

People talk a lot about balance, but balance isn't really the most important thing. Games can be highly engaging while being rather unbalanced. Balance is an obvious thing to talk about, but what would DU look like if it were perfectly balanced...? It might be better, but not by that much. With the features it has, it being unbalanced is hardly the biggest concern. I'm not saying it's unimportant....but if you imagine DU today being perfectly balanced....it still will lack gameplay depth and will still have core design issues that will be difficult to solve.

Yeah this always comes up...this idea that NQ spent 7 years and $20+ million on some "tech demo". It doesn't add up to me. People suggest that NQ wants to license their "server tech" -- what server tech...?! What "breakthrough"...? Nothing they've made has scaled...not with the initial crowd that joined public beta, not even months later with the few thousand people left (if that). They nerfed industry in part to save on server costs. They removed mining to save on server costs. Even small scale PvP can still be laggy. There's still all sorts of bugs in basic features. The only tech they've developed is tech that has struggled to perform even at low usage...tech that is tightly coupled with AWS (using technology like DynamoDB) and Unigen2. Honestly, it's not worth even $100. IMO JC's "passion" is one of the things that made this project impossible from the get-go -- it was all passion, but without having any experience in game development whatsoever. All passion but no substance is like your stoner roommate having "a great idea for a game". Maybe it is a great idea....but that doesn't mean much if they don't have the experience and skills to execute it. One of the most overwhelmingly common mistakes novice game devs make is overcomplicating their first project(s) -- because they don't know what it really takes, so they make grand plans that lack real details...just as NQ has done with DU since the start.

NQ has no sense of urgency to fix their product. They can call it beta all they want (we know it's years from being a real beta) -- once you make the game public and decide to charge real money, you're in a form of early release by definition. New player experience is next on their roadmap, but it's basically broken now. Just as people said it would be. Multiple times. Mining balance is clearly an issue post-Demeter. Just as people said it would be. Many many times. Even if NQ ignores all the feedback pre-launch....it's puzzling to meet a bad patch with silence and shrugs. They seem to think they can just wait and deal with things next patch...they still treat this like a closed alpha product where it's expected that things break often. Where we are "lucky" to be testing it. There's no sense at all that this is a live game they with paying customers. Then they'll whine and remind players that "this is a beta and we're still trying things out...you all don't understand the process..." -- the reality is that they don't understand the process. That's been abundantly clear to everyone except NQ's leadership for a long time now.

The short answer is no, it can't. Not now, not in 10 years. Probably never. Even if it were polished, bug free, and could actually scale technically, DU is a niche game, apparently by design. Even if it had all features like PvP done, its version of combat is not going to have mainstream appeal, which you need to "kill" a game like SC. Even if NQ had a sudden investment of another $20 million, they wouldn't be able to erase the last 7 years of tech debt and problems. Hell, even if NQ had $1 billion for marketing, they wouldn't be "killing" anything soon...because $1 billion can buy you new users, but it can't buy lower churn rates... If they attract 5 million players tomorrow (and magically can scale to handle them), they wouldn't keep them for long. Long term, it would make little difference to the health of the company. Why do I believe that DU won't fix all its problems and scale...? Because you judge a studio and product by its history, not the value of its "great ideas". Ideas are very cheap. A good idea is worth about $0.05. The execution is what actually matters -- and NQ doesn't have a history of executing their "grand ideas". The last 7 years have communicated one thing very clearly: that NQ can't build DU the way it was presented. That's not because NQ's devs are bad, it's because the idea was bad. It was always half-baked and overly ambitious. Some of the things JC claimed were never going to be plausible without the magic "cutting-edge" tech that never materialized. It might become a decent game one day, don't get me wrong....but it won't be the "civilization sandbox" people like to imagine -- and won't be competing with AAA studios in this reality.

Eve is successful at its niche, but it's an old game and clearly ripping elements off piecemeal (e.g. their crappy skills system) isn't great. How warp affects PvP isn't relevant to me because combat is drastically incomplete as a concept in DU in general. Clearly it needs work in balancing and core pillars of PvP like territory war (which is pretty fundamental to the concept of the game) don't even exist on paper yet as far as we know. IMO, even 30 minutes of travel time is a lot to ask of gamers in 2021...especially when travel is boring, crawling slowly through an ocean of nothingness. Adding risk to that travel doesn't make it better -- it could make it more boring by forcing people to monitor their ships the whole time. I agree that AFK-slow boating for 4 hours is beyond stupid -- it's an actual waste of electricity. I'm not some die-hard environmentalist....but it's pretty inane to burn carbon so that people can AFK in a game while their virtual ship flies. What worked for an MMO that launched in 2003 doesn't work for an MMO that has yet to launch in 2021. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt young gamers have the sort of patience where they can spend an hour (or even 30 minutes) just flying across the void...and MMOs do need young people to survive as a product. So...there's a billion ways to balance warp without removing it completely.

Yeah, it's mostly a scam in general....whatever promises they make, it's 100% on you as a consumer to take legal action if you feel they have failed to deliver....and good luck proving that they never intend to fulfill their promises! Each person that contributed to KS has to make those claims separately, so your actual clout is nil. That said....JC conned the VCs that invested over $20 million a lot worse than the backers on Kickstarter. They also believed NQ was developing "cutting edge" tech that would make a single shard server work with millions of people in some grand "build whatever you want" world. Strange how "cutting edge tech" translates to AWS/MongoDB/DynamoDB/Unigen2 and an obvious inability to scale even with a tiny population. I laugh now imagining DU with a million people in it, and they still have marketing speech like that on their website. That's not "aspirational" it's delusional. Unfortunately crowdfunding follows the same rules as gambling: only put in what you're willing to lose.

Maybe, but it's difficult to know where things are going because that isn't something NQ discusses (beyond releasing roadmaps). Those emergent loops that are so vital to the game shouldn't be mere placeholders after all this time...if they are, when do we get actual mechanics? If Industry, PvP, and the economy are still placeholder that means the majority of this game's core concepts are basically prototypes -- not a great place to be after nearly a decade in development! After this long, it's kind of fair to assume the mechanics we have today are close to what we'll have at release. I think the idea that "players will run everything" was always just that -- one of many random ideas that DU presented, but not a fully baked concept.

It's funny because players have nothing to "run" in this game -- the entity with all the power is actually an AI government that controls all the markets and collects weekly taxes. The AI that apparently controls who you can shoot and where. The AI that controls all the schematics that drive industry. The AI responsible for seeding all the quanta into the game through daily bonuses or missions. Rather than feeling empowered in a "civilization sandbox", you feel chained to mindless chores. You aren't "running" anything, you're a cog in Aphelia's machine. NQ has made a game with no NPCs...yet somehow, the AI is still the most powerful entity that controls the world far more than any player.

DU as it was "imagined" would support a sub-based monetization model no problem....but DU as it exists never will. Nor could it support a free to play model, really -- the game loops just aren't deep enough. As for the cost of DU, this was something they should have known on day 0. Obviously DU was going to be more expensive to run compared to the competition....so obviously that's something you need to consider as you prioritize what tech to develop and how. Unfortunately, NQ didn't do that. Standing your own servers is fairly industry-standard for an MMO, as is writing your own engine. Most MMOs do this -- yes, even with similar sized teams as NQ! Instead of standing their own servers, they rented them from AWS and decided to use fairly expensive AWS services like DynamoDB. I get why AWS is tempting -- it has virtually unlimited scale and a lot of great tools, but Bezos gets his cut and your control isn't as granular. Between AWS and Unigen2, NQ's ability to be efficient with their infrastructure is limited. Their server costs probably wouldn't be an issue if they had 100k subs -- but no one can believe this product will support 100k subs long-term. I wouldn't be surprised if their churn rate for paying customers is 40-50% and it'll only get worse come release...

Okay but what's the point in "pushing agendas" when NQ doesn't engage with feedback anyway...? When it's single or double-digit replies amid a community of maybe hundreds that visit these forums...? You could use the same logic to remove this forum in general (which to be fair, I kind of expect NQ to do) -- that it's "mostly used for pushing an agenda". It isn't like most feedback is purely objective -- the forum is exactly the right place to be sharing an opinion or pushing an "agenda". So what if polls are silly and as far from "scientific" as possible...? It isn't like there's much else to do...and at least it sometimes breaks up the 300,000 threads debating PvP or a wipe.

Is there a written summary of the Q&A? I don't understand why NQ always posts videos with no summary (often 1 hour+ with no edits) or in this case does it live with no other feedback. Posting a summary and locking this thread would be very helpful... It's like NQ wants us to go out of our way to get any information and if we're not willing to wade through hour-long videos or can't make a live Q&A that's too bad for us. For a company that's promised to "do better" with communication, they seem to only put forth the minimum effort. It's always up to the community to post videos of the Q&A or written summaries.