blundertwink

Yeah, that will be a problem....which is something many of us discussed prior to Demeter...but to be fair, "first time user experience" was already on their road map as the next item, so they must have realized they'd need to revamp this. That said....it's rather sloppy to push a feature that breaks FTUE for a paid public product thinking that you'll "fix it next update". Again this underscores how NQ treats the project as a closed alpha still where it's okay to test very major changes on production and leave things somewhat broken until they can be fixed. Acceptable in closed alpha, frustrating for a paid product.

I feel like I'm in high school English and have to explain that conflict doesn't mean "combat" -- conflict is when a person experiences a clash of ideas or wishes. That might be external with NPCs or other players, but in many games it isn't. My point about conflict is that the OP's idea about risk/reward is just one facet of creating engaging gameplay. Mining no longer has any conflict (other than mining asteroids) -- the modality before wasn't perfect, but it did create conflict because players had to make choices about where/what to mine, how much cargo to support, making warp fuel, finding ore efficiently....this creates a conflict of ideas/wishes as player figure out how to balance their ships and their time. Tuning AMs isn't engaging because there's no real conflict, no choices or tradeoffs to make -- it's just busy work. All the best games (in the MMO space) make you choose how to invest your time very carefully because there's almost always more to do than there's time for. That itself drives internal conflict and makes the game engaging. DU doesn't do that -- skills are all passive. Mining is all passive. There's no engagement because there's no conflict; risk/reward is a big part of that, but not the whole picture IMO. A game can have very little "risk", but still have conflict and high levels of engagement (even without combat). Unfortunately, DU doesn't really seem to understand game design basics and implements features based on what will save them money and what "seems cool" rather than approaching it as game design professionals.

This is why it isn't as simple as "risk/reward" -- it's about conflict and engagement, which is more vague and varies wildly from person to person. Yet DU wanted to create a game for "everyone" to do "anything" -- without creating engagement for the wildly different expectations each player has. That's what makes it a bad design, because most people do require structure. Conflict doesn't mean combat or PvP. Conflict is "a condition in which a person experiences a clash of opposing wishes or needs" -- the desire to spend time mining vs. spending time exploring or building is a source of conflict. Conflict can be completely internal to one player, it doesn't have to be a clash between people or NPCs.

IMO, conflict is the main driver of engagement, not just risk/reward -- and the two are subtly different. Good building games make acquiring materials dangerous -- in this context, building is the reward. Getting the mats is what drives conflict -- not really SI. The lack of SI can be immersion-breaking, but isn't a huge deal to me. Conflict can be complex. In many ways, building itself can be an engaging activity because the conflict is inherent -- the conflict between "the design in my head" and "making that design a reality". Of course, not every player is compelled by that sort of conflict. Demeter's changes obliterate any concept of conflict around acquiring mats. Before Demeter, there still wasn't much real "risk" in mining. Few people PvP and the chances of running into 'rats was low. It was still at least somewhat engaging because of the need to balance cargo space, where to mine, what to mine, how much time to spend mining, and doing the "mole simulator" game in the most time-efficient way possible. This created conflict, albeit weak conflict, which drove a level of engagement that's now missing. They saw how expensive it was to bury ore hundreds of meters, but rather than tweaking this and preserving this weak engagement, they obliterated it completely. Unfortunately, NQ has proven time and again that they suck at game design, and suck even harder at recognizing their own flaws and improving. That's a really bad combination of traits... I don't see a "way back" for NQ at this point -- but hopefully they prove me wrong and the new CEO can kick some ass and change directions. I'm not holding my breath, though.

To me, Demeter's price hike makes no sense because the game hasn't improved. As for NQ's server costs...? If they couldn't afford the technology, why did they make the game the way they did? What happened to all their claims of "cutting-edge" tech enabling "millions" to play together in a single shard environment...? This is why I dislike it when people talk about how "innovative" DU is -- no, it isn't innovative, it's just they had a naive plan that was detached from reality. It's only "novel" because the ideas presented are too good to be true, informed by inexperience rather than innovation. Innovation requires understanding the domain first, otherwise it's just idle dreaming. There's little difference between JC pitching DU and your stoner roommate having a "great idea for a game". They both have equal game dev experience, one just has a PhD in an unrelated field and VC money. No one forced NQ to claim that DU was cutting-edge. No one forced NQ to claim it would support millions of players. No one forced NQ to talk up how you could "build without limits". They did all this on their own based on inexperience and some naive vision......then realized it wouldn't work and raised prices while eliminating features...? The reason this community seems so negative is because of NQ's own hubris in wanting to push a dream instead of build a reality. Of course people aren't happy when they dream they crafted doesn't align with reality. Every single change with Demeter should have been done in closed alpha a long time ago. After over 7 years, they still haven't figured out which parts of DU are actually possible and which parts will remain idle dreams. Whatever you think DU ought to be based on everything they've said....forget it. It isn't possible and even if it were, NQ won't be able to build it.

If this is a tech demo, what they are demonstrating is an inability to scale and perform after over 7 years working on the core tech. This idea that DU's tech is worth something is puzzling to me and it keeps coming up around here. The only worthwhile tech here is arguably the voxel to mesh conversions, which implements a public algorithm. If their intent was actually to sell this tech and not build a game, they would have ended this a long time ago. No one spends over 7 years across two offices and 50+ employees on a "tech demo". Also....to what market would they sell this tech...? Any studio with funds enough to buy the tech would have funds enough to develop it themselves, which is a lot better than trusting a first-time studio that failed to build a robust product. So if DU is merely a "tech demo", it's a really really bad demo that wouldn't convince anyone -- and after over 7 years, you'd need to license this (unscalable) tech for a ton of money or to a lot of studios, which...again...no one is going to pay that sort of money for tech that doesn't work at scale. DU is a game. It was always made to be a game. It was never meant to be a "tech demo". It just isn't a well designed game, which is why it feels like a tech demo and likely always will.

The way players react to games (and specifically game designs) is not some mystery, and one of the most basic rules in game design is that nothing is ever the player's fault. If something doesn't work, that's because the design (or its implementation) doesn't work. There has never been a case in any game where the product is flawlessly designed but the player-base collectively "doesn't get it". If PvP was such a fantastically fun feature, it would speak for itself. No one would need to debate it or wonder "why don't more people PvP? I bet it's because they want to do 'second life' activities..." No, people don't PvP because of the way the game is designed. The problem isn't that players aren't motivated to PvP...it's that the design and implementation of the game design do not encourage PvP or make it fun, balanced, or engaging. Combat in DU is a boring, laggy, unbalanced, clunky mess. The main problem is never the playerbase, that just doesn't make sense to me.

What does "release" even mean...? The game won't be feature-complete by then (which they confirmed explicitly) -- and you can't balance a game when core features aren't even done unless you have a very carefully laid out plan, which isn't NQ's thing. A wipe at "release" would only set the stage for the next round of exploits and issues and imbalances caused by their "closed alpha" style of development where it's fun to try out major changes on production and see where things land. Suing a game because it broke its "promises" is such a waste of time even if you could win. The time you "invested" in DU is called the entertainment you paid for...even if a court took you seriously (they wouldn't lol), there's much better ways to deal with your dissatisfaction with this entertainment product that doesn't waste public resources. I can't think of a less important case than "a video game broke their promises".

The issue in my opinion isn't that "alts give you an advantage". That's fine. The issue (to me) is that you can make geometrically more money with more alts with limited additional risk/effort. That doesn't make sense for any game. There's a lot of possible solutions to this -- the core issue is with the design of the mission system, so they should update that design...For example, randomize delivery destinations -- now you can't pile a bunch of people into one ship without it making a lot of stops, increasing effort and risk along with the reward. And/or reduce the reward (a lot), but allow the use of warp to make it more accessible overall. Slow-boating is inherently a "nothing" mechanic -- there's no engagement or skill beyond flying outside the pipe, which isn't a real mechanic. The real mechanic is "go watch something while you fly". "Oh but that would eliminate even more risk because of how warp works" -- sure, but that's a completely separate issue. And therein lies NQ's biggest design flaws, that features don't connect cleanly. There's a mess of features and game rules and concepts....which don't drive gameplay depth or emergence at all. If you were to list every little mechanic in DU, it'd be a long and seemingly rambling list...a lot of complexity without a lot of depth. The result is a game that's difficult to learn, but easy to master.

"Please buy our tech, look how great it works in this game full of bugs that never scaled gracefully!" It's likely that the only worthwhile tech here is the voxel to mesh conversion, which implements a public domain algorithm -- yeah, it's impressive and useful, but any company big enough to buy or lease this tech could afford to develop it themselves. People have been saying this for a long time now -- that NQ just wants to "sell the tech"...but there's limited tech they actually could sell and it isn't clear who their customer would be or why anyone would think that DU is a good vehicle to showcase this tech. They wouldn't spend all this time and money on DU if it was merely meant to be a demo to show software for licensing -- if that were truly the primary goal, they'd be spinning servers down by now. This claim is often repeated around here, but just doesn't make any sense to me in terms of raw market viability or NQ's general trajectory. Maybe I'm wrong and the OP here will post a video fo the CEO stating this point blank, but even then I can only say "good luck" in trying to find buyers.

I might get banned for saying this, but when I pointed out this exact idea...that apologies work better than pointing the finger back at players....I was sent a DM by NQ basically scolding me for "telling them how to do their job", and explaining how "there's no way to avoid hurting the egos of people who have a high opinion of themselves". Yikes. And how they think their job is to inform their customers that "their attitude isn't helping" and combat the "recent trend" of players bashing devs. And reminding me that such behavior of "bashing" the devs is actually ban-worthy, as if anyone cares. To be fair, some things said to the devs are 100% unforgivable, but the feedback prompting this reply wasn't anything like that. I wish I could just paste the whole reply because it was so....extremely bad...but then the whole point of DMing a reply like that is to prevent it from being public....which by itself says a lot about their PR/customer service philosophy. NQ's issues aren't just technical or design. Their issues are a culture of arrogance and ego and completely detaching themselves from their customers because they don't think we are being fair. This isn't something that can be fixed. Nobody has ever said that game dev is easy, and we all have said that DU is an (overly) ambitious project...but NQ needs to grow up as a company.

Stripe is very expensive, but still far cheaper than Xsolla (5% for Xsolla vs 2.9% for Stripe) I keep hearing that using Xsolla was some condition by investor, but have never seen any evidence. Based on what I know about NQ, I'm not convinced that this was the case -- and would believe they just didn't want to spend time on it.

lol. NQ can't even make their own billing platform using a product like Stripe (which has much lower fees than Xsolla)....what makes you think they have the time, energy, or will to implement something like this? And why would it matter? They really don't read feedback anyway. It makes no difference where the feedback is coming from when it all goes to the same place.

Not wrong, but said in the least diplomatic way imaginable. To customers that are having issues simply playing the game...to customers that obviously don't have an understanding about the internals of the game because no one outside of NQ has that knowledge. No one is trying to say the issue is "obvious" or easy to fix. I doubt most people even care whose "fault" it is. People just want to know because they can't play the product they are paying for. At the end of the day, that's your responsibility no matter what 3rd party services you have decided to support as a company. How about: "Sorry that the game is still unplayable for those of you that rely on GFN. We know it's frustrating to be unable to play DU with your paid subscription and we're working hard to find the problem. Nvidia is still looking into the issue and we will post updates as soon as more information is available." I'm no PR expert, but I feel apologies work better than being defensive and telling people they are being simplistic and lack insight on how DU works...I get that it probably wasn't your intention, but that's how it comes off.

The idea that new players are deterred because of the forum is something that comes up occasionally and has never been true. The vast, vast majority of all players never read this forum just like the vast majority of prospective players for any game don't actually research products before they buy... Have some new players been deterred like this? Maybe sure. But nothing close to statistical relevance. And calm down about this being some crime. There's plenty of serious "virtual" crimes like money laundering, fraud, phishing, child abuse, stalking -- "conspiracy to commit a virtual protest" isn't a thing. There's no way that what was suggested rises to the level of a crime and I'd be offended by the idea that law enforcement ought to use resources to pursue something so inane...granted that's often what they do. TLDR: don't be a narc

I don't disagree that NQ has failed with most of the design fundamentals with DU. But it's also true that there's no way they can re-kickstart or reboot the project. A project reboot would involve years and years and millions of dollars and wouldn't erase any of the flaws with NQ's design philosophy or culture. We'd likely be back to the same place in 5 years, anyway. Their top investor has over $20 million invested in the company and even stepped in as CEO temporarily -- the goal now is recouping at least some of their investment. They would never green-light any big refactor/reboot. I'd argue that NQ might actually be on the right path to recouping that investment. DU doesn't seem like it has long-term life potential. So in that case....who even cares about current customers? Who says their strategy is to make a successful long-term game at this point...? I'd argue they will revamp new player UX and (combined with lower server costs and higher sub costs) will market the hell out of DU in some early release form. They will aim to secure 100-200k subs and have no intention of holding onto those subs. They know that most players won't try the game for more than a few hours. They know the churn rate will be just as bad (or worse) than open beta, and that's okay for them because they aren't trying to create long-term subs. Thanks to Xsolla, they know that many of the players they hook with (likely misleading) adverts won't even churn right away...that's just how sub-based billing goes. So the goal isn't really to make a game that survives, it's to recoup as much money for Adurance Ventures as possible and to keep the company itself afloat for as long as feasible. These changes might help them do that in one big marketing push. Maybe the reason NQ doesn't care about communication or player anger is because they stopped viewing DU as a game and it's now a product to milk as much as they can before it dies.

If I were GFN, I would probably kick DU out if they can't fix their shit and get it working promptly. Broken games make their service look unreliable and make people question the efficacy of streaming games in general. It especially sucks for customers that rely on GFN to play the (paid subscription) game -- NQ can't both offer it as an option then move slowly when these customers are affected by downtime. Even if the issue is on GFN's side....NQ should be careful about offering options to play that lead to weeks of downtime for players that rely on them. This would be a big issue at-scale....although tbh it doesn't seem like DU will ever see itself at-scale.

Yeah, but it's also sad and funny to see how little has changed since they posted this 3 months ago. "Yay new direction! But no, we aren't going to communicate in the threads about replying more and communicating better..." So many frequent posters in this thread are just gone now...has NQ improved as a company since then? Still early prototype design phase. Still no communication. Still no customer service. Yet NQ hopes to retain players at a higher sub price...when even the rather dedicated player core from this thread is mostly gone...? Bold plan, I guess.

Existing subs will not be affected, you can keep those indefinitely so long as you never cancel. --------- The thing about subs....is that subs only work for robust, successful MMOs. Less commercial MMOs have figured out that free to play and micro-transactions are the superior model. Churn rates are simply too high, otherwise. Don't get me wrong, free to play usually sucks for players, but there's a reason MMOs like STO pivoted away from sub and are still online after all this time. Like many parts of DU, the monetization model was poorly conceived, here. Subscriptions will never work. The math doesn't make sense for NQ and never will. Subs automatically increase the barrier to entry and make CPA (cost per acquisition) higher as a result. If someone only pays $9.99 and then churns, that's just not a good deal for NQ....even for highly engaged players, NQ will always be battling attrition. Subs only work if you can maintain and scale the game at a reasonable pace. You have to add content quickly, because players just rip through it. A bored player unsubs. With taxes and Demeter, it will be harder to lure them back to pick it up again once the game has changed enough to make the experience fresh again. NQ won't ever be able to stay ahead of the churn rate curve and won't be able to offer incentive to resub. It's like they are looking around a room of paid MMO subs....seeing WoW and Final Fantasy...and thinking "yeah we can hang, we're just as good as them". There's a good reason other MMOs in a similar league as DU go free to play. If they think they are somehow going to beat the math and make a sub work, that's just delusional.

I have to say....that JC's "vision" is both the reason most people started playing the game...and the reason it has generally failed. It's like if I decided that I had a great idea for a new car. It would be fully electric, but with just as much endurance as gas. And it would be cheap and easy to make. And self-driving, of course. Is that a great idea with a lot of "potential"...? No, it's an idiotic idea because I have no experience engineering cars. My ideas about what would make the next great vehicle are irrelevant because they aren't backed by experience or real-world proof that my idea actually works. The same is true with JC and DU. His idea was not based on experience or real-world proof that his "cutting edge tech" would work...he had no experience in gaming at all. He sold everyone on the idea of DU, but it was never more than an idea -- it never became working plans. As a result, NQ still thinks it's okay to iterate, throw it up, and adjust it later as if DU is an early alpha developer sandbox and we ought to understand "that's how things are done". This isn't how it's done.... First comes the idea, then comes the design, then comes implementation. DU is what happens when you try to develop your plan, ideas, and implementation all at the same time....it doesn't work for a complex game. This is usually the very first thing novice game devs learn....but JC didn't want to learn the craft or listen to the voices he hired that understood it.

The vexing thing to me is that NQ is struggling to design and balance the easy stuff. We're over 7 years into alpha and they're still making huge changes to how mining should work... If you think this is chaotic, wait until they try to balance PvP, assuming they ever implement the rest of it. If they struggle to bring engagement and balance to something as basic as industry and mining, anyone that's been "looking forward" to full PvP is going to be deeply disappointed. Even if the game thrives after Demeter, what will DU become? More experienced devs have invested a lot more energy and thought into bringing balance to PvP....even when PvP is well conceived and fully implemented, many fail to properly balance it! PvP is really the hardest thing for a designer to tackle because even a tiny loophole or inconsistency can ruin the experience for many players, who expect a level of fairness because no one enjoys losing, especially when the stakes are high. Hell, even in games where players respawn in seconds with little real penalty....people still don't react well to losing if they feel their loss was unfair. From their vlogs, it's like they have no concept of urgency and they think all this is a normal part of dev that we gamers just can't understand.

I get you, not trying to be the EULA-police....but if you do actually impact performance, they will possibly ban you. I think a ban is unlikely, but somehow I doubt you'd care all that much lol. IMO, the best form of protest is to simply cancel your sub. I'll give Demeter an honest chance once it lands, but won't be holding my breath.

I hate to be that person, but this is definitely against the terms of use. Virtually every TOU related to software has a section about not purposefully degrading the performance of the software, which this is intended to do: In this context, this is a technique designed to damage/interfere with system or data. It's about the intent -- if the intent is to have a big 'ole mining party to get dirty with each other....that's different. Similar outcome, but different implication with terms.

DU runs on a non-standard off-the-shelf engine, Unigen2. They are actually the most high-profile game to adopt that engine, as it's used more for benchmarking and prototypes. So....most games probably don't have issues because the underlying engine makers are simply more robust. Also, DU has shown it struggles with shaders (GPU programming) before, taxing GPUs higher than it should for seemingly little graphical complexity. If I had to guess, I'd say this is more likely the issue -- that their shaders have underlying issues that finally broke with the latest drivers and has very little to do with Nvidia. It does suck that some players won't even be able to play, but are still expected to pay. Devs don't treat it as "downtime", but it affects players as if it were.

Sorry, I mean that Pann's response was poorly worded, not your post. Miscommunication.