blundertwink

It's almost like this idea is something extremely fundamental when understanding how the game scales as an MMO...something that should have been understood ~7 years ago maybe...? It's absolutely a catch-22 for them. If you churn, there's still a good chance you'll reconvert and sub again someday in the future. If you rejoin the game to find your shit gone? Probably won't continue your sub, especially if you were a hardcore player that invested a lot of time developing a safe zone home. Reconverting churned users is vital for a sub-based MMO. On the other hand....if you're a new player trying to get set up on one of the safezone worlds, the extra travel time and absurdity of so many dead and mined-out hexes will be a massive turn-off that only becomes worse over time. IMO the only "everyone wins" solution is to increase the size of game world -- add more systems and planets. Either they have to scale the game world or they need to become an instanced MMO. MMO instancing was designed to solve these design issues, but they didn't want to do that...which is great, if they had considered how to scale the game world to do what instancing does in traditional MMOs. It isn't the only concept where NQ "wanted to be different" without bothering to understand why traditional MMOs use the design they do. In this case, instanced servers -- but also for NPCs, game engine, server platform...each of these they picked something "different" without weighing why the industry standard is what it is and adjusting their design accordingly.

I think adding it to steam would result in a huge number of bad reviews. Also DU hasn't been proven to scale yet...an influx of new players would not work cleanly. I'm fairly sure steam would allow a free release and NQ could continue to require subs via their external system -- I have seen other games on Steam do similar. That greatly reduces dev overhead and eliminates any revshare concerns. Further, steam has a degree of flexibility with return policies for sub-based games. This would be an okay move if they were desperate for cash. They could enforce a two-month minimum sub buy-in expecting 90% of new players to churn. It would also make the game look very bad from a PR perspective, especially for investors -- if you shovel money into a game with multiple failed launches you get what you deserve.

This is what attracted me to DU, too -- the fact that it was bold enough to try something different in the tragically formulaic world of MMOs. But there's a reason MMOs are so cookie-cutter...It's because of the high cost of development -- that means investors, and investors want the fundamental mathematics of your product to make sense. That means designing a game around churn to some extent, which means implementing tried-and-true gaming metaphors. I have no idea how NQ secured investors without any real concept of churn or even a fleshed-out design. Even today, does the game have a real design? Yes? So how it territory war and avatar combat supposed to work, if it's all planned out...? Or are they still flying by the seat of their pants with design choices, thinking they can just rebalance as they go...? If they got 1,000,000 subscribers tomorrow they'd be down to 100,000 subs by the end of the month (if that, even). It's too bad because it will make investors even less willing to take a risk on a bold new IP and the MMO genre clearly needs innovation -- I just wish DU had planned their design instead of relying on a novice that "had some ideas" and believed he could flesh them out as he went.

DU would probably be more successful with a similar model as MC: limited multiplayer and people can run their own servers if they want. All the chatter about PvP or no would vanish because those rules could be server-specific -- that's like 50% of this forum at least lol People that want to play in creative mode to create art could (see above) NQ wouldn't have spent nearly a decade in alpha/beta because the complexity of an MMO was more than they could handle With the game they wanted to design, an MMO never truly made sense -- it is far too niche (and incomplete) of a design with too inexperienced a team (especially at the leadership level). As has been said many (many) times, game design isn't NQ's strong point. Doing a sub-based MMO without strong game design is either hubris or vast incompetence. I mean...it's been 7+ years now, and there's still no good understanding of how PVP is supposed to really work. Territory war and avatar vs. avatar combat are basically just myths. Even with the changes and velocity in the last few months improving, I personally don't see NQ reaching enough subs to turn a profit and maintain that against churn. I don't think I can emphasize enough how important churn is and how little NQ has considered this in their design.

Yeah Twitch isn't the only metric for a successful game, but it is still an important metric. Same with reddit, the community hasn't grown and there's rarely much activity or comments. Is it the only metric? No, but it isn't the Eve online era of 2003 -- presence on social media matters. You can't pretend that a game is successful when every online community about it is stagnant or shrinking. I take mmo-population's numbers with a huge grain of salt (it does not measure actual players), but I do believe the general shape of the yearly population curve: a steady decline since open beta to the point where pop numbers now are not that different than closed beta.

LOD isn't ground-breaking tech, and they aren't voxels because the server translates voxels to simple meshes. The way the servers feed data to clients is not working very well even today...I've yet to see this game actually accomplish its scaling goals except in pre-planned events which is not a real test of auto-scaling infrastructure. Yes lag has gotten better, but that's also because server pops have drastically declined. I might believe it was "ground breaking" tech if these basic concepts worked, they worked well, and they scaled. I get what you mean that NQ's actual devs aren't to blame completely or even at all, really....but that doesn't mean their tech is "ground breaking" when I would say it is closer to "barely working" (which is also a function of bad management, not necessarily a bad tech team)

JC sold his vision...and he sold it well enough to convince investors to sink $20+ million into a company with no gaming experience and no detailed plan. You have to realize by now that this vision was little more than smoke and mirrors. His concept was always nonsense. The idea that you could build with near-infinite scale, the idea of cities, the idea that PvP would look anything at all like trailers, the idea that DU had "revolutionary" tech that would allow millions of people to play in the same game... It's too bad people still get suckered in by misleading ads claiming that this game is something it never will be. DU can became a lot of great things, but it will never become the game they push in the trailer -- which means most new players will always be disappointed. I feel like NQ hired a third party to do their adverts / marketing and it works to bring people in, so they won't update them...it's a really counterproductive marketing strategy.

Threads like these are so typical of DU. People have been having this debate about PvP for years and years and years now. The design of this game is rather horrible, and that's evidenced by the fact that conversions like these have been rehashed for years with nothing new to discuss. PvPers insist PvP is part of the game and that's true -- but it also sucks as a feature. Enjoy being a gunner, enjoy the lag, enjoy the inherent asymmetry of combat and its boring mechanics overall. Builders insist they shouldn't have to PvP, but they already don't have to -- it's like they don't want risk at all, not just that they find PvP boring/bad as a gameplay element. Blame NQ for a design that doesn't make sense. "Sandbox builder" meets "free for all PvP" -- gee, who would've thought these two concepts are basically polar opposites that mix poorly...? Oh, right...many of the forum users for years and years and years. There's an old rule in game design about not mixing genres. Of all the genres to challenge this 'rule', melding 'sandbox builder' with 'free for all PvP' is obviously a horrible idea...the popularity of the game and endless debate about what PvP should be is pretty solid evidence to me that the concept of DU itself doesn't work. It would be a different story if ships were easy to regenerate, if PvP was actually fun or interesting, if either combat or the building aspects were adjusted a bit to work together -- but NQ doesn't really do the whole "game design" thing, so we are left with a game that fields inherently disjointed.

Then the Internet would have much bigger problems than DU.... AWS becoming defunct or going down forever is as plausible as google.com suddenly going offline forever. AWS powers probably >50% of the internet by bandwidth (one of their customers is Netflix). NQ would be without servers for longer than "days", because AWS isn't just about the hardware -- DU uses deeper integrations like DynamoDB. Migrating off AWS might take months, not days.

Another lazy, incompetent approach to dealing with exploits. NQ literally crafts the universe. Their code dictates what is or isn't possible. Rather than fix their jenky code, they want to "fix" bugs with a code of laws. It's unprofessional, sloppy, and unfair. Real studios fix their software bugs with software changes, not with rules saying "don't use the bugs in our software or else". Rules enforced through a notoriously slow and unresponsive support system will never be equally enforced. I'd love to see a pinned thread of every single rule that isn't enforced in the game engine itself but is left up to the player's honor and GM's discretion.

Chargeback or complaint with CC company will likely work, but otherwise contact Xsolla.

lol, I'm just floored at the silliness of this back and forth. It's been the better part of a decade... NQ isn't going to figure out how to balance PvP and building. Not with your suggestions that have been discussed a billion times already, not with another 3-4 years, not with another 10 years. It ain't gonna happen. If you want to talk about the future of this game, go back and look at the past 6-7 years of it first. Same discussions. Same ideas. Same results.

The fact that people are still bickering about PvP in this game is hilarious. This argument has been going on for 6+ years now. The fact that it's still going on is proof of a fundamental design flaw that has never been solved and never will be. Sadly, people like to turn on each other and pretend the problem is somehow with other players. It's not. There is no issue with PvP players or concepts, and there is no issue with builders or peace-loving gamers. That's never been an issue. 6+ years of people struggling to understand what role PvP should have is a tragic example of utterly failed game design. Nothing more. I don't understand why this is hard for some gamers to understand... I'll believe DU has a future when discussions about the merits of PvP stop, because NQ has properly designed it to everyone's satisfaction. In other words, DU doesn't have a future and frankly it never truly did.

Honestly? This game hasn't had a future for a long time... It's been ~7 years of banal debate about PvP -- and when people aren't puzzled about the core concept of this game, they are puzzled by the poor implementation of those concepts! Let's be real: DU is a bad concept and it always was. There was never any cohesive design for how this game would work. On one hand, builders investing thousands of hours on construction. On the other, PvPers that want actual mechanics, politics, and meaning beyond a fancy garden of constructs. In 7 years, they never figured out how this design would work. They still don't know. And even if they did know how to make it all work? They have proven time and time again that they cannot physically change the game enough to get there...that the "foundations" built under JC are made of non-voxel sand. The only thing DU did well was create a vivid canvas in each players' mind. Everyone that bought into the premise filled that canvas with their idea of what DU would be. So many people say that DU had "such great potential". The actual potential they saw had little to do with NQ or DU -- the potential was imagined by gamers based on the concept. That potential was never reflected in reality -- DU never became more than a blank canvas filled by each players' idea of what it might become. It's still that blank canvas, with people saying it has "potential".

how optimistic you are to think that they use try / catch blocks at all. "if the game crashes that's just as good as swallowing the error...either way the exception goes away right?"

As a software engineer, imagine a 6-7 year old codebase where senior devs had no idea what they were building because the design was never crystalized. Then imagine your boss has never worked in the industry before -- literally has no concept of how games are made, but has very firm ideas about what DU is. Every meeting turns into a rant about the metaverse and Ready Player One. Someone asks about how all this will scale. Crickets. Someone wants to know exactly how PvP will work. More crickets. Someone wonders about the 6-7 year timeline to not even get to a beta stage...they probably leave the company. LinkedIn shows that they don't have many (maybe 1 or 2?) devs that have lasted the entire 7+ years DU has been in development. My point is that the slow velocity isn't just a question of manpower, it's a logical result of the way in which this game was developed: by an amateur with no industry experience and not enough humility to delegate the things he didn't understand. They could hire 100 devs tomorrow and it probably would't make a difference -- there's no simple way to unravel 6+ years of complete mess beyond re-writing the whole damn thing, which is just not feasible. I think everyone that's worked in software can see how there's issues here, but IMO it doesn't really matter if NQ has 1, 10, or 100 developers because the codebase is such a cluster it wouldn't matter. Also, good luck finding 100 skilled Unigen2 devs. I doubt there's 100 skilled Unigen2 devs on the planet...no one has released a large game like this using this game engine, so any dev you hire has to start out learning the engine...so they have a bunch of engineering overhead as if it were a custom engine without any of the benefits.

NQ can declare something an 'exploit', but that doesn't mean it will be easily enforced. Jaywalking is illegal, but few people are busted for it because no one has time for that. Enter as many constructs as you want. Don't be afraid just because "oh shit it's technically against the rules now" -- the only way you'll be busted is if someone complains (lol at anyone that thinks NQ will examine logs to find 'bad people'). Even with complaints, NQ's support isn't always timely or effective. If you do get busted, a ban seems excessive. If you do get banned, who even cares anymore...? ?‍♂️ I think there's limited window to label something an exploit in an MMO. Any professional studio patches it after less than a month (often within days if they are live). Otherwise, you have this running list of 'laws' that most players will not know about. "But didn't you read the list of laws?" -- ignorance of the law is very much an excuse in a video game because they design reality itself -- it is up to NQ to literally codify the rules. They want to punish players for their inability to design a game -- it's a draconian approach that is very much in line with their overall customer service ethos (tell customers nothing, treat them like you hate them, assume they are always wrong, and punish them for your own mistakes) I kind of get it if NQ's dev and tech isn't going to improve anytime soon. Tech is hard. Dev on an old poorly planned game must be a nightmare.... But basic customer service...? Basic concepts about how to treat a customer? They seem to eternally elude NQ, and this is really the easiest part. I don't think NQ really likes their own customers and fears/loathes them for daring to break their design with 'exploits' (despite this being the point of beta testing). I very much laugh at even the idea that this game will ever scale with their winning combination of technology, customer support, and game design.

I log in on occasion to see how the game is progressing and try new updates, but I can't really get into it again. Ultimately, the same core problems exist that have always existed since beta launched (and before) I don't really get the claim that this game is 'popular' -- I mean if that were true, why has the number of people in their reddit channel decreased over time? Why have their Twitter followers not grown? Why is it that many of the familiar faces around this forum have been slowly vanishing? Seeing many new players isn't always an indicator of growth unless you know for sure that the number of new players exceeds the number of churning players. That's how churn works -- some people leave and new players join...a bunch of new players is not an indicator of growth unless you can compare it to the number of churning players, which only NQ has data on. That's why external metrics like social media presence are valid indicators -- a growing game won't see social media channels decreasing in users over time. A subscription game with a constant stream of new players can be in very bad shape if those new users churn quickly. So basically...seeing a bunch of new users all the time isn't really an indicator of growth unless you know the churn rates.

Not only that, but it's a game still in alpha by any technical definition -- that means balancing the game 100% is kind of silly. How can you balance it completely when it doesn't even have all its features in place...? It simply isn't possible or reasonable.

DU has been in development for over 6 years, so it isn't like they can just switch to developing on Linux. Porting is always more complex and time-consuming than people think...no matter what stack you use, you need expanded QA pipelines to actually test multiple platforms. DU's dev is slow enough as it is. And why would they bother...? It's a waste of time considering <1% of gamers use Linux as their OS.

I get what you mean here -- and why it is frustrating. However...just because it works for you on Win7 doesn't mean it works for everyone on Win7 or that it will continue working as they roll out more updates. Consider how supporting an extra OS complicates QA. They have to test it on Win7 -- they can't just assume it works. Even if they do, they would need a Win7 environment to diagnose bugs unless they simply ignore all reports from Win7 users. Microsoft's support for an OS does matter to makers of software -- including software that NQ relies on to make their game like Unigen, which could add some low-level optimization that breaks on Win7 and forces NQ to pick between legacy OS support or better tech. I get that the game works fine for your machine for this version, but it isn't an 'arbitrary' reason. Beyond all the technical infrastructure that goes into supporting an older OS, Windows 7 is now 11 years old with decreasing global usage (~15%) especially among gamers (on steam, just 0.16% of users are on Win7...because Steam no longer supports it) -- you can't blame NQ for thinking it isn't worth the extra steps in testing or QA! TBH....I completely agree that they should "just let it run" if they can, but it isn't so simple as flipping a switch or not.

If you have issues with Xsolla giving you a refund, you may need to contact your credit card company and contest the charge. Unfortunately, issues like this are only made worse by their choice of payment providers. You'd think with DU now working on GFN they wouldn't have any issue with the concept of running the product on a VM, but I doubt they care enough to look into their anti-cheat settings.

I think we'll see many more restrictions... The reason they are doing these restrictions is because they want to start another marketing push and get more players into the game...and only now have they started to consider product cost and ROI. They can't justify a new marketing push if costs aren't kept under control, hence restrictions. Cost is complicated because most players they acquire via paid marketing churn early on...and the few people that stay tend to build a lot...so the limits might still be too generous, but I think they are banking on new users having less churn than they did when open 'beta' first launched. Here's what I see happening... - NQ introduces more restrictions (like Zarcata said, the energy system) to try to further reduce the cost/scale of 'hardcore builder' types - NQ revamps / removes tutorials because they've never worked right -- does a few small things to help first time user experience - NQ does another marketing push to hype the game, gets another crop of new players. It works very well because DU is easy to advertise with flashy videos that don't match reality - New players have almost exactly as much churn as they did in open beta...Ultimately (as the OP says), very little has changed since then. The few things they've added in the last 7 months won't be enough to improve churn (IMO) and the expectations set with adverts won't be met - Likely: same wave of optimism followed by crushing sadness as NQ gets a crop of new players, but they churn after a few months...more drastic company or product changes as they consider the next steps

It might not be viewed as a trap, though. NQ knows that a very small group of players is making huge, huge amounts of content -- and costing them 1,000s of times more than those 'average' players that dumped their speeder at a market and never logged in again. They likely want a model where people have to pay more to have more territory... I believe NQ is trying to gear up for their second big marketing push -- they (somehow) believe that the changes they've made since open beta will mean less churn and more profit...but only if they can properly monetize those outlier players that want to build a lot or own a lot of territory. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more restrictions coming.

I'd invest in development and scale the company down. I'd close one of their two offices. I'd let anyone go that isn't directly related to development and hire two people in their place: a UI/UX designer and an experienced game designer. I'd challenge tech to grow their team, improve their pace, and implement better accountability on developer time (because it feels like they are demoralized, misallocated, or just straight-up sandbagging). As CEO, I would not lead the game design effort -- a game like this needs a dedicated, experienced designer and not a CEO-as-a-designer like they've had. CEO is not lead game designer. I would look into real analytics to understand my demographics -- how many people are playing, what they do when they play, why and when they churn... I'd push for major design refactors that drastically reduce the scope of the game because it is still way too ambitious. Fix and improve the things that work, everything else should be scrapped and reconsidered, including PvP. Make these choices based on the data, not the gut. Overall? I'd focus on changes to the company itself first...IMO, nothing will change if I showed up as CEO with a list of design changes alone. Still will have slow dev, wasted money with two offices, and no true design lead.