blundertwink

Sure, but he's not risking 20 ships or making 20 trips. IMO the collateral is not the primary risk, here -- it's the risk of losing your ship or the risk of spending all the hours just to get blown up. Of course there's still risk -- but IMO it's less risky to take 1 trip vs. 20, risking only one ship, and most importantly to me, risking only one haul. Time is the most important currency in any MMO but especially DU, so anything that lets you become 20x more effective with your time seems incorrect. Do I personally think this is really such a big deal? Meh, I think they need to nuke the economy anyway and that they shouldn't worry about exploits until they are somewhat close to being feature complete....but I do get where the OP is coming from. Definitely an exploit -- and mostly it makes people with one account feel rather bad that the one haul spending hours slowboating could have been twice as profitable with just one alt. In that context, I can understand how some people would feel that's pay to win.

DU was created by an academic with no experience in the field -- so it isn't that surprising it was built with a lot of half-baked, experimental ideas...but not backed by a robust technical core that could actually scale in the real world (even with relatively small pops). The DU site says "build almost anything" like "cities", but they never actually planned the tech around supporting this at any meaningful scale. They saw that something could work in an early prototype and declared proudly that their "cutting edge tech" would work at the most extreme scales...without ever really testing it or optimizing for it. I think NQ is going to implement even more restrictions because they want to start ramping up marketing again. They probably believe that the last few updates have improved the game enough that their churn rates will be much improved relative to open beta...but to ramp up marketing, they need to be sure that costs are cheaper per player and that scaling out servers nets them a profit and not even more loss. I very much doubt that they'll be happy with their churn rates if that's the plan...

Buying that many accounts is surely an edge case -- and I agree with Graxxor that this person is probably super wealthy, regardless. Logging in and out of 20 accounts sounds like a version of purgatory. That said, in fairness to the OP, it's more than just multiple accounts giving you an "advantage" -- multiple accounts are scaling profits geometrically without any real increase in effort or risk. Simply shoving alts onto your ship to 20x the return of a hauling run does seem problematic. But there are wider issues with the economy, anyway. Personally? I think NQ should calm down about exploits ruining their already-screwy economy and focus on finishing their beta first. Once they get into true beta, they can worry about game balance...what's the point in balancing an economy when the next patch will introduce some new exploit or feature that unbalances things again, anyway? Very little point in worrying too much about balance in a game that is still in alpha (not feature complete) -- until every core feature is in place, it is okay for the balance to be rough.

Let's remember they've been working on missions since before 0.24. That's 6-7 months to push out a skeleton of a system -- so it isn't like this is some fresh feature they barely had time to work on. Personally, I don't really get it. I don't have hours to spend slowboating and am not interesting in paying for a game just to AFK. It's not a screen saver. The idea that the warp restrictions were done to "encourage pvp" makes very little sense to me. How is that a balanced game design? Investing hours slowboating is enough of a cost without the risk of total loss (+ lost collateral) -- if there's going to be risk, it must be balanced relative to the cost. Time is always the most important currency in an MMO. Slowboat hauling isn't going to incentivize new players to renew their subs. There are gamers that like this sort of slow experience...but not enough to build an MMO out of in 2021. It's like their design mentality is permanently stuck in 2003. That said, at least the skeleton of a mission system is finally out! Hopefully they can iterate on it quickly now that the foundations are done.

The issue I have with the concept of the metaverse is that is is a grand convergence of technology. Unfortunately, technology is often more divergent than convergent. Radio is still a multi-billion dollar industry. People still need to make phone calls even if texting is more popular. People still watch network T.V. People still use dial up. Beyond that....which part of your description doesn't already exist in the Internet? It's live and persistent. It has a full economy. It has no hard cap beyond the physical limits of server infrastructure and cost...which short of some incredible quantum computer breakthroughs, there will always be a limit here. It straddles the physical world thanks to Amazon et. al. It has extreme interoperability of data and networks thanks to APIs and common protocols like JSON, oAuth, GraphQL - that doesn't mean private companies are keen on sharing with competitors or 3rd parties unless there's mutual benefit, but this tech is not new. Private entities have to be willing to embrace interoperability, but this isn't a technical barrier. It is already populated by content created by a huge range of people -- mostly individuals. The metaverse, to me, has exactly the same capabilities of the Internet...but with some vague additional layer of cohesive "newness". Otherwise it sounds like the only difference between the metaverse and the Internet is that the metaverse mandates a sense of "presence" -- some avatar to "explore" this novel new realm. So basically the Internet with WASD keys? I'm only trying to be a little be snarky, I'm also trying to genuinely understand what people mean by the metaverse and how exactly it differs from today's Internet technically and commercially.

Huh? My point here is that experienced leaders could have helped JC instead of setting him up for failure. That they could have looked at his vision compared to the resources he had and guided him to make real design choices up-front instead of playing it all by ear. The "if you know so much, go do it yourself" line is really lame and a great way to not actually discuss anything I said on its merits. Also, I worked in game dev for several years, so I know how hard it is. Because of experience. JC didn't -- he made an extremely, extremely, woefully common mistake most novice game devs make (too much ambition in their design). I've made the same mistake. Having some voice to say "Hey JC, temper your vision. You'll never get there with this scope" isn't folly, it's wisdom. It doesn't mean they would be forced to make some boring commercial rehashing of an existing concept...you can have novelty without re-inventing every wheel. Looking back in hindsight isn't ridiculous, it's how people learn.

There's a wide range of what 'indie studio' really means. People talk about 'III' (triple-I) studios to distinguish between well-funded studios with some AAA experience and "actual" indies with little or no budget. NQ is clearly a 'III' studio by that definition -- normal indies don't get over $20mm in investment for their first-ever project in game dev. Compared to the big players in gaming, however, almost everyone is some level of "indie studio". EA could easily throw $1 billion into a massive MMO project. Hell, they claimed $1.5 billion in income from a one-time tax benefit in 2020 alone. Activision could throw a billion into a big project and it would barely dent them. They make nearly a billion in micro-transactions each quarter. All this being said, NQ made their bed. They decided to scope the project as they did. They don't get to complain about being "so small" just because they decided to rip off a lot more than they could chew. It is their project plan! They should have built the plan with their resources in mind instead of scoping it according to some dude's completely random vision -- and it was completely random, because JC had no experience in game dev. His ideas about scope are as informed as my drunk roomate when they talk about "you know what would make a great game...?" The fault is on NQ's board and investors, too. Don't throw money at random PhDs with a tech prototype and hope that it will translate to commercial success.

Dual Universe is a metaverse just like Second Life is a metaverse. Only the chart here is wrong, because Second Life launched in 2003. There are products claiming to be a metaverse going back to 1993... Of course, there's a big difference between calling something a metaverse and it impacting society in the same was as something like the Internet...but keep on dreamin'....

Congrats, Graxxor. I worked with a company that spent some good money to become an official sponsor of the team USA wrestling team to help launch a sports nutrition brand...that targeted schools and team sports. In 2020. Now that's a series of unlucky decisions; if y'all think NQ has had a rough time...it could always be worse! ? The Expanse is pretty great -- makes me want to rewatch it, too.

It's pretty obvious that DU is losing a lot more players than it is gaining. I would understand the idea that some old players are just naysaying assholes obsessed with "how 0.23 broke things" if there were any sort of influx of new players, but there's simply not. The player numbers are bad enough that even as a single player early access game, DU would be struggling. As an MMO...there's simply no evidence that the game will magically explode in popularity. Even if they could gain 1,000,000 subs tomorrow -- it wouldn't scale, they wouldn't be able to retain those subs, and the pace of dev just isn't fast enough that they could make changes rapidly enough to address those issues. The only way I see DU working is from radical change in scope under new leadership. It's long past time that people realize that DU can't support the silly, naive vision that was "promised". They need to eliminate entire concepts, entire pillars of the game -- then simplify everything else...and even after dramatically reducing scope, it would be a massive struggle just to stabilize the game, never mind scaling it! But they didn't do that...instead, they swapped one CEO with no gaming experience with another CEO with no gaming experience...then continued with dev as if everything was on track and things are "just a bit late" instead of there being deep, glaring issues with the fundamental design and implementation. I'd love to see even a small shred of evidence that suggests that it is physically possible for NQ to finish this game, but sadly I don't see that evidence. What I see is a studio that never learned from failure, recoiled from its own players to avoid confronting that failure, and refused to install experienced leadership for the better part of a decade. What I see is a studio that has spent over half a year not being able to push out even a simple and incomplete feature to the game - how can anyone believe the game will get back on track if it takes them 6+ months to not release a partially implemented mission system...? Yes, it's new players that will determine the future of DU...not those whining "old" players -- players that spent years and years following the project, spent a lot of money backing it, were very patient as they repeatedly complained about extremely obvious problems, players that made newspapers and supported the game at every turn...hmmm.... NQ can't retain even its most fanatically loyal customers, there's no evidence to suggest it can retain new players, either...the very few that buy the game, that is.

Uhm, that's some sneaky pirate intrigue right there. Exactly what guarantees that 'rats won't attack you after you pay their fee...? Their honor as pirates...? ? ?‍♂️ Combat in DU has a very, very, very long way to go before it makes sense in terms of design, appeal, and performance. I think shields are a good starting point, but also reducing the need to pile 5-6 gunners onto a vessel whose main job is to do nothing...that only makes the lag situation worse, and IMO it isn't an engaging experience.

I love how people think Kickstarter is a promise to get something. It's not. It has never been that. NQ has zero obligation to follow-through on any KS goals and Kickstarter makes it very clear that they are not a store. If that's not something you like, don't back things on KS ?‍♂️ I know it's very frustrating...but crowdfunding is not a promise, it's a donation or a gamble at best. By now I think most studios have learned that trying to keep KS backers happy can dangerously inflate scope...and for what? They already spent your money. I'll be the first to say that NQ's dev velocity is colossally slow -- they've delayed the mission system twice and that's the only significant game feature of 2021 so far. They aren't that interested in explaining what they are working on or why it takes so long -- they actually think this dev pace is normal and people just don't understand how hard it is. It's like they forget how many games we play, how many of us are developers, or the standards set by the industry at large (including plenty of much smaller studios). So yeah, NQ is uber slow...but chill on the KS obligations because they aren't real obligations and never were.

The tutorials in this game are so bad I think they are scrapping them entirely. Unfortunately, they have never been very reliable. I think they realized that it'd be easier to start from scratch with tutorials -- any efforts they've made to fix them in the last 6 months haven't really gone anywhere. New player experience still has a very long way to go

I agree. Shields would solve a lot of problems, potentially. At this point, NQ should be looking for ways to simplify the technical requirements of the game across-the-board. I think shields are a great way to do this -- it could vastly reduce or even eliminate the need to do these intensely expensive (computationally) voxel damage effects. These effects are "neat" but...a lot of trouble relative to the payoff. I also love the idea of using shields to help equalize the more aesthetically-driven ships -- forcing people to pick aesthetics or combat is a bad idea from a design/demographic perspective. I also think they need fewer gunners. Gunners don't really do much, but add a lot to the network load. When each ship has 5-8 players, that's a lot of extra work the server has to do for a battle with relatively few ships. I get the allure of having a crew on your ship, but there's clearly some issues with performance and the easiest way to solve that is to involve less people.

That's my opinion, yeah. It is hard to dev a game for 6 years with no real design then try to turn it all around when the dust settles. I don't envy NQ's dev team at all. I do think someone will crack this egg because the potential for profit is huge. I think it either requires an (unlikely) risk from a bigger studio or wider availability of high-level voxel engines or tools. Right now, there's way too many low-level technical problems to solve just around how voxel building works. MMOs are already very complex, to do this and build out the massive amount of content required for a PVE element to work will require a lot of effort...which translates to a lot of money. Bigger studios hate risk...I'd be surprised if they attempt something so novel despite Minecraft's infamous success (yes even into 2021 Minecraft has very solid sales). So...IMO? The tech itself isn't completely cooked yet. For smaller studios to really make something at this scale with PVE, they need to spend less time on low-level details which means wider availability of voxel engines/tools.

Right, Empyrion isn't an MMO and has plenty of issues. I wouldn't say the building is "tragic" -- it is a lot less granular, but that isn't always a bad thing. DU really should have opted for a bit less granularity and detail in building -- it is a source of eternal technical headaches. Also...let's be honest, most players won't understand voxelmancy. Very easy to create stuff in Empyrion because it is so simple. Not everyone can master DU's tools as easily. DU needs more simplicity both to reduce technical burden and to make things more intuitive for the average gamer. But that ship has sailed. Because JC created this project with this idea that there'd never be PVE -- and having never even worked in games before, his ideas were not informed by experience or knowledge. Again, this ship has sailed. It's too late in the project to even bother starting work on PVE -- fixing what they have will prove difficult enough.

"Everything built by players" isn't actually a design, it's an arbitrary rule. Rules need a real justification in the design layer to make sense. There's a reason virtually every successful MMO has ample PVE content -- PVE is a big, important gear fundamental to the design of commercially successful MMOs. Has there been any subscription MMO that is purely PvP? Actually curious. Both DU and SB decided to opt for this vexing hybrid of voxel builder and hardcore PvP game. Builders want permanence -- otherwise why bother building? PVP players want meaning behind PvP, otherwise why bother? PVP games are a proven commodity. So are MMORPGs. So are voxel builders. Each are worth billions as a genre. Each have fantastic demographics. Mashing all of them into one game? Not a proven commodity. We've seen in these forums how often people struggle with this divergence. It is far from being "obvious" that PvP + voxel building works as a genre, never mind in an MMO context where PVE has such a well-established, robust role. This is all a moot point, though. DU won't add PVE. They can't even if they wanted to.

I don't really get how any professional studio could fail to release a major planned feature, call it "phase 1" then go completely silent as to when "phase 2" will drop, even 2 months later. It's no longer fair to call it 0.24 "phase 2"...it's just the next update. So far this year, they've changed the jetpack, installed purchased textures, and added org wallets. I think I need a new job where I don't have to spend my Sunday fixing bugs or working so much and can just do like 2-3 tiny things in 5-6 months and call it day.

Right now, dev velocity is the game's big problem. People can discuss design aspirations and goals all they want, but it means very little if implementation can't happen. Patches this year: 0.24 Phase 1: jetpack tweaks, implement a purchased texture pack, org wallets That's it. That's the dev progress for this year so far. The promised mission system? It's been two months since it was supposed to drop and still no news. Previous patches: 0.23 (December 2020): infamous -- it added schematics, some DRM changes, some docking changes 0.22 (Aug. 2020): Screen unit image upload verification & beta launch 0.21 (Sept 2020): Mostly fixes, no new features The dev on this game doesn't look like it is moving forward...at all. I get that these patches each contained some bug fixes too, but not nearly enough relative to the glacial pace of dev...and fixes should be rolled out continuously, not bundled into feature releases (and if they aren't going to deliver features, the list of bug fixes should be much longer). I'd like to be proven wrong, but at this point I don't feel this is fixable. They don't want to do WIP dev footage because there's no real work in progress, it's all just spinning their wheels with too much tech debt and not enough resources. At this pace, we could look back 2-3 years from now and wonder why nothing has substantially changed.

It isn't just about this being a bug to be solved, it's about making the right dev choice from the player's perspective. "Minor exploit" vs "getting stuck to the point they need GM help" should be an easy decision. NQ has this weird obsession with exploits/balance (in an alpha product that's not even close to feature-complete). "Oh you're stuck and can no longer play the game? Well, we don't want to risk some players doing an exploit that will save them a few minutes of travel every few hours, so we're going to have to ask you to file a ticket and wait for help. And since we're NQ, we won't do periodic small bug patches so it'll be months until we fix this if we ever do." If this was a mature MMO at-scale in production, this might be a different story...but we're talking about a paid beta with a population that has shrunk down to around closed beta levels. Exploits are not nearly as important as making sure people can keep playing the game without GM intervention, especially when the exploit is not that meaningful. It isn't just about the bug itself, it's about deciding that exploits are bad, period, and therefore you need a GM to help you...not the right choice at this stage of the game and not the right choice with their pace of bug fixes.

In my opinion, the potential for abuse ought to be less of a concern than the potential for players to get stuck/stranded in a paid beta/alpha product. Abuse has an impact as people teleport their ships around and save time, but is that really a worse impact than players getting stuck? Don't you think it is likely that at least some players have quit out of frustration because of this (or because they didn't know they could reach out to support for help, or didn't want to wait)? I don't think the abuse that this tool causes exceeds the damage caused by stranding people and forcing them to get GM help...especially since the root issue will be fixed soon anyway? ?

Exploits? Meh...one of the most fundamental concepts of game design is to make sure players can't get stuck/stranded -- if they don't want to deal with exploits, they should fix the problem at its core. I think ships should be able to autopilot to you within a generous range (at least your last active ship), but something like that would take NQ's entire dev team 4-5 months if the last patch is any indicator... ?‍♂️ In general though, fear of an exploit should be secondary to fear of players getting stuck. There's no way paying customers at release will tolerate that sort of thing.

My worry is that missing their goals (apparently by months) with 0.24 will make them even less willing to share deadlines and goals in the future. We really don't have any clue what they are working on or when it will be ready -- that's kind of odd for a game, especially a subscription-based MMO in Alpha. Their "roadmap" is not helpful -- it isn't even close to a reflection of what they can actually accomplish. So...it comes back to communication like always. They managed to have 3 different posts about the future of DU without telling us anything about actual plans for the future! Even general goals for the rest of 2021 would be something. A revised roadmap? A monthly post about dev progress? A vague "in the next few months" sort of deal? But they can't even tell us when 0.24 phase 2 will drop...someone is still making some questionable decisions about dev priorities and velocity and how to communicate that progress to the community (as much to keep themselves accountable and on-track as it is to keep us informed about our subscription value) Now that JC is gone, maybe they gotta revamp the dev team leadership...something is clearly off beyond just tech debt.

I get that they held back the mission system to fix a few things...but it's been almost 2 months since 0.24 dropped. They seem to really like this "1 update every few months" pattern of dev. I was thinking that things might change a bit with new leadership, but they don't want to adopt a more industry-standard pattern of development with frequent bug fixes and less frequent feature deployments. I don't really get it. How is it even possible that the last 4-5 months could be spent on org wallets, purchased texture packs, jetpack changes, and (maybe) missions? Does that seem like nearly half a year of work to anyone...? Hell, it doesn't seem like 5 months of work even for 1 person. Like...I'm trying to find an excuse to re-activate my sub but they just aren't eager to make changes or fixes to the game. When they do patch, there's so little of substance it's not even a month of playtime to explore. Doubting that new leadership will change anything if the dev pace can't improve -- doesn't matter how much they plan or talk to the community if they can't actually change the game.

Yeah, I agree that it isn't going to happen -- this is something they needed to build for from the start to really make work. Not easy, not cheap, not feasible. Even harder with them not having their own engine or hardware...and even harder since constructs don't have set geometry. Competition shooters are built with this sort of thing in mind...it won't happen in DU. So...the longwinded answer to the OP is that it isn't going to happen because it isn't that simple.