blundertwink

Okay, first off...count all the exclamation points in your rant and delete like 95% of them! It doesn't help you! Apparently you don't really know anything about economics or game design. The reason they have a daily login bonus now is because there's no other fresh sources of currency beyond ore bots. Lack of currency supply results in deflation. The other fundamental game design reason is to mitigate stuck players, which is game design 101. It's far too easy for new players to get "stuck" without the daily bonus, no speeder, no way to make money beyond vacuuming rocks -- that login bonus helps new players find their feet when they crash. Beyond all that, your opinion about real life politics is neither relevant nor well-presented. The terms of this forum are very clear: this isn't a place for your crappy rant against socialism, this is the place to discuss Dual Universe. Stick to the game.

It's an arbitrary rule, though. The question isn't "does this break the rule", it's "why does the rule exist to begin with?" -- the world can be controlled by the players even with NPCs. The reason NPCs are a fairly popular suggestion is because NPCs fill a variety of important design concepts; concepts NQ hasn't created alternatives for. There's a reason most MMOs have them. This is more about how PvP is balanced in general than anything specific to NPCs, imo. I agree these points need work, but I also think they need work regardless of NPCs. Personally I don't think NPCs should be randomly scattered in space if they do exist, but player built -- that would include NPC hauler convoys that would give pirates more targets. If all NPCs belong to an org, it would help tie together PvP, industry, building, and organizational politics. Sure you can pirate some NPC convoy, but it means making enemies with their owners. It's still very much players running the show. I think most people realize that NPCs aren't a small concept for NQ to tackle and it's unlikely they'll ever be implemented. But for most NPC concepts, they seem to add more than they take away.

Agree with this a lot -- skills in this style don't measure achievement at all, they measure how long you've been subbed for. That's kind of what it was designed for, though. I'm not a fan of game systems that work like this. Right now, the only way the game 'prints' money is through ore bots and the daily login bonus. With a "no NPC" model, NQ hasn't yet figured out how to fix this without creating deflation...so yeah. A lot of your points are long-standing issues that most people would agree need more thought / work. Hope you enjoy your time in DU!

On one hand, i get where you're coming from... But on the other...NQ will benefit from understanding how the new player UX is broken. It's one of their bigger problems. Yes, they need mid/end game. Yes, their update pace needs to greatly increase and 0.24 was a sad, sad thing. But there's still a big percent of players that pay for a sub and don't play for more than a day. There's little point in mid/end game content if people churn in a few hours! NQ does need the perspective of noobs, too. NQ's devs are professionals (don't laugh, I mean this is their job). They are adults. They are fully capable of taking responsibility for their own dev decisions and understanding the context of feedback. No player feedback should ever be taken at face value, anyway. There's still no indication that NQ's actual dev team so much as glances at feedback, anyway...so i wouldn't be too worried about them getting distracted because of some random new player suggestion...no time is being wasted because there's no time being invested in reviewing feedback...

I tend to agree that a sub model is best for now, but I don't agree with this idea... FTP exists because it makes money. Sub-based games that would die otherwise have thrived under this model. Companies don't "crumble" because people "want everything for free" -- that makes no sense. It isn't a cultural thing, it's a monetization strategy...one that works very well for companies that understand it. FTP is about the mathematics of conversion rates, not people being entitled and demanding free shit. Consider this example: Someone lands in DU and gets really hooked. They enroll in a monthly sub. They play relentlessly for two months; they're hooked and play for 20-30 hours a week. Even the best games eventually get boring, but DU has some major walls when it comes to content / things to do. So they decide to pause their sub after 2-3 months. NQ has made $14 - $21 in revenue. Not great. Now compare that to an FTP model -- someone that's hooked will absolutely buy into MT, especially in the height of being interested in the game and especially if the alternative is massive amounts of grinding. The shit they need to buy will cost more than a sub. The magic with FTP as a monetization strategy is conversion rate, which is why DU should stay away from it. If they know 50% of all players eventually get an MT before becoming bored and leaving the game, that's big money. It's much, much easier to attract new players to a free game than one that requires a sub. They can shovel out cash for ads knowing that they'll make it all back and more. Companies do it because it works. I know this is a long rant...but subs are hardly the best model for revenue with DU, even if it makes the most sense today. Subs only work with high retention...if someone is churning from a sub in 1-2 months, they simply aren't worth it. They need subs to be closer to 6-12 months to really see profit. Good luck trying to buy ads when your budget has to be $5-6 per acquisition because so many players churn after 1-2 months! FTP games are crappy because the game's design is built around the monetization strategy...but they do work...and unfortunately? They work best for games that struggle with retention/churn like DU. I don't want an FTP model and I think NQ would struggle to make it work, but unless they can dramatically reduce churn, it'll be an inevitability. I'm 100% certain that the finance guy now leading NQ understands the nuance between subs, churn, and FTP and will do what makes them money. They will only stay with subs if DU's retention can dramatically improve...otherwise FTP is the better monetization strategy even if it is worse for the game.

I'm not having this issue personally. Could be a lot of things. How does it run when it's the only tab open?

Sure, that's one idea DU has....but it's more of an aspiration than a real design. NPCs fill an important role in most every MMO ever made. They are an integral part of the design and economy. For most games, NPCs are how currency is "printed" into the game. Right now, the only way fresh money is created in DU is through a daily login bonus and ore bots. DU wanted a game where "players do everything", but the role that NPCs fill was never really considered -- they didn't create some alternative concept that would make the game work better without NPCs. "Could they make DU work without NPCs?" isn't really the question....it's "would DU work better with NPCs?" I think it would. They should be created by players to tie industry, building, and PVP all together. NPCs could help create more security and order around denser pockets of civilization, give pirates more opportunities, create conflicts between orgs as they attack rival NPC ships, and give builders/industrials more things to build and maintain. At least IMO, NPCs would help DU a lot more than they would hurt it -- the only real argument against it is "well NQ wants it to only be players"...but why? What does that actually do for the game beyond making it feel empty...?

Honestly, NQ would need to work really hard to go FTP because micro-transactions require a carefully considered game design to balance properly. It's important to have a great hook that invests the player and pulls them toward a MT -- right now, FTP players would follow the same pattern as paid beta subs. They'd stay long enough to litter their speeder somewhere. "Getting more players" isn't the only concern, it's keeping them. They got a lot of new players during beta's initial launch, but they couldn't retain them. Some paid for months or even a year and didn't play for more than a day or two. They'd rather throw away their money than keep trying; that says something about new player UX. If they went free-to-play tomorrow, they'd get many new players...but only to lose money and clutter the servers. There's nothing compelling new players to stick around -- this game's new player UX gets worse over time, not better. Their MT conversion rate would be abysmal -- they'd have players, but not revenue. DU doesn't actually need new players right now. It needs a solid new player UX and a way to retain those players. You can't monetize players (FTP or subs) if they can't get past the early stages of the game.

Patches need much greater frequency. Small bug fixes should be in near-constant release -- every other week or monthly at the longest. Right now, NQ is averaging 4-5 releases per year. That's just not reasonable for a paid online game with as many bugs as DU has. There should be a much greater push to quickly patch, test, and deploy fixes -- feature dev isn't going very quickly, anyway, at least with faster bug fixes we could see improvements more consistently. It'd be nice to have more communication -- what features are you working on next? What's the ETA? How will they work in terms of design? E.G. territory war is a big concept but there's still no details on how it will actually work. I get that a flood of negative feedback on a feature that's not even done sucks....but the earlier you tell us what's going on, the earlier you can get feedback and the easier it is to make changes.

Okay "fixes take time" is 100% fair. There's a lot involved not just with fixing something but with testing and deploying that fix. However....NQ has got to get into a more regular release cycle. There's no reason a paid online game should have 3-4 month release cycles like DU has today. Small patches with fixes should be rolling out at least every other week -- a month at the longest. You can't leave major bugs unpatched in the wild just because you don't want to do deployments more than 4-5 times per year.

DU isn't a "scam", but the adverts are misleading. Sure, buyers need to research, but it's been shown that people buy based on emotion. Yes, even smart people. The question isn't just "could you have known better if you bothered to check?" It's also "is NQ trying to mislead people into buying their game?" -- because as we've seen so obviously in the real world, any claim you put out there someone will believe so long as it aligns with their expectations/needs and there's some shred of evidence. Someone that watches one of NQ's adverts that really wants a game like this to work...is it really their fault for believing the advert? Or is it NQ's fault for posting adverts they know are misleading...? I don't know, but in this day and age especially...we have to move beyond "go do your research" because however sensible, it isn't how people work. The main reason NQ should care is that it is counterproductive to have adverts that set the wrong expectation. We're not talking about some great moral failure because of a $15 sub to a video game...it's just not a good thing for new players to have the bar set by a flashy ad then land in DU to feel instant regret and bewilderment.

NMS is one of the most fantastic stories of hype, crushed expectations, and pure redemption in gaming history. They've worked it in the ~5 years since it launched. NMS was built by a small but technical team -- they built their own engine and did some magical things with procgen. Their approach to terrain generation / projection is very technically ambitious and pioneering. From the start, their game design was simple and their design/UI/UX was refined. Frankly, I don't see that same level of skill with DU...on any front. Design. Technology. UI/UX...All these need major, major work. But then, DU isn't at release yet, so who knows? Redemption is always possible, it'll just take a lot of work and a lot of focus.

Yep. It's so dumb that this has been something discussed for ages and ages and yet the dev priority with last update was plugging in purchased assets and jetpack tweaks lol. No wonder JC got canned...this issue alone would make me wonder wtf he is doing all day.

New player experience in DU is among the worst I've ever seen in any game. Tutorials break all the time. Lag is unbearable. Even the nature of the tutorials is wrong -- Go to Sanctuary, find a tile 10-15 minutes away from the market by speeder, then go back and forth to the market several times until done. Sure, some players know to skip this whole arc and settle on Alioth, but the average new player doesn't. This game has some enormous tech debt that needs to be settled before they can even think about release.

Compacting and re-spawning from a terminal would solve the clutter issue better than salvage. - Salvage takes time and there's no gaurantee people will completely salvage a craft. People have to identify salvage craft and do operations to destroy it. - Compacting could be done after a couple of minutes or hours after landing -- there's no loss, so no hassle. This makes it unfeasible to just respawn the construct for adverts and makes it much faster to clean things up. There's other controls they could add if people just try to spam a respawn, like throttling it so you only get 1 respawn per 15 minutes but that ships de-spawn after 10 minutes....

TBH that's one reason I reacted so negatively against the idea of salvage. I work really long hours (okay i sometimes lurk here as i work) and there's really no time to log in during the week. I probably need a different job lol.

That's a good point. NQ definitely needs to think about that as they develop territory war. Can you imagine spending hundreds of hours on a base, letting sub lapse...then coming back to nothing? You wouldn't keep your sub very long I expect. One of the fun aspects of a sub-based MMO.

No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that letting people salvage ships is a bad idea, not that they should linger forever. And i've already discussed my ideas in past posts because this topic comes back every month. There's plenty of other options -- among the most basic is simply de-spawning old constructs after and letting players re-spawn them from a terminal or hanger. Easy. Fair. Works for people that let their subs lapse for months then come back; sub-based games need people to be able to come back after their subs lapse without losing all their shit.

Good for you? There's plenty of players that don't find tiles so easy to get or so cheap -- especially new players or people that haven't been playing since alpha. There's plenty of players that log off at markets because they don't want to spend the time flying back to their territory. "Oh but that's their fault for not investing the time"...okay? Sure? But it's still bad game design. If you're making a sub-based MMO with the idea that people need to play all the time and that they can't easily come back after 6-12 months of not playing...then you should shut it down because you'll only ever have a small, hardcore niche. You're sending a clear message: "if you stop playing don't bother coming back", and that's just not marketable or reasonable to expect for the average player.

100% agree -- you shouldn't punish people for being idle (in a sub based game especially where NQ makes less money the more people log in). They'll just cancel subs and not come back if they log in to find their ship permanently gone. A huge part of sub-based MMOs is not just retention but returning users that come back after cancelling their subs for a few months -- this salvage idea creates a massive disincentive to play the game if again if you cancel. I don't feel like salvaging ships that are left in markets is a "gameplay mechanic" at all, there's no game or skill to it -- it's just random luck based off RL factors that have nothing to do with the game. The salvage concept makes no real sense in terms of the design, balance, or basic concepts of fairness. There have been sooooo many discussions on this topic and so many simple ideas that don't involve permanent destruction. Among the most basic concepts of game design is the idea that you don't make players "stuck" and that's what this could do, especially if/when daily login rewards go away.

Maybe...we'll see soon, but let's be clear: NQ didn't do this because it's a "better system". They made it very clear in their post that they're doing this because of performance, then tried to spin it like it's "better" while admitting that it won't be as flexible. They're doing this because they didn't really test how certain aspects of LUA scale in an MMO environment and now the performance cost is too expensive.

NQ was very clear that they're doing this because of performance -- they didn't think about how the initial implementation would scale at all...it's like they didn't even bother running performance tests in an MMO defined by creative possibilities. Now that they realize it isn't as performant as it needs to be, they are changing everything and trying to pitch it like its some benefit when really it was their mistake. Like many issues with DU, this was caused by poor planning and technical competence -- if you're building an MMO, you need to test for scale.

Yep. Don't blame ya...especially since operating a turret has no game to it. Not like you actually aim...it's just occupying space to occupy space. People complain about there not being enough PvP all the time...but it's so damn boring. "Mining simulator" is bad...but I'm especially not interested in "sitting in a chair" simulator.

Yeah, I assume that's an accurate analogy. I don't know cars. Is the unibody attached to the carburetors? It goes beyond just the code. For example, Empiryon uses Unity -- the entire nature of how the project is structured is based on Unity's constructs and editor. The idea of a commercial studio buying code to learn from it....unless the code is dirt cheap, that doesn't really make sense to me. It's very time-consuming to audit code like that -- and almost always better (and faster) to research and implement the concept yourself. It's very rare to have a task that engineers just can't solve because "they don't know how" -- it's almost always a question of how much time/engineering hours you want to spend on it vs. needing some third party code to learn. Not going to say i'm the best coder, but have been in software development for about 12-13 years and spent 3 years in game dev. I've worked with a lot of purchased codebases and it's often the brand and market position the boss is buying (which could happen with DU), not purely the tech.

I agree that DU will likely go F2P eventually....but I think it'd be a mistake for them to do that anytime soon. While the sub model makes no sense for DU in its current state, it does work as a gate to ensure that only very interested players willing to pay install the game. If they go FTP, they'll be opening those floodgates and neither the new player experience nor the technicals can handle this gracefully. They have a lot of work to do before they can even get to the point where FTP will make them money.