blundertwink

so this is why many people think PvP is dumb. This is why the whole idea of making a "civilization" game with a bunch of "pvpers" is pointless. not because of "childish crying", not because of game mechanics, but because many PvPers act like children. The level of hypocrisy here is just mind-numbingly stupid. elementary-school name calling and casual bigotry isn't PvP. Trash-talking isn't PvP. Homophobic slurs should be banned offenses -- yeah I remember the 90s, too, when that sort of stuff was widely permitted..it was hell for many of us. Grow up. Also...like...why does Tazer even still have an account...? this is the same dude that got suspended so he just jumped onto an alt to keep posting and didn't bother to even hide it. Hey NQ -- do I need to spam employee linkedIns to get some moderation? Or will you actually review/ban this trash...? I get that making a civilization game is hard, but at least figure out how to make a civilized forum.

because everyone knows that running an update is a graphically intensive task. sadly a lot of people get stuck at 0%...or stuck at 100%. on the bright side, NQ has 98% of it really dialed in. ?

there's never been a game design rationale for a time-based skills system... such a system is a ploy to maintain subscriptions. that's why they implemented it in Eve and that's why DU lazily copied it. Building skills should be at some level an achievement...you know, something based on the actual game, not based on how long you've been a subscriber. sure free to play games can suck, but subscription games can also build core game features around monetization and this is a prime example. NQ didn't want to make a "good skills system", they wanted to make a skills system that encouraged people to keep their subs active. PS I know you said not to mention it...but that screenshot makes me want to play PoE again

looks like it has some real features we need: https://untappd.com/b/fair-state-brewing-cooperative-double-universe/3444040

it is possible that their maintenance was actually major downgrade in hardware. they are probably trying to save some bucks by transitioning to less expensive classes of instances (especially with fewer players around), but that could cause all sorts of issues they didn't expect...not like their hardware stack was especially robust to begin with, so even a small change could cause all sorts of problems.

what a wild ride. honestly, being on a sub has probably helped DU's rep more than anything -- if it were free to play, you'd have a lot more first-time players cruising in, especially while most people are stuck at home looking for things to do. No barrier to entry will attract a ton of people, but you only get one first impression. having the sub as gate...it will never help them earn or retain players, but are they really ready for people to play this game yet en masse...? there's no way. These FTP players aren't the space nerds you're looking for; if people think we forum randos are too negative, they haven't seen anything yet. Even if they plan to change the pricing model in 0.24...why deploy changes to login/auth now? Is very odd and frankly a kick in the teeth to people that paid for a year in advance like an optimistic idiot ?

wait...you're saying NQ is going around asking people to BP buildings to fix framerates...? for realz? so...this magical "build as big as you want" tech is working great, eh? i remember long ago when they were talking about how you and your buddies could mine out a whole moon if you really wanted. ah, the bliss of ignorance. i'm sure players at release will really appreciate the back-and-forth to markets with how many hexes are taken. will be great fun for them because everyone knows players at release are more patient than alpha/beta testers. where's that sarcasm emoji...?

actually not true -- NQ has never made a game before, and the CEO/Creative Director/"Leader of all" has never even worked in game development before. NQ's leadership has as much game design experience as anyone around here (and in some cases even less). the big name designers they did hire are no longer with the company ? Yeah i agree with that general sentiment -- but it isn't so easy as just throwing out ads. you need ROI for ads, and that means keeping new players on subs for more than a month. Consider who DU will be running ads in competition against -- games that have solid ROI or a much higher retail price. Word of mouth is still the best form of advertising -- if the game were worth the price of the sub, there'd be some level of growth from word of mouth and social media, but DU doesn't have either of those at a meaningful scale. they can't afford to run ads at a loss -- if they get 50k new players but 25k drop of after just one month of revenue (which is likely optimistic)...there's no way they're revenue positive in the competitive game ad market. from what i can tell, they don't even listen to their own employees. there's threads that talk about this at length. JC has a fragile ego, he wants "yes-men", constant crunch, yet has no real design vision or experience. is anyone shocked that the PhD academic that wanted to make a complex MMO as his first ever project has issues with arrogance...?

the thing is...to me, ship combat is currently clunky, (very) laggy, and boring. it is a niche implementation of space combat that doesn't interest me in its current form -- i agree that pvp is vital to make this game work, but it is more than just tearing down safe zones. ...does anyone really believe that NQ can achieve a clean implementation for any of these concepts in the next 1-2 years...? I'd be shocked if they could deliver one of these concepts in a way that's clean and performant before "release". so to me DU falls into the "other" category: "tech demo with some chance of becoming a game someday" -- they've only got 10 months left to get to "release" and it took them half that to give us balance changes, a few bug fixes, org wallets, and...one type of mission...? yeah i can't wait to see how they approach base raiding and avatar combat. i'm sure it'll be just great.

If there's nothing that compels builders to actually play the game with creative mode...well, that's kind of the core problem, right? it isn't that builders will "go away" because of creative...it's that there was never anything to compel them to engage beyond building, anyway... right now, the only "point" to building people can see is pvp...but there's a lot more to the original DU pitch than that. It was always supposed to be about having a role beyond boring pew pews (if you want) creators aren't ever going to be sold on pvp. you'd think that would be super obvious based on the last few years of conversations, but people keep throwing their faces against it as if they will actually change people's personalities. it is completely pointless to try to sell creative builders on the concept of PvP...especially with this game's niche combat model that some find extremely bland and clunky. by "sell creative builders on the concept of pvp" I mean actually participating in PvP -- not just its existence as a core game concept which obviously is critical. the whole point of DU seems to be lost to NQ. they can't understand how to meld genres and don't seem eager to even try. they never had a plan to get from "building tool demo" to "civilization sandbox" and they still don't have a plan. PvP alone won't compel creatives; that should be really obvious. it was NQ that pitched them on the idea that engineer-types have a big role in creating this society. beyond creative mode, 0.24 is looking super pathetic. one mission type, org wallets, textures? How is this more than 30 days of work for a team of 50+...? How is this more than one two-week sprint for a team of 50+? "creative mode" is a symptom of a larger issue IMHO -- which is that NQ can't pick up the development pace or actually implement features that would unify these divergent genres -- and frankly they can't even design those features, even if their dev pace was something nearing reasonable.

it's really fascinating to dig into the forum's history. In this case we have posts as far back as 2015. Those poor, innocent souls thinking beta was a year or two away at most! https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/forum/10-general-discussions/page/114/ a bit amusing to see some of the same issues being talked about 5 years ago. people were so excited and positive, but scrolling forward in time 5 pages at a time you see avatars start to vanish, the tone slowly changing, even the mod activity dries up. but more than being funny or ironic, it's really kind of tragic to see how things ended up. so many of the people back then were all-in, super excited, loyal fans for years and years. even 10-15 pages ago there was hope. now? not so much.

I get this perspective, but LinkedIn is really bad at setting reasonable privacy defaults and presenting easy privacy settings. they will sue people for trying to scrape data, but won't make much effort to protect it... there have been many cases of people trawling LinkedIn to doxx -- I mean...it freakin' gives you the ability to find people by organization along with full name and general location...it isn't hard to figure out a home address from that. it's far too easy to target an org you don't like and extract personal details of employees -- that's like a core feature of their site. Even technically competent devs don't necessarily think about the risks of doxxing as they make their online profiles, or have the patience to dig through somewhat obscure settings to protect them from a situation no one really thinks will happen to them. and if they do protect their privacy, it might affect their ability to find a job by reducing their visibility. how many devs reading this post have set their last name to private and prevented organization searches? the fact that this got resolved in a civil manner is generous on NQ's part, because many other communities would slap bans and even pursue criminal charges. yes, sharing an already-public linkedin profile can be considered a crime in some (very few) contexts and jurisdictions. please remember that next time you're tempted to post links (especially to linkedin) -- just because it is public on the internet doesn't mean it is legal (or ethical) to post. i know that makes no sense to many of us, but that's life in 2021 after it has been repeatedly (tragically) proven how this data can be weaponized...it's more about how the data is used/intended than the fact that it is already on the internet.

doxxing is really not a fun thing and no one should fear the online mob just for showing up to work. Linked is especially bad for throwing up all your personal info and not having great tools to control what is or isn't public. it is way too easy to use that info to track back to home addresses because it gives your full name and general location. under settings->visibility, restrict "who can see your last name" -- this helps prevent address lookups and should absolutely be the default. under "edit public profile", disable for non-logged in members -- this helps prevent low effort search engine lookups targeting an org under 'account preferences', set "showing profile image" to "network only" if you don't want randos seeing your face I'm sure i'm missing something, but linkedin's privacy settings are trash. they'll sue people for scraping public data, but will make zero effort to actually protect it or make it easy for users to control what is or isn't public. TLDR: linkedin sucks, set your last name to not be publicly viewable, and treat your full name like sensitive information

wow ... i assumed this was new/proprietary because i hadn't seen it in a game before (plus DU has been in dev for a long time now), but that's interesting! Couldn't find that specific interview, but plenty of papers discussing various techniques on how to approach this problem. still pretty neat, honestly. but like...what do the devs actually do all day? From what I can see of 0.24 there's very little feature dev. Maybe it's a ton of optimizations and fixes...? probably shouldn't hold my breath. if they're gong to spend all this time on so few things, at least they'll be super robust and bug-free (lol)? i figured 0.24 would be their big push -- the first major feature release since beta after all this time -- but meh. A barely-implemented mission system isn't really that exciting. org wallets? how does that take them more than a few days....?

word. there's so much power in the curse of advertising. They sell many people a promise of a huge sci-fi world that you can mold...where you can be anything or anyone. The allure is so strong people keep buying into it....even if they quit! I guarantee they'll get a lot of new users once they slap a "release" label on it. They'll probably re-use the same exact advert they did for beta. and it will work. if they sold this game on Steam they'd make a lot less money because they'd actually have to honor returns and reviews would be prominent -- not so much through Xsolla and youtube ads. I'm willing to bet that NQ crosses the line from "honestly trying" to "basically vaporware" as they get to release -- and if they cut enough staff and continue to use a service like Xsolla, it'll probably work for a long while.

Yeah, there's no substantial "server tech" NQ is making. The most complex thing they've built is the translation of voxels to meshes on their servers. That's legit complicated, but hardly earth-shattering. They do not use their own servers or maintain their own game engine. There's a good reason most professional studios that make MMOs stand their own servers and make their own engines -- or if they are going to use an engine, they pick something robust...not a second-rate engine like Unigen2 that has like 5 or 6 games to its name. If they were trying to sell this "tech" to other parties, it probably wouldn't be worth much -- a professional studio that is making an MMO wouldn't dare touch this. The idea that NQ has some sort of cutting-edge "super tech" is just not correct. It's voxels to meshes. That's the novel thing they've made with 6+ years of dev time. Single shard is kind of a joke (for reasons beyond the fact that server pops wouldn't support more than one instance anyway lol)

yeah, but why would they play the game at all except for the minimum required to test...? do devs have dedicated time each day where they can just take a break and play...? Or does NQ expect them to play on their free time when they'd rather be doing anything else...? unless they are being paid to just play instead of coding, it is a lot to ask them to spend hours playing the game so they can "understand it better", especially when most devs have zero control over the project's priorities and they are busy crunching to hit dev milestones. what advantage would the devs really get from playing? better perspective? who cares when their suggestions aren't really listened to, anyway...?