blundertwink

It's really hard to find them in all this history, but here's a post from 2020 talking about this issue -- although in the context of resources scarcity more than just tile scarcity. That said, it's really the same issue (scarcity of land). In the end, for a game where property is a core part of the experience, the only way to scale it (IMO) is to add land as you add players OR change the fundamental reason why some squares aren't as good as others. If the core issue is that new players have to hike way too far to get to a market, change how the market works...e.g. people have been asking for player-built markets for a long, long time now.

Why people post is truly not relevant. The content of the post and the topic being discussed is what matters, not who is posting it or why. If you disagree with an opinion, articulate the reason you disagree. If you disagree with a person (or the motivations you believe they have), that's really not relevant to anything at all. Frankly, it's none of your business why anyone posts here, it's an irrelevant and trolly question by its nature because it's about a person's motivations rather than the their actual opinions...the purpose here is to talk about the game or at least to discuss some topic, not to play inquisitor and demand to know why a person has articulated an opinion (vs. actually responding to its merits).

Eh, I don't have any respect for this idea that scam victims deserve what they get for being "dumb", especially in real life. It is not a matter of "paying attention". Which...speaking of paying attention, it's "good riddance", not "good riddens". I hope you don't take offense to this correction -- after all, you're the one that thinks it's okay to punish people for being "dumb". 🤷‍♂️ I don't know where you are in your life to believe that scam victims just aren't paying attention, but this attitude strikes me as naive and heartless. Ignorance is not stupidity (not knowing how to spell good riddance is not stupidity, it's ignorance) and even if it were...being stupid doesn't justify jack shit, because being intelligent isn't something you've earned in any real sense. Some people have disabilities, some haven't had an opportunity to get a quality education, and some are just trusting or ignorant. What sort of attitude is this, anyway...? For a game with few players to be like "let's celebrate dumb people quitting" is...well, good luck with that. That's the OP's point...if DU wants to retain new players, it needs to focus on easy wins like this to improve UX across the board.

I could find it by applying the "MMO" tag to filter, and even then it's a bit far down the list (just above some DLCs lol). This goes to show how challenging it is to adopt the "release it now, fix it later" attitude (in general, but especially with a subscription game). If you don't do well on release, Valve will bury your game deep into pages few people see...and those that do see it will be greeted with "mixed" reviews, further tanking conversion. Valve showing it to fewer people means you don't have nearly as much opportunity to improve your stats, but you will struggle to improve your metrics without more views...so it's hard to see how DU can grow without some major marketing push outside of Steam. Especially since this promo was a great fit for DU....and not as popular as some of Steam's bigger sales, so a bit less competition.

Yeah, I am almost surprised that their promo did nothing....but Steam is a competitive place. Games with much better reviews and more players are offering much better discounts than 20% off your first month. Signing up to a sub is also a commitment, and people like to trawl these sales and add stuff to their library for some future rainy day...so committing to a sub might not fit well with the psychology of Steam sales in general. And of course...Valve isn't going to promote DU very highly because its metrics are horrible. They do not screw around with giving games "a chance" if their stats are not solid, and I suspect DU's conversion rate is not great....

Well, you're the one that doesn't seem to understand how a subscription monetization works, so I used the most popular subscription service as an example... Churning users permanently is a bad idea and will always be a bad idea for any product with a subscription model. It doesn't matter that DU is a different product than Netflix -- the monetization model works the same. Being "blocked" is completely irrelevant to how this model works. You're talking about specific gameplay, I'm talking about how subscriptions work at a fundamental level. That NQ didn't understand how subscriptions work is part of my point -- trying to make DU fit into a monetization model that doesn't work for the core design is a part of NQ's many problems. Changing the timing doesn't even really solve this problem, the game still can't scale indefinitely -- it's almost like making property ownership a core part of a persistent MMO is a bad idea unless they scale the property available along with the number of players. Adding planets doesn't do this because new players don't start on new planets. This topic has been discussed for so many years...this fact that the new player experience degrades over time as tiles get more claims. Years and years people talked about this, warning NQ that their design made no sense for a persistent MMO. At the end of the day, though...the core design of DU is counter-productive with a subscription model by NQ's choice and it would take more than a few small tweaks to change this. It doesn't matter that DU works differently than Netflix as a product, it matters that user churn is the number one most important thing for any sub and DU's core design is counter-productive for this model no matter how you slice it.

After a few days, I don't see any relevant bumps in Steam's metrics yet. 🤷‍♂️ There's still <200 people playing during peak, with the count continuing to trend downward. This underscores how hard it can be to get leverage on Steam when your product has a combination of bad reviews, few purchasers, and not great conversion rates. It might be somewhere in their promos, but few people are actually seeing it...and a 20% discount maybe isn't enough to compete with other games in this sale that have much better reviews. At least NQ is advertising the game somewhat honestly (the claim about making cities made me laugh) compared to trailers with fake action sequences...but we'll see how the weekend goes. It would be a bit sad if NQ's one effort to grow their Steam users yields no results at all, but so far it hasn't.

I really can't agree with this idea. First, GTA5 is not merely one of the most successful games. With over 6 billion in revenue, it's among the most successful entertainment products in history, period. By comparison, every "Harry Potter" movie combined is estimated to have made ~$7.7 billion. So...it's clearly an outlier not only in video games, but in the massive world of entertainment media in general. There's a lot more examples of games struggling to sell because of bad performance than examples of games that were successful despite bad performance. Let's not give into GTA5's survivor bias. Games like Cyberpunk and NMS infamously had rocky releases because of performance struggles -- it's silly to suggest that studios simply "don't care" and only want to release an "MVP" because that's what makes money. What actually makes money is releasing a good game that works as it should across every platform, even in the world of Early Access. Let's take the example of an atypically successful game's PC multiplayer port not working well with a grain of salt...I personally do not see evidence that the industry in general only wants to push MVPs because "that's what makes money". I also can't agree that "paying isn't the issue" as if money has no relation to what it takes to build a successful game...especially in the context of an MMO. The performance of servers is absolutely proportional to NQ's budget, especially running on AWS. The quality of dev you can afford is 100% driven by budget. NQ's CTO is someone who's previous job was literally as an intern, with NQ being their only game dev role. There's a big difference between someone like that and someone that's spent 30 years making MMOs leading the tech. Further, most modern MMOs secure at least $200 million in funding -- NQ is trying to do this with 10% of the funding of a typical "theme park" MMO. It's silly to suggest that hasn't hurt DU's chances. This example of a tiny, discontinued game made by a few people is a moot point and greatly misunderstands the real struggles with optimization and performance between complex titles like DU and simple, incomplete titles made by indies...as someone that spent several years working on an indie title that was also on Steam for a period, I can't fathom the comparison between a not-finished indie game and a released MMO like DU. Even GTA5 isn't a fair comparison -- there's a world of difference in complexity between 3rd party instanced servers and a true persistent MMO. Granted GTA5's client side optimization and graphics is leagues beyond DU's...but my point is that none of this is so simple.

I'm sorry, but this idea is absurdly bad for any subscription based MMO. To me, it betrays a complete misunderstanding of how subscription-based monetization works at a fundamental level. This idea that once someone's sub lapses, they ought to be completely purged from the game is immensely counter-productive. From a business perspective, it makes zero sense. This is because every subscription-based product faces high month-to-month churn, and with DU that's especially so. Every churned user then becomes a potential customer, because reengaging lapsed subscribers is a huge facet of any viable subscription service. Consider what percent of active Netflix subscribers has at one point paused or cancelled their sub. I'd wager it's a vast majority. This is just a core concept with how subscriptions work, and any sub-based product that decides to ignore this is not going to last very long. Deciding to make it so there's no reason for lapsed users to return is an objectively stupid idea for any subscription...especially one that suffers from as much churn as DU. The push and pull between DU keeping tiles and reclaiming them has been discussed for a long, long time -- the flaw is inherent in the design of this game and the solution that NQ already has makes a lot more sense than this suggestion. Hell, I'd argue timers should be even higher, because 3 months is not nearly enough time to re-engage a lapsed sub, and that's the whole point. TLDR: a game with so few subs can't be so arrogant in deleting old stuff to "make room" for new players, because there are no new players and regardless, all new players eventually become churned players (especially with DU's high churn rates), so this "strategy" is horribly counter-productive in every conceivable way.

In case anyone missed it, NQ is announcing a Steam-related event along with a discount for new players: There's only ~100 people playing via Steam right now and it hasn't broken 200 concurrent players in a while (down from 400-500 just a few months ago) -- so I appreciate that NQ is at least trying to attract more players on the largest PC gaming market. I think it is also wise to promote it with this specific event. If players join DU expecting PvP or PvE (even if that one new mission drops), they'll be very sad. At least this time NQ is marketing something that's actually up their alley: building bases. I personally think they'll have slightly more success marketing it like this compared to doing make-believe trailers that set a very wrong expectation about the game and its "combat". Granted, I'm not sure 20% off one month's sub is going to be interpreted as a great deal...and I'm not optimistic about retention considering the state of the game and NQ's development velocity. Do you think DU will see a bump in it's Steam stats because of this promo? Further...will they actually retain new users?

So the poster is not only a secret NQ agent, apparently NQ employees aren't "real humans"....? Is that the sort of claim a "real human" would make? Unlikely. Please prove your humanity before you accuse others of being some sort of nonhuman spies, else I can only assume you are the non-human spy. 🤷‍♂️

Huh...? I don't know why anyone would suggest that a subscription based model is actually working for NQ. Mathematics says that subs only work at-scale, and even then they only work for a limited period of time. Consider a company like Netflix. They have more subs than any MMO will (>230 million) and they recognize that churn is inevitable. The only way to combat churn is via constant content. Why do you think WoW has 300 expansions...? Why Netflix is willing to spend so much on new content? They know that every month, 10-20% of users will cancel their plan -- the only way to grow is to add enough content to re-engaged lapsed users or attract new ones. The rate of updates for DU is not nearly, nearly fast or deep enough to combat churn -- especially for an MMO, which players can easily invest more time into than any other entertainment sub product. We see this spelled out in the game's stats. Average pops today are ~20% of what they were at launch just 4 months ago...and that number was never high enough to be scalable, anyway. I don't think NQ is "on to something"...I don't see any evidence that their monetization "strategy" is sustainable.

Which is also one of the reasons cited for FF14's infamous mulligan. They had a pervasive attitude of "we will fix it after launch", and this is a horrible idea for a subscription-based MMO...or any product in general, really. Let's be realistic about that: NQ picked an obscure engine that isn't typically used for gaming because they insisted that they must have a 64-bit coordinate system (which is not true at all) and were willing to sacrifice anything to get that. Unigen2 was picked because of laziness and ignorance -- the founder and early prototyper hadn't worked a day in game dev, he had no clue how critical it is to pick a robust engine...so he picked one that would get closer to their apparent goals right away without any real study or experience. I agree that DU's performance flaws start at the engine level...but for a studio that has taken 8 years just to realize they needed at least 1 PvE mission...they won't be re-platforming, lol (never mind writing their own engine, as is typical for most MMOs)

It's beyond stupid to ask players to read and obey rules that can easily be integrated into the game itself...but this is something that's been said many, many times. Game rules are meant to be integrated into the game, and if NQ doesn't want to do that basic thing, at least they can have a lighter hand in enforcement. Hope you have fun in whatever game you find, @Cergorach! I'm sure there's plenty of other studios that would work much harder for your sub money.

Not really -- I articulated why it's bad design, why it's utterly unfeasible for NQ, and how there's an infinite number of far easier mechanics that would be much wiser choices for NQ. I don't "need" to do anything, and showering NQ with "more positive messages" won't help anything. As for subs and funding...that ship has already sailed, and it has jack to do with anything anyone is saying around here. No one cares. If criticism on this forum that so few people view is making the difference between success and failure, that only underscores how poorly the game has scaled. Criticism helps the game more than glowing positive platitudes. This idea that "if only people were more positive about the game, they'd have oh so much funding to hire devs" is just not grounded in any shred of reality. This idea that they might merely be "one dev away" from fixing things makes me think you haven't had much experience working on large technical projects. That's just not how it works. One dev can't retool 8+ years of legacy code or fix the fundamental scaling challenges that come with a single-shard implementation. To say it again: criticism is not the same as toxicity. Toxicity is doing what you are doing: making claims about personal motivations that you know nothing about. When you spend your time talking about a person whose opinions you don't like instead of discussing their opinions on their merit, that's being toxic. I'm not saying I'm perfect, but when I have something critical to say, I try to explain why I have the opinion I have. Trying to assert that every opinion I've posted is just "hate" and "bashing" is what toxicity is -- it's conjuring up motivations about someone you don't know and implying those motivations are "wrong" because you don't have the patience or civility to allow for the possibility that people might simply have different opinions. For what it's worth: I've explained why food isn't a good design choice, how there's an infinite number of better and more simple design choices, and how implausible the laundry list of random features you've compiled is considering NQ's 8-year history of development velocity. That isn't merely regurgitating "food is annoying", but whatever. You do you.

Got it. So you're yet another boring "I don't have anything to say about the topic, so I'll presume things about people I don't know and imply they are the ones being toxic". If you aren't interested in engaging further with the topic of the post in a civilized manner, you're the one that is bringing this to some weird personal level and should go. Criticism is not the same thing as toxicity -- you aren't obligated to agree with my opinions just as I'm not obligated to agree with yours...but you are obligated to stay on topic, remain civilized, and not resort to calling people "toxic" just because they express opinions you don't like. You asked for actual criticism of your "idea" of a hunger meter...instead of engaging with that criticism (which again...you asked for) you're ranting about how "toxic" I am...? 🤷‍♂️

Since you are having trouble understanding, food isn't a very good idea as a design concept. Suggesting that DU "needs" food and this is the only idea that makes sense is just not very imaginative. It's hardly the only or best solution to DU's lack of engagement, which you don't really seem to understand. As I explained, one basic concept in game design is that players don't like being "forced" to do things -- a meter that kills you when it expires unless you constantly shovel food in your mouth is boring, unimaginative, and not a wise design choice for any MMO...especially one that seems predicated on AFK. "It will force people to work together" -- again, you're not understanding how good design works. In a good game, people want to work together because there's a carrot, not a stick. I used a basic game like Mario because it's ostensibly simple for people to understand. There's no such thing as "MMO design" or "single player" design, good game design is about engagement and if you can't learn from such a simple example...that's on you. Also...the reason there's no cities in DU has jack to do with it's design -- it's because cities don't work. They aren't viable technically and they never will be with NQ's core tech. The game often struggles with few players...the issue with creating "empires" is that the servers couldn't support such complexity even if NQ had the resources to implement the many vague ideas you're throwing against the wall...which they don't. Why do you care...? This has nothing to do with the topic -- people with no point to make love to imagine things about people they do not know and make believe about the motives of internet strangers. It's a waste of space and a window into what your version of what a "reasonable argument" means.

That's...an interesting theory of game design. The challenge with motivating gameplay "by virtue of necessity" is that in general, players dislike being "forced". Consider a classic game like Mario, because it's often used as an example of quality game design. You can complete the level as quickly as you want or barely finish within the time limit...you can care about points or power-ups or ignore them. The only thing you're "forced" to do is complete the level without dying. This is what creates engagement -- if you were forced to stop and eat every now and then, it might "give you something to do", but in the same way as busy work. It isn't something you want to do, it's something you have to do. Having gameplay or activities doesn't automatically mean those activities are engaging, which is the core goal of good design...not fidelity to real life. There's an infinite number of ways to create feature depth and engagement without having to force people to eat or starve. It's easy to brainstorm about all the little things they could add "if only food were a thing", but this would be a huge undertaking for a studio with very limited resources that has shown very little willingness to introduce new features in general... You can list some of the same integration points with something like energy production -- how it could encourage x/y/z dependencies between players and create new markets or promote "civilization" if done in x/y/z way....but no matter how you boil it down, it's a pipe dream because NQ doesn't want to make new features.

To be clear, this change doesn't mean "DU now has PvE". Technically, sure, but this isn't what most people imagine when you say "DU has PvE", especially for an MMO. If you told someone that "DU is a space MMO that has PvE", they'd probably cancel their sub when they learn that "DU has PvE" really means "DU has one PvE mission". There's a world of difference between repeating one PvE quest forever and actually having PvE content. I fear some players will conflate the two -- let's be clear about what this is, it's one PvE mission you can use to practice combat or grind, but it isn't PvE content as the average MMO gamer would recognize it from competing titles.

Are they actually adding "PvE", though? There's a world of difference between "the game has PvE" as every MMO gamer understands it and "there's one PvE mission", which is what it will actually be. PvE is more than the mechanical ability to "do combat" against mobs. Don't get me wrong, this is still a big improvement...but it would be a huge stretch to then say that "DU has PvE" as if it has the same level of PvE as any other MMO. But back to the topic of food.... The OP is suggesting this because the game has such a profound lack of feature / content depth. That's the underlying issue, that "there's nothing to do". One PvE mission won't change that. Would "food" solve this...? I don't know, maybe, but there's many easier ways that NQ could improve feature depth and they've truly not shown any interest or capacity to do this in the last 8 years. The last couple years of updates have entirely been focused on revisiting things they've already done, with one exception for "space territory war" in the form of alien cores. Even their "roadmap" is just revisiting things they've already done -- one new mission type, new planets when in the beginning they talked about countless solar systems, joystick input support...? DU needs food? Unsure that's true...but DU does need content depth so it feels like there's "something to do" and that just isn't going to happen anytime soon.

I'm of two minds about PvE content -- because clearly its needed, but it all depends on implementation and timing. It's hard to celebrate something that was sorely needed pre-launch and hard to see how an invariably basic implementation will make a big difference, especially if we're talking about it dropping 5-6 months post-release at a minimum. True -- have to give credit when due! At least they've finally outlined a plan, even if vague. Is it enough to reverse churn and grow the game...? Even if the implementation behind each idea is solid, I'm not sure it would be...and again, if they aren't devoting the company to DU entirely, I don't think they will have the resources to make changes fast (or complete) enough to grow the game. Timing is so critical for an new, subscription MMO...the longer they take to deploy updates, the fewer people they'll even retain with these improvements, never mind growing the subscription base...and if these improvements are all months and months out? It just won't be big enough changes fast enough, not for a subscription game. NQ has a heavy vested interest in DU's dev appearing to be business as usual, at least until the new ventures that the CEO has mentioned completely roll out. Otherwise, any potential investors (or big customers if they go the B2B tooling route which is plausible) will have far less confidence in NQ and might even view such products as desperate pivots. I guess now the ball is in NQ's court and we just have to wait and see, but I'm not betting big on NQ's integrity or competence.

Obviously my timing was perfect, as they posted this about DU's future at a similar time. Of course, this doesn't really answer anything about DU's future or NQ's priorities other than confirming there's some level of dev still going on, even if it's nothing major. It really isn't anything major on this list -- especially depending on the implementation specifics and pace of development. There's a lot of ground to make up between this list of future changes and the game being sustainable. I'm still very skeptical full-scale dev is still going on, but I suppose they have every chance to make it clear with 1.3 and 1.4...

DU has clearly faced many challenges in the last 8 years, and NQ deserves credit for trying to be novel in the MMO genre. It was never an easy undertaking, and I have to believe that the devs working on it did their best despite many difficult circumstances. That said, recent statements from the CEO strongly imply that NQ's main focus right now is on new projects (i.e. "3d Blogging", whatever that means). Paired with a lack of any updates or roadmaps or even vague plans for the future, it seems to me that DU isn't going to be developed further, except maybe small fixes and optimizations. There can be no illusion that DU's release has not gained enough subs for the product to be sustainable as a subscription MMO, so I can't blame them if this is true. No one can reasonably expect them to keep shoveling money into a project if it isn't working. Of course, it's also fair to ask NQ to be honest about their priorities and the future of DU. If their new focus is to develop tooling for metaverse-related projects, okay...but I think it's important for players to know what they are buying with their subscription. Is this limited revenue going to support and grow DU, or other projects? Is DU even being developed as NQ's main priority...? Or does it have limited resources such that big updates are unlikely? Why should people keep subbing if NQ's leadership is clearly more keen on talking about metaverse BS...? If the leadership doesn't believe that DU is NQ's future, why should players believe in the future of the game? Is honesty with paying customers (some of whom have been loyal for nearly a decade) just not possible...? I understand there's a business interest in pretending that the game is fine as they try to pitch other products...but it feel dishonest to be collecting sub money, using player creations to show off other products, all-the-while having no intent to continue full-scale development. Of course I could be wildly off base and wrong...but what else should I think when the product has few players, no news about updates, and the only news from NQ's CEO is about how excited he is for new products...?

Unfortunately, there's no evidence to suggest that NQ is actively developing DU beyond bugs and maintenance. There is evidence to show the opposite: that they've given up on DU, are working on other things, and only doing the minimum bug fixing and maintenance. The lack of any roadmap or even basic information bout a next update only emphasizes how DU is not being developed. If I'm wrong, it's on NQ to showcase even a little interest in their own product and communicate this to paying customers. Right now, you should assume that the game is dead because this is what NQ is stating with their silence. New MMOs live and die by update cadence as churn begins to erode the initial influx of new players -- only with DU, there was no influx, it's only churn. So being fair....If I were NQ, I wouldn't update the game either. I can't blame that for making that sort of choice, I just wish they'd be honest with paying customers. Is DU still a priority? Are most resources in the company dedicated to it? What will change with the game in the next year? Even if they were actually developing DU, @Jinxed isn't exaggerating -- NQ doesn't have a history of engagement with their customers, especially when it comes to anything that might be construed as criticism.

Riiight? Honestly, it's weird that people believe DU is still being developed. If you're still paying your sub, waiting for the game to improve, you should probably stop. There's no plans for future updates, the CEO is saying clear as day that their focus is on a "3d blogging" project and not DU, and the demographics of DU are so abysmal it would be absurd to suggest that NQ even should keep sinking time into a failed product. The game is dead. People say that about MMOs all the time, granted, but in this case...the small studio developing it is clearly broadcasting that they are working on other stuff, the game has minuscule player pops, there's no updates in the works at all, and after 4 months, nothing has improved (4 months is an eternity for a new, sub-based MMO!) and player churn is the only stat that's growing. So...the answer about when X/Y/Z feature or change is coming....? It truly doesn't matter. There's no evidence whatsoever to suggest that DU is a viable product, even if you're one of the confused people that insists that horrid Steam stats "mean nothing". New players especially (the four of you) should be aware that DU is not an MMO....it's a small-scale online builder that does not have persistence because the product isn't sustainable. The servers could go off in a year or in a month, but terribly low pops combined with not even having an announcement for the next update...that spells "we stopped working on DU" in any language.