blundertwink

Its actualy not that simple. Like not all actors involved are per se NQ employees.
 
It may not be widely known fact, but NQ outsouring quite a bit. First -- marketing (speaking of advertising strategy) -- with at least 3 different companies (HomeRun PR, MSM, WarningUp). Extent is unclear, but interestengly, press contacts on official website give only those outsourcers, no one from NQ proper. Second -- support. Last summer, before Beta, I believe, NQ actualy had opened position of some sort of support supervisor on welcometothejungle.com with task to control/coordinate all other (oursourced) GM/support stuff.
 
So its also a bit question of company structure, compomises and priorities. 

What can be and what will be remains to be seen. But that was not op's question in this survey, but what kind of game this is for me. And since I still had the vision 4 years ago of what they wanted to sell to the customer so that they would leave money, I evaluated and filled it out accordingly. I will probably be able to draw a first feedback with the territoral warfare.

Retrospectivly (observing this game since 2016) I think "building" part of game kinda served very bad service to NQ. In way it provided sense of false security -- people done all kind of fancy builds, NQ gladly promoted them in social media, so its established this sugary narrative and endless talks of "what players can build in our game, just look how its cool". But its very... decieving thing to rest upon, because as builds fancy (and creative), as they hollow (and useless) in way of actual dynamics and systems of gameplay. And they, to be honest, main "food" for minority (in terms of paying population such MMO needs). Majority need something else.
 
Buildings =/= Civilization.
 
Im meawhile its very telling (and very observable) how most (if not all) of "political" life of game, starting pretty vigorously in 2016 gradualy died out -- because despite all efforts social players not found anything to base their efforts. Game just lacked (and still largely lacking) any content for them. Even community page broken and abandoned for whole year.

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. 

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 

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 

With much warmth, the phrasing in this post is a tad sensationalized. Nobody is being forced to do anything.  Yes, we have rules about how to conduct ourselves while using our NQ Dual Universe accounts, but the rules are not all that surprising, unique or scandalous. They're also public, as I see some forumers have already quoted our official communications about 'em here. 
 
We are encouraged to interact with the community in-game. We just can't participate in certain aspects of gameplay like, for example, joining a player Organization under our NQ names. Doing so would absolutely cause negative ripples re: favoritism. I can imagine it now... players coming to me with things like:

- "Why did you join their Org and not ours? What do they have that we don't? I'm sus."
- "NQ is signaling support for one Org over another, officially, and that's not fair - look at how much recognition they're getting! Why can't my Org receive official backing!!?? What's really going on here?"
- "Omg, what special advantages is NQ giving that Org that we won't get?! I bet they'll be fed insider knowledge about the next patch!!1 They must have friends in high places..." etc.

Please also consider that our accounts are "fully loaded"/have "God Mode" abilities, which would give staff an unfair advantage (within the context of regular play) no matter how you slice it. It makes sense to me that we'd want to maintain a firm boundary between staff and player accounts to avoid any conflicts of interest or cries of unjust behavior.
 
Someone, somewhere will find a way to take issue with whatever any game dev staff choose to do or not do in-game. It's just how the cookie crumbles in MMO-land. We have personal accounts we play on to experience the game as you all do. I personally paid for a subscription, because I strongly agree with the point that products must be thoroughly explored and understood by the employees that touch them.  (Edited to add this note: employees are not obligated to pay for subscriptions to personal accounts! I chose to prior to being hired because of my interest in Dual Universe.)

PS - This was a valid and interesting subject to bring up, and I appreciate that you have all remained civil about it. Disagreeing with the rules we lay out is fine, and I hope my two cents provided some clarity. Keep those critical thinking caps on!
 
 
 
 

The voxel mesh tech is actually not new nor created by NQ, JC explained this in an interview in September. They use a well established technique for this which is found in many places.
 
The server tech NQ has designed for DU is not new nor unique either, it is a very commonly used method to achieve the same thing in many different applications, the difference here is that they are adopting it to accommodate agame which has some special requirements. They have succeeded in some parts (the single persistent world actually works very well most of the time) but others are not doing so hot (especially their backend for functionality like RDMS and Industry is shaky at best and they have had to take some rather drastic measures to keep it alive). 
 
If you are interested check this video which explains the server tech they designed (i would prefer calling it that as they really did not develop anything new here)

NQ is not selling anything, the game is free to download. You pay a subscription fee to access the servers which would not be refundable through steam either.
They use XSolla as they are contractually obligated to do so (don't know for how long) which was part of investment they received previously as one of the former investors also owns XSolla.
 
They could just as well use PayPal and build a payment solution using that in house at probably less cost to them.
 
I do expect they will increase the subscription price to $15/mo once they "release" and I'm pretty sure part of why they are so adamant they can "release" end of this year and see no issues preventing that because they are counting on the revenue from that. That "release" will clearly be at best an actual Beta stage game "where they really are still knee deep in Alpha right now) with all the features in  game but unfinished and they will need at least a year, if not two, to actually complet ethe game based on the feature set they promised during kickstarter.