blundertwink

Anyone saying there’s no way to enforce it “mechanically,” (programmatically?) is wrong. 
 
there could be audit system and permissions systems like the barter system that could be used to mitigate the chance of one person leaving with everything 
 
though it won’t save a ship, it could save an entire multiplex of containers. 
 
there could be an RDMS system which requires a vote to undertake actions
 
Eg.. want to remove something from the coffers? requires a vote or a predetermined wait time before automatically being accepted. 
 
problem is that the system would be somewhat cumbersome and no way in hell a team of NQ’s caliber could pull it off without another major Market Place 15 debacle. 

atill, as flawed as it is, it is possible to use org structure and RDMS to protect much of your wealth. 
 
back in alpha and second alpha etc we legates split our org into five functional sub orgs. Each of us and our respective Alts were the only full legates in our sub-org so the maximum any one of us could have stolen from the whole was approximately 1/5 of the total org value. 
 
it did present challenges if someone was away but even then only 1/5 of the org went offline until they returned. 
 
the central org Nova X, where each of us was a legate and our sub org members were also members was the staging ground for all our current builds and drop boxes for ore etc. 
 
we’d deposit the stuff for the build into the central org ‘s containers and cooperate to get it built. 
 
ore for processing was placed in the master refinery. 
 
once the build/refining was complete it was handed off to one of the sub orgs and locked down. 
 
this system served us well until player churn killed or org. 
 
TL/DR; management is a thing.

 
 

Explain how "not giving perms to dishonest people" is supposed to work, though...? How are you supposed to know who is or isn't honest in a game, especially one where there's no repercussions for stealing because NQ insists it is "emergent gameplay"...?
 
Theft isn't "emergent gameplay", because theft is literally just using RDMS as intended -- emergence is an interaction of features, not using one feature exactly the way it was coded.
 
It isn't "gameplay", either, because it has no consequence -- PvP is barely implemented and there is no reputation or legal system of course. There is no gameplay whatsoever around theft. 
 
It's the game's job to manage ownership and property in a way where everyone can contribute to orgs without the org crumbling because a legate gets bored and tears it all down.
 
And let's be honest, when NQ had their market destroyed...they responded with bans...so maybe it's a bit silly to suggest that the end-all answer is "just configure RDMS right" when even NQ has made mistakes. 

Explain how "not giving perms to dishonest people" is supposed to work, though...? How are you supposed to know who is or isn't honest in a game, especially one where there's no repercussions for stealing because NQ insists it is "emergent gameplay"...?
 
Theft isn't "emergent gameplay", because theft is literally just using RDMS as intended -- emergence is an interaction of features, not using one feature exactly the way it was coded.
 
It isn't "gameplay", either, because it has no consequence -- PvP is barely implemented and there is no reputation or legal system of course. There is no gameplay whatsoever around theft. 
 
It's the game's job to manage ownership and property in a way where everyone can contribute to orgs without the org crumbling because a legate gets bored and tears it all down.
 
And let's be honest, when NQ had their market destroyed...they responded with bans...so maybe it's a bit silly to suggest that the end-all answer is "just configure RDMS right" when even NQ has made mistakes. 

I've said this before, but the biggest sink in any MMO is player churn.
 
What percent of WoW items and gold are just sitting on inactive accounts collecting dust? Likely the vast majority of all the money and items ever "printed" into the game. 
 
Honestly, I'm not sure I much care about the "economy" of any MMO, overall...I'm just not the sort of player that cares to "play the markets" as a facet of gameplay.
 
What matters to me is that earning money is fun and that it is motivating because there's stuff I want to buy.  
 
In games, that is the primary driver of a good economy in my opinion -- actual interest in wanting to earn and spend money because it drives engagement with the game, overall. 
 
Earning money just to pay taxes is an objectively stupid design idea that undermines the whole point of having a currency system in games to begin with! it isn't to create a fake economy just for the sake of having an economy. 
 
This isn't complicated stuff; it's like they put quanta into the game without understanding why currency exists in video games. Game economies are not at all like real world economies.
 
NQ needs to step back and think about how to make their game fun; the state of the economy really doesn't matter if there's nothing fun to do with it.

MS has not dropped support for the 5000 series on W10 (EOL Oct 14, 2025), nor has Nvidia dropped driver support for the 900 series of video cards. W11 indeed has no official support for this cpu.
 
The issue is not money. The issue is power consumption. I run two AMD 4800U (8c/16t, 64GB RAM, 2TB+4TB SSD) with integrated graphics (8GB assigned), passively cooled they are completely silent, those are also at least twice as powerful CPU wise and not that far behind in GPU power as you might think of integrated graphics. They only use a small amount of power compared to the old machine and tiny amounts of power compared to more modern stuff. I work from home and it's often at least 50 hrs a week, but probably more in the 80-120 hrs a week that my workstation is on. The amount of power it uses is wasteful and with the current pricing of power around here, just not a good idea. It's also not fun running during the summer without airco. The a fore mentioned 4800U machines will work as my main machines in the future and I'll be PC gaming on my Steam Deck, anything it can't handle I'll run via a cloud service (Geforce Now for now)... I'm just working through 10TB of stuff on the old machine and get it well sorted on the NAS, I'm also working on changing my workflow, etc. (moving over takes some time)
 
Those 4800U will actually run DU at lowest settings (only draws 40W). During beta they did a TON of mission running. Nothing too complex or I will have issues.
 
The newer generations of desktop CPUs and GPUs use way too much power and generate way too much heat. Especially with the hot summers this is going to force me use an airco. For what? A couple of games that refuse to optimize? There's a ton of good and fun games I can play on a Steam Deck. And with  €100-€200/year I can run something like DU on a cloud service. I can run for years on the cloud for the cost of a new machine, especially when you add power costs...
 
What I find strange is that everything seems to run fine in DU in somewhat lower settings on my pc, but this basic feature (this is a floor) doesn't often seem to work ok. If stuff like this continues at a certain point DU is no longer viable as a game/experience, beyond it's already massive shortcomings.

I've said this before, but the biggest sink in any MMO is player churn.
 
What percent of WoW items and gold are just sitting on inactive accounts collecting dust? Likely the vast majority of all the money and items ever "printed" into the game. 
 
Honestly, I'm not sure I much care about the "economy" of any MMO, overall...I'm just not the sort of player that cares to "play the markets" as a facet of gameplay.
 
What matters to me is that earning money is fun and that it is motivating because there's stuff I want to buy.  
 
In games, that is the primary driver of a good economy in my opinion -- actual interest in wanting to earn and spend money because it drives engagement with the game, overall. 
 
Earning money just to pay taxes is an objectively stupid design idea that undermines the whole point of having a currency system in games to begin with! it isn't to create a fake economy just for the sake of having an economy. 
 
This isn't complicated stuff; it's like they put quanta into the game without understanding why currency exists in video games. Game economies are not at all like real world economies.
 
NQ needs to step back and think about how to make their game fun; the state of the economy really doesn't matter if there's nothing fun to do with it.

It's not much of an addiction... I'm feeling zero pangs, or urges to log in... 
 
These forums tho'....
 

I've said this before, but the biggest sink in any MMO is player churn.
 
What percent of WoW items and gold are just sitting on inactive accounts collecting dust? Likely the vast majority of all the money and items ever "printed" into the game. 
 
Honestly, I'm not sure I much care about the "economy" of any MMO, overall...I'm just not the sort of player that cares to "play the markets" as a facet of gameplay.
 
What matters to me is that earning money is fun and that it is motivating because there's stuff I want to buy.  
 
In games, that is the primary driver of a good economy in my opinion -- actual interest in wanting to earn and spend money because it drives engagement with the game, overall. 
 
Earning money just to pay taxes is an objectively stupid design idea that undermines the whole point of having a currency system in games to begin with! it isn't to create a fake economy just for the sake of having an economy. 
 
This isn't complicated stuff; it's like they put quanta into the game without understanding why currency exists in video games. Game economies are not at all like real world economies.
 
NQ needs to step back and think about how to make their game fun; the state of the economy really doesn't matter if there's nothing fun to do with it.

All of that plus:
 
The original vision as stated was a group of disparate features that had not been tried in this combination before.  Some of the intended features are in conflict with other features.  It isn't impossible to get them balanced but that balance should have been achieved in the pre-alpha and alpha or the project scrapped then.  To push into later stages without addressing the conflicting systems within the design was a recipe for disaster.  It is also telling that there is so much finger pointing and blaming of groups.  United we stand, divided we fall.  There was a spectrum of players who wanted everything, but more were at one end or the other; squeezing out players all the while. 
 
All of that to say:  Why should we build the game for a company that ignores and blames us?  That's just a lose-lose scenario.

Because on-topic chat is sooo productive. 

So you pay all your bills in fractional BTC? or do you just hand them 1oz silver bars to pay for your tab?
Also before someone jumps in and says how unproductive this off topic chat is... notice we are having pleasant convo.
Remember fun, do you remember what fun is? lol

Cause I do think we could stand to loosen up a bit on some things lest we strive for a very potent and concise dead forum.

I see even more potential!  That would be a great track for drag racing and if it's long enough would be cool for cruising too.
 
Just keep in mind that an ever-present "potential" backed up by years of no progress on any of the desired "potential" is an earmark of a trap, a scam, or Isaac Newton's writings.

Keep in mind that some with 10-20 accounts certainly didn't pay $300+/month... Some paid $70/year/account and prepaid for years. Sure, $1400/year for 20 accounts is a lot of money for some, for other's it less so. But keep in mind that this happened in a period where people couldn't spend money on vacations, going out, new computers, etc. Thus some might have that money to spend...
 
Keep in mind that a study in 2017 had as a result that the average US student spend $900/year on booze... What if you're a student that doesn't drink (alcohol) at all? Add inflation and that $1400/year for 20 accounts isn't so much as you thought. IF you want to do that now, it is more like ~$2800/year for 20 accounts, but still quite a bit removed from the $300+/month...
 
That said... 20 accounts... Much of DU is gated by player activity. I wouldn't want to manage 20 characters! I have four and while I might theoretically would like a few more due to talents, actually using them all would be an absolute pain! I wouldn't even want to think about using them all to automine... That would be another full time job! No thank you!

I get what you're saying, but it's hard to take any conversation "seriously" when the chance of NQ engagement is near-zero.
 
If people honestly believed their feedback might be seen by devs, the tone of this forum would likely be very different. There's thousands of posts that go into pages and pages and pages of detail, but communication has never been bi-directional. There's no reason to believe this will change after so many years.
 
You might say that devs would come around more often if the tone was more serious and productive....but that's not how these things work. 
 
You need to have a presence in the conversation if you want to control its tone and direction... 
 
It isn't our job to make these forums a serious place for productive, detailed topics -- and there's no reason to assume that's NQ's goal, either.
 
If it were, they should do the work to change the tone by showing people that they are in fact engaged, they are human beings trying their best, and they do indeed have a plan for the game. 
 
What doesn't feel helpful in my opinion is the "cop" attitude where things must go in the proper threads and must stay on topic because "we have to be helpful for NQ". 
 
If NQ valued this as a channel for comms, they'd spend even 10 minutes a day on posting or cleanup.
 
I appreciate that you want polite, focused topics that are grouped into common threads, but to be blunt...I don't see how it's really any of your business how people use this forum, or if they don't put things into the threads you'd like, or don't adopt the tone or level of detail that you think would help NQ best. 
 
The issue with the community being heard is not the tone or content! It's that NQ hasn't shown any shred of ability or interest in engagement. It's their job to be professionals, engage their customers, and control the tone and content of their own forum.
 
Not mine. Not other players. Not yours, either. 

I get what you're saying, but it's hard to take any conversation "seriously" when the chance of NQ engagement is near-zero.
 
If people honestly believed their feedback might be seen by devs, the tone of this forum would likely be very different. There's thousands of posts that go into pages and pages and pages of detail, but communication has never been bi-directional. There's no reason to believe this will change after so many years.
 
You might say that devs would come around more often if the tone was more serious and productive....but that's not how these things work. 
 
You need to have a presence in the conversation if you want to control its tone and direction... 
 
It isn't our job to make these forums a serious place for productive, detailed topics -- and there's no reason to assume that's NQ's goal, either.
 
If it were, they should do the work to change the tone by showing people that they are in fact engaged, they are human beings trying their best, and they do indeed have a plan for the game. 
 
What doesn't feel helpful in my opinion is the "cop" attitude where things must go in the proper threads and must stay on topic because "we have to be helpful for NQ". 
 
If NQ valued this as a channel for comms, they'd spend even 10 minutes a day on posting or cleanup.
 
I appreciate that you want polite, focused topics that are grouped into common threads, but to be blunt...I don't see how it's really any of your business how people use this forum, or if they don't put things into the threads you'd like, or don't adopt the tone or level of detail that you think would help NQ best. 
 
The issue with the community being heard is not the tone or content! It's that NQ hasn't shown any shred of ability or interest in engagement. It's their job to be professionals, engage their customers, and control the tone and content of their own forum.
 
Not mine. Not other players. Not yours, either. 

Right because it was a wish list of things JC wanted in a game - without ever sitting down with real game designers to sort out the mechanics for these and then engineers to see what it would take for these to work as described - and then to do a POC and then road map it publicly. 
 
I'm willing to bet you that a lot of these roadmap items were placed there with no feedback from the dev team on feasibility. 
 
I've worked in places exactly like that - where client provided list of deliverables had items on them that any of the company engineers would have said were not feasible with our infrastructure and could not be provided with the resources we have.  For example a place I used to work promised a client that we would improve our guaranteed uptime from 99.9 to 99.999 because sales folks doing the contracts "didn't think it'd be a big deal" for us to do that - and we found out that we were on the hook AFTER the client was presented the new contract....needless to say we failed to deliver. Of course IT guys got the blame for failing to meet the SLA....
 
The DU map is no different - it is full of things that cannot be delivered regardless of dates because nobody sat down and asked "How would this even work?" before throwing it on the map.

This idea comes up a lot, but I don't really understand it. 
 
You don't spend 8 years just to create an elaborate, secretive demo of technology that doesn't even scale or perform well. If this was the plan, they would spend a lot less time and effort creating a demo that showcases the tech in a positive light. DU isn't even close to that. 
 
Creating a game like this is absurdly difficult -- yes, made 10x more difficult by a lack of design clarity and technical due-diligence early on, but still...making any modern MMO for ~$22 million is not going to be easy. 
 
I can't buy into the conspiracy that NQ has been secretly trying to sell technology this whole time. I believe they spent the last 8 years trying to make a game and a lot of mistakes have coalesced into an unsustainable product.
 
That's the most likely situation in my mind. It happens all the time, even with experienced studios...but especially for new studios trying to do something extremely, extremely ambitious. 
 
It might seem like they have made so many obvious mistakes or simply "don't care"...but all I know for a fact is that they've spent many, many years working on DU as a game.
 
If they really only cared about the tech, why pay for forums and customer service at all? Why market to gamers or put it on Steam? Why spend so long on such an immensely counter-productive "demo" in general?
 
Who is the market for this tech and can you really expect them to pay enough to sustain NQ as a company?
 
Skilled devs can certainly implement voxel-to-mesh (a fundamental concept in all voxel-based implementations, hardly unique to NQ) and NQ's "server tech" is hardly proven to be scalable or robust (besides the likely vendor locking with AWS)...so what's this "tech" even worth...? 
 
I do think NQ might try to sell their their company in general now that it seems so impossible for DU to scale...but I don't believe this was their plan all along, and if they did sell...it'd probably be for a loss compared to the ~$22 million invested. 

Please have some respect for the devs. Coding DU is bad enough, being required to actually play it too feels like just kicking someone when they are already down.
 
I know how many of us feel about NQ, but please find some mercy in you for the devs - they've suffered enough without having to play DU.

Quickly, though...?
 
It's been 71 days since release, almost 3 billing cycles...yes, it's a given they will focus on bugs and performance in the first cycles, but this hasn't been fast or effective enough. The game still suffers from far too many obvious bugs and performance issues.
 
NQ decided to monetize the game with a sub...they should have done even a little bit of homework about what a sub-based monetization actually means, because their update cadence is about the same as a single player game. 
 
With this current pace and their history of glacial dev, there's no feasible way they can actually maintain DU. It just isn't possible.
 
There's no realistic way they can grow the game faster than churn rates. Even if they had the most brilliant marketing campaign in the world, success would be short-lived because they can't retain players and there's no evidence to suggest this will magically change. 
 
It's easy to see this unfold on Steam, the world's largest PC gaming market, with active player maximums barely even breaking 200 concurrent players anymore (just 25% of its "peak" of only ~800 2 months ago).
 
There's now more people playing 2017's "Pinball FX3" than Dual Universe on Steam right now. A Pinball game from 2017 has more popularity than a brand new MMO. 
 
More people are playing Star Trek Online right now than have ever played DU on Steam concurrently -- STO also has its own launcher; this idea that everyone plays outside of Steam and that Steam stats therefore don't matter is hopelessly unfounded and absurd.
 
Steam users are the most qualified potential customers NQ will find anywhere. Valve pushes at least 1 million unique impressions to your product -- their conversion rate was just as abysmal as their retention.
 
If NQ can't convert these users even at the level of ancient MMOs like STO, the game just doesn't work. 

I could live with the bugs and performance issues if there only would be gameplay. Currently the only reliable way to get cash for taxes are NPC missions. DU is a sub-based sandbox MMO with a main gameplay loop that would not even be sufficient for a free-to-play browser game! I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

Frankly, I find the listed topics chilling and utterly dystopic.

Am I the only one that thinks that if ChatGPT would do all CEO communication from now on, it would make more sense, or at least sound more believable? 😉

That's obvious! Everyone has one of those... 😉

I actually don't agree with you.
 
I have a big issue with the use of persistent and have difficulty with attaching the term 'game' to DU, at this point it's more like "DU is a very long (2 year) multiplayer experience."
 
The Role Playing part is actually true for many, in a greater or lesser degree. That it doesn't use stats in the same way Dungeons & Dragons uses them or that there are no NPCs to really interact with does not make the experience any less 'Role Playing'. We're all playing a miner, a trader, an industrialist, a ship designer, a pirate, etc. The only downside is that all of our characters have only one 'quirk', namely all being 'sadomasochistic'... How else do you explain the 'gameplay' and our pursuit of it... 😉

I don't think this will ever be completely fixed.
 
IMO, massive battles in this game will never be possible...it struggles to scale even with a low player count on a platform famous for on demand hardware -- if they can't make the stack work even with so few players, it doesn't work. 
 
Unfortunately, very early on they believed they had invented groundbreaking tech that would make the game scale...but this was also from someone that hadn't worked in gaming before...
 
The academic theories about how it "should" scale in the real world were never challenged, tested, or fully understood.
 
Their early prototyping was not done correctly -- someone with experience in gaming (or tech in general!) would have known to challenge the many absurd ideas or assumptions about this product that never were never realistic, especially around scalability. 
 
The technical core of this game was based on foundations of sand, which makes the game's many design issues even harder to solve...but also means that issues with lag will never likely be solved, even and especially if they somehow manage to attract more players.