blundertwink

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.  

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.  

Probably development has not halted but frankly, the old ideas section was also only for players as none of the proposals ever made it to the game. Illusion of listening is a great good

Compare the number of bytes in a timestamp to the number of bytes in a 0 or 1 (unitCalibrated), multiply that difference by the number of MU being used in game.  It my be a tiny difference but when you're shaving every coin already it seems counterproductive. 
 
Even Amazon owned properties are paying near full rate for AWS, though that is in part to protect their prices charged to external customers.  Amazon discounts are typically a [filtered]-for-tat; so what value would NQ/DU bring to the table to warrant a price break?
 
Edit: over simplistic auto-filter?  The original text is a legit, non-offensive term.

So the cost of DU is not really CPU cycles but CloudFront - DU uses Cloudfront to push out all the voxel data. Any construct or terrain change you make is stored in cloudfront and pushed out to other clients as needed and then stored as cache by your client, at least till the cache is invalidated. Just how much data is pushed is easily tracked by checking your cache size folder. For the estimated costs it's pretty easy - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/
 
You can confirm this easily by the way - 
 
 
Keep in mind that NQ likely has a contract with AWS that is for negotiated pricing, it's pretty rare for any significant users to just pay the list price.
 
That's why mining had to go and that's why constructs have to get destroyed if not tied to a paid account - else they are forever sent out to other clients and NQ pays for it.
 
Tracking millions of autominers is just a bunch of rows in a table - it's not a significant cost really. 
 
As to why NQ made the AM timer 24 hours instead for 20h like the "daily" timers in many games - it's because they have a consistent history of failure to learn from the mistakes made by other games.
 
"Daily" timers being either set to a specific reset time or less than 24h to avoid the constant 'shift right' for the players has been standard practice for some time in other games.
 
I had previously posted a breakdown of what I estimated NQ to be paying for hosting and how many players they needed to cover their staffing costs with the profit assuming France average DEV costs + taxes - and that post got deleted and I took a 3m ban for it sooo uhh not doing that again - you're welcome to draw your own conclusions though...admittedly I did also state that you shouldn't buy into DU because of that data because well...uhh...DOA.

Fair points - our cloud hosting bill is about 25M per year so given our scale we've never paid list for anything but I have no idea how low the bar goes for "You pay list and you don't" - I admit my general mindset is that "list price isn't real price" but I might be totally out of touch here...
 
Org scale is not the only thing, sometimes "unique' use case that can serve as whitepapers/case studies for the vendor or proofs of concept that they can use to secure other clients can be used to reduce pricing at least in the short term. AWS going around pointing at NQ as a K8 cluster success story in the gaming world given Amazon's push into game hosting via GameLift might be enough for them to cut them a deal - but who knows. 
 
You're also right about the compute costs not being 'insignificant' but I just have no way to know how intensive or not their backend is because none of the data points are visible to us. All we do know for a fact is how much data DU pushes to clients by looking at our cache size. 
 
I'd love to have more insight into the DU backend - especially  given that DU is a fairly unique concept - but doubt it'll ever be public data.
 
 

When it comes to NQ I think Hanlon's razor is a better explanation for most things that happens.
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I think it's important to remember that the people making the game, the people actually working on the game, want to do a great job, and i'm sure they're trying to do a great job, and they're also at work, trying to make a living, and they truly don't deserve any form of abuse.  Ever.
 
BUT i think it's also important to make sure that upper management knows, when they make uninformed, poorly thought-out, profit driven decisions, they are in danger of failing to produce the product that we are all here to buy from them.
 
And if they want to produce that product, and they want us to buy it, they need to actually know what it is.  And care whether it's as good as it could be.
 
 
 

"So even if everything we are using as a model is considered distopic we must press forward to ensure it happens and our hand is on the wheel."  (Paraphrasing)

Unfortunately, linkedIn is obnoxious in requiring a login.
 
I'll post a screenshot of the post to avoid direct linking to LinkedIn -- if any mods have issues with this, I apologize in advance. 
 
I'm only sharing because it's from a public post and the direction of NQ as a company is 100% relevant to DU: 
 

See, if you take any word, and add a 3 to it.  Now it's on the blockchain.  And that means it's better.

Even if they threw in TW tomorrow, it wouldn't be enough to turn things around.
 
We're beyond the point where one big change alone would be impactful enough to make the game work. 
 
Consider that a vast majority of the new players that quickly churned in month 1 or 2 never tried PvP -- hell, most of them probably never made it to space.
 
Introducing a new PvP feature isn't going to magically make them come back...nor will it change the realities around new player engagement.
 
With NQ's track record, TW as a fresh feature will likely be horrible -- I can see it working against them for engagement until they slowly get around to patching, and that's assuming their brittle stack can even handle it at scale. 
 
As for NPCs....it just isn't possible. It takes them months to push out stupid features no one cares about like skins...it would take them years to refactor the game to the point where NPCs could work. I can't emphasize enough how slow their dev is and always has been, and this won't change. 
 
It won't change because the entirety of their Steam subscriber base is likely not even enough to pay one person a decent wage...long term, churn will only get worse, here. There's no evidence that they can or will scale the game outside of Steam -- either organically or with paid ads. 
 
The game has too many weaknesses for one thing to magically reverse its fate.
 
If NQ really wants to fix things, it needs a series of radical extremely risky ideas...because honestly things are bad enough that they've very little to lose. Playing it safe with small updates in the hopes that fixing tiny bugs or pushing more marketing will change things is not going to work.
 
Meanwhile, the CEO is off to London to talk about the metaverse...so I'm sure NQ will remain focused and do what it needs to do! /s 

The game's downward pointing charts continue to point to a future where the game may not even survive 2022, never mind 2023. 
 
There's currently more people playing "Coin Flipper" -- a single player game about flipping coins. 
 
Flipping coins is more engaging than every game concept DU has struggled to implement...it has better reviews and literally has more people playing it right now than a new MMO that took 8 years to build.
 
There's over twice as many people playing "PC Building Simulator" right now. 
 
I'm not (just) saying this to be mean...but to drive home the point that NQ needs to be making drastic changes. They need to actually engage with the players that are leaving and fire the devs or managers that insist that player feedback is useless.
 
Their CEO needs to actually seem like they are doing something other than posting about web3 and crypto on LinkedIn and talking about NQ's other projects...
 
Yet...I think it'll be business as usual up until the end. So much for NQ's post-update cycle fixing oh so many things and adding all the many things that are missing. At this rate, I truly would not be shocked if the game didn't make it past 2022. 

#1 If you pay per year, it only costs $144/year...
#2 An that is cheap compare to what you need to pay a mistress/master to get stepped on! 😉
 
People seem to like a little pain in their lives, why people drink, get hammered, and wake up with a hangover for a lot more per year has me confused, but it happens every Friday/Saturday....

Update it got fixed by the dev team! 😮

Deckard: Really?  We're meant to be impressed by the "feature list" in 1.1? This is a fairly stark demonstration of the disconnect between DU's aspirations and those of the player base.
 
As our pixellated colleague says: the headlined changes are peripheral at best to people's game experience, and amount to no new gameplay worth mentioning.

There's nothing wrong with liking this game -- games are even more subjective than movies or books, and people have wildly different opinions on those, usually without it becoming personal or hostile. 
 
So...having a different opinion doesn't automatically make someone all about "FUD" or "entitlement gaming". That makes your post sound a lot less "objective". 
 
Also, let's be real about what "objective data" means when we're talking about this game, because it's a fact that the Steam launch has gone very poorly.
 
On one hand, you say it's unfair to judge it so soon after release....but that's like saying it's unfair to judge a movie based on its release. Release time is when they should be getting a huge influx of players!
 
Release is when Valve gives every new product guaranteed impressions on their store (it used to be at least 1 million, unsure if that's still true) -- Steam watches the metrics and gives new products more and more visibility if they have better sales. Release is the most critical time for any game, but especially for an MMO. 
 
You seem to acknowledge that by pointing out that it's normal for MMOs to have large churn in month 1 or 2. This isn't actually the case with DU. 
 
With DU, there hasn't been a massive churn because there never was a big launch -- going from ~800 active players to <~400 is not a huge drop in absolute numbers.
 
There's a world of difference between that and something like New World going from ~800k to ~80k DAUs...yes, people talk a lot about how MMOs are dying all the time and certainly a lot of that is exaggerated BS, but that doesn't mean every claim of it is automatically wrong. 
 
Beyond Steam stats (literally the only objective data we have on player numbers), look at actual reviews -- the few gaming media outlets that bothered to review tend to give it around 60%. User reviews are similar.
 
To me, this means plenty of people do enjoy the game and plenty of people can see at least some positive elements of the game....but not in enough numbers to keep things moving forward, and not with enough month-to-month retention considering NQ's pace of updates. 
 
Of course that doesn't mean that anyone can know for sure that the servers will go offline, nevermind when...but trying to claim that the game is doing well and that Steam means nothing is really not a helpful or realistic perspective.
 
You certainly haven't presented any objective data to suggest that the game is growing outside of the largest PC gaming platform in the world. Nothing wrong with liking the game and wishing more players would give it a chance...but let's not pretend that DU will magically turn itself around by NQ staying the course and doing exactly what they are doing. 

There's nothing wrong with liking this game -- games are even more subjective than movies or books, and people have wildly different opinions on those, usually without it becoming personal or hostile. 
 
So...having a different opinion doesn't automatically make someone all about "FUD" or "entitlement gaming". That makes your post sound a lot less "objective". 
 
Also, let's be real about what "objective data" means when we're talking about this game, because it's a fact that the Steam launch has gone very poorly.
 
On one hand, you say it's unfair to judge it so soon after release....but that's like saying it's unfair to judge a movie based on its release. Release time is when they should be getting a huge influx of players!
 
Release is when Valve gives every new product guaranteed impressions on their store (it used to be at least 1 million, unsure if that's still true) -- Steam watches the metrics and gives new products more and more visibility if they have better sales. Release is the most critical time for any game, but especially for an MMO. 
 
You seem to acknowledge that by pointing out that it's normal for MMOs to have large churn in month 1 or 2. This isn't actually the case with DU. 
 
With DU, there hasn't been a massive churn because there never was a big launch -- going from ~800 active players to <~400 is not a huge drop in absolute numbers.
 
There's a world of difference between that and something like New World going from ~800k to ~80k DAUs...yes, people talk a lot about how MMOs are dying all the time and certainly a lot of that is exaggerated BS, but that doesn't mean every claim of it is automatically wrong. 
 
Beyond Steam stats (literally the only objective data we have on player numbers), look at actual reviews -- the few gaming media outlets that bothered to review tend to give it around 60%. User reviews are similar.
 
To me, this means plenty of people do enjoy the game and plenty of people can see at least some positive elements of the game....but not in enough numbers to keep things moving forward, and not with enough month-to-month retention considering NQ's pace of updates. 
 
Of course that doesn't mean that anyone can know for sure that the servers will go offline, nevermind when...but trying to claim that the game is doing well and that Steam means nothing is really not a helpful or realistic perspective.
 
You certainly haven't presented any objective data to suggest that the game is growing outside of the largest PC gaming platform in the world. Nothing wrong with liking the game and wishing more players would give it a chance...but let's not pretend that DU will magically turn itself around by NQ staying the course and doing exactly what they are doing. 

The game's downward pointing charts continue to point to a future where the game may not even survive 2022, never mind 2023. 
 
There's currently more people playing "Coin Flipper" -- a single player game about flipping coins. 
 
Flipping coins is more engaging than every game concept DU has struggled to implement...it has better reviews and literally has more people playing it right now than a new MMO that took 8 years to build.
 
There's over twice as many people playing "PC Building Simulator" right now. 
 
I'm not (just) saying this to be mean...but to drive home the point that NQ needs to be making drastic changes. They need to actually engage with the players that are leaving and fire the devs or managers that insist that player feedback is useless.
 
Their CEO needs to actually seem like they are doing something other than posting about web3 and crypto on LinkedIn and talking about NQ's other projects...
 
Yet...I think it'll be business as usual up until the end. So much for NQ's post-update cycle fixing oh so many things and adding all the many things that are missing. At this rate, I truly would not be shocked if the game didn't make it past 2022. 

There was a guy (presumably, don't want to be gender specific, LOL) on here saying..."why do you losers need bot ore sales? Once they started to run out, I simply turned to missions... I only have FIVE alts, nothing silly... and I'm made a 100 million..."
 
Five... Nothing silly.

This is the the sort of players this game is catering to, currently.
 

The game's downward pointing charts continue to point to a future where the game may not even survive 2022, never mind 2023. 
 
There's currently more people playing "Coin Flipper" -- a single player game about flipping coins. 
 
Flipping coins is more engaging than every game concept DU has struggled to implement...it has better reviews and literally has more people playing it right now than a new MMO that took 8 years to build.
 
There's over twice as many people playing "PC Building Simulator" right now. 
 
I'm not (just) saying this to be mean...but to drive home the point that NQ needs to be making drastic changes. They need to actually engage with the players that are leaving and fire the devs or managers that insist that player feedback is useless.
 
Their CEO needs to actually seem like they are doing something other than posting about web3 and crypto on LinkedIn and talking about NQ's other projects...
 
Yet...I think it'll be business as usual up until the end. So much for NQ's post-update cycle fixing oh so many things and adding all the many things that are missing. At this rate, I truly would not be shocked if the game didn't make it past 2022. 

The game's downward pointing charts continue to point to a future where the game may not even survive 2022, never mind 2023. 
 
There's currently more people playing "Coin Flipper" -- a single player game about flipping coins. 
 
Flipping coins is more engaging than every game concept DU has struggled to implement...it has better reviews and literally has more people playing it right now than a new MMO that took 8 years to build.
 
There's over twice as many people playing "PC Building Simulator" right now. 
 
I'm not (just) saying this to be mean...but to drive home the point that NQ needs to be making drastic changes. They need to actually engage with the players that are leaving and fire the devs or managers that insist that player feedback is useless.
 
Their CEO needs to actually seem like they are doing something other than posting about web3 and crypto on LinkedIn and talking about NQ's other projects...
 
Yet...I think it'll be business as usual up until the end. So much for NQ's post-update cycle fixing oh so many things and adding all the many things that are missing. At this rate, I truly would not be shocked if the game didn't make it past 2022. 

DU has reduced me to sending memes.

youre desire for them to improve and listen more wont get them to actually listen it has to come from their desire to listen and improve 

I suggest uninstalling at this point in time and see if anything improves come 6 months from now

the future of DU? NQ are going to have to pull their thumbs out, and sharpish, or there will be no customers left at all. 
 
30% down in one month?
And this is the second month with the same trend. 
 
just look at the rhythmic 7 day drop off pattern. To be frank, I’ve never seen such a regular, periodic drop off pattern in a game I’ve played.  
It’s like every Sunday 10% of the player base just calls it quits.  That’s a rate of hemorrhage that should be sending major alarm bells ringing in NQHQ. 
 
The first thirty days were no better. 
 
For context, here’s my screenshot from the end of September.