blundertwink

Yes...and no. Over $20 million in funding is way out of reach for a typical indie studio...NQ would be more like a "III" studio -- indie relative to big and established studios, but hardly a small shop. 
 
However, MMOs are a different beast.
 
Commercial MMOs often involve 10x NQ's funding -- $200 million or more. A big part of that is marketing, sure, but the point is that NQ never really had the budget to make something as ambitious as DU...especially when they didn't roll their own servers or engine (throwing it all on AWS is vastly expensive as NQ eventually learned). 
 
We don't know how many employees NQ actually has or had, but even at 150...that still isn't a AAA level of development scale for an MMO, especially if there isn't a lot of experienced people.
 
Their CTO hasn't had a job other than NQ (and a 4-month internship), so it isn't like they are overflowing with experienced technical minds.

A team of mostly mid and junior devs isn't going to make quick progress...and when the most senior technical person at the company has only worked at NQ before, that's not a healthy sign. 
 
Their CTO hasn't likely released software before, and certainly hasn't released a game. Think about that for a moment. How is NQ planning for release when their technical leader has no experience about what's involved? 
 
 
This isn't a conspiracy; why do people think this is some secret...?
 
NQ is very, abundantly clear that they are working on multiple projects. Their CEO has stated this more than once. 
 
Yes, NQ is working on more projects than DU.

Yes, that does likely mean that DU is not getting 100% of NQ's development resources...although even when DU was their only known project dev was very slow.

Unfortunately, I'd say that NQ's current leadership doesn't share that vision....they more interested in blockchain, web3, and NFTs. They don't even seem to view DU as a game, insisting it is actually a metaverse -- a platform to create content, not a provider of content. 
 
NQ's current plan is to shill the hell out of the web3/NFT/metaverse trend and hope someone will buy them even as these concepts implode. Hopefully I'm wrong...but I'm basing this on posts the CEO has made on LinkedIn. 
 
Otherwise, you're right. They have no plan. If they did, they wouldn't share it. 
 
NQ has gone beyond "having a bad rep" for not communicating or engaging with players. It's not just a bad rep anymore, it's a fact of how they operate. 
 
As I'm sure some will agree, the most likely way for NQ to interact with you is via temporary bans when they rarely decide to moderate the forum. 

"only if humanity has solved other more pressing problems by then" is a really important point. 
 
The word "metaverse" was coined in the work "Snow Crash", a book by Neal Stephenson written in 1992.
 
Some nerds like JC obsess over the metaverse itself and ignore the themes of the book, which explores in part how the digital landscape is merely a sour reflection of real life inequality and racism. It really isn't meant to be inspirational (which is sometimes a criticism of the work). 
 
Many of the same people obsessed with the metaverse embrace the scammy world of NFTs, where they don't see an issue with $200 digital sneakers. Indeed, that's a fundamental part of their dream. 
 
Digital worlds won't be paradises, they will reflect the ambition and inequity of their capitalist builders. 
 
Until we can learn to value people in real life, a metaverse will hardly be an improvement to society...or does someone out there honestly believe organization like Meta are the best people to create (and monetize) a digital world and its denizens?
 
With how social media has impacted society, I would hope that people are more wary of how technological can shape society in negative ways...but sadly, I do see this concept continuing to move forward in the next few decades and expect it to be as greedy and evil as scifi authors imagine. 
 
I do think it's hilarious how web3/metaverse fanatics invariably seem to be nontechnical people that have a limited understanding of how technology actually works, yet have no issue claiming that blockchain or web3 is the inevitable future. 

"Well...it's been 113 days since they started their internal discussion."
-----
"That's only 30% of the year, it's fine."
"That's only like 81 weekdays, don't be dramatic."
(whispers) "...that's only 8 paychecks..." 

"Well...it's been 113 days since they started their internal discussion."
-----
"That's only 30% of the year, it's fine."
"That's only like 81 weekdays, don't be dramatic."
(whispers) "...that's only 8 paychecks..." 

"Well...it's been 113 days since they started their internal discussion."
-----
"That's only 30% of the year, it's fine."
"That's only like 81 weekdays, don't be dramatic."
(whispers) "...that's only 8 paychecks..." 

When we write here, we should stick to the truth and reality.
DualUniverse is supposed to become a game, currently it is a test version that would be described as alpha or beta.
To be fair, it should be called alpha, also because basic mechanics are still being worked on and will be removed from the game and added to the game.
 
In the end, at release, you expect a game, not a metaverse. It is simply not possible to build a real metaverse with such a small company, neither in terms of the number of employees, nor financially, and certainly not in terms of the hardware that would make it possible.
 
What used to be a dream of DualUniverse will remain a dream, from 20 years ago as a child I dreamed of bigger dreams, what should be feasible to keep me busy in a game. Perhaps this was also one of the reasons why I found the DualUniverse project so interesting. Unfortunately, I was very quickly pulled out of my dreams again when I got to know the game more closely on a daily basis and was able to really see what this game was all about. So actually very, very far away from the dreams I had as a child, but also very far away from what Novaquark had set as the direction for the game. It's disappointing, but at the same time I knew it would be too good to be true.
 
If we stay in reality, I would say that there will not be a metaverse within the next 20-30 years. There will certainly be a lot of companies trying to get rich from it, very few companies will try to build something similar, but in the end it wouldn't even come close to a metaverse. Maybe in 50-100 years, but only if humanity has solved other more pressing problems by then.
However, the game DualUniverse will not become a metaverse, not even in 50 years, because the basic framework does not seem to be capable, financially feasible or compatible with the possibilities that can be implemented in the game.
 
I hope that NQ will still release the game on the market, but bring it in a reasonable direction of a building game, so that the players can at least have fun building their dreams with voxels. That's all I expect from DualUniverse at the moment.

@blazemonger You will be missed! Nothing else that i can say will make this better.
 
Hope to see you around somewhere, somegame in the near future!
 

Funny how this comment came just before the honeycomb changes were announced 👀 How prophetic! 

And as the OP said, flying used to be fun. Cruise around and see all the cool stuff that people made. Maybe some shenanigans ensue and you do some tricky flying. Now landing and using the maneuver tool to change direction is less painful than turning in the air. It is a science fiction game. It is not a simulator, It is supposed to be fun!

NQ needs to grow up if they want to be treated like professionals. 🤷‍♂️
 
Are they really this unprofessional and insecure? 
 
This whole "you need to provide 'balanced' feedback" demand is something I've never heard from a business before, but NQ isn't shy about saying it (more than once). 
 
NQ wants to make their own customers the problem -- we're the ones at fault for not praising their efforts enough. We're "toxic" for complaining. For "not telling them what we like" about their recent choices, implying there's got to be something they are doing right and we're the ones that can't acknowledge their great work. 
 
It's because of their own actions and utter lack of engagement that people don't care to indulge their egos and flatter them with misplaced praise...but yet again, NQ is complaining about a situation they created with years and years of incompetence and neglect.
 
We'd be a lot more keen on actually being 'balanced' if they cared to spend even a few minutes answering basic questions like how long their paid beta will have persistence before being wiped. 
 
No worries, though...NQ doesn't like hearing from paying customers, that's fine! That's a problem that will solve itself in a few months. 

This is all chatter about the same repeating matter. Call it whatever you want, say whatever you think is why it occurred. In the end it is the same over and over... game changes make all ship build invalid. This is wearing the player base for sure and we still have power around some corner that will do it all again.
 
Go for it, rebuild all your ships for this so you can do it again soon. I'm at the point of doing the sixth rebuild of the same ships not because I want to or because I found a better way but because what I did and learned in game is no longer useful as the game changes how ships work all too often. At some point I really really hope NQ makes ship build stable so people do not need to be upset redoing things they do not want to...

 
 
 

This all goes back to the basic question...

Can NQ look at all new features and simply ask is this adding or subtracting fun from the game. Everything else a feature is trying to achieve means nothing. Bottom line if you take the fun out of a game no one will play.

The very fact that this thread exists goes to show how bad NQ is at communicating major changes.
 
If they lock this thread asking to put all feedback about the wipe in one of the existing threads so that players can try to dig through 40+ pages of unanswered complaints and feedback, I will laugh heartily at their "moderation".
 
 
 
I wouldn't classify this as a "recent" letter seeing as how it's August 1st and this was posted on June 6th. 🤷‍♂️
 
Honestly, it's kind of a stretch to call this "information" either, as it's really impossible to believe that any company could actually spend 3+ months "discussing" the reset.
 
Either they are vastly, incredibly incompetent for needing a quarter of a year (going on 1/3rd) to make a simple choice, or as most people expect, they made a choice a long time ago and just don't want to announce it yet. 

Increasing the skill points for achievements could encourage players to play the game and not to by alt accounts to get passive skill points instead. That would mean more server load and less income. That's not what NQ is interested in.

Dear Devs,
They are now Copyrights not Schematics.
 
If it were up to me, I would change the in-game nomenclature to reflect the paradigm shift. Aphelia is charging us licensing fees.  I'm still not sure where that b!#$% gets off thinking she has that right, but that is a short story for another day.
 
Kewe to pensa kopeng?
Tordan
 

They are going for that 1 wave but I think even that will be small. Pretty much everyone I use to play with is completely over DU and said they won't be playing release. Maybe if the game doesn't die they will check back in 5 years. But as it stands I get the feeling that most who would be the type to be interested in DU have already heard of it.  It always has and will always be niche.

The very fact that this thread exists goes to show how bad NQ is at communicating major changes.
 
If they lock this thread asking to put all feedback about the wipe in one of the existing threads so that players can try to dig through 40+ pages of unanswered complaints and feedback, I will laugh heartily at their "moderation".
 
 
 
I wouldn't classify this as a "recent" letter seeing as how it's August 1st and this was posted on June 6th. 🤷‍♂️
 
Honestly, it's kind of a stretch to call this "information" either, as it's really impossible to believe that any company could actually spend 3+ months "discussing" the reset.
 
Either they are vastly, incredibly incompetent for needing a quarter of a year (going on 1/3rd) to make a simple choice, or as most people expect, they made a choice a long time ago and just don't want to announce it yet. 

They pushed this idea that they developed "cutting edge" technology that would magically allow them to maintain vast amounts of data and scale to "millions" of players. I wondered how this would work, but I generally believed them. 
 
Then I played the game on beta launch and realized they were in way, way, way over their heads.
 
Learning more about their tech, it became clear that they hadn't really "innovated" anything to make their claims about scale even a little bit realistic. 
 
As we see now, they didn't even do basic due diligence in testing the crappy tech they did make with any sort of real load or even basic, basic common sense.
 
Yet they love to complain about their bad choices, too...like telling us that "scaling to infinity" is so obviously not a path forward with industry as if they weren't the ones that designed it like that to begin with years and years and years ago. 
 
If they owned their mistakes, I think everyone would give NQ a lot more sympathy and patience. But they don't do the whole "humble" thing...instead, they want us to adjust our tone and be more positive in feedback. They want us to understand why changes are "required" while in the same breath admitting that it's probably not fun. 
 
The hubris is just outstanding...and I admit, their whole attitude makes me eager to see the next few months play out as we all know they will. 

They pushed this idea that they developed "cutting edge" technology that would magically allow them to maintain vast amounts of data and scale to "millions" of players. I wondered how this would work, but I generally believed them. 
 
Then I played the game on beta launch and realized they were in way, way, way over their heads.
 
Learning more about their tech, it became clear that they hadn't really "innovated" anything to make their claims about scale even a little bit realistic. 
 
As we see now, they didn't even do basic due diligence in testing the crappy tech they did make with any sort of real load or even basic, basic common sense.
 
Yet they love to complain about their bad choices, too...like telling us that "scaling to infinity" is so obviously not a path forward with industry as if they weren't the ones that designed it like that to begin with years and years and years ago. 
 
If they owned their mistakes, I think everyone would give NQ a lot more sympathy and patience. But they don't do the whole "humble" thing...instead, they want us to adjust our tone and be more positive in feedback. They want us to understand why changes are "required" while in the same breath admitting that it's probably not fun. 
 
The hubris is just outstanding...and I admit, their whole attitude makes me eager to see the next few months play out as we all know they will. 

This is something people have been bringing up for like 2 years now, haha. 
 
I thought that this was something NQ had planned initially as well, but obviously never implemented. 
 
It's sad to see how NQ failed to design for scale with every core pillar of the game from mining to PvP to industry. 
 
They insist that it's impossible to let players run 1000s of factory units, but...really, like all things, it depends on the implementation.
 
They didn't want to fix the implementation (just like with mining), so they decided to fix bad technical choices with worse mechanics. 
 
I could write a long, detailed rant about specific ways they could have designed this for scale (e.g. the simplest is much longer production loops), but NQ wouldn't read it and even if they did, this ship has sailed years ago. 
 
The issue isn't that there's no better ideas than what NQ has implemented, it's that they made their technical choices 6+ years ago -- and failed to design for scale through the history of this whole project, so now the design itself has to be altered to fit into a bad technical foundation. 
 
So much for "cutting edge" tech that can support "millions" of players. 

I'm not sure NQ really has "intent" in their designs, but if they did....I think their intent with this last change was to reduce server loads, which was successful.
 
In a way, this makes sense. 
 
We all see that release isn't going to go great...we knew this months ago when it was first announced. NQ knows this, too. 
 
They will market the hell out of this game to people that have never heard of it, make trailers look just as promising and misleading as beta, and collect as much as they can from this one wave of new players post release.  
 
They know they'll only have those few months before the player population crashes, just as it did with beta. If this is their one chance to monetize and they know they can't make the game sustainable, why not reduce costs across the board...? Every cost that's cut means more profit during the one opportunity they have to make it. 
 
It isn't like spending the last few months trying to make this game sustainable and scalable would have worked anyway...there's just way too much technical and design debt. Changes like this are sadly logical. 
 
NQ's leadership has made clear that they're working on other projects...IMO, they're preparing DU for release knowing it won't scale or stabilize because they believe they can still make them some money before it goes offline, hopefully enough to fund one of these "other projects" (read: scammy NFT BS) to completion. 
 
They're probably right, too...with some good marketing, plenty of gamers would plop down $10 to give this concept a try. 
 
I wonder if they'll change back to a minimum of 3 months for a sub...that would really make this "strategy" work. 

Maybe speak for yourself instead of explaining other people's thoughts and motivations. There's a lot more opinions than the simple dichotomy you're presenting. 
 
I do see how this change makes it easier on new players...but also see how this changes the nature of industry at scale, which removes yet another core pillar of the game, reducing overall engagement. 
 
Exploration isn't a thing, anymore, because mining is gone. Wrecks obviously don't count as a real exploration mechanic to anyone that's tried. 
Mining isn't a thing anymore, it's a timer. 
Missions are mostly NPC missions slowboating, that's not fun to me or to most people. 
Now industry...it's still a feature, but with these changes, it limits how much time you can really spend on it. 
 
To be clear, this change wouldn't be a problem if DU was like other MMOs, overflowing with other things to do.
 
If that were the case, I'd be far more open to this change, because I understand (very well with a lot of real experience) why scaling factories is difficult. 
 
But...DU isn't that game. It's a game that's always suffered from a lack of feature depth, which NQ's recent crop of changes have made far worse. So we can't scale factories anymore...okay, that wouldn't be a huge deal on its own...but then, what can we do? Build bases that don't do anything? Fly ships that don't need to go anywhere? 
 
They keep talking about cost and making changes to reduce cost....but where are these resources going? There needs to be something to do at scale -- it isn't industry, it isn't mining, it isn't missions, it sure as hell isn't PvP. 
 
Looking back on when this beta launched and thinking "hey, there was actually more stuff to do then than there is now" isn't a great sign that this is an MMO that can grow and expand. 
 
That's the fundamental issue I have with these changes...it takes a game with little feature depth and makes it even more shallow.
 
At this stage, things should be progressing the other direction. Instead, development is going backwards...making the game less and less feature-rich and engaging with every patch in the name of cost. It was NQ's job to design and develop a working game knowing the limits of infrastructure, as every professional engineer in the world does. 
 
This is one of the most basic and obvious facets of developing an MMO and isn't something you think about only in the months before release. 

Yes, the more I think about it...the more I believe that DU's lack of customization fits perfectly with the new lore of the game. Your job is not to explore. It is not to build civilization. It is not to build orgs. 
 
Your job is to monitor machines, pay taxes, and serve Aphelia. Did humanity really survive the neutron star? Or are we now little more than meat puppets working for the benefit of an omnipotent AI...? 🤷‍♂️

Aphelia also seems to control when and where asteroids spawn, and when and where you're allowed to engage in "space territory war" via alien cores. 
 
Aphelia also controls the Exchange, the closest thing to a "player run market" there is. It's powered by NQ reviewing Google Forms, lol. 
 
Aphelia controls NPC missions, while player missions seem to be rare. 
 
Aphelia is also the only entity that can print money...in other games currency is 'printed' by NPC drops, but DU doesn't believe in NPCs as a plural, it only believes in one all-powerful NPC that we can't ever directly interact with.