blundertwink

Don't re-read the ToS or community rules. 

I got my Arcship passenger ID card in the mail a few weeks ago.
 
I didn't have any other physical rewards though, so I don't know about the T-shirts.

JC: I am making an unlimited persistent open-world MMO with user created content! Single shard of course!
Players: That sounds almost to good to be true. How are you going to design for and address the obvious technical challenges for such a game?
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Players: Hello? Anyone there?
..
..
JC: Don't worry guys! It is going to be great! You can even subscribe now if you want!

Fair, but my point was that by the time the VC took over, it was too late to implement any ideas other than scaling back. 
 
The game's future was crystalized by 8 years of JC's thoughtless dev and the only choice was to scale down features to slash costs. 

Even putting the horrid tech aside, the game's design was so wildly unfinished they didn't even understand how to fit PvP into the game. 
 
I'm not convinced that the VC really had a choice in the direction they took DU. It was either push it out in a lame form or abandon the project.
 
That's reflected in how Andurance hired their current CEO, whose stated purpose was always to focus on other projects (per his own LinkedIn)...since before release. 
 
To be honest, I don't think any idea that the VC pursued to fix the game would have worked. We all knew the game was (at best) half-finished even before they started slashing.
 
I'm no fan of their strategy in pretending to develop DU while they clearly weren't, but I also don't believe there's anything anyone could have realistic done to fix this project. 

I think it's both easy and fair to criticize them for whittling away what little content there was, but...for someone that claimed that DU would support "millions" of players, JC did not put one iota of thought into things like scalability or cost. 
 
So yeah...NQ made the game shallow, but perhaps that's because it was built on a pile of sand by someone with no experience making scalable online software. 
 
I still believe it was JC's own ego that ruined DU. He wanted to be the founder. The CEO. The Creative Director. He did not want a skilled CTO that might challenge his "design", so he promoted someone from within whose only other technical role was an internship...? 
 
I could easily be very, very wrong....but my impression is he built a team that would do what he said and not challenge his lack of expertise in making software, driving away experienced vets (like Hrafnkell Oskarsson of Eve Online, who exited after less than a year).
 
I think it's weird that some people are now insisting that the company would be better off if they "brought back JC", as if his loss was the reason so many things went awry. 
 
In reality, I think the thing that went awry is those investors deciding it was okay for someone with no experience in gaming to lead a gaming company.
 
That wouldn't have been a huge problem if it was a humble, open-minded leader that was able to understand their own lack of experience. 
 
Honestly...and I'm sure some people will read this and think otherwise, but his perspectives on monopolies really showcases his slightly naive arrogance and inability to look beyond his own narrow, privileged world view. People like that rarely make good leaders. 
 
Funny how the company he works for is now the "solution" to capitalism. Funny how the problem with monopolies has nothing to do with consumer choice, according to him...and blockchain magically fixes it. 
 
This guy...is not much better than a con artist. This article is among the most silly, self-serving use cases shilling blockchain that I've seen in a long time. 
 
This is exactly the way he approached DU, too...a bunch of baseless, lofty ideas (like this claim they made "cutting edge" tech that would support "millions of players") with no grounding in science whatsoever, ideas that crumbled with even the most basic scrutiny. 

Well...the scam game "the day before" has 5 times as many people playing right now over Dual Universe, an "actual" MMO...
 
If that doesn't drive home the idea that DU has no future I'm not sure what will.
 
What bothers me is the lack of transparency and integrity on NQ' side. At this point it's really clear that there will be no 1.5 update, but they're still happy to collect subs and new players if they can. 
 
I don't think DU started out as a "scam" as some have accused...but that's where it seems to be, now.
 
It's not that much different from "the day before" in my mind.
 
Neither dev has any intention of using the money they are making to improve the game and neither delivered on anything close to the premise as presented in adverts. The main difference is that "the day before" is massively more popular, even now...hence more scrutiny and fallout.
 
NQ actually thinks they've been poisoned by "online toxicity" (as if every major review outlet didn't give the game a bad review), but when you don't respect your customers, they aren't obligated to respect you back. 
 
Either NQ needs to announce 1.5 (hah) and make it clear that the game is still being developed even a little or they need to announce their other projects properly and make it clear where their backer's money is actually going. 

I think there will definitely be a reckoning on the horizon, especially for the many firms focusing on AI-driven UGC or AI-driven assets in general. 
 
And when you think about games like Minecraft (often cited as an example of the power of UGC), the actual engagement point (at least IMO) isn't really the things people create, it's the act of creation itself...
 
When studio CEOs and leaders talk about how generative AI or UGC will change gaming, it's almost always from the widget-driven perspective where these people view making games like a factory, since that's the process they can understand. Producing more "widgets" with less people will of course lead to better things from their perspective. 
 
Not better, though, because they don't talk in language like that....they talk about how it will "vastly increase retention".  
 
It's kind of like claiming that AI will make writing novels much better, since AI can provide "more words with less time". Only idiots would believe that the quality of a novel relates to the "amount of content" it provides. 
 
When you're making something as complex and artistic as a game, CEOs and leadership often get in the way. This push for trying to make their own users develop the game so that they can capitalize on it "forever" is going to backfire because those same CEOs can only view games as cash registers. 
 
I hope that games like BG3 send a clear message about what the market actually craves -- quality, not just quantity. I highly doubt NQ's leadership has learned this even after investing 9+ years in DU. 

Dual Universe obviously didn't work out the way NQ intended, but everything they've posted indicates their leadership is still very huge into the idea of UGC (user generated content) as a vehicle to create gaming experiences. 
 
In my opinion, games like BG3 and Starfield show how "content" is misunderstand by executives that look at day-to-day development as a cost center.
 
Content is not the visuals, models, music, or "things" in a game. As an executive that pays for those "widgets" day to day, they might think that's the case...but really, it isn't. 
 
Content is about interactivity and immersion, not just having a big world for its own sake (as Starfield seems to prove). It's a holistic thing, not just about assets. 
 
The idea of UGC is that everyone can contribute to assets...but it still depends on a strong layer of content crafted by actual professionals. 
 
Trying to empower players to create every facet of engagement and immersion is like turning the Steam or Google Play store into a game, where most the content isn't that good. That's why services like Steam exist to begin with...publishing as a concept still makes sense for all parties, especially consumers. 
 
I think people like NQ want to capitalize on this idea of user-built-everything, but they don't really understand what content actually is and will spend a lot of time and money just to realize that they've created a product that has no real market fit.  

The KickStarter campaign barely raised any money at all...it raised about 560,000 euros -- less than $600,000 USD today...that's less than 3% of their total funding. With a second kickstarter very unlikely to do as well, it wouldn't be a meaningful sum. Besides...aren't some backers still waiting for stuff from the first round...?
 
 
A few things, here....first, they do have funding. NQ's CEO recently discussed how they have around ~80 employees still. They obviously do have funding left to support a company at that scale.
 
They aren't using those resources to develop DU, though. Again, the CEO has been very clear to say that the focus is on other projects! This is a matter of obvious fact considering that update 1.5 still hasn't even been announced.  
 
That aside...it's absolutely not true that more money will fix everything.
 
It doesn't erase major design flaws, it doesn't fix their major technical flaws, it doesn't guarantee an increase in developer velocity (anyone that's worked on a complex project knows that throwing more hands at it doesn't lead to more productivity), and it certainly doesn't ensure that it would "make the game really really appealing". 
 
It also doesn't change the math around cost and profitability in trying to host a massive, sandbox world...we have no reason to believe it would ever be viable even with another $50 million in development.
 
In essence, they'd have to start from scratch. No reasonable investor would put even a penny toward this idea today considering the history...and that includes Kickstarter backers. 

I see what you mean, but I am not so sure that the game's high cost are purely driven by the infra living on the cloud. Having worked with AWS for so many years, there's so many ways to skin that cat.
 
We don't know what the breakdown is between running the game on EC2, their now-reversed choice to leverage DynamoDB (very expensive), etc., but it's entirely plausible to suggest that DU wouldn't still be online without AWS. 
 
In theory, the cloud is a great choice for small scale MMOs that don't need the cost savings from standing your own hardware. Yes, you'll always be less efficient (especially when they also didn't craft a custom engine), but you would also be far more flexible and cost-effective with smaller player counts...like DU has always had. 
 
I think 99% of the problems with scale and cost are due to poor software design: layers upon layers of bad tech that were built because the company never had technical nor design leadership. We see this with the constant, never-fixable bugs, the slow development pace, and sluggish performance, and way too many major features refactored radically just before release. 
 
All that points to bad software and bad software design; I think there's great potential to host MMOs on the cloud if it is done right, especially niche products that truly benefit from some level of dynamic scale. 
 
I hope indie studios considering AWS or Azure do their homework better than NQ did, because the math suggests it can absolutely work...personally, I don't think DU would be any more effective living in its own metal.
 
Their bad software would not run any more effectively on self-hosted servers, and it wouldn't be any cheaper with so few players...probably more expensive, even. 
 
NQ needed more technical expertise early on in general -- AWS is near the bottom of the list in terms of their technical sins in my opinion. 

They've said many, many times that there are three projects in the works other than DU.
 
Just a few weeks ago the CEO mentioned that NQ still has just under 80 employees. If you look at the CEO's most recent posts, it's really clear they have already pivoted and  are focusing on new pitches, publishers, and investors. 
 
There's just no evidence that DU's dev is ongoing in any real way; I'd be surprised if there were even a dozen people still working on DU out of those 80. Based on the last few months of no real activity, it is likely even less than that. 
 
DU's dev is effectively dead...which is not a surprise as they have only managed to bleed players since launch (per the only stats we have). 

I've been thinking back to the recent events and dev activity in and out of the game.  I could only name about half a dozen visible so I concur with your estimate of roughly a dozen max bodies working on the sleep mode version we seem to have.  I've already decided that I can't justify spending more on the game now that my annual subs & DACs are dwindling to an end. 
 
If we had 1) a roadmap, and 2) visible signs of NQ trying to save DU financially AND technically I may change my mind.  Even a "free to play, micro-transaction cosmetics, and sub for premium" announcement would be a welcome improvement at this point.  I recall seeing a positive response from NQ when I got vocal about not having a cosmetic shop, but no sign of it since.  Even the king-daddy of MMOs, WoW, brought in a cosmetic shop while they were still growing but NQ/DU shows no outward sign of it even when it looks this dire.   (edit:  If the hold-up with cosmetics is durability/recycle then just give a pile of in-game cosmetic points equal to the element's purchase value upon recycle)
 
The fact that Web3 is/was a focus (even JC went on to other Web3 stuff) is troubling.  There are plenty of obvious scams out there but the warning signs I'm seeing with DU smell just as funky and off-putting.  This isn't the first time I have brought it up, yet we have only gotten vague assurances that we're not being duped or trolled.

There's still no news about a new update....the game is basically abandoned, as all evidence has pointed to for a while now. 
 
Let's put this in context with some of the CEO's latest posts on LinkedIn. Consider this gem: 
 
This is from a post about 3 weeks ago. 
 
If anyone still believes that NQ is devoting resources to DU, please explain what those 80 people are doing day-to-day considering the last 8+ months of development velocity.
 
The answer is very clear: they aren't working on DU, which we already knew because they've said their focus is on other projects and have said that for a while now. 
 
Anyone that believes DU still has a real future is not interested in reality -- there's not one single piece of evidence to suggest that development is still going on at any real scale.
 
There's not one piece of evidence to show player counts are doing anything other than plateauing at <100 players online concurrently. 
 
You can keep pretending that the game is growing and that constant churns of new players is somehow a good thing, but all objective evidence says that even NQ is not interesting in furthering this moonshot. 

The last patch announced was 1.4 back in...May?
 
That the game is still online doesn't mean it has an actual future as an MMO...a dead MMO doesn't mean that it vanishes offline, it means there's no realistic hope for scaling it to be a real product. It could stay online for another decade, that doesn't mean it will ever be scaled out. 
 
Let's also be real about just who is "ignoring 99% of feedback" -- that's how NQ has worked since the start. Maybe if they'd been more engaged years ago it would be different. This has been their reputation for nearly a decade now.
 
That I'm reminding people not to bother isn't me being mean, it's pragmatic. 
 
They've yet to even announce another patch afaik...the idea that they'd make huge sweeping changes at this point is not grounded on anything other than weirdly placed hope in the ~50-100 people that play in a given day. 🤷‍♂️ 
 
NQ has been clear that their focus is other projects, I just don't understand why people don't understand this and keep thinking they can magically turn this around.
 
I think people vastly, vastly, vastly underestimate how much retooling would be needing to make any of these suggestions practical, and that requires money that no sane company would spend for a product that hasn't scaled. 

All these ideas depend on the game doing much better than it is. Moving the game to FTP, optimizing, fixing bugs...these are expensive ideas that only increase the scale of DU as a liability for NQ. 
 
Unfortunately, the chance of any of this actually turning this product around is too small to justify the effort.
 
The scale issues should be made clear by NQ's own post about the PvE numbers they've seen -- these aren't very good metrics even for single player games; for an MMO, it means that the product doesn't work. 
 
We're long past suggesting changes for DU at this point, the product will not evolve or scale and NQ has moved on a long time ago. 

I get what you're saying and think a lot of people likely agree........but technology isn't magic. Not every problem has a solution. There do exist limits to scalability, especially when cost is a factor. 
 
Building games often requires compromise between technical reality and design. To your point, NQ hasn't been good at finding that compromise.
 
They buried ore so absurdly deep it was a mole simulator, but then complained about costs and removed digging for ore completely, eliminating an entire pillar of exploration-focused gameplay to replace it with a mini-game.
 
That said...a core issue with DU is that the general premise of the game wasn't on solid technical footing from day 0.
 
The very idea of a single shard MMO sandbox is arguably impossible to scale as imagined.
 
Players creating cities? Terraforming moons? Building whatever they want without limit in a persistent multiplayer world? That concept would only ever work with a highly optimized tech stack that used some sort of cutting-edge breakthrough to manage scale and cost...which NQ claimed to have early on, but that claim ended up being total, absolutely BS. They didn't even write their own engine or stand their own servers. 
 
There was no fix to that BS, so there was no way to make the "vision" work. There was no way to "buckle down" and just fix things....the core premise and core technical foundations just didn't make sense. The only way to just fix things would have been to start from scratch, which wasn't practical after years and years of JC's "leadership". 

Javascript has inconsistencies, sure.  But array subscripts starting from 1?  It's not right.

Yet somehow people around here still insist that NQ's "tech" is worth money and that DU has always been a vehicle to test, develop, and "sell the tech".
 
When I ask "what tech exactly are you talking about...?" there's only shrugs and vagueness, because no one can point to one single concept in this game that actually works properly and works properly at scale. 
 
Issues like this are why NQ has effectively (IMO) put DU on the shelf to focus on other projects. There's very little interest in today's planned update and there's no real chance that the "addition of PvE" does anything other than amuse people. 

All that tells us is that you don't want to pay for the game.  That has nothing to do with whether a game that features a constantly evolving persistent shared online world can exist indefinitely without a steady income.
 
You're saying, "They didn't finish the game, so i don't want to pay for it." 
 
I'm saying, "For the game that was marketed to exist, it would require people to pay more than $70 total."
 
I agree that NQ isn't showing the kind of interest in the game that i would like to see.  And I wouldn't blame someone for not wanting to sub.
 
But i would like them to continue to work on the game, and make it worth paying for.
 
 
 
 

That's wrong, though -- people don't post here because no one is playing the damned game.
 
It's the same on other channels like Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit -- no one is posting about DU anywhere. If it were merely an issue with people not liking the forum negativity, you'd see activity...somewhere on the Internet. 
 
 
First, I don't know why you think this is low-hanging fruit. Anytime someone explains how "easy" it is to implement something, I have to roll my eyes. Granted, you do acknowledge that it's just your perception that it'd be easy.  
 
All we know is that dev has been historically very slow and that the project is 8+ years old -- that doesn't communicate a flexible, simple codebase to me where this would actually be "low hanging fruit". Tax rates are not likely so flexible -- it means introducing new networked variables for every TCU and introducing a level of dynamism in the actual tax rate recurring "jobs" that might not be so trivial. 
 
Also, we do know that NQ's dev resources are now split among 4 projects. We do know that player counts have only decreased since launch. 
 
We do know that NQ implemented taxes as a means to control cost; it has little to do with design. 
 
To speak to the idea itself...I'm not sure that this idea will be so impactful. 
 
Adding incentives like a tax break doesn't magically transform a poorly designed feature (like combat in general, to be real) into something engaging and fun. If PvE alone isn't enough to create engagement (which I 100% agree that it isn't), I don't see how any level of incentive will really make the game more popular!
 
In most games, combat and fighting is the engagement point...saying "this isn't enough and won't work" only underscores how impossible it is for NQ to make this game scale. Even with tax breaks...will that be enough to 1000x the number of players? That's what it'd take, at a minimum...and that doesn't even matter if NQ can't retain those players. 
 
I get that the community here is negative...maybe unfairly at times.
 
Still, the game's population and the reality that even NQ is focusing on other projects...that's completely relevant to every idea as it speaks to the core of how NQ views the product and what steps are realistic for them to take...and puts any idea in a grim but fair context: which is that the game needs a lot to turn around from where it is today. 

The combat in this game isn't fun, PvP or not.
 
The risk (by which we're talking about time, not money or resources) is never worth it -- because the payoff is a niche form of combat that most players find too boring and clunky to take seriously. 
 
If it were really so fun...there'd be plenty of people to PvP and no one would need to be plopped into PvP space just to give PvPers something to do.
 
Like...if the game isn't fun as a PvPer, maybe try a game with an actual player base and a real implementation of combat mechanics...a game where you can face real competition. It's hilarious seeing people around here proud of their PvP 'smackdowns' when it's against the same tiny group of players in a game that no one takes seriously as a PvP experience. 
 
It's the same with using words like "coward"...if you're so brave, try a game with even a shred of an actual competitive PvP scene.
 
Not that using "coward" means anything to anyone playing a game that's over fourteen; we play games to have fun, not to show how "brave" we are.
 
Granted, there's nothing especially brave about PvP in any video game, especially this video game. If you're concerned about everyone else being a "coward", that's just a really strange obsession to me...especially in a thread that's supposed to be about PvE. 
 
PvP and its many issues have been talked about for years and years, give it a rest for this one thread...

You're not wrong, but I think the smarter move would be to embrace existing code editors instead of doing their own, as well as other tooling that already exists in the community.

Do you think they know that ^ means XOR in most programming languages?

Completely disagree with the 'what brought anyone here was the building' comment.  Look at the few people who are still here, a lot of them have 'alpha' tags.  Back when there were a lot of people interested in DU it was mostly people who came through the alpha and early beta stages of the game.  Those people came because of JC's original vision of the game and nothing since then has succeeded in drawing even a fraction of the same number of players here. 
 
As a building game DU is mediocre at best.  Voxels are slow, hard to work with and really really bad at very simple things like 45 degree rotation of part of a construct, curved surfaces, etc.  Also the detail is coarse, there are minimal surface texture options, etc.  Look at the difference when you start adding decorative elements, etc.  If voxels were good enough we wouldn't need elements.  It's sort of nice for a video game because it means that there can be skill, but the problem is for the less skilled and less patient people there's a ceiling which means that most people have built everything they want to build within a month or two and then the building game part ends for them.  The rendering engine is also poor, rendering voxels and elements at different distances so you can see through doors as you approach them, for example.
 
Factory gameplay is fun for some, and quite detailed with a bit of depth although NQ seems to have completely forgotten about concepts like opportunity cost which would have turned it into an actual game with optimisation decisions, etc instead of an exercise in just putting more and more machines down forever to build everything.  If I put a machine down there should be something else I can't do because I chose to run that machine, then it would be good.  Again you'll get to a point fairly quickly where you have done a big factory and only a few will want to continue on from there.
 
Your point about PvP is a good one.  Being able to go shoot those people who are stealing your ship (or fly up and board theirs while they loot you or whatever) is something which would have added a lot of depth to DU.  I spent a fair amount of time doing PvP and I don't find being on the opposite side of that (shooting someone on an asteroid) to be very much fun after the first couple of goes either.  Other types of PvP are fun but the game relied on multiple PvP focussed groups developing to provide PvP content and that didn't happen (partly because of limited reasons for it to happen) so PvP never really took off enough to attract a large crows.
 
When I was a computer science student a lecturer put a picture of a duck on the board.  "This is a duck.  It can swim, fly and walk but it isn't particularly good at any of these things".  And went on to explain how if you try to make your software do too many things it isn't very good at any of them.  And I think this is the problem with the original DU in a nutshell.  You can go back and find JC quotes to the effect of "you've seen all these features before but not all in the same game".  They tried to make it do too many things.  And we all liked that because it sounded like a great game, and that is the only thing about DU which has ever attracted a large enough crowd to sustain an MMO.  Nothing they have done since has drawn people in and retained them in the same way.

Everyone will have their favourite part, but will admit that it isn't perfect and needs more work.  But I don't think any single part of the game is strong enough to carry the game without significant work.  Any sort of 'take out all but XXX' change would instantly lose most of the players and the remaining game would fail to attract replacements, so they're stuck.  Based on the things NQ is saying it looks like the studio are doing something along the lines of what you suggest, but it won't be DU, it will be a completely different game that isn't held back by trying to do too many things.

Should have gone FTP or had cosmetic store for launch