jkspartan

What drew to me DU originally was the mining, scanning, locating ore and the chance of coming across larger nodes of ore. What sold it for me was the manual side of it, you physically had to roll up your sleeves go find the resources, and the more time and effort you put in the greater the opportunity of reward as you could come across larger volumes and other tiers. This tied together with upgrading your ship, linked containers, storage, travelling around different planets and facing different challenges, plus do all that with your friends made it enjoyable!

95% of my time in DU is mining. I have no interest in PVP or Industry. I fund my assets through mining, by providing manufacturers and builders with resources and buy their inventions to do more mining, greater yields and better productivity!

Whilst I appreciate the issue of underground mining on planets is impacting financially and performance of the game, it just feels like rather than fixing the issue at source, the issue is simply being deleted. Rather than fixing the problems underground mining cause and adding to the game with mining units, your deleting and replacing with automation. Am sorry, but if we are talking about the game being sustainable for the long term, fix the architeture of the game as opposed to dancing around the problem.

The mining units sound interesting, but they are automated with some manual input which has been confirmed to be limited. The update also referred to ‘limiting our time engaging with mining units.’ I mean if I spend all my time mining, I now have no reward for time invested and have been limited in that regard as I no longer play the game on my terms, am being ‘pushed’ away from what I enjoying doing.

In addition, as mining units are automated and basically end up AFK mining, it opens up the gates for those with many alts and quanta accumulated to date to set up an AFK income of ore which totally takes away from the game again, as this is venturing in pay to win territory.

Ahh wait! I can still get plenty of ore from asteroids right? Well, on the basis it takes me 75-90 minutes! to get to an asteroid (and everyone else is rushing to it also), 30 minutes to get back and to come away with less ore's worth than it cost me in fuel……. No.

The safe space asteroids get rinsed, and even if you go to discovered asteroids, it’s an hour of travel for a round trip where there’s nothing but shrapnel left. Try putting 200 asteroids in safe space and on daily respawn then there might be enough to go round.

In any case, it seems this update will make fundamental changes, create its own issues on top of existing issues, ground players to planets more than likely and take away rewards for time invested.
 

It does not require a wipe. 
Those who have cheated so far should have been punished and the values they received should have been taken away. In the meantime, it hardly matters whether a player has stolen 50 million quanta or 5 million quanta. The bigger problem is multiaccounts and the use of missions, which create billions of quanta within a short time.
All the weeks and months when you could "cheat" back then are balanced out by time after all. You had plenty of time to earn billions of quanta. In the end, it's like in almost every game:
- Time invested = advantage
- Number of accounts = advantage
- Interaction with a group = advantage 
These advantages always outweigh a one-time cheat. (This is not meant to be a justification) The cheaters should have been punished immediately at that time and their unjustly received things should have been taken away from them).
But what exactly would a wipe do today, except punish all players?
 

May take a tad longer to snipe the tiles but I can assure you there are players out there with that amount of scans. 

I think the idea of the 'Calibration Charges' is going to be a severe limitation on the game and only result in horrendous ore price inflation, as the limit this will place on the global extraction rate is likely to result in not anywhere near enough to supply the game.
 
I understand the idea for including the efficiency mini-game, to keep auto-mining from being set and forget (though in my opinion it should be - the game is set 10,000 years in the future after all) but the introduction of these charges putting an arbitrary cap on the extraction rate will only lead to a shortage of available ore, so sparking ANOTHER inflation in ore prices.

Actually, by definition, it is an alpha.

Just adding more asteroids does not solve the problem. We need more variety of asteroid size, more variety of node sizes on the asteroid, and territory scanners to operate on asteroids. Also, asteroids should not ever show as discovered. that state should go away and only the rumor/undiscovered and broadcast state should exist. And broadcast should take a minimum of 1 hour after someone touched down on the asteroid.

And not just more in safe zone. This whole patch could be acceptable if asteroids had larger nodes. having to mine 100 5kl nodes on an asteroid is not fun. Make some larger, make some smaller, make some in between. Vary the size of the asteroids, some even smaller than what currently exists and some even larger. Allow territory scanners to work on asteroids. when the ore drops below a certain percentage on an asteroid de-spawn it and spawn a new one. These are all things that would allow asteroid mining to become useful and tolerable.

I believe and allways have believed that a game should release with a full wipe. 
But NQ promised players that their beta stuff would count for release...... 
NQ was wrong in letting the money of the new subscriptions be more important than the fairness of a buggy beta game. 
 
The effects of 4 ppl exploiting the game do not only affect those 4 ppl. Their ammunition suppliers got richer because they sold the ammo at an higher price to the exploiters, their factions used their factories mounted with exploit money, their alies were defended by ships mounted with exploit money. 
Their competition was destroyed because they could not compete with an exploiter. 
How about those other 100 exploits? 
How about all those ships with staked engines? How about those players that did not use that exploit? 
How about the tutorial exploits? 
It is naive to think only 4 ppl were affected.... 
If we are to make a wipe to correct the impact of ppl using exploits there is only one alternative. A full wipe. 
 
Having said this, every wipe has to have a reason. 
This patch only requires the planet terrain to be wiped. 
 
And in my opinion, there is no point on doing a full wipe now. Bugs still exist. Exploits still exist. New features will bring new bugs and exploits. 
A full wipe should only happen if there is a technical requirment or at release. 
 
 

That is not correct. The beta players should build a functioning society and thus create content for the upcoming players, since the game actually only wanted to rely on player-based content and synergies....

I like the vlog info please keep that coming, this helps on many fronts to give players expectation management of what changes will be coming to the live server. The changes coming with this update I feel are going to be welcomed by new players for sure in the long run but may upset some older players. I for one welcome these changes as I have been playing for about 8 months and I do a mix of tasks over the course of my game play, I may mine for a bit then hunt for asteroids or build bases etc etc. 
 
I would welcome a talent reset as I think many would so they could re-spec into these new mining changes coming with this update. Other players may see a talent reset as a pain but over all this will benefit many players new and old. 
 
The tool talked about at the end is super nice as I know my few bases are underground and I have many friends that have constructs underground, thank you for thinking ahead to solve these issues with regards to that.  
 
We need to generate as much discussion about this prior to the update so the players and NQ can have meaningful dialogue about these changes and any issues seen or unseen can be discussed early on.  

I will say this SOMETHING MUST be done about the low number of asteroids in the SZ 12 to 19 per week and over 130+ in the PVP zone per week come on, mark my words there will and have been players quit already due to bugs, crashes, and now the looming update and the low asteroid count in the SZ will only add to that number of people that don't come back and quit all together.  

I will say this SOMETHING MUST be done about the low number of asteroids in the SZ 12 to 19 per week and over 130+ in the PVP zone per week come on, mark my words there will and have been players quit already due to bugs, crashes, and now the looming update and the low asteroid count in the SZ will only add to that number of people that don't come back and quit all together.  

I will say this SOMETHING MUST be done about the low number of asteroids in the SZ 12 to 19 per week and over 130+ in the PVP zone per week come on, mark my words there will and have been players quit already due to bugs, crashes, and now the looming update and the low asteroid count in the SZ will only add to that number of people that don't come back and quit all together.  

offtopic:
 
NQ, keeping in touch / doing an Inside Star Cit... / DU video series is a good step in the proper direction.
 
Also the frequency of client / game updates is getting better.
 
Keep up the improved work.

Demeter is about NQ saving money, not about good design choices that will improve the game. 
 
Mining changes are designed to remove as much terrain deformation as possible, which is very expensive. 
Taxes are designed to impose a level of attrition so that they can reduce costs....which will also reduce the desire to re-sub to the game after leaving IMO. 
 
These changes are the result of them never really understanding or planning around the scale of the game as an MMO or its cost (and refusing to build their own servers, instead renting them from AWS)
 
Betas are intended to give devs time to polish the game and fix bugs, not make sweeping design changes or test the product to see how much it costs -- all this should have been figured out in the 6+ years of development prior to "open beta". 

I'm in for the long ride, enjoying the journey I would like to see these Q&A's regularly.
 
If you do make a mass change at release please don't take all my assets/stuff away

No it won't.  The game has unlimited production capability.  So if you bring back element destruction (and it doesn't make players quit after they break their 500+element mission ship for the 3rd time due to framerate bugs causing it to crash with a tower which didn't render) then demand will go up.  Briefly the economy will work.  People will then produce more (a lot of people have a lot of factories turned off right now due to low demand).  Supply will increase again until it is just above demand and we will be back where we are now again.  And people will be saying the problem is that there isn't enough consumption.

If there is a wipe, the most active and organised groups will be the ones to profit most from it because they will recover the most quickly due to better organisation multiplying out more collective hours spent playing.  And within a few weeks everyone will be complaining that Legion won DU again

First off those assholes in the DU discussion on discord need to be hung up by their balls, I posted in there looking for help getting in touch with the devs about helping to show them what settings and things I have done to mitigate the crashing and all I got from Carter and those dicks was a load of crap.  I also tried to @GM in game and got no where I really do tihnk I have some insight on this issue to help. All I got from them was, "Oh its fixed on PTS he is talking about a non issue" well folks mama was wrong again No its not fixed on PTS as I still cant and have not been able to log into the PTS since before .26 patch. So if a Dev wants to hear how I have managed to stay in game for more than 2 seconds please fell free to contact me on discord at BlackBeardActul#8635. Thanks!!

PART ONE: REFINING OUR PROCESSES 
As promised last week, we would like to give you a glimpse at the changes, improvements, and additions we have in store for Dual Universe. 
We’ve learned many lessons since our beta began seven months ago.  Going from a backer-focused game in alpha, under NDA, to a public, wide-open beta with many new players gave us a lot of insight in several areas: processes, economics, and gameplay. In this blog, we’ll focus on processes with the latter two being the topics of subsequent blogs. 

THE LONG HARD LOOK
At Novaquark, we’re still a fairly small team. Given the ambition and complexity of this game, it can be quite a challenge to make the right decisions on how to make the most of our resources. To date, we’ve been focused on bug fixing, stabilization, balancing, scaling, and improving our server and database infrastructure - plus firefighting when necessary - to make the game work better. 
 
Not to say that this is all behind us; it never will be (such is the way of MMOs), and we know some bugs and exploits still need to be addressed - this is a beta after all. Still, we paused earlier this year to ponder what the next phase of development of DU should be, to stay the course of the original plan or adapt to how things have evolved since beta began. After taking a  long hard look at everything we’ve learned from the beta, we decided where we need to focus next, based on what we think will be best for Dual Universe and its community. 

“IF IT’S BROKE, FIX IT”
Maintaining a live game while we continue to develop it ended up being quite the leap from our tightly-controlled alpha environment. As much as we prepared for it, actually doing it was a whole different beast. That’s probably one of the areas where the reality check was the most brutal for us. The world of Dual Universe is a persistent one, and every time we introduce something, it impacts the player and the delicate balance of its economy. There’s no safety net, and player feedback often came once bugs or balancing issues had already impacted the game’s common universe. 

Let’s start with how we plan to improve our processes and quality control, because this is an area where doing something wrong can have a major impact on players. We have three goals in this area: 
 
 
Gather feedback from players earlier in the process, so that when new features and changes are introduced in the game, their impact on the persistent universe is properly measured.  Have a more flexible and collaborative development approach that will allow us  to take player feedback into consideration, modifying plans when we’re able.   Overall, improve the quality of our releases, which means fewer bugs and exploits, and less hot-fixing.
  When it comes to gathering feedback from players earlier, we are evaluating some options on how we might get feedback on game design ideas from players at an earlier stage before they have actually entered the production pipeline. We are already seeing significant improvements in this area since the launch of the public test server (PTS), which lets us test prospective new features, improvements and bug fixes in a non-persistent environment where it won’t impact players’ progress on the Live server. If enough players test features on the PTS, we’ll be able to prevent bugs and balancing problems from making their way to the persistent universe. 
 
When we deployed 0.24 on the PTS first, players gave us invaluable feedback, helping us to identify several issues that we were able to address before they reached the production server. Although  our PTS-to-production process isn’t perfect yet, we are still working to improve it and think it’s getting significantly better with each iteration.  In the future, we will expand the use of the PTS to testing prototypes of features, outside of regular releases, so that all players can give their feedback as early in the development process as possible. 
 
Another major improvement to our processes that we are addressing is flexibility. On our way to beta, we had a fairly rigid roadmap that was dictated by the necessity to lay the foundations for all of the gameplay pillars for beta as well as fulfilling our promises to our backers. While the overall plan and long-term goals for DU haven’t changed, we need to be able to adapt to the feedback of players along the way whenever it’s feasible. For example, if we decide to make a major overhaul of our mining mechanics, we need the flexibility to iterate as much as necessary until we find the right formula before we move on to something else. 
 
Although they may not be visible to players, there are many other things happening internally  that have already proven to improve our releases. First and foremost, our internal release process is undergoing a revamp, based on the learnings from our past launches. We’ve allotted more time for QA than we used to, and we will postpone a release if we think it’s not ready (as we did  with the 0.24 update.) These new processes are still being refined, but we’re seeing improvements already.
 
We remain steadfast in our promise to deliver the best game possible. We feel confident that the changes we’re making now to our processes are a big step toward making that an attainable goal. 

Ready to discuss part 1? Click here.