Congratulations to everyone who's in the corp! we reached 100 members today! first major milestone! looking forward to play with all of you. nice work.
One of the ambitious and new aspects of Dual Universe is that traditional organizations that are found in other video games, like guilds, nations or corporations, should actually emerge in the game. This means that we have to design a generic structure to represent the union of several players, without biasing it towards one particular type of organization or another. The term we use to designate this structure is "organization". A state, a city, a guild, a nation, a group of pirates, an alliance, etc, are all organizations in the game. They differ in the particular way they specialize the generic definition, and in doing so they specify political orientations and implicit organizational goals. Let’s have a look at how it works.
To start with, organizations are divided into legates and members. All legates are not necessarily members, and vice-versa. The legates literally own the organization, which is divided into several shares that are distributed to the legates. Members don’t own the organization, but they have what we call “roles”. Roles are defined by a set of rights, duties and privileges that apply to members. A member can have one or several roles (and, as an legate can also be a member, there can also be roles for legates, but not always), and a role can be fulfilled by one or several members. Roles can be organized hierarchically, so that sub-roles inherit their default set of rights/duties/privileges from their parent.
One could say that legates are making decisions regarding the organization structure, while members are more in charge of running the organization. The mechanism by which legates make decisions is voting, with a weight based on the number of shares owned by the legate. A delegation system enables certain legates to gather the voting rights of other legates. This delegation can be limited in time or not, and can be for every vote or for certain types of votes only. Note that the wording used here, “vote”, induces a notion of democracy, but this is not necessarily the case. In an organization where all legates have permanently delegated all their voting rights to one single legate, you have a de-facto dictatorship. Intermediary cases involve a parliamentary system, where a subgroup of legates concentrate the voting rights of all the others, but none of them can rule alone. All nuances are possible.
There are several types of votes that legates can cast, but one crucial type is about creating roles and assigning/revoking members in those roles. Other types of votes involve approving new legates or revoking them, deciding whether organization shares are tradable or not, and many subtles details on the voting system which are meant to prevent obstruction situations.
Roles, as we said, are about rights, duties and privileges. Rights are defining what a member can do with the organization properties. Can you open containers? What type of containers? Can you access the bank account? Can you delegate your rights to other members? Can you fly ships owned by the organization? Can you control the organization territory system? Can you create subroles? Can you hire/fire members? etc. Duties are things like paying taxes on your in-game revenues or when using certain organization property, obligation to deliver a certain amount of certain assets per month to the organization, etc. And finally, privileges are things like salaries, insurances in case of death, protection in case of aggression, and other practical in-game benefits.
And last but not least : legates and members can be organizations themselves. As such, organizations can be hierarchical, like an alliance, a federation of alliances, or any kind of union.
Now, what can you do with this? Let’s try to build a corporation: you have a board of shareholders, representing all legates through delegation. They elect a CEO, who is a member with a special role that grants him/her the right to create subroles (head of marketing, head of RH, etc) and who will run the company. Each member gets a salary, and the profit of the company is shared among the legates with a dividend mechanism (voted by the legates). This is pretty close to how a real company works. Now, can we imagine creating a democratic nation? In that case, every legate has only one share of the organization and is also a member. Voting can happen through parliament representatives through the delegation mechanism by the legates/members (same thing here). Member roles’ duties include paying taxes, and privileges include possibly a minimal wage (sort of “salary”). A president role can be created and granted subrole delegation powers and full access to the nation’s assets. This president can create roles for prime minister, ministers, etc.
We will provide default templates for typical organizations, but it’s easy to figure out how you could create an interplanetary alliance of planetary organizations, themselves organized in a hierarchy of nations, cities, etc. Corporations can be members of nations, with specific roles separating them from regular citizens. And you can also structure corporations in a hierarchy of conglomerate, trusts, etc. Now, can you imagine how you would like to create your own organization, your own political system, your own subdivision between legates and members? We hope to see pretty amazing things emerge from this, let us know what you think!
@johan26:
To make a few things clear (before closing this topic that was ongoing for too long):
1) Arguing the fact that the limited success is just due to the monetization model is a very very biased statement to justify a point view.
True, it had an impact, without a doubt. But if there was a calculated factor to reduce the amount of players interested, it was this one. We don't want to publish a "mass market" game to apply to any kind of player. And it's also just a matter of financial viability: Dual Universe might the first MMORPG to use cloud technology to host the game universe and it will have a cost per player. Yes, Dual Universe will be a niche game, but with a community probably much bigger than all those against the subscription model can imagine: Free to Play and Buy to Play have shown they weren't perfect models or the ideal solution for every game. In short, there are not the prophetized evolution as they were presented. There are just alternatives, and alternatives that make sense in specific cases. As it is now, they're are not the models that make the most sense for Dual Universe. Plain and simple.
2) If you don't see other reason for the slow progress of the kickstarter, here are a few that are quite obvious:
- Dual Universe was nearly unknown 3-4 months ago. Visibility takes time. A lot of players that can be potentially interested are not even aware yet of the game existence.
- There have been a few recent events (notably one very ambitious Sci-Fi game made by an indie studio that promises a lot more than what has been really delivered) that generated - understandably - a lot of distrust to the genre and we happen to have started the Kickstarter campaign in the middle of that. This is very unfortunate, but we couldn't reschedule the kickstarter campaign for later. So we have to deal with it.
- There have been several kickstarter projects that have disappointed recently, generating - again understandably - some distrust to the crowdfunding model. This didn't help to promote the game either. We still think that Kickstarter is a powerful way for indie developers to finance their game, even if there are projects failing. It's not a perfect model (no one is), it's true it can be improved, but it's a model that need to exist, just because it's a relevant model in many cases.
Failure shouldn't make loose faith in a model or a genre, especially when there have been also many success, but this is something only players can decide on a personal level and the mood nowadays tends - unfortunately - to see the bad without seeing the good.
We hope this will have answered most of the questions on the topic.
