Duragon

Really?
How very 12th century.
What are we the purity police?

 

Auto-Mining:
Before I get into my major concerns I would like to say thank you for replacing the current system of mining underground with something better than "click, watch circle get big, release." I think the system holds a lot of potential if balanced right, will be more rewarding than the current mining system, and I am glad that it can help NQ unburden some overhead cost, especially as the player base must be much smaller than NQ's business model accounted for.

My only concern with mining-units is the "chicken or egg" dynamic of need to have same tier ore to build the mining unit. Where I feel it would be more sensible to require T2 ore for a T3 unit, T3 ore for a T4 unit, etc. Otherwise NQ risks progression locking players with a mechanic that subjects them to predatory exploitation of players who have gotten to T4 and T5 already. 

If players are willing to exploit mechanics to gain billions in quanta they will not hesitate to exploit players to stratify the economy and widen the gap between a few with everything and the mass majority with the left overs.


Territory Tax:
NQ claims that a player driven economy and player made content is the backbone of the game. Yet builders who are working hundreds if not thousands of hours over the past two years risk losing the most with projects that are focused on building unique locations for others to visit.

Building and selling blueprints is simply not competitive with the earnings made through current mining, and with changes to the economy sales of ship and building designs has gone off the cliff as everyone hoards currency and materials to survive upcoming changes.

I also feel that a clear and final tile tax rates MUST be announced 30-60 days before Demeter release to give adequate time for organization of assets to prevent huge and punishing loses to the creative community within Dual Universe.

People simply need to know what they will and won't lose and what to do to safeguard their hard work, NQ's ambiguity simply drives ambiguity, and snarky responses from support team when players want to know if they can reasonably expect to earn enough from auto-mining to cover taxes for the number of tiles they own is simply inflammatory.
 

In-Game Abuse Reports:
I am hoping bans won't become automated, and will also have a review system that takes context of the situation into account. It is well known we have members of the community who bait, troll, and instigate to produce reactions that they can then report to weaponize the NQ support staff against players.

Some of these people are the same individuals who have exploited, and abused mechanics to gain advantage over the players they taunt and bait with their comments.

Also feel rule #10 of the Code of Conduct should be removed from the CoC, as the demographic of the player base on average is well above 30 years of age, and there are things that 8 year old's say these days that make me blush. It is no secret that colorful language is often present in passionate expression ideals, dissatisfaction etc. 

The rule is ambiguous as to how much profanity is excessive, and it is well known players purposefully instigate and antagonize others into the point of frustration where profanity is used and then weaponize abuse reports against them. 

It is a highly dishonorable tactic that needs addressing.

My use of a four letter word, or expression of frustration is by no means as harmful to the community as the exploits, use of alt accounts, etc. for players to manipulate the economy, and gain huge material advantage over those they taunt and troll.

This while seeming off topic I believe will become highly relevant with in game abuse reports coming in Demeter.


Voxelmancy Tools:
Last but not least I want to thank you for working to provide tools to make building more accessible to everyone, I think this is awesome. My only concern here is will this cause more "invalid cell error" issues in the future?


Closing Summary:
Thank you very much for the work being put into DU, I know I am critical of some of the decisions. Mainly I just have a huge fear of losing hundreds if not thousands of hours of work. Dual Universe is the one place I feel I have my little slice of peace to escape from RL stress. 

I don't need to be rich, or have the best guns, or even biggest ship... I treat my tile territories as a carefully maintained zen garden, and right now I see fire burning all around that garden threatening to take it away. To take away the very little peace I have some days.

I work with victims of violent crime, sexual assault and domestic abuse with my job as a government contractor, trying to help them rebuild after horrible events. It is a job that is emotionally taxing, and Dual Universe is how I cope with the stresses of that job, and the risks of harm and even death from violent people who would do me harm to get to the survivors they have victimized.

Respectfully,

Creator

 

Here are my questions for NQ:
 
Will the sanctuary moon also be taxed in the future if they want to create a game world for hundreds of thousands of players, the space on the moon will not be enough.
 
Is planned to tax space station and in what form.
 
What will happen to the owner's dynamic constructs located on territories if the tax is not paid.
 
Will there be a safe place or mechanics for paying subscribers to keep their stuff safe.
 
What bad things will happen if we don't pay the taxes.
 
Do they really want to penalize players who can't spend that much time on the game.
 

10 million Quanta says they won't address the major concerns people are voicing in the Q/A. They'll pick the softball questions and opinions that align with their will. Any takers?
 
Also, I guess this means well received.

QUESTION: 

Are you trying to punish PvE, New, and Solo players? First the miniscule number of PvE Asteroids, and now the taxes on territory that yield less ore per hour than you can mine per 5 second scoop currently. 


Comments on question.

Based on the numbers from PTS, you need 20-30 territories and many more miners to yield a steady flow of resources

All this is going todo is assure is that the inflated ore market becomes more inflated, and that smaller orgs, solo players, and new players have virtually no chance to ever progress, and force people into just doing hauling missions, which in turn forces them to risk PvP Conflict, which with the new changes increases the chance of now being not able to replace what you lost.

I understand this is a civilization building game. To have a civilization you have to have groups, large groups, even nations or mega corporations. But if you remove the ability to make an impact as an individual, or even be able to function self sufficiently to a good degree, what's the point? 

What is the attraction for a new player?  "Welcome! Now pick one of 5 mega organizations to join, or spend the next month collecting your daily reward to build your first ship. By the way, if you want a Territory not on Sanctuary, you are going to need to find a way to make more money, because the daily reward won't even pay for your taxes for one territory."

Honestly I have rarely said anything about the game updates. Even schematics. I enjoyed the challenge of working hard to build something. But honestly, if these extraction numbers stay anywhere in the neighborhood where they are now, I honestly think my time will be better spent elsewhere. This is not a threat, or me generally just whining. I love this game, I truly do, but this will literally suck the enjoyment of the game right out of me. 

You have the ability to create and maintain what is likely the best MMO in a generation - Don't waste it on bad  decisions. Listen to your player base, what remains, learn from the many people who have left. When Beta hit, the first couple months were amazing, despite the bugs. When you looked at Dual Universe on a streaming site, it was loaded with people building, PvPing, exploring, and enjoying the game, with thousands of people enjoying watching them.. But if you look now, you see the same few streamers, with maybe a couple dozen viewers, if anyone is online at all.

Listen. Learn. Debate. Act. Do better.
 

So, here are some questions. This time I even spent time on the PTS and watched the full video first

-Demeter fees will pull a lot of money "out of the system" and slow the inflation or even reverse it (deflation). The 1M per week fee is set now, at a time when it is equivalent to only 10kl or hematite, or one t2 engine L. Will you adjust the fee should the buying power of the quanta change significantly? The whole "player driven economy" is, by far, not really player driven anymore, and this patch is yet another step in that direction, the fixed rates for schematics, missions, other bot buy and sell orders, and now territory fees see to that.

-I generally like airbrakes now finally getting an obstruction zone, however the current direction indicated by the yellow arrows is not only unintuitive but would also just lead to players stacking them on the inside of the craft pointing outwards to the sides. On the current PTS it appears the obstruction is checked above the brakes (if placed on horizontal surface). What are the plans for the direction of the obstruction directions for the airbrakes?
 
-This is a nice reminder that plenty of items have obstruction zones which dictate a certain usage, which is often not visually pleasing, intuitive or, for better lack of word, "feels right". Any plans for an overall overhaul of obstruction mechanics and directions?
 
-To use mining units to their full potention, by at least never wasting charges because the charge pool is already full, you have to log in almost daily (every 30h with no talents, every 35h with full charge gain and pool talents). It feels rather tight. Do you think DU is a game for casuals, RP players, weekend warriors and others who are not playing in a regular profit oriented way? (So not like me   ).
 
-My first ever ship sale was to a player who just travels the planets and maintains a little base on almost every planet and moon. Quite serene and dreamy actually. He will now have to set up mining units and get into business, or collect rocks, or quit. He is not allowed to continue the way he is used to play. The fee is too high for that. Patch .23 stopped groups of people from having autonomous outposts and building civilisation away from alioth. Demeter now stops another group of players from playing their way. What is the intended and therefore likely future-proof way to play DU? 
 
-With planet based mining gone, yet another thing to actually do in the game is removed. For players who have time on saturdays there is still asteroid mining, for the rest there are AI missions, which consist of taking off and waiting for 5h to arrive, assuming you do one that actually pays something. Player made long distance haul missions can not compete with AI missions. Any plans on revisiting Apelia missions, their payout, or the fact that the long distance ones are overly profitable with multiple accounts or "car sharing" via VR?
 
-Related to above: Any plans to add anything to the game that is fun to do and at the same time brings an amount of resources?

-In order to find asteroids you need access to a DSAT which is t3. In order to mine t3 via units you also need t3 ore for the advanced autominer. Will it be impossible to get t3 ore without already existing t3 ore?
 
 
 
 

Lets look at some of the basics.  Ore generation is tiny compared to what it was.  You could easily mine 100KL in less than an hour of T1 now this will take days.  I know you can have multiple territories but even with talents this idea of auto-miners will see you being pushed to asteroids for the ore fix.  Ore inflation is already at crazy highs and to be honest its shame even from previous feedback NQ just ignored it and carried on.
 
PvP is still broken unless by some magic you fixed the issues already highlighted? 
 
Airbrake changes not sure who knew this change was coming (I didnt) but so many constructs broken!.  Sadly you need loads for large ships to be viable so either make them more powerful to make them viable or look to otherways otherwise you'll end up with ugly ships again
 
Taxes - dont mind it but cost is high especially if your solo, who does this benefit?
 
Scans - Delete them render them useless then everyones equal.  Yea I got over 2k scans..... i'll be a sad panda but seems more fair.

Its a bit interesting why NQ is so resistant to doing a full reset. Its not like they dont have the capability they have done it in the past. So I am trying to think of a reason why they would not want to.  Is it a service they want to sell? Is there a bigger change coming in the future that is going to need a reset? Worried that reset requests will become the norm on future major updates? Just want to watch players squirm under your control?
 
Anyways I just dont see the negatives to doing a reset, and lots of positives to doing a reset.  Just going to give a big thumbs down to only resetting mining skills. 

What is the point of polls if things will turn out differently? I feel slightly fooled.

You must: 
Pay taxes of all tiles you own. Regularly create income to finance your due taxes. Pay about schemas or mining units. Regularly calibrate your mining units. Haul ore to markets and sell it. Pay taxes of all tiles you own. Calibrate your mining units. Haul ore to markets and sell it. Pay taxes of all tiles you own. Calibrate your mining units. Haul ore to markets and sell it. Pay taxes of all tiles you own. Calibrate your mining units. Haul ore to markets and sell it. Pay taxes of all tiles you own. 
 
So: 
You need to have steady income, run missions or mining units to be able to pay your territory taxes. 
To be able to run mining units yo need either to buy them from markets or craft them.  
For crafting you need to buy schemas for mining units. 
When you have your mining unis placed you need to: 
Calibrate them regularly basis 
Also, you need to collect ore and haul it to markets to sell it to be able to pay your territory taxes. 
If combining Territory taxes and Auto miners. Term “Auto miner” is not true. It is auto Grinder. Creating automatically new endless need to grind. 
Sounds more like second work than way to spend my free time. 
 
 
 

Can't remember, but I'll take your word for it
 
The difference is in Elite dangerous, it's not that dangerous. You can quickly gain money with little risk. First doing trading, then doing exploring or mining. You can play completely in a non PvP group or solo if you wish. You aren't running out and grabbing territory which once you have you get to keep and everybody who joins latter has to travel further further to get the same benefits if they can find them at all.
 
Missions and Mining seemed to be the main way for noobs to make money in DU, and now you are taking away the ability to grind the mining to get ahead.
 
You can't compete in industry for ages as you are competing with people with a huge talent head start and probably better supply lines.
 
You can't compete with mining as there are hardly any safe zone asteroids and it takes awhile before you have the skills and resources to try and poach from the others.
 
You can't compete in trade (like ED) as people in the market are more talented.
 
It's going to make the new user experience feel slower and more unfair, or have people pressured into orgs to follow directions/orders in the hope for scraps handed down from the elite.
 
No I don't have a solution, just concerns.

Nice post overall, some of us were talking about removing planet voxels / digging altogether 6 months / a year ago. Believe it or not we have lost a lot of really impressive devs from this community due to .... stuff... some of them are way more qualified than NQ. DB iops are super expensive for what NQ was trying to go for. Additionally they scaled way too early (who needed that many planets at start of beta?). They are dealing with scaling / cost problems while trying to develop new features, which throws the development cycle into a loop of late-come optimization on a lot of the backend code.
 
The main kicker is... atmo pvp combat was removed from the roadmap.. it simply does not exist. Will it ever be added again? Who knows. I think not. Mind you, this game was supposed to have avatar vs avatar pvp first, JC (the starter of this project) said exactly this in one of his development videos. The focus shifted completely somewhere else (Landmark playerbase, building building building). AVA is now only a pipe dream, and sad to say, atmo pvp as well.

Lock and fire AvA will be glorious /s
 
Do you really think that NQ, not able to pay the cost of their infrastructure now, will be able to get to the point where freefire for handguns will be possible? They can't even get lock and fire to work properly..
 
I would not be surprised if, like most of what was discussed this time last year, AvA is off the table for the moment, only to be reconsidered if and when NQ is in a more stable and financially secure place to undertake development of such a feature.
 
In fact I expect that what we have now (including Demeter) will be pretty much what they will go to "release" with (early 2022) and from there they will just hope and pray that the hundreds of thousands of subscribed players they will need to survive magically show up AND stick around.

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". 

it's going to really kill the players who mine 5-9 hours/day as they will no longer be able to grind in the ore

We definably need a talent respec.
 
I'm an underground miner, but have never been to an asteroid as I have no interest in the PvP aspect of the game and the safe space ones are low tier and go so fast.
 
Would be a loss of a lot of my talent points if I were stuck with something I wouldn't use anymore

Will this type of mining yield enough ore to meet current and future demand?

I don't like the idea that multiaccount players will now have a significant advantage in mining.

Why several? You can give bonuses through the units when mining ore, which now takes place on the surface. So you don't just get 20 litres / lump of ore, but more depending on the bonuses and skill.
How many terretories you will still have depends on the amount of the coming taxes and how you manage to add them to the quanta.

This patch scares me!
I don't like taxes because it usually forces you to farm quanta to pay for them. So it's not enough to just collect ores to build something fancy and have fun - I have to collect Quanta now.
The game at that time promised everything to be player-controlled and that you can play as you like - now there are all these restrictions and guidelines on how you have to play. I don't know, I'll have a look at it at the pts, but I'm worried that it will keep me in the game.
 

NQ's latest (and largest) round of funding was in 2019 for ~$11 million. I personally don't see how they could attract more investors until their KPIs improve.
 
Investors won't throw them money to "get their tech" -- because their tech doesn't work at scale and is tightly coupled with AWS. Several people have suggested that NQ is making DU as a "tech demo" and the "real" asset investors care about is their tech...but that doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny. 
 
Staff is hard to estimate but varies between 50 to 100 employees based on the site you look at. It's a surprisingly large indie, and arguably has too many people relative to the number of developers. 
 
They do have recent job postings -- if they were in such a dire financial situation, they wouldn't be looking to fill 3-4 positions (one would think). 
 
It's baffling they would spend money on two expensive offices, but yes they have offices in Paris and Montreal -- why spend all that extra overhead as a new studio making your first ever game...? Cuz JC didn't want to leave Paris...? 
 
So...all the public information we have suggests they spend a lot on staff and overhead, including high fees for hosting since they don't stand their own servers. AWS isn't that cheap at scale, especially for things like DynamoDB. 
 
IMO there's no immediate danger of the doors closing on the simulation because we'll likely see it coming, but there's no way NQ is "financially sound". 
 
They will push the product to a "1.0 release" and market it. They will see churning users in the month / months to follow and realize that the math isn't going to work. Before they shut it all down, they will likely scale the company down (they don't need two offices or 100 people) and keep it going as a smaller project. 
 
I'm honestly not super optimistic about the state of the game or its future, but I don't think there's any immediate danger of NQ evaporating just yet. 

Well, the problem is not that there are no benefits in building close together.
The current problem is: The game is still not ready for this.
We tried it in "Hyperion City", and the game causes so many issues if you want to build close together.
 
Advantages of a City:
- Feeling:
Its much nicer building close together and see others buildings grow bigger and bigger
- Industry:
Everyone can specialize on some parts and build a perfect optimized industry line. And your Neighbor can specialize on other parts
- Shopping:
In Hyperion, we have a fully automated ore deposit and shopping center that works very nice and is more comfortable and immersive than flying to the markets everytime
- We even experimented with street systems where hovercars can drive with ease (yeah, not absolutely necessary, but adds feeling too)
- Building together on large projects
 
Issues with a City in DU:
- Performance:
The industry city is a nice idea, but the game cannot handle it currently. Just a few cores filled with industry are causing massive FPS drops. Imagine what it is with dozens of buildings. Thats the main issue and thats the reason why the real use of a city is not achievable.
- Overlap-Protection:
DU has an overlap-Protection that does not allow to build too close to others buildings (not even the tileowner can disable this). But the range of this is way too far. So EVERY player with a house in the city has to manually disable this overlap-protection for every core. But this is extremely bugged and there has to be just one inactive player who has not disabled this protection, to make a whole 300x300m area unusable. Several players reached out to NQ because of this. The protection does not need to be removed, but at least give the tileowner the option to disable this protection for his tile. Issue would be solved. But nothing changed so far and this for already more than 1 year.
- Organization Core limits:
The only other way to avoid this overlap-protection is if all the building cores belong to the organization (and the player just gets all the rights for his own buildings). But NQ decided to reduce the max. amount of cores for every org massively (doesnt matter if its a org with 5 Members, or with 500). So this does not work too. Many players reached out to NQ with ideas like "scaling the core limit according to the player amount" / "add some missions to expand the org core limits" and others. But so far nothing changed, and this already for ~ 4 months.

You nailed it.  While NQ is hammering Pvp into shape they totally forgot one of the first groups to embrace DU, roleplayers and casual PvE players, combine that with absolutely no reason to actually center players since the markets are all NQ dominated and small shops is not a thing. Add 0.23 to it what limits the local placements of small businesses and the long overdue addition of actual elements that make living in DU itself a feast including possible farming, extra plants, stuff to actually do In a housing besides be bored. Cities are doomed to never happen in large scale. Add lag to that and its end of line.
 
But this actually is also a threath to the sustainability of DU, all large popular mmo have social centers where loads of players gather for festivals or social contacts places to visit while your logged in and just want to wander around. without any reason to be somewhere or any reason to build it DU will more and more become an individualistic game where you meet the same 2/3 people every day. Making it possible and giving incent to building a fun thriving city with shops, industry, restaurants, bars, adventure centers, repair bays, and everything else should be a priority but as we see the current road all paths lead to PvP and individualisation. Pri-0.23 we saw the birth of some cities and some locations where loads of people worked together to build large factory and storage units so individuals could startup their own stuff as reward for helping the orgs but most of those locations lay dead since 0.23. Adding schematics might have been what NQ saw was needed to do....something... but as it killed the smaller industizations and some of the larger the aftermath (scemes etc) did more on the bases of trust and  stopped some nice developments in city building halfway.
 
At the moment DU is being developed Top down,  "yeah give us endgame!!!!!!!"  but nothing efficient is added to support that and the apparent "endgame" is PvP only it seems and thus all other professions are treated in development of DU like shit. Thus end the need of cities as city development needs loads of diferent occupation and large masses of elements, materials, and lore elements to actually build a pleasing to the eye city that actually has a role in DU.
 
There was a point in development where cities were on the brink of reaching out, apparently that was unwanted and remediation took care of it.

Well, some of us are proposing alot of possibilities for years already but well, nothing changes on new years day, or in DU for all that matters. So at this moment the L core is largest. There is no merging or anything else to make the ship larger. Its not like space engineers where i have a 2 km ship performing perfectly, in Du you have to do with the largest core available and although there are larger cores developend they took them out of DU long time ago and we remain with this little L core that is barely large enough to build an imperial shuttle. On the other hand, the initial idea that loads of people would be needed or would find it fun to fly a single ship was proven unsuccesfull and thus all larger ships apparently are flying solo or only with a small crew.

Threads like these are so typical of DU. People have been having this debate about PvP for years and years and years now. 
 
The design of this game is rather horrible, and that's evidenced by the fact that conversions like these have been rehashed for years with nothing new to discuss.
 
PvPers insist PvP is part of the game and that's true -- but it also sucks as a feature. Enjoy being a gunner, enjoy the lag, enjoy the inherent asymmetry of combat and its boring mechanics overall.
 
Builders insist they shouldn't have to PvP, but they already don't have to -- it's like they don't want risk at all, not just that they find PvP boring/bad as a gameplay element. 
 
Blame NQ for a design that doesn't make sense.
 
"Sandbox builder" meets "free for all PvP" -- gee, who would've thought these two concepts are basically polar opposites that mix poorly...? Oh, right...many of the forum users for years and years and years. 
 
There's an old rule in game design about not mixing genres. Of all the genres to challenge this 'rule', melding 'sandbox builder' with 'free for all PvP' is obviously a horrible idea...the popularity of the game and endless debate about what PvP should be is pretty solid evidence to me that the concept of DU itself doesn't work. 
 
It would be a different story if ships were easy to regenerate, if PvP was actually fun or interesting, if either combat or the building aspects were adjusted a bit to work together -- but NQ doesn't really do the whole "game design" thing, so we are left with a game that fields inherently disjointed. 

How do the devs justify the current nonsensical DSAT asteroid broadcast mechanic fitting in with DU's theme of emergent gameplay?
 
Emergent gameplay would result from two (or more) parties that happen to scout the same asteroid at around the same time finding each other by pure chance since there are many asteroids to choose from, and not from a forced conflict brought about by broadcasting the location of an asteroid soon after anyone finds it.
 
If you tell people interested in pvp where to always find pvp, they will always go to there to engage in it. It's lazy, and not emergent gameplay. On the other hand if two parties happen to find the same asteroid by chance anything can happen. Maybe they decide to fight each other. Maybe they decide to mine ore together. Maybe they agree to mine ore together peacefully, but one of the parties decides to secretly call in reinforcements to take out the first party. That's emergent gameplay, but scenarios like those are never going to happen if asteroid locations are being broadcast to everyone.

I'm ok with the current mechanic of being able to remove unwanted players. It's too easy for them to plant a spy on a ship and use that to target you. I truly believe its crippled their mission running gameplay. BUT all that being said, I believe the true solution would be proper AvA on Constructs, and maybe even anti personal "turrets" of some kind. Something to provide a risk for onboarding players. I really hope NQ hasn't given up on this......