CousinSal
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Posts posted by CousinSal
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1 hour ago, FryingDoom said:
Yeah the Backers who paid more than the subscribers are now being screwed for gambling on a product that may never have existed if it was not for the backers.
Makes you so proud to be a backer, knowing NQ think you are worthless compared to a subscriber.
Ya, I mean I accepted the risk backing in alpha. But it really has been a bait and switch. And they dont even have the gall to look us in the eye and say "ya our server tech didnt perform how we wanted and this is what its gotta be" but continue on this bullshit path. WE backed a game that was suppose to be heavily in PVP and PLAYER DRIVEN. Its not player driven with alphelia, bots, and safe zones. This is some broke ass theme park mascaraing around as some "revolutionary mmo technology". Remove safe zones, put some better tools in place. Make a better radar system. Expand how orgs are ran and how they can utilize planets/moons to form nations. Let the players figure the rest out.
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1 hour ago, Deadrank said:
I feel like a lot of people have really forgotten intent for this game was primarily focused on PvP/survival. I think the PvP community are the ones that have had to give up more than any other community in the game. We were told we would get Territory Warfare, instead they gave us Alien cores and said go play in a corner of the universe away from the rest of the community. We were told that survival outside the safe area that you start in would be "cut-throat" and you would definitely need to know what you were doing before venturing out away from that starting safe zone, instead they put a large safe bubble around EVERY planet and a HUGE safe zone that covers three different planets, they gave everyone the ability to completely skip any possible PvP risk by setting warp drives as a T3 element.
So from my standpoint, the beacons being PvP locked is the first step NQ has really ever taken to make PvP an actual part of the game and I hope they continue to gate more things behind PvP (or at least the risk of PvP).
And btw, I am currently on the side that doesn't hold any of the alien cores.Exactly, its become boring universe. Yes in real life people want to be safe. But when i log into a video game im looking for adventure because "death" is just a respawn away. I have quit DU and dont plan on coming back because of complete boredom. I'll might come back, but only if they drop all the safe zones except Haven/scan and then also limit the industry you can do on those starter moons.
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the whole game should be gated behind pvp. I dont see this last past 1 year after release if the game is as it stands now.
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40 minutes ago, ADCOne said:
I will stay after the wipe to see what happens and hope that the game progresses towards what it could be in full. Like everyone I would like things to be different in all kinds of ways but as long as it works together and makes a fun experience that is what really matters.
It is a good video and I agree the speed change was a mistake but not enough to stop me playing the game. I would have preferred if they had just separated the adjusters and engines for the various ship sizes and adjusted how much thrust etc. they produce since that would have achieved something similar without it being an arbitrary cap, which very much spoils the space flight. I had not tested to find out that the speed restrictions were severely in place even on small ships so the video was really an eye opener on that. I currently am build hauling ships anyway so small ships was not really on my list of things to try to be honest. So having seen the video the speed changes really do need a rebalance at the very least - Though I would still prefer a less 'blunt' instrument solution to the problem so the general fun in flight is not crippled at the same time.
Bro, the 30k cap for all ships before was "arbitrary". Now it's tied to mass. That's the opposite of arbitrary.
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6 hours ago, StaticAstraeus said:
Oh good lord, is this change for real?
Schematics are data, why would they be consumed? Limited use Copyright enforced by the AI overlord? That's just plain silly.
This is what we (in the business of actually developing schematics for a living) would usually call an "over-engineered solution"... and no, that's not a compliment.
You want to limit the amount of stuff a player can make in a set period of time? Add power requirements to the damned machinery!you want to make 100 screws? that will cost you 1kWh (random figure)
you want to assemble an engine? that will cost you 10kWh (another random figure)
you want to smelt several tons of ore? that will cost you 100kWh (random again, but higher than assembly since it is a energy intensive process in real life)
Get a generator in game that produces a set amount of energy, gate how many you can have/deploy with skills.
There you go, job done. A simple idea inspired by real life that opens up no end of possibilities for further expansion: energy trade; energy storage; energy harvesting... and so on.
Sad thing is this has been shouted to NQ for at least 5 years. They don't care about making a fun game anymore.
- merihim and StaticAstraeus
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10 hours ago, blundertwink said:
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.
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.
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1 hour ago, Hecticus said:
Well Grump, you can’t just go around flying all over the place like it’s a game or something. What were you thinking?
Ya this isn't star citizen where you can land at any space station or city and instantly refuel for a small fee. This isn't EvE online where warping costs nothing and moving around the game world isn't restricted.
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5 minutes ago, Kurosawa said:
How about the ability to link any number of containers to the core, and allow factories to pull from the core of the construct they are on (no link), that would reduce the massive amount of links not to mention extra containers and transfer units and so on.
It would also be more in line with what EvE does no NQ should like that.
Would make sense, keep it for space and static cores.
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1 hour ago, DarkEvader said:
I have a small industry, so I'm OK with the new schematic mechanics, I will still produce about same the ammount of stuff as before.
However, the task of manually loading schematics into dozens of industry units is an unnecessary waste of time. A more efficient way of feeding schematics would be appreciated. Perhaps feeding could be done by a container unit linked to multiple industry units that consume the same kind of schematics.
So you are only ok with things that don't effect you personally. As long as it's not bad for you, A ok.
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27 minutes ago, Jinxed said:
Even Star Citizen knows how to keep their players informed of pending wipes.
heck they are looking two wipes ahead.
they are also in Alpha, just like DU claims it isn’t.
Say what you will about Star Citizen, but you gotta respect them for correctly classifying their game, and treating it as an alpha with regular wipes and doing what they can to develop their game.
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27 minutes ago, CptLoRes said:
Good post Msoul, but it has to be a two way street to function.
Which it's not or ever been, so it's a pointless post.
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Can you imagine NQ even attempting to put in atmo pvp and AvA sometime after release? Sure that will go smooth with no lasting problems. No need to alpha test that just slap it in and all good. And watch them not put any real rewards and everyone still just lives in the safe zone.
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Will they have atmo pvp ever? If they do it's gonna be such a drastic change who knows what will happen. Something like that is usually reserved for the alpha stages of game development....
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1 hour ago, FatRillos said:
I've been screaming this for the 3 months since the wipe talk. I mean WTF? We have to wait 3 damn months (a whole business quarter) to get a decision that effects the player base in such a way that the game is going to die because everyone has left because of indecision.
I mean I just found starship evo and it has one guy developing it and it already has everything this game has including better voxel tech with moving parts like hinges and rotation.( land vehicles and mechs) and you get to scale engines and thrusters to the ship. The map is thousands of systems almost in the vein of elite dangerous.
And it has some pve and has online pvp. Yes it's in VERY EARLY access but it shows how far up their ass these Devs heads are. To have a whole group of Devs that can't beat a one man show. Embarrassing.
Damn that is embarrassing.
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31 minutes ago, Zarcata said:
What's stopping you from taking the game idea and implementing it better yourself? If the game were filled with meaningful content, it would definitely be a huge success.
Ya ok. This makes no sense. Making games are a risk. "Oh just do this and it will be success". Not how any of it works. You need funding, and MMOs aren't 1 man projects. There is nothing saying DU would be a huge success if they had better content. Could the game be profitable and sustainable. Sure that's realistic. But it won't guarantee some huge booming success where it makes 10s of millions or more a year in profit not gross.
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Game, metaverse, whatever. Doesn't matter what you call it, as shown by NQ they call it beta when it's alpha or even pre-alpha. The question is, will people play it, enjoy it, and sub to it. And will the way NQ monetize DU be enough to keep servers online and also enough to continue development and make a profit. That's all that matters.
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19 minutes ago, Wolfram said:
Every single new "limit" they add can be conveniently ignored if you pay for another account.
Meanwhile good ideas that could also address their industry issues, such as adding a power usage system, simply get postponed or completely ignored. Like, really, if NQ truly didn't want mega factories they could add some pool of energy per tile, similar to how it works with mining, and have each machine use a certain amount of power. There you go, nobody would be able to easily produce every single element without having to spread production across multiple tiles and constantly move inventory and obviously everyone would be in a level field, since having an alt or not wouldn't matter much.
And we have told them this for years now. I guess it really is about selling alts, because they know the player population will always be low.
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25 minutes ago, Jake Arver said:
Fuel or energy management will "control" the mechanic. It will be what allows the mechanic to work.
It really is not that difficult to implement but as it is a control/management system, it really needs to be in early and at the core of the code so it can reach everything en vice versa. NQ never bothered to implement it and at this time if they did it would at best be a bolt on.
There is a few good posts on the forums which show how a proper system could work like THIS one. It shows a mechanic which is at the core of the code and so can control (or be made to control) what you can do on a core. When everything on a core needs to "report" into this and report what power is needed, you can teak numbers to manage what can be done on a core and what needs additional resources. you could add batteries for instance which wil then make more energy available and you can add generators to burn fuel and allow energy to be replenished.
And in that way, you effectively give players a way to manage their needs while you still maintain a way to control how that will work and what cap (if any) is set for that. None of this exists in DU and at this point there really is no way (outside of a complete rewrite of core code) to add and whichever way you do, it will massively disrupt the game.NQ has had their chance and has been given good ideas and feedback on this, but they choose to ignore it all.
You are right NQ never thinks of foundational mechanics. Everything is a bolt on. Same with Asteroids, we get a shitty dsat and it's done. Instead they could of made a long range scanner that not only detects Asteroids but other ships. It would be a foundation to add other gameplay. And to find those Asteroids you would have to fly out in space and look and scan for them. Makes the pvpers have to move about too Instead of sitting checking a dsat every 20min.
There really isn't any good foundation mechanics in this game at all.
- CptLoRes, Novean-32184 and Hazaatan
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11 minutes ago, blundertwink said:
Eesh, they'll never be able to reduce server costs enough at those sort of subscriber numbers! They'd need their servers running soooo efficiently that Amazon would be paying them for this game to be viable at 20,000 subs. 😁
Also, they don't actually have to pay back the $25 million...it'd be generous if that was how VCs worked, but they invest money in exchange for ownership shares. It isn't a "loan" they expect to be paid back, although that's kind of how I assumed it worked before I had to research VCs for my dayjob.
NQ is on the hook with them forever.
If that ownership share leads to $500 million of profit for the VC, well...that's why they do it. Huge risk for the potential of huge rewards.
That's also why most VCs would never invest money in a new studio with zero revenue led by someone with no experience in the field...they know that most new ventures fail in general. Nowadays, they want to see at least some revenue first...which I suppose NQ has, but they sure didn't when the investments came in around 2016!
A very high percent of all VC ventures fail -- they still do it because the potential returns are so astronomical when ventures do have success.
Well that may be true, I just can't envision a big group of people wanting to play the game with that we have. And are people gonna wait around for 2-3 years after release for more real content? I just don't see it happening. This game should of been the way of space engineers and have players rent out servers then can mod and play with rules. NQ doesn't even utilize the single shard they just make boring afk mechanics.
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16 minutes ago, blundertwink said:
Huh? This math makes zero sense to me.
You're saying 300,000 users pay a 50 euro annual sub. So that's 15mm euros per year in revenue.
Divided by 400 employees, that's an average wage of 37k euros assuming the studio has zero other costs. Yet somehow they are able to pay costs, pay 400 employees a living wage, and manage a net revenue of 2 million annually...?
There's clearly something missing in these calculations...
What is your source? Does this studio also do microtransactions? Either they have a huge source of revenue other than subs or this information isn't right. There's no way this math adds up otherwise.
DU with 20,000 accounts: paying infra costs and 50+ employees off ~200k a month or less simply isn't possible...the average employee wage would need to be well under 48k euros per year assuming 100% of their revenue went to payroll. Just doesn't add up.
I think NQ is banking off reducing server costs and selling DACs and possibly other micro transactions to survive. And possibly some layoffs after release. I feel that's their plan of attack. Keep in mind NQ has to do more than break even, as NQ is around 25mil + in the hole right now.
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Just now, Leppard said:
I doubt this, because i think it's a normal misconception. From my experience, pvpers are simply the loudmouthest forum/social media warriors in every game that offers pvp and pve together.
Well you are wrong. It's been well documented. Because NQ sold it as such, saying repeatedly that only Sanctuary was safe zone and maybe 20km around Ark ship. This was not a one off comment this was said many times and put in. They originally were goin with AvA first but claimed the community "wanted CvC first" but who knows why they switched. And the discord was under NDA during alpha so the community wasnt some huge size. So the people in it generally had seen all the pitches from NQ and it was very much pvp focused.
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2 minutes ago, Aaron Cain said:
in 3 hrs you cannot do this much in DU
Can you in 3weeks? 3 months? Ever?
And during that 3 hours we did encounter bugs and some desync during FPS. Luckily the bugs were the smaller ones and didn't force us to restart. But it just goes to show that they have a good foundation of FUN. SC isn't sitting there talking about economics, all this bullshit. SC is actually going to wipe again in a week. They call themselves alpha. But did I have fun during that 3 hours. Yes I had a damn [filtered]ing good time flying around in a space ship with my buddy doing missions and pvping real players. Fun matters.
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3 minutes ago, Gottchar said:
You have pvp, you can, shoot other people.
Shittily, with bugs, no proper way of organizing and whatever issue, I don’t do pvp, but I am sure there is a giant amount of reasons why people don’t pvp more actively. You can shoot though. It is, in general, in place.
Same thing for pve.
While pve saw more things removed, and pvp more things added, they are both missing major features and instead get pointless things nobody asked for, or people even specifically asked to please not add.
So this is not an issue of "the game need more pvp", it is an issue of "the game needs a lot of things, pve and pvp". And many of the active gameplay loops and tools people suggested would help both alike anyway.In star citizen they have lots of PVE. But guess what, all of it is in a pvp zone. Segregation is not the answer.
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21 minutes ago, Knight-Sevy said:
The failure with the population currently more than weak in the game is not to have implemented PvP at all.
With NQ's recent reactions, I think they've finally figured that out.
But it may be too late for the financing of the game.
It's now quite useless I think to yell at NQ to ask them for more complicated changes. The nerve of the industry is badly needed, maybe they also want to reduce the development of the players as much as possible to have time to really add content to the game post release.
==> I repeat myself, but clearly the lack of respect that there has been towards PvP players who have now waited 2 years to finally be able to play the game is the main cause of the drop in the number of players.
As an example for only speaks of the French-speaking side that I master:
- At the launch of the Beta I remember 14 active organizations (10 to 100 members)
- 3 totally PvE organizations
- 5 mixed PvP-PvE organizations (large organization 50/100 members and streamer organization)
- 8 TOTALLY PvP organizations
And I may be able to add one from EvE which ultimately never came because there was no real PvP.
You can imagine, 60 to 80% of theplayers in these organizations were there to do short or long term PvP on the game.
Some were expecting atmospheric PvP.
NQ to shit on all these people who finally left and left the game in this state of population.
=> The only chance for the game to work is to leave its safe zone on 3 planets. AND put everything else in PvP.
There is no more time anyway, if NQ survives the release, they will have 3 months maximum to create the PvP content and bring the real player population back to the game.
Otherwise it's dead
During alpha tons of people wanted pvp in some form. It was the main focus. DU without open world pvp Is dreadfully boring.
Star citizen is a buggy mess in alpha I won't deny that. But yesterday I got a friend friend play it with me for the first time. Here is a recap of our 3 hour play session. I picked him up in my ship and we went and did some NPC missions while he manned the turret, and made a few bucks. We then went to gear up and did some shopping. After that a player Ingame activated a mission saying he was downed and needed a revive. So we went to that bunker and found him and revived him. But then my buddy decided he wanted to kill him and blasted him and we looted him ([filtered] move but hey player driven). My friend now was a criminal and as we were flying away someone looking to get his bounty engaged us and we had a 5min dog fight but me Being a new pilot and bad I rammed into him and we blew up.
Well I respawned and he went to prison. 2.5 hour sentence. Or he could mine and reduce it. So he did some mining and got out in 20min or so. After that we went bounty hunting for a criminal that lead to a space station where he was hacking to reduce his crime status. We landed our ship and went in on foot, and we killed him but also 2 of his buddies. After that when we were about to leave another ship arrived and blew our ship up so we retreated into the space station. no ship we were stranded. Well 5min later a guy stuck in and downed my buddy but then I killed him. I then had time to revive my buddy, and he said "can we steal the ship he came in?" So we went outside the space station and were jetpacking in space. Found his ship!!! Back door was locked. So I pulled out my gun and kept shooting the door watching it take damage until it opened. Success we have a ship!! We took it and flew back to a space station to regear, get more ammo, food water and reflect on our adventure.
All that in a span of 3 hours and my buddies first day. No need to build any thing, just get a space ship and go on an adventure In pvp zone that also has npcs. It was FUN. It was organic. It showed what SC could become someday soon. When u compare that experience to DU well...I think you get it.
[Post Wipe] How do you feel about warp beacons being gated by PvP?
in General Discussions
Posted
Yes it was. They literally said that the only safe space would be Sanc and 20km around the ark ship. The rest was in the pvp zone. You could have temp safe zones. "protection bubbles" as they put it, that could provide for people and cities to grow, and then try to defend their home. But PVP was always the focus in the original pitch. Watch all the old alpha videos they say it plain as day. JC even mentions EvE over and over which is about as pvp as it gets....ie. the whole gameworld has some sort of pvp in it.