CousinSal

I don't agree at all that the wipe is their most important choice ever. I don't get how they are still "discussing" it. That betrays a profound lack of leadership if that's really true.
 
The wipe isn't nearly as important as maintaining a stable volume of players so that NQ can (someday) get to the goals outlined in this letter. These ideas are for post-release, and there's no guarantee that they will materialize if the sub count never meets the basic minimum. 
 
NQ's most important, critical choices have already been made...the design of the game itself is far more critical than any wipe discussion, and that's where the game still struggles. The die has already been cast for DU and its "most important choices" are long in the past.
 
All we can do is wait to see if release earns them enough subs, and I'm not optimistic that it will, which means none of the goals discussed in this letter are material. 

They got rid of $10 for 3 months? why?  $10 a month? only temporary? Is this game releasing with $15 a month??  There isn't $15 a month worth of content, there isn't $10 a month worth of content.
What a complete disaster this all is.  The voxel building, industry(before schematics), and flight are so good.  But everything else is so off the mark.  It seems so far behind of even the most basic games.  I feel like this game is like a stillborn birth.. there will be a game, but it's dead... the poor thing is already dead.
 

Really impossible to not agree -- first impressions are formed very quickly by gamers and character creation is a huge deal to a lot of people. If you're going to invest time in an MMO, making a character "your own" is important. 
 
DU creates a series of bad first impressions that makes me believe release will go just as well as public beta. 
 
Lack of character customization alone might not be enough to make people quit, but then they get into the game itself (if it loads).
 
They see a UI that looks like it was improvised by coders (and probably was).
Bland visuals make the game feel dated.
Initial gameplay that involves going back and forth to a market, which might be a considerable hike depending on when they join. 

It doesn't take much for gamers to roll their eyes at the wasted $9.99 and realize that the game doesn't meet the expectations created in whatever advert got them to sign up.
 
DU doesn't communicate "quality" in the first 30 minutes. It still feels like it was made by a tiny team on a small budget -- that might not be a fair impression, but it is the impression that NQ has unwittingly engineered.
 
These aren't hard problems to solve, but when it takes 45 days per decision, of course nothing ever gets done 😏

And NQ clearly already knows this, considering all the eh.. creative freedom they apply to their own 'game play' videos.

Honestly, I don't see what Dual Universe video content can be released without making the viewer die of boredom.

Alien cores are the best they could do with the tech they have -- DU just isn't capable of scaling technically, especially with them wanting to limit costs as much as possible. 
 
NQ's solution is control: they control where battles happen and how many battles can happen at the same time. Alien cores and asteroids are both examples of this. With this control, they can isolate PvP traffic and limit the strain on servers. 
 
IMO, the only way TW and PvP in general become more player-centric is if the game does well on release and they can afford to put more money into infrastructure...otherwise, I don't see any changes here and don't expect ground-based TW to ever be a thing (except maybe around more alien crap spawned by NQ).

So far, from almost all their implementations of things, its been done bare bone so they can check the marker that they have achieved the goal on the roadmap. Space Territory Warfare will be no different. 

The vids of the battle looked very boring though, even more boring then EvE vids . never the less glad you had fun
 
- can you disable the shield effect (looks ugly as f...)
- can you change ammo effect
- does everyone have modded huds
- how possible is it to battle with a standard ship/lua/hud

Just stating my opinion of what I read on the forums.
I realize that people get deeply emotional when it comes to their creations. Problem is that most of the buildings in DU are only interesting visually but have no purpose/function. Which makes them "random" in my point of view. And that has also been stated over and over again by other people on the forums.
However the usual DU player completely ignores that criticism and is happy with their "creations without a purpuse"="random building". From my perspective.
Furthermore the huge amount of DU players who are simply against any changes which involve PvP and which are completely not able to even try to understand other opinions is the main reason why I stopped playing.

havent beeen around for a while,  but i do pop in every once in a while to see if any progress has been made to this mismanaged mess, gotta say im rather impressed by the financial resilience of this "company" , they sure have a talent to rake cash together from god knows where to stay afloat for as long as  they did, and keep this charade goin with whatever mediocre story this crowd wants to hear.  

Lol.
This game will be lucky if it makes 6 months past release, let alone taking on SC. No chance buddy !

I would, if there were any fun to be had.  For flying and killing stuff, there are much better games out there,  feel no desire to sodomize myself with DU's take on PVP 

All these posts about what people are doing in game... Most all of it sounds like work, chores, and grind. Anyone playing DU for fun or just out of the fear of loss if you did not play? 

The only thing these two projects have in common is mismanagement. But unlike DU, SC is reasonably good at keeping it's balance sheets heathy.
It is important to note the two games are not even in the same genre. SC for all fluff one may see in promotional videos is basically a  rendition of Freelancer with online multiplayer.   Depending on your expectations, this can equal parts exciting and dissapointing, but on the whole the project already achieved what it set out to do. Yes it basically 40 million game that cost in excess to 400 mil to make to date.  It is certainly plenty buggy and probably we never reach "released"  status, but what's on the table now is pretty much what all those Wingcommander boomers wanted all along. 
 
DU on the other hand is more akin EVE online with voxels.  It certainly did not improve on EVE formula of spreadsheets on space in any measurable way, and whatever systems they might have borrowed from eve, had been implemented without deeper understanding of what makes them work or fail within eve's own ecosystem.  The biggest strenght of DU is its voxel buiding tools. But at the end of the day, what matters most is how much of "game" du really is. After 8 years of development i must say, not really much of game at all.  It's certainly pleases the Landmark crowd, which was never a large crowd (even before its cancellation by SOE Ladmark hardly ever crossed 1000 concurrent logins).
DU is certainly not the PVP game backers ( with many eve expats among them) asked for, and at the same time it's not even PVE game the peace loving, mindless NPC murdering crowd could get behind. Reasons why the way things are is besides the point, the point is, based on it's ever dwindling population one must ask the question, what is the the actual "niche" DU tried to cater to ?
 
With SC it's quite obvious what its niche is, with DU, after all these years, i cannot really say.  So in response to OP question i gotta say, no there's no chance DU outliving SC, much less killing it. That would be like asking if DRDOS 6.0 could kill MaOS 7.0

If this is pvp game has no chance when release comes.

It's NQs motive. They moving pvpers as far away from the other part of the game as they can. Pvp in DU doesn't co-exist with all the other mechanics.  Only redeeming factor of DU or main selling point is the single shard, where everyone lives in same shared universe.  But NQ purposely segregates gameplay.  I don't envision any scenario where more players than they currently have will play and pvp after wipe and release.  

If this is pvp game has no chance when release comes.

Also aimed at reducing cost...to be fair, the idea of multi-crew ships was never going to work great with a single shard system.
 
This should have been obvious to NQ during the design phase, but yet again their ideas were implemented far ahead of actually thinking about the system at scale. 
 
Network performance requires more resources (often exponentially so) as there's more clients.
 
Relatively small battles between multi-crew ships might involve 10+ clients...if battles were instanced, maybe this wouldn't be as big a deal, but otherwise it yields much better "bang for buck" for network performance without multi-crew ships. Even if it means more ships, fewer clients will likely be more efficient. 
 
That said, PvP performance will probably never be great and I don't think DU will ever see "massive" battles. 

100% agree. Game is as good as it will ever be. Server limitations mean the game will never get better. The players playing the game right now are the only players who will ever play. The idea of launch is just a fantasy. Only hardcore lego lovers play this game. It's not a MMO. When they do the wipe, they will go bankrupt all so they can have hope that may be new players will come when they "launch".

Again this loop gives PvP players hours of doing nothing in game for minutes of fun some of the time. 
 
Just fix that all these PvP changes are great but they keep missing the point...
 
Hours of no fun to have minutes of fun is a super bad trade and not good for any game. 

Agreed, it needs more than a few shallow changes to gain the mainstream appeal that other games have...
 
I've seen posts about how much "potential" DU has for years and years. I'm not convinced that potential was ever real, though...because DU never had any real focus.
 
It promised to be a game where you can do anything and be anyone: build, mine, trade, industry, pvp, politics, civilization...
 
A game that tries to appeal to everyone will seem like it has limitless "potential", but only because it isn't realistic.
 
In reality, the design was never concrete enough to capture even a fraction of this "potential".
In reality, the "cutting edge" tech that was supposed to allow "millions" of players to share a world was never going to work and has never worked even at tiny populations. 
In reality, the game is far too niche and hardcore to scale its player-base enough to achieve its unrealistic vision...a vision created by someone that hadn't ever worked in games before (or even had significant experience in commercial software development). 
 
But all that aside....let's be realistic, here.
 
NQ can't even make one simple choice about a wipe....so I don't think it is realistic to expect them to make hard choices on their top 5 goals pre-release and still have enough time to test that those changes for both scalability and bugs. 

I'm not Dissing a good acid trip.
I just don't want one forced on me all the time.
 
I rest my case:

And there has by now been many cycles of NQ toning down effects after complaints, so why do they keep making the same basic mistakes over and over again?
Whoever is in charge of SFX in this game need to learn that "LESS IS MORE" is a saying that is often used in design for a good reason. And that subtle hints and effects are more impressive then the "OMG!! DIAL IT UP TO 11!!" approach. Especially for something that players are forced to watch over and over again while playing.

100% -- the design of DU makes no sense anymore. A game with no NPCs where players also don't have the power to do anything....yeah, that's a "bold" design choice for sure. 
 
There's no real reason that NQ hasn't rolled out player markets other than being stubborn and having a poor design vision.
 
They have had ample time in the last 8 years. They have instead focused on refactors to existing features...usually making the overall gameplay worse. 
 
I mean...are you telling me that they coded the markets without player controls in mind...despite saying this was always a planned feature...? Puzzling at every level. 

I am pretty sure I'm the kind of player NQ wants "back". I poured stupid amounts of time into the game, was in an org, built a massive factory, etc etc. I was even happy with schematics. I also supported a full wipe of the game. I stopped playing when most of my org stopped a few months after 0.23 out of frustration with the grind and soul sapping tedium of making any good sized build. I also couldn't believe how brain dead the implementation of missions was that I couldn't put something in a box, have it delivered and someone get payed without me online. I stopped in to check out the auto mining update only to discover they botched that all the hell and back with taxes.
 
So many core systems in this game need to have a real game designer overhaul the entire game design doc, full-wipe or no, DU is a failed project that will never reach critical mass of players. DU tried to do to many different game types at once, Sand-box, MMO, PvP, Strategy, Simulation, FPS, Industry, Building. The only one it pulled off at all was the creative building and as my org mates discovered, creatively building stuff "just for the sake of it" can only hold your attention so long. The other genre's it tried to do were all shambled together without a cohesive plan and design on how the system interact with each other and feed off or lead players into each other. Leading to a bunch of a half implemented "ideas" that play more like a tour some kid gamers wish list then a cohesive singular game experience. 
 
Add to all this the game universe of DU is WAY to big for the pittance of players it has. It's a niche game, and the game world size should reflect that. Now they are trying to throw in a few of the 'good' ideas the community has been clamoring for in a hopes that 'release' will somehow bring back the initial rush. Good Luck. Like seriously? It took you this long to understand bots in the markets were a bad idea?
 
The sad reality is DU would need to be overhauled at such a core level it would probably take 3 more years to even approach a state that would be full wipe->release ready. Could I sit here and write out a game design doc that would work better and a path for DU to get there? Sure, but why would I bother? NQ has proven time and time again they are so stuck in a quagmire the best they can manage is to think or hear an idea and then just throw it at the wall at hopes it improves rather then hurts gameplay.
 
This ship has no Captain. After it fails, perhaps some entity with money and real game design chops can buy the IP, put it behind the curtain for 3 years. Then, overhaul the core systems and release it under a different name, with an actual idea of how all these system are supposed to work together, and make the real game we have all waited for. I mean for heaven sakes people, we still have ship construction/operation mechanics I could design better on the back of a napkin, and ships are the core of the game!