FoolsFolly

The ONLY thing that will save this game is frequent and substantial improvements to the game mechanics.
 
Any short term advantage and influx of new players directly caused by a wipe (if any), will quickly be lost once they start to actually play the game.
The long tail with loss of player respect and trust caused by a wipe on the other hand...

The entire concept of equalizing new and old players is fundamentally flawed. Having a fresh start where everybody is starting a zero means literally nothing in the span of the game, and there will always be new players joining that are behind older more veteran players.

Jesus man, the enter key, do you know what it is? Holy wall of text. 
 
 

A wipe will not make the game significantly more appealing to new players. A wipe will not get rid of bots and exploiters mass-producing resources to skew the economy. A wipe will not accomplish any of what you hope for; not in any meaningful way.
 
I would be willing to accept a wipe, start over and continue playing DU if I honestly believed it was for the best. But right now, there's really very little to gain from a wipe, and a lot to lose.

Hello FoolsFolly, don't worry you still have time. I suggest you submit a ticket to the support team via https://support.dualthegame.com. It may take a day or two but they know all the intricate details about the launcher and will be able to walk you through a fix. I strongly recommend you wait for official support if at all possible, but I am also going to provide you with an unofficial workaround to your issue.
 
By default the launcher stores temporary files in this location before extracting their contents to your installation directory.
%AppData%\..\Local\NQ\DualUniverse\Temp\ Updating will fail if there is insufficient storage space in this location. As of writing, it is non-trivial to change this working directory so instead I am going to guide you through a direct download and manual install of the game.
 
How to Perform a Manual Game Update:
 
The download link changes with every patch and I don't think NovaQuark would appreciate me publishing it here. Instead I will explain how you can find it yourself.
First run the launcher as usual and let it start downloading the game. Close the launcher once you see it has started downloading. Open an explorer window and enter the following in the address bar to access the launcher logs directory %AppData%\..\Local\NQ\DualUniverse\ Left click the logfile called out-daemon.txt to open it in notepad You will see a line labeled "Downloading Whole Game Archive" followed by version and checksum information along with a link to a "Dual.zip". Use that link to directly download the game files ("Dual.zip") to any drive you have sufficient space on. Once the download completes, extract the zip contents to a Game subfolder inside your DU installation directory like this:
C:\ProgramData\Dual Universe\Game\<Bin+data> Note you will need to create the Game subfolder yourself if it does not already exist.
 
Now create the following text files in your installation directory:
C:\ProgramData\Dual Universe\Game\Bin\version.txt C:\ProgramData\Dual Universe\Game\Bin\sha1.txt Copy and paste the version and checksum you found in out-daemon.txt to the newly created version.txt and sha1.txt respectively. To give you an example, we are currently on version 0.27.8-Demeter which has checksum of 9a5da5a9028d3f3568a73d91c823ac02f7d65a76 so that is exactly what you put in these text files (do not add any spaces or newlines).
 
After that you can launch the game and if you did everything correctly the update button should turn into a play button. Please play cautiously for the first 30 minutes (ie: avoid flying). Performing this workaround bypasses the launcher's built-in integrity checking, meaning you could be playing with a corrupted game client if any files did not download or extract correctly. This would cause client instability, resulting in graphical glitches or random crashes. The third party anticheat system (EQU8) performs passive checks on file integrity and will let you know if it detects any issues but you need to give it time to work.