Owl_Superb

If a wipe has to happen I'd like Megas back. Figure out something with resetting the underground geometry every x days unless the player designates that tile as HQ if so allow for a flag to not reset for those with underground bases. Thinking about doing it all again with asteroid mining or setting up a machine to mine then logging off for weeks until the game does what I considered the fun part... Just no. Guess I could run deliveries but that is also 90% watching the game play itself.
 
In fact had the current mining paradigm been implemented from the get-go I would never have found the game fun enough to play et-all. To rebuild everything with this system.. please no.
 
I know it wasn't for everyone but I enjoyed hunting Megas and pulling them out of the ground so much I would even clear a mega out then donate the ore to projects I liked. Thus allowing those creators to continue doing what they loved and all was well in DU. I still feel rudderless after that loss. This is your least fun implementation of mining and you want that to be the basis of a rebuild? I don't know what to say.

Game launch - that's generally the time when access is given to the general public.
Does the general public have access to DU? Yes - I'm a paying customer since May 2021.

The "game launch" you speak of is just a marketing ploy. It is not the grand opening of the flood gates to the millions of eagerly awaiting enthusiasts who did not manage to secure a limited spot in a closed beta. In other words, few players are waiting to jump to DU when it "launches".

For Dual Universe the beginning of the "Open beta" was its true and only Game Launch.

So for the people playing DU right now this "game launch" has as much relevance as does the rain over the ocean for the fishes swimming in it.
My conservative estimate for a split between current players and new players post-"launch" is 90/10. As in 90% of players will be the existing players.

When you see it that way, you'll understand that screwing 90% of the user-base for the expectations of the 10% will be a stake through NQ's heart.

Game launch - that's generally the time when access is given to the general public.
Does the general public have access to DU? Yes - I'm a paying customer since May 2021.

The "game launch" you speak of is just a marketing ploy. It is not the grand opening of the flood gates to the millions of eagerly awaiting enthusiasts who did not manage to secure a limited spot in a closed beta. In other words, few players are waiting to jump to DU when it "launches".

For Dual Universe the beginning of the "Open beta" was its true and only Game Launch.

So for the people playing DU right now this "game launch" has as much relevance as does the rain over the ocean for the fishes swimming in it.
My conservative estimate for a split between current players and new players post-"launch" is 90/10. As in 90% of players will be the existing players.

When you see it that way, you'll understand that screwing 90% of the user-base for the expectations of the 10% will be a stake through NQ's heart.

Game launch - that's generally the time when access is given to the general public.
Does the general public have access to DU? Yes - I'm a paying customer since May 2021.

The "game launch" you speak of is just a marketing ploy. It is not the grand opening of the flood gates to the millions of eagerly awaiting enthusiasts who did not manage to secure a limited spot in a closed beta. In other words, few players are waiting to jump to DU when it "launches".

For Dual Universe the beginning of the "Open beta" was its true and only Game Launch.

So for the people playing DU right now this "game launch" has as much relevance as does the rain over the ocean for the fishes swimming in it.
My conservative estimate for a split between current players and new players post-"launch" is 90/10. As in 90% of players will be the existing players.

When you see it that way, you'll understand that screwing 90% of the user-base for the expectations of the 10% will be a stake through NQ's heart.

Terrible slanted poll.  There are really only 2 achieved asset options, weighted with negative connotation.  No wipe is necessary, envy is a weakness.

Hyperbole much?
 
Let's say you do the most expensive mission (9.5M/trip), you need about 95 accounts for that warp beacon schematic. That means 100 packages = 50 Extended XL containers, and just 171Kt for the packages, add containers, engines, shields, brakes. Can we even make a ship with those specs?
 
Then we need to log in 190 times with userid/password add mission, get package, deliver package, transfer quanta. Switching between two accounts is already a massive pain in the behind!
 
Now, let's say that we get all the stuff into and out of orbit with multiple elevator(s)/trips and a massive space only ship, you should never fly directly between two points, so a significant detour, won't make the trip 5 hours, add to that all the lifting and dropping into orbit and that will take a LOT longer, not to mention a significant amount of infra structure. The biggest issue with that though isn't the time or the investment that it takes, it's the huge ship that says to pirates, kill me! Such an operation is obvious from the ground if you hang around a bit at Aphelia or go looking above, in space. You can easily start taking out those ships. You want it stopped? Go pirating yourself!
 
I'm pretty sure a single player/account could make a 100+ million quanta per week, if playing it save, if not, 175 million quanta isn't outside of the realm of possibilities. Pirates spending that amount of effort on a single small ship wouldn't happen often...
 
And are those beta keys 'free'? People paid for them through working as a streamer or paying for them via the KS. For some buying a subscription for a 100 accounts is chump change. But managing those 100 accounts would be an absolute pain imho! Beyond a handful of accounts it becomes more akin to work...
 
And why does this not actually happen, beyond your mathhammer mind skills? Have you seen the recent prices for Warp Beacons? If what you said is actually happening, we wouldn't have so few Warp Beacons available and the price wouldn't have (over the last month) doubled. People would have setup huge Warp Beacon factories a month after the mission system was introduced, that would only have increased production in the months that would follow...
 
If someone wants to spacetruck 24/7/365, then let them. If someone wants to build, manufacture, design, mine, pvp, etc. 24/7/365, let them.

There is no problem at all. Its literally a post-scarcity market utopia when the costs of manufactured goods is less than the cost of materials. It just can't get any better than that.

Your post is a triumph, I'm making a note here - HUGE SUCCESS!
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction!

Your post is a triumph, I'm making a note here - HUGE SUCCESS!
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction!

I had a similar premise in my head cannon. The difference was that humanity entrusted AI to see us through the cosmos until we arrived at a habitable planet. Afterwards, we were supposed to be reconstituted and slowly introduced to the new seat of human civilization they had set up for us.
 
Unfortunately, humanity’s old grudges and prejudices reared their ugly heads again and our benefactors wiped the slate clean after it was determined that if we remembered our former lives, we would surely destroy ourselves vying for supremacy.
 
After numerous small batch social experiments (like GLaDoS in portal lol) it was determined that our memories must be erased and all “unsafe” history deleted for our protection. What a mind fudge it would be to learn that we were actually the XXXth attempt at rebuilding humanity, but aphelia time and time again wipes us out because we became unworthy and self destructive.
 
That would give a lore reason for us not having talents at the start of the game, along with any hand holding after being rezzed the first time. It would also explain any mysterious ruins we’ve found, without actually having to introduce aliens. Why things we encounter seem advanced beyond our present capabilities, yet strangely intuitive and familiar.
 
Over time, we would uncover the truth about what aphelia had done to us and be forced to align with her or rebel/go off world to assert our autonomy.

+1 Great insight. Being attacked by a PvP'er during a mission must be an exception, not the normal. Anything else would just make running missions pointless.
 
These new rules seem to give PvP'er all the good cards when it comes to missions (just like they already have with asteroid mining), since haulers must now not only build ships for hauling but also defense. Making the ship even heavier, more expensive to lose and not optimal (min/maxed) for any task. I.e haulers are left with all the risk for a payout, and PvP'ers win big with minimal risk.
 
"But why not just have someone protect your hauling ship, you ask? Great for community driven game play!"
Sure, if NQ's goal is to make the cost of safely running missions so expensive that only orgs and alts can make money that is a great idea. And how many people are going to want to be AFK for hours at the time running protection for a hauler?
 
The short answer here is that there are to few players, and that NQ are trying the force the few that are still left into a particular type of game play. Which is going to lead to some very predictable and not good results in my opinion (death by a thousand cuts). Especially when you consider the selling point that initially attracted most players was "make your own game"..

Is 20.000km/h the slowest it will go? Or will it go down even further if the ship is heavier? If a very heavy ship goes close to 0km/h, the system is very broken imho. It already feels completely broken with the speed nerf, the stasis, and the propriatory pvp systems some corps have already developed.
 
I understand why the lowered the speed for one of those large packages, it's because it would make interception way more likely by pvp ships. Then add the already pvp systems in place that some pvp corps run (scripts), AND stasis.. It's going to make pvp a LOT easier... What NQ seems to forget is that the reason why pvp vs haulers is now so bad is because of there just are not so many targets, increase travel time by 50% and you'll get even less targets that come across the target zones. Then there are the haulers that just give up, as they can't make the hauls anymore in the time it takes, as it doesn't line up with their game time... When IF player count ever spikes and there are a LOT more PVPers that hunt haulers, this system would make the hauler loop impossible, haulers leave, no haulers to pvp on, pvpers leave...
 
I think the stasis weapons are a great addition to the game. I also think it needs a counter module. Speed changes in space feel bad imho. I also think that there are other ways to discourage 20 character haulers, imho it should be cost of the ship. PVPers should be easily able to identify the LARGE ships, those should have a small fortune of engines on them to move all the stuff, it's a far better payout then just attacking a small single haul ship. But honestly, I suspect that the PVP corps themselves already run those trade routes with huge ships... Most of the 'solutions' by players for the hauling 'problem' are just as much full of holes as the NQ solution though. This is a complex problem that requires a complex solution that scales well, I suspect that all of the solutions proposed just don't scale well at all.
 
Wipe: I just assume there won't be a wipe-wipe, as that would create such a sh!testorm that NQ should just close the servers now, as the bad publicity we would certainly generate (just true statements in reviews everywhere, so no libel cases) would make very short work of any playerbase they might attract. And that's just the sane folks that work within the law (please stay within the law!)...

Yes! I gave up on asteroid mining because its all just little pockets here and there.

It would also be fun if there were ship drills, so we could have real mining ships. We used to grind down entire asteroids in Space Engineers with drill-behemoths.
Also the asteroids in Space Engineers were much more lucrative, sometimes 80% of the whole asteroid would be useful ore. In DU asteroids seem 80% rock.

My first and last meganode of Chromite (2.3ml) is the foundation of my current well-being in DU. There is no "big score" anymore, and its sad.

It would be super fun if we could get mega nodes on asteroids. Make them rare but possible. The game loop of exploring for a mega was a super fun loop. Players really want the possibility to hit a huge score it keeps them engaged longer. Mega nodes where that in DU and some fun went with them. Mining a mega node over the week the asteroids is in game would bring this lost fun back. 

Wow, that brings back some memories. Nothing like Pink Floyd for some deep philosophy. 🙂

Problem is that even if everyone "restarts" at the same place, within a month the front runners will be so far ahead that they are actually behind you (possibly shooting at you)

Somewhere with-in these lyrics lies the answer:
 
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
  Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells

They should add wormholes in pvp space, where players can take a short cut through the larger expanses, at the risk of getting engaged in PvP in and around these areas.
 
That way, haulers can get from point a to b faster, but they’re basically much easier to find by pirates. More people will arm themselves or hire escorts, if it means shaving a lot of time. I imagine slow boaters would be less of a target, because they’re harder to find, so a longer trip generally would mean lower risk.

The wormholes would be their own instances, naturally. They would be a winding corridor or sci-fi gobblety gook that require you to actually make flight corrections, or you risk hitting the outer walls of it and getting ejected back out into normal space and taking significant damage. This should in effect create an artificial speed limit to them to account for course corrections, and make PvP more likely.
 
You could also throw in a few ship wrecks in there from time to time.

And decreasing the max speed is going to attract more players how? It's not like you can say "the game is finally balanced" and millions of players just show up. The only thing achieved by taking away things that people could do before is people leaving. Nerf paradigm is not the only strategy to balance things. Buff paradigm can be used to balance things instead.

How about instead of speed nerfs we get speed buffs by over-driving the engines up to 130% throttle to a final speed of 39,000km/h but with a trade-off of losing the engine HP starting at over 100% throttle during acceleration continually until it breaks. Smaller engines could over-drive for longer than the bigger ones. The buff speed of 39,000km/h drops off gradually to 30,000km/h if throttle is not at 130%. Different "flavors" of engines would have different rates of HP loss when over-driven. i.e. Military can be over-driven for considerably longer than the Basic.

Thanks NQ!

Just wanted to say that the Mining Unit mini-game is so much snappier now and the transition-skip is great!
It feels like my FPS went up overall, and the sound changes are also nice and crisp i.e. walking on various surfaces and refilling fuel tanks.

I figured out the corp slots and assigned them after a bit of fiddling. I still wish there was a way to see personal construct slots somewhere.

Great work, huzzah!

And decreasing the max speed is going to attract more players how? It's not like you can say "the game is finally balanced" and millions of players just show up. The only thing achieved by taking away things that people could do before is people leaving. Nerf paradigm is not the only strategy to balance things. Buff paradigm can be used to balance things instead.

How about instead of speed nerfs we get speed buffs by over-driving the engines up to 130% throttle to a final speed of 39,000km/h but with a trade-off of losing the engine HP starting at over 100% throttle during acceleration continually until it breaks. Smaller engines could over-drive for longer than the bigger ones. The buff speed of 39,000km/h drops off gradually to 30,000km/h if throttle is not at 130%. Different "flavors" of engines would have different rates of HP loss when over-driven. i.e. Military can be over-driven for considerably longer than the Basic.

Limiting speed in space means further gamifying  Dual Univeerse in order to appease the pewpew crowd.
 
Speed in space is limited .. to the speed of light. obviously getting up there is pretty much impossible but the very simple laws of physics would remain in place. Any object shoudl be able to hit the same max speed depending on it's ability to generate enough force to get it there. High Mass objects (size is really irrelevant here) should need more time and/or more thrust to get there but they still should have the  ability to.
 
Limiting speed by core size will also mean you have to start creating all sorts of additional mechanics and checks to prevent someone from "cheating the system" by making a small construct very heavy. By simply adhering to the laws of physics you only have to deal with one factor , mass, to achieve the same..  You add XL guns (with high mass) to an XS core? sure, but that means you will not have the room to fit the XL engines you need to move that mass and even if you do, the combination of two elements with high mass means you still limit yourself.
 
NQ continues to overthink and over engineer mechanics while the solutions that they could use are far more elegant and yes, more efficient in a good many ways.

I respect your argument, but I personally do not feel the need for artificial constraints to compel community. For me, the sense of existing community, is one of the main reasons that I am drawn to this game in perpetuity. 
 
I will draw a parallel here anecdotally. When my son used to complain "I'm bored!" my response was always "then be more interesting!"
If you feel that DU lacks commitment, then find a purpose and commit yourself to it!

The part where i'm doing the actual calibrations is no fun at all.  Having enough ore and quanta to do what i want in game, is fun though.  But to have fun with the ore and the quanta, it has to have value in the game.  And to have value, it has to be hard to get.  So the part that's not fun, is essential to the part that is fun.
 
When you are calibrating an MU, the moment that you click the START button, you spend one Charge, and immediately receive the base calibration gain.  So as soon as you click the START button, you can immediately click the X in the top right corner to end the mini game.  You don't even have to wait for the screen to finish loading.  Then you have to click a conformation dialog box, then close the main calibration window and you're done.  
 
If the base calibration isn't enough to get me to 100%, then i'll play the mini game sometimes, but i put very little effort into it.  I drop a large circle in the corner closest to where the drone starts, if the hot spot isn't there i just keep dropping large circles, based on where i think it might be.  If i haven't found it by the 3rd circle, and the location isn't obvious, that usually means it's on the edge somewhere, and i just give up and pick the highest spot visible.  It's just not worth it to me to waste time thinking about the mini game.  I just blast through it and move on, if i do it at all.
 
My schedule isn't anything fancy or complicated either, i just wrote down the days of the week, Monday thru Sunday, on a piece of paper, and then assigned a cluster of 7 territories to each day.  I have two clusters on Alioth, one on Jego, and one on Lacobus.  I calibrate everything on Alioth in person, and i calibrate the outer planets by VR on workdays, and i pick up ore and calibrate in person on my days off.  There are not enough days in the week to hit all 4 clusters twice, so one day i have to double up, so i try to save a few extra charges for that day.
 
Pre Demeter i probably spent less time mining.  But i also had a lot less ore and Quanta.  I might have been able to make, in a day, what i make in a week now.  But now i make that every week.  Whether i feel like it or not.  It's a bit more work overall, but it's a system that works better for me.  I like being able to spread out the pain, instead of spending a whole day mining, once a month.  i spend a few minutes every day.
 
 
 
 

Here's an idea on-top of the proposed changes that would make things much smoother with regards to Org cores:

Have a "Slot Exchange Market" where buy/sell orders of "1 slot/mo" can be traded.

That way players can put up their unused Org slots for a nice monthly income, and Orgs can quickly buy emergency slots.

Maybe even allow Org Legates to set a rule to auto-purchase "market slots" @ "set price" if Org is running short on the next core check.

Dear NQ,

I had to make a forum account to make this post, but it's been brewing for a long time:

It is painfully, nakedly, embarrassingly obvious that the latest changes to Dual Universe were dictated by factors outside of the current game play or the community needs/requests. You are not hiding that you're dealing with server costs - whether computations or monetary - and removing tunnels, taxing tiles, limiting voxel complexity, and now limiting cores are all remedies that seem to be aimed at your daily AWS bill.

AWS is NOT the right infra for DU to use. Any working IT professional knows that AWS is only good for:
a) Prototyping
b) Established businesses with healthy margins and relatively static costs, with occasional high-demand bursts of money-bringing activity.

Dual Universe is out of prototyping, but the business is not established and your AWS costs seem to be ballooning relative to your revenue. How else can the recent changes be explained?

I don't think anybody asked you to remove the hand-mining completely, I was expecting auto-miners to just pick up the ore from the tile so I don't have to. And once it's gone, we pack up and move the MUs to a new tile. There is no justification for taxes on tiles at all: not from the game lore perspective, nor for any problems for players. If anything the only request from players was to deal with towers that are above >1Km height, and then you auto-HQ'd them at the last moment.

And do you think anybody wants their constructs to be more plain? I get it - you compress the constructs for storage, and the more complex structures don't compress as small. But that's none of my problem as a paying customer, and I certainly don't want to hear about it and I don't want the game I'm paying for to change for the worse because of your failure to build an RL business model or to change me enough money.

And now with the core limit changes you're completely over the top. I'm sick and tired of you dumping your problems on us. Maybe you're all eating instant noodles and nobody got their X-mas bonus, I'm sorry about that, but you don't need to punish players for it. There are plenty of people who would pay more money if you could just show that you'll use it for the benefit of the players:

1. Hire a creative director who will oversee the direction of the game from start to finish. We need lore, we need story, we need immersion. Most of all we need the changes to make sense in the context of the game, and not make us worry about your RL business model.

2. Hire a technical director who will oversee the transition of your infrastructure to a self-hosted or dedicated-hosted model with CDN integration like CloudFlare that can be used to deliver unlimited game assets over high speed HTTP for a laughable cost of $200/mo. Run from AWS, it's killing you, like it has killed many-many start-ups.

3. Hire an economic director, or two, who would oversee your RL business model and the in-game business models that are available to players and the over-all economy and its direction.

I understand that you'll need money for all of that, but you have a very intelligent game that attracts mature and established players, who can save you financially if only you can renew our hope that you truly intend to make the best space game possible. You have an excellent start so far, but you've hit a rut that would require creative financial models to overcome.

We as paying customers don't want to lose any game features and complexity, ever. Just like we wouldn't want our own house basements to get randomly filled with dirt. We'd pay for it to stay dirt-free, but you just won't give us the option.

We want you to build the best space game ever and we want it to become popular and we want to be able to sell/trade currency and accounts down the line for real money like all successful MMOs do. There are so many aspects of monetization that you're not capitalizing, yet you're obviously suffering an urgent financial crisis. Worse off you're wringing yourself and the player base with endless stress, which can seemingly be resolved, if only you could stand back and reassess what it is you are planning to create.

Please take notice of this pivotal moment and open up the honey, even if it comes with an increased price tag of multiple tier VIP memberships, paid core limits, paid talent boost implants and so on. Use whatever remaining hardcore player base you have left to soar on top, not sink to the bottom.
 
Good luck!