kbruderTech

Slow and Steady wins the race. You guys are doing great works. Thanks to the team.

Greetings all, Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a longtime MMO fan since UO in 97. I only play MMOs. I have backed several from the early crowd funding stages and only play one at a time. I am not a hardcore player due to having a full time job and raising a family. I just started playing Dual Universe a month before launch. I had heard about it a long time ago and thought to myself, "This game looks amazing". So far I have 18 days playtime logged. I have only one account and one character in game. I play using the native client, not via Steam. I come from a professional systems architecture/cloud computing and networking background. I hope that provides some good context to this post and any others that I may post in the future and speaks to my level of objectivity as a seasoned player of MMOs. First, I would like to congratulate Novaquark for the massive effort that went into this passion project. You guys really went out on a limb and took a massive risk with choosing the old-school way of funding your game with subscriptions. Bonus points for no cash shop, no cosmetics, no P2W element (perhaps besides the ability to multibox by paying for multiple subscriptions). Over the years as the MMO genre moved towards P2W, cash shops, loot boxes, etc., I recall considering the industry in a race to the bottom and thought eventually all game producers would succumb to such short sided greed. Many of them did; some of them that I backed and played exclusively. Most of them are but a faint memory and no longer exist. Just when all was lost, some game producers caught onto this dynamic and started announcing early access to projects that promised a return to the more traditional models free of P2W where players could feel confident in not having their efforts rendered meaningless. In lieu of P2W elements, players could support the game by purchasing strictly cosmetic items, thus the micro transaction model came into being. Unfortunately, this drained development focus from improving QoL and game mechanics and fixing known issues toward creating an never ending and vast offering of cash shop items. Many of these projects also died off leaving a sort of virtual doll house where a functioning game of skill full of meaningful social interaction used to be. That brings us to today, where the zeitgeist is returning to its origin with the original UO subscription model, steep progression curve and PvP based endgame (without loosing it all each time you die of course!). Dual Universe is not the only game to revert to the model, several other titles being announced of late are going this route as well. So to my first point, thanks Novaquark for having a backbone and sticking to your vision, especially in this gaming era of entitlement and “dead game” FUD. Thank you for keeping the focus on game mechanics, in game economy, and QoL items such as grid snapping. Second, I would like to add my input to the “dead game” FUD. This sentiment is present across every MMO at this moment in time. Its almost a meme at this point. There is not a single game that doesn’t have a video or post about how their respective game is dying. There is no game of any genre, let alone MMOs that has a strong uptrend in concurrent player spanning months. Most people will buy a game and play it for around 40 hours then move on to something new. To put the contemporary gaming market in perspective, when many of us were told to stay at home or lost our jobs over the past couple of years, we started playing more games more often. Now that societies of the Western world have sent us all back into the world, we are seeing the number of concurrent players drop off on a YoY and MoM basis. Additionally, all games experience a massive dropoff in the months after launch. To base the overall success of Dual Universe on concurrent player metrics (from the portion of player that use Steam) sampled over a handful of weeks is absurdly short sided. If we are being honest, no player knows how many people are perma-quitting or how many new subscriptions are incoming. Claiming that there will be no playerbase within a matter of months with no data to back that up makes one appear disingenuous and spiteful, especially when doing within the in-game global chat. Third, I would like to represent the contingent of players that agree with the recent economy changes. It seems like most of us are busy playing the game compared to the number of players spending their gaming hours complaining, shading and dooming on every available outlet so I thought I would present an alternative perspective here. If a player based their entire strategy, talent pool and identity into the mining unit trade, I can certainly empathize with how devastating that must be to have the carpet pulled from beneath you like that. However, give it some time and you will see that the economy will adjust to the demand for ore and you may even profit heavily in the long run. I chatted with player who claimed they were deleting T1 ores because it “wasn’t worth the storage”. There is something wrong with that and NQ knew it. What they did was react using insights that we as players don’t have access to. The developers aren’t clueless when it comes to this as many players have claimed ad nauseam. In fact, this is the first game I have ever played where the developers can effectively communicate their understanding of virtual economies. Clearly every one on the small development team has been hand picked for their integrity and knowledge. Lastly, as a player that didn’t play for years before launch, this game has an incredible amount to offer a person who wants to play in an immersive open single instance of an infinitely expandable universe containing multiple worlds and local economies. It allows pure and beautiful creativity within a very stringent set of constraints (The best artists are driven by constraint, this is an actual concept that is accepted within the fine art community). The best part is, we don’t have to kill animals, zombies, aliens or other mindless AI mobiles to progress. That is honestly the most refreshing thing about this game. I seriously became desensitized to killing literal millions of humanoid and animal representations over the course of my life. If people feel unfulfilled with out being able to kill AI, there are thousands of games where you can do this in perpetuity alone or with your pals. Thanks again Novaquark for delivering the perfect game to players like myself. even if I am the only person on earth who likes this game, I still thank you and consider myself fortunate to have discovered it. Keep strong and never give in to greed or angry masses. If you guys keep it up, I am certain you will always have a paying player base even if its not in the millions.