le_souriceau

The market lag is just the tip of the iceberg so to speak, for a much larger problem. Market 6 and 7 are just the early warning signs for a much larger problem that will also affect player controlled based tiles and large gatherings, if and when the games gets a larger player base. Anyone who experienced 'lag city' know what I am talking about.
 
So despite what has been said by NQ, D6&7 shows that this game will not able to handle community driven large scale cities, space stations etc. And while the long-term solution of course is to make the entire game faster and more efficient, there will also always be need for 'crowd control' functionality to manage community based long-term gatherings.
 
So many of us fail to see why NQ has ignored this for so long, when there are simple and effective solutions that can be applied that will mostly fix the short term problem of D6&7 (while waiting for the long-term solution that may not even be possible) and also be useful long-term for player driven markets etc in the future.

Without avid PvP scene (despite all difficulties to establish it) this game is good as dead.
 
Because hardcore peaceful players (who can do their thing for years) are serious minority, more casual peaceful players have generaly "lifespan" of several months, they grind, do all what they wanted (or have patience to) and quit, often forever, because story is exausted for their short attention span.
 
So, its mostly up to more or less involved PvP players to pay big chunk of "keeping game alive" money, with draggin in buddies, alts, ocasional returns to "check new combat balance", etc.

Looks like he is now in some comfortable french-only bubble, fantasizing about "civilization building" like in old good times.
 
Why?
 
 

This video...
 
They. Talk. Literaly. About. Another. Game.
 

This video...
 
They. Talk. Literaly. About. Another. Game.
 

This video...
 
They. Talk. Literaly. About. Another. Game.
 

I'm pretty sure we'll starting seeing the real JC now.. with no inhibitions about sharing his dream.
And with it more clarity about why NQ is  where they are.. in more detail than the recent blogposts..
 
Biggest problem I see is while JC no longer call the shots, there is JC fans still inside who carry the torch, believing their fallen leader was just "misunderstood"
 
Some of the things said by JC or confirmed by him from what the interviewer asks or says here puts an interesting spin on things.

Yes seems like "dev-time" isn't so precious after all when its for the french.

I think not much of "haters" left to enjoy too : )
 
Anyway, stay in relative touch, Blaze, there is other space game around and their worlds not that big to not meet again.

I myself kinda in limbo state myself with trust crisis, realisation how JC shamelessly lied playing with generaly empty hand as now revealed when going to release and even later "no red flags" (while he perfectly knew real situation), grows on me everyday. 

So I finally make the choice to leave the game behind me for now. I really do not see how the current company will be able to make this work and I feel their attitude and overall outlook on what they are doing will help any chance of a revival of the viability of the project. And no amount of pushing the buttons to try and see some movement will have any effect I believe. Maybe I'm wrong but I do not think so.. I see no reason to spend more time supporting a company when I do not see much of anything to make me believe they can and will support the game.
 
So there, all you haters can rejoice as I'm out.. been a good few years but unless things change drastically, this game will not make it.
 
And no, you can't have my stuff..
 

I see what you mean. That depends of course...
 
if we're talking pvp meta ships, no, this statement is not true. Those things are really expensive to build. And they are expensive to repair. I'm not sure people comprehend how much mining and man hours it takes to build one of the golden ships from Boo's Gold Armada. I'm not sure people understand how much it takes to repair them after a "battle". No one wants to lose one of those, so pvp battles tend to be more about whoever gets pushed out into the safezone first, battle of attrition. Additionally, if we talk about piracy as an easy win card, it's not like piracy is profitable, it mostly does not exist and the "piracy" you can do is very aids if you ask me, you'll spend more on fuel and waste more time and quanta pirating than if you were digging holes in the ground and selling to bots. I don't think it makes much sense to divide people into pvpers and builders... pvpers are also builders, whereas you're probably talking about a subset of players that are purely builders I'm assuming. PvP builders are just more specifically focused on indy buildings, ship building for pvp, and station building rather than purely builders who want to avoid pvp. Have you looked at the Foundry for example? That is a station built by a pvp group. There are also others, some really fancy. Talents don't matter too much in meta pvp, again it's mostly about ship stamina rather than who can shoot further. Repair talents help though, repair engineers are really important in fights. Smart pvp ship builders make ships that last longer and take more shots.... but they also mine a lot in order to repair.  
 
I see. And I agree. If that's where the conversation headed before I mentioned this was a civilization building game then no comment. If it was the case though... then... I think games should (and they do) take inspiration from real life but they should not mimic real life. And I'm mainly talking about the fact that in real life things are cohesive, there are causes and effects, stuff just doesn't appear out of thin air. In a game, this happens all the time, but it only makes sense if it is cohesive within the world it is trying to build. The cohesion is where I make the parallel between real life and games. I do not like that some games mimic real life where it becomes a second job. In terms of DU and civilization mechanics, this is why I already mentioned elsewhere on this forum that before you set out to make such a game with such "grandiose visions", maybe you should start with first principles and ask what civilization is, what are its characteristics, what are its causes. Once you have the key ingredients, then you think about choosing a few important ones that you can actually gamify and make a cohesive yet fun system out of. And I'm simply saying this never happened. It doesn't feel like it did anyway, since the game exhibits absolutely no civilization building mechanics or progressions. NQ should probably rethink that "vision"  

@Gangolf Ovaert
I'd agree with your thoughts. It seems NQ is not realizing that many existing and a potentially much larger future number of their player base would not be able to afford the kind of system needed to run DU comfortably but can (and do) use Shadow as a viable alternative to owning a decent spec gaming PC.
 
It's just very unfortunate they appear to just brush this aside as "not a high priority". And that means they ignore a potential problem in the code that may at any time trigger a much broader problem. It really is part of the bigger issue with NQ, having a very short term outlook on development of the game and not really setting the priorities which will allow them to move forward faster over time. If it's not a quick fix, it's not a priority it seems.

How many players are logged in at once. Why are you afraid to tell us? Is it because it's that bad? Eve tells us who is in the launcher, and that game Is considered small and niche.  Just tell us how many people are logged in at once during primetime.

You have zero means to actually come to that %. 
 
So this comment is totally your uninformed opinion, or worse, your attenpt to manipulate the argument with a clear lie. 
 
I also talk to ppl that play the game from new players to old alpha backers. None agree that the current situation is fair or that they should not wipe. 
 
But even if your % was true. NQ needs to do what is best for the game. Not what the majority of the players wany. 

I have the strong feeling, that if you realy wanted to avoid a wipe, even a partial one.. you should have (re)acted accordingly to the bugs/ flawed mechanics you introduced over the time.
E.g. giving away schematics for a tiny fraction of their price..and now you probably even 'compensate' the abuser, making them provit twice. You could have done a rollback to an earlier backup immediately. (i hope there are backups at all..)
Or the mechanic that chars can use infinite territory scanners simultaniously, enabling orgs to scan and claim whole moons in short time. There should be a limit, probably skillable to an higher ammount of scanners..like 6-9..IMO.
 
But overall the existing world now just leaves the taste of growing imbalance.
I know that the no-wipe-promise is still high valued at NQ, but i honestly dont see how you want to correct the 'system' in a meaningfull fair way..specially for player that come way later, if you aim for a release mid 2022, and all they'll find claimed tiles and billionaires.
 
On a side note..i don't feel that mining units will do any good to that situation.

Hopefully the devs already learn from the last event how crap they are.

Because coming from years of MC, I can say, that builders stamina is relativly finite resource.
 
For sure, DU has very mature audience with hugely superior attention spans, then MC youngsters (on average), but even they have some soft-cap limits on how long they can be occupied with building. Obviously resting and revigoration occures, but general trajectory is to some sort of creative end, when you done all you wanted/tired doing it/catched "priority" interests somewhere else.
 
It was discusussed I think ad nauseam here, that while builders are very convinient part of community to use in pseudo-marketing NQ so adores, they not demographic who can really "carry" game financialy.

Its I kinda messed with logic of my post/was in hurry, making MC example that was used against me in way : )
 
Let me throw some clarifications.
 
1) Defining builders. Most of MC players (statisticly -- over this millions upon millions) surely built something, fooled around with blocks, but generaly what can be called "builders" both in MC and in DU -- its same minority who go into it really serious (at least for some time).  MC just allows enter more causualy, but for most people it stops somewhere before building cities or giant fancy statues in creative for 1000s of hours. 
 
2) Yes, I spend several years playing very activly (doing also some admin stuff), but its more of expection. 99% people I ever seen playing around me gone. So retention is not that fantastic, but flow of new ones was massive (hype).
 
3) Also, its was not question of subs or even for most people bying of legit copy (in my country) back then. Changes things too a bit.
 
So, to re-iterate (and also correct it to bit softer form) -- I doubt, they building (as primary thing) can carry niche hardrore eve-like mmo with sub. Or something like that. Usualy such things carried by PvP.

Well, its not that hard "guessing" math.
 
Currently like 38 k Sanctuary claims. Its safe to assume, that 99% of legit new players put their TCU on. Some obviously just alt placings, but they are hard to pinpoint, so lets be super generous and just ignore them (this also balance some cases, when people not placed TCU for some reason intentionaly or just quited at start).
 
So, we had 38 k "players" (both from KS era and new ones, some alts) who achieved stage of placing TCU.
 
This brings 2 questions.
 
1) How much of this number can be considered "active" (and to what extent), because obviously, there is a lot of "dead" ones.
2) What is concurrency ratio for numbers left.
 
My guess, that we have several thousands players still reasonably "active" (loggin in regulary, even if for short time) and they form several hundreds concurrent (at least in prime time).
 
In short, game not totaly empty, but population is very low for healthy MMO.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

An asteroid puzzle race is just another race to the bottom for this game.
 
It should be obvious that anything puzzle or time based will translate into gain for big org's and the 0.1% of most dedicated players, at the expense of new players and the larger average player base that don't have the time or interest to live and breath DU 24/7.
 
Same with broadcasting asteroid locations. Org's already have the advantage in numbers increasing their chances for finding asteroids worth mining, and now they are also going to be told where to travel to kick out any smaller group of players that worked hard to find a good asteroid?
 
Why does NQ keep making these basic fundamental mistakes over and over again?

Yeah just buy guy who proposing this puzzles all the time some 300 pages sudoku book and incancereate him in toiled cabin with it. Enough of this crap.
 
What we need is physcial (persistant) asteroid belt with some randomization and regen cabability (per exemple by zone updating when there is no players present around) + ore scanner. No warp around in big radius.
 
 

Exactly. Incremental HTML DOM updates is one of the fundamental techniques that makes modern interactive web pages possible with reasonable resource drain on smartphones etc.
So the current LUA Screen implementation is fundamentally flawed. And now NQ is blaming the technology (that works great for billions of users btw.), instead of their own bad implementation that probably was some early "just make it work as quickly as possible so we have something to show, and then we fix it later" deal that ended up being the 'final' version.
 
And now they want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and start over using classic "Not Invented Here" reasoning to try and fix already solved problems.
This makes my blood boil, since this type of reasoning and reinvention for the sake on reinventing, is exactly why this game is where it is today..
 

At current state of affairs, the most sensible thing NQ can do with DU is what  Square Enix did with FF XIV, which to this date is considered the biggest and probably only truly succesful comeback of a mmo in history. For those who are not familiar with the situation, the initial release in 2010 was an utter broken mess despite 5 years of development, In 2012 Square shut down all the servers. After complete redesign and another year in closed alpha testing they came back in 2013 with what had become as the most successful mmo besides wow (22 mil copies sold)
 
If NQ is as commited to the DU project as they're declaring they are, and if NQ can secure sufficient funding,  instead of patching a one hole to have two more sprout in its place, give the current iteration a closure in a grand world ending event and close this current technical alpha test.
 
In followup to that, spend whatever time you need to parse and process all the feedback us, dedicated customers have been giving you for the past 2 years.  There are some great ideas there, they really bad ones, and even some that are truly out there.  That please take you time to research those that came before you such as Freespace, Elite, Earth and Beyond and Eve just to name a few. See what made them great as well as what made them fail in their respective ambitions.
 
I believe you convinced most of us you can make the technology work.
 
Now is the time to convince us all you can actually design and make a game.
 
And please, please for the love of Spock, hire actual Producer, and a Creative lead that has shipped at least one game in the last 10 years.
 
If you can credibly show us you can do that, i'm pretty sure most of us who stuck around would not hesitate to throw another 60 bucks your way at the right side of the tunel

Without avid PvP scene (despite all difficulties to establish it) this game is good as dead.
 
Because hardcore peaceful players (who can do their thing for years) are serious minority, more casual peaceful players have generaly "lifespan" of several months, they grind, do all what they wanted (or have patience to) and quit, often forever, because story is exausted for their short attention span.
 
So, its mostly up to more or less involved PvP players to pay big chunk of "keeping game alive" money, with draggin in buddies, alts, ocasional returns to "check new combat balance", etc.