Maxim Kammerer

They wanted to build a game engine and hoped that the players will use it to build the game. Neither of them turned out all right.

You guys don't get it...
For ppl like the OP, the word socialism is not what a definition says.
It is an insult. It is 100% synonymous of the enemy, of hell, of everything that ppl should not be.

A certain group of countries created this hate against this word to justify wars and commercial deals.
Now that the Cold War is over, a certain group of political activists use that word to fulfill their agenda.

Their agenda is simple, it is to discriminate everything associated with the word. To make any idea related to the word "undebatable" because it is evil. And everyone that does not agree that the word is evil is also evil.
In summary, the end of constructive debate...
 
 
But back to this topic.
The op lives in this environment where "socialism" is evil.
And tried to associate some DU mechanic with "evil" to make it "undebatable"
I don't believe the OP knows what "socialism" is in any definition, and I don't think the OP actually thinks his complaint is about socialism.
 
He just used the word to have an "impact" tittle and some "support" from similar players.

What you describe here is capitalism, not socialism. what that American told you is incorrect, stop listening to Americans, and educate yourself on the topic by doing your own research, you can literally google this. but I'll try and put it as simply as I can.
 
CAPITALISM: is when a "capitalist" owns and controls the resources and means of production, an can decide what to do with those resources.
 
So in an org, the Legate/ Capitalist takes ownership of the "Members/ Workers" resources, and they alone have the power to decide what to do with those resources.
 
 
 
SOCIALISM: is when the "workers" own and control the resources and means of production. an can decide what to do with those resources.
 
if Orgs where socialist, there would be NO "Legate/ Capitalist" , because "Members/ Workers" would own and control the resources and means of production, and they would collectively decide what to do with those resources.
 
 
That's the basics... you can research and learn more on your on. which I highly recommend.
 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
so·cial·ism /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/   noun noun: socialism a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.  
 
 
 
 

I think you need to educate yourself on what socialism actually is before making oddball suggestions like this.

Might be good, don't know.
But what I DO know is that I really don't like the voice of that woman ... she sounds like those clerks (in USA) who work at some store and always put an ARTIFICIAL SMILE and talk to you with a squeaky "sweet" voice but actually hate their job and are dead inside. Or like those hired female voiceover people for some Techno Channels on YouTube when you just FEEL that she absolutely has no idea about the subject matter and is just reading a script.
This one here also sounds as if she is smiling the whole time while explaining to us how to obliterate each other with capital ships and fighters, lol.

I’m all for third person camera elements placed on the outside of the ship that relay information inside. 
 
And As the elements are damaged, you lose 3rd person visibility externally. 
 
for example guns /radars could still come with cameras which could be used in lieu of free 3rd person camera. You could choose any such camera equipped system to be your external vantage point from a list of ship elements. 
 
Free 3rd person camera view should be for cinematic use only, recording fights and making trailers etc, it should lose all the cockpit/LUA access. 

If they have 20 accounts, it means they bought 4 Alpha or Beta accounts to get the 5 extra beta access keys. That's at least $240 they paid towards funding a game that is likely to go titsup at any moment.
 
moreover, they have to log into each of those accounts at least twice to do the missions... that's anywhere up to 3 minutes per account to log out and back in... twice...
lets call it 3 minutes per relog... 40 times... that's 120 minutes of sheer boredom plus travel time.  If they are willing to "play" that way then they will be the type of people that will tend to get rich anyway...

Why on earth would you paint a particular performance class of engine a particular and completely disparate colour?... makes little sense to me.
Quite literally sprinkling glitter on poo, but for some reason they don't let us choose which poo and what colour glitter we want to sprinkle.
If they were skins i'd be more inclined to have a positive opinion... as it is, this is just another minimum effort addition to the game.
 

Most of us called all this tone deafness out the moment they started mentioning what they were planning in 0.23. It was what, like a few weeks before the actual patch itself?
When they actually went ahead and delivered all the things that weren't wanted AND more in that patch I knew where this game was headed.
 
Some folks laughed and dismissed our voices back then, now we're all laughing at this trainwreck.
 
I still stand by my F2P or shutdown statement. I really can't see a viable comeback like this after all this time.

You can mine the environment.
 
 
In return, the environment can bore you.
 
Interactivity confirmed.

You can mine the environment.
 
 
In return, the environment can bore you.
 
Interactivity confirmed.

You can mine the environment.
 
 
In return, the environment can bore you.
 
Interactivity confirmed.

You can mine the environment.
 
 
In return, the environment can bore you.
 
Interactivity confirmed.

You can mine the environment.
 
 
In return, the environment can bore you.
 
Interactivity confirmed.

That's indeed a basic problem. There should be more restrictive rules for static and dynamic constructs (e.g. no floating voxels or elements or even complete static constructs, no flight elements completely covered with voxels but still being functional, no asymmetric lift or thrust without resulting torque and so on). Maybe it could even be possible to implement simple rules for structural analysis (as far as possible without decrerasing performance too much) making weak structures collapse or brake apart. That would open a market for those who are specialised in designing and optimising specific types of constructs.
 
However, implementing such rules would brake most existing constructs. That would be even worse than a full whipe and is therefore not going to happen in DU.

I understand your point, but the reality is that MC has proven that it can retain and grow a massive, massive audience of players.
 
You're saying you spent years in MC...that's really good retention and lends evidence to the idea that building is a viable niche. 
 
Everything about MC's demographics suggests that builders can carry a game financially. I mean...MC is among the most successful games in history. Yes, people get bored eventually, but that's true of every game ever, sub or MMO or otherwise. 
 
Nearly 30 million people bought Minecraft last year alone (2020)...DU won't get 30 million sales for its entire life. 
 
I'm not understanding the idea that builders can't carry a game financially because there's ample evidence in the industry to suggest otherwise. 

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. 

Yes. Even if you parked your stuff right in the middle of a market place platform and left it there for months...
 
even if you were blocking other people from landing on the platform...
 
even if you haven’t logged in for a quarter of a year and others’ numerous constructs were causing players’ computers to lag and their ship to plummet into the ground and explode...
 
even if you left automated scripts running that cause players’ computers to act up and throw errors into the LUA session panel every time they try to pass by...
 
even if it’s plastered with screens playing Rick Astley on loop...
 
even if something like a corrupted voxel in your ship caused their client to crash to desktop every time they visit the site. 
 
even if you pasted a randomly-generated, 24 character string that you could not possibly remember as your password, change your email address then delete the game from your hard drive... and swear never to touch the game again...
 
even then, at this moment in time: Your.stuffz.will.still.be.in.the.game
 
(I’m not saying *you* did all that, just giving an example) ?

It would be nice if we could build harvesters for surface ore.

How about implementing new ways to inject cash into the game other than removing ore by market bots? That would stop the excessive mining grind.

Honestly, NQ would need to work really hard to go FTP because micro-transactions require a carefully considered game design to balance properly.
 
It's important to have a great hook that invests the player and pulls them toward a MT -- right now, FTP players would follow the same pattern as paid beta subs. They'd stay long enough to litter their speeder somewhere. 
 
"Getting more players" isn't the only concern, it's keeping them. They got a lot of new players during beta's initial launch, but they couldn't retain them. Some paid for months or even a year and didn't play for more than a day or two. They'd rather throw away their money than keep trying; that says something about new player UX. 
 
If they went free-to-play tomorrow, they'd get many new players...but only to lose money and clutter the servers. There's nothing compelling new players to stick around -- this game's new player UX gets worse over time, not better. Their MT conversion rate would be abysmal -- they'd have players, but not revenue. 
 
DU doesn't actually need new players right now. It needs a solid new player UX and a way to retain those players. You can't monetize players (FTP or subs) if they can't get past the early stages of the game.

Comes with a free built in tracker so BOO knows where you are at all times.

For those that havent read:
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/22565-changes-to-lua-screen-units/
 
My entire range of products in-game is based on HTML screens and CSS animations. It would not be feasible to rewrite them in any amount of time that would make it worthwhile. The new LUA based drawing features are extremely limited. For example, a large part of what makes my Bacterium product look realistic is the use of CSS animation on SVGs. Most crucially, the ability to use existing skillset (HTML/CSS) and familiar tools (SVG creation outside of the game e.g. Adobe Illustrator) are what make my products possible within the already tight limitations of DU.
 
I don't want to be dramatic, because I know its important to be constructive when giving feedback but if you remove support for HTML on screens, I'm out. Hundreds of hours of work will have been wasted and the key element that attracted me to this game will have been lost.
 
HTML/CSS is an existing technology that attracts creators becuase they can use existing skillsets. Removing it is too greater loss. If anyone else feels this way, please comment below.
 
EDIT
Can I just give an example of the sort of thing I am regularly doing on screens so you can understand how unachievable it will be using the new LUA commands:
 
My Bacterium product (https://du-creators.org/makers/NoxCorp/ship/NoxCorp Bacterium) uses animated SVGs inside <DIV> containers that are then animated to move around and transformed in 3 dimensions using CSS. This can all be achieved in around 30,000 characters of HTML/SVG markup and CSS. There are no amount of "useful drawing commands" that can offer this kind of flexibility.

I would like to put my thoughts on the CEO change out there as I actually feel a lot of this aligns with what I have been saying would be good for the game for a long time.
 
Right now, DU was forced into an early public release for what many expect will be funding needs. And it did not work out. The short-term thinking and rushed implementation of features has only done one thing, cause more delays and waste dev time because a lot needs to be redone.
 
NQ, by means of JC, kept a brave face, and kept saying that all would be well, that there were no signs that they would not be able to meet the end of 2021 target for a full release. The list of features to be done as well as the immense mountain of technical debt, bugs to be squashed, optimization and polish to be done simply make a release in the true sense of the word at best unlikely for the end of 2021.
 
Now, the vision of JC for the game is great but poses a lot of challenges that are extremely hard if not impossible to overcome. The idea of implementing several vastly different playstyles and preferences in one world by itself is tough, the technical challenges remain huge. JC the visionary could and did dream of his game and how it would all come together while JC the CEO of NQ needed to temper expectations and bring that vision down to a manageable and viable level. And that IMO is where things went wrong.
 
 
When I backed the game, shortly after Kickstart ended, I was certain (and had no issue with) that NQ would not be able to hit the December 2018 release as it was clearly unrealistic for a game this scale. When Alpha opening to backers was delayed by several months and we then found ourselves in pre-alpha and under NDA instead at the end of September 2017, it should have been clear it was never going to be possible to get a release done in about 12 months. Yet, it took NQ nearly a year to announce an updated roadmap which pushed release to the second half of 2020. That new release date was clearly still overly optimistic at best seeing the state of the game at the time.
 
Then a new studio opened in Canada, we can only guess as to why but a combination of using a better tax environment for software development, more access to talent and yes, they speak French there. We do not know the ins and outs of how the management structure worked/works but it seems that much of the decisions were made in Paris still. When the first studio lead left the same year JC moved to Canada.
 
With some fanfare a new backing round by investors was announced by JC in June 2019 and when looking at the normal timeline for Venture Capital investment this was a pretty standard Round A option that was taken after the initial seed. Crowd funding never played much of a role in all this with the eventual 2.5M or so being spent before it was received basically.
 
Around November 2019 and honestly very little actual progress later, still under NDA a new roadmap was released pushing the release out for another year to end of 2021. That roadmap still read more as a wish list of features and still seemed very optimistic to me as NQ still had to implement all main features outside of mining and building.
 
Then, 30th of April 2020, JC announced that the game would come out of NDA and go to public beta with subscriptions instead of the planned closed development up to release for backers only. That was the moment where some of us backers started to see signals that NQ was not doing great and needed to start generating revenue which was never the intention. Meanwhile NQ had been operating on a total budget of around 25Million since end of 2014 so it was only reasonable to assume they were running on debt which in itself is fine as long as you can pay interest and keep paying your bills.
 
In December the 0.23 patch dropped which caused much discontent and an exodus of players with changes which were really not bad in themselves, but the implementation was terrible and very superficial. NQ, again by means of JC, blamed the need for the changes on the small groups and solo players who did not use the markets and did everything themselves so that needed to change. Add several badly handled exploit fallouts to the mix and the fragile player base shrunk at an alarming rate. To me, this was a massive signal that JC the visionary was not able to separate from JC the project manager or JC the company president/CEO.
 
JC also said on several occasions that he saw no reason to assume that it would not possible to meet the release date on the roadmap of end 2021, anyone understanding the amount of work left to do and especially the list of feature JC brought in as “coming in the next year” towards the end of 2021shoudl have been a clear sign of the many red flags regarding hitting a 2021 release.
 
Then, as the next major update came around it was underwhelming at best and NQ had to spin missing their milestone by announcing that 0.24 would arrive in “phases”.
And so, here we are start of April and we know that JC has resigned as CEO with anew CEO being appointed in the person of Nicolas Granatino who also is the CEO of the main investor in NQ. And from here all we can do is speculate on what is next.
 
 
 
My hope is this:
Under new management the potential and promise of DU is acknowledged while at the same time the need for more time is established. A big factor in the assets of the game is the server tech which can be developed and licensed to third parties with potentially considerable revenue. For that reason, Novaquark will be receiving a fresh investment injection with a business savvy and financially qualified CEO at the helm. 
 
To achieve this, the company will need to go through a restructure and cut a lot of mid level ballast. I would really hope that NQ will have the balls to relabel the development to where it is, alpha, and postpone the scheduled release with a TBD new date.
 
Then spend time to fix what they have, work through the technical debt, stabilize the backend and improve their community facing communication to a point where we do not need details but do find NQ to actually listen and be responsive and not “be heard” and then hear nothing back. So many great suggestions and ideas have been lost because NQ has shown a chronic lack of engagement and interaction at even the most basic levels.
 
I have always said and still feel that DU has such massive potential and promise as well as will be able to appeal to many different play styles and ideas but NQ as it was, has never really shown the ability to make that happen. I hope that this change is not the end of the company (despite the "letter", I would not disregard that option yet) but a new start in making that potential come alive and a reality.
 
 
I really feel NQ (and with it DU) has a chance here to recover and grow. From where we now are and for it to work, NQ needs to do their part in showing progress and improvement in many ways while we, as the community, need to start with giving them the space to do that and then get past what was and work with what is to come..
 
 
Let's have a good discussion here and not dwell on the past, we're all here because we have a passion for DU and the only way DU will stay alive is for "new NQ" to be able to make it happen. 

Alright, let’s talk about the positives first.
-fixed linked container range after VR. That is quite sweet, I like it, but you are no linked to the second last container you linked to. They hotfixed the infinite range on that after 30 minutes, but the new situation is as annoying as the old one.
-Notifications now correctly show size of the item sold or bought. Again, really nice, but the item name is now missing. Instead of "sell order of 2 uncommon space engine" it now says "sell order of 2 XL" (at market market)
-"A possible crash when using fireworks in the northwest corner of a space station close to feli while still on the first step of the long tutorial has been fixed". About bloody time.
 
 
Now to the bad stuff.
-While the extension to the extension of the parking space at market 6 may solve the parking issue. I think maybe we need a more long term solution.
-The introduction of LUA controllable speakers really did not help the market 6 situation. Especially since the client still loads all sound files, even if you turn the sound off.
-the idea of warpgates to create chokepoints but also shortcuts for long distance travel is awesome. Sadly in the first hours players were able to build space station directly in/at the gates within the safebubble. Why is there a safebubble anyway?
-There was yet another ninja patch and now nickel is the strongest for pvp. After every patch we have to check the stats for honeycomb.


For anybody who missed it, here the transcript for the MC interview, the video is currently down.

user: So most of the industry talents don’t work, the other trees also have talents that do nothing or the opposite. When will those get fixed, what is so hard about fixing them?
MC: Great question. As DU is a consistent single shard universe with a player driven economy, we think that only a low amount of users actually do industry with massive factories while most other users dive deep into all the other content the game has to offer.
user: So about that other content, some players are complaining that besides mining and selling to bots or ship building and spamming advertisement there is not really that much to do.
MC: Yes, i fully understand your question. So we constipated Dual universe as a consistent single shard universe with a player driven economy and deep industry mechanics. The world is yours to take and make your own.
user: Also, given that the new player experience gets worse and worse, with the broken tutorials and and only free tiles 40 kilometers from the next market, it seems the influx of new players has stopped. Do you see this as an issue that needs fixing?
MC: The interesting thing for new players to discover in DU is that we actually made this game as a consistent single shard universe with a player driven economy. As such, the new players are a business opportunity for the existing players.
user: The other players and I, especially I, especially right now, often don’t feel understood. Do you think the new ticket based feedback system, with positive feedback pushed to the front via "triage system in times of increased activity" can give you the information you need about what the community is thinking?
MC: Oh yes, you are right, I totally agree. We listen to the players, this is important as our game, like our economy, is player driven in our consistent single shard universe. The world is yours to take and make your own in Dual Universe, a consistent single shard universe with a player driven economy.