Maxim Kammerer

Hi evereyone,
 
We deeply apologize for the wait regarding the missing Sanctuary Territory Units (and other in-game expected backer rewards).

As you may have noticed the fix has been deployed last Wednesday and should have solved the issue for the most part.The only ones who should be currently missing a Sanctuary Territory Unit are the Contributor Backers. We hope to fix this last part next week, if everything goes well.
 
However, please bear in mind the Contributor Pack did NOT originally contain a Sanctuary Territory Unit.
The reason why we are going to give 1 Sanctuary Territory Unit to every Contributor Backer is to make it fair for everyone:

In an old communication, we promised that Kickstarter Backers will get automatically some of the Supporter Pack rewards from an equal level (Silver Founders  gets some Contributor rewards, Gold Founders get some Sponsor rewards, Sapphire Founders - and above - get some Patron rewards). In that communication, a mistake was made in promising a Sanctuary Territory Unit to Silver Founders, while Sanctuary Territory Units were only included in Sponsor and Patron packs, not the Contributor one. As the mistake was on our side, we decided to proceed. However, as Silver Founders are supposed to be on the same tier as Contributor Supporters, this situation seemed to us unfair towards the Contributor Supporters. That's why we decided (and mentioned in our previous communication) that Contributor Supporters will get a STU as well. When this decision was taken, the fix that has been deployed last Wednesday was already in preparation, and adding that in the fix at the last minute would have a risk to make a mess. That's why it was decided to proceed with a separate fix for this specific category of players.
 
Last but not least:
If after the fix from Wednesday, you are still missing a STU (or another expected in-game rewards) and you are not in the case of waiting a STU for being a Contributor Supporter, then please contact our Customer Support by submitting a ticket mentioning that you're not in that specific category of players and you have checked your inventory after the fix. To contact our Customer Support team, you can do it from this page.

Best regards,
Nyzaltar.

Or they could just read the forums and respond to major complaints.

The only thing I desire is more honesty and more communication. It doesn't have to be 10 pages full of information, but tell us smaller pieces of that.  Even of your "roadmap" 1.1 and 1.2. Give us a little inside of your world. What is hard in your development right now? What are the current challenges you are trying to get fixed up to December?
 
@Anderson Williams
In my eyes a community-manager should be the bridge between the community and the company, and not a player based council. “Ask Apehlia '' was a good start, but we clearly need more…
 

The eve council was just abused by heads of alliances to get over on the rest of the community by leaking upcoming release info to their alliance even though they were under NDA. 
 
Like every good idea, people being in the equation ruins it, People are by nature giant pieces of garbage that would sell their grandmother for a few bucks if it got them ahead. Gamers are even worse. While a good idea at heart, I'm going to have to go with no.

Without mining, sooner or later there would be no other gameplay anymore. Anything in this game is made of ore - including industry units for production workers and ships for pvp fighters. If miners stop mining than everything else will collaps as well. They will stop mining if ore doesn't pay the tax anymore. Thus, as long as tax is fixed, minimum ore prices need to be fixed as well. The only way to fix it are bot orders. That is not encouraging miners but a logical consequence of a design decision. Either ther is a player driven economy or not. And NQ decided for not.

Yep, that's what I do as well. Nanocrafting beeing better than industry should tell NQ that something went terribly wrong. At least T1 product material schematics need to go immediately.

Yep, that's what I do as well. Nanocrafting beeing better than industry should tell NQ that something went terribly wrong. At least T1 product material schematics need to go immediately.

Yep, that's what I do as well. Nanocrafting beeing better than industry should tell NQ that something went terribly wrong. At least T1 product material schematics need to go immediately.

Just like most aspects of this game that were tacked on in the last couple of years, they were done so purely to reduce server load.
 
There was nothing (major) in the recent updates designed to actually improve the player experience, or to support the lore of the game, or to improve the logic. Purely cost savings.
 
The “why?” Is because it was easier for them that way. That’s why you cant request a batch of just 10m3 of T2 honeycomb but get 432 or something in one go, taking 3 minutes and multiple “schematics”. 
 
As for queuing T1 schemes, 
 
Whenever my guy’s nano is idle i queue up all the T1 products. He can make them as fast as an industrial unit can and in much more precise amounts. I’ve saved well over half to nearly 2/3 of our T1 schematics that way and can use my five schematics queues for more valuable, longer stuff. 

the fact that we need schematics for anything we can make in our Nanopack, especially T1 intermediaries is ridiculous, IMHO. 

I lost nothing because I expected a wipe for launch before they told us no wipes during Beta and cemented once they did the first wipe during.  
 
If they had more manpower I would expect at least a little more communication.  For the size of team they have I'd say they've pulled off a miracle to get this far.  I don't want to throw any stumbling blocks in their path but that would require we see a roadmap to know what their path is.

Which is clearly a nonsense and broken system. That an org only needs a single tile with 1L of each of the four T1 ores to survive is clearly not what the developers intended. Sure they don’t count it as an exploit (calibration charges Yada Yada) but it is pretty much game breaking. 
 
TLDR:
That 10 players can somehow get 200kL of ore per day from a 1L per hour tile even using a single size S mining unit is a stupid game mechanic. 

You go there. I didn't start playing this game for PVP. 

That would at least replace schematic as a money sink. But it wouldn't be the intended bottleneck for production because you have only 5 schematics slots but you can have virtual infinite industries. In order to keep the original purpose of the new schematics system you would need to implement a maximum number of industries running in parallel per account. I don't think that the community would be amused about that.
 
The problem could be solved with proper implementation of energy management. But there we would again have the inconsistency between NQ and "proper implementation".

Add the time to make the schematic to the time to make the item, then make the machine charge the schematic fee as a tax.
Then put the schematics back in the hell whence they came.
 
Make tea.
Job done.

In the original anouncment of the new schematics system it reads "Copying schematic batches will cost time and a small amount of quanta." I wonder if they just failed at balacing or if the "small amount" was a downright lie from the beginning.

Please don't put such ideas into their heads! Yes, it could work if implemented correctly. But this is NQ. They would reduce the "given number of batches" to a point where a factory needs to run at full capacity just to produce its own spare parts.

In the original anouncment of the new schematics system it reads "Copying schematic batches will cost time and a small amount of quanta." I wonder if they just failed at balacing or if the "small amount" was a downright lie from the beginning.

Please don't put such ideas into their heads! Yes, it could work if implemented correctly. But this is NQ. They would reduce the "given number of batches" to a point where a factory needs to run at full capacity just to produce its own spare parts.

In the original anouncment of the new schematics system it reads "Copying schematic batches will cost time and a small amount of quanta." I wonder if they just failed at balacing or if the "small amount" was a downright lie from the beginning.

Please don't put such ideas into their heads! Yes, it could work if implemented correctly. But this is NQ. They would reduce the "given number of batches" to a point where a factory needs to run at full capacity just to produce its own spare parts.

Let's set aside for a moment that wiping beta player constructs at launch was always unfair, given past commitments. NQ have now heaped insult on injury with a number of stealth nerfs at launch:
 
Alioth T2 Distribution: 
I did 80 territory scans on Alioth at a ~3 tile spacing and found zero T2. None at all. Zip. Nada. No T2 - after spending 3 days building the XL assembler and scanner. This is a broken gameplay loop. Combined with the removal of Malachite from Alioth, the stealth nerf of ore distribution on Alioth resulted in a week of wasted effort. Forcing effort with no payoff is not gameplay. 
 
If NQ had been transparent with us before launch, said they were going to nerf T2 on Alioth, I wouldn't have wasted that critical week. I would also have rebuilt my base before launch so the BP wasn't made of 500,000M3 of Copper. Now, to deploy my BP I have to swap copper for another honeycomb, and then go back and untangle where the new material has blended with the same material already in the BP. More rework, on top of the wasted time.
 
1000m Build Height: 
This was self-evidently dumb. By choosing a 1000m cap instead of 1128m, it's impossible to build a 1000m AGG pad without placing your foundation core at an exactly multiple of 128m (since you won't be able to place the top core if there is less than a 128m gap.) Even then, you can put nothing on your 1000m pad, no elements, no structure. And you have to either use smaller cores for your top layer (increasing server load) or build your base from the top core, down - which means tall temporary scaffold structures first to place top cores and work back down - while others complain about griefing the entire time. 
 
A large number of pre-launch bases had AGG pads at or slightly above 1000m. All these pre-launch base BPs are now bricked.
 
This misstep demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of their game's own mechanics by devs, and poor understandng of players. To make matters worse, the change wasn't even included in patch notes. The only place it was mentioned - just wks before launch - was in 'Ask Aphelia #12. Few players had any opportunity to fix their builds before launch. This mistake (1000m vs 1128m) would easily have been picked up if players had been warned.
 
In summary, not only did NQ reneg on prior commitments to honour our builds in their 'persistent' universe - the only compensation being retained blueprints - they went on to stealth nerf the BPs we kept. 
 
[EDIT: Because this rule is not yet being enforced, and it is still possible to place a core above 1000m, this will create even more pain for players uncertain or unaware of the rule - should NQ decide to delete structures after they are built. And for as long as the rule is unclear, it is impossible to safely place the foundations of a tall structure.]
 

 
Missing STUs for 'Contributors' (and Surface Natron):
By making Sanctuary the only place with surface natron near Alioth, Alpha contributors already had a significant advantage at launch - since natron is needed to make many popular elements: screens, lights etc.. NQ then messed up further, by jacking up the distribution of STUs meaning only some Contributors received them. ~10 days later, this still has not been fixed. This means a small number of players, purely by chance, have the only access to surface natron near Alioth.
 
HTML/SVG nerf and Indiscriminate LUA Changes: 
The disabling of HTML screens was long rumoured, but took so long to be done it appeared to have been abandoned. Waiting till launch to tell players all SVGs and HTML are also now bricked is also poor form and counter-productive. Because a large number of ship BPs from pre-launch contain screens using HTML, and virtually every factory monitoring set-up, any player flying these ships or running these factories, will now simply go to settings and re-enable HTML, to be able to play the game - undermining the point of the exercise to phase out HTML, and prolonging the inevitable pain and frustration when it is finally done. This pain is now unavoidable given the original misstep of building a new API with zero compatibility with HTML/SVG. (The new API should always have been implemented in a way to minimise the effort of reworking existing content for players - rather than forcing ground up rebuilds of all screens. Better still, existing content should ideally have been ported on behalf of players.)
 
Combine this with the frivolous renaming of a number of LUA cmds, additional rework has also been created for players to reimplement scripts written before launch - for no apparent reason. 
 
STILL No Static BP Placement Snapping!: 
We asked for this in the Alpha Trello 3 yrs ago. It was poorly implemented on day one - snapping new cores only. Hundreds of players have asked for it to be fixed for static BPs over the years. It never made sense that new cores snap into place, but static BPs work of a bizarre raycast that doesn't even align with the player camera and - annoyingly - nudges by 2 voxels instead of 1. This feature was already long overdue, but now made more critical since it is essential to redeploying any mult-core construct after the wipe. Finally... finally, it was coming! In the launch livestream it was promised for launch here, at timecode 35:38:
 
Instead, we now learn this was skipped, rendering all multi-core static construct blueprints useless. 
 
Summary:
 
- Forcing players to constantly rework their builds is not gameplay.
- Reworking existing content is a poor proxy for new gameplay loops.
- Player input is invaluable. 
- Last minute, uncommunicated changes rarely if ever have a positive outcome.  
 
The culture at NQ of disregarding the time and effort of players, and lack of consideration of impacts on our gameplay, is worrisome. More worrisome, is the tendency to continuously rework existing content - mechanics, terrain, boolean noise - rather than develop significant new features, many of these features requested years ago. NQ are still missing the winning strategy of successful 'player generated content' franchises like Minecraft, where the focus of the first several years was on adding new gameplay loops - as opposed to continuously reworking existing ones. Reworking existing content decays player satisfaction by forcing the constant rework of our own builds. And making changes by stealth only magnifies the problem.
 
Until this is understood, the future of this franchise is fraught. 

Last night I took one last slow walk around my complex on Sanctuary. I symbolically shut down the factory, flipped the switch on the mining units, deactivated the DSAT and sat in the chair on my rooftop observatory and took in the view one last time. The silence was deafening. 
 
I felt a little emotional as the time I'd spent working on all this had been one of the most difficult parts of my life. Every time things had been difficult, I'd found myself retreating into this game as a form of therapy to help me through the events going on around many of us for the past few years. I think in a world that feels totally out of control at times, its amazing that we have the technology to be able to immerse yourself into being somewhere else like this.
 
Out of the probable thousands of games I've played since being a youngling I can say proudly that Dual Universe is one of the very few that has made it into my upper echelon of games that I love and have spent a significant amount of time with.
 
So I just wanted to write this positive thread to say thanks to NQ for the development of this game. It's not a perfect game by any means, there's still glaring omissions in features as well as bugs galore but its a special game to me nonetheless. I sincerely hope it manages to ride the storm over the coming weeks, months and hopefully years to reach its full potential as I feel it deserves it. I've played all the other similar and inspired games such as Elite Dangerous, No Mans Sky, Space Engineers, Starbase, Star Citizen, Empyrion, and Eve Online but this one holds my interest in a way the others didn't. 
 
I took one final screenshot from the observatory before descending the lift one final time to the habitat area that I never got around to working on. The enormous empty room contained a solitary bed and a bonsai tree. I made one more cursory check of my Nanopack to make sure all the blueprints I would need for the coming journey were there before laying down on the bed and stared at the slightly janky ceiling voxels.
 
Lets see whats out there...

Surface mine rocks

Increasing the skill points for achievements could encourage players to play the game and not to by alt accounts to get passive skill points instead. That would mean more server load and less income. That's not what NQ is interested in.

Increasing the skill points for achievements could encourage players to play the game and not to by alt accounts to get passive skill points instead. That would mean more server load and less income. That's not what NQ is interested in.