SirJohn85

Call me crazy, but the trees and terrain in pictures and videos on their fantasy section look like it's the unigine engine. 
Compare this to the Unigine Valley benchmark:

Edit: It's Unreal Engine 5, mentioned in the telegram link, before you join. I had made the thesis because both DU and the Unreal Engine use the Quixel Megascans.
 
 
 

I think NQ has giving up on DU a long time ago, it is now a side hustle then can do when the other games compile and for shits and giggles of cause. nothing more nothing less.
The cost is properly absorbed in other project as they share resources, other wise it would just be a waste of resources.
 
conspiracy theory: It is test to see how long they can string players along and still make them pay, but even that fails as most left in 0.23
 
edit:
oh stop posting, we almost got to 14 days with no posts again. 3 times the charm for sure

We sure can, we have 8 years of experience with NQ/DU, plenty of time to see how they operate. On top of that the game IS finished, they did a launch and it is sold as finished on Steam.
 
 

They don't. They are part of a parent company. In this case Epic Games.

https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-has-made-easy-anti-cheat-free-for-game-developers/
 
 

The servers are overloaded due to the influx of new players.

Would be news to me that these games were considered dead (Especially since one was originally a mod, became a b2p product and is now f2p). The only game that had always been called dead was WoW. Strangely enough, it lives on.
 
But yes, I think the comparison is flawed at the latest when you compare a 6 year old f2p battle royale game with 500,000 players for 3 years and a freshly released monthly subscription massively multiplayer online role-playing game that has no growing numbers on Steam and is more like a bigger Minecraft or Space Engineers server.
 
Correlation does not imply causation. Especially not if you want to compare different games from different genres with a different target group. Conversely, you would then claim that PUBG is more MMO than DU because of the numbers.
 
 
https://steamdb.info/charts/?compare=578080,2000270
 

 
 
Edit: I've added some stuff.
 
So how do we tell when a server is dead? Quite simply. Player activity. Let's take a genre comparison of WoW example with the European fresh server Giantstalker in Wrath of the Lichking.
 
Point 1:
Players usually raid. These numbers can be measured with raidlogs. Even if we don't know how many people play on the server, we at least know how many characters raid. This helps to get an overview of what is happening on the server. So, how does the server look like?
 
https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/Giantstalker/
 

 
 
What happened here that out of 3000 characters only 233 are still raiding? Exactly a few days before the data collection for end of January, Blizzard offered free transfers to Nethergarde Keep. Mind you, it was forbidden to transfer to Giantstalker for economic reasons. Now Blizzard created the situation that you can transfer away but not to Giantstalker.
 
Point 2: 
Even if we don't know the numbers of players, at rush hours on the server in the capital of the Lichking expansion you can hardly see players on my faction who have the maximum level. Likewise, the auction house indicator is good to see how many end-game items are in it. 
 
I'll leave the link to the transfer server. People can form their own opinion about what happened here.
https://ironforge.pro/population/classic/NethergardeKeep/
 

Of course. I absolutely agree with you. Every game attracts its playerbase. There is a reason why all the big orgs since 2016 have collapsed in DU and moved on. Because the pillars of the game have not convinced. You can also just ask around who plays DU with friends. Or why that person no longer does today. 
 
Today, the game will attract other players. Whether the "Landmark in Space" player will be enough to pay money on a monthly basis I don't know. The moment you consider the removal of planetary mining as an evolvement, I just question that it has done the game any good. It was also put right that 200 tiles does not automatically mean 200 new players, but accounts. Who the owner of these accounts is can now be speculated. But it doesn't seem to be the Steam players, as they show a downward trend.
 
But to find a conclusion here: My point, however, still stands. The raids in WoW are, among other things, a criterion for how you measure it. What would be the equivalent in DU? I would say the marketplace and its offerings. If you can't find (high tier) things, then in my eyes you have too few players to cover the economy. 

Its little bit trickier. Depends on who you ask.
 
If you ask players who expected something even remotely on level of EVE, player-driven galactic opera so to say -- at this threshold game as dead as your egyptian mummy. 
 
If you ask someone who are mostly for "Landmark in Space" and comfortably enjoying their stuff on level of large Minecraft server (as you mentioned above) -- game for them is totally alive. And they are right, inside their framework.
 
This why we have sometimes arguments and lots of passive-hostility in these talks. Because people speaking pretty much about different planes of existence.
 
 

That's why the event goes for a week and not a weekend.

Am I the only one wondering who is at this "round table discussion with members of our PvP community"? 

Thank you for the link. It sounded to me like NQ had organised it or had it take place somewhere, because one never heard about it in the news. That's probably also the reason why one doesn't find anything about it.
 
But since employees do this in their spare time and thus avoid the accusation of favouring players and don't speak for the company, that is of course something else.

Am I the only one wondering who is at this "round table discussion with members of our PvP community"? 

Am I the only one wondering who is at this "round table discussion with members of our PvP community"? 

Which is kind of my point..."the bulk of the players" represents a tiny, tiny segment of gamers mostly limited to people that have played since alpha or beta.
 
There's should be no illusion that DU's largest distribution platform by far is Steam, not organic growth from its own launcher. 
 
I'm glad that you like the game, honestly. There are things to like without a doubt...but it's a subscription MMO.
 
A few gamers liking it isn't enough.
 
The dismal loss of players on Steam and the lack of apparent organic growth anywhere else is why I don't have faith that NQ will figure out how to make the game popular. 
 
It isn't enough to like the game or even to think the game is good, the game has to be popular for it to survive as a sub-based MMO. 

If you want any catharsis, just write a letter and mail it to: Sanat Claus, Northpole... You might have a better chance of something happening with your idea that way...

I could live with the bugs and performance issues if there only would be gameplay. Currently the only reliable way to get cash for taxes are NPC missions. DU is a sub-based sandbox MMO with a main gameplay loop that would not even be sufficient for a free-to-play browser game! I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

And the initial M for that matter. 

 
MMORPG clearly stands for:
 
“Marginally Multiplayer Overly Restricted Progression Game. “

Just a little quote from the EULA:
 
 
So TLDR: They can do whatever they want with your stuff.
 

May it is just sunk cost fallacy:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sunkcost.asp

It's just a different name space:
 
NQ.beta = alpha
NQ.release = beta

What you are asking for is a completely different game and has nothing to do with what they used to advertise.
I have always said, build the vision of your AvA Lock & Fire into the game - With a gun. Just one gun. Use that as a foundation to also show that you're not forgetting the people from a pillar, which had interest in this game.
 
Why should I pvp if it has no impact on the world? That is also something completely different from what they always said. Heck, we don't even have territoral warfare yet.
And I disagree with you. Landmark in space won't survive long like this with a subspriction model. 
 
A very good comparison here is New World, which originally started as a pvp game, then at some point fired the game designer, brought in someone new and wanted to make it a pve game with opt-in pvp. What happened then: the people in the beta said that there was no pve content. Amazon had to postpone until the pve content was delivered.
So, what happened at release? People had fun for a few months. But the game is dead. The servers are empty.
 
I would like to state here that we are not talking about an indie developer. We are talking about Amazon. (Who had a bad statistic with released games - 1 cancelled, 1 back to alpha before New World came out).

It has been postponed indefinitely after release. This was confirmed in a podcast here in December 2019, which was later shown in a roadmap.
Podcast here with timestamp to the ava/cvc part: 
 
 
 
And of course, after listening to it, I couldn't help making memes. Link: https://imgur.com/a/uVOYJT0
 
It was just funny to see how no one had a problem except a few who pointed out the problems that already existed there. But blind trust didn't help anyone. The unpleasant awakening of the majority came later. And today we are where we are.

How can it be silly if that's a selling point as to why people left money in the first place?
You've been around long enough to know which big orgs were there and what they always wanted. 
 
How many of them are left? We now have what we have. Will that be enough?

How exactly do you envisage this? Everyone talks about how much potential the game has. The game had potential two years ago. The game had potential 4 years ago too. It also had potential when it was introduced on KS in 2016.
 
But now comes my question. We are going into release next month - when is the potential going to be realised in this game that was in development for 8 years?
 
I can't tell a new player that things are good that are not good or missing. About missing features, about things that don't work and a feature that was completely changed, that you can't do planetary mining anymore but have to use mining units.
 
There are so many indicators, just the fact that you didn't see any advertising (or scenes in trailers that don't take place like that), that the Twitch statistics have dropped rapidly (the game is currently at 28 average viewers, that once was at 1000 in August 2020, with every week falling, I had recorded somewhere in the forum here how the case was), that cost-cutting was worked on, that a new CEO was suddenly there - attention, the community had first found out that he was the new one, before NQ said anything. 
 
Furthermore, employees in key positions quickly resigned (example: former CCP Technical Director Högni Gylfason as CTO who left after less than a year), which can be seen in the public profiles on LinkedIn. And I don't even want to talk about false promises and information, bad or no communication of the developers in the last years, which the players have already experienced since the beta in August 2020.
 
And I go back to my original question:
How do you imagine that I can enthuse a new player for this game after this text? Especially with the argument that this person has to sign up for a subscription in order to continue playing.
 
Why shouldn't that person rather play World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Classic on 26 September?
 
I would describe the game as follows: It's Landmark in space. The "millions of players" it has always talked about are not there. And it doesn't even manage to show 50 players in one place.
 
But in the end, everyone has the opportunity to play the game for 2 weeks at release. Then everyone will decide for themselves how long they want to stay with it. It can be assumed that many will be there for the first 2 months, as with any other mmorpg.
 
But it will be interesting to see what happens after these 2 months.

- Survival elements like oxygen and energy? 
- NPC enemies like wolves or spiders? 
- Weapons for the avatar to kill NPCs or players?
- NPC ships that attack you?
- Meteoroids that hit planets?
- Mountable mining units on ships?
- Planetary mining (besides on asteroid)?
 
This is exactly why I play Space Engineers, sign me up for this!