SirJohn85

The Future of DU Part 2: The road to War
 
Now that you have spoke about the process, how about some of that sweet transparency telling us what NQ aims to release content wise over the next few builds? ?

Sorry, but this is just the next iteration of "we heard you"
 
There is nothing substantial in this post, it does not commit to anything and just reiterates how NQ has failed to listen (which is not the same as hearing in case you wonder) to what their community is telling them.
 
That hey seem to think that much changed from Alpha is frankly very funny as they have just continued their attitude and ways from there with little to no change, that they seem to think or try to make the claim they did is probably the most worrying aspect of this post.
 
The proof wil be in the pudding here but based on the many previous attempts by NQ to spin their mistakes and shortfalls by not really taking ownership but pretend they will does not give me much hope for change.. But we'll see

Been playing it for a few months now, and these last week have been a nightmare to play. My corp is slowly dying because well... it doesn't evolve much.
 
I'm 46 years old and been on quite a few MMOs for the last 20 years. The closest thing to DU I played? A Tale In The Desert.
 
Basically, I would sum up DU like this:
 
Too much anything.
 
At some point, you have to decide what is your "finished product". I put this between quotes, because well, by definitions, MMOs are never finished, bugs are always here 2/3/4/5 years after launches. That's how it is. Right now I'm not sure NQ does have a definition of what their "finished product" his. It's cool to have a loading page with all the incoming features. But if they wait to have them all to call the game finished, we're good to wait for a few years. Not sure my patience will last that long.
 
Some problems:
- Too many planets on the system. Those IG are less than 10% populated, and I'm being nice. And you're woring on a new system? That's a loss of ressources that would be helpful somewhere else. Shrink that system to 3/4 planets right now and ride with it, that will force interaction between players. Right now you can spend months without seeing somebody else. You don't have an MMO in players do not interacts. Be it friendly or not.
 
- Space PvP guys... Who thought that this PvP would be fun? Ideas are good, but badly implemented. That part should be fun. That's where you need space dogfighting with big ships shooting on everything around. Reworking the way you move in space should be priority N°1 here. Stop going straight and shoot 400kms away. Go back to basics, like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, and add joystick control.
 
- Schematics, idea was not bad, but badly implemented. And too late. Newcomers starts with a huge disadvantage here from vets. A freaking one. Sure you could join an organization or whatever, but well, see point 1.
 
- Since ressources are a finite number on every planet, that's a problem that'll rise at anytime soon. Mining units are supposed to be a solution, except well, they still aren't IG and aren't really viable either. A new system won't help as players will have to go to the next zone and start from scratch again. That should be a problem solved from day 1 too...
 
- Skills, here again, it's too many, way too many skills. I get the point, but crap, it'll take eons before all these are completed. I'll have to try to add everything in the queue and see how long it'll take. A few years probably. Sure you don't want players to be perfect in everything, but if that's what you want, have them choose their way early in the game instead of this. Links back to point 1 as well.
 
- Players needs directions. Even in sandboxes type of game. Mission system should have been a Day 1 feature. It would have been good for organisations building and cohesion.
 
- Can't believe there's a spawn/despawn protocol for ships when players are logging in/out. Result is here for everyone to see. Go to District 6/7 on Ailoth. That's a nightmare. OK. That's cool for players to see what others have done, but I don't want to see ships that where done by guys that don't even play the game anymore. Either despawn them, or allow players to deconstruct them. Let's be ecologist here.
 
- Finally, on the mechanics of the game, lots of stuff is done client wise, not server wise. Idea of having just one server is good. But doing calculation client wise is really bad. How do you prevent hack from the client then? That's a huge problem here. Especially in a PvP game. If you don't have a solution here, you don't have a game, because hacking usually kills the fun out of the game.
 
So well, not everything is beyond hope, but guys need to shrinks their dreams down and go back to the basics of playing and have fun playing.
And fast!

Have you tried deactivating it? It doesn't work on the new page, because there's no option for it. Even setting the flag on the old page had no effect.
It is activated by default. I had deactivated it a long time ago on the old page and was only able to reactivate it thanks to Naerais.
 
Even though I'm a naïve person from time to time, believing that all people are good, there are certainly individuals who look for the fly in the ointment to have that one moment of success where they say to themselves, "He said something wrong, I won, his argument is wrong."
 
But I don't want to accuse anyone of anything here. I'll leave it in the room.

I will not answer this question and leave it as it is. Instead, I'll just list things so that everyone can draw their own conclusions since the soft launch in August 2020 (yes, a version that has subscription packages is a soft launch). Otherwise people might get the idea that I'm always negative and push my opinion on people. Also, I want to avoid sounding like an endless loop because otherwise people will think I can't think of anything else to say.
 
Here are a few things since the soft launch:
- Since August 2020, viewership has steadily dropped from 1000 average viewers to a staggering 60. The average channels have also dropped from 10 to 2. I've already noted this in various other forum posts over the last few months, of course with the current numbers at the time. I am sure that one or the other still remembers and if not, you can search for it in my posts.
 
My source that I have always used for these figures:
https://www.twitchmetrics.net/g/493826-dual-universe
 
- Speaking of which: There hasn't been a Twitch stream or AMA event since August that showed players anything new or streamed events. Instead, we have a (cheap) workforce that diligently tweets everything the players build in the game on social media. There is a deliberate lack of communication, let alone trying to say something with Devlog that should be long term but doesn't capture the spirit of the present, what is on the players' minds.
 
- As a final point on streaming, I would add that markeedragon has gone back to EVE and the last video I find is just a review of patch 0.24. Otherwise, his Twitch library is filled with EVE and Valheim. Worth mentioning for me because he was mentioned by NQ in the news every now and then.
 
- In the New Year video there was the outlook for this year that a lot of things will come like bugfixes and features that were not mentioned in the video. Nevertheless, let's take a quick look: 
1. first major release: Graphics improvements (more to come later in the year), mission system, wallets
2. early in the year: Already working on pvp overhaul
3. energy system, asteroid mining
4. later in the year: territory warfare
other features mentioned: voxel vertices, mining units, new solar system with new planets
 
We are now in April and have only received part of the big patch of 0.24. In four months we will be a year into the soft launch.
 
- With patch 0.24, things were introduced that were not there or communicated on the PTS server. They had to be deactivated on the same day on the live server because they had bugs. It can be assumed that it has not been tested.
 
- Players use the PTS server to do calculated mining, because the ore spots are on the same spot as in the live server
 
- Players were able to play free days in December and January because the billing didn't work. I don't know if the other players were compensated accordingly because they had already paid in advance. But it can be assumed that this is not the case because NQ has not communicated publicly.
 
- 2 community managers (Naunet and Nudbrokk) left after a few months at the end of 2020 / early 2021
 
- there is no support anymore on weekend, on the grounds that they can provide better support. No ingame gms either, everything has to through support tickets.
 
- 0.23 is a chapter in itself, you read and hear a lot of opinions that people have stopped playing and you are practically alone in the game. I won't say much about this because instead of cooperation, this patch has created dependency. That should not be the case in a mmorpg, according to my basic understanding.

Phew, actually I didn't want to write that much. I'll save this in case someone gets the idea of deleting it, like the 0.25 meme thread.
 

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. 

I think this is where they lost all support from KS Backers from long time ago. And this is the reason we dont believe a single word of what they say, knowing the State of du for years. 
 
Get it to alpha again, fix broken stuff, communicate what you do next and then start over. Otherwise I really cant See this working

I agree that DU will likely go F2P eventually....but I think it'd be a mistake for them to do that anytime soon.
 
While the sub model makes no sense for DU in its current state, it does work as a gate to ensure that only very interested players willing to pay install the game. 
 
If they go FTP, they'll be opening those floodgates and neither the new player experience nor the technicals can handle this gracefully.
 
They have a lot of work to do before they can even get to the point where FTP will make them money. 

Here's the thing... 
 
Unless JC got fired for a scandal or health/drugs issue then he got fired because they think the game is failing.  So one of two things will happen.  They shutter it, or they 'fix' it.  Lets look at the latter. 
 
If a VC is going to fix a failing restaurant they don't just come in and change the wallpaper and add a dash more paprika to the chili.  They reevaluate the entire business because whatever is there clearly isn't working.  That means major changes, and since the biggest issue is lack of customer interest they will focus on appealing to more people.  A broader appeal to a more mainstream audience. So anyone who uses the term 'casual' to denigrate suggestions they don't like are in for a very rude awakening.  When a game is failing, you don't double down on niche appeal after firing the guy who designed it.
 
As a newcomer it doesn't bother me but I suspect most of the people who consider themselves fans of the game will be writing a lot of angry forum posts in the near future.  
 
(The only other possibility is they are keeping JC and just giving him a boss, but I wouldn't hold my breath as it was his 'vision' that caused the subscriber count to tank in the first place)

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.

Assuming, of course, that this is all true. But if it is true, then I would find it shabby that we customers were informed by a 3rd source and not by NQ.
 
Oh wait... I see a pattern...

I took the liberty of posting a group picture from the closed alpha.
 

DU goes f2p and brings cosmetics.

I see the game as having just as good a chance to survive as with JC at the helm. It was long overdue.
 
Everything we've seen and heard suggested he wasn't just a bad leader because he lacked experience in the game industry...but because he wasn't open-minded and didn't want anyone else's ideas. That's reflected in how NQ interacted with the community and (from all the evidence we have) based on how he treated his own employees. It was always his project, his vision, his castle, his "ready player one" roleplaying game.
 
When the community complained, he told them why they were wrong. I expect he did something similar with his own employees, hence the very high employee turnover and slow, slow progress. 
 
If investors want to salvage this game, they can't just "sell off" tech because there's nothing to sell.
 
Everything they've made is very buggy and vendor-locked on AWS or Unigen2 (which no one in the industry uses) -- never worth it to buy buggy code that hasn't been proven to scale! It's far, far cheaper to develop it yourself long-term...any studio with the cash to buy tech like this would have wisdom enough to avoid it. "Wanna buy tech for this game that's been mired in bugs and hasn't shown it can scale even with low population?" No, hard pass, maybe worth $50,000 but not anything substantial enough for investors. 
 
i expect the investors will make up their mind shortly -- but my guess?
 
They wouldn't start taking things over unless they had some runway left to try to salvage the project. Otherwise they'd have laid everyone off and shut it all down already, because every day it is online is money spent. I'm not holding my breath, but getting JC out of there might be the change NQ needs. 

I took the liberty of posting a group picture from the closed alpha.
 

I will not answer this question and leave it as it is. Instead, I'll just list things so that everyone can draw their own conclusions since the soft launch in August 2020 (yes, a version that has subscription packages is a soft launch). Otherwise people might get the idea that I'm always negative and push my opinion on people. Also, I want to avoid sounding like an endless loop because otherwise people will think I can't think of anything else to say.
 
Here are a few things since the soft launch:
- Since August 2020, viewership has steadily dropped from 1000 average viewers to a staggering 60. The average channels have also dropped from 10 to 2. I've already noted this in various other forum posts over the last few months, of course with the current numbers at the time. I am sure that one or the other still remembers and if not, you can search for it in my posts.
 
My source that I have always used for these figures:
https://www.twitchmetrics.net/g/493826-dual-universe
 
- Speaking of which: There hasn't been a Twitch stream or AMA event since August that showed players anything new or streamed events. Instead, we have a (cheap) workforce that diligently tweets everything the players build in the game on social media. There is a deliberate lack of communication, let alone trying to say something with Devlog that should be long term but doesn't capture the spirit of the present, what is on the players' minds.
 
- As a final point on streaming, I would add that markeedragon has gone back to EVE and the last video I find is just a review of patch 0.24. Otherwise, his Twitch library is filled with EVE and Valheim. Worth mentioning for me because he was mentioned by NQ in the news every now and then.
 
- In the New Year video there was the outlook for this year that a lot of things will come like bugfixes and features that were not mentioned in the video. Nevertheless, let's take a quick look: 
1. first major release: Graphics improvements (more to come later in the year), mission system, wallets
2. early in the year: Already working on pvp overhaul
3. energy system, asteroid mining
4. later in the year: territory warfare
other features mentioned: voxel vertices, mining units, new solar system with new planets
 
We are now in April and have only received part of the big patch of 0.24. In four months we will be a year into the soft launch.
 
- With patch 0.24, things were introduced that were not there or communicated on the PTS server. They had to be deactivated on the same day on the live server because they had bugs. It can be assumed that it has not been tested.
 
- Players use the PTS server to do calculated mining, because the ore spots are on the same spot as in the live server
 
- Players were able to play free days in December and January because the billing didn't work. I don't know if the other players were compensated accordingly because they had already paid in advance. But it can be assumed that this is not the case because NQ has not communicated publicly.
 
- 2 community managers (Naunet and Nudbrokk) left after a few months at the end of 2020 / early 2021
 
- there is no support anymore on weekend, on the grounds that they can provide better support. No ingame gms either, everything has to through support tickets.
 
- 0.23 is a chapter in itself, you read and hear a lot of opinions that people have stopped playing and you are practically alone in the game. I won't say much about this because instead of cooperation, this patch has created dependency. That should not be the case in a mmorpg, according to my basic understanding.

Phew, actually I didn't want to write that much. I'll save this in case someone gets the idea of deleting it, like the 0.25 meme thread.
 

Assuming, of course, that this is all true. But if it is true, then I would find it shabby that we customers were informed by a 3rd source and not by NQ.
 
Oh wait... I see a pattern...

A brief public reserche revealed that they went to the same college. They therefore seem to be friends.

Assuming, of course, that this is all true. But if it is true, then I would find it shabby that we customers were informed by a 3rd source and not by NQ.
 
Oh wait... I see a pattern...

Have you tried deactivating it? It doesn't work on the new page, because there's no option for it. Even setting the flag on the old page had no effect.
It is activated by default. I had deactivated it a long time ago on the old page and was only able to reactivate it thanks to Naerais.
 
Even though I'm a naïve person from time to time, believing that all people are good, there are certainly individuals who look for the fly in the ointment to have that one moment of success where they say to themselves, "He said something wrong, I won, his argument is wrong."
 
But I don't want to accuse anyone of anything here. I'll leave it in the room.

I will not answer this question and leave it as it is. Instead, I'll just list things so that everyone can draw their own conclusions since the soft launch in August 2020 (yes, a version that has subscription packages is a soft launch). Otherwise people might get the idea that I'm always negative and push my opinion on people. Also, I want to avoid sounding like an endless loop because otherwise people will think I can't think of anything else to say.
 
Here are a few things since the soft launch:
- Since August 2020, viewership has steadily dropped from 1000 average viewers to a staggering 60. The average channels have also dropped from 10 to 2. I've already noted this in various other forum posts over the last few months, of course with the current numbers at the time. I am sure that one or the other still remembers and if not, you can search for it in my posts.
 
My source that I have always used for these figures:
https://www.twitchmetrics.net/g/493826-dual-universe
 
- Speaking of which: There hasn't been a Twitch stream or AMA event since August that showed players anything new or streamed events. Instead, we have a (cheap) workforce that diligently tweets everything the players build in the game on social media. There is a deliberate lack of communication, let alone trying to say something with Devlog that should be long term but doesn't capture the spirit of the present, what is on the players' minds.
 
- As a final point on streaming, I would add that markeedragon has gone back to EVE and the last video I find is just a review of patch 0.24. Otherwise, his Twitch library is filled with EVE and Valheim. Worth mentioning for me because he was mentioned by NQ in the news every now and then.
 
- In the New Year video there was the outlook for this year that a lot of things will come like bugfixes and features that were not mentioned in the video. Nevertheless, let's take a quick look: 
1. first major release: Graphics improvements (more to come later in the year), mission system, wallets
2. early in the year: Already working on pvp overhaul
3. energy system, asteroid mining
4. later in the year: territory warfare
other features mentioned: voxel vertices, mining units, new solar system with new planets
 
We are now in April and have only received part of the big patch of 0.24. In four months we will be a year into the soft launch.
 
- With patch 0.24, things were introduced that were not there or communicated on the PTS server. They had to be deactivated on the same day on the live server because they had bugs. It can be assumed that it has not been tested.
 
- Players use the PTS server to do calculated mining, because the ore spots are on the same spot as in the live server
 
- Players were able to play free days in December and January because the billing didn't work. I don't know if the other players were compensated accordingly because they had already paid in advance. But it can be assumed that this is not the case because NQ has not communicated publicly.
 
- 2 community managers (Naunet and Nudbrokk) left after a few months at the end of 2020 / early 2021
 
- there is no support anymore on weekend, on the grounds that they can provide better support. No ingame gms either, everything has to through support tickets.
 
- 0.23 is a chapter in itself, you read and hear a lot of opinions that people have stopped playing and you are practically alone in the game. I won't say much about this because instead of cooperation, this patch has created dependency. That should not be the case in a mmorpg, according to my basic understanding.

Phew, actually I didn't want to write that much. I'll save this in case someone gets the idea of deleting it, like the 0.25 meme thread.
 

I'm not going to interfere much, but if we're going to set the record straight, I'll just briefly mention the following:
 
Pre-Alpha was back in October 2017, which means that it was the first time it was open to players who were not ATV members. 
Nevertheless, his statement does not change the fact that the game has been in development for much longer. These include:
- Friends and Family Access
- Prototype of the server architecture (which, by the way, was already started in 2014)
- Preparations for the KS campaign
All in all, this statement is true. Just because players did not have access does not mean that they were asleep until then.
 
JC, the ceo, the leadership as itself, has not published a game. That does not change this fact. Instead of attacking the player here, he just said something that was true. JC has been a scientist in his career working on robots and AI. 
 
Yep, it was Naunet, not Naerais. I've corrected that in the previous post. Thanks for mentioning this.

Notice I said the word "magic"?  Reports of some of the vanguard members quitting publicly in the last few months was a real eye opener for those paying attention.  It sends a powerful message to the devs, but I'm not sure they are even there to receive it.  We appreciate your work regardless.

I hear this from every corner by now. Some miracle is supposed to fix something. How is that supposed to work?
Please keep in mind, in 4 months it will be August and technically 1 year beta aka softlaunch. You can now draw your own conclusions.

I hear this from every corner by now. Some miracle is supposed to fix something. How is that supposed to work?
Please keep in mind, in 4 months it will be August and technically 1 year beta aka softlaunch. You can now draw your own conclusions.