hdparm

All I know is Aphelia is one mean AI <insert foul word here>.  She has taken everything from me a few times now and played really bad tricks about how my whole DU existence was a simulation. You can fight her and see her wrath. I'm still hoping she is not again messing with us and come next year we awake poor, talentless, and on an empty planet to start over. 
 
#StopTheWipeHype

The qustion should be:
Does this improve quality of life in game? Why dont taxes actually get used for anything in game? Why is NQ forcing a speed of gameplay? Why is NQ pushing people out of the game? Why is NQ booting potential players from the game they need back as paying customers at launch?  
Purging inactive players and all their hard work and opening up their property to looting is counter productive to their origional vision of help build a lasting civilization other people will experience before turning around and wanting to erase what they have made with taxes if they fall off the tredmill when NQ arbitrarily turns the speed up and people mug them when they fall off is a bad president to set when NQ could just pack up their stuff in golden BPs like they used to at the markets. If things are that bad that you have to go against your own mottos or principals to push this thing out the door its not going to end well.
 
Anyone remember when NQ was like hey we need to get rid of mining for performance and to make mining "LESS" "tedious before they turn around and made it like 200% more tedious by then taxing miners and giving quanta billionares/trillionaires the ability to mine with opperations that can produce more than a traditional miner could in a day automatically? Anyone remember how NQ flooded the economy with quanta from missions that justifies these taxes from their own inaction of unplugging the printing press?
 
Its not like we have any kind of in game government like the empire that has AI npcs and star destroyers enforcing their oppression on the galactic citizens or having the option for avoiding taxes and fighting the empire to clear out a planet or region from their oppression.
 
If we actually got something in return for paying taxes i would be for it if it had content added by paying it. Like I pay property tax, sales tax, carbon tax, core tax, or whatever else they want to tax me for in return for police NPCs, Military, Infrastructure, etc along with a mission system that works for the people that isnt just waypoint to waypoint but involved actual items instead of fictional components that do nothing for anyone.
 
The way I see it NQ squandered their resources and now its do or die time.
 
They could have made the mission system take taxes, buy the ore in the market, pay for missions, and then make actual content drivers that take the purchased ore, refine it, make parts, ship to a factory that can build NQ ships, then put them into action with player crews in some kind of group finder NQ space fleet of both players or NPCs to act as law enforcement, or military. Those who want the benefits of protection or benefit of NQs government can do so. Anyone who does not like it can leave that civilization as a rogue faction or factions and fight against NQ who is better funded, better armed, etc and actually have some kind of meaningful warfare that could be fun.
 
Instead they want to nail down people with taxes as some kind of Sci-fi neo space sharecropper for ore and taxed to death to prevent gameplay that should have opened up gameplay. 

In a game that's described as "the space MMO entirely built and driven by the players", a currency issued by NPCs (quanta) should not be required for anything. Not for unlocking or changes recipes, not for territory upkeep, not for anything else. Quanta should only be used to optionally trade on NPC markets.

It is true that the mesh server made the game much more playable.
 
But at the same time it also highlights how much NQ is struggling with voxels.  The entire point of using voxels in DU, is that voxels are an extremely effective way to manipulate large 3D datasets. Which then in theory should make it well suited for streaming and multi user manipulation, and the reason why DU exists at all.
 
So it is a bit ironic that NQ's solution to making their self made voxel engine perform, is to not use voxels... I.e everything you see in the game except for when you are building, are plain vanilla 3d meshes (converted by the server when you leave build mode) using the built in Unigine engine LOD and mesh streaming features. So NQ basically spent years trying to make their streaming voxels work, and after all that work had to fall back on existing Unigine features instead.
 
And it also makes the extreme lag we seen in the game, make no sense. There is no reason why DU should have so much lag compared to other MMO's, other then.. well.... NQ. And it should be very clear by now that I have very little faith left in them.. ?
 
 
 

https://www.gamespress.com/ANTICIPATED-SCI-FI-MMO-DUAL-UNIVERSE-REVOLUTIONIZES-THE-VIRTUAL-WORLD-
 
"The team is planning its final content wipe for the Beta release, making it an ideal time to start rebuilding civilization."
 
/Shrug

I don't understand why they put these taxes in. Of course they said that it would get rid of many areas and constructs that are no longer used by active players. Accordingly, it is also an austerity measure. (Is NQ really doing so badly financially?)
The problem could also have been solved by moving this process to an active subscription. Same result, except that you wouldn't harm very many players by doing this, because you are now imposing a game compulsion and style of play on the players. Where is the motto "Play how you want - be who you want and develop yourself"?
I have now tested the MiningUnits for a few days and the mini-game is already annoying! Just running back and forth to the ground ores, just the fact that you first have to level up for many weeks to enable progress.
It feels wrong to demand taxes from players just to force them into the game in terms of time. They wanted players to have more freedom and more time to "play" - so why weren't these MiningUnits completely automated? An area restriction on how many areas a player can have in each solar system would have done justice.
By the way, their system does not prevent that many players now create many alts to generate more ores. Let's see how long they will enjoy doing this.
In principle, it doesn't matter, since they apparently plan to do a wipe at the end of the beta anyway. So why invest time and money now and not just wait for the release? When it's released in 3-5 years, at least you'll see what you're buying.

I find it cheeky that inactive players from the beta will now lose everything and have to log in to save it. Some players have reasons why they don't currently play DualUniverse, but would have come back later if there was meaningful content. Telling these players to log in or pay a subscription to log in so you don't lose your areas and buildings shames me. It smacks of NQ currently begging for every subscription and not understanding that this way more subscription players will leave.
 

It's even harder to start from scratch, especially solo, now than when "beta" first launch.
 
Like many others, I don't really have the desire to do that again.

Hi. 
 
Along most players, I find my self "enjoying" the calibration mini game and the need to calibrate. (sarcasm) 
 
I hate it...
 
My game joy is now restricted to fly around alioth/sanctuary with my xs ship helping new players. 
Since i dont charge, i have to craft my own fuel. 
 
This leads me to auto mining on my sanctuary territory. 
But i hate the entire mechanic except the part of my container filling up. 
 
So i was wandering if i could use a macro to simply accept the default calibration value and start mining. 
 
No decision would be involved, just a sequence of clicks. 
 
Btw, if any NQ is reading, please allow mining, without any human interaction on sanctuary.

100% agree. At the very least, I'd say reduce the brightness to a fraction of what it is now, and maybe reduce the amount of rocks as well. They're so abundant it shouldn't matter if the spawn rate was limited to, say, 1/3rd for example.
 
They also lessen diversity and uniqueness among planets and moons in my opinion, as having such a large portion of the area around you be covered with these rocks makes all the planets feel just that little bit more the same.
 
Here's another gorgeous shot just to add:

Remove emission from rocks.
Remove that nebula.
Leave space alone.
 
Give @Eternal his landscaping business back. I worry about his commute.

Harvesting ore stones (that are spawned after calibrating mining units) requires players to hold the left mouse button a lot. For some players this causes wrist and/or finger pain/discomfort. Could surface ore harvesting be made more ergonomic? Mining tool had an auto-mine mode (toggled with the middle mouse button). Perhaps the harvest tool could have this mode too?

Maybe it is just me, but I am already pining for a way to skip the mining bot "loading" animations.
 

The mining mini-game such bad gameplay.  Apart from the fact that the mini-game is just tedious, it's also completely RNG so sometimes we get 4k rocks and sometimes 1k, and on top of that half the time is flat out doesn't work and gives no rocks.
 
Please fix the bugs, and re-work the gameplay so it's not so demoralising. I'm really getting fed up of logging in to just be disappointed by the randomness of it all.
 
Ideally, get rid of the mini game and the RNG completely - make calibrate a button you press to keep efficiency up and spawn surface rocks at 100% each time.
 
It's frustrating enough to make a profit the way things are atm, never mind farm enough ore to actually build something.
 
- The previous manual mining system worked on positive reinforcement: time put in = amount of ore gained, and finding the ore was a predictable and rewarding mini-game.
- Current mining unit is an RNG mini-game, that is time gated, and only rewards small amounts of ore (if it actually works!), which is more along the lines of negative reinforcement. It just annoys me every time I do it because it's not optimal, and no amount of extra effort/time can change that.
 
A real step backwards in core DU gameplay.
 
 

That is not quite true!
The normal mining was voluntary. Everyone could dig as much as they wanted and do whatever they wanted with the ore.
The new mining system, however, was introduced together with taxes. So a player has to go digging/calibrating or fly afk missions for hours. 
Without taxes no machines, no autominer (although autominer is wrong for me, it is only partially automated) no progress. You could also stay on Sanctuary forever, but progress is even more limited there because the resources are set extremely low.
So, the system was not only replaced 1 to 1, but made worse by additional obligations. If ore prices fall even further, some areas will not be worthwhile at all if the ores are brought to the market - just to be able to pay the tax. There are hardly any ores left over for the progress of the game. I'm already waiting for the prices to drop to the bot prices, then not only Quanta will disappear from the game, but the ore as well.

And that most likely means players leaving the game.
 
So once again like with 0.23, NQ has managed to drive away players with their "game saving" features. Makes you wonder how many more "features" this game can survive..

If more compulsory content comes in the form of more restrictions and controls, I will definitely leave the game. There are now enough limits that the game imposes on me, there was never any talk of that at the beginning. There is not much left of a huge infinite sandbox voxel building game.

Full wipe or no wipe at release? It's the only question that matters and you need to stop dogging it.

Harvesting ore stones (that are spawned after calibrating mining units) requires players to hold the left mouse button a lot. For some players this causes wrist and/or finger pain/discomfort. Could surface ore harvesting be made more ergonomic? Mining tool had an auto-mine mode (toggled with the middle mouse button). Perhaps the harvest tool could have this mode too?

Where is the fun?

My question is will there be a wipe? Yes or No. decide and be concrete by Dec 1st, cause we deserve to know, so we can spend out time right.

Update: So I did the things recommended....

- HQ'ed tiles I wanted to keep
- Moved to Space
- Tried going back to Sanctuary.
- Reduced My Expectations
- Even used a Beta Key to try restarting new...

I can no longer enjoy this game in the current state. There are jobs I have hated that were more exciting then the daily logins to Nanny your Mining Unit. Until the developers change the Mining Units or implement a new way to progress in the game there is no point in playing. I gave this update a try, I took all of the advice, and the progression rate which was already abysmal is now unbearable.

I love this community and the people in it, even those I disagree and fight with but I just can't DU it any longer. Not until they fix things, which is unlikely, cause they don't care if players leave.
 
Original Post:
I will be taking an extended and potentially permanent break from DU.
If you see me log in, it will be to kick (calibrate) mining units, post a haul mission, and sell things so I don't lose tiles. 

It is clear the developers don't respect the players or their time, and if the tax situation doesn't get fixed with the falling ore prices, no point in owning tiles to earn a little more than break even.

Also Sanctuary sucks...

( will be placing everything of value on HQ tiles to ensure no one scalps my stuff.)

Q: is NQ still considering single ( non Org) gameplay feasable beyond sancturary and are you planning anything to make this gameplay stile worth while again?

I agree it would be difficult to get anywhere legally.
 
But at the same time, here is what NQ is selling when a new subscription player wants to join. So a wipe would be disingenuous at best.

We don't want a wipe.

Currently early game is completely broken, the only think keeping us in the game is because we have already some asset and ore.

I think you are not seeing the general problem here. There is now a MUCH greater need for people to hoard quanta and push ore on the markets.
And that means there is also less incentive to spend quanta on others and do big projects just for the hell of it, which is how the race tracks got made in the first place. And after demeter it is less likely they would ever have been made in the first place.