CptLoRes

I would go as far as to say there is hardly any design at all in this game, and it is absolutely for sure they have no master plan to follow or any idea of how it all is supposed to work as a whole. And because they don't have a plan it means that changes are almost always purely reactionary to some specific issue without looking at the whole. And this is made even worse since the few times NQ actually introduce a new feature, it is with the mindset "how can we check this item of the list with the least effort and/or hack existing functionality to do the job", instead of focusing on what would be best for the overall game design and play ability.

This soooooo much. I am normally the chill dude that tries to be impartial and insert reason and facts into discussions. But as a professional software developer it makes my blood boil having to watch NQ doing things 'their way'. And the saying "you reap what you sow" is very much deserved in this case.

And NQ has no track-record for turning temporary test versions into permanent features of the game.. no.. none at all..

With regard to the alpha/beta/release state of the game, I keep coming back to questioning where did all those dev hours go? Despite what some people think, NQ cannot really be classified as a indie company when they have two office locations (Paris & Montreal in Canada) and had about 150 employees at one time (currently 76 employees according to linkedin). Meaning that regardless of how big a budget NQ may, or may not have there should have been lots of people working on the game for all those years. So what features did the 6+ (8+ depending on how you count) years of development with that many employees go into? Even now all we have are like maybe 2 of the 6 pillars functioning, and the whole game is just layers of "early test with lots of bugs. But don't worry guys, we will improve it later" functions and no real game design. I mean.. The game is supposed to be a community driven MMO, and it doesn't even have proper social/chat/voice/message functionality and a UI from early 2000.

And this is also part of why I am strongly against any kind of wipe leading to players losing resources. Not because it is necessarily a bad idea, but because we told them clearly that the game was not ready for any kind of open beta with subscriptions. And yet they went ahead and did exactly that and made promises about player progression being "forever" to try and justify the subscriptions. So NQ made their bed, and now they have to lie in it. And the way 'release' is shaping up is look very much to be a repeat of the same problem as with the 'beta' + subscriptions changeover, where we ALL know the game is not ready and that there will be many game breaking changes coming after 'release'. So if NQ breaks their promises and remove player resources at release, it is almost guaranteed the same will happen again after release also.

And according to the video this is a test with minimal schematics requirements, but don't worry "we can quickly add more schematics later on".

Ha! The 'Improved' schematics will either A. Have a symbolic week on PTS and then go live (regardless of feedback). B. Go straight to live server since the feature is 'complete'. And I am hoping and praying NQ will prove me wrong this time, but as so many times before they probably will not..

Before 0.23 it was not unheard of to have a industrialist order raw materials from someone else and have them delivered to his factory, since the profit margins where good enough for that and the industrialist was busy doing what he wanted (building industry) instead of waiting and funneling all his earnings into the next schematic (as opposed to other players and the market).

The [filtered] part only comes after desperately trying to help for years, and then having to watch any and all constructive feedback (including bug rapports) from the entire community being ignored.

I wish it was a bad joke, but the main death mechanic in DU is ... boredom leading to permadeath.

This brings the discussion back to my point about having social features link with LUA functionality, enabling all sorts of functionality like for example voting and maybe even some of that "emergent gameplay" we are all looking for since it could then be used by players to make quest systems etc.

Blockchain + blueprints = NFT aka #createtoearn. shudder.. As if things could not get worse. But to be fair. NQ is struggling, and it is the CEO's job to try and save the company. It is just the way he goes about doing this, that is questionable.

CptLoRes is a person who agrees with that statement..

I have been saying that DU should be "Easy to understand, hard to master" for years. And if you look at the things that actually work in the game, like building, scripting (to a certain degree), piloting etc. they are exactly that. Take for example building. Anyone can easily build something in this game since it is easy and relatively straight forward. But making something that make heads turn and players open up their wallet, requires dedication, skills, know-how and creativity. And this is the type of game mechanics that is rewarding and makes players come back for more year after year. But on the other hand there is running around like a headless chicken pressing the same buttons over and over again to complete some pointless task, that does not make players want to stick around.

Industry was never about server cost. Server cost is all about network bandwidth, and industry are fixed elements that require almost no server-client traffic to maintain (at least they should not if implemented correctly). The big server drain bar none is transferring voxel data (constructs and terrain changes) between server and clients, and that is why mining was nerfed so that people would no longer have a incentive to dig tunnels everywhere. And the big problem with many of the recent changes, is that the entire premise for DU is now questionable since it may turn out that a game like this cannot work with regard to server cost. At least not with the small player base we have now.

Problem is when most players select the second option and leave. So every time NQ makes a change they need to ask themself, how does this help to make the game fun and make more players want to play? Am I the only one that find it ironic that DU is a so called open-world building MMO with the slogan "make your own game", that has a restrictive and limited scope of game features that forces players to play in a very specific way. And getting more so with every new patch..

This was probably one of the reasons why JC went out the door. DU was his baby, and one of the original kickstarter promises was that NQ existed with the sole purpose to be working exclusively on making DU a reality. And resources being allocated to other projects (despite being a clear violation of the kickstarter promises), would also explain some of the glacial slowness in the DU dev process.

Managing is maybe not the best word in this discussion, since industry should be about designing and tweaking a complex automation system trying to make it run as smooth and efficient as possible. That is the fun part in industry. But that is not what NQ are giving players, since their version of "improvements" is to give players many small tasks that they have to repeat endlessly over and over again, regardless of how well the players designs their industry. I.e. they are trying very hard to remove the automation part of industry, which effectively makes industry meaningless and no different from plowing the fields as a farmer.

That's not the question. He is trying to get confirmation that sanctuary tiles will be wipe safe, so that he can leave the game today (with active sub) and then continue where he left of when he comes back in November.

They exists in the current form simply because it was the method that required the least effort and dev time to be able to tick of the "missions" part of the list.

This game needs fun, and adding more micromanagement tedium is generally not considered fun by players..

That's the type of questions that would be reasonable to expect an answer to in this type of game, but.. You are not going to get it until just before 'release'.

A big freighter with a large mass and inertia should turn, accelerate and de-accelerate based on how much force you apply in any given direction, just the same as for a lightweight XS ship. Nothing more, nothing less.

And facebook.. sorry AlfabetaMetawhatever is going to be the standard by default (for better or worse) simply because they have the money, experience with VR (HW and SW) and more users then they know what to do with. And if NQ's secret plan is to be bought up by Meta, they have to show something better then what the many, many other VR startups already are doing out there.

Metaverse is just a fancy word for multiplayer VR. And VR requires a lag free and spatial coherent environment at all times. And no amount of eloquent words from the CEO is going to turn the current technology we see used in DU, fit for 'metaverse' usage. And only if and after they manage to solve to fundamental technological problems in DU, can they start talking about being 'the metaverse' company (despite not having made a single VR product ever)..