CptLoRes

We have had this discussion many times. And the bottom line is that DU shows all the symptoms of bad system design. The lack of separation on the screen render (fps) and asset loading (network/ssd streaming), being just one of many such examples. I.e. the renderer should operate in a separate thread working only with the assets it has available, and by design it should never be affected (fps) by asset being loaded until the new voxels are finished processing and ready to be rendered. So having a slow network/storage would result in longer loading times before voxels show on the screen, but the fps should never drop while doing so. And this problem is made even worse since DU appears to not have any occlusion culling on either streaming or rendering, meaning that everything like underground constructs, tunnels and inside of constructs etc. are always loaded and rendered while you are flying above them.

You got some stray leftover voxels from when you dug out the land. Best way (that I know) to find those tiny almost invisible voxel artifacts is to make a dynamic construct with a voxel wall in it, and swipe it across the area using the move tool until it get snagged on one of the artifact. This way with some trial and error you can figure out where the artifact is and hopefully be able to get a lock so that you can delete it. And yes, this is just one of many such things that NQ should have fixed a long time ago, instead of frustrating players and forcing them to come up with all sorts of workarounds just to make the game playable.

A simple solution would be to just add and remove square boxes of dirt (like landmark did). This would be a win-win since it would be very useful for players, and also make it easier for the servers to handle with simpler voxel shape updates. And then you would just use the smooth tool afterwards, if you don't want sharp edges.

I am more fascinated by how every one of those "revolutionary future tech" web3 portal tech demo/game sites, manage to look like it is some type of early year 2000 style game or CGI from The Lawnmower Man movie.

More web3... web4?!! I am going to be rich!!

But, but the game has been released for a long time now, so there should not be any more game breaking changes.. right?

By now I am 99.9% convinced the only reason DU still exits, is to try and avoid any more bad PR before they launch whatever new products they are working on. I mean.. Being NQ "the metaverse company" and self proclaimed "voxel experts" is not an easy sell for any future investors and costumers, when your only previous project using your "revolutionary voxel technology" has failed spectacularly both technically and creatively. Another reason for just letting DU slowly whittle down instead of just closing it, is as you touch upon to avoid to many reimbursement claims from players with long subscriptions.

And some of us asked NQ multiple times from day 0, "how are you going to solve the obvious technical limitations and scaling issues with this design?". And for years NQ/JC would only shrug and say "don't worry guys" or something to that effect. But guess what, the problems did not go away. And by now the history of DU is pretty much just a long list of community "we told you so" issues being proven right as time went by and NQ continued to ignore the feedback.

Just like that statement is nothing but empty bravado, there is no community left that can be bothered to react.

That is because the entire game is unsustainable. Or to be more concise, the game is far from finished and lack the necessary game loops to sustain players in the long run. And NQ in their infinite wisdom tried to quick fix this fundamental problem by adding grind and time gating (starting with v.23) in an effort to extend the game time (without doing the actual dev work required to add content) so that players would pay subscriptions for longer. But players generally don't react well to lots of grind just for the sake of it with no real reward, other then paying taxes and building yet another ship or base construct. And the grind made losing ships to PvP very costly in actual player time, which is the most valuable asset in any MMO. And combined with the lackluster and also time stealing PvP game design on top, it is no wonder that many players stayed away from PvP in DU. And so as a consequence of this, players start demanding more quanta in return for missions etc. to offset the grind and time requirements of the game. But using quanta to combat grind is going to ruin the already struggling economy in the game. So it's just another lose-lose scenario for the few remaining players in the game. In short. No amount of tweaking mission rewards, ore yields, PvP mechanics or any other quick fix will make this game sustainable. And the only thing that can salvage this game, is adding the actual game content (six pillars) that was promised. But that is not going to happen..

PvE in a normal MMO: Explore some exotic world with your friends, discovery hidden treasures monsters and loot. Have chance encounters with other players that you may or may not cooperate with to take down difficult PvE enemies for better loot. PvE in DU: No exploration because there is nothing to discover. PvE is basically just a collection of new VR challenges that use the existing and lackluster PvP functionality, only difference is that NPC's replace players as opponents. Ohh.. And it's instanced away from the main game to make sure there absolutely will not be any kind or community interaction or emergent game play/strategic element to the PvE missions.

That is the problem with DU in a nutshell, but not in the way you think. We the community have been looking for and suggesting workable solutions to in-game problems for many, many years now. And the problem has always been that NQ has either not acted on them, or implemented something completely different (usually some half way quick fix) that would only partly solve problems and at the same time introduce new ones.

NQ did "double down" for something like 4 years, but they got nowhere. And the "release" is pretty much just NQ giving up and doing a release regardless of the game state. Why they got nowhere beside the obvious ignoring feedback stuff, is something we can only speculate on. And it is my hope that when NQ collapse, that some former employee will come clean and tell the inside story.

This looks to be is some kind of fixed Player-vs-Challenge type of deal. So basically just an extension on the existing tutorial/challenge system in the game. PVE on the other hand as the name implies, is embedding different types of challenges into the actual game environment so that there is a risk and reward system that makes it fun and exciting for players to explore the world. And exploration was supposed to be one of the main pillars of the game btw.. But this has nothing of that.. and looks to be just another example of NQ doing some half-assed feature implementation like with so many other parts of the game.

Short version. NQ loves mini games. Longer version: DU is a single shard emergent community based MMO based in a persistent world, that will isolate players away with instances so that they don't risk running into the rest of the community and experience any kind of emergent behavior while playing..

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_fool_and_his_money_are_soon_parted

This.. Every operating in a game like this is by definition possible to log, and a game company has all the information about players and every operation they do by default as a consequence of hosting the MMO game. Adding blockchain on top of this would mostly only add complexity for data that is already there. So NQ not dealing with the exploits was nothing but indifference from their side.

While it is technically true that NFT does not directly tie into something with a monetary value, there is an established connection there in the eyes of most people. And I have a hard time believing that companies (and especially NQ) would want to make a NFT game/whatever simply because it is "cool for players".

I am not disagreeing at all. Ideas are worthless without a functional implementation. But NQ's leadership still has to at least pretend that they have a plan for the future and act accordingly, be it NFT or getting bought or whatever. The alternative is to close doors and admit that all the invested money has been lost.

Cause and effect. The low player count is mainly caused by the lack of progress in the game. And this has been a major concern for almost as long as DU has excited, to the point that we talk about NQ development as if it is some alternative time domain. And back in the early closed forums we had regular discussions about how slow/inefficient the NQ dev cycle was. And it became even more apparent in the early alpha period when NQ had 100+ (~150 at the peak) employees and still hardly any progress worth mentioning to show for it.

Appearances is everything if your main plan for the future is to be sold to some large corp. or become the next big NFT/web3 something.. And I think that is probably the main reason why DU is still up and running, to maintain the appearance that their technology is functional.

I imagine it would be very hard to continue to pretend to be community driven anything, if they did that.

That's corporate speak for "we don't have any successful products and a clear path going forwards, so we are desperately trying to find the next big thing.."

They spent 8 years on DU, and it is still FAR from finished. So we are talking something like 2028ish for the next one then?

Speaking of Metaverse/Web3/NFT/whatever and NQ, watch this video (long one, but worth it) and replace Decentraland with Novaquark.