CptLoRes

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.

I think we both understand each others point. But take the SSL example. When anyone can generate a Let's Encrypt certificate and put any kind of site behind it, what security does the certificate actually add? And again don't get me wrong, I understand very well why those certificates are needed for commercial sites to verify the site and prevent scams, man in the middle attacks etc, but what actual security is added by forcing everyone to use SSL on every site (even including internal ones if you don't want the browser to complain)? There is nothing preventing you from putting a scam site behind a SSL, so what justifies forcing the complexity on everyone?

It's not just code signing. It is the sum of all those bits like signing, SSL, 2FA, TPM, DRM etc. etc. that adds up costing time and money and adding lots of complexity and points of failure. And I am not saying I have a better solution, but it is strange that all those solutions somehow always ends up costing money and causing some kind of vendor type lock-in/walled garden scenario. Aka the security cartel..

So in short, yet another way that money exchange hands with the security cartel to ensure that "there is no accident" with your software.

none... And when they did wipe, they did not even do the one thing that was used as a reason for a wipe. Which was to change the planets to something much better then the original. The promise was "no wipe unless absolutely necessary" and that if they where forced to do a wipe, that they would make sure that players would not lose assets from the wipe. So no matter how you look at it, promises where broken.. And many players payed subscriptions with real money and put down A LOT of effort based on those promises made. And this was the moment where any respect I had left for NQ, was lost.

I generally agree about this "global statistic". But there is one major difference, and that is that DU is subscription based. Meaning that the ratio of 'inactive' players will be much lower, since there is no such thing as "taking a break" in DU without either loosing hard earned assets (the grin is real) or continue paying for a subscription that you don't actually use that much. And that is also why the wipe hit so hard (just like we tried to tell NQ that it would do), since it deleted players assets (quanta, constructs, tiles etc) which players had spent both real money and lots of time and effort to gain. Often based on a promise from NQ, that they would not lose them when the game released no less..

DU is just a remake of Landmark in space. And despite being older, Landmark in many ways had better voxel tools then DU. And to anyone wanting to say something like "but DU has single shard technology blablabla", it should be pretty clear by now that it never worked or scaled as planned.

I guess NQ is the PVE boss in this game..

But at least we got an definite answer to something for a change.

To me he looked more and more tired as worn out as time progressed. And I would not envy anyone being in a leader position at NQ. Or any other position at that company for that matter..

This is the only part I slightly disagree with in your post. And the reason is that NQ never even came close to finish the tools we need to make proper content. So all they really proved was that a game with subpar content creation tools, will fail when they are supposed to be a content creation game.. Duh! But I do agree that unless the players are given so much freedom that they could script fully interactive content (and we disregard all the potential exploit issues), then yes there must be some PVE elements to make a game fun and interesting for normal players. And this is part of the problem. It would appear that the only players NQ have been listening to, are certain PVP focused org players who have gotten a foot inside the door. And the interests of those hardcore org players does not even remotely represent the needs and wants of the majority of normal players in DU who has a life outside the game..

Yes.. It is morbidly fascinating how they managed to end up with the complete opposite of every core promise made. And the answer to "How would you have fixed du?", would be to make NQ not behave like NQ.

There is A LOT that went wrong. But the fundamental problem has always been communication. Here is what NQ said during the kickstarter. But as we all know, this lasted only a short time before they went the complete other way and started to ignore the community instead. And remember this was back when the community was under NDA restrictions and played with the sole purpose of testing and giving feedback on early game play no less! And NQ was never able to receive constructive criticism. If you played the cheerleader and told NQ how great they where, they would interact and be all smiles and thumbs up. But any type of constructive criticism or legitimate concerns with the game design and it would be radio silence or at best some boilerplate "don't worry guys" and "we know best" type of answer. And when things would boil over and the entire community would rage, we would get some "we hear you" type of deal with promises to do better. All promises that where broken over and over again.. And that is why the community turned toxic against NQ, and things are the way they are today. And it is basic math really. When testers are telling you that things aren't working, but you ignore them and keep doing the same things. Then chances are that you will fail.

Servers needing an emergency reset after 80 players meeting for some fun, color me NOT impressed.

And? For a MMO that number is a for sure confirmation that the game is dead.

And NQ knows it to. From the job description: That right there is a very telling story, with NQ basically wanting to hire from the lower ranks to fill a senior/chief position. Either in a cynical attempt to try and cut cost with a lower salary, or simply because they know that someone experienced would most likely take one look at the project and immediately walk away. Or a combination of both.. Either way it is just yet another example of NQ doing what NQ does best.

To long since I've played to give specific answer, but you need to look into changing engine tags to VERTICAL etc.

To be fair that was an insider joke, and he appears to be a new player.

So.. The game is failing even as a tech demo for their voxel technology, since there is hardly anyone willing to play any more. And the last ditch effort to get anyone to play is F2P? How is that going to work in a game where both active and inactive constructs (left behind by hit-and-run F2P players) will lead to increased server cost? And what about people with unused DAC/long term subscriptions?