CptLoRes

Just great. We finally get the vertex editor, but not before NQ makes the game unplayable for solo builders with low yield mining bots and territory tax in the Demeter update.. Feels more like salt in the wound then anything else.

Any game that tries to force me to do something I do not want to do, is a game I will not play. It's a very simple concept really. And one of the reasons I started playing DU, was because it was a MMO that you supposedly did not have to PvP.

Ok, that's it. If this goes live then I am out. I have been hanging around but not really played actively for a long time now, waiting for NQ to make a game that is fun to play again. But if NQ is this far removed from reality, then there is no reason to wait around any more because the ship is no longer sinking but well and truly sunk.

The game is going to be very empty after that. There is also a potential RL money problem with NQ removing in-game assets made by the users having a subscription contract that was made before demeter. Another elephant in the room, is what about all the quanta people spent buying territories?

Power would also allow slow but almost infinite growth, and NQ is terrified of that because they don't have the server architecture to deal with it. 0.23 for example was just a mini "demeter" to limit the hosting cost of industry. In other words the complete opposite of the initial game premise of "unlimited" building and expansion, huge cities, spaceports etc.

I am on the fence about the territory tax. As long as we still get the 150K every 24h, I guess there will be no problem for a newb to maintain some limited amount of territories. So that aspect is fine. The problem for me has more to do with paying a subscription and still being forced to log into the game and travel around to maintain your territories and buildings etc. Imagine having spent years building up an empire in DU, and then for some medical reason or whatever you are unable to login for a long time. Or maybe you simply just want to take a break from the game, and play something else for a while.. And perhapse it is just me. But when I am told I have to do something, it makes me not want to do it..

Jupp.. And it is not exactly a new problem. Right from the very start in 2016 we asked them multiple times. - How will you solve the scaling issues with finite resources in an persistent world? - What about server and bandwidth requirements as we get more and more players digging? - How will you address the "swiss cheese" problem around popular areas? And all we got where either silence or the NQ trademark quote "don't worry guys, we are looking into this", which we have learned means they have no clue how to solve it. So I guess we have now come full circle, and NQ is finally now in late 2021 addressing the major problems with the game that we pointed out for them in the beginning.

Direct quite from NQ in the Demeter video comment section.

Lua and coding skills is an in game resource just like everything else. So if you don't want to learn or spend time on lua, you pay someone else for the job the same as if you suck at building and buy a ship from someone else.

If they are supplying both the protection and the mining ship for the newb to use, I don't see how they have anything to gain by partnering up with pirates. Or put in other words, the newb will be protected from loss and most likely end up have a good time regardless of if pirates attack or not.

PvP needs love for sure, and so does most other parts of the game. And while building is the one thing they do reasonably well, there is still a lot of frustration because of many, many, many long standing bugs and no progress. A simplified DU progression chart from the player perspective looking at new features, looks something like this. And I probably forgot to include some stuff here, but still.. 2017/2018 jan 2020 aug 2021 Pre-Alpha building ------- nothing ------ industry & pvp prototype ------ industry nerf ------ asteroid mining & pvp update So you see that for a pure builder player, this game is still very much unchanged from the early pre-alpha times.

DU already has a official feature up vote system https://upvote.dualuniverse.game/ that NQ is mostly ignoring. And considering the fact that NQ is ignoring the official list, I am sorry to say it is unlikely they will care about another one.

There is no use trying hard to get more players to join, before the game is in a stage that makes players not quit again.. Remember it is much harder to get someone to try again, once they have been put off the game. So aggressively pushing the game (releasing on steam etc). would only burn bridges at this stage.

Only way to get back to pre-0.23 is to remove schematics. It was made very clear by JC that the purpose of schematics is to limit industry. So if the market is currently up and making schematics relatively cheap, it also means there will be more industry that eventually will flood the market with products and pull prices down making schematics more expensive again. So schematics is still a time-gating mechanics designed to limit industry, which in the end also means it adds grind to building and creativity. So the question is more if the industry pre-0.23 was sustainable long term, and how NQ can remove grind without destroying the economy. One such suggestion that NQ never acknowledged, is that we could use the ground we dig in as dirt cheap materials for large scale static building, that would be balances out with some limitations like weight/strength that would make then unsuitable for use on dynamic constructs.

Let's hope so, because depending on how you count they are currently burning out a third wave of players. And I don't think they can except many more waves of new players wanting to play the game. And grind is of course is not the only reason why players leave. But it is worth considering that PvP'ers have a tendency to "burn brightly" with multiple accounts and then switch games rather quickly, while the creative crowd on the other hand will stick around for a long time if you give them the right tools to express their creativity. And the creative side will also slowly improve the overall game in the process by generating user content. Proved NQ gives us tools to make content that adds worth to other players also. Like player driven markets, better large scale building tools, more advanced user generated/scripted missions, more ability to affect the game using LUA etc.

This is what many of us has been asking for a long long time. But with the exception of the upcoming auto mining, all actions from NQ, has been to hide building/creativity behind an increasingly large wall of grind. And the by now infamous 0.23, being the final straw that broke the camels back and made many players quit the game (and probably a big reason why we are now getting auto mining).

I would rather see a buff then allow stacking. But yes. NQ is for sure not playing the game they make.

Nope.. After the update my local shipyard feels more like a game of pinball. So docking permits for owned constructs definitely not set by default.

This is something we have been asking for since day one of play testing (2017). The idea being that you have separated engine and nozzle elements for more flexibility, and fuel tank voxels where volume of connected voxels become volume of tank. This would solve MANY of the creative freedom vs cube meta problems in DU. But NQ has never even acknowledged this.

I don't think they did it on purpose, since there is no advantage for NQ in that and would require actual dev time. So my guess is that the problem came with either an EQU8 update or when they added the GeForce Now api.

Is there some need to push away a ship without docking rights? Would it not be enough that the ship is unable to stick/dock? What am I missing? And what about when we get AvA later? This magic force field would prevent any type of boarding large ships scenario.

On atmos planets like Alioth etc. it would be a huge advantage for haulers stacking engines and wings to get a smaller footprint with less atmos drag and higher top speed, making it easier to leave the planet etc.

Why so complicated? Just make it so that 100% overlap means 100% obstruction and suddenly all stacked ships become completely useless without affecting legal half voxel 'stack' ships.

I play the game my way. And my way does not entail having multi accounts or trying to figure out every way possible to gain some advantage over other players in PvP etc. That is not my jam. I just do my builds and programming experiments, and could not care less if others have better ships then me. So even after having played this game for many years all I know about exploits is what I have discovered myself by happenstance, or things mentioned in the forums.