CptLoRes

NQ has painted themself into a corner being depended on cloud services (AWS) for the game to function, meaning they get monthly bills for storage regardless and processing and data transfer rates that vary depending on the user load. The last one being the costly one when you look at how AWS operates. I think self hosting would have been a much better alternative with the limited number of players they have. But NQ was shooting for the stars with millions of players from day one so they went cloud. And the entire AWS system is designed so that you cannot easily replace the service once you are up and running. With self hosting on the other hand, once you are past the initial cost of building infrastructure and IT management, then processing and storage becomes very cheap. The real problem here is the cost of bandwidth in a game like this, where server bandwidth requirements go through the roof as player numbers increase. The only solution I can think of that would scale with players is a P2P network between the clients where players close to each other in the game would share the load. But getting something like that to work robustly and with low latency would NOT be a trivial task. And there are also problem with privacy and leaking IP addresses from other players.

Good idea. But the usual problem is NQ tech limitations. Such a conversion would be the same as a XXXL static core or something like that, even with 1m3 landscape resolution instead of 25cm3 construct resolution. And NQ has repetitively said they are unable to handle larger cores then what we already have now.

The original planet landscape is cached locally on all player clients so that flying over unmodified landscape with no constructs requires hardly any data streaming. Good idea, but NQ never figured out how to make a seamless transition from unmodified to streamed in modified landscape. So instead we get large chunks of landscape change just popping in out of nowhere as we get closer. And with the exception of very early pre-alpha tests, it has only gotten worse over time since NQ is tuning for server cost and not game performance. And from a technical viewpoint it is strange that there are no square shaped terraforming tools, since circle shaped tools make more costly voxel changes then square ones. My guess is that NQ are terrified of anything that could lead to more terraforming. An easy way to build roads for example, would just lead to the same performance and cost issues that mining tunnels caused earlier. So in short. DU is an open world voxel based game with unrestricted terraforming, that is hosted on a cloud server solution that makes it to costly to actually allow all players to do any kind of large scale terraforming. I.e. every time you dig it cost NQ money.

Yes.. And we all knew this right from the start, and kept asking how they where going to solve the obvious scaling issues. And all we ever got was silence or "don't worry guys" in return, until suddenly years later it was not OK at all.. And this together with all the other stuff is why I do no longer respect NQ as a professional company.

I actually agree a lot with this. The building part is what works in DU. But instead of leveraging this, starting with v.23 and moving forward they instead put in roadblocks that made it harder and harder to enjoy that part of the game. And I also see the argument about NQ setting expectations to high for players during the kickstarter etc. But there should be no questions that NQ has been under performing over the years to put it mildly, even if we adjust the expectations for the game.

As I have already said before, after giving NQ my time, money and many, many chances I am now at the point where I am just here to eat popcorn and watch the slow-mo train wreck as it happens. Does this make me a small person? Maybe.. But at least I get more entertainment from watching NQ fumbling along then playing the game. And even after all these years the one thing NQ consistently manage to do, is to add a little fuel to the fire now and then. Edit: But don't worry. Judging be the lack of traffic in the forums, it wont be long now before I can retire my DU persona it would seem. Unless that is if NQ release whatever meta thing they are working on, which would liven things up in here also I bet (fuel for the fire).

And even if they somehow suddenly got more resources for DU, since they ignored major technical and design issues for years it mean that the game would need a complete overhaul to deliver the pillar functionality of the game, in any way close to what players would expect from a modern MMO. In other words. NQ dug a big hole, and now they get to lie in it. And thanks to how they treated the community and especially the early adapters, all the help they are going to get from players (mostly ex by now) is to fill in the hole after NQ has lied down in it.. And it will certainly not help NQ when they release whatever they are working on in the already unpopular NFT/WEB3 segment.

The problem as I see it, is that NQ knows very well that their server technology is not good enough for ground based AvA, or planet side CvC or any similar low latency game play that users would expect from territorial warfare. And doing some kind of turn based board game/mini game is just going to prove how flawed their technology is, and make even more players give up on the game.

As long as someone is paying the subscription, that have just as much right to hold a tile as anyone else. And this kind of persistence was supposed to be a key feature of DU, and something that made it different from all the other MMO's out there. The mechanics for changing ownership (before server cost became the key motivator for changes) was always supposed to be trading or ground based warfare. So the problem is two fold where NQ are implementing cost driven changes that are clashing with the game design, and at the same time not implementing key features needed for the game to function as planned.

I think the underlying discussion here is not about plasma, but how to take away some of the tedium and make the game fun to play in general.

Sounds like the best strategy is to just wait until that group grows tires of not getting to pew-pew and leaves the game.. And in other news NQ bad game design is bad.

All that is needed is basic filtering with tag and blocking functionality, like you would expect from any sane MMO where trading and markets are supposed to be a major part of the game. So put it on the list with the other WTF's like the chat system etc.

And I envy you that experience, because judging from how many left that is not what the majority of players have experienced.

That is if you only look at the time after release. Historically they have been underperforming for a long time with many more devs then they appear to have now. So what can we realistically expect from NQ at this point?

When developing a AI driven game, the developers define the scope of the game, backstories for characters and key moments to set the frame for what happens and what is allowed inside the game. The AI will then fill in the blanks and bring every part of the game to life in much more detail then what would be possible to script. Here is me spending literally 10 seconds defining a "game" story in chatgpt, and telling the ai about an even that happens while playing. Imagine what a proper dev studio would be able to do with an AI model trained specifically for the game they are making.

Because the improvement are of such a complexity that it would not be economically or timely to do by hand, like being able to ask a NPC more or less anything and get reasonable answers. Or having the NPC react realistically to any action you can think of and manage to do while in the game, regardless of if the developers planned for it or not. And some of the graphical improvement like close to photorealistic graphics are only possible using AI for now and a long time away with traditional methods. And the bragging about AI just to generate hype thing was very real 5-6 years ago. But in the last couple of years has some real breakthroughs that bring AI very much into the useful category both in general and for games.

Not sure if you are joking or not with the AI biscuits comment, and it is not my job to educate you. But you should at least make an effort to get to know about basic principles like Reinforcement learning etc. before making derogatory comments about things you appear to know little about. Some more examples below, and remember these videos are early prototypes and some of them are more then a year old. But you also have to ask yourself that if this AI stuff in games is nonsense, then why are all the big names like Intel, Nvidia and game dev studios spending big money and lots of time and energy on developing this technology?

One of the major differences is that technology using AI is derived from training data sets and/or goal/reward driven evolution, and the resulting solutions are often able to perform under situations they have never encountered before. That is very different from the handcrafted/scripted list of behaviors that you will find in a typical game character 'AI' in current games. It would not be possible or at least not practical to program the complexity you get from training AI's by hand. For example a AI driven walking solution if trained, would start to move completely different in a heavy armor without having to be told do so. And that movement would be dynamic. Lose a piece of the armor and the movement changes. Add a slippery floor and hilarity ensues etc. While current solutions on the other hand would just move exactly as programmed regardless. And I predict that games are going to start looking and feeling much more dynamic and realistic in years to come. Much more so then the current progression in games.

We tried so hard for so long to tell NQ that they where making huge basic mistakes with the community, and with the game in general. So maybe it makes me a small and petty person, but all I have left now for NQ is schadenfreude.

It does not matter how powerful your gfx card is. If the render pipeline is not optimized and lacking proper GPU fencing, it will lag almost regardless of which gfx card you have. And that is why game devs spend countless hours optimizing the 3d engine, regardless of any content that may or may not have been made yet. Or alternatively they use pre-made engines from dedicated game engine companies (unity, unreal etc.), where hundreds of engineers do nothing but optimize the code all year long.

So the obvious stuff like more realistic human like behavior from NPC's, but also things like player characters moving in a realistic way in all situations and reacting to the environment, and AI driven graphics optimizations etc.

Funny thing is JC has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, but didn't want any kind of intelligent behavior in the game unless coming from players. And big corp is literally throwing money at AI currently, and all the big name game companies are now investing heavily into AI driven game mechanics.

A 'lots of people quitting' is a relative term considering how few are remaining and still actively playing in the first place.. 😛

And it is highly unlikely that NQ will deliver.

Well.. we are talking about a dev studio that made it so that the game would freeze for seconds if there was to many messages in the notifications list.. (not that many in reality, and should not have mattered regardless how many there was).