CptLoRes

It is Saturday and since I am not spending any time playing DU, I decided I might as well kill some time doing more research. This time I looked at high profile hires, and it is not looking good. And since these where published in the news, I can use names. - Dual Universe Adds EVE Online’s Hrafnkell Oskarsson Linkedin: Mar 2018 – Oct 2018, Employment Duration 8 mos - Dual Universe developer christens new Montreal studio opening by hiring former Eidos executive Stéphane D'Astous Linkedin: Feb 2019 – Sep 2020, Employment Duration 1 yr 8 mos - Dual Universe developer Novaquark hire former CCP Technical Director as new CTO Linkedin: Nov 2019 – Sep 2020, Employment Duration 11 mos

Statistically that was an anomaly. But most of us are happy whenever our nay saying is proven wrong by NQ. Problem is it happens so rarely..

Yeah.. I am pretty much at a place where a "sunk cost fallacy" is the only reason why I read the forums and do my daily 5 min login.

100 lights = 100 elements that has to be rendered regardless of if light is on or off. This amount of extra work should normally not be a problem, but DU is a strange game..

Mostly tech side that is gone I am afraid. And of special interest is that the "Lead Server Developer" went Dec 2017.

This has always been one of the main concerns from the very beginning.

I just did a quick search (mostly linkedin) and from the original team of 24, only 8 people (9 if we include JC) are still working there. This translates to a 65% turnover rate (excluding JC from the team of 24).

Judging from the dev blogs, 0.24 will mostly be already existing functionality in the game just formalized as "hauling missions". I.e. instead of transporting your own ore/gods to the market and selling it, you will be transporting someone else's stuff from A to B for what I assume will be a relatively small amount of quanta. So it is kinda like UBER in space I guess. And as usual, the potentially big and lucrative jobs will still remain internal inside ORG's.

Of course NQ is the one making all the decisions when it comes to game features. But that doesn't mean we the players have to like them, especially when they are obvious efforts to time gate the play time in a subscription game that is severely lacking features. And just like NQ get to decide when and how to implement features, we get to decide if we want to play a game with such features. And if enough people decide they don't want to play that game, whatever NQ decides will no longer be relevant.

Windows licenses is an totally artificial restriction put in place to recoup the dev investment and make money. But in the context of "save the human race, and rebuild civilization" it makes no sense.

I do see where you are coming from, and I even agree to up to a certain point. But the economy in DU is at best "an early version" like most other things in the game, and bots for better or worse are currently the only way to injecting new cash into the economy (they also remove I know, but still).

The account management system is probably "an early test version, but don't worry guys we will improve it soone".

The problem with the DU design, is that it hasn't been designed yet..

There are several issues here. 1. Unwanted construct cluttering, degrading the game experience for everyone. Long term this will not only be a problem for markets, but also for any community driven gathering points. 2. NQ not reacting to this long standing issue in any meaningful way. Despite there being several solutions suggested that would be relatively easy to implement, and would not only fix the market problem, but also unwanted cluttering in general. 3. Underlying game performance issues. Just as the market clutter makes the game unplayable for many, is also means that any large community gathering of constructs (for valid reasons) will face the same issues. From a technical perspective the markets are just a smaller version of the lag city test in alpha, and the problem still remains unsolved.

Removing the marketing fluff and applying actual player experiences, that statement would be something like.

Those sharp edges at the sides are typical for a texture that has been cropped to aggressively, cutting of the pixels used for antialiasing against the background. I.e another one of those quick and dirty bugs, that would be dead simple to fix but will probably stay put for a long time.

This right here is the problem that as a software developer is driving me nuts! In beta you are supposed to be long past big sweeping changes to the game. Beta is refinement towards final release. And it should be obvious that adding massive game loop changes shortly before proper release (making the game reach a state that would be considered beta by all others), pretty much guarantees a buggy, unbalanced and problematic game release. And with all focus on adding game loop features, there will be no time to fix the many, many bugs already in the game. And here is the kicker. In the entire history of this game development for as long as it has been available to players. There has never ever been any sweeping changes, frequent new feature implementations or focus on fixing some of the many bugs. Just infrequent patches with relatively minor changes and at most some early stage (that never actually gets refined into a more mature state) of a new feature if you are lucky, followed by long periods of radio silence. The only time we had something that felt like an actual push, was just before the 'beta' soft release, in what was probably a do or die moment for NQ. But before that (and after) the lack of steady progression made mine and some others spider senses tingle relatively early on, and made it so that we started asking some difficult question instead of just praising NQ and proclaiming over and over how great this game was going to be. And as time went on and the progression never came, the people asking hard questions went from a few to many. And today now in the year 2021, this game is still in many ways surprisingly similar to the very first pre-alpha test we played back in september 2017 with mining, industry, markets and 'pvp' being the only actual game loop changes. And the only thing that has truly seen massive changes since the start, is the roadmap and schedule..

The alpha forums where all about positivity. So much positivity and creativity that it bordered on the silly some times. But it can only stay that way for so long, when all actions (or lack of such) from NQ is tearing it apart. And then predictably the hopes and dreams are turned into frustration.. But relax. Even those of us that have stuck with this game since the very beginning, are now running out of energy. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but my post count is in a sharp decline simply because I can't find the energy to bother any more. But is that a good thing?

https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/personal-data/

Whatever it will be, it is going to be whatever they could throw together with the least amount of effort. And then NQ will say something like <JC voice>Guys, we know this is an early version, but we will make it much better I promise</JC voice>. And then after some weeks of putting out fires from 0.24, NQ will go into silent mode again for 0.25, and we will be stuck with some subpar clunky mission system for a couple of years at least.. I would like nothing more then to be proven wrong. But all historical evidence point to the scenario I just described.

The new upcoming 0.24 mission system is yet another examples on the NQ dev style, and how it leads to balancing issues and community backlash. In short, we essentially know nothing about the mission system. No ideas exchange, no community feedback, nothing. So when NQ release 0.24, that will be the first time we get to see and try the mission system. Meaning NQ will already be heavily invested in the new system, before any player has had a chance to try or comment on anything. And it also happens to be the complete opposite off what was promised during the kickstarter.

That's just a bad implementation in that case. Just queue the past and split it into multiple transfers if so needed.

It is well known that the NQ 'beta' release was forced, mostly likely by the investors. A do or die so to speak. But that is not what is troubling me. The lack of actual progress in the game, especially during alpha but also now after 'release' is much more worrying. If you look at for example the dev videos for Starbase on youtube, there is a steady stream of actual progress at frequent intervals. NQ on the other hand will now and then do some sporadic PR push, and then stay quiet until the next big patch that most likely breaks the game in some fundamental way.

NQ doesn't do suggestions, unless they are 100% in-house and completely different from any established method.

P2P is just a broad term for decentralized data distribution. But one of the fundamental principles for P2P networks, is to try and maintained data integrity regardless of one or more clients being disconnected. So the Elite behavior can be seen as atypical for a P2P network.