CptLoRes

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..

I didn't expect my topic to make the discussion last so long and address all these different subjects (which remain very interesting, so continue).
 
I hope that NQ's next project will completely detach itself from the "emergent gameplay" side or the metaverse.

They proved that they were completely incompetent, not on the technique, which I cannot judge, but on the very principle of this operating system.
 
Jean-Christophe Baillie, even if he certainly had a huge share of responsibility in the failure of the project, was the person who had the vision that corresponded to the reality of what emergent gameplay should be.
 
I will have for proof of it the multiple DevBlog edited years ago with mechanics described in detail and more than deepened. Nothing was respected.
 
And here we are before this bitter failure.
 
BUT 2023 seems to be a good year for MMOs, there are new projects with veterans coming out. Maybe elsewhere, a vision close to that of JC will hatch on another theme.

We have been waiting for more content (actual pillar type content) for something like 4+ years now.
And that is why most of the veterans are frustrated with NQ, and no longer give 'balanced' feedback.

We sure can, we have 8 years of experience with NQ/DU, plenty of time to see how they operate. On top of that the game IS finished, they did a launch and it is sold as finished on Steam.
 
 

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.

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.."

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.."

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

What was the "need" that was supposed to justify the wipe?
 
Now that it's over and done, In hindsight, what exactly did it solve or fix or improve?
 
They thought that wiping the game and launching it fresh on Steam would bring in more customers.  That's not a need, it's a hope.  They didn't need to wipe, they wanted to.  And their reasoning was wrong.  So whether we want to define it as a need or a want, it was a mistake either way.
 
All it accomplished was diminishing the product that they had already sold, to the people who were the most interested in it.
 
 
 

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.

Well, its what some people seen in one way or another for years (with more evidence or less, relying on gut feeling, experience with game industry), some were better in formulating it, then others. All this discussions, about economy, wipes, population. At core it was about is NQ to be believed or not (obviously - not).
 
Early whistleblowers, like Blaze, had it hard, with more conformistic players attacking them.
 
Now its pretty clear to almost everyone, but some super die-hard fanatics. 
 
 

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

Hello everyone,
 
We understand your concerns and why you would suspect that we intend for Dual Universe to go to a free-to-play model. Without going into detail about the open position, we can however let you know that there are currently no plans to change Dual Universe into a Free-to-play model for several reasons, “Cost-per-User” being one of the major ones. Nor do we have any plans, or intents to introduce any "Pay-to-win" microtransaction systems into Dual Universe. This position is open for another project and NOT for Dual Universe.
 
We hope this cleans up some of the assumptions that are being made in this thread.
 
Best regards,
The Novaquark Team.
 

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.
 

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..
 

So for me, there were all sorts of small failures along the way (many in beta, some since) but they are all really just details next to the central problem.  One of the key features of the design for DU was that players would provide *all of the content*.  That meant that the game just needed to provide the mechanics and frameworks and literally everything else would be player driven.
 
Now players did actually try to do this.  There were people who created puzzles, etc for people to solve, created factions who fought each other, tried to build whole cities and many other interesting things.  The game and its developers seem to fight against content creators at every turn - recent examples being ship builders being put off because the stacked element checker means they have no way to know whether or not they are selling ships which will error 6 months later and warring factions being put off because nobody can shoot each other in battles.
 
Putting that aside though, I think that the one thing this game has proved beyond all doubt is that a game with solely player built content does not work.  You need to have some other content created by the game itself first in order to create gameplay loops that players can do when they aren't doing any group content.  A player needs to be able to just log in, play for 1/2 an hour, enjoy that time and profit from it.

So the one thing I would have done right away is add some background life to the game.  Put creatures in that might attack the player, make some basic challenges on the ground and in space, give players something to shoot at and reasons for doing so (protect base, get resources, whatever).  That would also give them a reason to team up, live in walled villages or space stations with a large shield, etc.  Some of this was in the original game design videos which were put out.  Then I would have built on it by adding more of a survival element to the game, adding PvE and NPCs to allow players to make their spaces more interesting.  I can build a huge space station but it has nobody in it at the moment, let me make it more interesting, make a bar where NPCs come and players I let in might be able to get missions from those NPCs.  I think that would have given players much more of a sense of shared purpose and struggle and a reason to come together into groups and play together.
 
As it is the game is, frankly, boring.  It's a game relying on player created content which literally deletes player created content on a regular basis made by a company which has no problem with breaking existing content and blaming that on the players trying to create it.  The world itself, and the constructs the game allows you to create, are fairly static and uninteresting too and it is difficult to come up with actual functions for many of the rooms in a construct.  I can add a bed but it has no use.  A lot of the cool stuff I see is just huge empty shell buildings with one or two rooms because people made them to look pretty rather than because they needed the space for things.

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.
 

More importantly. none of the people who actually play the game were impressed either.  Organising and preparing for that sort of a fight is not a trivial and stress-free task and when the final result is both sides agreeing that they can't fight each other successfully because of the game then that's another huge fail.  For me these types of fights were the only reason I was coming back and it's hard to see that there will be many more in the near future when they end like this, would you want to put in the hours and suffer the stress for that result?

This game never even made it to beta in anything other than name. For all intents and purposes this game is still in Alpha.

NQ be like:  "Ummm... sure, territory warfare is a concept we've talked about...  Roadmap? LOL.. Where we are going we don't need roads.... We might introduce power requirements at some point possibly... Sorry not sorry the collision detection broke all your ships... again... We are the Metaverse company... Avatar PvP? Yeah, nah... LOL...  In the meantime, have a pointless floating robot and purple voxels... 3D Blog tool goes brrrrrr....  Oh noes, you're going to have to refactor your Lua just a couple more times now... promise....   Wipe? What? No, we'll not be wiping again... But can't exactly promise we won't have to wipe again... "

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?

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

The servers are overloaded due to the influx of new players.

The stacking 'detector' was the last straw that made me stop playing in beta, and the wipe was why I never returned.

The stacking 'detector' was the last straw that made me stop playing in beta, and the wipe was why I never returned.