CptLoRes

Ita nice to see Novaquark finally listen to the cries of their community. I hope it's not too little too late.
 
I remember Deckard saying to ke directly that adding NPC PvE was never gonna happen due to the conflicting ideals for the game being player driven... I am glad they're realizing how badly it's needed. I may come back for a bit when this gets added.
 
Side note, jettesoning cargo is something you'd see if a real pirate was on your @SS. Instead of stopping players from doing it, with items being deleted.... drop the items as a lootable container behind the ship to be used as a decoy/dropping weight. Pirates can then double back for the package. Add more gameplay, don't restrict it further... I am so tired of yall restricting gameplay, so much I could / did in Beta can no longer do on the launch game because of that mentality. 
 
Apart from that, you didn't address the largest complaint right now on Steam reviews, and that is the game is a second job to play. It still needs some heavy balancing, and nothing in this post about the future has even hinted at that.  You can try to stifle players, but whales are still running alt mission running/field mining... with the solo player left to eat crumbs..  
 
All that I see left in terms of players are mostly hard-core PVP holdouts. Most of the PvE crowd beyond pure builders have already left... and a lot of them feel pushed out by PVP, and how BAD the pvp actually is. If you don't improve the overall combat experience...  will just end up with meh PvE, and lackluster PvP. 

i would suggest to reconsider the "for a single fuel tank"  bit.
a problem that all advanced Flight Huds have is the number of links on the control units. mainly the fuel tanks are the limiting factor, as whenever you have a bigger number of fuel tanks, those consume so many links, that we are unable to link all elements needed to control the ship to a single seat.  there are some workarounds in place, like not linking the fuel tanks and going via core and talent levels to try to get the correct amount of fuel in each of the fuel containers. but this is painful, difficult and honestly nothing we should have to do.

Just implement this change as a fuel "hub" allowing 10 fuel containers per fuel type to be accessed via one link and the problem would be solved, and wouldn't cause a risk,like increasing the general number of allowed links might do.

Hagbard.

The problem here is that you are all trying to apply logic and common sense to how NQ should handle game changes. That's not how they operate.
 
So expect sudden changes to the game that may or may not break game loops or make players constructs invalid.
Changes that may or may not even be mentioned before hand before being implemented. Changes that may or may not show up in a blog or the change logs at all, depending on if NQ can be bothered to include them when it is so much easier to just let players discovery the changes while playing instead.

Seems like a match to me, with the speed and type of game patches and improvements we are seeing after release. And as the saying goes. If the shoe fits..

Two types of players left in the game by now.
 
- Veterans who live on the promise of the game that was sold them (aka potential), and somehow still manage to believe/hope that NQ will turn things around.
- New players that are feeling the rush of discovering what works in the game like building and flying, and have yet to discover how shallow the game actually is.

And with active new players being in the hundreds according to steam statistics, and looking at how NQ is handling the game then I think it is safe to say that yes.. The game is dying. I would even argue that the game is already dead, and only being kept alive with artificial life support.

Seems like a match to me, with the speed and type of game patches and improvements we are seeing after release. And as the saying goes. If the shoe fits..

Despite all the flaws and broken promises from NQ, they did treat players time and content with respect. Minimizing pain via magic blueprints, landscape recovery tool etc. right up until end of beta. And the wording was always very clear on that "time and content from players matters".
 
And then suddenly at release, they just did not care any more what so ever..
My guess as to why, would be that they internally knew the jig was over and that DU is running on borrowed time.
I.e. running the game as a tech demo for NQ would cost them less after a reset, so screw the players since it is just a matter time anyways.
 
Only thing I don't understand is why they published the game on Stream, and how they could be so dilutional as to think that would result in good pr for them.

🤷‍♂️
 
Clearly it was never a lot. 😅
 
I think the point is that even NQ isn't focused on DU's future.
 
So the answer to "what's next?" is very simply: "a project other than DU". The CEO is spelling this out clearly (IMO), even if they don't want to announce it here. 
 
To those that enjoy the game by all means keep playing, but don't pretend sub money is going to improve DU or that the game will have major changes. 
 
New players especially should understand that as of right now there's no evidence to suggest NQ is going to keep developing DU in any meaningful way, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.
 
Of course I could be wrong, but it's on NQ to clarify the statements by their own CEO and the lack of any updates or information in general since the last patch. 
 
I get that people have been doom and gloom for a long time and talking about how DU is "dead"...but at this point the writing is very literally on the wall. They are moving on to new projects and naysayers should get over it since it's "just a game". 
 
NQ seems to be all but done with DU, but they will milk remaining players for every penny they are worth and use player creations to promote other projects as "proof" of their great tech.
 
I wouldn't care enough to rant this long if they were at least somewhat honest with their players, but it's very likely that NQ ditched major dev on DU months ago to work on other projects. That's the final cherry on top of the "NQ treats its customers oh so well" sundae.

The problem is not having dedicated scanning orgs, but that they are able to effectively scan entire planets and by that gain a disproportional large control over the game.
 
And again, not the scanner orgs fault since they are just "making their own game" in one of the sadly few ways possible right now.
 
And no NQ, the solution is not to increase tax, or to time gate scanning even more, or to make scanning units even heavier and more expensive or any such limitations. That would just make the game even more unplayable for beginners and solo players so that orgs would dominate even more, just like with every other &#*! feature where you have 'balanced' creatives and solo players out of the game.
 
The solution is to fix the fundamental issues in the game (will never happen, so all this is just hypothetical) and then enable mining and distribute A LOT more ore, so that we can have access to resources and actually be creative and "make our own game" again.
 
In other words turn back the clock to how it was earlier, and then start working from there to give us the game you said you would make.

Which is kind of my point..."the bulk of the players" represents a tiny, tiny segment of gamers mostly limited to people that have played since alpha or beta.
 
There's should be no illusion that DU's largest distribution platform by far is Steam, not organic growth from its own launcher. 
 
I'm glad that you like the game, honestly. There are things to like without a doubt...but it's a subscription MMO.
 
A few gamers liking it isn't enough.
 
The dismal loss of players on Steam and the lack of apparent organic growth anywhere else is why I don't have faith that NQ will figure out how to make the game popular. 
 
It isn't enough to like the game or even to think the game is good, the game has to be popular for it to survive as a sub-based MMO. 

The game did not die because of players. The game died because NQ sucked the life out of the game alienating players at every step, to the point that not even the hard core fans would stay around any longer.

The game did not die because of players. The game died because NQ sucked the life out of the game alienating players at every step, to the point that not even the hard core fans would stay around any longer.

The game did not die because of players. The game died because NQ sucked the life out of the game alienating players at every step, to the point that not even the hard core fans would stay around any longer.

In short, the illusion that someone from NQ read it was not working, thus the section is closed.
 
 

The game did not die because of players. The game died because NQ sucked the life out of the game alienating players at every step, to the point that not even the hard core fans would stay around any longer.

Agreed 100%. 
 
another “1st alpha” backer here where most of our time initially consisted of waiting for the servers to open up. 
 
I remember at one of the first Alpha resets where inventory was introduced, spawning on the arcship, literally hundreds and hundreds of nondescript (no colors yet) players constantly pouring out and flowing across the bridges like somewhat low frame rate water. 

there was a sense of eagerness and we honestly felt like pioneers on a search for a grand vista to place down our first cores. I remember bumping into a then promenent backer called Yamamushi and we chatted about how groundbreaking the game was and how it was basically a cross between Eve and Minecraft and how huge it was going to be… and with the sun shining down from bright blue sky and the snowy mountain peaks glistening in the distance, and seemingly endless players flowing past us over the bridge and away from the Arcship in every direction, we could believe it, too.  

Cut to the final release, and the fifth reset for me and the feeling of pioneer is just a distant long forgotten memory, like a dream of a dream…
 
every release has been a diluted, lesser version of the one before to the point where this time, the “release” came and I couldn’t even be bothered to place my STU. 
 
For many, STUs themselves arrived far too late to make them relevant either ingame itself or as a valid player number counter. 

the old guard are generally tired, disaffected or outright bored. 
 
NovaX was on MP2 on Alioth for the first Alpha release, then for the Balpha (alpha masquerading as a beta) we were part of the MP3 development on Madis, along with MTI which was, AFAIK, the biggest Madis development that spread 15km end to end and consisted of perhaps 500 L cores by the time the suspicion of an incoming wipe knocked the wind from our collective sails. 
 
Madis was never a busy place, even MP3 but you’d always see a yellow marker or two at any time of day or night. People visiting via surrogate pods or dropping in at the market to buy something. 
 
numerically, there were I think six first wave backers in NovaX.  Of those two of us remain, but by the Beta we had grown to pushing 60 players (not alts) of which 20 or 30 might have been on at any one time. 
 
now there are four of us and I am usually on by myself, much like the last half of the Beta. 
 
damn, I’m getting the feels now…
 

DU is lousy sci-fi, since there is so many inconsistencies and hardly any correlation between what you do in the game and the technology available. So a more correct term would be space-opera.
 
For example everything must fly in DU, but there is no advanced technology or Lore or anything in the game that would justify a society based around flying.
 
And one moment you have nano transformers doing hand-wavy magic and resurrection pods that can transfer you across the universe in a split second, and the next you are running around picking up glowing rocks from the ground.
 
Kinda reminds me of Star Wars where people are living in a western movie but then suddenly have all sorts of crazy technology for whatever fits the short term narrative, without any thoughts as to how having access to such technology would impact a society as whole. I mean just take a look at something as simple as the invention of the iPhone, and how much smartphones (and the internet) has changed our society in a relatively short time.

Despite what NQ would like, people want to be self sufficient. So if a stable source of T2 is unavailable for most, they will use T1 instead regardless of price.

We don't have TW because anything but some turned based mini game for TW would be to costly to host, and implementing TW as a mini game would just further highlight how flawed their technology is.
 
Same with air combat and AvA, not possible with the technology in this game..

Its long talk about DU demographics, but in short -- its not much left to retain. And this on itself will not switch viability in green.
 
DU started like rather niche thing -- with limited number of people in world who can be interested in such product, but because of years of failures, gradually burned over most of potenial player base, who was alienated over all kinda of dissapointments. So, issue is how to return thousands of "sandbox space mmo" loving people who tried DU, but had enough and now have negative (sometimes very negative) opinion over it. 
 
I can't formulate it well in english, but in marketing terms its like limited volume market, where you can't "create/convert" consumers in any meaningful number out of raw population, its harsh competition for rather static number of existing ones.
 
I think this is main thing in DU demographic doom, that people kinda trying to ignore all the time, imagining how some features or right action suddenly reverse so much catastrophic loss.
 

The problem is not having dedicated scanning orgs, but that they are able to effectively scan entire planets and by that gain a disproportional large control over the game.
 
And again, not the scanner orgs fault since they are just "making their own game" in one of the sadly few ways possible right now.
 
And no NQ, the solution is not to increase tax, or to time gate scanning even more, or to make scanning units even heavier and more expensive or any such limitations. That would just make the game even more unplayable for beginners and solo players so that orgs would dominate even more, just like with every other &#*! feature where you have 'balanced' creatives and solo players out of the game.
 
The solution is to fix the fundamental issues in the game (will never happen, so all this is just hypothetical) and then enable mining and distribute A LOT more ore, so that we can have access to resources and actually be creative and "make our own game" again.
 
In other words turn back the clock to how it was earlier, and then start working from there to give us the game you said you would make.

That’s always been my canon as well. Imagine if we didn’t migrate recently, or even AT ALL. What if the AIs simply wiped out humanity every time their attempt at creating the perfect society failed. All the wreck and ruins aren’t alien, they’re us before the most recent fall of mankind.
 
That way, from a lore perspective, you could begin to introduce robotic NPCs/actual factions. Those loyal to the architects of civilization, and those in the outer worlds grasping at the last semblance of autonomy.
 
Its such a damn good chance for quality story telling, it’s a shame they never went past the vanilla story they came up with. It COULD be retconned safely, as the opening cinematic could simply be represented as a lie we’ve been sold and not the actual nature of our existence.
 
Imagine being able to start the game in an outer Haven (lol mgs lol) outside the SZ and getting a darker, more conspiratorial sequence that casts doubt on aphelia. I think of it kind of like the B5 intro after the Shadow War started.
 
Doubt they take it that far, though.

I wont go into the fine detail of our patterns etc but we have scanned enough to know when you find X, Y isnt going to be 1 hex away so we adjust. We located everything of value in 66% of the planet, of course some people did beat us to things we would have eventually found as we moved across the planet. 

The moon is a whole other ball game as it revolves around 1-2 massive blobs as seen on the moons at launch and requires a totally different tactic.
 
As I say our doors are open, we are always recruiting. The more players who do this with us the more we get, but in turn this will cause debate within the community.
 
I have seen organised mission teams do insane quanta per day, we dont do it as I find mission running boring and too afk for me. Scanning at least gives me 7mins in between scans to shop on the market or work on the factory : )

And the really frustrating part is that they broke it trying to fix a problem that did not even exist any longer.
 
The exploit that made it possible to stack had already been removed, so when wiping all they had to do was to scan all blueprints a single time and remove the obvious problems ( >10 percent overlap).
 
The slight overlapping (< 5 percent?) sometimes possible by careful managing element placement was never an exploit or even a problem, and overall a great help to make things more aesthetic.
 
So there was no need for any more check that what was already in place before they "fixed" it. And yes, I and others tried telling them this, many times.. 

As mentioned, high tier ore is now distributed in hot spots the same way as with the MU mini game.
 
Meaning there is no longer any need to scan all the tiles, since you can find all the tiles worth having just by scanning periodic tiles in a system.
 
And as I said many years ago, I still think ore should be distributed based on geographical features.
 
Coal should be found in segments with lots of forest etc, metals in mountain areas, silicon at deserts and gold along the coastline etc.