Wyndle

Don't re-read the ToS or community rules.

At this point crowd funded games appear to be almost exclusively grift. There needs to be an aggressive middle party that has some authority over the project or there's too much money sitting on the table without anyone watching where it goes. I am not opposed to the general concept of crowd funding but the current iterations are broken with regard to game development. IMO, a crowd funded hostile corporate takeover of a studio has a better chance of completing a project and less financial risk to boot. A hand picked exec team for a newly created studio would be ideal rather than handing money to a black box with a studio name already attached.

Not just AAA sub prices, but a price increase at launch. There are a few devs that I have had brief positive interactions with but my overall experience leaves a bad taste in my mouth for NQ. I held more hope for DU than NQ earned and I ignored warning signs I should not have so I accept my part of the blame. I even got my hopes up when I saw an unread icon in the patch notes section, hoping for even the tiniest bug fix to be tossed in. If the goal was disenchantment, disillusionment, or demoralizing then congrats. You win.

Not even a hint of giving thought to another patch... backers complain of not getting physical rewards... and the mesh exporter feels like a "save what you can" tool before shutting it down forever.

The feature name suggests that the entire mesh would be exported, to include interior walls at the least. The example images also imply that components will be included in the mesh. Not sure if the stair stepping in the speeder is due to the scale of the ship or settings in the print.

If only this had happened a year ago... I miss playing with DU's voxel engine but not nearly enough to justify the sub. I don't miss the chores.

DU may have been designed as an MMO but I question that it ever lived up to the Massively part of that acronym. There are more full population, invite-only minecraft servers than DU players using the steam client.

I have been watching for signs of hope but the forums have all but died. At this rate I doubt I will achieve the forum post count goal I set for myself years ago without spamming or being a Steve Martin level of Jerk. TBH, I am surprised NQ still keeps the lights on for this game.

"This is a nice build. It'd be a shame if ya missed a weekly tax and monthly protection payment."

And I thought EU law on such things was supposed to be relatively strict?

It would need a central creative figure and a board trusted by at least 1/3rd of the player base to even be worth considering. Getting a few of the streamers involved couldn't hurt. Anything other than an organized effort is outright a waste. The VC would only be aware of the community if there were a massive snail mail campaign by the majority of the community. And your last sentence above is one of the big reasons why I opted to stop playing before my subs expired. I am relatively certain that the people who actually care about DU have zero influence over the VC. A genuine buyout campaign would be newsworthy. I made the suggestion lightly because it couldn't hurt to discuss it but I don't think anything will come of it.

I'm interested. On an ever slightly related note, what would you imagine a player run buyout to cost? Since NQ isn't developing it they may be keeping it alive to sell, right?

The whole time I was having flashbacks of fan "save our show" campaigns that generally flop. The only thing that brought back old shows were reboots, and it is even more rare for those to be hits than first run shows. I won't say it can't work but I wouldn't wager a single molecule on it having an impact.

Aye, AI is a tool with near limitless potential but just how many monkeys fudge-flinging around typewriters would it actually take to stumble across Shakespeare? The tool is only as good as the person or process using it (doubly so for processes). If you're going to toss BG3 and Minecraft on the comparison heap then I'll raise you NMS, SC. Afterwards we can take Todd and Bethesda behind the shed.

Now that you word it that way... ...a monthly rental fee to own digital goods is an oxymoronic concept. 'nuff said.

Anecdotal Evidence, however plentiful, will only ever be anecdotal. You may know people who shy away from a subscription but that is not actionable from a corporate standpoint. Also, the numbers you're throwing out seem to contradict your own statements about "trying" the game. Comparing a $30-50 one time charge to a $15 game time code (no risk of forgetting the sub) suggests those people may be using cost as an excuse to not bother trying the game. I pre-paid a year sub for each of 3 accounts on the release hype (before the sub price increase) which only cost me a little more than Bethesda was asking for the supreme package of Starfield-loading-screens at pre-release a year later. Now that we're more than a year beyond the release of DU the real world economy is in much worse condition and DU development appears to be stalled out (how many total bullet points in the last several patch notes?). I love the flight engine and the building tools but there really isn't anything more being offered in DU IMO. I can get the same or better atmosphere flight from a slew of sims and while there's not a ton of space games DU isn't uncontested there either. As for building: Why should I slave over doing the work that other studios pay teams of artists to do? If RMT were in DU I could see an argument for earning a living through that effort but otherwise it's only an ego treadmill. I could see building just for artistic release and personal pleasure if there weren't so many chores and limitations tied to it. All of that said, and without touching on any of the controversies and bugs from the past, it doesn't look good for DU.

Baring some miracle of a secret 1.5 plan, I'd say it's finished. There have been too many things taken away to be focused on the hope of potential at this point. Potential mattered pre-release, now we're looking at results in the wake of SC's latest convention and compared to a 20+ year old MMO. SC probably won't be officially launched before 2030 but they're showing real tortoise level progress. What has DU brought to the table so far?

Sure, there are significantly more players than steam numbers. The same is likely true of the OG MMO, EQ, which has 10 to 25 times the numbers of DU on steam. EQ launched in 1999 and hasn't spent anything on advertising that I'm aware of for more than a decade. I didn't even know it was on Steam until a youtuber dropped a video "playing so you don't have to." So I ask, how good or bad are DU's Steam numbers? NQ may be able to maintain the current players count for a couple of decades like EQ, but that isn't growing nor pushing profits. I guess the real question is, what is NQ planning going forward? I would think EQ is still alive due to active development and new expansions but I could be wrong.

Has the PvE event made any changes or any verifiable impact to the solar system or any celestial body within? Is the lore completely encapsulated within what is effectively instanced-only content?

5 new forum posts in the past week with 1 being a repeat question that was literally answered weeks earlier and another a necro post from 2 years ago. At what point does NQ decide the forums are an unnecessary expense?

Oh the irony. Wasn't the point of making it a cloud based system specifically for the intent of making the game dynamically scalable? Weren't all the features that were dropped (or handicapped) what attracted a significant portion of the initial interest?

Please keep in mind that prior to DU NQ was not a game studio. We cannot assume when they started they were familiar with all the tropes and tools of the gaming industry. Now that their manpower has been reduced it seems we cannot expect more than bug fixes and treasure hunts. Regarding DACs; If you look at the game economies in MMO games that have RMT (DAC, PLEX, WoW Token, etc) there are in-game consequences. WoW went on a massive inflation spree for several expansions before they started putting in more controls but the damage was done, WoW became pay to avoid the grind (aka pay to win) while simultaneously destroying their leveling experience. DU's economy did not stabilize enough for the DACs to be used as planned without nuking the economy. If they turned DACs on with the game as it is now I am relatively sure it would kill what is left of the game.

How many of those failures were caused by the aliens being invisible to radar?

Correct. They are using weight to punish players for using objects that are resource intense for rendering as CptLoRes stated.

The former then. You are not the only person who has told NQ about problems with PvP. There are many other problems that others have told NQ about from the very beginning, yet they still ended up at this point. It is a years long running gag that NQ doesn't listen to the forums. Thanks for trying.