Wyndle

Have you ever experienced being "in the zone" or had a sudden realization about something that makes perfect sense but you can't explain where the idea came from or the details or why it works? That was a part of JC's vision for DU. You can't ask a bean counter to streamline something when nobody understands how or why that version worked in the first place. Once you start pulling those strings the whole dream begins to unravel and more often than not cannot be stopped, much less put back together in any meaningful way. Most of the potential that I perceived in DU came from the passion of the other players despite what the devs were doing. With each game changing patch that potential was chiseled away, eventually revealing a hollow shell and then that was further reduced so that it looked like a child pressing shards of broken pottery into mud to make a 2D representation of the pot the shards came from. The voxel building system here is amazing. The single shard world is really helpful but not the end-all, be-all that it should have been. The community has been the soul of the game thus far but even that well has been poisoned repeatedly with no sign of change of tactics to speak of.

I have been holding my tongue far more than NQ deserves but I will continue to be cautious in what I post here since their rules are not forgiving. I can't even begin to explain my situation without loudly stomping all over certain vague rules that are swiftly enforced and earn a forum ban in the process, but I digress. If I am not on these forums after this post then I probably broke a rule that I wasn't aware of. My prior back-to-back strikes were... well, I can't say, but it was the final straw that drove me off after 0.23. I guess some lessons are really slow to sink in and I shouldn't have given NQ my money again. As much as I loudly protest about people who just want to blow up other people's hard work I have seen some those same players act like great stewards to a caring and cooperative community. The PvP in and of itself isn't the problem, nor are the players who choose to participate in it. It's the false advertising of being a sandbox with PvP being optional that is irking me. It's the lack of AND INTENTIONALLY FALSE communication about plans that have game changing value that push me away from being able to re-ignite my own passion within the game. Speaking as someone who has been trapped in an abusive relationship, I have no tolerance for the same behavior from someone I have paid to produce a product for me and others to share.

It sounded more to me like this was the plan from the start. If they had told us that plan up front I would have applauded and probably championed the decision (and probably have previously). To hide the plan in case it didn't work only harms trust between NQ and the community.

And what do you think will happen the day they turn on territory warfare? All the people who hold producing land in non-safe space either leave or become legion. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't been paying attention. Under the current system of poor resources if you add in the ability to lose your territory despite paying the tax would be the day DU collapses. I was a champion for TW during Beta, but the current setup is so far removed from what we had that there is zero hope for DU should NQ enable TW now.

The building experience is still the best thing available in a multi-player flavor to date. It is the tiny amount of lift for my wings as I scream toward the planet Burn-out when I discover my airbrakes aren't working for some reason. Having seen examples of what Nanite can do right now, out of the box, it's only a matter of when (not if) DU's top spot gets sniped. The first project to get true player cooperative building with UE5+ will likely become the brand name for the next generation of all gaming (i.e. Kleenex for tissue, Google for search, etc.) JC's heart was close to the mark, that's part of what attracted so much support. I think the current management took the wrong aspects from the concept as being the key ingredients to JC's success when trying to cut the fat from the project. The best scenes being on the cutting room floor just to fit a metric will hurt a film, just as cutting the life out of a gaming community will kill it.

I second this. I would add that a number of the community members have made amazing suggestions that would all be possible with UE5.1. You built it and we came. Rebuild it with the help of your community and many, many, many more will come. Or keep us in the dark while DU dries up.

As a player with years of experience having these issues, what do you think the new player experience would be? Would someone new to DU today even consider a resub? AFAIK, the only people having any fun in this game at the moment are the ones who just want to blow up other people's hard work. I fell in love with the old mining system and the building. There was a glimmer of hope for asteroids but the current implementation started as a really bad joke and has only soured from there. I have spent more time looking at the MU mini-game since launch than most of my ships existed before being rebuilt in Beta yet I have spent less time in build mode since launch than I spent looking at the logon screen during Beta. I can see the remnants of the original vision at the heart of what DU is today but it is now devoid of all passion and fun, IMO.

Sure.... let's depend on all the surface ore that doesn't respawn to keep our ships flying indefinitely. Non-PvP consists of ALL of the activities that are not pew pew including making ships, weapons, ammo, and fuel for said pew to occur. "Material passive income" Methinks you're leaning too heavily on the wrong meaning of income. Being required to maintain machines on an ongoing basis to keep the material flowing also starts to chip away at the passive portion of the statement. Using material passive income in the same way it could be said that I have material passive incoming water and natural gas material that I use to produce home heat and process food into usable product. If you genuinely believe the game is already dead why put any energy into the forums?

This. The available resources in safe space becoming less predictable would immediately kill the last vestiges of non-pvp play. There would be fuel shortages killing missions and the rest of the economy with it. Quanta is a unit of trade, not a resource in and of itself. You can't fill your tanks with an infinite supply of quanta if there's no ore to process.

A mass-transfer of wealth doesn't mean moving a massive volume of money, it means taking from the many for the benefit of a few already atop the pile. If you want to hyper-focus on the quantification that's your right but numbers alone will not tell the whole story. There are several key, non-numeric principles that exist in the foundation of an economy that are at imminent risk of being irrevocably harmed in this scenario. Some of those same principles were alluded to in the justification(s) for wipe that NQ made public as well as in other public communications. The fact that DU is in the situation where everyone is by default forced into one specific activity is antithetical to the concept of a sandbox.

Because they explicitly stated it wasn't an exploit it is listed as an improvement to clamp down on that faucet.

Prediction is only involved if you're trying to time it. The newest players not in experienced orgs are the ones hurt the most by the current situation because they'll try to play the game the way it has been described. Sources of income for a new solo player: auto miner ore to sell, surface ore to sell, challenges (frustrating WHEN available), and the lowest tier missions. It isn't just a bad way to treat new players, it all but ensures the vast majority will cancel their subs. All iterations of mining currently in game are absurdly un-rewarding. Building just to build will only last so long before boredom sets in. If only mission runners and pirates are supporting the economy then you either build stuff THEY want or you don't sell, and odds are against you filling their needs even by accident if you've never done those activities yourself. It is very much a real problem. You're looking at the quantification of the maths without the context of what the numbers represent. A mass-transfer of wealth caused by a conglomeration of poor design and bugs not caught during the prior years of development could be the final nail in the coffin for DU.

If you want to get a head in DU then build a guillotine? DU is classified as a game, not a job. If NQ wants players to build their game world then we need to be able to PLAY and time gated chores don't count.

Spinning disk hard drives are not recommended for this game. Even some SATA SSDs are relatively slow with this game and an NVMe drive is highly recommended.

Wow, reading that suddenly made it feel like an abusive relationship.

On top of bot ore orders being depleted to have the bigger payout of the two challenges unavailable (again)... *sigh* That leaves missions as essentially the sole source of income in an ore poor and sink heavy post-launch environment. It may be my poor memory of the events but I am starting to wish DU was at least half of what No Man's Sky was on launch. Don't get me wrong; I prefer the premise and promise of DU to NMS but I have yet to see any sign NQ is trying to pull off what Hello Games accomplished with NMS post-release. Nor have I seen any indications that they haven't copied the playbook from a long list of now defunct services. Give us something to go on. Now we're at the point that NQ is almost systematically out of time to own the mistakes and take clear measures to correct.

@NQ - Is UE5 being investigated for an engine swap? Is this the reason we haven't seen any significant changes other than clamping down on faucets? If yes then I'm all aboard. If not then I'm not going to include you on my list of holiday card recipients when I win the lotto.

For an experienced player with a ship that can haul cargo. For a brand new player with no clue about the game it would be a refund request and/or bad review without getting to see anything the game has to offer.

A paraphrase of your statement, but I suspect is fairly accurate to your meaning. I suspect also that despite your forum avatar sporting glasses you are not using rose tinted glasses in your examination of this game. I prefer to flip between the two viewpoints to see the difference between what DU promises and what NQ has delivered thus far.

I don't think you can separate the two topics in this case. Per NQ, the bots buying ore was stated as being a vital part of the economy by giving easy access to quanta for new and/or solo players. NQ is the source of the mixing on these topics.

AFAIK, the only people with money to spend are the ones NOT producing anything, only involved in bot delivery missions. Sure, they need ships and fuel but even with half or more of the population doing so it still would not provide enough demand to keep a fraction of the economy afloat.

So PvP hit chance is based on cross-section which directly implies a "visual" on a scope but you can ignore other real, interactable objects entirely even when the object is many dozens of times larger and blocks LoS several times over? Why do we even have PvP anymore? Is there any fun value in it (beyond being the cog in the economy that removes elements and ships from the world when they cross an imaginary line)?

My thoughts on this topic have been posted a few times so I'll keep it brief this time. 1) Meteor strikes are a real phenomenon and could be implemented into the lore of why we get surface respawns. 2) The current grind is too steep for solo players who want to experience anything other than flying other people's ships for NPC missions.

Instead of selling to a bot, post it for sale at the bot price at your nearest market. You may not get your money as fast as a bot sale, but all of the factories being constructed are hungry non-stop meaning there's enough demand that your ore is highly likely to sell at that price. If you want to sell faster you could split the difference between bot price and the buy orders at Market 6 on Alioth. Since you are only delivering it to your nearest market instead of Market 6, the amount of potential savings in fuel should offset your loss compared to the bot orders.

This is better communication. Thank You.