Pleione

If only they added things... instead every major change was designed to lighten their server load. That was Goal 1, with "substitute" game play instead.

I remember during alpha server restarts that results in login queues in the THOUSANDS (a stat they eventually removed). Those days are long gone. Early alpha (seem to recall pre-alpha) devs actually interacted with players a bit - not real time, but would comment about constructs, question how players accomplished things, etc. Those were the "good ole days".

Your being optimistic...

It was a great advert, but like most advertisements, fails to mention the flaws that are keeping people away. Its my opinion the tax system is the most constraining. When me and my playing partner left we were spending 6 days a week, 4+ hours a day, earning the in-game cash needed to pay the taxes on our infrastructure. That left us 1 day a week (about 14% of our playing time) to explore near items and actually PLAY. It just wasn't worth it. FWIW I consider both property taxes and the schematic fees "taxes", since they serve no purpose other than to slow players down and constrain them. Lack of deliverance of some features - like player owned markets that have been long promised, didn't help. Of course, I laughed out loud on the "Explore new planets" - we had more of those in Alpha and Beta than exist in production. But that concept died when they abandoned procedurally created planets; not that they had a database which could have handled those.

Yep. Personally played pre-alpha and was thinking this was the game for me for the next decade. Then patch by patch they reduced it to the current state, with things accelerating after V0.23 (as previously mentioned).

In general I agree with the Op, but the analogy is weak. Paintball fields representing an infinitesimally small percentage of places one could stumble into, and are often fenced in to prevent such stumbling. Personally, had that been the approach for PVP, I would have been fine with it.

Hunt for The Golden Goober. Note the 3rd definition you silly Frenchman. Is SO describes what DU has devolved to. goober goo͞′bər noun A yokel; a bumpkin. A foolish or silly person. A gob of phlegm. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

I think this song sums it up pretty well:

I concur. I was one of the pre-alpha players that took time off work for the 3-4 day play periods per month of the early Dual Universe. Logged 72 hours in one of those 96 hour periods once. I remember login queues of 2500+ people. Sad to say but those were the best days of Dual Universe. Too many time NQ tried to sell "Performance Improvements" that were nothing but efforts to reduce resource consumption due to bad initial design. To compound that, their fix was often poorly implemented.

What is the community reaction to Novaquark's CEO (Nouredine Abboud) stating on Linked-In: "And Novaquark has pushed the idea of Dual Universe as far as possible, with a bold shot at building a persistent MMO built by the players with next generation voxels and a single shard server tech."

So long, fair well... My org decided today to shutter its doors - will spend the next week or so HQing everything we can, and hauling all the good stuff, like Rare Mining Units, either to Haven or our space stations. Its been interesting, but its just drudgery now. Will be watching for the next year or so to see if they turn things around and give us the game they promissed.

Actually elected to compromise: I'm going to play when I feel like it, with total disregard for 24 hour calibration cycles. Yeah, I won't make as much profit, but hopefully it will start feeling like a game instead of a job. Maybe I'll play daily, maybe I won't, but I won't feel guilty if I skip a day or three.

Honestly, I wish they would just pull the plug. Then I could quit playing guilt free. Now I'm in a small group and play to support them, but its really feeling like duty now, not fun.

Really? I can't remember any such post since launch, and they were far and few between (the occasional "We are reading and working hard" but nothing meaningful) before that. Excepting patch notes of course. I'm working with another game that has a total of 5 devs, plus support staff, that is moving much quicker - and they talk to us on Discord, often DM us to make sure we are ok, etc. And they appear to be happy to do so. We hear about the trials and tribulations of their current efforts, they send out meaningful, neutral, surveys (not marketing ones), and remind us they are human and take weekends off. The environment is SO much better. Because of it, the test base is friendly and non-corrosive. Testers help by voting on the bugs they want to see squished first, and they actively solicited suggestions, also open for voting. The environment is SO much better. Because of it, the test base is friendly and non-corrosive. Oh, and despite being pre-alpha, they have more online players than DU... As a result, my 12 hour a day addiction to DU is down to a few hours a day - mostly calibration mining a few dozen MUs in order the pay taxes on our 24 territories. I'd never consider spending another dime on DU, mostly because the devs don't give us any meaningful clue about if there will even be a tomorrow. Like the last roadmap was published in December of 2019??? Over THREE YEARS ago? In fact, I commented today to my last remaining org mate that I'm actually rather pleased - for awhile I didn't think DU would make it to 2023. About the "DU is live - join us on Twitch?" No major news, just an hour or so of looking at player constructs. (Plus 30 minutes of "Hello xyz!") Bleh.

Pre-0.23 there was a very shiny chrome honeycomb. So shiny if you built a platform and looked down, you would see stars at night. Does that still exist? So far everything I've tried has been dulled down.